Coming to terms with the past - terror death's during Stalin's time

National Review, March 10, 1989 by Robert Conquest

THE EXTENT of the long-drawn-out Stalin terror is now at last being fully and irrefutably demonstrated. The key question remains, how many suffered?

The Soviet press has lately-so far in a piecemeal fashion-been giving figures for those killed, imprisoned, and deported in Stalin's time which match those long since deduced in the West, but denied in Moscow and often rejected as excessive or incredible by some in the West as well. In a book published twenty years ago, I was able, by the careful handling of a variety of sources, to reach a rough total of twenty million deaths-with the proviso that this might be an underestimate by as much as 50 per cent.

There is now talk in Moscow of high-placed, official demographers and statisticians having used unpublished material to produce a set of figures for terror deaths in the same range. They hope to be able to publish these in the fairly near future.

In Stalin's time, little of this was fully known abroad. It was even possible to distort the facts of the terror famine of 1932-33, which took place over a huge area penetrated by many foreigners. As to the mass executions, and the even larger numbers sent to-and dying in-the forced-labor camps, they were kept even more secret. The official line was that Stalin killed very .few people, and sent only a small number of others to humanely run "corrective labor camps." Some truth came out officially in Khrushchev's time-but no figures; and for two decades thereafter nothing or less ("less" being, for example, the de-rehabilitation of some rehabilitated under Khrushchev).

The scent had been confused by the Soviet census of the period. The results of a census taken in January 1937 were suppressed and members of the Census Board were shot as "a serpent's nest of traitors in the apparatus of Soviet statistics," who ha"exerted themselves to diminish the numbers of the population of the USSR." A new census was taken in 1939. It naturally failed to carry much conviction-but it has even now been used as authentic by some Western "scholars." Soviet statisticians have, indeed, lately rebuked them, explaining that there were two reasons for rejecting the figures: first, that Stalin had announced them before the Census Board had examined the data; second, that deaths in prison or labor camps had not been included. Such were the problems, or some of them, that bedeviled the research.

Reasonably accurate estimates of the numbers sent to the labor camps have been available for forty years at least. But they were based on evidence that, though varied and cumulative, came from defectors, escapees, Poles, and others ill-affected to the regime: so they were rejected. They still are, by a few Western (mostly American) academics. This year, Soviet accounts by the dozen confirm them.

A Moscow scholar prominent in the field estimates 15 million peasants were deported to the Arctic in 1930-32, two million of the able-bodied males among them to the forced-labor camps. (My deportation estimate in The Harvest of Sorrow, 1986, was ten to 12 million.) At least a third of them are believed to have perished. Then Moscow has published the figure of six million dead (I made it around seven million) for the terror famine of 1933, now referred to bluntly as a "murder-famine," "artificial," and "consciously" planned. Figures indicating seven to eight million arrests in 1937-38 have also appeared; 17 million in the labor camps over the whole period have been put forward; 16 million post-Stalin rehabilitations have been mentioned publicly. And at least a million executions for 1937-38 (not counting executions inside camps) have been given-the same figure as my own, reached in 1968. But it now looks, from other Soviet evidence, that this may be an underestimate.

For the Kuropaty NRVD execution site has been discovered outside the Byelorussian capital, Minsk. The Soviet estimate of the bodies in mass graves in the area already examined was 102,000; but the chief investigator has just published an estimate of 250,000 to 300,000 for the whole site. And this for the capital of a minor Soviet republic-with five other sites around it still awaiting investigation, and others near the Byelorussian provincial capitals! Even allowing for the fact that these executions include, after 1939, many from the newly annexed Western Byelorussia, the numbers imply a slaughter on a rather larger scale than- any of us imagined. But there are still men in Western "Sovietological" posts writing books, misleading students, even writing 0p-Ed pages in the New York Times, who have claimed, and continue to claim, that Stalin only killed a few thousand, or a few ten thousand: numbers that would fit into a single corner of the single Kuropaty mass gravesite. As for total victims of the whole Stalin period, Soviet assessments in the last few months are giving a figure of twenty million killed and at least as many imprisoned and deported.

The Russian poet and Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Brodsky, has written that Westerners simply cannot face the idea of a regime (a "socialist" one too) that killed tens of millions of innocents, so they turn their indignation against the "mustachioed colonels" and other comprehensible targets. In fact, the main reason Westerners-including alleged experts-failed to understand the Soviet phenomenon was that they could not believe Stalin's acts were possible. That is to say they made unconscious or conscious assumptions that did not admit certain types of reality. Their minds were, in fact, irremediably parochial. As Orwell said, it took an effort of the imagination as well as of the intellect to grasp Stalinism.