there ARE
>people who have made an ideological cottage industry out of exaggerating
>the figures of deaths under Stalin. They are unsatisfied with the level of
>ideological service that the truth would perform, so they proceed to make
>up wild figures about 8-10 million or even 20 to 30 million deaths.
>
Since this was directed at me, I will say just two things: (1) I was alluding to the Ukrainian famines involved in forced collectivization, where there are credible estimates of up to 7 or 8 million deaths from malnourishment and disease of people who were never even arrested; (2) in Sovietological circles, of which I was once a sort a marginal occupant, I was sometimes criticized as an apologist for Stalinism because I defended the Getty figures, actually in their earlier incarnations, against the figures bandied about in the 1980s and before of 8-20 million, which were not "wild" in their day, but which I believed to have been wrong.
My point was not the general evils of totalitarian repression but the specific failure of Stalinist economic planning. That is why I picked the Ukraining famine and not the Yezovshchina of 1937.
Yours in abject servitude to the imperialist bourgeoisie,
jks _____________________________________________________________________________________ Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com