The Soviet Century By Moshe Lewin - 33

We may add some data from a source used by Kurashvili – and V. N. Zemskov, a well-known researcher from Moscow, who made a name for himself by publishing reliable figures on the camps and purges long before others. Here I give only a few examples of the widespread practice of proposing enormously inflated figures for Stalin’s repression.

Zemskov engages with Roy Medvedev and Olga Shatunovskaya in his article ‘Gulag – istoriko-sotsiologicheskii aspekt’ ( Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniia , no. 6, 1991, pp. 12–13). Medvedev claimed that the Gulag expanded by several million people during the 1937–8 purges and that between 5 and 7 million persons fell victim to repression. In fact, the camp population rose from 1,196,369 inmates in January 1937 to 1,881,570 in January 1938, and dropped to 1,672,438 on 1 January 1939. There was indeed an explosion in numbers in 1937–8, but in the hundreds of thousands, not millions. The declaration by Vladimir Kriuchkov (KGB head under Gorbachev) that in 1937–8 ‘there were no more than one million arrests’ corresponds to the Gulag statistics. Zemskov stresses that, according to the official document reproduced in Appendix 1 , approximately 700,000 people arrested for political reasons were executed between 1921 and 1953. Shatunovskaya (herself a victim of the repression and later active in the rehabilitation campaign under Khrushchev) asserted that, for the period 1935–41 alone, more than 19 million people were arrested, of whom 7 million were shot – a figure enthusiastically taken up in the West – while the remainder perished in the camps. According to Zemskov, Shatunovskaya has multiplied the figures tenfold – no small exaggeration! Reliable statistics exist for the period 1 January 1934–31 December 1947 indicating that, throughout the Gulag camp complex, 963,766 prisoners died. This figure comprises not just ‘enemies of the people’, but also common law criminals. This number, along with that for those who died during the deportation of the kulaks ( raskulachivanie ), can be added to the ‘terrible price’ that was paid.

In his Novyi Sotsializm (Moscow 1997, pp. 22–7), B. P. Kurashvili offers something of an apologia for the regime, reminding readers that it did have enemies and suggesting that the war saw approximately 1.5 people actively collaborate with the Nazis. No source is given for this estimate, which – and he is right about this – involved around 1 per cent of the active population. But the existence of such collaborators indicates that the purges launched against ‘enemies of the people’ struck blindly at innocent people and spared some real or potential traitors. Many of those who fought with the Germans were captured but not executed. After the war, they were not treated with excessive severity. According to Kurashvili (and certain documents in my possession), many of those who served with the Nazis (Vlassov’s army, Cossack units, units composed of non-Russian nationals), when arrested, were not accused of any concrete crimes but sent for five years to ‘labour battalions’. The same was true of many of the Ukrainian and Baltic state partisans who fought against the regime after the war. This involved some hard-fought battles, with many casualties. However, the majority of partisans who were captured were sent into exile and later amnestied and allowed, from 1960 onwards, to return home. It is possible that such comparative indulgence was designed to placate nationalist circles in the Ukraine and the Baltic countries.