Talk:Gulag

I see that there has been a Redirect from "Penal Colony" to Gulag.

Why? They're two separate things. The gulags were prison settlements within Russia. they were not colonies.

If you want "penal colonies", come Down Under. We have a range of them. Sydney (Port Jackson) was founded purely as a convict settlement in 1788. It was followed by Hobart in 1804, then Launceston - both in Tasmania - then Brisbane in 1824. I think that by 1825 Norfolk Island had been tried as a prison twice. The first major non-convict colony in Australia was Adelaide in 1836.

Can we please have "Penal Colony" released from the strictures of "Gulag" please? AlanE (talk) 21:18, 6 November 2016 (EST)

AlanE, I fixed it. Conservative (talk) 21:47, 6 November 2016 (EST)

Thanks mate. AlanE (talk) 22:04, 6 November 2016 (EST)

Many Gulag were in fact founded as penal colonies. The City of Magadan, fot instance. Long before Hitler, the communists did not herd people into gas ovens, they simply dumped hundreds and thousands off the Tran Siberian Railroad in the wilderness, out in the middle of nowhere, marked out on the ground were blocks and barracks were to built, and told to get to work. Many of these gulag/penal colonies did not need barbed wire fences as there was nowhere to go for an escapee.RobS^{#NeverHillary} 08:03, 8 November 2016 (EST)

Rob, if you squint and hold your head just right you may just catch a glimpse of the word "colony" in amongst the horrors of the labour camps that were the Gulag. But if you can describe a penal colony as being within the borders of its parent country and its inhabitants arriving there by train, you're stretching things.

Anyway, my aim in wanting change was not to deny Gulag as a penal colony so much as deny penal colony the need to be described as a gulag. Which they weren't.

AlanE (talk) 23:10, 8 November 2016 (EST)

Khrushchev amnesty 1953-1957

Many of those released under Khrushchev were German POWs. This is a central theme of the Gulag Archipelago - the fact that Solzhenitsyn, a Red Army Capitan in the War against fascism who defeated fascism, was held in the Gulag under Khrushchev, not Stalin, while the Germans who fought for fascism were allowed to go home. Is this point about justice, ideology, and the Khrushchev reform era articulated in article? RobS^{Deep Six the Deep State!} 14:06, 6 October 2018 (EDT)

Rob, you do whatever you think best. VargasMilan (talk) 13:36, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

Transmission error discovered

I discovered an overestimating numerical error in the transmission of a reliable count of the population of the targets of the Soviet terror apparatus in a routine check of my accuracy. It looks like a factor of 1.5, and it's nobody's fault. The range I will be using, which I will make an effort to describe here, will still be among the highest recorded estimates (by conservatives) and [this correction] places those estimates closer together, so they will be easier to associate together in rendering the [potential fruits of the] account. VargasMilan (talk) 13:31, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

Good. I'm following you. Will you have figures on both estimated internees and deaths between a certain timeframes, and will the timeframes of the two categories match up? `RobS^{Deep Six the Deep State!} 13:43, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

Also, there were penal battallions that served with the Red Army during WWII who served with a shovel rather than a rifle. These may have existed before the war, and continued after the war. They mostly dug trenches and tank traps. They had a high casualty rate from hunger, disease, exhaustion, and combat fatalities. Being they were constantly on they move, and sometimes not directly under control of the KGB, not much is known. But Solzhenitsyn mentions them from third hand testimony, and the losses evidentially are high. RobS^{Deep Six the Deep State!} 13:50, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

I'm not a particularly good literary digger or filler of holes myself; I can refer you to a few sources by conservatives as I am able to pull them together, but some of these are quoted by a person who believes and has published together every damaging generalization [in the form of a mortality statistic, credible or not] people [have made] about Christianity, but on the other hand his quoting these conservatives lends him credibility, so I don't feel too guilty about not mentioning him specifically but just the sources.

Our militant atheism expert User:Conservative has found one of the conservative sources independently, Rummel, and quotes from him extensively, so he seems to find his reporting and sources pretty reliable.

I'd like to do an itemized accounting like your suggestion would entail, but I don't know what the sources look like, and how difficult it would be to pull something like that together from them. Maybe there should be a transition period when just the correction of the FIGURES that were already there are replaced by more accurate ones and an allowing of that to "sink in" for a while. VargasMilan (talk) 15:03, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

In the March 20, 2005 issue of The Washington Times, Richard W. Rahn, adjunct scholar of the libertarian Cato Institute, recounted: "I happened to be at the Kremlin in Moscow in August 1992, when the Russia demographers announced they had determined there were 63 million “excess deaths” in the Soviet Union during Josef Stalin’s reign — 1923-53."

Rahn was the husband of Peggy Noonan, one of the Top Conservatives on Twitter that I located, vouching for the provenance of the information.

Actually, this had been determined ten years prior as quoted by a Russian university organization reported 56 to 62 million "unnatural deaths" for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin.</ref>

This university organization republished this account in 1993 and may have been the very book mentioned by Richard Rahn. It may have been misquoted in a Pravda article—if Pravda published it at all and was the mode of transmission—and picked up by Rahn or misunderstood by Rahn. In 1993 this may have been the first official acknowledgement by Moscow of these figures or the first time Pravda had reported them.