I believe in socialism, but I feel Stalin shouldn’t be idolised due to things like the Gulag.
I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn’t help the cause.
I’ve tried to have a constructieve conversation about this, but I basically get angry comments calling me stupid for believing he did atrocious things.
That’s not how you win someone over.
I struggle to believe the Gulag etc. Never happened, and if it happened I firmly believe Stalin should be condemned.
You are factually incorrect in the very first statement. “Gulag” means “главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей” and is a name of a state agency directly operating a network of concentration/forced labor camps. Each of the camps had their name, control and command structures and operated under direct oversight of some best Stalin’s chaps.
Also, it wasn’t just ‘prison’. Each of them was a concentration camp for politically it otherwise unsound elements, that provided Stalin with supply of free slave labor.
“It wasn’t a prison! It was [definition of prison]”
You know, when you change the name of a thing, you totally change its essence too! Or something like that, I’m no anarchist.
“It wasn’t a prison. it was a prison by another name!!11111”
The correction on the name is actually important. It’s literally an acronym, like SCUBA. GULAG is an abbreviation of “главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей”. Translated to English “Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps”, so in English the abbreviation would be MDCLC. GULAG does not mean “prison” in any language much like USA does not mean “country” and CIA does not mean “spies”.
I’ll direct you to @[email protected] in his comment here going over the Soviet prison system, along with myth-dispelling surrounding the Soviet prison labor system.
You didn’t need to direct me anywhere to accept that you made a clear factual mistake.
The Gulag system was the Prison system of the USSR for much of its existence. No, it did not translate directly into “prison,” but that doesn’t change that it was the prison system, and moreover the conditions of many gulags were favorable compared to American prisons. It’s worth reading RedWizard’s comment because he dispelled a lot of the myths you perpetuate.