Your stay in the GULAG could be short for one of two reasons, remember.
What's the current guess of deaths during the collectivization of agriculture? 5 million? What proportion of the 5 million "displaced persons" returned to the Soviet Union after World War II ever made it home? Half? Perhaps 1 million shot by the NKVD during the Great Terror itself who never made it to the GULAG.
I do remember being struck that *both* of Gorbachev's grandparents were arrested during the 1930s (although both survived): his paternal grandfather for failing to meet production targets, and his maternal grandfather for being a right-wing Trotskyist. Stalin was much harder on Communists than on peasants and workers, and the closer you got to Stalin, the lower your chances of surviving became...
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