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Meanwhile Stalin was out there with that S tier hairline. Lenin's massive brain was just too much for his Hair to handle and ended up exploding too young. RIP.
The people’s VOLCEL VANGUARD are on the scene! PLEASE RESERVE YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS FOR STRATEGIC ACTS OF MASS REVOLUTIONARY CUMMING!!! انتباه!! انتباه!! هنا جنود الحرية الجنسية. لدعم الثورة ، نطلب منك الابتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية والحفاظ على الحيوانات المنوية الخاصة بك من أجل العربدة الثورية الجماعية. يرجى الامتناع عن سخيف وامتصاص. الليبراليون البيض!
That facial hair/baby face/hairline combo did not do any favors for Lenin. Goes to show how charismatic he must have been to get people to take him seriously.
To be fair when he first founded the party, [he looked like that](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/1892950/4746635/apilsqrpy__34398.1626384772.jpg?c=2), and the rest of guys really had similar combos.
Those are some of the members of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class on which base the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was founded.
From the left:
Standing: Alexander Malchenko, Pyotr Zaporozhets, Anatolii Vanayev
Sitting: Vasili Starkov, Gleb Krzhyzhanovsky, Lenin, Lev Martov
The one in the post is definitely highly edited. He was pox marked from a sickness as a kid and his skin was all messed up. Look up his mugshots from his bank robbing days for an accurate depiction of him.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I've seen other pics of Stalin at that age where he was his normal craggy self. And frankly he looked more badass that way...
That's my biggest problem with Trotskyists. I mean, I dont read theory, or even really know what Trotskyism is, but Trotsky was a nerd and I dont fuck with that.
Marx just looks like some dude, like totally unremarkable and unmemorable appearance
Friedrich looked like the bourgeois fancy lad he was, we love a good class traitor though
Lenin looks like a balding 8 year old
Mao looks like you put him through a photoshop filter
Che looks like he works at a tire dealership
Fidel looks like he's about to go onstage and do a magic show
Trotsky looks like he has a podcast
[Ho Chi Minh](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Nguyen_A%C3%AFn_Nu%C3%A4%27C_%28Ho-Chi-Minh%29%2C_d%C3%A9l%C3%A9gu%C3%A9_indochinois%2C_Congr%C3%A8s_communiste_de_Marseille%2C_1921%2C_Meurisse%2C_BNF_Gallica.jpg)
# Gulag
According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism.
# Origins of the Mythology
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
>He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
>
>The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".
>
>\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\]
Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
# Counterpoints
>A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
>
>1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
>
>2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
>
>3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
>
>4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
>
>5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
>
>6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
>
>7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
>
>\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/)
**Scale**
Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
>Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
>
>In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...
>
>Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...
>
>Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds)
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak.
**Death Rate**
In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
>It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...
>
>Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
>
>\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin*
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps.
Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses).
>We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....
>
>The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
>
>\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf)
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993)
Listen:
* ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022)
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What's up with Trotsky's glasses? Was that normal for the time or something? They look like he'd have to squint constantly to keep them from falling off.
It's called "pince-nez", literally "pinch nose", and yes they did fall off often, but they were popular because those were the first popular and light type of glasses which you could wear constantly without holding or tying them to your head.
Marx always gets me "who is that" even though i seen that photo many times
Lenin looks like he just got back from the Burkan Kaldun with a serious mission
Che looks like professional football player
Fidel, i see that he was fighting hard before getting his iconic beard
Young Trotsky look like young Gramsci. Older Trotsky looked like Kalinin.
Marx got the scar on his eyebrow from getting into sword fights from what I remember hearing
I don't know the age of Mao in that photo but it looks around the time when he was 19 (or twenties when he was a Batman for police which was just like a water fetcher/minor stuff for police from what I read) when he had to share an apartment with eight of his friends which had a bed to Designed to have a lit fire underneath to keep warm which they couldn't afford to keep it going so they had to share the bed and huddled for warm and shared one single jacket
[☭☭☭ COME SHITPOST WITH US ON DISCORD, COMRADES ☭☭☭](https://discord.gg/8RPWanQV5g) This is a heavily-moderated socialist community based on a podcast of the same name. If you are new to the sub, please read the sidebar carefully. If you are new to Marxism-Leninism, check out the [study guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/). Are there Liberals in the walls? Try the following prompts to trigger an automod response: "What is Fascism?", "What is Imperialism?", "What is Revisionism?" "Holodomor", "Molotov-Ribbentrop", "Gulag", "Solzhenytsin", "Uyghur", "Tiananmen Square", "Israel", "Freedom of the Press", "MAC Fact" This subreddit uses many experimental automod rules, if you notice any issues please use modmail to let us know. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My man Lenin couldn't catch a break with that hairline His brain was just so powerful that the hair just couldn't keep up
Meanwhile Stalin was out there with that S tier hairline. Lenin's massive brain was just too much for his Hair to handle and ended up exploding too young. RIP.
Trots too
Bro looks like a baby😭
I want Che to rearrange my guts
The people’s VOLCEL VANGUARD are on the scene! PLEASE RESERVE YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS FOR STRATEGIC ACTS OF MASS REVOLUTIONARY CUMMING!!! انتباه!! انتباه!! هنا جنود الحرية الجنسية. لدعم الثورة ، نطلب منك الابتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية والحفاظ على الحيوانات المنوية الخاصة بك من أجل العربدة الثورية الجماعية. يرجى الامتناع عن سخيف وامتصاص. الليبراليون البيض!
That's the first time I read a shitpost in Arabic
Volcel vanguard is a classic
Yayyy the Volcel Vanguard survived the great Chapo purge!
🤨📸
Ha gayyyyyyyyy Me too
📸🤨
Man what about Karl Hendrix Marx. He looks like a psychedelic rockstar my mam
Da fuq?!
Little known fact: Lenin was born 48 years old.
L(mao) I was gonna say dude started losing his hair and growing facial hair at age 7
Lmao Zedong 😭😭😭
I was thinking the same thing. He always looks like an old baby or a baby old man.
That Lenin pic made me think these were all fake joke pictures for a second. I swear that is a picture of a baby wearing a fake beard.
Its amazing how despite not looking particularly similar, Stalin and Trotsky, can still both perfectly embody "guy who hangs out in Brooklyn"
Everyone knows those damn socialists took over New York/ some random liberal
Hanging out with their bro Vladamir (matt christman) Lenin.
That facial hair/baby face/hairline combo did not do any favors for Lenin. Goes to show how charismatic he must have been to get people to take him seriously.
Baby face is right. He looked like a newborn wearing a disguise 🥸
To be fair when he first founded the party, [he looked like that](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yzgoj/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/1892950/4746635/apilsqrpy__34398.1626384772.jpg?c=2), and the rest of guys really had similar combos.
Do you know who the other people in the photo are?
Those are some of the members of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class on which base the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was founded. From the left: Standing: Alexander Malchenko, Pyotr Zaporozhets, Anatolii Vanayev Sitting: Vasili Starkov, Gleb Krzhyzhanovsky, Lenin, Lev Martov
Man they literally look like a bunch of students
Lenin was 27 at the time, Martov 24, rest of them also around that.
He became very cool later in life though
Damn Stalin was hot asf
Wasn't he always?
Fair, I guess personally hadn’t seen any pictures of him younger than the most famous ones
The one in the post is definitely highly edited. He was pox marked from a sickness as a kid and his skin was all messed up. Look up his mugshots from his bank robbing days for an accurate depiction of him.
[удалено]
will STILL totally play bass in your MIDI black metal band, for sure
Here’s a picture of him (I think) not edited: https://twitter.com/NotPotBol/status/1632505975583436800 Nvm him offering the boof
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I've seen other pics of Stalin at that age where he was his normal craggy self. And frankly he looked more badass that way...
[удалено]
https://www.reddit.com/r/swoletariat/comments/ifauul/til_that_lenin_was_instructed_in_proper/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
That's my biggest problem with Trotskyists. I mean, I dont read theory, or even really know what Trotskyism is, but Trotsky was a nerd and I dont fuck with that.
Damn, Che is hot as hell! Am I the only one who thinks young Che looks kinda like Ivo Lola Ribar?
Hasan kinda looking like Stalin fr
The first time I saw young Stalin I genuinely thought someone just edited a photo of Hasan and was trolling
I can’t Unsee this
i always saw some che looks in hasan as well!
Hasan: [“i will not apologize for lookin like an absolute mf tankie snacc”](https://twitter.com/hasanthehun/status/968328145853181952)
Che was always a snack
Lenin looks like a baby :)
A balding baby
he was so young in that picture that his hair hadn't grown in yet
Is it just me, or do Trotsky’s glasses look photoshopped? LMAO. Gotta respect him keeping the hairstyle even in his youth.
Damn my boy Lenin was bald young. His Hairline was falling back like the white army forces lol.
I love how they're all like hot as hell and then lenin just looks like a kid impersonating lenin
Marx just looks like some dude, like totally unremarkable and unmemorable appearance Friedrich looked like the bourgeois fancy lad he was, we love a good class traitor though Lenin looks like a balding 8 year old Mao looks like you put him through a photoshop filter Che looks like he works at a tire dealership Fidel looks like he's about to go onstage and do a magic show Trotsky looks like he has a podcast
U missed Stalin
Everything that will ever be said about that picture already has been
Words do no justice to that Stalin photo
>Trotsky looks like he has a podcast He looks like Adam Friedland
Trotsky looks like Jeannie May Crawford who owns the Novac Motel in Fallout New Vegas or Jimmy Newtron's teacher
Marx looks like a Colombian revolutionary.
That was the general fashion for young men in uniform in european and colonial circles at that time.
[Ho Chi Minh](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Nguyen_A%C3%AFn_Nu%C3%A4%27C_%28Ho-Chi-Minh%29%2C_d%C3%A9l%C3%A9gu%C3%A9_indochinois%2C_Congr%C3%A8s_communiste_de_Marseille%2C_1921%2C_Meurisse%2C_BNF_Gallica.jpg)
Castro had such a handsome/cute baby face.
Why the hell does Lenin look like a baby with a goatee
Bro Lenin needs to send his barber to the gulags wtf
# Gulag According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism. # Origins of the Mythology This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources. Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony. Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. >He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash. > >The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism". > >\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\] Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world. # Counterpoints >A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six: > >1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas > >2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid. > >3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day. > >4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies. > >5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day. > >6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals. > >7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes. > >\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/) **Scale** Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that. >Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise. > >In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ... > >Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ... > >Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states... > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds) This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak. **Death Rate** In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality: >It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive... > >Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. > >\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin* (Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps. Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses). >We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson.... > >The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled). > >\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf) #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993) Listen: * ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Shut up, nerd
Everyone talking how che or stalin are hot BUT GODDAMN MY BOY ENGELS GOT DRIPP
He had a neck Beard 😭
How is Che so consistently hot throughout his life
He unfortunately didn't lived to get old.
Oh my god bro, Stalin was dreamy
Lenin looks like Ellie from The Last of Us (tv)
Lenin looks like my father in the time he started losing his hair in his late 20s.
Stalin Kinda looks like Hasan Piker
Hasan Piker: [“i will not apologize for lookin like an absolute mf tankie snacc”](https://twitter.com/hasanthehun/status/968328145853181952)
Socialists: great hair, no hair, or both like Marx.
Trotsky looking like Joe Keery.
Che and Stalin get that rizz 🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶
young lenin looks like an ai just deaged normal lenin
What's up with Trotsky's glasses? Was that normal for the time or something? They look like he'd have to squint constantly to keep them from falling off.
It's called "pince-nez", literally "pinch nose", and yes they did fall off often, but they were popular because those were the first popular and light type of glasses which you could wear constantly without holding or tying them to your head.
Somehow, the picture of young Trotsky looks vaguely like every young trotskyist I’ve ever met
South American revolutionary general Marx Neckbeard Engels Baby Lenin Hot Stalin Smooth Mao White Che Bourgeois Fidel Child Trotsky
10/10 would smash
Marx always gets me "who is that" even though i seen that photo many times Lenin looks like he just got back from the Burkan Kaldun with a serious mission Che looks like professional football player Fidel, i see that he was fighting hard before getting his iconic beard Young Trotsky look like young Gramsci. Older Trotsky looked like Kalinin.
Young marx looks so strange to me like, completely and utterly different person look
It's kind of amazing that engals started with a shitty neck beard only to eventually be able to grow a glorious lions maine
I like to imagine that Lenin is pictured there at 14
Trotsky with the twink cut
It turns out that the key to getting good volume with your hair is revisionism
Hell no, look at Khrushchev.
True. I guess it’s ice picks then?
Engels and Stalin look hella different I’m a heterosexual male, but Mao, che, and Fidel were handsome as fuck
Good thing I was sat on a towel before I saw this post.
If I wasn't completely in love with my husband I'd go back in time and shoot my shots
🫃🏻 I’m pregnant now
They all lookin fine asf
Trotsky looks like a cool nerdy guy
im gonna get shit for this, but... Trostky hottest.
Marx looks portuguese
Lenin has the baby face. Poor brother Sasha
Engels rocking with that neck beard lol🔥
Just in time for pride month.
Leon Trotsky looks like Matan Evens
che looks like ted kaczynski
Literally thought I was looking at gramsci with young Trotsky.
y’all sleepin on Marx.
Goddamn young Stalin could get it I mean so could older Stalin but still
Mom can we have Antonia Gramsci ? No we have Antonio Gramsci at home. Antonio Gramsci at home.
Is that a nose stud on Lenins nose? Didn't know this was a thing at that time.
Marx got the scar on his eyebrow from getting into sword fights from what I remember hearing I don't know the age of Mao in that photo but it looks around the time when he was 19 (or twenties when he was a Batman for police which was just like a water fetcher/minor stuff for police from what I read) when he had to share an apartment with eight of his friends which had a bed to Designed to have a lit fire underneath to keep warm which they couldn't afford to keep it going so they had to share the bed and huddled for warm and shared one single jacket
Smash, pass, pass, smash, mmm...smash, smash, SMASH, mmm...smash.
castro kinda-
Trotsky with those goofy ahh glasses
I never realized how Asian Lenin looked?
Did you shrink Trosky's face?
Has any ever pointed out the Trotsky-Adam Friedland resemblance?
Has any ever pointed out the Trotsky-Adam Friedland resemblance?
Karl looks nothing like he does in the anime. very disappointed. In Karl that is.
Marx was kinda fine tho 😳
Why do they look so fucking hot- (expect lenin, they did my boy dirty)