From the Editors

The present translation of Russian historian Viktor Zemskov's article is a typical specimen of bourgeois positivism in historiography. The author meticulously counts the number of those convicted for "political motives" in the USSR and arrives at the conclusion that for the years 1921–1953 this number has been exaggerated by at least a factor of ten.

Not 50–60 million (as Western Sovietology of the Cold War era claimed), but about 4 million convicted.

Why are we publishing this?

Zemskov's work partially dismantles bourgeois mythology from within, using bourgeois methodology itself. This is an intermediate stage in the deconstruction of lies for an audience poisoned by anti-communist propaganda.

Zemskov effectively made public the consensus of the young Russian bourgeoisie regarding the number of the "repressed," since by 1994 it was already impossible to lie in the Solzhenitsyn-style manner—about tens of millions of "victims of Stalinist repressions."

What is missing from the text?

Zemskov sidesteps the main question: who are these 4 million, and for what specifically were they convicted? Despite the expiration of all classified storage periods, the archives of criminal cases remain closed to research.

Taking into account the scale of falsification of historical documents in Russian state archives during the period of "Perestroika," we assume that the ban is connected with two reasons:

• The first is the risk of exposing the scale of falsifications, including the scale of political expediency in rehabilitation cases—with corresponding consequences for contemporary Russian ideology.
• The second is the risk of exposing the actual bankruptcy of the 'Great Terror' concept, which occupies a prominent place in the ideological foundation of the counterrevolution that occurred in the USSR and in the temporary defeat of the inernational communist movement.

Zemskov does not distinguish between counterrevolutionaries (White Guards, kulak-terrorists, saboteurs, spies, wreckers, Hitlerite collaborators, etc.) and victims of bureaucratic abuse. For him, all of this is merely faceless "statistics of repression." As can be seen from the author's introduction, class analysis is replaced from the outset by moral categories and bourgeois "impartiality."

There is also a complete absence of analysis of what was being defended—the dictatorship of the proletariat, the achievements of October, industrialization, the first socialist state as such. Instead, the concepts of 'Great Terror' and 'repressions' are legitimized in their bourgeois interpretation and then linked to Stalin's name.

The problem of sources

Zemskov relies on archives "opened" under A. Yakovlev (a member of the CPSU Central Committee Politburo, an ideologue of "Perestroika") and other falsifiers who were directly interested in discrediting, rather than studying, the Stalin period of Soviet history.

As the author himself writes, it was Yakovlev specifically who first published the number of those convicted for counterrevolutionary and other especially dangerous state crimes for 1921–1953.

How should this text be read?

Zemskov's article is a reference work, not verified by a single historian of a Marxist worldview.

His figures refute the crudest lies about a complex period of Soviet history, but they divert attention from the essence of what was taking place. History is not impersonal arithmetic: behind every line of statistics stands an acute class war, attempts at the restoration of capitalism, foreign intervention, and sabotage. Zemskov leaves all of this outside the frame.

We have accompanied the text with comments in those places where bourgeois methodology most clearly distorts the picture.

The original article can be found here: https://istmat.org/node/19968

Dec. 2025

On the Scale of Political Repressions in the USSR

Source: Mir i Politika, No. 6 (33), June 2009, pp. 89–105

V. N. Zemskov, Doctor of Historical Sciences

Through the Thickets of Speculation, Distortions, and Mystifications

Human life is priceless. The murder of innocent people cannot be justified—whether one person or millions. But a researcher cannot limit himself to a moral assessment of historical events and phenomena. His duty is the resurrection of the authentic image of our past, all the more so when certain of its aspects become objects of political speculation. All of this fully applies to the problem of statistics (the scale) of political repressions in the USSR. The present article makes an attempt to objectively examine this acute and painful question.

By the end of the 1980s, historical science faced an acute need for access to the secret archival holdings of the security agencies (former and current), since in literature, on radio, and on television various speculative, unsubstantiated figures of repressions were constantly being cited—figures we, as professional historians, could not introduce into scholarly circulation without appropriate documentary confirmation.

In the second half of the 1980s, a somewhat paradoxical situation took shape for a time, in which the lifting of the ban on the publication of works and materials on this topic was combined with the traditional insufficiency of the source base, since the relevant archival fonds remained closed to researchers. In terms of style and tone, the overwhelming majority of publications from the period of Gorbachev's perestroika (and later as well) were, as a rule, sharply denunciatory in character, moving within the framework of the anti-Stalinist propaganda campaign that was unfolding at the time (we have in mind first of all the numerous journalistic articles and notes in newspapers, the magazine Ogonyok, and the like). The paucity of concrete historical material in these publications was more than compensated for by repeatedly exaggerated "homemade statistics" of the victims of repression, which struck the reading audience by their enormity.

At the beginning of 1989, by decision of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, a commission of the History Department of the USSR Academy of Sciences was established, headed by Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences Yu. A. Polyakov, to determine population losses. As members of this commission, we were among the first historians to gain access to previously unavailable statistical reporting of the OGPU–NKVD–MVD–MGB, the highest organs of state power and state administration of the USSR, which was held under special storage in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR USSR), now renamed the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF).

The commission of the History Department operated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and already at that time we published a series of articles on the statistics of repressions, prisoners, special settlers, displaced persons, and so on.¹ Subsequently, and up to the present time, we have continued this work.

As early as the beginning of 1954, a memorandum was prepared in the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs addressed to N. S. Khrushchev on the number of those convicted for counterrevolutionary crimes, that is, under Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR and the corresponding articles of the criminal codes of other union republics, for the period 1921–1953 (the document was signed by three individuals—the Prosecutor General of the USSR R. A. Rudenko, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR S. N. Kruglov, and the Minister of Justice of the USSR K. P. Gorshenin).

The document stated that, according to data available to the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, for the period from 1921 to the present time, that is, up to the beginning of 1954, 3,777,380 persons were convicted for counterrevolutionary crimes by the OGPU Collegium, NKVD troikas, the Special Council, the Military Collegium, courts, and military tribunals, including 642,980 sentenced to the supreme measure of punishment (death sentence).²

At the end of 1953, another memorandum was prepared in the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. On the basis of statistical reporting of the 1st Special Department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, it cited the number of those convicted for counterrevolutionary and other especially dangerous state crimes for the period from 1 January 1921 to 1 July 1953—4,060,306 persons (on 5 January 1954, a letter containing this information was sent to G. M. Malenkov and N. S. Khrushchev, signed by S. N. Kruglov).

This figure consisted of 3,777,380 persons convicted for counterrevolutionary crimes and 282,926 convicted for other especially dangerous state crimes. The latter were convicted not under Article 58, but under other articles equated with it, primarily paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article 59 (especially dangerous banditry) and Article 193-24 (military espionage). For example, some of the Basmachi were convicted not under Article 58, but under Article 59. (See Table No. 1).

Table 1

Number of persons convicted for counterrevolutionary and other especially dangerous state crimes in 1921–1953*

* GARF [State Archive of the Russian Federation]. F. 9401. Op. 1. D. 4157. L. 201–205; Popov V. P. State Terror in Soviet Russia, 1923–1953: Sources and Their Interpretation // Otechestvennye arkhivy [Domestic Archives], 1992, No. 2, p. 28.

Note: Between June 1947 and January 1950, the death penalty was abolished in the USSR. This explains the absence of death sentences in 1948–1949. "Other measures of punishment" included crediting time served in detention, compulsory treatment, and expulsion abroad.

It should be noted that the terms "arrested" and "convicted" are not identical. The total number of convicts does not include those arrested who died, escaped, or were released during the preliminary investigation—that is, before conviction.

Until the late 1980s, this information was classified as a state secret in the USSR. Authentic statistics on convictions for counterrevolutionary crimes (3,777,380 for 1921–1953) were first published in September 1989 in an article by V. F. Nekrasov in Komsomolskaya Pravda. Subsequently, this information was presented in greater detail in articles by A. N. Dugin (Na Boevom Postu, December 1989), V. N. Zemskov and D. N. Nokhotovich (Argumenty i Fakty, February 1990), as well as in other publications by V. N. Zemskov and A. N. Dugin. The total number convicted for counterrevolutionary and other especially dangerous state crimes (4,060,306 for 1921–1953) was first made public in 1990 in an article by Politburo member A. N. Yakovlev in Izvestia. A more detailed presentation of these statistics (from the First Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), including annual dynamics, was published in 1992 by V. P. Popov in the journal Otechestvennye Arkhivy.³

We draw particular attention to these publications because they contain genuine statistics on political repression. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were, metaphorically speaking, a drop in the ocean compared to numerous other publications that cited unreliable and typically grossly inflated figures.

Public reaction to the publication of authentic repression statistics was mixed. There were frequent claims that these figures were falsified. The well-known publicist A. B. Antonov-Ovseenko, emphasizing that these documents were signed by interested parties such as Rudenko, Kruglov, and Gorshenin, told readers of Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1991: "The disinformation service has always been excellent. Under Khrushchev too... So, over 32 years—less than four million. Who needs such criminal reports is obvious."⁴

Despite A. B. Antonov-Ovseenko's certainty that these statistics were disinformation, we assert that he was mistaken. These are genuine statistics, compiled by summing the relevant data for 1921–1953 held by the First Special Department. This department, which at different times was part of the OGPU, NKVD, and MGB (from 1953 to the present—the Ministry of Internal Affairs), was responsible for collecting comprehensive information on all politically motivated convictions from judicial and extrajudicial bodies. The First Special Department was not a disinformation organ, but a body for gathering complete and objective information.

Following Antonov-Ovseenko, another well-known publicist, L. E. Razgon, launched a sharp attack against us in 1992.⁵ The essence of Antonov-Ovseenko's and Razgon's accusations was that V. N. Zemskov was allegedly engaged in falsification using fabricated statistics, and that the documents he relied upon were supposedly unreliable or even forged. Razgon even hinted that Zemskov was complicit in creating these false documents. However, they were unable to provide any convincing evidence to support these claims. My responses to the critiques by Antonov-Ovseenko and Razgon were published in 1991–1992 in the academic journals History of the USSR and Sociological Research.⁶

The sharp rejection by Antonov-Ovseenko and Razgon of our archival-based publications was also driven by their desire to "salvage" their own "homemade statistics," which were unsupported by any documents and amounted to nothing more than the product of their own imagination. For instance, Antonov-Ovseenko published in the United States in 1980, in English, the book Portrait of a Tyrant, in which he claimed that 18.8 million people had been arrested for political reasons in the period 1935–1940 alone.⁷ Our publications, based on archival documents, directly exposed this "statistic" as pure charlatanism. Hence their clumsy attempts to present their own "statistics" as correct while accusing Zemskov of being a falsifier publishing fabricated statistics.

L. E. Razgon attempted to counter archival documents with testimonies from repressed NKVD officers he met in detention. According to Razgon, "In early 1940, a former head of the NKVD financial department I encountered during a prison transfer, when asked 'How many were imprisoned?' paused and replied: I know that as of January 1, 1939, about 9 million living prisoners were in jails and camps."⁸ We, as professional historians, know perfectly well how dubious such information is and how dangerous it is to introduce it into scholarly discourse without thorough verification and cross-checking. Detailed study of the NKVD's current and summary statistical reports led, as expected, to the refutation of this "testimony"—in reality, in early 1939, there were about 2 million prisoners in camps, colonies, and prisons, of whom 1,317,000 were in camps.⁹

Incidentally, the total number of prisoners in all places of detention (camps, colonies, prisons) on any given date rarely exceeded 2.5 million. Typically, it fluctuated in different periods between 1.5 million and 2.5 million. The highest number of prisoners in all of Soviet history was recorded on January 1, 1950—2,760,095 people, of whom 1,416,300 were in camps, 1,145,051 in colonies, and 198,744 in prisons.¹⁰

Therefore, one cannot take seriously, for example, the assertions of the same A. B. Antonov-Ovseenko that after the war, Gulag camps and colonies held 16 million prisoners.¹¹ It should be understood that on the date Antonov-Ovseenko has in mind (1946), Gulag camps and colonies held not 16 million but 1.6 million prisoners. One should still pay attention to the decimal point.

A. B. Antonov-Ovseenko and L. E. Razgon were powerless to prevent the mass introduction of archival documents, including the statistics on repression they detested, into scholarly discourse. This field of historical research became firmly grounded in documentary archival evidence (not only in our country but also abroad). In this connection, in 1999, A. B. Antonov-Ovseenko, still laboring under the profoundly mistaken belief that the statistics published by Zemskov were false and that his own "statistics" were supposedly correct (in reality monstrously distorted), once again noted with regret: "The disinformation service has always been excellent. It lives on even today, otherwise how can we explain the 'sensational' discoveries of V. N. Zemskov? Unfortunately, the obviously falsified (for the archive) statistics have circulated in many publications and found supporters among scholars."¹² This "cry from the heart" was nothing more than a voice crying in the wilderness, useless and hopeless (for Antonov-Ovseenko). The idea of "obviously falsified (for the archive) statistics" has long been perceived in the scholarly world as remarkably absurd and preposterous; such assessments evoke no reaction other than bewilderment and irony.

Such was the natural result of the clash between professionalism and dilettantism—for in the end, professionalism is bound to triumph. The "criticism" by Antonov-Ovseenko and Razgon directed at us was then part of the general offensive by militant dilettantism aimed at subjugating historical science, imposing its own rules and methods of scholarly (or rather: pseudo-scholarly) investigation, which from a professional standpoint are utterly unacceptable.

N. S. Khrushchev also contributed to the falsification of prisoner numbers when he wrote in his memoirs: "...When Stalin died, there were up to 10 million people in the camps."¹³ Even if we understand the term "camps" broadly, including colonies and prisons, the actual figure in early 1953 was about 2.6 million prisoners.¹⁴ The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) holds copies of memoranda from the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs leadership to N. S. Khrushchev indicating the exact number of prisoners, including at the moment of I. V. Stalin's death. Consequently, N. S. Khrushchev was perfectly well informed about the true number of prisoners and deliberately exaggerated it nearly fourfold.

The publication by R. A. Medvedev in Moskovskie Novosti (November 1988) on the statistics of Stalin-era victims caused a major public stir.¹⁵ According to his calculations, approximately 40 million people were repressed in the period 1927–1953, including dekulakized peasants, deportees, those who died from famine in 1933, and others. In 1989–1991, this figure was one of the most widely cited when discussing Stalinist crimes and became quite firmly embedded in mass consciousness.

In reality, even under the broadest interpretation of the concept "victims of repression," this number (40 million) cannot be reached. Into this 40 million, R. A. Medvedev included 10 million dekulakized peasants in 1929–1933 (in reality there were about 4 million), almost 2 million Poles deported in 1939–1940 (in reality about 380,000), and similarly inflated figures for absolutely all components that made up this astronomical number.

However, these 40 million soon ceased to satisfy the "growing needs" of certain political forces for blackening Soviet-period domestic history. The "research" of American and other Western Sovietologists came into play, according to which 50–60 million people perished in the USSR from terror and repression. As with R. A. Medvedev, all components of such calculations were extremely inflated; the difference of 10–20 million was explained by the fact that R. A. Medvedev started his count from 1927, while Western Sovietologists started from 1917. Whereas R. A. Medvedev noted in his article that repression did not always mean death, that the majority of dekulakized peasants survived, that among those repressed in 1937–1938 only a minority were shot, and so forth, a number of his Western colleagues cited the figure of 50–60 million people as those physically exterminated and who died as a result of terror, repression, famine, collectivization, and so on. In short, they labored to fulfill orders from politicians and intelligence services of their countries with the aim of discrediting their "Cold War" opponent in scholarly-appearing form, not hesitating to fabricate outright slander.

This does not mean, of course, that there were no researchers in Western Sovietology who tried to study Soviet history objectively and conscientiously. Major scholars and specialists in Soviet history such as A. Getty (USA), S. Wheatcroft (Australia), R. Davies (England), G. Rittersporn (France), and several others openly criticized the research of most Sovietologists and demonstrated that in reality the number of victims of repression, collectivization, famine, etc. in the USSR was significantly lower.¹⁶

However, the works of precisely these foreign scholars, with their incomparably more objective assessment of the scale of repression, were suppressed in our country. Only material containing unreliable, grossly inflated statistics on repression was actively introduced into mass consciousness. And the mythical 50–60 million soon eclipsed Roy Medvedev's 40 million in mass consciousness.

Therefore, when USSR KGB Chairman V. A. Kryuchkov in his television appearances cited authentic statistics on political repression (he repeatedly provided data from KGB USSR records for 1930–1953—3,778,234 convicted for political crimes, of whom 786,098 were sentenced to execution),¹⁷ many literally could not believe their ears, thinking they had misheard. Journalist A. Milchakov shared with readers of Vechernaya Moskva in 1990 his impression of V. A. Kryuchkov's speech: "...And then he said: thus, tens of millions are out of the question. I don't know if he did this deliberately. But I am familiar with the latest widely circulated research that I believe in, and I ask readers of Vechernaya Moskva to once again carefully read A. I. Solzhenitsyn's work The Gulag Archipelago, I ask them to familiarize themselves with the research published in Moskovsky Komsomolets by our most renowned literary scholar I. Vinogradov. He cites a figure of 50–60 million people. I also want to draw attention to research by American Sovietologists, which confirms this figure. And I am deeply convinced of it."¹⁸

Comments are, as they say, superfluous. Distrust was shown only toward documentarily confirmed information, and boundless trust toward information of the opposite nature.

However, this was still not the limit of public bamboozlement. In June 1991, Komsomolskaya Pravda published A. I. Solzhenitsyn's 1976 interview with Spanish television. From it we learn the following: "Professor Kurganov, using an indirect method, calculated that from 1917 to 1959, from the internal war of the Soviet regime against its own people alone—that is, from destruction by famine, collectivization, exile of peasants to destruction, prisons, camps, simple executions—from this alone we lost, together with our civil war, 66 million people... According to his calculations, we lost in World War II, due to negligent, due to sloppy conduct of the war, 44 million people! Thus, in total we lost from the socialist system—110 million people!"¹⁹

With the formulation "due to negligent, due to sloppy conduct," A. I. Solzhenitsyn effectively equated all human losses in the Great Patriotic War with those who died and perished as a result of collectivization and famine, which many historians and publicists include among victims of political terror and repression. We are inclined to decisively distance ourselves from such an equation.

The assessment of these losses at 44 million people is, of course, extremely inflated. We are also skeptical of the recently accepted estimate of 27 million, which has entered many textbooks, considering it inflated. Without counting normal annual mortality (as well as decreased birth rates), we attempted to establish human losses (military and civilian) that were in some way connected specifically with military operations. To armed forces casualties (about 8.7 million) were added losses of civilian volunteer formations (militia, partisans, etc.), Leningrad blockade victims, victims of Nazi genocide on occupied territory, Soviet citizens killed and tortured in fascist camps, and others. The resulting figure does not exceed 16 million people.

From time to time, but fairly regularly, the mass media cited statistics on political repression based on the recollections of O. G. Shatunovskaya. She was a former member of the Party Control Committee under the CPSU Central Committee and of the commission investigating the murder of S. M. Kirov and the political trials of the 1930s during Khrushchev's tenure. In 1990, Argumenty i Fakty published her memoirs, in which she cited a certain USSR KGB document that allegedly later mysteriously disappeared, stating: "...From January 1, 1935, to June 22, 1941, 19,840,000 'enemies of the people' were arrested. Of these, 7 million were shot. Most of the rest perished in the camps."²⁰

O. G. Shatunovskaya's motives are not entirely clear: either she deliberately invented these figures out of revenge (she herself had been repressed), or she fell victim to some disinformation. Shatunovskaya claimed that N. S. Khrushchev allegedly requested a report containing these sensational figures in 1956. This is highly doubtful. All information on political repression statistics was set forth in two reports prepared in late 1953 to early 1954, which we discussed above. We are confident that no such document ever existed. After all, a reasonable question arises: what prevents the political forces now in power—presumably no less interested than O. G. Shatunovskaya in exposing Stalin's crimes—from officially confirming Shatunovskaya's statistics by reference to a credible document? If, according to Shatunovskaya's version, the security services prepared such a report in 1956, what prevented doing the same in 1991–1993 and later? Even if the 1956 summary report was destroyed, the primary data would have been preserved. Neither the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation (MBRF, later FSB RF), nor the Ministry of Internal Affairs, nor any other agencies could do this for the simple reason that all the relevant information at their disposal directly refutes Shatunovskaya's statistics.

O. G. Shatunovskaya's assertion that "most of the rest perished in the camps" (presumably 7–10 million, counting from her virtual nearly 13 million "rest") is, of course, also untrue. Such assertions can only appear credible in an environment where erroneous notions prevail that tens of millions supposedly died and perished in the Gulag. Detailed study of statistical reports on prisoner mortality, however, presents a different picture. From 1930 to 1953, approximately 1.8 million prisoners died in places of detention (camps, colonies, and prisons), of whom nearly 1.2 million died in camps and over 0.6 million in colonies and prisons.²¹ These calculations are not estimates but are based on documents.

Here a difficult question arises: what was the proportion of political prisoners among these 1.8 million deceased prisoners (political and criminal)? There is no answer to this question in the documents. We believe that political prisoners constituted approximately one-third, that is, around 600,000. This conclusion is based on the fact that those convicted of criminal offenses typically constituted about two-thirds of prisoners. Consequently, of the number sentenced to serve time in camps, colonies, and prisons indicated in Tables 1 and 2, approximately this many (around 600,000) did not live to see release (in the interval between 1930 and 1953).

The highest mortality occurred in 1942–1943—in these two years, 661,000 prisoners died in camps, colonies, and prisons, which was mainly a consequence of significant reduction in food rations due to the extraordinary wartime situation. Subsequently, mortality rates steadily declined, reaching 45,300 people in 1951–1952, or 14.6 times lower than in 1942–1943.²² In this connection, we would like to draw attention to one curious detail: according to our data for 1954, among the free population of the Soviet Union, an average of 8.9 people per 1,000 died, whereas in Gulag camps and colonies, only 6.5 per 1,000 prisoners died.²³

Possessing documentary evidence that O. G. Shatunovskaya's statistics were unreliable, we published corresponding refutations in 1991 in the academic journal Sociological Research.²⁴ It seemed that the question of Shatunovskaya's version had been settled back then. But this was not to be. Her figures continued to be propagated on radio and television in a rather insistent manner. For instance, on March 5, 1992, on the evening news program Novosti, anchor T. Komarova broadcast to a multi-million audience about 19,840,000 repressed, including 7 million shot in 1935–1940, as if this were an established fact. And this was happening at a time when historical science had proven these figures unreliable and possessed authentic statistics.

On August 2, 1992, a briefing was held at the press center of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation (MB RF), at which Major General A. Krayushkin, head of the department of registration and archival holdings of the MB RF, informed journalists and other invited guests that during the entire period of communist rule (1918–1990), 3,853,900 people were convicted in the USSR on charges of state crimes and certain other similar criminal law articles, of whom 827,995 were sentenced to execution. In the terminology used at the briefing, this corresponds to the formulation "for counterrevolutionary and other especially dangerous state crimes."

The mass media's reaction to this event was revealing: most newspapers passed over it in dead silence. Some found these figures too large, others too small, and as a result, editorial boards of newspapers and journals of various orientations chose not to publish this material, thereby concealing socially significant information from their readers (silence, as is well known, is one form of slander). Credit is due to the editorial board of Izvestia, which published a detailed report of the briefing with the statistics cited there.²⁵

Notably, in the MBRF data cited above, the addition of information for 1918–1920 and 1954–1990 did not fundamentally alter the statistics on political repression for the period 1921–1953 that we had cited. MBRF personnel used some other source whose data diverge somewhat from the statistics of the First Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Comparison of the information from these two sources leads to a rather unexpected result: according to MB RF information, 3,853,900 were convicted for political reasons in 1918–1990, whereas according to the statistics of the First Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 4,060,306 were convicted in 1921–1953.

In our view, this discrepancy should be explained not by the incompleteness of the MBRF source, but rather by a stricter approach by the compilers of this source to the concept of "victims of political repression." While working in GARF with operational OGPU-NKVD materials, we noticed that quite often cases against ordinary criminals who had robbed factory warehouses, collective farm storerooms, etc., were brought before the OGPU Collegium, the Special Board, and other bodies as cases against political or especially dangerous state criminals. For this reason, they were included in the statistics of the First Special Department as "counterrevolutionaries" and by current concepts are "victims of political repression" (something that can be said about repeat thieves only mockingly), whereas in the MBRF source they were filtered out.

The problem of filtering out criminals from the total number convicted for counterrevolutionary and other especially dangerous state crimes is far more serious than it might appear at first glance. Even if they were filtered out in the MB RF source, it was far from complete. One of the reports prepared by the First Special Department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in December 1953 contains a note: "Total convicted for 1921–1938: 2,944,849 people, of whom 30% (1,062,000) were criminals."²⁶ This means that in 1921–1938, purely political convicts numbered 1,883,000; for the period 1921–1953, then, the number comes to not 4,060,000 but less than 3 million. This is assuming that among convicted "counterrevolutionaries" in 1939–1953 there were no criminals, which is highly doubtful. True, in practice there were cases when political prisoners were also convicted under criminal articles.

In 1997, V. V. Luneev published annual statistics of convicted political prisoners taken from the USSR KGB (MB RF, FSB RF) source.²⁷ In these statistics, two years (1937 and 1938) occupy a special place, known as the years of the Great Terror, when there was a sharp spike in the scale of political repression. During these two years, 1,345,000 people were convicted on political charges, or 35% of their total number for the period 1918–1990.

The picture is even more striking in the statistics of those sentenced to death from among them. Over the entire Soviet period there were 828,000, of whom 682,000 (or over 82%) occurred in these two years (1937–1938). The remaining 70 years of the Soviet period account for a total of 146,000 death sentences for political reasons, or less than 18%.

Since the present article is devoted to the scale—that is, the statistics—of political repression, it does not set itself the task of investigating their causes and motivations. But we would nevertheless like to draw attention to one circumstance, namely: the role of I. V. Stalin in this matter. Recently, voices have been heard asserting that Stalin supposedly was not personally the initiator of mass repression, including the Great Terror of 1937–1938, that this was allegedly imposed on him by local party elites, and so on. We must understand that this is not so.

A large number of documents exist, including published ones, where Stalin's proactive role in repressive policy is clearly visible. Take, for example, his speech at the February-March 1937 Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), after which the Great Terror began. In this speech, Stalin said that the country found itself in an extremely dangerous situation due to the machinations of saboteurs, spies, and subversives, as well as those who artificially create difficulties and produce large numbers of discontented and embittered people. He also criticized leading cadres who, according to Stalin, had become complacent and lost the ability to recognize the true face of the enemy.

For us it is completely clear that these statements by Stalin at the February-March Plenum of 1937—this is the call for the Great Terror, and he, Stalin, is its chief initiator and inspirer.

It is natural to want to compare the scale of political repression in the USSR with corresponding indicators in other countries with totalitarian, repressive regimes—first of all with Hitler's Germany and Franco's Spain. At the same time, we wish to caution against the incorrect nature of comparisons with the scale of political repression in fascist Germany.

It is claimed that in Germany the scale of repression against German citizens was significantly less. Yes, political repression against ethnic Germans appears relatively low, though we are talking about tens of thousands of people. But it is precisely in this case that one cannot confine oneself to the framework of individual states, and the question should be posed differently: what did the Hitler regime bring to humanity? And it turns out that it brought the destruction of millions of Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Serbs, and other peoples.

Or another example—comparison with the scale of political repression in Franco's Spain. So, in the USSR over 800,000 death sentences for political reasons, in Spain under Franco—over 80,000, or 10 times fewer. From this the conclusion is drawn that the scale of political terror in the USSR was immeasurably higher than in Spain under Franco. This conclusion is completely wrong; in reality these scales were roughly the same.

The lion's share of death sentences for political reasons in Spain falls in the late 1930s to early 1940s, when Spain's population was about 20 million, while the USSR's population by the start of the Great Patriotic War approached 200 million—that is, a tenfold difference in population. Yes, in Franco's Spain there were 10 times fewer death sentences for political reasons than in the USSR, but the country's population was also 10 times smaller—that is, per capita these indicators are the same, practically identical.

We do not at all encroach on the well-known postulate about the absence in the USA of prosecutions for political reasons. However, we have grounds to assert that American jurisprudence deliberately classifies certain crimes with political underpinnings as purely criminal. Indeed, in the USSR, Nikolaev—Kirov's assassin—is unambiguously a political criminal; in the USA, however, Lee Harvey Oswald—President Kennedy's assassin—is no less unambiguously a criminal offender, although he committed a purely political murder. In the USSR, exposed spies were convicted under the political Article 58, whereas in the USA such individuals are criminal offenders. With such an approach, Americans naturally have every reason to advertise themselves as a society in which prosecutions and convictions for political reasons are completely absent.

A grandiose mystification has been firmly embedded in mass consciousness: the notorious myth of total (or near-total) repression in the USSR of Soviet servicemen who had been in fascist captivity. This mythology is typically constructed in the darkest and most sinister tones, both in various publications issued in the West and in journalism within our own country. In order to present the process of repatriation of Soviet POWs to the USSR from Germany and other countries—and its consequences—in the most horrifying light possible, an exclusively tendentious selection of facts is employed, which in itself constitutes a sophisticated method of slander. In particular, sometimes gruesome scenes of forced repatriation of collaborationist military unit personnel are dwelt upon, and the corresponding conclusions and generalizations are transferred to the main mass of prisoners of war, which is fundamentally incorrect. Accordingly, their repatriation—which, despite all its hardships, was fundamentally a natural and moving epic of hundreds of thousands of people regaining their Motherland, of which they had been forcibly deprived by foreign conquerors—is interpreted as a journey practically "into the devil's maw." Moreover, even the tendentiously selected facts are presented in distorted form with predetermined interpretation, literally forcing upon the reader the absurd conclusion that the repatriation of Soviet POWs was carried out allegedly solely in order to repress them in the Soviet Union, and that there were supposedly no other reasons for repatriation.

However, the data presented in Table 3 decisively do not confirm such pessimistic assessments. On the contrary, they utterly shatter the myth of allegedly near-universal repression in the USSR of Soviet servicemen who had been in fascist captivity. This statistic encompasses 1,539,475 POWs who arrived in the USSR during the period from October 1944 to March 1, 1946, from Germany and other countries, of whom 960,039 arrived from Allied zones (Western Germany, France, Italy, etc.) and 579,436 from zones of Red Army operations abroad (Eastern Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.).²⁸ In 1945, servicemen of the 13 oldest age groups were demobilized from the army, and correspondingly their age-mates among POWs (over 280,000) were released to go home. Some POWs of non-demobilizable ages were enrolled in labor battalions—these were by no means repressed individuals, but rather one of the forms of mobilized labor (standard practice at the time), and their dispatch to places of residence was made dependent on the future demobilization of their age-mates who continued service in the Red (Soviet) Army. The majority of POWs of non-demobilizable ages, however, were restored to military service. Only the NKVD special contingent remains (comprising less than 15%), but it should not be forgotten that the main mass of this category of repatriated POWs consisted of persons who, after capture, had entered military or police service for the enemy.

R. A. Medvedev assumes that up to and including 1946, NKVD organs repressed 2 to 3 million people living in USSR territory that had been subjected to fascist occupation.²⁹ In reality, throughout the entire Soviet Union in 1944–1946, 321,651 people were convicted for political reasons, of whom 10,177 were sentenced to the supreme penalty (according to records of the First Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs). It seems that the majority of those convicted from formerly occupied territory were punished justly—for concrete treasonous activity.

The widely circulated assertion in Western Sovietology that 6–7 million peasants (mainly kulaks) perished during collectivization in 1929–1932 does not withstand criticism. In 1930–1931, slightly more than 1.8 million peasants were sent into "kulak exile," and in early 1932, 1.3 million remained there. The decrease of 0.5 million was accounted for by mortality, escapes, and release of the "wrongly exiled." From 1932 to 1940, in "kulak exile," 230,258 were born, 389,521 died, 629,042 escaped, and 235,120 were returned from flight. Moreover, from 1935 onwards, the birth rate became higher than the death rate: in 1932–1934, in "kulak exile," 49,168 were born and 271,367 died; in 1935–1940, 181,090 and 108,154 respectively.³⁰

There is no consensus in the scholarly and journalistic literature on the question of whether to count dekulakized peasants among victims of political repression or not. The dekulakized were divided into three categories, and their total number varied within a range of 3.5 to 4 million (more precise determination is still difficult). Here it should be immediately noted that first-category kulaks (arrested and convicted) are included in the political repression statistics presented in Tables 1 and 2. The question is disputed regarding second-category kulaks, sent under convoy to live in "cold regions" (to special settlements), where they were under the supervision of NKVD organs, which very much resembled political exile. Third-category kulaks, who avoided both arrest and conviction as well as dispatch to special settlements, have no grounds, in our opinion, to be included among victims of political repression. Incidentally, among landowners whose property was expropriated in 1918, only those who were subsequently arrested and convicted by punitive organs of Soviet power can be classified as victims of political repression.

We have studied the entire complex of statistical reporting of the Special Settlements Department of the NKVD-MVD USSR. From it, it follows that from 1930 to 1940, approximately 2.5 million people passed through "kulak exile," of whom around 2.3 million were dekulakized peasants and approximately 200,000 were "admixture" in the form of urban declassed elements, "suspicious elements" from border zones, etc. During the indicated period (1930–1940), approximately 700,000 people died there, the overwhelming majority of them in 1930–1933.³¹ In light of this, the well-known and frequently cited assertion by W. Churchill that in one of his conversations with him, I. V. Stalin allegedly named 10 million exiled and perished kulaks³² should be perceived as a misunderstanding.

Those who died from hunger in 1933 are often included in the number of victims of political terror, which is hardly legitimate. After all, we are talking about fiscal policy of the state under conditions of natural disaster (drought). At that time, in regions affected by drought (Ukraine, North Caucasus, parts of the Volga region, Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan), the state did not see fit to reduce the volume of compulsory deliveries and confiscated from peasants the meager harvest they had gathered down to the last grain, condemning them to death by starvation.

The debate on the number of those who died from hunger is far from concluded—estimates vary mainly within the range of 2 to 8 million.³³ According to our estimates, approximately 3 million people became victims of the 1932–1933 famine, of whom roughly half were in Ukraine. Our conclusion is, of course, not original, since roughly the same estimates were given back in the 1980s by historians V. P. Danilov (USSR), S. Wheatcroft (Australia), and others.³⁴

The main obstacle to including those who died from hunger in 1933 among victims of specifically political terror—with the formulation developed in human rights organizations of "artificially organized famine with the aim of causing mass death"—is the circumstance that fiscal policy was a secondary factor, while the primary one was natural disaster (drought). Nor was the goal pursued of causing mass death (the political leadership of the USSR did not foresee and did not expect such negative consequences of its fiscal policy under drought conditions).

In recent years, the idea has been actively propagated in Ukraine (including in scholarly circles) that the 1932–1933 famine was a consequence of anti-Ukrainian policy by Moscow, that it was deliberate genocide against Ukrainians, etc. But the population of the North Caucasus, Volga region, Kazakhstan, and other areas where famine reigned found themselves in exactly the same situation. There was no selective anti-Russian, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Kazakh, or any other orientation here. Indeed, the United Nations was guided by precisely such considerations when in 2008 it refused by majority vote to recognize the fact of genocide of the Ukrainian people (although the USA and England voted for such recognition, they found themselves in the minority).

Losses among peoples deported in 1941–1944—Germans, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, and others—are also greatly exaggerated. In the press, for example, estimates have slipped through according to which up to 40% of Crimean Tatars died during transport to places of exile. Whereas from documents it follows that of 151,720 Crimean Tatars sent in May 1944 to the Uzbek SSR, 151,529 were received according to protocols by NKVD organs of Uzbekistan, while 191 people died en route (0.13%).³⁵

It is another matter that in the first years of life in special settlements, during the process of painful adaptation, mortality significantly exceeded the birth rate. From the moment of initial settlement to October 1, 1948, among exiled Germans (excluding the labor army), 25,792 were born and 45,275 died; among North Caucasians (Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, etc.), 28,120 and 146,892 respectively; among Crimeans (Tatars, Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks), 6,564 and 44,887; among those exiled from Georgia in 1944 (Meskhetian Turks, etc.), 2,702 and 16,594 people. From 1949 onwards, the birth rate among all of them became higher than mortality.³⁶

The expulsion of certain peoples, with deprivation of their historical homeland, otherwise called ethnic cleansing, unambiguously falls into the category of humanitarian crimes.

Among the unconditional victims of the Bolshevik regime, dilettantes of history include all human losses during the Civil War. From autumn 1917 to early 1922, the country's population decreased by 12,741,300 people³⁷; this includes the White emigration, whose numbers are not precisely known (approximately 1.5–2 million). Only one of the opposing sides (the Reds) is peremptorily declared the culprit of the Civil War, and all victims, including its own, are attributed to it. How many "exposé" materials have been published in recent years about the "sealed train," "Bolshevik machinations," etc.?! Countless. It was often asserted that had there been no Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders, there would have been no revolution, Red movement, or Civil War (we add on our own behalf: with the same "success" one can assert that had there been no Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, Wrangel, there would have been no White movement). The absurdity of such assertions is completely obvious. The most powerful social explosion in world history, which the events of 1917–1920 in Russia represented, was predetermined by the entire preceding course of history and caused by a complex set of intractable social, class, national, regional, and other contradictions. In light of this, science cannot interpret the concept of "victims of political repression" in an expansive manner and includes in it only persons arrested and convicted by punitive organs of Soviet power for political reasons. This means that victims of political repression do not include millions who died from typhus, typhoid, relapsing fever, and other diseases. Nor do they include millions of people who perished on the fronts of the Civil War on all opposing sides, who died from hunger, cold, etc.

And as a result, it turns out that victims of political repression (during the years of Red Terror) number not millions at all. At most, we can speak of tens of thousands. No wonder that when at the briefing in the MBRF press center on August 2, 1992, the number of those convicted for political reasons starting from 1917 was named, it fundamentally did not affect the corresponding statistics if we count from 1921.

According to available records at the FSB RF, in 1918–1920, 62,231 people were convicted for "counterrevolutionary crime," including 25,709 sentenced to execution.³⁸ This information forms an integral part of the above-mentioned statistics named at the briefing in the MBRF press center on August 2, 1992. We believe that the cited statistics for the Civil War period are incomplete. There, many victims of lynch justice against "counterrevolutionaries" were surely not accounted for. These lynch executions were often not documented at all, and the FSB clearly recorded only the quantity confirmed by documents. It also raises doubt that in 1918–1920, exhaustive information about the number of those repressed arrived in Moscow from the provinces. But even taking all this into account, we believe that the total number of repressed "counterrevolutionaries" (including victims of "Red Terror") in 1918–1920 hardly exceeded 100,000 people.

Our publications, relying on archival documents, on statistics of political repression, Gulag prisoners, and "kulak exile" have had a substantial influence on Western Sovietology, forcing it to abandon its main thesis about allegedly 50–60 million victims of the Soviet regime. Western Sovietologists cannot simply brush aside published archival statistics like a bothersome fly and are compelled to take them into account. In the "Black Book of Communism" prepared in the late 1990s by French specialists, this figure was reduced to 20 million.³⁹

But even this "reduced" figure (20 million) we cannot recognize as acceptable. It includes both a number of reliable data confirmed by archival documents and estimated figures (in the millions) of demographic losses in the Civil War, those who died from hunger in different periods, etc. The authors of the "Black Book of Communism" included among victims of political terror even those who died from hunger in 1921 (the famine in the Volga region), which previously neither R. A. Medvedev nor many other specialists in this field had ever done.

Nevertheless, the very fact of the reduction (from 50–60 million to 20 million) in estimated scales of victims of the Soviet regime testifies that during the 1990s, Western Sovietology underwent significant evolution in the direction of common sense, but, true, got stuck halfway in this positive process.

According to our calculations, strictly based on documents, we get no more than 2.6 million under a sufficiently broad interpretation of the concept "victims of political terror and repression." This number includes over 800,000 sentenced to the supreme penalty for political reasons, around 600,000 political prisoners who died in places of detention, and approximately 1.2 million who died in places of exile (including "kulak exile"), as well as during transport there (deported peoples, etc.). The components of our calculations correspond simultaneously to four criteria indicated in the "Black Book of Communism" when defining the concept "victims of political terror and repression," namely: "shooting, hanging, drowning, beating to death"; "deportation—death during transport"; "death in places of exile"; "death as a result of forced labor (exhausting labor, disease, malnutrition, cold)".⁴⁰

As a result, we have four main variants of the scale of victims (executed and killed by other means) of political terror and repression in the USSR: 110 million (A. I. Solzhenitsyn); 50–60 million (Western Sovietology during the "Cold War" period); 20 million (Western Sovietology in the post-Soviet period); 2.6 million (our document-based calculations).

A question may arise: where are Roy Medvedev's 40 million? This figure is not comparable with those cited above: there we are talking only about those executed and killed by other means, whereas R. A. Medvedev's statistics include also millions of people who, although subjected to various repressions, remained alive.

And the final question we would like to address is the statistics of rehabilitation and its stages. We return to our baseline figure—3 million 854,000 (more precisely, 3,853,900) convicted for political reasons over all 73 years of Soviet power. This figure served as the starting point for calculating the number and percentage of those rehabilitated.

Rehabilitations took place even during Stalin's lifetime, but their scale was utterly negligible. The period of mass rehabilitation began in 1953, immediately after the well-known events connected with Stalin's death, the arrest and execution of Beria, and especially after the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, which condemned Stalin's cult of personality.

Rehabilitation was headed by the former Stalinist entourage led by N. S. Khrushchev, directly implicated in the previous Stalinist repressions. In this case, they, especially Khrushchev, displayed a certain political foresight. In the first years after Stalin's death, the situation was such that to continue the line of the deceased leader without substantial corrections was the path of assured political suicide. The idea of mass rehabilitation for many considerations was politically advantageous and literally suggested itself. As for the fact that this process was initiated and headed by the former Stalinist entourage directly implicated in the repressions, their internal driving motives we would formulate thus: "Better we do this than someone else instead of us." Here the instinct of political self-preservation worked.

The rehabilitation process over time had its rises and falls. Its first stage—mass "Khrushchev-era" rehabilitation—covers the period 1953–1961. Then rehabilitation declined, but nevertheless continued (at a slower pace). From 1987, mass "Gorbachev-era" rehabilitation began, significantly exceeding in scale the "Khrushchev-era" one.

Of nearly 3 million 854,000 convicted for political reasons (according to personalized records held at the FSB RF), by the beginning of 2000, 2 million 438,000 (63.3%) had been rehabilitated, and approximately 1 million 416,000 (36.7%) remained unrehabilitated. Subsequently, the rehabilitation process stalled, since, essentially, there was no one left to rehabilitate. The foundation of the unrehabilitated consists of collaborators with fascist occupiers—all these policemen, punitive troops, Sonderkommando members, Vlasovites, etc., who, as a rule, were prosecuted under Article 58 as political criminals. In Soviet legislation, there existed a provision prohibiting the rehabilitation of collaborators with fascist occupiers. This provision passed into current Russian legislation as well, i.e., their rehabilitation is directly prohibited by law. In addition to collaborators with fascist occupiers, there remains unrehabilitated another group of persons whose actions were of such a character that it is simply impossible to rehabilitate them.

Notes