Slop.

Gulags were prisons, but they were in fact better than contemporary western prisons, and in some ways better than modern ones too.

Quote from an Anne Applebaum book, a noted anti communist.

“Needing hospitals, camp administrators built them and introduced systems for training prisoners pharmacists and prisoner nurses. Needing food, they constructed their own collective farms, their own warehouses and distribution systems. Needing electricity they built power plants. Needing building materials they built brick factories. Needing educated workers, they trained the ones they had. Much of the ex-Kulak workforces turned out to be illiterate or semi-literate which caused enormous problems when dealing with projects relative technical sophistication. The camps administration therefore set up technical training schools which required in turn, more new buildings and new cadres. Math and physics teachers as well as political instructors to oversee their work. By the 1940s, Vorkuta, which was a city that as mentioned started as a gulag, a city built in the permafrost, where roads had to be resurfaced and pipes had to be repaired every year, had acquired a geological institute, a university, theaters, puppet theaters, swimming pools, and nurseries.”

If we exclude the war years, when there were food shortages and no shortage of Nazi prisoners, death rates in the gag were below that of contemporary US prisons.