…and local businesses constantly close in favour of big companies, as countries develop the amount of self-employed people goes down:
Local businesses simply cannot outcompete ever-growing big businesses, and because big businesses are in a need to ever-grow to satisfy the raising stock value imperative, they inevitably intrude the market share of local businesses. This is well-known since the mid-1800s.
Your comment isn’t consistent with historical evidence, though. At the peak of WW2, the GULAG death rate was about 17-20%, during a famine and a war that killed about 10% of the country. Death rate for the war was 10%, so a 20% death rate in prison during the war doesn’t seem that crazy to me, and the fact that it was much lower before and after kinda indicates that it wasn’t the intention. Additionally, out of the millions that went thorugh the GULAG system, about 700k seem to be the consensus for political prisoners, which makes up only a fraction of the total. It’s not great, but it’s not death camps for the enemies of the state, it’s a prison system in an underdeveloped country undergoing the greatest war of human history.
It’s sad to me that you need to consult the “big book of made-up rules” to argue against Greta being kidnapped by a genocidal colonial state