John Lewis Gaddis remarks that communism did comparatively well in the 1930s by preserving full employment when the rest of the world was suffering in the depression.
I suppose it's easy to maintain full employment with forced labor and killing between 15 to 20 million of your own citizens. As far as I can tell, that's about 12% of its then 165 million population. If the US had killed 12% of its 125 million population, the unemployment rate would sure have looked a lot better (somewhere between -4 and 12%)
It's frightening to hear anyone say that the Soviet Union did comparatively well at anything during the 1930s. Except democide. That they were good at.
Moreover, the unemployment rate is just not a good statistic to compare countries with free and forced labor: it tells you nothing about the productivity of labor or its remuneration.
