They weren't necessary sent to work camps. Some were just fired and couldn't get hired. Later, in 1950's & 60's, you would be effectively banned from career. Sometimes librarians would paint black their name if they were in references section. Since 1960's victims of these political battles could go to other institutions, probably at less important position.

This practice continued all the way till the collapse of the USSR, I heard of such stories in Moscow universities, and in the Academy of Science.

I would not compare anything that happened in the West to what happened in the USSR. I don't recall anyone in the West being sent to a work camp or shot because someone accused them of something they were not.

Did I talk about forced labor in this comment above? I said: in later times, such clashes with bureacracy made people lose their entire career.

Along with what would happen to your family. In the USSR it was often not just yourself, they'd also target your family and its well-being just the same in the name of collective guilt.

most people reading this have never missed a meal in their lives; a good number of people reading this have never been in a grown-up out-of-money situation where you face deadlines and have no source of money; probably a few people reading this have had to work doing low-skill work, but personal computers have changed access stories. The new version of "labor camp" is a phone that costs you little to nothing but is restricted, tracked and required, and work that is low-skill or away from a center of decision making somehow. Parts of this are happening in the USA out of sight, and elsewhere, and it may be increasing under new economics regarding income and housing. Smug dismissal among those that have never really had parts of it yet, can be expected IMHO

They literally shot politicals in GULAG for stepping out of a line. Nothing in the US even compared.

McCarthyism? (it is not 30s like in the article but it is 40s-50s)

Weird definition of "recently".

"Recently" ends upon uprootal.

I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say

No prob, I'll be clearer. Phenomena may be indicated which, in form of episodes, very defined events, may be part of a "past", but the direction, inclination, patterns behind those events may still be lurking much later. (For instance, an expression of fascism ended in the forties, yet fascism may linger, emerge etc.) So, thin latency and occasionalities aside - minor traits and occurrences that just confirm exceptionality -, for the phenomenon to be over it must be uprooted. Unexpressed but latent is "not over": it remains of concern, it may express differently, it may re-explode.

70-80 years is not any reasonable definition of "recently," particularly when discussing politics.

You're the first person in the thread to bring up work camps. How easily one can defeat a specter of one's own construction.

That’s 100% what happened to political offenders in the USSR even after GULAG officially closed. Theses scientists may have gotten article 58, but I didn’t dig that deeply. There is no US parallel.

Work camps are just the extreme of the policies that we have yet to implement. We seem to be lubing the slippery slope towards it though, with political correctness and cancel culture.

> Work camps are just the extreme of the policies that we have yet to implement.

Yet to? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

> We seem to be lubing the slippery slope towards it though, with political correctness and cancel culture.

No we are not.

When do you think cancel culture started?

Probably it started thousands of years ago, but recently it has certainly changed and become a new and terrible thing with social media.