Gulag prisoners were paid.
And some gulags were more like villages than prisons. They couldn’t escape because they were in remote areas of Siberia
After all, the Gulags were intended for reeducation first and foremost, not punishment. Unlike the US penal system.
Better than the average American, too, plus free housing
Le source?
From the fucking CIA itself (https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf) [you may need to enter “RDP80T00246A032000400001-1” in the query box of the CIA reading room page if that link only redirects you there] they even admit on page 3, article 13 that prisoners, able bodied and not, got paid.
Then there is this: (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf)
Chapter 2, 3, and 5 go into more detail here: (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/metabook?id=hoovergulag)
And page 29 here: (https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817939423_75.pdf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Even liberal media can’t hide this shit, and though they do try to paint it as meager by their terminology, as comrade Anatolianin remarks, the wages were enough to buy a house, so it clearly wasn’t meager or insubstantial.
Edit: Spelling correction
Why thank ya partner
Np, though I can’t take all the credit, some other comrades somewhere at some time showed these somewhere and I saved the links. Passing on the knowledge does them honor though.
WOW! The level that democracy was genuinely regarded for in the USSR never fails to make me think the true possibility of a better world :'). The fact that prisoners were allowed to have some level of say in how they organized themselves is quite astounding. Even better is that there was involvement from civilians (who i imagine would be locals sometimes), to actually interact with these people and be a part of their rehabilitation.
Memoirs of the father of the Russian actor Zhzhenov for example.
If I remember correctly he worked in the Kolyma camp for like 8 years? After his release, it turned out that he had earned enough money to go to Moscow oblast to reunite with his family, buy new clothes and even a new house. Then he returned to Kolyma and worked as a full-time worker.
Poor nazis and kulaks got worked to death! Why no one talk about the poor nazis guys!
Muh gulags!
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Yep
Workers in USSR prisons and gulags got fair wages, enough to put down payments on homes when they got out in many cases. Also “millions” my ass, someone spends too much time on “Victims of Communism” threads.
US prisoners, who are overwhelming the descendants of former slaves merely re-enslaved while inside and actually unpaid, get shackled with debt from parole, bail, and other legal fees when released while simultaneously being unable to get jobs in just about any industry.
As a Soviet chad might put it: “We are not the same.”
I once saw a picture on Reddit of Soviet “propaganda” saying that hard work will shorten your prison term. And people were comparing it to how “arbeit macht frei” was printed at Auschwitz and “that’s why communism and Nazism are the samee!!!”
Conveniently ignoring the fact that working hard in Gulag literally did reduce your sentence, there was an entire system for that and it was extremely meritocratic. Auschwitz, just gonna hazard a guess here, not so much.
USSR rapidly industrialized because they called on the whole society to do so. That’s ridiculous to think all those people were in gulags. Because then they would have had to literally imprison most of their population.