this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
78 points (95.3% liked)
Slop.
819 readers
477 users here now
For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.
Rule 3: No sectarianism.
Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome
Rule 5: No bigotry of any kind, including ironic bigotry.
Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.
Rule 7: Do not individually target federated instances' admins or moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There were certainly people who were imprisoned secretly (usually high-profile figures, including Yezhov himself before his execution I think), but the gulags were by no means generally secret nor were most of the prisoners there, because it was literally just what ~~equivalent of the federal prison system was~~ penal labor camps with a sentence of 3 - 10 years were called for a period. (my bad, see Edie below)
Also, it's kind of weird to call sending someone to prison "deportation," since it's not like they were just dumped in the wild when their sentence was up, and if you want to accuse the Soviets of internal deportation, especially to Siberia, they did a ton of that shit and it was usually awful, but it's weird to use gulags as your example of it.
I once knew a self-described anarchist who said this. It is nothing short of Nazi apologia, because overwhelmingly the only Ukrainians who thought this were fascists and a huge proportion of the remaining population was immediately put on the chopping block. Did the Jews, Poles, and Russians and so on in Ukraine who were slaughtered by Nazis and Ukrainian fascists for being the Wrong Ethnicity feel liberated? Fucking freak shit.
I idly wonder where this specific talking point comes from, but also I feel like it'll just be useless psychic damage to find out, so I'm not really in a hurry for someone to tell me.
Edit 2: This person might just be a literal teenager, with this breathless Very Important news about the Great Terror like every single person in the US learns in school and/or from conservative think tanks or whatever.
Translated it's essentially the same name a bunch of states in the US call their prison systems too.
Much like "sharia" law. Foreign word = scary
Just like all the Americans that want to bomb Agrabah for sounding too Muslim
It seems to me to slightly different than that
if you would consult the chart from chapter 10:The etymology of GULAG is: "the acronym of Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj, “Chief Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps”)" emphasis mine, as it corresponds directly to the above, specifically the camps under the O.G.P.U. These are where those with harsher sentences were sent, as seen in the chart (3-10 years)
Though, this nuance (as the libs love to say) is probably not to be found in the average person, so every kind of prison just gets called "gulag."
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
How do you do that collapsible formatting?
In the web ui clicking on the ! in a diamond ◇ will paste in the code, otherwise it's like this:
Also, (again in the web ui) you can click the paper 📄 (next to the upvote button on a comment) to see the markdown of a comment or post
I don't know how these things work in apps. Presumably the spoiler markdown will work, but if the buttons exist or where I don't know.
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
Thank you for the correction
The CIA if I had to guess
Well, the original original source is probably the Nazis themselves and the OUN-B, but I don't know who the modern purveyor of the myth is.