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The author of that graph miscalculated and accidentally inflated the Tsarist era statistics. They were closer to this. (If I remember correctly, the original author might have misunderstood Wheatcroft when he wrote ‘These rates were extremely high in the 1880s, when they were more than five times the normal prison mortality rate[.]’)
The Tsars were still pretty awful, though, and were one of the reasons that made the October Revolution inevitable.
Evidence for that claim?
I learnt this from a commenter on Reddit’s Chapotraphouse when another user shared that same graph; the comment explained how the author miscalculated. Unfortunately, the comment vanished when Reddit deleted Chapotraphouse years ago, so now I don’t have the evidence.
However, one of the sources in that graph, The Crisis of the Late Tsarist Penal System, does not really support the miscalculation:
That is unfortunate.
This doesn't imply the figures in the graph are wrong. It implies that the later soviet figures had higher numbers. The graph is not of total numbers of deaths it is of the mortality rate, providing a comparison of the overall conditions. The soviets undoubtedly had massively more raw numbers, particularly in ww2 when they held many millions.