5 ms·

How long emptied, exactly?

short_sells_poo 2y ago
My wife's grandfather had to endure the horrors of a soviet gulag and came back almost starved to death. A 1.9m tall man who weighed less than 50kg. And then revisionists like you come along and start questioning things because you in person haven't seen it. Well, I guess lucky you.
- cempaka 2y ago
  I haven't made any argument that no gulags ever existed, or that no one was ever mistreated in them. I imagine it was especially rough to be in one when resources were being poured into ending Nazi Germany's salt-the-earth campaign during Barbarossa.
  - mopsi 2y ago
    Nice deflection. Except that Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned after the war and his personal experience comes from 1945-1953, well after Barbarossa had anything to do with it. It wasn't much better in the 1970s and 1980s either. I knew a person who was sentenced to 6 years of hard labor for human rights activism in 1975. Upon his arrival in Perm-36 camp, he was greeted with "we run a humane establishment and don't kill people; we torture you long enough that you die on your own". According to him, the turnaround was very high indeed, up to 20% of prisoners his section died each year. In 1996, he returned with other fellow inmates and established a private museum. The museum's staff were labeled "foreign agents" and the museum was forcibly taken over by Russian government when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. All mention of Stalin was erased, exhibitions about crimes against humanity and the fight for human rights were revamped in favor of a more "balanced" approach: "We don't want to take sides," the museum's new head of exhibitions, Yelena Mamayeva, said shortly after being appointed. "We're trying to talk more about the architectural complex [of the camp], and not to get involved in assessing specific people who served sentences there, and assessing Stalin, and so on. Because right now this is not quite politically correct." https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-perm-gulag-museum-takeover-contribution-to-victory/27152188.html https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-perm-gulag-museum-takeover-co... Instead of warning future generations about the dangers of totalitarianism, the museum now celebrates timber output of the camp and tries to present forced singing of songs praising the government that brutalized them as a rich cultural program offered to the inmates.
ceejayoz 2y ago
That's kind hard to pin down. Khrushchev did mass amnesty to clear them; Brezhnev went right back to mass imprisonments; Gorbachev loosened things up. Again, Navalny died in one of the more notorious Gulag sites; it never completely went away.
- cempaka 2y ago
  A single prisoner dying in a remaining camp now being used as a prison in 2024 is a far cry from making the argument that "gulags were essential to the Soviet system."
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    You asked when the system ended; I pointed out it never really ended, it just got smaller. Putin's clearly using the "kill off the dissidents" playbook. The argument that gulags were essential is "when their use was drastically reduced, the Soviet Union declined". I think that's overly focused on one element - the collapse had many causes - but easing up on dissidents is likely to have played at least a part. I'm not surprised today's neo-Stalinists yearn for a return to the system.

My wife's grandfather had to endure the horrors of a soviet gulag and came back almost starved to death. A 1.9m tall man who weighed less than 50kg. And then revisionists like you come along and start questioning things because you in person haven't seen it. Well, I guess lucky you.

cempaka 2y ago
I haven't made any argument that no gulags ever existed, or that no one was ever mistreated in them. I imagine it was especially rough to be in one when resources were being poured into ending Nazi Germany's salt-the-earth campaign during Barbarossa.
- mopsi 2y ago
  Nice deflection. Except that Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned after the war and his personal experience comes from 1945-1953, well after Barbarossa had anything to do with it. It wasn't much better in the 1970s and 1980s either. I knew a person who was sentenced to 6 years of hard labor for human rights activism in 1975. Upon his arrival in Perm-36 camp, he was greeted with "we run a humane establishment and don't kill people; we torture you long enough that you die on your own". According to him, the turnaround was very high indeed, up to 20% of prisoners his section died each year. In 1996, he returned with other fellow inmates and established a private museum. The museum's staff were labeled "foreign agents" and the museum was forcibly taken over by Russian government when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. All mention of Stalin was erased, exhibitions about crimes against humanity and the fight for human rights were revamped in favor of a more "balanced" approach: "We don't want to take sides," the museum's new head of exhibitions, Yelena Mamayeva, said shortly after being appointed. "We're trying to talk more about the architectural complex [of the camp], and not to get involved in assessing specific people who served sentences there, and assessing Stalin, and so on. Because right now this is not quite politically correct." https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-perm-gulag-museum-takeover-contribution-to-victory/27152188.html https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-perm-gulag-museum-takeover-co... Instead of warning future generations about the dangers of totalitarianism, the museum now celebrates timber output of the camp and tries to present forced singing of songs praising the government that brutalized them as a rich cultural program offered to the inmates.

ceejayoz 2y ago

That's kind hard to pin down. Khrushchev did mass amnesty to clear them; Brezhnev went right back to mass imprisonments; Gorbachev loosened things up. Again, Navalny died in one of the more notorious Gulag sites; it never completely went away.

cempaka 2y ago
A single prisoner dying in a remaining camp now being used as a prison in 2024 is a far cry from making the argument that "gulags were essential to the Soviet system."
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  You asked when the system ended; I pointed out it never really ended, it just got smaller. Putin's clearly using the "kill off the dissidents" playbook. The argument that gulags were essential is "when their use was drastically reduced, the Soviet Union declined". I think that's overly focused on one element - the collapse had many causes - but easing up on dissidents is likely to have played at least a part. I'm not surprised today's neo-Stalinists yearn for a return to the system.