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"the Soviets deliberately murdered over 30 million of their own people, and that's the low estimate. Putin is one of them, and now he presides over "Russia."

Yes, they did but the Gulags stopped in the sixties. That is where the mult-millions died. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you will not be able to support your economic system with such population decreases. In fact, I would wager the Gulags what caused the economic collapse of the Soviet Union a short couple of decades later.

Also, Putin is a very young president. He would have been around 15 when the Gulags stopped, so he did not preside over it as you suggest. Don't get me wrong, I am no fan of Putin at all. I think he is a dangerous adversary but for other reasons.

Quant5 wrote:

"Yes, they did but the Gulags stopped in the sixties."

Excerpt from Inside Story: World Report, 1995 (well after the Soviet Union "Collapsed").

Concentration camp survivor Avraham Shifrin was able to leave the Soviet Union in 1970 and move to Israel, where he established the Research Center for Prisons, Psychprisons and Forced Labor Concentration Camps of the USSR. He published his comprehensive research on Soviet camps in 1980, indicating more than 2,000 concentration camps were active-including 119 camps for women and children and at least 41 death camps.1 By 1990, Shifrin reported that some 2,500 camps were now holding an expanded population of 7 million inmates under Mikhail Gorbachev's regime.2

But more chillingly, Shifrin has recently discovered that the "former" Soviet Union under Boris Yeltsin is rapidly building many new camps throughout the country, in addition to the thousands of ongoing camps. These still-empty camps could serve to hold vast numbers of Western Europeans once the Red Army moves into Germany, Italy, France, and England.

Since the "collapse" of Soviet Communism in 1991, Moscow has opened to the public a tiny handful of old camps, mostly in Siberia. But the other 2,500 camps remain in full operation, exterminating large numbers of citizens under a continuing regime of terror. The Soviet propaganda works only because most Americans never understood the severity of Communist oppression in the first place.

11 Shifrin, A., First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union, Bantam Books, NY, 1982, esp. pp. 10, 19-21, 31-35.
12 Shifrin, A., "A Performance: Glasnost and Perestroika," an open letter, Jan. 1990.

In fact, I would wager the Gulags what caused the economic collapse of the Soviet Union a short couple of decades later.

The gulags also contributed to a nationwide culture of relinquishing children in state-owned orphanages. There is now an orphanage in almost every city in Russia. The Russians are not always kind toward these children. One tv show I watched in Moscow simply called them "little criminals", an attitude which has persisted since they were set up to house the children of those sent to the gulags.