Millions of people died of starvation/thirst and frost burns and lack of anti sanitary in gulags.
I think that is an exaggeration. The "gulag" was a prison system and they are never pleasant. But it gets conflated with exile to Siberia which was not pleasant but the problems it created (cold, lack of food, etc) were the same for people who lived their to begin with. And it was hardly an invention of the Soviets, it was just a continuation of Tsarist practice. It had nothing to do with either communism or capitalism. It was just authoritarians acting like authoritarians.
Again, disagree with you, 20 millions of people give or take that were send to gulags. This is significant percent of population. Thats not counting people already living in permafrost regions. Albeit their situation was much better for sure, In the world back then, I would call bare minimum for person to survive: roof above head, cloth(two things keep you from overheating/freezing), food, place to sleep/take care of hygiene, basic medic services. Most of those were either denied all together, or provided of sub par quality to significant amount of population. Many peasants/intelligentsia workers were sent to gulags for owning too much through their own labor. So I would not even consider them to be prisoners because of that. Same goes for political prisoners. Criminal prisoners were a minority there.
If you look at the Soviet Union post Stalin and his crazy bullshit it actually did a very very good job of providing basic necessities but the living was absolutely miserable because it couldn't provide the niceties that make it worth getting out of bed.
I would argue it did not. Millions of people died of starvation/thirst and frost burns and lack of anti sanitary in gulags.
A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used. -- D. Gries
