Really? Maybe its because I was in school during the tail end of the Cold War, but the brutality of Soviet punishment, especially during Stalin's despotism, was taught to the point of oversaturation in social studies when I was a kid. I still associate Siberia with the same sort of go-there-and-don't-come-back, openly-secret-horrors that Guantanamo is associated with today. Only worse, because Commies.
The amount of things they leave out of history lessons these days is horrendous.
I graduated high school in 2007. I loved history class and paid very good attention, so my gaps in knowledge are due to gaps in material, not inattention. When I left school, here's what I knew about modern (post-1900) history:
*WWI: Germany did something bad. The British told them no. Fighting happened, we helped the British.
*1920's: WOMEN CAN VOTE! Also, prohibition and flappers and speakeasies. BUT MOSTLY VOTING.
*1930's: Shitfuck Great Depression. Droughts and famine and everybody was poor. Hoover sucked, Roosevelt rocked. Also Hitler started doing shit.
*1940's: WWII. That's literally all that happened in the 40's despite it ending in 45. Nazis and the holocaust. GERMANS ARE BAD, KAY. Japan dropped normal bombs on our military base, so we nuked their civilians because 'MURICA. We also rounded up Japanese-Americans into internment camps, but it's OK because THE GERMAN CAMPS WERE WORSE and we only locked people up, we didn't kill and experiment on them. Also, Russia was there, but they're not important, because NAZIS.
*1950's - People made lots of babies. Rock & Roll happened. Also, Russia was there, some thing called Sputnik, but THE AMERICAN DREAM, LIFE WAS PERFECT.
*1960's: We went to the moon, bitches! Civil Rights Movement, MLK and JFK were shot, people were pissed about the Vietnam War. Russia was there - something about a space race? - but they weren't that important, because hippies, drugs, war protests.
*1970's - Watergate. That happened. It was a thing.
*1980's - The Berlin Wall came down! We're not going to bother teaching you much of anything about the significance of the wall or why it being taken down was such a big deal, but it happened.
*1990's - I mean, you lived it, you remember what happened, we're not going to remind you.
No Child Left Behind, folks. No Child Left Behind. I've literally learned more history from watching TV than I did in school. American History and World History was mainly focused on WWII, America's involvement, and ermagahd Nazis. And this was at a "good school" with "good test scores", a school that's so supposedly good that people are flooding to that town so that their kids can go to that school, and the town can't keep up with the expansion.
/derailment, yeah, Stalin was a POS.