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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Don't swallow your contraband.

In the US a callous cop gets tried and gets sent to prison.

In the USSR you got taken around the back, shot in the head and dumped in a hole on the ground, or if slightly luckier you got a chance to freeze to death after the commander of the gulag had you tamp down the three foot snow for his truck to drive in in your ragged boots and in your escape attempt you get lost and starve and freeze to death a couple of miles away but the commander doesn’t bother with a search party knowing what your fate is.

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>In the US a callous cop gets tried and gets sent to prison.

You're forgetting to include the fact that the cop was lucky enough to be recorded by a member of the population, that person had the courage to post the video, and this whole process required riots in all major cities to occur before it became serious enough to for the courts to properly prosecute.

How many other offenses have gone unprosecuted? For example this same officer had a prior complaint from 2017 for hitting a 14-year-old black boy in the head with a flashlight so hard he required stitches and then afterwards holding him down with his knee for almost 17 minutes, ignoring the boy's complaints that he could not breathe.

Thats just this officer, in a country this size there are likely tons of horror stories.

>"In the US a callous cop gets tried and gets sent to prison."

Sure. Whole 2 times when they were caught on video and caused mass movements.

It really hurts your credibility when you mix up distinct Soviet eras.

The Gulag system began to be dismantled immediately upon Stalin's death and was fully dismantled by 1960.

Just because it began to dismantle it doesn't mean it was completely gone.

Stories about KGB are popular for a reason, you know.

By late USSR, the KGB wouldn't put a bullet in the back of your head, either. They'd hand you over to "experts" who would declare you insane and shove you into a straitjacket - and even that treatment was generally reserved for active dissidents.

By the way, the police and the KGB often didn't get along. There was a famous case where a couple of cops who were very drunk robbed a high-ranking KGB official (he was carrying food from one of those "special" stores). When their senior found out, he decided that it'd be better to cover it up, and had the KGB guy killed and dumped the body in the woods. The KGB eventually unraveled the case - and many other similar ones, of cops partaking in robberies and beatings.

(https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2020-12-26-%0A---war-of-th...)

So on the whole, I suspect you'd be far more likely to be brutalized by the Soviet cops than by KGB.

His writing style and credibility live on a different planets.

Gulag still lives under a different name: FSIN

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/11/10/new-russian-prison... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/08/i-was-always-s...

How is the comparison helpful?

Something with not entirely the same effect happens in the US but not often to rich white men.

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