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Hello Tom and Francisco,
Thank you for your request for sources. I think by
sending this to the wsn address the whole group gets to see it - I'm something
of an internet amateur.
My source for the numbers is a review article in an
Australian publication. The article was" A moral and statistical
reckoning'' by Paul Monk in Quadrant July August 1999 pp. 31 to 38. The review
was of the works of a scholar Stephen Wheatcroft who was conducted archival
research in the former USSR since 1990. SOme of hisworks cited were: "Victims of
Stalinism and the Soviet Secret police: The comparability and reliability of
archival data - not the last word" in Europe - Asia Studies vol. 51, No.2 1999;
"Soviet statistics of Nutrition and mortality during times of famine 1917 - 1922
and 1931 - 1933" in Cahiers du monde russe vol. 38, no. 4 October / December
1997 and a further (untitled in my source) joint article by Zemskov, Getty and
Ritterspoon in American Historical Review June 1994.
The figures quoted in my article are:
3.5 million deaths in the collectivisation and
dekulakisation famines of the early 1930s (compared to 19.5 mill estimated by
Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow;
37,843 death sentences from a total of 826,568
people sentneced for political reasons during the same period (1929
1933);
681,692 death sentences from 1,344,923 political
sentences during the great terror years (1937-1938) (Conquest's The Great Terror
estimated about 1 mill executions and 8 mill sentenced to gulags);
1.5 million gulag prisoners at the peak in 1941with
a death rate of around 7% per annum in the camps, for a total of 1.2 to 1.5
million deaths over about 20 years (1929 - 1953). Again estimates by the
established scholar of the stalinist terrors Robert Conquest were for 12 million
deaths in the camps.
So all up about 700,000 shot, another 3.5
deaths as a consequence of famine and 1.2 million in the camps - a long way from
the usual figures of 20 million plus thrown around. Note that the late 1990s
published Livre noir du communisme was claiming upwards of 85 million deaths
under communism (though I think they were lumping civil war casulaties, Chinese
figures and the appalling Pol Pot experience in as well).
Anyway, the figures while horrible enough, are a
whole order of magnitude different to the common myth. Certainly suffcicient to
reinforce the point made in Ismail's posting about where most atrocities have
occurred.
For your information, Quadrant is a right wing
magazine in Australia. The editor is a well known neo liberal publicist and the
journal was originally set up and published in 1950s by the Australian branch of
the Congress for Cultural Freedom which was in turn funded by the CIA. I felt
this background almost gave the figures added credibility...
Regards to all,
Cedric Beidatsch
Perth, Western Australia
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