"Two books from Oxford University Press provide a reminder of just what life was like on the other side during the last sixty years of the 20th century. The books offer a look at two forms of repressive Communist societies.
One, and by far the more brutal, was the Soviet Gulag, a collection of hundreds of work camps where between 20 and 30 million Russians and others were sent after their arrest to help build the Soviet industrial state before, during, and after World War 2. Millions died in these camps -- a full quarter of all prisoners every year during the horrific years of the Soviet war with Nazi Germany from 1941-1945. Prisoners were arrested for two primary reasons: concern that they were not loyal and, to a much larger extent, the need for bodies to work. The prisoners lived in inhuman conditions -- bitter cold, flimsy sleeping quarters, minimal food and water, in unsanitary surroundings.
The Stasi was a repressive force of a very different kind. The East Germans did not routinely murder dissidents or conduct mass arrests. Instead, they gathered information on a very large number of the state's citizens. No other country in the world has ever had as high a percentage of the population participating in domestic spying (as many as one in forty adults). This included the employees of the Stasi and the far larger army of informants they relied on. Though Stasi employees furiously burned documents in the days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, over 111 miles of such documents remained. A quarter of the East Germans had Stasi files in the documents that were recovered. "
[American Thinker]
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