DISINFO: GULAG offered hot meals and warm accommodation for the prisoners
SUMMARY
For city intelligentsia, former merchants and rich farmers, the conditions in the GULAG could be a nightmare, but for poor peasants, Lumpen Proletariats and abandoned children, having starved all their lives, the camps meant three hot meals a day, warm accommodations and some level of medical assistance.
RESPONSE
A idyllic and false description of the conditions in the Soviet penal colonies. Encyclopedia Britannica describes the conditions as follows:
Most prisoners laboured under the threat of starvation or execution if they refused. It is estimated that the combination of very long working hours, harsh climatic and other working conditions, inadequate food, and summary executions killed tens of thousands of prisoners each year. Western scholarly estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 ranged from 1.2 to 1.7 million.
Russian writer, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov have shared detailed accounts on their own experiences of the Soviet GULAG system.