And as Leon Trotsky used to say, "Once Again On..."
Originally rom the Marxist at yahoogroups.com list of John Lacny, mermber of Soli and CofC, no red-baitin' from John. http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0012/0436.html Total #ers killed in the GULAG and/or a shot in the back of the head at Lubianka in '37 and '38 ny the Stalinist pricks, respectively, 353,074 and 328,618.
Acknowledging the mass murder of leftists by regimes that had origins in leftist ideology while, never forgetting the slaughter of some 2.8 million Vietnamese by the U.S. and French, hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Nicaraguans and Salvadoreans http://www.gwu.edu/ ~nsarchiv/latin_america/guatemala.html or remembering that 9/11 was also the date of the Coup in Chile in '73, still seems to be impossible to some hidebound curmudgeons, I see though.
(piggybacking from John Lacny's post http://www.egroups.com/message/marxist/1436 ) ...I have culled the following from "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 swath of the Soviet archives which have been released since 1991, and their numbers are authoritative; I know of no serious refutation of them, from any "side." For what they're worth, these are the facts. The statistics below cover the relevant period under discussion, 1929-1939. I have not reproduced the entire chart here; keep in mind that not all of these are for political offenses, although the majority are (for "counterrevolutionary crimes" and "anti-Soviet agitation").
I've devised a key as follows:
(1) Year
(2) Total Arrests (3) Convictions (4) Shot (5) Camps and prison (6) Exiled
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(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
1929 162,726 56,220 2,109 25,853 24,517
1930 331,544 208,069 20,201 114,443 58,816 1931 479,065 180,696 10,651 105,683 63,269 1932 410,433 141,919 2,278 73,946 36,017 1933 505,256 239,664 2,154 138,903 54,262 1934 205,173 78,999 2,056 59,451 5,994 1935 193,083 267,076 1,229 185,846 33,601 1936 131,168 274,670 1,118 219,418 23,719 1937 936,750 790,665 353,074 429,311 1,366 1938 638,509 554,258 328,618 205,509 16,842 1939 2,552 54,666 3,783
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You can notice a period of particularly vicious repression
in 1930-31 during the most turbulent years of the Five Year Plan and collectivization; then, in the Purges of 1937-38, an unparralleled orgy of arrests and executions.
Getty and Naumov write further 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) Some may wince at the comparison, but the prison population in the United States today is around 2 million.
Moreover: "According to the NKVD archival material currently available, 681,692 people were shot in 1937-38 (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, whereas the KGB press release concerns only persons persecuted for 'counterrevolutionary offenses.' 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. The only period between 1930 and the outbreak of the war when the number of death sentences for nonpolitical crimes outstripped the ones meted out to 'counterrevolutionaries' was from August 1932 to the last quarter of 1933.
"Aside from executions in the terror of 1937-38, many others died in the regime's custody during the 1930s. 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." (p. 591)
Any way you slice it, these are some appalling figures. But while Jason Schulman is expressing a decent humanitarian impulse when he advises against playing the numbers game, I find myself agreeing with him in the abstract but unable to carry out the recommendation in practice. This gets us to the grain of truth which Rosenthal's polemic contains: 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. Their purpose is to make the Communism seem "worse" than Nazism. In doing so, they play fast and loose with the historical facts, and sometimes simply lie. When certain people get this dishonest with the numbers, it's hard to avoid a serious attempt to determine the real numbers in response. To do so you don't have to make excuses. It's only by the prodigious standards of twentieth-century evil that one and a half million deaths can look more like a statistic than a tragedy.
John Lacny
Michael Pugliese