(1) Here are some points about the Gulag system.

1) There were at least 476 camp systems, each containing hundreds or thousands of camps and sub-camps spread over the entirety of the USSR.

(2) Anne Applebaum in her "Gulag: A History" estimates that at least 18 million people were incarcerated in Gulags between 1929-53. She also suggests that at least, a further 6-7 Million were deported into slave conditions in so-called "exile-villages."

(3) That however might not tell you the full story. The full death toll is still being debated over but to give you an idea about the Gulag's death toll on certain groups, consider the fate of a group of 12,000 Poles deported in 1940 to a camp near Magadan

(4) which included the future president of the Polish govt in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski. By the time of the amnesty of 1941 only 583 out of that group of 12,000 were left alive!

(5) The largest Gulag camps, such as within the Kolyma/Magadan and Vorkuta systems outsized even the largest of the German concentration camps in WW2, such as Auschwitz or Majdenek and many Gulag camps were in their own way just as lethal!

(6) Avrahim Shifrin in his "The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union" referred to certain camps as being "death camps" because prisoners would be worked to death by being forced to perform tasks such as uranium mining

(7) or the cleaning of nuclear submarines such as at Paldiski bay in Estonia. If the starvation or cold or disease didn't kill the inmates first, the radiation sickness most certainty would have.

(8) Many major population centres had a local Gulag system or (in the case of Siberian towns and cities, also an exile village system) and in some places one could not walk by without seeing a prisoner.

(9) The city of Magnitogorsk for example was built using deported Tatars as slave labour. Their camps contained no medical facilities and no clean water either. As with Gulag camps elsewhere, food rations were kept deliberately at starvation levels

(10) and prisoners would have their rations reduced further for any supposed minor transgressions. Much like above, if the winter cold or starvation didn't get the inmates, rampant diseases like typhus would.

(11) One grisly sight routinely seen during the construction of Magnitogorsk was the special carts going around every day to collect the dead prisoners, mostly consisting of young & old.

(12) The length of sentence given was for most inmates an immaterial number given that the average life expectancy in the bloodiest gulag camps averaged one winter! But even those who somehow managed to survive their term weren't safe from the agony of death by Stalin's regime!

(13) Mykhailo Kozoriz for example, was a member of the VUAN (Ukrainian Academy of sciences). On February 14, 1933, he was arrested for allegedly belonging to an illegal organisation and punished to 5 years in the Gulag system. After his 5 years were up, he was shot!

(14) A major part of Gulag propaganda revolved around the theme of supposedly "re-educating" inmates. This actually finds an echo in how Hitler's German regime initially presented Dachau as but a way to reform supposed "degenerates" back into German society.

(15) Another echo can be found with the sinister slogan displayed on a number of Gulag gates that reads "Труд в СССР есть дело чести, дело славы, дело доблести и геройства." This was a Russian equivalent to the German slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei"

(16) Alexander Solzhenitsyn thought of the propaganda directed against inmates as "mockery." Certainly it is true that the behaviour of camp guards openly humiliated prisoners. As part of the dehumanisation process prisoners themselves were forbidden to call one another "comrade"

(17) and when prisoners arrived at a Gulag camp with any possessions, those possessions were immediately confiscated. The treating of prisoners as subhuman alongside bombarding them with propaganda about "work" served a purpose (in the regime's eyes at least)

(18) to make it easier to get prisoners to "help" in the regime fulfilling any central plan. Fear of being imprisoned into the Gulag system on a whim was widespread and nobody, no matter how prominent in Soviet society they were, was safe.

(19) Despite this Stalin ran a denial campaign to the rest of the world. In 1944 US Vice President Henry Wallace actually went to Kolyma and left convinced that its industrial centres was but a Russian version of his homeland of Montana and that no serious camps existed.

(20) This was reflected in his Duranty-esque 1946 book "Soviet Asia Mission." When Elinor Lipper had her "11 Years in Soviet Prison Camps" translated into English in 1951, it exposed how much Wallace had been duped by Stalin's NKVD.

(21) When Stalin got to smile with Churchill and Roosevelt at Tehran and Yalta he did so safe in the knowledge that his concentration camps would never have the same level of exposure as that of the Germans. And Russian denial continues to this day, hence RT's Sameera Khan.

(22) Her tweets weren't just inaccurate, they are catastrophically inaccurate in every way! The above is just a brief riposte to her idiotic pair of tweets. Let they be a lesson to all should any of my followers encounter anyone else posting Gulag denial!