Totalitarianist

Today in Russia the death rate is 14.6 per 1000 persons.

The death rate of the Soviet Gulags from the 1920s to the 1950s was 1.6%; only slightly higher than the death rate for everyday Russians above.

The death rates in Russian prisons of today is seventeen times higher than that of the general population. That would mean a 25% death rate in prisons. Much worse than any Gulag!

This means that the living conditions for everyday Russians are comparable to the Stalin era Soviet Gulags of the 1930's.

Interesting, also, that Putin re-opened the Soviet Gulags, isn't it? Hmm....

Jat

I wouldn't trust any stats which had come out of Stalinist Russia. They were known to play games with numbers. Unreporting something when it was in reality far worse.

You have a real trouble.

Risiko

From here:

Last year [1993], the death rate soared to 14.6 for every 1,000 people, an increase of 20 percent over the 1992 figure. The birth rate last year was only 9.2 per 1,000, a drop of 15 percent from the previous year. By comparison, the figures for the United States last year were almost exactly the opposite: the birth rate was 16.0 and the death rate was 9.0.

The death rates in Russia are indeed appalling. But the US death rate puts a perspective to it. In both the US and Russia a lot of people dies of old age. The inhabitants of the gulag camps were generally younger, though (criminals, you know).

From here:

What this means is that although the official numbers of prisoners who died are lower than might have been expected--they peaked at 25 percent of the 1.7 million camp population in 1942, and, if they are to be believed, normally hovered around 3 to 5 percent--the number of Soviet citizens with some experience of labor camps is significantly higher. Adding up the totals for all of the years between 1930 and 1953, and factoring in the turnover, it is safe to say that some 18 million Soviet citizens had experience of camps, and perhaps another 15 million had experience of some other form of forced labor. Yet even these estimates include neither those shot before they made it to the camps nor the plight of families left behind. Wives of prisoners lost their jobs; children were forced into orphanages which were hardly more than breeding grounds for epidemics. Many died as a result, but how many?