[lbo-talk] Gulag query

[andie nachgeborenen]

See also Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts. However, recognize here (and in response to Carrol also) that it will be argued that it makes a big difference that the deaths, if foreseeable, were not intended; it was not the purpose of British laissaez faire capitalism to kill millions of people. That was merely a byproduct. There are responses to this, of course, one could deny the distinction betweena cting and ommitting to act, one might say that lack of ill intent makes British imperialists better people than Stalinist apparatchiks, but does not redeem the system of British imperialism as opposed to Stalinist terror, etc. But the point is that the body count doesn't tell the whole story. And anyway, who said that British imperialism was OK? Except for . . . Karl Marx, who viewed it as progressive. ';> jks

"Max B. Sawicky" <sawicky at bellatlantic.net> wrote:I'm reading Sen's book about famines now. A million or so
died in the Bengal famine of 1942, and not because there was
a shortage of food. It seems like this sort of thing gets
lost in the Hitler/Stalin comparisons.

mbs

From: "Chris Doss" 

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?

Your stay in the GULAG could be short for one of two reasons, remember.

What's the current guess of deaths during the collectivization of
agriculture? 5 million? What proportion of the 5 million "displaced persons"
returned to the Soviet Union after World War II ever made it home? Half?
Perhaps 1 million shot by the NKVD during the Great Terror itself who never
made it to the GULAG.

I do remember being struck that *both* of Gorbachev's grandparents were
arrested during the 1930s (although both survived): his paternal grandfather
for failing to meet production targets, and his maternal grandfather for
being a right-wing Trotskyist. Stalin was much harder on Communists than on
peasants and workers, and the closer you got to Stalin, the lower your
chances of surviving became...

Brad DeLong

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