Reddit reviews Gulag: A History

Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" is very accurate, but I can recommend the book by Anne Applebaum called "Gulag: A History" which is a thorough study of the gulags.

I have a carving from the bone of one of the wooly mammoths that were occasionally found in the permafrost in the gulag mines. Their flesh was so well preserved that the starving prisoners ate it.

The Soviet Union makes an interesting point of comparison. Here's something I learned from Applebaum's Gulag: Animal Farm is broadly right about the political history of the Soviet Union, but is totally wrong about its economic history. Lenin did not undo Tsarist kleptocracy and oversee a halcyon period of prosperity. Rather, his net impact on the average Soviet citizen's standard of living was roughly zero: the War communism policies of 1918-1921 were a substantial step back, and the New Economic Policy of 1922-1928 was a substantial step forward, but in the end the economy was in roughly the same place it had been under the Tsar in 1913. Real growth doesn't happen until Stalin's Five-year plans (derided by Orwell as the "windmill"), which catapult the country into the ranks of the global industrial powers.

This is not to say that Stalinist economic planning was good --- projects like forced agricultural collectivization and the White Sea Canal managed to be both economically useless and human rights atrocities --- but Stalin successfully modernized the Soviet Union, simply because there was so much low-hanging fruit to be plucked through industrialization.

This in turn suggests a variant interpretation of Deng's legacy: all he had to do was set aside the insanity of Maoism and learn from history instead. Even by 20th century standards, Maoism was exceptionally dysfunctional: I like Bryan Caplan's description of the Great Leap Forward's backyard furnaces as cargo cult industrialization. And of course, rolling back Maoism without copping to it took great ideological dexterity and was a substantial achievement. But the example of Stalinism suggests that Deng had a lot of leeway to get things wrong and still make progress.

Have you read Gulag yet?

Well... been reading Gulag, and no, the USSR was crazy terrible place for a human.

I think it's time you read up on the Soviet Union, bub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardakh

https://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/1400034094/

Edit: I should clarify, that while the Soviet Union did not have a vision of one supreme pure race the way the Nazis did, the point is that they did at times attack and purge and persecute people on the basis of their ethnicity.

hahaha, here's the book BB :3

http://www.amazon.ca/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/1400034094/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348616651&sr=8-1

Gulag by Anne Applebaum

This is how history textbooks should be written. Completely viseral and engaging.

Gulag

Of course I'll read some books. Perhaps you should do some reading as well. May I make a few suggestions?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226320618/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400034094/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/140009593X/
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195051807/

how about this one

or this

or this that'll be fun for you to read..

More sources for the gulag claim here: it appears historians are conflicted about the total number of people imprisoned by Stalinist Russia. Historian Anne Appelbaum, author of Gulag: A History puts the number at 1.2 to 1.5 million, a figure corroborated by historian Steven Rosefielde. Comparisons to history aside, America is currently has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the modern world today, including China and North Korea.

As far as internet freedom, please note I mentioned "western world," more specifically I will compare to OECD countries only. The US also imprisons people for internet speech. I will definitely stand by my claim that the USA is in, let's say the top 3, most surveilled state in the OECD nations. Moreover I will argue in other nations surveillance mostly comes through court orders in the judicial system, whereas in America mass surveillance via initiatives like PRISM is performed without case-by-case judicial oversight.

>firearms homicides trending down over time, while firearms ownership trends up.

Crime in general is decreasing as methods of detecting and punishing criminals advance, increasing the cost of committing a crime. Firearm ownership alone is not the full story as studies have shown increased firearm ownership is the result of gun owners buying multiple guns, not more people buying their first gun. This is evidenced by polling data that shows the number of people with a gun in their home trending downwards over time.

Meanwhile, evidence is quite clear than nations with nationwide gun bans experience a far lower homicide rate, and a drastically lower firearms homicide rate, than the USA.

>Your opinion about 2A causing tyrannical behaviour is simply that, your opinion. I would like to see you connect your opinion to actions that the government has taken.

Broad strokes - the more people use guns to commit crimes and violently fight back against law enforcement and the government, the more militarized and tyrannical the law enforcement and government becomes out of necessity for survival. There is the idea among the 2A community that civilian gun ownership makes the government "afraid" - this could not be further from the truth. In reality when police believe everyone they encounter could shoot them, it incentivizes the police to act quickly, brutally, and without mercy, because the paradigm shifts from "I'm peacefully helping my community and I have faith they will engage with me peacefully as well" to "I'm waging a war against criminals who are trying to wage war back, and the only way I can stay alive is to shoot first and ask questions later." The complete history of American police militarization follows this pattern - the police militarize in response to increased gun ownership among the public and the criminals they are meant to fight against, and now we end up with the highest levels of police killings, harassment, incarceration, and brutality in the developed world. Civilian gun ownership actively incentivizes tyranny - it does nothing to stop it.

"Gulag: A History" by Anne Applebaum is a fantastic and incredibly in-depth history of the prison camp system in the Soviet Union.

Also stalin's White Sea Canal, during the first "five year plan" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sea%E2%80%93Baltic_Canal
which accounts for 250,000 deaths by 1933

Though one big reason they took a lot of the food away was for export. This correlated with the 5 year plan in terms of making the USSR more export oriented in order to gain capital. This would include the collectivization of Farms


For anyone interested in further detail on the Gulag system, I'd suggest Anne Applebaum's "gulag"

A must read for understanding the Horror and fear of the Soviet System of Repression.