They were in effect death camps, as you surely must realise. Just as the famine in the Ukraine was in effect a gigantic Belsen, supervised and facilitated by the State under direct orders from Stalin (he even admitted it to Churchill at Yalta). So the deaths in the Gulag, a system set up and supervised by the Soviet State, can also qualify as a mass killing. Or is it a case of "all deaths are equal, but some deaths are more equal than others" (i.e., if you die in a Nazi death camp you're part of a mass killing, but if you die in a Soviet death camp, you're not). Another question for you – do you think that holocaust victims who died from diseases brought on by malnutrition and poor sanitary conditions should not count among the 6 million who died?