> I just read that during the worst years of Stalin only 2.5% of the
> Soviet population was in prison. This CAN'T be true, can it?
The sensible discussion below based on Michael Ellman's work (based on documents only available in recent years) suggests that 2.5% may be in fact high, if you are considering those in prison _at any given time_. The only specific number given below (1.5 million in November 1940) would work out at just under 1%. The total number sentenced in the period 1930 -56 he estimates at 17-18 million.
The US gulag has roughly comparable numbers. Just under 1% (at the present time) in prison. And the flows are also comparable, if the incarceration rates reached in the 90s (under Clinton) will extend over a similar period. Of course, executions are far less frequent in the US.
But (at least prior to the deportations of Crimean Tatars and Chechens during the war) no national or racial segment of the Soviet population was subject to state repression comparable to US Blacks (12% of all Black men between the ages of 20-34 are currently in prison).
For Pugliese - this demonstration of approximate numerical equivalence between Stalin's gulag and the US Democratic/Republican gulag is NOT intended to justify anything about the Stalin repression - rather the reverse.
john mage
from JRL RESEARCH AND ANALYTICAL SUPPLEMENT Editor: Stephen D. Shenfield Issue No. 15 January 2003
HOW BIG WAS STALIN'S GULAG?
SOURCE. Michael Ellman, "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments," Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54 No. 7, November 2002, pp. 1151-72.
...How big was the Gulag? How many people were sent to the camps and how many perished there? How many were shot?
The main antagonists in this debate have been:
* Stephen Wheatcroft... and
* Robert Conquest [of] the Hoover Institution (Stanford University)...
On the surface the debate has revolved around the choice and interpretation of statistical sources. Wheatcroft prefers to rely on the official Soviet data that have become available in greater abundance as archives have opened up, while Conquest continues to put more trust in unofficial "literary" sources such as "guesstimates" presented by former prisoners in their memoirs.
However, the passion with which often abstruse statistical issues are argued points to another much more political clash not far beneath the surface. Conquest suspects that Wheatcroft favors the relatively low official figures because he is an apologist for the Soviet system, perhaps even for Stalin. Wheatcroft naturally finds Conquest's imputations on this score highly offensive.
The intervention that Michael Ellman of the University of Amsterdam has now made in this rather barren debate is most balanced and constructive... On the one hand, he agrees with Wheatcroft that the worm's eye views of ex-prisoners cannot form the basis of an accurate global assessment. On the other hand, he demonstrates how a sufficiently critical interpretation of the official data yields results fully compatible with the qualitative picture so eloquently portrayed in Conquest's works.
Crucial is the distinction that Ellman draws between the Gulag's relatively modest "stocks" and its much greater "flows." "Only" a few million people were prisoners in the Gulag at any one time (at the end of 1940, "only" 1.5 million); nonetheless turnover was so high that according to the author's estimate "in the 27 years of the Gulag's existence (1930-56) the number of people who were sentenced to detention in prisons, colonies and camps was 17-18 million."
Like Wheatcroft and several Russian researchers, Ellman concludes that the number of "repression deaths" in 1937 and 1938, the peak years of the great terror, was about one million (more precisely, in the range 950,000--1,200,000). Most of these deaths were deliberate NKVD killings ("executions"), deaths in detention accounting for the remainder...