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A comment on The Caging of America. Parent comment

Re:The Caging of America by ssp on Sunday March 11, 2012 @11:04PM (#3692176)
The Soviet Union had a population of 189 million people in 1953 according to Wolfram Alpha.
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Re:The Caging of America by yummyfajitas on Sunday March 11, 2012 @11:10PM (#3692186)
For an incarceration rate of 0.9%.

This also assumes the Soviet Union sent everyone to the Gulag, and had no local jails, etc. I don't know if this is actually true, can anyone comment?

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Re:The Caging of America by arethuza on Monday March 12, 2012 @05:25AM (#3692808)
I believe that during the height of the Gulag, local jails were mainly used as interrogation and storage facilities for people who would eventually end up in the camps. Certainly the camps held both those convicted of political and criminal offences.

I can recommend both Anne Applebaum's excellent "Gulag - A History" and, of course, Solzhenitsyn's incredible "Gulag Archipelago":

http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag-a-history/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

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