“You are confused. What happened is that some brave souls did their ten years, and immediately upon release picked up with the dissent right where they left off and were arrested again on a new charge.”
False. Go read Solzhenitsyn, a first-hand witness to the Gulag. For political prisoners imprisoned under Section 58 it was standard practice to immediately resentence them to another 10 years (and then after that to 5 years of deprivation of civil rights) immediately upon the expiration of their term, without them ever being released. Of course the Soviets would say “well we interrogated them and they were still dissidents”, but that was simply wallpapering.
I mean, the death sentence was also “technically” outlawed in the Soviet Union, but that did not stop them from giving thousands and thousands of prisoners the death penalty. They simply summarily executed them as soon as they were arrested, rather than giving them a judicial hearing where they could not be sentenced to death. Anyone who believes that what the Soviet law books said reflected the actual practice of the law in the Soviet Union was is a fool.
Hey buggeryman. I am merely pointing out that even a despotic communist dictatorship wouldn’t formally codify a prison sentence of more than 10 years and kept the Czar’s sentence structure. The Soviets also had a constitution that was completely ignored.
The point is that even a communist dictatorship wouldn’t legally codify a 641 years sentence, or a 17 year sentence for a single protest. They might kill you in a gulag, but they didn’t brag to the world about it like DC does.
Even Bolsheviks had enough sense to hide their despotism. DC does it right out in the open and feels like they are “protecting democracy”.