Gulags were not that bad, claims LGBT student body

A UNIVERSITY society yesterday faced a fierce backlash after it launched a bizarre defence of the Soviet Union’s gulags.

Critics of the communist regime were incarcerated for years and forced to work to exhaustion, with more than a million dying in the forced labour camps.

But the LGBT student union group at Goldsmiths, University of London, branded the atrocities a ‘myth’ – and described the camps as ‘compassionate’.

The group tweeted that the gulags focused on rehabilitation and allowed inmates to join book clubs and theatre groups and write for prison newspapers.

But the comments provoked fury among historians and relatives of victims. Blogger Anna Polyakova, 27, whose greatgrandmother Sofia Fedina, now 105, endured a decade in a work camp, said the idea that the Gulag was ‘a kind of summer vacation’ was nonsense.

She said: ‘I was shocked, angry, offended, I was shaking [after reading the comments]. My first thought was, what next, call Auschwitz a resort?’

The row began after the LGBT group tweeted that so-called TERFs – or transexclusionary radical feminists, a derogatory term for feminists who do not accept trans women as real women – should be sent to gulags.

After criticism, the group said it wanted to ‘clarify what a gulag is’ and why sending people there was ‘actually a compassionate, non-violent course of action’.

The LGBT society further tweeted it was a ‘myth’ prisoners died in the camps. The comments have been deleted.

Goldsmiths Students’ Union said: ‘We condemn the abhorrent content of the tweets and they are in complete opposition to the values of the Students’ Union.’

WANTED posters in the Wild West featured the fugitive’s name and picture.

Fast forward 150 years and Police Scotland have turned the concept on its head.

They are refusing to disclose details of criminals on the run, deploying that cursed excuse of the modern era: data protection.

How typical of Secret Scotland, where the default position of too many public servants is to hide information.

Criminals set themselves outside the norms of society, at which point protections that apply to the law-abiding should fly off. Why should an on-the-run criminal have their identity protected? The public, were they aware of who they are looking for, could be key in bringing them to justice.

It is going to take a sea-change to ditch the secrecy the Scottish Government fosters but it is the Mail’s belief that the public’s right to know ought to trump the so-called rights of thugs and thieves.