WaPo: Katrina wouldn't have been as bad under Communism

On Sep. 23, the Washington Post published this graphic from Richard Rhodes and Gwyneth Cravens. It lists the "similarities" and "differences" between the responses to Katrina and Chernobyl. If there was an article associated with this graphic, it's apparently not online. However, the text of the graphic is here, and two letters calling the WaPo to task are here.
One of the differences is that in Katrina there were "Roving gangs of armed criminals, random violence, derelict police officers". However, in the Sovietski Soyuz, there was an "Unarmed and cooperative population, minimal disorder."
Unfortunately, I already read "Caring Communists", otherwise I'd say the same things he does:

Unarmed and cooperative? Folks, the Soviet Union was a police state. That's what you get with a police state. The thugs don't have to rove the streets, they own them. They have all the guns. The roving gangs in the Soviet Union were called the KGB, They killed millions of people in prison camps. To call the Soviet people "unarmed and cooperative" in the face of Chernobyl would be funny if it weren't tragic.