One
of the main arguments made against Socialism is
that it leads to the Gulag. For many, Gulag is synonymous
with the crimes committed in Nazi concentration
camps. The popular view is that under Stalin, dozens
of millions died. It has even been argued by some
that Socialism is worse than Nazism because it has
been responsible for far more many deaths. The work
of scholars like Robert Conquest, Robert Service
and Richard Pipes (or more recently Dmitrii Volkogonov)
represents that conventional view. One of the problems
with their work is that most of it was published
before the death of the Soviet Union, and these
historians had not full access to the Soviet archives.
One has also to bear in mind that this was cold
war historiography.
Robert
Conquest had worked at the UK Foreign Office's Information
Research Department doing anti-communist propaganda
before publishing his 1968 book 'The Great Terror'
and his 1986 research on the Ukrainian famine,
'Harvest of Sorrow' was paid by Ukrainian nationalist
groups which had collaborated with the Nazis (1).
Also, Richard Pipes was an advisor to Ronald Reagan'
s administration.
Since
the end of the Soviet Union and the opening of the
Soviet archives, the work of this cold war 'totalitarian'
interpretation of the Stalin period had been undermined
by the so-called 'revisionist' school of Soviet
history. This school of thought is non-Marxist and
has no political interest in somehow 'rehabilitating'
the Stalin period. It does however challenge the
work of the cold war historians.
The
best known of these 'revisionist' historians are
John Arch Getty, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Roberta T Manning
and Robert W Thurston. The first and groundbreaking
work of this school was John Arch Getty, Origins
of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party
Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge University
Press, 1985). The collection Stalinist Terror:
New Perspectives edited by John Arch Getty and
Roberta T Manning (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
gives a good general overview of their work. It
should be noted that these are all serious mainstream
historians, and that their work is published by
prestigious publishers like Cambridge and Yale University
Press who cannot be accused of Communist sympathy.
Over
the last decade the 'revisionists' published a number
of important books such as Robert W. Thurston, Life
and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941 (Yale
University Press, 1996); Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday
Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times
(Oxford University Press, 1998), Lewis Siegelbaum
and A.K Sokolov's Stalinism As a Way of Life:
A Narrative in Documents (Yale University Press,
1999), and the crucial book by J Arch Getty and
Oleg V Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and
the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks 1932-1939
(Yale University Press, 1999).
On
the basis of solid evidence (archival and other),
these authors demonstrate that the amount of people
sent to the Gulag and the number of custodial deaths
previously reported by various scholars were vastly
inflated. Parallel to them, the work of Steven G.
Wheatcroft on the size of Soviet forced labour camps
and number of deaths has developed as a refutation
of Conquest et.al.(2). Getty
and Naumov write that "The population of all
labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons on 1 January
1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976.
This gives us a total increase in the camp and prison
population in 1937-38 of 1,006,030." (p. 590)
To
put things into perspective, the prison population
in the United States today is around 2 million.
What
about "custodial mortality" figures? In
their 1993 article, J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn,
and Viktor N. Zemskov state that on the basis of
archival evidence "we know that, between 1934
and 1953, 1,053,829 persons died in the camps of
the GULAG. We have data to the effect that some
86,582 people perished in prisons between 1939 and
1951. (We do not yet know exactly how many died
in labor colonies.) We also know that, between 1930
and 1952-1953, 786,098 "counter-revolutionaries"
were executed (or, according to another source,
more than 775,866 persons "on cases of the
police" and for "political crimes").
Finally, we know that, from 1932 through 1940, 389,521
peasants died in places of "kulak" resettlement.
Adding these figures together would produce a total
of a little more than 2.3 million." It goes
without saying that those figures are horrific,
but they are far below Conquest's twenty million
dead.
The
same goes for the number of executions. Stalin signed
numerous death sentences, the record number being
3 167 (approximately the number of people who died
during the Troubles of the last thirty years…)
on 12 December 1938. The 1st Special Section of
the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in a summary
dated 11 December 1953 documents 684,244 executions
in the period 1937-1939. Of these 681,692 occurred
in 1937-1938 (compared with 1,118 persons in 1936).
These archival figures, coming from a statistical
report 'on the quantity of people convicted upon
cases of NKVD bodies,' include victims who had not
been arrested for political reasons. Also, in New
Left Review 219, R.W. Davies quotes a formerly
secret report from the Soviet archives, prepared
for Malenkov and Khrushchev, which stated that from
1921 to 1952 inclusive 799,257 persons were executed
by the decision of various agencies and tribunals
of the OGPU and its successors and by the Military
Collegium. In any event, the data available at this
point make it clear that the number shot in the
two worst purge years was more likely in the hundreds
of thousands than in the millions (3).
"If
we add the figure we have for executions up to 1940
to the number of persons who died in GULAG camps
and the few figures we found on mortality in prisons
and labor colonies, then add to this the number
of peasants known to have died in exile, we reach
a figure of nearly 1.5 million deaths directly due
to repression in the 1930s." (J Arch Getty
and Oleg V Naumov p. 591)
Even
if drastically reduced from Conquest's twenty millions,
these figures are still appallingly atrocious. There
is no case for negationism. The carnage in those
days was horrific, but this not an excuse to exaggerate
the number of deaths attributable to Soviet state
terror. While one cannot exonerate the Stalin and
the Soviet authorities from their crimes against
humanity, it is wrong to claim that they were responsible
for murders which weren't in truth committed.
History
is written by the winners, and today there are people
who have made an ideological cottage industry out
of exaggerating the figures of deaths under Stalin
(see for example the book about the Gulag recently
reviewed in the Blanket by S. O Murchu). Their purpose
is to make the Communism seem "worse"
than Nazism with ten to thirty million deaths. They
play loose with the historical facts when they don't
simply lie. But debates about statistics should
not mask what those figures really are: a terrible
human tragedy.
NOTES
(1) Jeff Coplon, "In Search of a Soviet
Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right",
Village Voice, Jan. 12, 1988 (<http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html>).
The author interviewed many leading historians of
the USSR, all rejected Conquest's research on the
Ukrainian famine. See also Robert Thurston, "On
Desk-Bound Parochialism, Commonsense Perspectives,
and Lousy Evidence: A Reply to Robert Conquest",
Slavic Review 45 (Summer 1986), 238-244.
(2)
Wheatcroft's research was published in Europe-Asia
Studies (formerly Soviet Studies). For example,
in "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet
Repression and Mass Killings, 1930-1945", EAS
48 (December 1996), 1319-1353, Wheatcroft attacks
the facile, anti-Communist comparison of Stalin
with Hitler. The abstract reads:
Repression and mass killings carried out by German
and Soviet leaderships during the period 1930-45
differed in several respects. It appears that the
German leader Adolf Hitler put to death at least
five million innocent people mainly because of his
antipathy towards Jews and communists. In contrast,
Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered the murder of
some one million people because he apparently believed
them to be guilty of crimes against the state. He
was careful about documenting these executions whereas
Hitler did not bother about making any pretence
at legality.
Also of interest in the same journal are Stephen
G Wheatcroft 'Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet
Secret Police: the comparability and reliability
of the archival data -not the last word. Statistical
data included' (March 1999); John Keep 'Wheatcroft
and Stalin's Victims: Comments' (September 1999);
Robert Conquest 'Comment on Wheatcroft: Critical
Essay' (December 1999). A few other works which
base themselves on recently-published Soviet archival
documents refuting the work of the likes of Conquest
include: Nicolas Werth, "Goulag: Les Vrais
Chiffres", L'Histoire no. 169 (Septembre, 1993),
38-51; and J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn,
and Viktor N. Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet
Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach
on the Basis of Archival Evidence," American
Historical Review, Vol. 98 No. 4 (October 1993),
pp. 1017-1049. A polemic of great interest between
the 'revisionist' and 'totalitarian' schools of
history took place in the New Left Review. See R.W.
Davies, 'Forced labour under Stalin: the archive
revelations' (issue 214, November/December 1995,
pp 62-80); the exchange between Robert Conquest
and R.W. Davies 'Excess deaths in the Soviet Union'
(issue 219, September/October 1996, pp.143-144)
and its conclusion 'Stalin's victims' (issue 225,
September/October 1997, pp. 157-160).
(3)
"Table 5: Secret Police (GPU, OGPU, NKVD) Arrests
and Sentences, 1921-39" in J. Arch Getty's
and Oleg V. Naumov's 'The Road to Terror: Stalin
and the Self-Destructon of the Bolsheviks', Yale
University Press, 1999, p. 588. Getty and Naumov
rely on a huge amount of the Soviet archives which
have been released since 1991, and their numbers
are authoritative; I know of no serious refutation
of them.
