It was a (a) federal union of national republics and (b) besides the Karelian being incoporated into the Russian in 1956 would have all it’s constituent republics in 1940

If you want to compare with NATO you should compare the Warsaw pact as a whole to NATO, not just the Soviet Union.

Prison is just one more arm of the Capitalist Financial Extraction System. There is no crime that you can’t buy your way out of, if you have enough.

It’s all fucked up. My brother ended up on parole and it was designed to keep him from holding down a job. He’d have random drug screenings, which meant that each morning he’d call in to the system to find out if he had a drug screening. If he did, he’d have to drive to the county where he committed the offense and was convicted (2 hours away from his home) to wait a few hours to pee in a cup. Imagine holding down a job and not knowing until day of that you’ll need to take off most of the day. And they wouldn’t even let him do his drug screenings closer to home–theory was that the county got paid per parolee.

Anyways, my brother is a jerk but the system is needlessly cruel.

When looking that up, I came across this tidbit of extra irony at the start of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate :

According to the World Prison Brief (WPB) the United States had the world’s highest incarceration rate from 2001 (when the US overtook Russia) through October 4, 2022 (US rate of 629 per 100,000 population at that time).

Rummaging around through other sources gives me the idea the numbers are being massaged and manipulated, and that the real numbers could be much higher, and not had [as many sources imply] a decline from around 2003-2023. I suspect it could very likely be higher than 1996, now in 2026, rather than around half of what it was in 1996 [as many sources imply].

I wonder how many on house arrest, in bureaucratic states of transition that do not get counted as incarceration (even for extended periors), kept for questioning for terrorism, crammed into slavery prisons with quotas to fulfil, in local jails, in ICE holding, in private prisons that do not call themselves part of the US prison system, in unrecorded illegal incarceration, immigration processing, etc etc etc that are not being counted.

Not to mention the sanctuary districts! [Like Star Trek Deep Space Nine warned us about, on our television sets around the world in 1996, 57th & 58th episodes (11th & 12th episodes of season 3).]

And the broader “open prison” aspects of society… even just like the prison slop in place of food.

Depending on how one cuts the pie… could arguably go right up to around 300 million.

Or, perhaps more contrived an over-reach of interpretation… around 8 billion.

There’s another 2.9M Americans under probation, which rounds out the total to the 5.5M in the statistic.

We often hear about probation as a “lenient” sentence for someone facing possible time behind bars, and about parole as the act of a benevolent parole board, allowing an incarcerated person to be released before completing their maximum sentence. These one-dimensional views trick us into seeing these systems as entirely separate from incarceration, but they’re deeply linked. Staying in compliance with dozens of high-stakes, arbitrary rules is so unmanageable that experts call community supervision systems “a deprivation of liberty in their own right.” Moreover, probation and parole are often pathways into incarceration from the community, with violations of supervision accounting for 42% of prison admissions nationwide.

In practice, the process of probation outsources the costs associated with incarceration to the convict, while still imposing a litany of restrictions on travel, association, employment, and behavior through continuous surveillance. The difference between probation and incarceration largely comes down the second-order putative aspects of jail life (inedible food, lack of sleep, prison-encouraged social violence including murder). The primary purpose of jail - social isolation and continuous state monitoring - continues to be fulfilled.

be owned by owners,

is not what freedom looks like.

perverse incentives.

Quality of life in the Soviet Gulag system was higher from 1952 onwards than modern us prison system

Comparing by totals isn’t really accurate, per capita rates matter more, and the US holds an enormous prison population both by ratio and by total. Further, the Soviets did care a lot about human rights. See Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.

“In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests propagated anti communism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War the anti communist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If Soviets refused to negotiate a point they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off guard. By opposing arms limitations they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armaments treaties it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions) this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system. If they didn’t go on strike it was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated failure of the economic system; and improvement in consumer goods only meant that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communist in the US played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African Americans, women, and others this was only a their guileful way of gathering support among disenfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is an unfalsefiable orthodoxy so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the political spectrum.”

If the communists have many prisoners, it’s for no reason other than being evil. But when in fact the communists don’t have that many prisoners, it’s because they’re so evil they just killed everybody. How they got anything done despite supposedly killing everyone was never explained.

"During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum."

-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds

Life expectancy doubled in Russia before Stalin’s term was over. The Soviets weren’t killing everyone, this is a fantasy.

it’s easy to spew nonsense when you have a brain the size of a peanut

I don’t think it should be surprising that Marxists are on a site developed by Marxists.

I love seeing libs seething in the morning.

The US government told u/Talcosis to reject the evidence from his eyes and ears. It was their final most essential command.

i don’t see statist propaganda, one being worse doesn’t preclude both being bad if that’s your framework

Yes, it’s the people with a reading group who are ignorant and not the people so historically vapid that they recently let a bunch of Epstein associates convince them to support a second Holocaust.

AFTER, mind you, getting tricked by those same pedophiles a few years earlier into supporting actual nazis in Europe, with swastikas and tiki torch marches and everything. We warned you guys then that you were being slow-boiled into fascists, but predictably you were too vain and high on nationalist bloodlust to listen. Same as it ever was.

really telling on yourself there

> Talking sense
> Look inside
> It’s long debunked red-scare propaganda and a chauvinist crashout

Do you think ableism and general bigotry is “talking sense?”

USSR was on its way to falling apart in the eighties. For example, underground punk like Grazhdanskaya oborona was already around at the time (though still persecuted unlike the 90s).

Well the USSRs economy was turning to shit during the 80s, that leaves plenty of room for theft/drugs/domestic violence etc…

Authoritarian is a meaningless word. Its just a scary-sounding descriptor that’s used to frame a designated enemy state as especially heinous. All states are authoritarian.

As are all states. The important distinction between them isn’t the degree by which authority is used, which is largely decided by the conditions a state is in rather than the form of the state itself, but instead is which class controls the state. The USSR was run by the working classes, the US by capitalists.

Can you name a non-authoritarian government?

Which goes to show that “authoritarian” is just a vague, vibes based signifier with no useful purpose.

Authoritarianism is a meaningless term used by edgy children whose brains haven’t fully developed yet. The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.

Every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.

What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.