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Estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the Soviet revolutionary and dictator Joseph Stalin vary widely. [1] The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants. [2] [3] [4]
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher. [5] [6] [7] After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953), [8] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag, [9] [10] some 390,000 [11] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s, [12] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories. [13] According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility. [2] The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million [14] persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes, though not always, included with the victims of the Stalin era. [2] [15]
According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, and a further 7 to 8 million were deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union. [16]
According to a 1993 study of recently declassified archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag (not including labor colonies) from 1934 to 1953 (there was no archival data for the period 1919–1934). [17] : 1024 More recent archival figures for the deaths in the Gulag, labor colonies and prisons combined for 1931–1953 were 1.713 million. [15] According to historian Michael Ellman, non-state estimates of the actual Gulag death toll are usually higher because historians such as Robert Conquest took into account the likelihood of unreliable record keeping. [18] According to author Anne Applebaum, it was common practice to release prisoners who were either suffering from incurable diseases or near death. [19]
Golfo Alexopoulos, history professor at the University of South Florida, believes that at least six million people died as a result of their detention in the gulags. [20] This estimate is disputed by other scholars, with critics such as J. Hardy stating that the evidence Alexopoulos used is indirect and misinterpreted. [21] Historian Dan Healey argues that the estimate has obvious methodological difficulties. [22] [ failed verification ]
Citing materials pre-1991, author John G. Heidenrich estimates the number of deaths at 12 million. [23] [ undue weight? – discuss ] His book is not primarily about estimating deaths from repressive policies in the Soviet Union, and he appears to have relied on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's political and literary work The Gulag Archipelago , which historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft explains was not intended as a historical fact but as a challenge to Soviet authorities after their years of secrecy. [24]
According to estimates based on data from Soviet archives post-1991, there were around 1.6 million deaths during the whole period from 1929 to 1953. [25] The tentative historical consensus is that of the 18 million people who passed through the gulag system from 1930 to 1953, between 1.5 and 1.7 million died as a result of their incarceration. [22]
The deaths of 5.7 [26] to perhaps 7.0 million people [27] [28] in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and Soviet collectivization of agriculture are included among the victims of repression during the period of Stalin by some historians. [29] [30] This categorization is controversial, as historians differ as to whether the famine in Ukraine was created as a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] was an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization, [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] or was primarily a result of natural factors. [41] [42] [43] [44]
According to official figures there were 777,975 judicial executions for political charges from 1929 to 1953, including 681,692 in 1937–1938, the years of the Great Purge. [9] Unofficial estimates estimate a total number of Stalinism repression deaths in 1937–38 at 700,000–1,200,000. [45] [46] There were also operations of mass ethnic cleansing against various minorities living in Stalin's USSR, known as the National operations of the NKVD, with the largest one being the Polish Operation of the NKVD during which 150,000 Poles were arrested, of whom over 111,000 were exterminated. [47] Under Stalin, the death penalty was extended to adolescents as young as 12 years old in 1935. [48] [49] [50]
The last major famine to hit the Soviet Union began in July 1946, reached its peak in February–August 1947 and then quickly diminished in intensity, although there were still some famine deaths in 1948. [51] Economist Michael Ellman states that the hands of the state could have fed all those who died of starvation. He argues that had the policies of the Soviet regime been different, there might have been no famine at all or a much smaller one. Ellman claims that the famine resulted in an estimated 1 to 1.5 million lives lost in addition to secondary population losses due to reduced fertility. [51]
Large numbers of kulaks regardless of their nationality were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. According to data from Soviet archives, which were published in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931, and 1,317,022 reached the destination. Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. Data from the Soviet archives indicates 2.4 million kulaks were deported from 1930 to 1934. [52] The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who had died in labour colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521. [11] [53] Popular history author Simon Sebag Montefiore estimated that 15 million kulaks and their families were deported by 1937; during the deportation, many people died, but the full number is not known. [54]
According to Russian historian Pavel Polian, 5.870 million persons were deported to forced settlements from 1920 to 1952, including 3.125 million from 1939 to 1952. [52] Those ethnic minorities considered a threat to Soviet security in 1939–52 were forcibly deported to Special Settlements run by the NKVD. Poles, Ukrainians from western regions, Soviet Germans, Balts, and Estonians peoples from the Caucasus and Crimea were the primary victims of this policy. Data from the Soviet archives list 309,521 deaths in the Special Settlements from 1941 to 1948 and 73,454 in 1949–50. [55] According to Polian these people were not allowed to return to their home regions until after the death of Stalin, the exception being Soviet Germans who were not allowed to return to the Volga region of the Soviet Union. According to Soviet archives, the heaviest mortality rate was documented in people from the Northern Caucasus (the Chechens, Ingush) with 144,704 deaths, or 24.7% of the entire deported population, as well as 44,125 deaths from Crimea, or a 19.3% mortality rate. [56]
The massacre was prompted by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps, dated 5 March 1940, approved by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, including its leader Joseph Stalin. The number of victims is estimated at 22,000. [57]
Writing in Slavic Review , demographers Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver maintained that limited census data make a precise death count impossible. Instead, they offer a probable range of 3.2 to 5.5 million excess deaths for the entire Soviet Union from 1926 to 1939, a period that covers collectivization, the civil war in the countryside, the purges of the late 1930s and major epidemics of typhus and malaria. [58] In 2001, American historian Richard Pipes argued that the population had decreased by 9 to 10 million people from the 1932 to 1939 censuses. [59] The 17th Congress of the UCP estimated that the USSRs population was 168 million in 1933, and predicted that it would grow to 180 million by 1937, yet the 1937 census registered only 162 million people, a decrease in population. The mortality rate was double the average one than in Europe at that time. [60]
Some historians claim that the death toll was around 20 million, [68] a figure based on Conquest's book The Great Terror (1968), with some estimates relying in part on demographic losses such as Conquest's. [69] In 2003, British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore suggested that Stalin was ultimately responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people. [70] In 2006, political scientist Rudolph Rummel wrote that the earlier higher victim total estimates are correct, although he included those killed by the government of the Soviet Union in other Eastern European countries as well. [71] [72] In his most recent edition of The Great Terror (2007), Conquest stated that while exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, at least 15 million people were killed "by the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors." [73] According to Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver, historians such as Robert Conquest made the most primitive of errors. They asserted that these Cold Warriors overestimated fertility rates and underrated the impact of assimilation, through which many Ukrainians were redesignated as Russians in the 1939 census, confusing population deficits, which included unborn children, with excess deaths. [58]
Historians such as J. Arch Getty, Stephen G. Wheatcroft, and others, insist that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by the revisionist school. [74] [75] In 2011, after assessing twenty years of historical research in Eastern European archives, American historian Timothy D. Snyder stated that Stalin deliberately killed about 6 million, which rise to 9 million if foreseeable deaths arising from policies are taken into account. [76] [77] American historian William D. Rubinstein concluded that, even under most conservative estimates, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of at least 7 million people, or about 4.2% of USSRs total population. [78]
Some historians believe that the official archival figures of the categories that were recorded by Soviet authorities are unreliable and incomplete. [1] In addition to failures regarding comprehensive recordings, as one additional example, Canadian historian Robert Gellately and Montefiore argue that the many suspects beaten and tortured to death while in "investigative custody" were likely not to have been counted amongst the executed. [79] [80] Conversely, Wheatcroft states that prior to the opening of the archives for historical research, "our understanding of the scale and the nature of Soviet repression has been extremely poor" and that some specialists who wish to maintain earlier high estimates of the Stalinist death toll are "finding it difficult to adapt to the new circumstances when the archives are open and when there are plenty of irrefutable data" and instead "hang on to their old Sovietological methods with round-about calculations based on odd statements from emigres and other informants who are supposed to have superior knowledge." [81] [3] British historian Michael Ellman argues that mass deaths from famines should be placed in a different category than the repression victims, mentioning that throughout Russian history famines and droughts have been a common occurrence, including the Russian famine of 1921–1922, triggered by Stalin's predecessor Vladimir Lenin's war communism policies, which killed about five million people. [82] [83] He also states that famines were widespread throughout the world in the 19th and 20th centuries in countries such as China, India, Ireland, and Russia. [15] Ellman compared the behaviour of the Stalinist regime vis-à-vis the Holodomor to that of the British government (towards Ireland and India) and the G8 in contemporary times. According to Ellman, the G8 "are guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence because of their not taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and Stalin's "behaviour was no worse than that of many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." [15] Ben Kiernan, an American academic and historian, described Stalin's era as "by far the bloodiest of Soviet or even Russian history". [84]
Event | Est. number of deaths | References |
---|---|---|
Dekulakization | 530,000–600,000 | [85] |
Great Purge | 700,000–1,200,000 | [45] [9] [46] |
Gulag | 1,500,000–1,713,000 | [15] [22] |
Soviet deportations | 450,000–566,000 | [86] [87] |
Katyn massacre | 22,000 | [88] |
Holodomor | 2,500,000–4,000,000 | [89] |
Kazakh famine of 1931–33 | 1,450,000 | [90] |
Stalin has been accused of genocide in the cases of forced population transfer in the Soviet Union. Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who initiated the Genocide Convention and coined the term genocide himself, assumed that genocide was perpetrated in the context of the mass deportation of the Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks and Karachay. [91] Some academics disagree with the classification of deportation as genocide. Professor Alexander Statiev argues that Stalin's administration did not have a conscious genocidal intent to exterminate the various deported peoples, but that Soviet "political culture, poor planning, haste, and wartime shortages were responsible for the genocidal death rate among them." He rather considers these deportations an example of Soviet assimilation of "unwanted nations." [92] According to Professor Amir Weiner, "...It was their territorial identity and not their physical existence or even their distinct ethnic identity that the regime sought to eradicate." [93] According to Professor Francine Hirsch, "although the Soviet regime practiced politics of discrimination and exclusion, it did not practice what contemporaries thought of as racial politics ." To her, these mass deportations were based on the concept that nationalities were "sociohistorical groups with a shared consciousness and not racial-biological groups." [94] In contrast to this view, Jon K. Chang contends that the deportations had been in fact based on ethnicity and that "social historians" in the West have failed to champion the rights of marginalised ethnicities in the Soviet Union. [95]
Contemporary historians classify these deportations as a crime against humanity and ethnic persecution. Two of these cases of mass deportation with the highest mortality rates, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars and the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush, were recognized as genocides by Ukraine (plus 3 other countries) and the European Parliament respectively. [96] [97] On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and genocide." [98]
Historians continue to debate whether or not the 1932–33 Ukrainian famine, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, should be called a genocide. [99] Twenty six countries officially recognise it under the legal definition of genocide. In 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament declared it to be such, [100] and in 2010 a Ukrainian court posthumously convicted Stalin, Lazar Kaganovich, Stanislav Kosior, and other Soviet leaders of genocide. [101] Popular among some Ukrainian nationalists is the idea that Stalin consciously organised the famine to suppress national desires among the Ukrainian people. This interpretation has been disputed by more recent historical studies. [44] These have articulated the view that while Stalin's policies contributed significantly to the high mortality rate, there is no evidence that Stalin or the Soviet government consciously engineered the famine. [102] [38] [40] The idea that this was a targeted attack on the Ukrainians is complicated by the widespread suffering that also affected other Soviet peoples in the famine, including the Russians. [103] [104] Within Ukraine, ethnic Poles and Bulgarians died in similar proportions to ethnic Ukrainians. [104] Despite any lack of clear intent on Stalin's part, the historian Norman Naimark noted that although there may not be sufficient "evidence to convict him in an international court of justice as a genocidaire [...] that does not mean that the event itself cannot be judged as genocide." [105]
Stalinism is the totalitarian means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1924 to 1953 by dictator Joseph Stalin and in Soviet satellite states between 1944 and 1953. Stalin had previously made a career as a gangster and robber, working to fund revolutionary activities, before eventually becoming General Secretary of the Soviet Union. Stalinism included the creation of a one man totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, forced collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which Stalinism deemed the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev Thaw, a period of de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin's ideology to begin to wane in the USSR.
The Great Purge, or the Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 to 1938. It sought to consolidate Joseph Stalin's power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and aimed at removing the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky within the Soviet Union. The term great purge was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror, whose title was an allusion to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.
From 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories. Dekulakization marked the first time that an entire class was deported, whereas the deportation of Soviet Koreans in 1937 marked the precedent of a specific ethnic deportation of an entire nationality.
The Soviet Union introduced forced collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into nominally collectively-controlled and openly or directly state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed from 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food would be needed to keep up with urban demand.
The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a human-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties is a book by British historian Robert Conquest which was published in 1968. It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet history known as the Great Purge. Conquest's title was also an evocative allusion to the period that was called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. A revised version of the book, called The Great Terror: A Reassessment, was printed in 1990 after Conquest was able to amend the text, having consulted the opened Soviet archives. The book was funded and widely disseminated by Information Research Department, who also published Orwell's list collected by Conquest's secretary Celia Kirwan.
Soviet and communist studies, or simply Soviet studies, is the field of regional and historical studies on the Soviet Union and other communist states, as well as the history of communism and of the communist parties that existed or still exist in some form in many countries, both inside and outside the former Eastern Bloc, such as the Communist Party USA. Aspects of its historiography have attracted debates between historians on several topics, including totalitarianism and Cold War espionage.
Throughout Russian history famines, droughts and crop failures occurred on the territory of Russia, the Russian Empire and the USSR on more or less regular basis. From the beginning of the 11th to the end of the 16th century, on the territory of Russia for every century there were 8 crop failures, which were repeated every 13 years, sometimes causing prolonged famine in a significant territory. The causes of the famine were different, from natural and economic and political crises; for example, the Great Famine of 1931–1933, colloquially called the Holodomor, the cause of which was, among other factors, the collectivization policy in the USSR, which affected the territory of the Volga region in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, tens of millions of people suffered political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution. It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist during the "Khrushchev Thaw", followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents during the Brezhnev era, and it did not cease to exist until late in Mikhail Gorbachev's rule when it was ended in keeping with his policies of glasnost and perestroika.
The actions by governments of communist states have been subject to criticism across the political spectrum. Communist party rule has been especially criticized by anti-communists and right-wing critics, but also by other socialists such as anarchists, democratic socialists, libertarian socialists, orthodox Marxists, and Trotskyist communists. Ruling communist parties have also been challenged by domestic dissent. According to the critics, rule by communist parties has often led to totalitarianism, political repression, restrictions of human rights, poor economic performance, and cultural and artistic censorship.
The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and different parts of Russia, including Kazakhstan, Northern Caucasus, Kuban Region, Volga Region, the South Urals, and West Siberia. Major factors included the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan and forced grain procurement from farmers. These factors in conjunction with a massive investment in heavy industry decreased the agricultural workforce. Estimates conclude that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died from starvation across the Soviet Union.
In 1932–1933, a man-made famine, known as the Holodomor, killed 3.3–5 million people in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, included in a total of 5.5–8.7 million killed by the broader Soviet famine of 1930–1933. At least 3.3 million ethnic Ukrainians died as a result of the famine in the USSR. Scholars debate whether there was an intent to starve millions of Ukrainians to death or not.
The causes of the Holodomor, which was a famine in Soviet Ukraine during 1932 and 1933 that resulted in the death of around 3–5 million people, are the subject of scholarly and political debate, particularly surrounding the Holodomor genocide question. Soviet historians Stephen Wheatcroft and J. Arch Getty believe the famine was the unintended consequence of problems arising from Soviet agricultural collectivization which was designed to accelerate the program of industrialization in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Other academics conclude policies were intentionally designed to cause the famine. Some scholars and political leaders claim that the famine may be classified as a genocide under the definition of genocide that entered international law with the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Mass killings under communist regimes occurred through a variety of means during the 20th century, including executions, famine, deaths through forced labour, deportation, starvation, and imprisonment. Some of these events have been classified as genocides or crimes against humanity. Other terms have been used to describe these events, including classicide, democide, red holocaust, and politicide. The mass killings have been studied by authors and academics and several of them have postulated the potential causes of these killings along with the factors which were associated with them. Some authors have tabulated a total death toll, consisting of all of the excess deaths which cumulatively occurred under the rule of communist states, but these death toll estimates have been criticised. Most frequently, the states and events which are studied and included in death toll estimates are the Holodomor and the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, the Great Chinese Famine and the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China, and the Cambodian genocide in Democratic Kampuchea. Estimates of individuals killed range from a low of 10–20 million to as high as 148 million.
Stephen George Wheatcroft is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet social, economic and demographic history, as well as famine and food supply problems in modern world history, the impact of media on history, and in recent developments in Russian and Ukrainian society. Wheatcroft speaks Russian fluently and has spent a good portion of his career researching in the Soviet archives, and he played a major role in publishing materials from the archives.
Kulak, also kurkul or golchomag, was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned over 3 ha of land towards the end of the Russian Empire. In the early Soviet Union, particularly in Soviet Russia and Azerbaijan, kulak referred to property ownership among peasants who were considered hesitant allies of the Bolshevik Revolution. In Ukraine during 1930–1931, there also existed a term of podkulachnik ; these were considered "sub-kulaks".
The Kazakh famine of 1930–1933, also known as the Asharshylyk, was a famine during which approximately 1.5 million people died in the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, then part of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in the Soviet Union, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs. An estimated 38 to 42 percent of all Kazakhs died, the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine of 1930–1933. Other research estimates that as many as 2.3 million died. A committee created by the Kazakhstan parliament chaired by Historian Manash Kozybayev concluded that the famine was "a manifestation of the politics of genocide", with 1.75 million victims.
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine is a 1986 book by British historian Robert Conquest published by the Oxford University Press. It was written with the assistance of historian James Mace, a junior fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, who started doing research for the book following the advice of the director of the institute. Conquest wrote the book in order "to register in the public consciousness of the West a knowledge of and feeling for major events, involving millions of people and millions of deaths, which took place within living memory."
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
The Stalinist regime was consequently responsible for about a million purposive killings, and through its criminal neglect and irresponsibility it was probably responsible for the premature deaths of about another two million more victims amongst the repressed population, i.e. in the camps, colonies, prisons, exile, in transit and in the POW camps for Germans. These are clearly much lower figures than those for whom Hitler's regime was responsible.
New studies using declassified Gulag archives have provisionally established a consensus on mortality and "inhumanity."
During 1921–53, the number of sentences was (political convictions): sentences, 4,060,306; death penalties, 799,473; camps and prisons, 2,634397; exile, 413,512; other, 215,942. In addition, during 1937–52 there were 14,269,753 non-political sentences, among them 34,228 death penalties, 2,066,637 sentences for 0–1 year, 4,362,973 for 2–5 years, 1,611,293 for 6–10 years, and 286,795 for more than 10 years. Other sentences were non-custodial
We are all inclined to accept the Zemskov totals (even if not as complete) with their 14 million intake to Gulag 'camps' alone, to which must be added 4–5 million going to Gulag 'colonies', to say nothing of the 3.5 million already in, or sent to, 'labour settlements'. However taken, these are surely 'high' figures.
New studies using declassified Gulag archives have provisionally established a consensus on mortality and 'inhumanity.' The tentative consensus says that once secret records of the Gulag administration in Moscow show a lower death toll than expected from memoir sources, generally between 1.5 and 1.7 million (out of 18 million who passed through) for the years from 1930 to 1953.
When Solzhenitsyn wrote and distributed his Gulag Archipelago it had enormous political significance and greatly increased popular understanding of part of the repression system. But this was a literary and political work; it never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective, Solzhenitsyn cited a figure of 12–15 million in the camps. But this was a figure that he hurled at the authorities as a challenge for them to show that the scale of the camps was less than this.
According to latest estimates 2,5 million people were arrested and 700,000 of them shot. These figures are based on reliable archival materials [...]
The best estimate that can currently be made of the number of repression deaths in 1937–38 is the range 950,000–1.2 million, i.e . about a million. This is the estimate which should be used by historians, teachers and journalists concerned with twentieth century Russian—and world—history
Between 1929 and 1953 the state created by Lenin and set in motion by Stalin deprived 21.5 million Soviet citizens of their lives.
My own many years and experience in the rehabilitation of victims of political terror allow me to assert that the number of people in the USSR who were killed for political motives or who died in prisons and camps during the entire period of Soviet power totaled 20 to 25 million. And unquestionably one must add those who died of famine—more than 5.5 million during the civil war and more than 5 million during the 1930s.
I suggest about eleven million by the beginning of 1937, and about three million over the period 1937–38, making fourteen million. The eleven-odd million is readily deduced from the undisputed population deficit shown in the suppressed census of January 1937, of fifteen to sixteen million, by making reasonable assumptions about how this was divided between birth deficit and deaths.
For decades, many historians counted Stalin' s victims in 'tens of millions', which was a figure supported by Solzhenitsyn. Since the collapse of the USSR, the lower estimates of the scale of the camps have been vindicated. The arguments about excess mortality are far more complex than normally believed. R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Re-assessment (London, 1992) does not really get to grips with the new data and continues to present an exaggerated picture of the repression. The view of the 'revisionists' has been largely substantiated (J. Arch Getty & R. T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge, 1993)). The popular press, even TLS and The Independent, have contained erroneous journalistic articles that should not be cited in respectable academic articles.
The long-awaited archival evidence on repression in the period of the Great Purges shows that levels of arrests, political prisoners, executions, and general camp populations tend to confirm the orders of magnitude indicated by those labeled as 'revisionists' and mocked by those proposing high estimates.
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. ... All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million. These figures are of course subject to revision, but it is very unlikely that the consensus will change again as radically as it has since the opening of Eastern European archives in the 1990s.
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