There isn't a single prison in the world in the history where prisoners are without food, water, and clothes as long as the country itself was doing reasonably fine.

Nazis Germany for example clothed, fed, and gave their Jewish prisoners water. If they wanted to kill the Jewish they didnt starve them, they killed them. Those starving Jewish pictures were taken during an era where the Germans were low on supply. Soviet Union wasn't low on supply. Nazis had death camps but even there the Jewish still had food, water, and clothes, Soviet Union didn't have any death camps. Those dead bodies of Jewish without clothes was because the Jewish took their clothes off before entering the gas chambers.

Certainly the Jewish suffered from frost bite and I'm sure the prisoners in gulag camps also suffered from such, but they certainly had food, water, and clothes.

You probably are talking about the struggle between the Kulaks which are the 10 million rich peasants in Soviet Union who didnt like Stalin. That was a struggle between 10 million peasants who resisted agriculture collectivization vs 110 million peasants who supported Stalin and his collectivization.

In the case of the counter-revolutionaries, it is also necessary to consider the crimes of which they were accused. Let us give two examples to show the importance of this question: the first is the kulaks sentenced at the beginning of the 1930s, and the second is the conspirators and counter-revolutionaries convicted in 1936-38.

According to the research reports insofar as they deal with the kulaks, the rich peasants, there were 381,000 families, i.e., about 1.8 million people sent into exile. A small number of these people were sentenced to serve terms in labour camps or colonies. But what gave rise to these punishments?

The rich Russian peasant, the kulak, had subjected poor peasants for hundreds of years to boundless oppression and unbridled exploitation. Of the 120 million peasants in 1927, the 10 million kulaks lived in luxury while the remaining 110 million lived in poverty. Before the revolution they had lived in the most abject poverty. The wealth of the kulaks was based on the badly-paid labour of the poor peasants. When the poor peasants began to join together in collective farms, the main source of kulak wealth disappeared. But the kulaks did not give up. They tried to restore exploitation by use of famine. Groups of armed kulaks attacked collective farms, killed poor peasants and party workers, set fire to the fields and killed working animals. By provoking starvation among poor peasants, the kulaks were trying to secure the perpetuation of poverty and their own positions of power. The events which ensued were not those expected by these murderers. This time the poor peasants had the support of the revolution and proved to be stronger than the kulaks, who were defeated, imprisoned and sent into exile or sentenced to terms in labour camps.

Of the 10 million kulaks, 1.8 million were exiled or convicted. There may have been injustices perpetrated in the course of this massive class struggle in the Soviet countryside, a struggle involving 120 million people. But can we blame the poor and the oppressed, in their struggle for a life worth living, in their struggle to ensure their children would not be starving illiterates, for not being sufficiently `civilised' or showing enough `mercy' in their courts? Can one point the finger at people who for hundreds of years had no access to the advances made by civilisation for not being civilised? And tell us, when was the kulak exploiter civilised or merciful in his dealings with poor peasants during the years and years of endless exploitation.