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.