You're right it could've been a lot greater however you should apply the same analysis towards the USA as well.
If you're black you're all but barred from participating in the space program. This was only recently acknowledged in a Hollywood feel good movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
That is a travesty and a loss for everyone, but you cannot compare those two things in good conscience.
>All the while they were actively preventing 399 men from receiving the same treatments.
And:
>The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or they died soon after they were released.[
I just picked one egregious example to compare to Korolev and other researchers that suffered. If you want to compare systemic examples like the Gulags then the Jim Crow system that effectively instituted slavery [1] and likely killed way more than 1.7 million people. Alabama alone imprisoned 200,000 blacks as effectively slaves[2].
Again I am not trying to dismiss the crimes of the Soviet Union but I almost never see the same analysis applied to the US.
