Hello all!
The following image (https://imgur.com/gallery/nTpc33M) has been making the rounds in several far-left authoritarian circles on Reddit, claiming to show that, while Russian labour camps experienced mortality rates of between ~40% and ~55% in the years preceding the Russian Revolution (1885-1916), Soviet-era gulags during the tenures of Lenin and Stalin (1917-1952) never went beyond 20%, typically hovering around only ~5%.
How accurate are those numbers, how reliable are the sources cited, and how honest is the graph's presentation?
Even with my own fairly limited knowledge of 20th century Russian history however, these numbers do not ring particularly true. The years depicted in the graph seem arbitrarily (not to mention, manipulatively) selected, and the graph does not supply definitions for what constitutes either a prison or a gulag, nor does it seem to factor in either the impact of the First World War, the Russian Civil War or the Second World War, nor does it appear to reflect the considerable persecution of individuals by secret polices and other paramilitary or military authorities during these times, even though these would have greatly impacted the mortality rate of persons in custody.
What do you think?
Questions about this graph have come up before, and I think I finally tracked down the answer.
The Gulag numbers for the 1930s and 1940s look relatively accurate, insofar as they reflect the official rates as described in Vishnevsky's Demographic Modernization of Russia, 1900-200, with the relevant section available as a pdf here, and the statistics on page 432.
Now, the tsarist information seems to be coming indirectly from Stephen Wheatcroft's "The Crisis of the Late Tsarist Penal System", which discusses the Russian katorga penal colony system (gulags as such didn't exist in tsarist Russia). I say indirectly because I notice that the citation is actually word-for-word from a paper by Mikhail Nakonechnyi, "The Forgotten Success of Penal Transportation Reform in Late Imperial Russia", which is available here. I would specifically direct attention to his graph of Wheatcroft's figures here, in particular the "crude prison death rate, all categories", because this seems to be where the tsarist figures are coming from.
However, the graph in the OP lists the tsarist death rate as a percentage, with a spike of over 50% around 1891. However, Wheatcroft's figures seem to actually be per thousand, with 50 per 1000 as the death rate in 1891 (or actually 5%).
To be blunt, this would seem to be a pretty blatant lie and distortion of the information provided, and not at all representative of the sources cited in the OP graph. And that's not getting into the fact that the "official" death rates for the gulag system in the USSR were intentionally massaged figures, and that the true number of mortalities is disputed, as I discussed here, but generally considered now to be between 1.5 million and 1.7 million deaths out of 18 million or so who passed through the camp system between 1930 and 1953. In comparison to that, the number of katorga prisoners in the last tsarist years was in the low tens of thousands.
