Here.
For a more academic source that Sousa’s essay is based on, see Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years:A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence by J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Ritterspoon and Viktor N. Zemskov.
I am really getting tired of endlessly answering these questions to people who are not familiar with the literature. Note: I am not insulting those of you who have not heard of the revisionist studies, as the revisionist tolls on Stalin have never been disseminated by the “free press” (LOL!) in the West, so of course no one has heard of any of this stuff.
Peacetime figures for political deaths in the USSR 1921-1953 are:
Executions: 900,000 Deaths in the gulag: 300,000 Dekulakization Ukraine: 390,000
Totals: 1.59 million
Granted this does not include their fake deliberate famine (5.4 million) or the deaths during WW2. It’s open to debate whether to include such things or not.
The source is J. Arch Getty and various Russian scholars. The KGB archives were opened up by Gorbachev in 1990 and the millions of pages were pored over by scholars from the world over. The killers wrote down everything. Google J. Arch Getty for more.
The debate has continued to be conducted in academic journals since then, and the Conquest liars have stuck to their guns. The debate gets complicated, and I am not privy to all the details. Bottom line is that Conquest is saying that Commies lie all the time, so why should we believe the KGB archives, since obviously the KGB lied in their own archives?
Feel free to dip into it if you wish. I gave up after a bit and am just siding with Getty and rest. It may be some time before this is all sorted out. There are clearly some overheated emotions, at least on one side anyway.
The figures do not include:
WW2 minority transfers: 300,000+ Executions during WW2: ~100,000+ Gulag criminal deaths: 900,000
Totals: 1.3 million
Even if you include those deaths, the figure only goes to 2.9 million. That’s a far cry from 20-110 million.
So many people have been fed the Conquest fertilizer for so many years that they can’t help but believe it, and they refuse to believe that the US government and the World Press lied to them for so many decades. People don’t like to hear that they got lied to.
References
- Getty, J. Arch, Ritterspoon, Gabor T. and Zemskov, Viktor N. 1993. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence American Historical Review 98:4, 1048-49.
Reblogged this on Cbmilne33′s Blog.
Dear Robert
Did the Soviet government also keep acccurate reports of the Katyn massacre?
The reports for peacetime death tolls are considered accurate. These reports are for peacetime. Wartime death tolls are very problematic with all sorts of lying on all sides. The Soviet archives do not deal with death tolls during wartime, but they do keep tabs on gulag deaths during the war.
The bulk of the evidence is on the side of the low estimates. And revisionist research suggests that the effects of the Red Army purges were neither as thorough nor damaging as originally thought.
Still, none of this obviously helped.
1.5mn for the famines seems to low. To me the most credible figures are 2.5-3mn in Ukraine, and 2-2.5mn in the rest of the Union, since they are based on annual demographic data and simple tallying of excess mortality in 1932-34 vis-a-vis previous years. To this should also be added the almost forgotten 1946-47 famine which was another 0.5mn.
Tired of Polish catholic nationalists whinging about Katyn. Equally pissed off at communists who still deny Soviet responsibility for this brutal, but necessary operation.
The Polish officer class were proto-fascists who wanted an alliance with Hitler against ‘Jewish bolshevism’. Under Colonel Beck they even aped the Nuremburg Laws in Poland. Catholics they blamed the Jews as ‘Christ-killers’, (I know this as I was reared a Catholic and was subjected to anti-semitism in post-war Ireland. Read Joyce if you want to see how pervasive this was in that country.) Being they were ‘inferior’ slavs was the only reason the Nazis refused to countenance their importuning.
They also collaborated with Hitler at Munich seizing parts of Czechoslvakia in 1938.