• ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
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    22 hours ago

    It’s going to be a separate message to keep the discussion focused.

    Gulag literally means prison.

    That’s the end of discussion here. You know nothing about gulags. It does not. Gulag is an acronym. Even wikipedia knows better.

    Prisoners in the Gulag worked, but they were paid the national minimum wage and it was saved for them when they left prison.

    Source please. Because while not everyone died, and gulags differed, my great-grandfather was not offered “salary” for forced slave labour.

    I’m not an USian, we’re not talking about US here. Don’t steer the conversation there, as it’s “whataboutism” and bears no relevance to you romanticizing USSR.

    • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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      21 hours ago

      Yes. An acronym for administering corrective labor prisons. It was the primary prison system of the USSR and was in no way some grand evil. It was created as a way of making prisoners productive instead of letting them rot in a cell. It was designed to be rehabilitative.

      Yes, I am fairly positive your great-grandfather was accounted for in the prison salary system because that’s how bureaucracies work. The only way he wouldn’t have been is if he was a prisoner of war and all that implies.

      • ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml
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        21 hours ago

        It was designed to be rehabilitative.

        Yes it was. On paper. And maybe the first one tried to be. Be the 1930 they were designed to mine, chop, place rails and so on. With an impressive death rate and population.

        I think you’re confusing “taiga gulags” with “sharashka” or lagry near western USSR part if you think it was anything but slave labour camps in general.

        • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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          20 hours ago

          I wonder what was happening on the Western Front that creates the conditions for more brutal labor camps? Could it have been widespread fascism, Operation Gladio, Nazi and Nazi sympathizers, and bourgeois nationalistic anti-communism?

          Or is it, as you say, just the moral failing of a morally and intellectually inferior people?