The bourgeois propaganda machine has spent decades portraying the Soviet Union as a gigantic “prison camp.” Yet the figures tell a far more uncomfortable story: 2.5 million prisoners, or 2.4% of the adult population, in the USSR in 1950 — compared with 5.5 million, or 2.8%, in the United States in 1996. And the historical circumstances could hardly have been more different. In 1950, the Soviet Union was still recovering from the catastrophic destruction of the Second World War