Popular graph on "Prisoner Mortality Rate Within Gulags" is misinformation
check your decimals before you post
Vanguardist socialists sometimes use the graph below to defend forced-labor camps under Stalin. The graph suggests that Tsarist forced-labor camps ("katorga") had much higher (~10x) prisoner death rates than Soviet forced-labor camps ("gulags"):
However, the creator of the bad graph above misread the original data as "per 100" rather than "per 1000". As a result, the Tsar-era death rates are 10 times (!!) higher than in reality. Here's an accurate graph:
As you can see, forced-labor camps usually had mortality substantially higher than civilian mortality -- which is especially striking because most inmates were fairly young.
Read below for details (and some discussion of the Soviet carceral system as a whole):
The bad graph confused per cent with per mille
This graph is fairly popular in vanguardist spaces: It got 770 upvotes on /r/communism, 440 upvotes on /r/InformedTankie, and 220 upvotes on /r/socialism. All of the (not-deleted) comments are positive.
This graph is wrong. Really wrong. And explaining why is really simple.
The Tsarist katorga death rate data comes from Wheatcroft 2002, Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History, in location Table 2.8, titled "Russian prison mortality for different categories of prisoners: Crude Death Rate per thousand population":
That table clearly states that death rates are per 1000 ("per mille", or "‰"). However, the bad graph treats these rates if they were per 100 ("per cent", or "%").
That error inflates all of the Tsarist katorga death rates by 10 times. For example, in 1885, 28.1 deaths per thousand (28.1‰) is equal to 2.81 deaths per hundred (2.81%). Instead, the bad graph treats this as 28.1 per hundred (28.1%). (The actual figure in the bad graph for 1885 is 40%, but I have no idea why.)
The bad graph's creator probably confused these rates because their second source uses a different denominator. The Stalinist forced-labor camp death rate data comes from Vishnevsky 2005, Демографическая модернизация России, 1900-2000 [Demographic modernization of Russia, 1900-2000], in location "Таблица 19.5. Общий коэффициент смертности заключенных и населения России в целом, 1930–1956, %" [Table 19.5. General mortality rate of prisoners and the population of Russia as a whole, 1930–1956, %] (note the "%", meaning per hundred):
And that's it! The graph creator messed up per cent and per mille.
A better source is available
But there's no need to stitch together two sources: Wheatcroft 2009 Appendix Table 1C stitches together several archival sources (and Soviet estimates) into one table of Russian Empire and Soviet Union penal mortality rates from 1890 to 1953:
Even better, they've already provided a graph of the various death rates involved (see the red line; ITL = correctional labor camp):
In short: Wheatcroft's graph and my graph above should make it very clear that forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union did not have a lower death rate than forced-labor camps in the Russian Empire until the 1950's. Tsarist katorga were horrible, and Stalinist forced-labor camps were even more horrible.
Prisons are not morally justified by a lower death rate
Even if Tsarist prisons were far worse than Stalinist prisons, that wouldn't make Stalinist prisons good. Post-1900 Russian "katorga" and Soviet "gulags" had mortalty rates about 2 times higher than similarly-aged civilians.
These penal systems killed thousands. They were forced-labor camps meant to produce resources, not correct behavior and re-educate. Neither should have existed.
Gulags weren't even efficient at marshalling forced labor: Conservative historians Ivanova Flath Raleigh 2000 highlighted several Soviet estimates of gulag productivity as about half that of civilian workers:
The gulags were failures. They had immense human cost and immense economic cost.
In short: Stalinist gulags were not just regular prisons, with all the brutality and mind-warping that that entails. They were an atrocity, and not one that socialists should defend.
How bad were gulags after Stalin?
Senior Soviet leaders, like Khrushchev, were very aware of these failures. After Stalin died, reformers freed millions, ended the forced-labor camp system altogether, sharply reduced work quotas, and overhauled the carceral system toward re-education. The gulags of old were no more.
For a brief overview, there were three major Soviet carceral institutions:
ITK, "corrective labor camps" (often called "gulags"): After Stalin, these were virtually all shut down or completely reformed.
ITL, "corrective labor colonies": After Stalin, these were analogous to most prisons worldwide, but with mandatory work requirements. These contained a majority of prisoners.
Prisons: After Stalin, these were analogous to most prisons worldwide, but without mandatory work requirements. These contained a minority of prisoners.
These reforms, kicked off by a prison strike, dramatically improved carceral quality of life. I can't find firm data, but it's likely that Soviet carceral death rates were well below civilian death rates for this time period (again, mostly due to youth).
These reforms also sharply reduced the number of people arrested for "political" crimes, as you can see in Elie 2013:
By the time that Gorbachev took power, the number of political prisoners seems to have numbered in the hundreds. Gorbachev released ~150 political prisoners in 1987 and abolished political incarceration in 1988, when WaPo estimated "Soviet prisoners of conscience" at "200 to 300".
(If true, that's probably on the same order of magnitude as the US of the 1960's-1970's, when civil rights activists and anti-Vietnam-War protesters were routinely incarcerated. For a lower and later estimate, Amnesty International listed 11 "prisoners of conscience" (a narrower category) in the USA in 1978.)
In terms of scope, the Soviet Union still maintained one of the world's highest incarceration rates. From the 1960's to the 1970's, incarceration rates in the United States were about 3x lower than in the Soviet Union. In the 1980's, the War on Drugs and Gorbachov's decarceration gave America the lead as the world's most carceral state: Elie 2013:
After Stalin, Soviet prisons weren't great. But prisons everywhere aren't great. Here's how Hardy 2016, Gulags After Stalin, concludes their book:
The reforms of the Khrushchev period had an important lasting effect on the Soviet penal system. This certainly holds true in terms of the Gulag's permanent reduction in size, but it also applies to the reorientation of Gulag aims and the resultant improved conditions experienced by its inmates. Although certain inmate privileges were reduced or eliminated in the early 1960s at the culmination of the “camp is not a resort” campaign, many of the most important prisoner-friendly reforms of the 1950s, such as parole and the eight-hour workday, remained. Despite certain continuities, therefore, the Gulag did not return to a state of unchecked (and even abetted) violence, grueling labor, and oppressive living conditions—the defining features of the Stalinist penal system. De-Stalinization in the penal sphere was a real and enduring legacy of the Khrushchev era. [....]
By 1964 the Gulag devoted far less energy to “construction,” and more “to the correction of people,” than it did in the last years of Stalin’s life. Although economic concerns continued to play an important role in penal facility operations, no longer did central economic planners treat the Gulag simply as “a source of labor power.” [....]
Criminologists globally in the postwar era promoted a variety of penal measures that avoided incarceration or that placed inmates in “open” institutions, and the Soviets were very much engaged in such efforts. Yet no country, in the East or West, was able to displace incarceration as the backbone of their penal system. From Western Europe to the United States to apartheid South Africa, prisons and their equivalents remained the punishment of choice. And these were not “liberal” institutions, but ones in which compulsory labor, corruption, beatings, and prisoner-on-prisoner violence abounded. Moreover, they were often places of severely curtailed rights and arbitrary rule. Some commentators from the period poignantly noted that prison systems in the West were in essence “totalitarian” islands in otherwise free societies.
It's extremely frustrating to see people (rightly) condemn the Soviet Union's authoritarianism -- and then turn around and defend the United States system of mass incarceration. Human rights don't stop at borders.
In short: The Soviet prison system after Stalin became far less lethal and was akin to most prison systems worldwide. Incarceration is authoritarian, everywhere.
Giving credit
As a final note: It looks like two other people, Twitter user devarbol (2021 Jul 18) and Reddit user Kochevnik81 (2021 Aug 29) independently came to the same conclusion I did (2022 Feb 21): That the graph in question misread "pro mille" data as "percent" data.
I'm not sure who created the graph. I reached out to /u/Mr-Stalin, but they say they're not the creator. If the creator ever reads this, send me a DM!
Conclusions and shilling
It's easy to lie with graphs. Don't trust sketchy graphs unless you trust the graphmaker or read their sources.
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Transcript of the bad graph so that people can easily Google it
Prisoner Mortality Rate Within Gulags
Yellow = Tsar Rule of Russia
Red = Communist Party Rule of Russia
Sources:
Demographic Modernization of Russia. 1900-2000. Ed. A.G. Vishnevsky. M., 2006, p. 432.
Tsaplin V.V. Archival materials on the number of prisoners in the late 30s. / / Questions of history, 1991.
The German and Soviet repression and mass killings, 1930-45. In: Europe-Asia Studies, 1996, vol. 48, No 8.
Wheatcroft S.G. The crisis of the late Tsarist penal system. Challenging traditional views of Russian history, 2002, pp 27-54.
See also Otcheti po glavnomu tyuremnomu upravieniyu 1885-1915. Spb-PG.
Thank you for making this. I was the original creator of the graph this post is about. I was 16 during the 2016 election and saw a constant bombardment of attacks against Bernie Sanders decrying how if he won the primary then millions would die under the communism he would adopt. It got me interested in actually researching the mass killings which occurred in Russia and China and from seeing lists on Wikipedia of famines and mass killings throughout the 19th century it seemed to me that both countries had violent histories where an authoritarian government oppressed and killed their citizens en mass and the deaths which occurred after these countries adopted communism was just an extension of previous systems of oppression under their previous governments rather than the creation of an oppressive system in an otherwise free society. I'm not and never was a Tankie. The research I did and the graph I made was supposed to be an extension of that point but I now see I had misunderstood the charts I read having been a 16 year old who was just reading through the citation sources for Wikipedia pages without much historical knowledge and regret having had spread misinformation.