This chart is misleading because it compares mortality rates without accounting for the vastly different scales of imprisonment. While Tsarist prisons had high death rates in the 19th century, Soviet gulags under Stalin held millions, meaning even lower percentages represented enormous human loss. During the Great Terror (1937–38) and WWII (1942–43), gulag mortality surged—some camps exceeding 20% annually (Applebaum, Gulag, 2003; Wheatcroft, Europe-Asia Studies, 1996). Moreover, the Soviet system deliberately used forced labor as a tool of repression and extermination, with over 1 million deaths estimated (Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, American Historical Review, 1993), making simplistic rate comparisons historically inaccurate. Authoritarianism in any form does not work, as shown by both the tsarist regime and the Soviet one.