Dennis,
The prison system and labor camps did not constitute a very large
proportion of the population in USSR, particularly when compared to the
prison system and labor camps of the United States (and I think a
comparative basis is important here). Considering size of population the
United States has a much more extensive system. Even at the height of the
Purges, the US system is comparatively much bigger. The prison system in
Russia was an extension *in time* of the system Russians were accustomed
to. Crime and punishment are also culturally relative things. The "gulags"
system has been greatly exaggerated. One only wonders the comical degree
of disappointment shared by the corporate media when after the "fall of
communism" there were no hoards of skinny, starving, and diseased masses
stumbling from non-existent concentration camps. Probably almost as much
as when the police files showed such a small amount of people executed
(small in relation to the wild claims made by ideologues guessing from
Stalin's fingers), and among them criminals and Nazi prisoners. But can
this imagined disappointment match the embarrassment of Vaclac Havel, who
in 1989 released two-third of Czechoslovakian "gulag" population (under
the assumption that they were oppressed masses) only to find he had
unleashed seasoned criminal upon the population?! The idea that the
Russian gulag system provided a Keynesian stimulus is, frankly, laughable;
the system was nothing like the prison *industry* in the "advanced
western" countries. The wartime conditions were exceptional (and
successful). The impact of Solzhenitsyn on the US consciousness is a
testament to the deceptive power of the anecdote. A lot of "captive
nations" rhetoric is sneaking into this discussion. I think people need to
be more critical of their assumptions.
Andy