tos@psc70.UUCP (Dr.Schlesinger) (08/07/85)
Various net postings have referred to Stalin's victims by way of comparison to other human rights violations, etc. The following article from today's New York Times may help us master the data: "The Scale of Stalin's Crime," page A3, New York Times, 8/6/85. President Reagan's use of a a figure of 20 million people to describe the victims of Stalin's purges cannot bereadily documented from available published sources. The 20 million figure is usually associated with the losses of the Soviet Union during World War II, not as a result of Stalin's rule of terror. In contrast to the figure of war losses, which is used officially by the Soviet Union and is generally not contested by Western historians, no official Soviet count has ever been issued for the number of people who died as a result of Stalin's repressions. They include people executed during purges and those who died of deprivation in the vast system of prisons and labor camps that has become known as the Gulag, after Alexander Solzhenitsyn's documentary account. Western specialists on the Soviet Union have long tried to estimate the number of Gulag victims. They include the kulaks, private farmers who opposed the collectivization of agriculture around 1930; the great wave of mass repression of the late 1930's, and the successive purges of the early postwar period that ended only with Stalin's death in 1953. According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union published in 1982, "careful estimates indicate that about 15 to 16 million people died of exhaustion and starvation between 1930 and 1953." In addition, according to this source, one million were executed. The encyclopedia estimates that at the time of Stalin's death, about ten million people were in labor camps. Most of the camp system was then dismantled and most of the political prisoners were released.