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]]]]]]]]]]] COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST [[[[[[[[[[[
By Robert Conquest
(Robert Conquest, a historian, is Senior Research Fellow at the
Hoover Institution, Stanford University)
From National Review, 10 March 1989, pp. 14:2-16:1
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
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 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 [The Great Terror (1968)], 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demographers and statisticians having used unpublished material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 had ``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 1930-2, two million of
the able-bodies 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 in 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 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 Op-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.
It does indeed require such an effort to understand the
enormity of the blow to the consciousness of the Soviet peoples,
the hideous effect of the vast slaughter, of year after year of
fear, of forced falsification, of denunciation and treachery.
For when we register the millions of dead, we must also recall
that even larger numbers underwent various phases of the terror
and just survived. One Soviet article, in a government organ,
has already stated that in the terror against the peasantry, in
1930-33, 25 million people were ``dead or half-alive'' and that
``no fewer'' suffered in the post-1937 phases. Another tells us
that even for the ``few'' who did not have relatives arrested,
extreme fear penetrated their whole existence. The effect has
not yet worn off.
If we do not fully grasp the Soviet past we cannot understand
the Soviet present, and so cannot understand the present-day
world.
* * *
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