The number of repressed in the USSR. Repressions in the USSR: socio-political meaning
Due to the fact that once again a memorandum to Khrushchev on the number of convicted people from 1921 to 1953 came to light, I cannot ignore the topic of repressions.
The memorandum itself, and most importantly, the information it contains, became known to many people interested in politics - quite a long time ago. The note contains absolutely exact numbers of repressed citizens. Of course, the numbers are not small and they will frighten and horrify a person who knows the topic. But as you know - everything is known in comparison. Let's do this and compare.
Those who have not yet had time to remember the exact figures of repression by heart - now you have such an opportunity.
So, from 1921 to 1953, 642,980 people were executed. 765,180 people were exiled.
Placed in custody - 2,369,220 people.
Total - 3,777,380
Anyone who dares to say a figure that is at least somewhat large, about the scale of repression, is blatantly and shamelessly lying. Many people have questions, why such large numbers? Well, let's figure it out.
Amnesty of the Provisional Government.
One of the reasons why so many people were repressed by the Soviet authorities was the general amnesty of the provisional government. And to be more precise, Kerensky. You don’t have to go far for this data, you don’t have to rummage through the archives, just open Wikipedia and type “Provisional Government”:
In Russia, a general political amnesty has been declared, as well as the terms of imprisonment for persons held in custody on the basis of sentences of courts for general criminal offenses have been reduced by half. About 90 thousand prisoners were released, among which were thousands of thieves and raiders, popularly nicknamed "Kerensky's chicks" (Vicki).
On March 6, the Provisional Government adopted a Decree on political amnesty. In general, as a result of the amnesty, more than 88 thousand prisoners were released, of which 67.8 thousand people were convicted of criminal offenses. As a result of the amnesty, the total number of prisoners from March 1 to April 1, 1917 was reduced by 75%.
On March 17, 1917, the Provisional Government issued a Decree "On alleviating the fate of persons who have committed criminal offenses", i.e. on the amnesty of those convicted of common crimes. However, only those convicts who expressed their readiness to serve their Motherland on the battlefield were subject to amnesty.
The calculation of the Provisional Government to recruit prisoners into the army did not materialize, and many of the liberated, if possible, fled from the units. - Source
Thus, a huge number of criminals, thieves, murderers and other asocial elements turned out to be free, with whom in the future the Soviet government will have to fight directly. What can we say about the fact that all the exiled people who are not in prison, after the amnesty, quickly scattered throughout Russia.
Civil War.
There is nothing worse in the history of a people and civilization than a civil war.
A war in which brother goes against brother and son goes against father. When citizens of one country, subjects of one state kill each other on the basis of political, ideological differences.
We still have not departed from this civil war, to say nothing of the state in which society was immediately after the civil war ended. And the realities of such events are such that after the civil war, in any, the most democratic country in the world, the winning side will repress the loser.
For the simple reason that in order for a society to continue to develop, it must be integral, united, it must look forward to a bright future, and not engage in self-destruction. That is why, those who did not accept defeat, those who did not accept new order, those who continue direct or covert confrontation, those who continue to incite hatred and encourage people to fight - are to be destroyed.
Here you have political repression and persecution of the church. But not because pluralism of opinions is unacceptable, but because these people actively participated in the civil war and did not stop their "struggle" after it ended. This is another reason why so many people ended up in the Gulags.
Relative numbers.
And now, we come to the most interesting, to comparison and transition from absolute numbers to relative numbers.
The population of the USSR in 1920 - 137,727,000 people The population of the USSR in 1951 - 182,321,000 people
An increase of 44,594,000 people despite the civil and second world war which claimed much more lives than repressions.
On average, we get that the population of the USSR in the period from 1921 to 1951 was 160 million people.
In total, 3,777,380 people were convicted in the USSR, which is two percent (2%) of the total average population of the country, 2% - in 30 years!!! Divide 2 by 30 and you get 0.06% of the total population per year. This is despite the civil war and the fight against the accomplices of the Nazis (collaborators, traitors and traitors who sided with Hitler) after the Great Patriotic War.
And this means that every year 99.94% of the law-abiding citizens of our Motherland worked quietly, worked, studied, received medical treatment, gave birth to children, invented, rested, and so on. In general, they lived the most that neither is a normal human life.
Half the country was sitting. Half the country guarded.
Well, the last and most important thing. Many people like to say that we are saying that half a third of the country was sitting, a third of the country was guarding, a third of the country was knocking. And the fact that in the memorandum, only counter-revolutionary fighters are indicated, and if you add up the number of those who were imprisoned for political reasons and those who were imprisoned for a criminal offense, then these are generally terrible numbers.
Yes, the numbers are scary until you compare them with anything. Here is a table that shows the total number of prisoners, both repressed and criminals, both in prisons and in camps. And their comparison with the total number of prisoners in other countries
According to this table, it turns out that on average, in Stalinist USSR there were 583 prisoners (both criminal and repression) per 100,000 free people.
In the early 90s, at the height of crime in our country, only in criminal cases, without political repression, there were 647 prisoners per 100,000 free.
The table shows the United States of the times of Clinton. Fairly quiet years even before the global financial crisis, and even then, it turned out that 626 people per 100 free people are sitting in the United States.
I decided to dig a little into modern numbers. According to WikiNews, there are currently 2,085,620 prisoners in the United States, which is 714 prisoners per 100,000.
And in Putin's stable Russia, the number of prisoners has dropped sharply in relation to the dashing 90s, and now we have 532 prisoners per 100,000.
WHAT IS THE SCALE OF "STALIN'S REPRESSIONS"?
Introduction — How many were repressed in total — Number of prisoners — How many among the prisoners were “political” — Mortality among prisoners
All sorts of debunkers of the "crimes of Stalin", ranging from A. Solzhenitsyn with E. Radzinsky and ending with R. Conquist, name an absolutely fantastic number of "victims of repression": 60, 80, finally 100 million dead. However, this is not the limit. Recently, in a speech by Yuri Karyakin, it was already about 120 million. It is easy to see the absurdity of these figures. It is enough to open any demographic directory and make simple calculations. And for those who are too lazy to do this, we will give a small illustrative example.
According to the census conducted in January 1959, the population of the USSR was 208.827 thousand Human.
By the end of 1913, within the same boundaries lived 159.153 thousand person (1).
Thus, the average annual population growth of our country
between 1914 and 1959 was 0.60%.
For comparison, let us give data on how the population of England, France and Germany grew during this period - countries that also adopted Active participation in both world wars (2).
1913 1959 Annual increase
RUSSIA 160 million 210 million 0,60
1920, thousand 1960, thousand annual growth, %
England 43718 52559 0,46
France 38750 45684 0,41
Germany 61794 72664 0,41
(GDR: 17241, West Berlin: 2199, Germany: 53224)
So what do we see? The population growth rate in the Stalinist USSR is almost one and a half times higher than in the "Western democracies", although for these countries we excluded extremely unfavorable demographically, the years of the 1st World War.
Could this be the case if half of the country's population (100 million) or at least a third (60 million) had been destroyed under Stalin?
Almost all publications that touch upon the issue of the number of repressed people can be classified into two groups. The first of them includes the works of detractors of the "totalitarian regime", who call astronomical multi-million figures shot and imprisoned. At the same time, the “truth seekers” are trying hard ignore archived data, including and published, pretending that they do not exist. However, it has long been known that in addition to "eyewitness recollections" there is mass of documentary sources. In the funds of the Central State Archive of the October Revolution, supreme bodies state power and government bodies of the USSR (TsGAOR USSR) revealed several thousand document storage units relating to the activities of the Gulag.
Having studied archival documents, the researcher is surprised to find that the scale of repression, which we “know” about thanks to the media, is not just at odds with reality, but exaggerated tenfold. After that, he finds himself in a painful dilemma: professional ethics require the publication of the data found, on the other hand, he does not want to be branded as a defender of Stalin. The result is usually a kind of "compromise" publication, containing both a standard set of anti-Stalinist epithets and curtsy to Solzhenitsyn and Co., and information about the number of repressed people, which, unlike publications from the first group, are not taken from the ceiling and not sucked from the finger, and confirmed by documents from the archives.
How many were repressed
In connection with the signals received by the Central Committee of the CPSU from a number of persons about illegal convictions for counter-revolutionary crimes in previous years by the Collegium of the OGPU, troikas of the NKVD, the Special Conference, the Military Collegium, courts and military tribunals, and in accordance with your instruction on the need to reconsider the cases of persons convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes and now held in camps and prisons, we report: during the time 1921 to present for counter-revolutionary crimes
was condemned 3.777.380 people, including
to VMN (to execution - NM) - 642.980 people,
Of the total number of convicts, tentatively convicted:
2.900.000 people- The Collegium of the OGPU, the troikas of the NKVD and the Special Conference and
877.000 people - by courts, military tribunals, the Special Collegium and the Military Collegium.
It should be noted that created on the basis of the Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR dated November 5, 1934 Special meeting at the NKVD USSR, which existed before September 1, 1953,
was condemned 442.531 person, including
to VMN - 10.101 people,
to imprisonment — 360.921 Human,
to other measures of punishment (offset of the time spent in custody, deportation abroad, compulsory treatment) — 3.970 people …
Prosecutor General R. Rudenko
Minister of Internal Affairs S. Kruglov
Minister of Justice K. Gorshenin
So, as it appears from the above document, total from 1921 to early 1954% were sentenced on political charges
to death 642.980 people,
It should also be borne in mind that not all sentences were carried out. For example, from July 15, 1939 to April 20, 1940 for the disorganization of camp life and production was sentenced to capital punishment 201 prisoners, but then some of them the death penalty was replaced by imprisonment for terms of 10 to 15 years (3). The camps held prisoners, sentenced to the highest measure with the replacement of imprisonment: in 1934― 3849, in 1935 ― 5671 , in 1936 - 7303, in 1937 - 6239, in 1938 - 5926 , in 1939 - 3425, in 1940 - 40374.
Number of prisoners
“Are you sure that the information from this memorandum is true?” - A skeptical reader will exclaim. Well, let's take a look at more detailed statistics, especially since, contrary to the assurances of the noteworthy "fighters against totalitarianism", such data are not only available in the archives, but also published many times.
Let's start with data on the number of prisoners in the Gulag camps. Let me remind you that those convicted for more than 3 years, as a rule, served their sentences in labor camps(ITL), and those convicted for short terms - in corrective labor colonies(ITK).
However, those who are accustomed to taking the opuses of Solzhenitsyn and his ilk for Holy Scripture are often not convinced even by direct references to archival documents. “These are NKVD documents, and therefore they are falsified. they say. “Where did the numbers they cite come from?” Two specific examples of where "these numbers" come from. So, year 1935:
Year of Prisoners Year of Prisoners Year of Prisoners
1930 179.000 1936 839.406 1942 1.415.596 1948 1.108.057
1931 212.000 1937 820.881 1943 983.974 1949 1.216.361
1932 268.700 1938 996.367 1944 663.594 1950 1.416.300
1933 334.300 1939 1.317.195 1945 715.505 1951 1.533.767
1934 510.307 1940 1.344.408 1946 746.871 1952 1.711.202
1935 725.483 1941 1.500.524 1947 808.839 1953 1.727.970
NKVD camps, their economic specialization
Camp Economic specialization Number of employees
DMITROVLAG Construction of the Moscow-Volga canal 192.649
BAMLAG Builds in the second tracks of the Trans-Baikal
and Ussuri railway. and Baikal-Amur Mainline 153.547
Belomoro-Baltic Combine. Arrangement Belomor. channel 66.444
SIBLAG Builds in the Gorno-Shorskaya railway. d.;
coal mining in the mines of Kuzbass; construction of the Chuisky and Usinsky tracts;
provision of labor to the Kuznetsk Metallurgical Plant,
Novsibles and others; own pig farms 61.251
DALLAG(later - Vladivostoklag ) Construction railway
"Volochaevka-Komsomolsk"; coal mining at the mines "Artem" and
"Raychikha"; construction of the Sedan water pipeline and oil storage facilities
"Benzostroy"; construction works"Dalpromstroy", "Committee of Reserves",
aircraft building No. 126; fisheries 60.417
SVIRLAG. Logging firewood and commercial timber for Leningrad 40.032
SEVVOSTLAG Trust "Dalstroy", works in Kolyma 36.010
TEMLAG, Mordovian ASSR Logging of firewood and commercial timber for Moscow 33.048
SAZLAG (Central Asian) Provision of manpower to Tekstilstroy, Chirchikstroy, Shakhrudstroy, Khazarbakhstroy, Chui novlubtrest, state farm "Pahta-Aral"; own cotton state farms 26.829
Karaganda camp (Karlag) Livestock farms 25.109
Ukhtpechlag. Works of the Ukhto-Pechora trust: coal mining,
oil, asphalt, radium, etc. 20.656
Provlag (later - Astrakhanlag) Fishing industry 10.583
Sarov camp NKVD Logging and sawmilling 3.337
Vaigach. Mining of zinc, lead, platinum spar 1.209
Ohunlag. Road construction 722
On the way to the camps 9.756
Total 741.599
1939
The number of prisoners in the NKVD camps
See the table in the book
Total 1.317.195
However, as I wrote above, in addition to ITL, there were also ITK - corrective labor colonies. Until the autumn of 1938, they, together with prisons, were subordinate to the Department of Places of Confinement (OMZ) of the NKVD. Therefore, for the years 1935-1938, so far it has been possible to find only joint statistics:
Year of Prisoners Year of Prisoners Year of Prisoners
1930 179.000 1936 839.406 1942 1.415.596 1948 1.108.057
1931 212.000 1937 820.881 1943 983.974 1949 1.216.361
1932 268.700 1938 996.367 1944 663.594 1950 1.416.300
1933 334.300 1939 1.317.195 1945 715.505 1951 1.533.767
1934 510.307 1940 1.344.408 1946 746.871 1952 1.711.202
1935 725.483 1941 1.500.524 1947 808.839 1953 1.727.970
Year of Prisoners
Since 1939, the penitentiaries were under the jurisdiction of the Gulag, and the prisons were under the jurisdiction of the Main Prison Directorate (GTU) of the NKVD.
Year of Prisoners Year of Prisoners Year of Prisoners
1939 335.243 1944 516.225 1949 1.140.324
1940 315.584 1945 745.171 1950 1.145.051
1941 429.205 1946 956.224 1951 994.379
1942 361.447 1947 912.704 1952 793.312
1943 500.208 1948 1.091.478 1953 740.554
Number of prisoners in prisons (10 )
MARCH: 350.538 190.266 487.739 277.992 235.313 155.213 279.969 261.500 306.163 275.850
MAY 281.891 195.582 437.492 298.081 237.246 177.657 272.113 278.666 323.492 256.771
JULY 225.242 196.028 332.936 262.464 248.778 191.309 269.526 268.117 326.369 239.612
SEPTEMBER: 185.514 217.819 216.223 217.327 196.119 218.245 263.819 253.757 360.878 228.031
DECEMBER 178.258 401.146 229.217 201.547 170.767 267.885 191.930 259.078 349.035 228.258
186.278 434.871 247.404 221.669 171.708 272.486
235.092 290.984 284.642 230.614
The information in the table is given at the middle of each month. In addition, again, for especially stubborn anti-Stalinists, a separate column gives information as of January 1 of each year (highlighted in red), taken from A. Kokurin's article posted on the Memorial website. This article, among other things, provides links to specific archival documents. In addition, those who wish can read an article by the same author in the Military Historical Archive (11).
SUMMARY TABLE
the number of prisoners in the USSR under Stalin:
Year of Prisoners
1935 1936 1937 1938 1939
965.742 1.296.494 1.196.369 1.881.570 2.004.946
Year of Prisoners
1940 1941 1942 1943 1944
1.846.270 2.400.422 2.045.575 1.721.716 1.331.115
Year of Prisoners
1945 1946 1947 1948 1949
1.736.186 1.948.241 2.014.678 2.479.909 2.587.732
Year of Prisoners
1950 1951 1952 1953
2.760.095 2.692.825 2.657.128 2.620.814
It cannot be said that these figures are some kind of revelation. Since 1990, such data have been presented in a number of publications. Yes, in the article L. Ivashova and A. Emelin, published in 1991, it is alleged that the total number of prisoners in the camps and colonies
at 1.03. 1940 was 1.668.200 people,
on 06/22/1941 - 2.3 million ( 12);
as of July 1, 1944 - 1.2 million (13).
V. Nekrasov in his book "Thirteen" Iron "People's Commissars" reports that
"in places of detention"
in 1933 was 334 thousand prisoners
in 1934 - 510 thousand, in 1935 - 991 thousand,
in 1936 - 1296 thousand14;
According to A. Kokurina and N. Petrova(especially indicative, since both authors are associated with the Memorial society, and N. Petrov is even an employee of Memorial), at 1.07. 1944. in the camps and colonies of the NKVD contained about 1.2 million. prisoners (17), and in the prisons of the NKVD on the same date - 204. 290 (18).
On 12/30/1945 about 640,000 prisoners were kept in NKVD corrective labor camps, about 730,000 in corrective labor colonies, about 250,000 in prisons, about 38,000 in penal colonies, and about 21,000 in juvenile colonies ., in special camps and prisons of the NKVD in Germany - about 84 thousand (19).
Finally, here is the data on the number of prisoners in places of deprivation of liberty, subordinate territorial bodies Gulag, taken directly from the already mentioned Memorial website:
January 1935 307.093
January 1937 375.376
1.01.1939 381.581
1.01.1941 434.624
1.01.1945 745.171
1.01.1949 1.139.874
So let's sum it up. During the entire period of Stalin's rule, the number of prisoners who were simultaneously in places of deprivation of liberty never exceeded 2 million 760 thousand (naturally, not counting German, Japanese and other prisoners of war). Thus, there can be no talk of any “tens of millions of Gulag prisoners”.
Number of prisoners per capita.
On January 1, 1941, as can be seen from the table above, the total number of prisoners in the USSR amounted to 2.400.422 people. The exact population of the USSR at this point is unknown, but is usually estimated at 190-195 million.
We get from 1230 to 1260 prisoners for every 100 thousand population.
In January 1950, the number of prisoners in the USSR was 2.760.095 people. This is the highest figure for the entire period of Stalin's rule. The population of the USSR at that time was 178 million 547 thousand (20).
We get 1546 prisoners per 100,000 population.
Now let's calculate similar figure for modern USA.
Currently, there are two types of places of deprivation of liberty:
jail - an approximate analogue of our temporary detention facilities, jail holds people on remand, and also serves sentences convicted for short periods, and
prison - actually a prison.
Mid 1998 (when this article was first published) per 100 thousand the American population had 693 prisoners. H and the end of 1999 the prisons contained 1.366.721 man, in jails - 687.973 (See: Bureau of Legal Statistics website), which adds up to 2.054.694. The population of the United States at the end of 1999 is approximately 275 million(see: US population), therefore, we get 747 prisoners per 100,000 population.
Average annual in 1990-1998. population growth was in jails — 4,9%, in prisons - 6,9%. So, at the end of 1999, this figure in the United States half as much as in the USSR under Stalin but not ten times. And if we take into account the growth rate of this indicator , then, you see, in ten years the United States will catch up and overtake the Stalinist USSR.
By the way, here in one Internet discussion an objection was made - they say, these figures include all the arrested Americans, including those who were detained for several days. Let me emphasize once again that by the end of 1999, there were more than 2 million prisoners in the United States who are serving time or are in pre-trial detention. As for the arrests, they were made in 1998 14.5 million(see: FBI report).
Now a few words about the total number of people who visited under Stalin in places of detention. Of course, if you take the table above and sum up the rows, the result will be incorrect, since most of the Gulag prisoners were sentenced to more than a year. However, to a certain extent, the following note (21) allows us to estimate the number of those who passed through the Gulag:
The head of the Gulag of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Major General Yegorov S.E.
In total, the units of the Gulag store 11 million units of archival materials, of which 9.5 million make up the personal files of prisoners.
Head of the secretariat of the Gulag of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR. Major Podymov
How many of the prisoners were "political"?
It is fundamentally wrong to believe that the majority of those who were imprisoned under Stalin were “victims political repression»:
The number of those convicted for counter-revolutionary and other
especially dangerous state crimes (22)
Years 1921 to 1953 capital punishment, camps, colonies and prisons, exile and expulsion other measures total convictions %
Total 799 455 2 634 397 413 512 215 942 4 060306
the highest measure 799 455
camps, colonies and prisons 2 634 397
other measures 215 942
Total convicted 4 060 306
“Other measures” refers to the deduction of time spent in custody, compulsory treatment and expulsion abroad.
For 1953, only the first half of the year is given.
From this table it follows that there were somewhat more "repressed" than indicated in the above memorandum addressed to Khrushchev - 799.455 condemned to the highest degree instead of 642.980 and 2,634,397 sentenced to imprisonment instead of 2,369,220. However, this difference is relatively small - the numbers are of the same order.
In addition, there is one more point - it is very possible that a fair number of criminals have "clucked" into the above table. The fact is that on one of the certificates stored in the archive, on the basis of which this table was compiled, there is a pencil mark:
"Total convicted for 1921–1938 - 2 944879 people, of them 30% (1,062 thousand) are criminals” (23). In this case the total number of "repressed" does not exceed 3 million. However, in order to finally clarify this issue, additional work with sources is needed.
PERCENTAGE of "repressed" of the total number of inhabitants of the GULAG:
Composition of the Gulag camps of the NKVD for counter-revolutionary crimes (240)
Year quantity % to the entire composition of the camps
1939 34.5
1940 33.1
1941 28.7
1942 29.6
1943 35.6
1944 40.7
1945 41.2
1946 59.2
1947 54.3
1948 38.0
1949 34.9
* In camps and colonies.
The composition of the inhabitants of the Gulag at some points in its existence.
The composition of the prisoners of labor camps for alleged crimes
Incriminated crimes Number %
Counter-revolutionary crimes 417381 32,87
including:
Trotskyists, Zinovievites, rightists 17,621 1.39
treason to the motherland 1,473 0.12
terror 12,710 1.00
sabotage 5,737 0.45
espionage 16,440 1.29
sabotage 25,941 2.04
leadership counter rev. organizations 4,493 0.35
anti-Soviet agitation 178,979 14.10
other counterrev. crimes 133 423 10,51
family members of traitors to the Motherland 13,241 1.04
without instructions 7 323 0.58
Especially dangerous crimes
against the order of control 46374 3,65
including:
banditry and robbery 29514 2.32
defectors 13924 1.10
other crimes 2936 0.23
Other crimes
against the order of control 182421 14,37
including:
hooliganism 90291 7.11
speculation 31652 2.50
violation of the law on passportization 19747 1.55
other crimes 40731 3.21
Theft of social property Number %%
Official and economic crimes 96193 7.58
Crimes against the person 66708 5.25
Property crimes 152096 11.98
Social harmful and socially dangerous element 2 20835 17.39
War crimes 11067 0.87
Other crimes 41706 3.29
No instructions 11455 0.90
Total 1269785 100.00
REFERENCE on the number of those convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes and banditry, held in camps and colonies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as of July 1, 1946(26)
By nature of crime In camps In colonies % Total %
Total number of convicts 616.731 755.255 1.371.986
Of these, for counter-revolutionary crimes, 354.568 26%
including:
58–1. Treason to the Motherland (art. 58-1)
Espionage (58-6)
Terrorism
Wrecking (58-7)
Sabotage (58-9)
K-r sabotage (58-14)
Participation in the anti-Soviet conspiracy (58 - 2, 3, 4, 5, 11)
Anti-Soviet agitation (58 -10)
Political banditry (58-2, 5, 9)
Illegal border crossing
Smuggling
Family members of traitors to the Motherland
Socially dangerous elements
Head of the OURZ Gulag of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR Aleshinsky
Pom. head of the URZ GULAG of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs Yatsevich
The composition of the Gulag prisoners by the nature of the crimes
Counter-revolutionary crimes:
treason(art. 58- 1a, b)
Espionage(art. 58- 1a, b, 6; st.193-24)
Family members of traitors to the Motherland (Art. 58-1c)
Participation in a / c conspiracies, a / c organizations and groups (Art. 58, paragraphs 2, 3, 4, 5, 11)
Rebellion and political banditry(Art. 58, paragraph 2; 59, items 2, 3, 3b)
Sabotage(art. 58- 7 )
Terror and terrorist intentions(art. 58- 8 )
Sabotage(art. 58- 9 )
Anti-Soviet agitation(art. 58- 10, 59 -7)
Counter-revolutionary sabotage(v. 58-14)
sabotage (for quitting a job in the camp) (vv. 58-14)
sabotage (for escapes from places of detention) (Art. 58-14)
Socially dangerous element
Other counter-revolutionary crimes
Total convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes: in 1951― 334 538
in 1948― 103942
Criminal offenses
Speculation
Banditry and armed robberies(art. 59-3, 167) committed outside of places of detention
Banditry and armed robberies (art. 59-3, 167) committed while serving a sentence
Intentional killings(Articles 136, 137, 138) committed outside places of detention
Intentional killings (art. 136, 137, 138) committed in places of detention
Illegal border crossing(v. 59-10, 84)
Smuggling activities(v. 59-9, 83)
Cattle theft(Art. 166)
Thieves-recidivists(Article 162-c)
Property crimes(Art. 162-178)
Violation of the law on passportization(Article 192-a)
For harboring evicted people who fled from places of compulsory settlement, or aiding
Socially harmful element
Desertion(Art. 193-7)
self-mutilation(Art. 193-12)
Marauding(Art. 193-27)
Other military crimes (Article 193, except for paragraphs 7, 12, 17, 24, 27)
Illegal possession of weapons (Article 182)
Official and economic crimes (Articles 59-3c, 109-121, 193 paragraphs 17, 18)
According to the Decree of June 26, 1940 No.(unauthorized leaving enterprises and institutions and absenteeism)
By Decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (except for those listed above)
Other criminal offenses
Total convicted for criminal offenses
Total: 2.528146 1.533767 994.379
Thus, among the prisoners held in the Gulag camps, the majority were criminals, and "repressed", as a rule, was less than 1/3.
The exception is 1944-1948 years when this category received a worthy replenishment in the face of Vlasov, policemen, elders and other "fighters against communist tyranny". Even less was the percentage of "political" in corrective labor colonies.
Mortality among prisoners
The available archival documents make it possible to shed light on this issue as well.
The death rate of prisoners in the Gulag camps28
Year Average
prisoners died %
The arithmetic mean between the figures for January 1 and December 31 was taken as the average number of prisoners.
Mortality in the colonies on the eve of the war was lower than in the camps. For example, in 1939 it was 2.30% (30).
Mortality of prisoners in Gulag colonies (31)
Year Wed. number of s/c Died %
1949 1.142.688 13966 1,22
1950 1.069.715 9983 0,93
1951 893.846 8079 0,90
1952 766.933 7045 0,92
Thus, the death rate of prisoners under Stalin was kept at a very low level. However, during the war, the situation of the Gulag prisoners worsened. Nutritional rations were significantly reduced, which immediately led to a sharp increase in mortality. By 1944, the food rations of the Gulag prisoners were slightly increased, but even after that they remained about 30% lower in calories than the pre-war food rations (32).
Nevertheless, even in the most difficult years of 1942 and 1943, the death rate of prisoners was about 20% per year in camps and about 10% per year in prisons, a not 10% per month, as stated, for example , A. Solzhenitsyn. By the beginning of the 1950s, in the camps and colonies, it fell below 1% per year, and in prisons - below 0.5%.
In conclusion, a few words should be said about the notorious Special Camps (special taxes). They were created by Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 416-159ss dated February 21, 1948 In these camps, as well as in the Special Prisons that already existed by that time, they were supposed to contain all those sentenced to imprisonment. for espionage, sabotage, terror, as well as Trotskyists, rightists, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists, nationalists, white émigrés, members of anti-Soviet organizations and groups, and "persons who pose a danger through their anti-Soviet connections." Prisoners of special services should have been used for heavy physical work (33).
February 15, 1952 Certificate of availability of a special contingent held in special camps on January 1, 1952
No. Name of the special camp
1 Mineral 4012 284 1020 347 7 36 63 23 11688 46 4398 8367 30292
2 Gorny 1884 237 606 84 6 5 4 1 95 46 24 2542 5279 20218
3 Dubravny 1088 397 699 278 5 51 70 16 7068 223 4708 9632 24235
4 Stepnoy 1460 229 714 62 — 16 4 3 10682 42 3067 6209 22488
5 Beregovoi 2954 559 1266 109 6 — 5 — 13574 11 3142 10363 31989
6 River 2539 480 1 429 164 — 2 2 8 14683 43 2292 13617 35459
7 Ozerny 2350 671 1527 198 12 6 2 8 7625 379 5105 14441 32342
8 Sandy 2008 688 1203 211 4 23 20 9 13987 116 8014 12571 38854
9 Reed 174 118 471 57 1 1 2 1 3973 5 558 2890 8251
Spies: 18475
Saboteurs: 3663
Terror 8935
Trotskyists 1510
Mensheviks 41
Right SRs 140190
Anarchists 69
Nationalists 93026
White grants 884
Antisov members. organizations 33826
Dangerous element 83369
TOTAL: 244 128
Deputy Head of the 2nd Department of the 2nd Directorate of the Gulag, Major Maslov (34)
As can be seen from the table, in 8 special charges, according to which information is given, out of 168,994 prisoners in the IV quarter of 1950 died 487 (0,29%), which, in terms of the year, corresponds to 1,15%. That is, only a little more than in ordinary camps. Contrary to popular belief, special services were not "death camps" in which dissident intelligentsia were allegedly destroyed, and the most numerous contingent of their inhabitants were "Nationalists" are forest brothers and their accomplices.
Notes
1. A. Dugin. Stalinism: legends and facts // Slovo. 1990, no. 7. P.24. 2. Ibid. P.26.
3. V.N. Zemskov. Gulag (historical and sociological aspect) // sociological research. 1991, No. 6. P.15.
4. V.N. Zemskov. Prisoners in the 1930s : socio-demographic Problems // National history. 1997, No. 4. P.67.
5. A. Dugin. Stalinism: legends and facts // Slovo. 1990, no. 7. p.23;
In a contest of liars
archival documents say
"To the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU
Comrade Khrushchev N. S.
…
Prosecutor General R. Rudenko
Minister of Internal Affairs S. Kruglov
Minister of Justice K. Gorshenin
Number of prisoners
Mortality of prisoners
Special Camps
Notes:
6. Ibid. S. 26.
9. Ibid. S. 169
24. Ibid. L.53.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid. D. 1155. L.2.
Repression
Categories: Blogs , Editor's Choice , Favorites , History , StatisticsTags: ,
Interesting article? Tell your friends:
Stalin's repressions occupy one of the central places in the study of the history of the Soviet period.
Briefly describing this period, we can say that it was a cruel time, accompanied by mass repressions and dispossession.
What is repression - definition
Repression is a punitive measure that was used by state authorities in relation to people trying to “undermine” the formed regime. To a greater extent, it is a method of political violence.
During the Stalinist repressions, even those who had nothing to do with politics or political structure. All those who were objectionable to the ruler were punished.
Lists of the repressed in the 30s
The period of 1937-1938 was the peak of repression. Historians called it the "Great Terror". Regardless of their origin, sphere of activity, during the 1930s, a huge number of people were arrested, deported, shot, and their property was confiscated in favor of the state.
All instructions on a single “crime” were given personally to I.V. Stalin. It was he who decided where a person was going and what he could take with him.
Until 1991, in Russia there was no information on the number of repressed and executed in full. But then the period of perestroika began, and this is the time when everything secret became clear. After the lists were declassified, after the historians did a lot of work in the archives and counted the data, truthful information was provided to the public - the numbers were simply frightening.
Do you know that: according to official statistics, more than 3 million people were repressed.
Thanks to the help of volunteers, lists of victims in 1937 were prepared. Only after that did the relatives find out where their family was. native person and what happened to him. But to a greater extent, they did not find anything comforting, since almost every life of the repressed ended in execution.
If you need to clarify information about a repressed relative, you can use the site http://lists.memo.ru/index2.htm. On it by name you can find all the information of interest. Almost all the repressed were rehabilitated posthumously, which has always been a great joy for their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
The number of victims of Stalinist repressions according to official data
On February 1, 1954, a memorandum was prepared in the name of N. S. Khrushchev, in which the exact data of the dead and injured were spelled out. The number is simply shocking - 3,777,380 people.
The number of repressed and executed is striking in its scale. So there are officially confirmed data that were announced during the “Khrushchev thaw”. Article 58 was political, and about 700,000 people were sentenced to death under it alone.
And how many people died in the Gulag camps, where not only political prisoners were exiled, but also everyone who was not pleasing to Stalin's government.
In 1937-1938 alone, more than 1,200,000 people were sent to the Gulag (according to Academician Sakharov). And only about 50 thousand were able to return home during the “thaw”.
Victims of political repression - who are they?
Anyone could become a victim of political repression during Stalin's time.
The following categories of citizens were most often repressed:
- Peasants. Those who were members of the "green movement" were especially punished. The kulaks who did not want to join the collective farms and who wanted to achieve everything on their own farms were sent into exile, while all the acquired farming was confiscated from them in full. And now the wealthy peasants were becoming poor.
- The military is a separate layer of society. Ever since the Civil War, Stalin did not treat them very well. Fearing a military coup, the leader of the country repressed talented military leaders, thereby securing himself and his regime. But, despite the fact that he secured himself, Stalin quickly reduced the country's defense capability, depriving it of talented military personnel.
- All the sentences were turned into reality by the NKVD officers. But their repression was not bypassed. Among the employees of the people's commissariat who followed all the instructions, there were those who were shot. Such people's commissars as Yezhov, Yagoda became one of the victims of Stalin's instructions.
- Even those who had something to do with religion were subjected to repression. God did not exist at that time, and belief in him "shattered" the established regime.
In addition to the listed categories of citizens, residents living on the territory of the Union republics suffered. Entire nations were repressed. So, Chechens were simply put into freight cars and sent into exile. At the same time, no one thought about the safety of the family. The father could be planted in one place, the mother in another, and the children in a third. No one knew about his family and where they were.
Reasons for the repressions of the 30s
By the time Stalin came to power, a difficult economic situation had developed in the country.
The reasons for the start of repressions are considered to be:
- Savings at the national level, it was required to force the population to work for free. There was a lot of work, and there was nothing to pay for it.
- After Lenin was killed, the leader's seat was free. The people needed a leader, whom the population would follow unquestioningly.
- It was necessary to create a totalitarian society in which the word of the leader should be law. At the same time, the measures used by the leader were cruel, but they did not allow organizing a new revolution.
How were the repressions in the USSR
Stalin's repressions were a terrible time when everyone was ready to testify against a neighbor, even fictitious, if only nothing happened to his family.
The whole horror of the process is captured in the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago": “A sharp night call, a knock on the door, and several operatives enter the apartment. And behind them is a frightened neighbor who had to become understood. He sits all night, and only in the morning puts his painting under terrible and untrue testimony.
The procedure is terrible, treacherous, but thus understood, perhaps, it will save his family, but no, it was he who became the next to whom they would come to a new night.
Most often, all the testimony given by political prisoners was falsified. People were brutally beaten, thereby obtaining the information that was needed. At the same time, torture was personally sanctioned by Stalin.
The most famous cases, about which there is a huge amount of information:
- Pulkovo case. In the summer of 1936, there was supposed to be a solar eclipse across the country. The observatory offered to use foreign equipment in order to capture the natural phenomenon. As a result, all members of the Pulkovo Observatory were accused of having links with foreigners. Until now, data on the victims and repressed are classified.
- The case of the industrial party - the Soviet bourgeoisie received the accusation. They were accused of disrupting industrialization processes.
- Doctors business. Charges were received by doctors who allegedly killed Soviet leaders.
The actions taken by the government were brutal. No one understood guilt. If a person was included in the list, then he was guilty and no evidence was required for this.
The results of Stalin's repressions
Stalinism and its repressions are probably one of the most terrible pages in the history of our state. The repressions lasted for almost 20 years, and during this time a huge number of innocent people suffered. Even after the Second World War, repressive measures did not stop.
Stalinist repressions did not benefit society, but only helped the authorities establish a totalitarian regime, from which long time our country could not get rid of. And the residents were afraid to express their opinion. There wasn't anyone who didn't like it. I liked everything - even to work for the good of the country practically for free.
The totalitarian regime made it possible to build such facilities as: BAM, the construction of which was carried out by the forces of the GULAG.
A terrible time, but it cannot be deleted from history, since it was during these years that the country withstood the Second World War and was able to restore the destroyed cities.
Ours with D.R. Khapaeva's article, devoted to the collective ideas of post-Soviet people about Soviet history, caused a series of letters to the editor demanding that the following phrase contained in it be refuted:
“73% of respondents are in a hurry to take their place in the military-patriotic epic, indicating that there were those who died during the war years in their families. And although the Soviet terror suffered twice more people than died during the war , 67% deny the presence of victims of repression in their families.”
Some readers a) found it incorrect to compare the number affected from repression with the number dead during the war, b) found the very concept of victims of repression blurred, and c) were indignant at the extremely overestimated, in their opinion, estimate of the number of repressed. If we assume that 27 million people died during the war, then the number of victims of repression, if it were twice as large, would have to be 54 million, which contradicts the data given in the well-known article by V.N. Zemskov "GULAG (historical and sociological aspect)", published in the journal "Sociological Research" (No. 6 and 7, 1991), which says:
“... In fact, the number of those convicted for political reasons (for "counter-revolutionary crimes") in the USSR for the period from 1921 to 1953, i.e. for 33 years, amounted to about 3.8 million people ... Statement ... of the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR V.A. Kryuchkov that in 1937-1938. no more than a million people were arrested, which is in full agreement with the current Gulag statistics that we studied in the second half of the 1930s.
In February 1954, in the name of N.S. Khrushchev, a certificate was prepared, signed by the Prosecutor General of the USSR R. Rudenko, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR S. Kruglov and the Minister of Justice of the USSR K. Gorshenin, which indicated the number of those convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes for the period from 1921 to February 1, 1954. this period was condemned by the Collegium of the OGPU, the "troikas" of the NKVD, the Special Meeting, the Military Collegium, courts and military tribunals of 3,777,380 people, including capital punishment - 642,980, to detention in camps and prisons for a term of 25 years and below - 2,369,220, in exile and exile - 765,180 people.
In the article by V.N. Zemskov also cites other data based on archival documents (first of all, on the number and composition of the Gulag prisoners), which in no way confirm the estimates of the victims of terror by R. Conquest and A. Solzhenitsyn (about 60 million). So how many victims were there? This is worth understanding, and by no means only for the sake of evaluating our article. Let's start in order.
1. Is the quantity matching correct? affected from repression with the number dead during the war?
It is clear that the injured and the dead are different things, but whether they can be compared depends on the context. We were interested not in what cost the Soviet people more - repressions or war - but in how much today the memory of the war is more intense than the memory of repressions. Let's put aside a possible objection in advance - the intensity of memory is determined by the strength of the shock, and the shock from mass death is stronger than from mass arrests. Firstly, it is difficult to measure the intensity of the shock, and it is not entirely known what the relatives of the victims suffered more from - from the "shameful" - and from what they themselves completely real threat- the fact of the arrest of a loved one or from his glorious death. Secondly, the memory of the past is a complex phenomenon, and it depends only in part on the past itself. No less does it depend on the conditions of its own functioning in the present. I believe that the question in our questionnaire was formulated quite correctly.
The concept of “victims of repression” is indeed vague. It can sometimes be used without comment, and sometimes not. We could not specify it for the same reason that we could compare the killed with the injured - we were interested in whether compatriots remember the victims of terror in their families, and by no means what percentage of them had injured relatives. But when we are talking it is necessary to stipulate how many "actually" were victims, who should be considered victims.
Hardly anyone will argue that those who were shot and imprisoned in prisons and camps were victims. But what about those who were arrested, subjected to "interrogations with prejudice", but by a happy coincidence were released? Contrary to popular belief, there were many. They were not always re-arrested and convicted (in this case, they fall into the statistics of convicts), but they, as well as their families, certainly retained the impressions of the arrest for a long time. Of course, one can see the triumph of justice in the fact of the release of some of the arrested, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that they were only hurt, but not crushed by the machine of terror.
It is also appropriate to ask the question whether it is necessary to include in the statistics of repressions those convicted under criminal articles. One of the readers said that he was not ready to consider criminals victims of the regime. But not all who were convicted by ordinary courts under criminal articles were criminals. In the Soviet kingdom of distorting mirrors, almost all criteria were shifted. Looking ahead, we say that the cited V.N. Zemskov in the passage quoted above, the data relate only to those convicted under political articles and therefore are deliberately underestimated (the quantitative aspect will be discussed below). In the course of rehabilitation, especially during the perestroika period, some convicted under criminal articles were rehabilitated as actually victims of political repression. Of course, in many cases it is possible to understand here only individually, however, as you know, the numerous "carriers" who picked up spikelets on the collective farm field or took a pack of nails home from the factory also went into the category of criminals. During campaigns to protect socialist property at the end of collectivization (the famous Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of August 7, 1932) and in the post-war period (Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of June 4, 1947), as well as in the course of the struggle to improve labor discipline in the pre-war and war years (the so-called wartime decrees), millions were convicted under criminal articles. True, the majority of those convicted under the Decree of June 26, 1940, which introduced serfdom in enterprises and forbade unauthorized leaving from work, received insignificant terms of corrective labor labor (CTR) or were sentenced conditionally, but a rather significant minority (22.9% or 4,113 thousand people for 1940-1956, judging by the statistical report of the Supreme Court of the USSR in 1958) were sentenced to imprisonment. With these latter, everything is clear, but what about the former? It seems to some of the readers that they were just treated a little cool, and not repressed. But repression - this is going beyond the limits of generally accepted severity, and such an excess was the terms of the engineer for absenteeism, of course. Finally, in some cases, the number of which is impossible to estimate, those sentenced to the ITR due to a misunderstanding or due to the overzealousness of the guardians of the law still ended up in the camps.
A special issue concerns war crimes, including desertion. It is known that the Red Army largely held on to methods of intimidation, and the concept of desertion was interpreted extremely broadly, so that some, but it is not known which part of those convicted under the relevant articles is quite appropriate to consider victims of the repressive regime. The same victims, of course, can be considered soldiers who fought their way out of the encirclement, escaped or released from captivity, who usually immediately, due to the prevailing spy mania and for "educational purposes" - so that others would be discouraged from surrendering - fell into the filtration camps of the NKVD, and often even further to the Gulag.
Further. Victims of deportations, of course, can also be classified as repressed, as well as administratively deported. But what about those who, without waiting for dispossession or deportation, hurriedly packed up during the night what they could carry, and ran until dawn, and then wandered, sometimes was caught and convicted, and sometimes started a new life? Again, everything is clear with those who were caught and convicted, but with those who were not? In the very broad sense they also suffered, but here, again, one must look individually. If, for example, a doctor from Omsk, warned of his arrest by his former patient, an NKVD officer, took refuge in Moscow, where it was quite possible to get lost, if the authorities announced only a regional search (this happened with the author's grandfather), then perhaps it would be more correct to say about him that he miraculously escaped repression. There were, apparently, many such miracles, but it is impossible to say exactly how many. But if - and this is just known figure- two or three million peasants flee to the cities, fleeing dispossession - then this is rather repression. After all, they were not only deprived of their property, which they sold in a hurry at best, for as much as they could, but they were forcibly torn out of their habitual habitat (it is known what it means for a peasant) and often actually declassed.
A special question is about "members of the families of traitors to the motherland." Some of them were "definitely repressed", others - a lot of children - were exiled to colonies or imprisoned in orphanages. Where are these children to be found? Where are the people, most often the wives and mothers of convicts, who not only lost loved ones, but also evicted from apartments, deprived of work and registration, who were under surveillance and awaiting arrest? Shall we say that terror - that is, the policy of intimidation - has not touched them? On the other hand, it is difficult to include them in the statistics - their number is simply not taken into account.
It is of fundamental importance that different forms repressions were elements of a single system, and this is how they were perceived (or, more precisely, experienced) by contemporaries. For example, local punitive bodies often received orders to toughen the fight against the enemies of the people from among those exiled to their districts, condemning such and such a number of them “in the first category” (that is, to be shot) and such and such in the second category (to imprisonment). ). No one knew on which rung of the ladder leading from "working out" at a meeting of the labor collective to the Lubyanka basement, he was destined to linger - and for how long. Propaganda introduced into the mass consciousness the idea of the inevitability of the beginning of the fall, since the bitterness of the defeated enemy is inevitable. Only by virtue of this law could the class struggle intensify as socialism was built. Colleagues, friends, and sometimes relatives recoiled from those who stepped on the first step of the stairs leading down. Being fired from a job, or even simply “working through” under conditions of terror, had a completely different, much more formidable meaning than they can have in ordinary life.
3. How can you assess the scale of repression?
3.1. What do we know and how?
To begin with, about the state of the sources. Many documents of the punitive departments were lost or purposefully destroyed, but many secrets are still kept in the archives. Of course, after the fall of communism, many archives were declassified and many facts made public. Many - but not all. Moreover, for last years a reverse process was outlined - the re-secretization of archives. With the noble goal of protecting the sensitivity of the descendants of the executioners from exposing the glorious deeds of their fathers and mothers (and now more likely grandfathers and grandmothers), the declassification dates for many archives have been pushed back into the future. It is amazing that a country with a history similar to ours carefully guards the secrets of its past. Probably because it is the same country.
In particular, the result of this situation is the dependence of historians on statistics collected by the "relevant authorities", which can be verified on the basis of primary documents in the rarest cases (though, when it is possible, the verification often gives a rather positive result). This statistic was presented in different years different departments, and it is not easy to bring it together. In addition, it concerns only the “officially” repressed and is therefore fundamentally incomplete. For example, the number of those repressed under criminal articles, but in fact political reasons in principle, it could not be indicated in it, since it proceeded from the categories of understanding of reality by the above-mentioned bodies. Finally, there are inexplicable discrepancies between different "references". Estimates of the scale of repression based on available sources can be very approximate and cautious.
Now about the historiographical context of V.N. Zemskov. The cited article, as well as the even more famous joint article written on its basis by the same author with the American historian A. Getty and the French historian G. Rittersporn, are characteristic of the 1980s. the so-called "revisionist" direction in the study of Soviet history. Young (then) Western historians of leftist views tried not so much to whitewash the Soviet regime as to show that the “right-wing” “anti-Soviet” historians of the older generation (such as R. Conquest and R. Pipes) wrote unscientific history, since they were not allowed into the Soviet archives. Therefore, if the “rights” exaggerated the scale of repressions, then the “lefts”, partly from dubious youth, having found much more modest figures in the archives, were in a hurry to make them public and did not always ask themselves the question whether everything was reflected - and could be reflected - in the archives. Such "archival fetishism" is generally characteristic of the "tribe of historians", including the most qualified ones. It is not surprising that the data of V.N. Zemskov, who reproduced the figures cited in the documents he found, in the light of a more careful analysis, turn out to be underestimated indicators of the scale of repression.
To date, new publications of documents and studies have appeared, which, of course, give a far from complete, but still more detailed idea of the scale of repression. These are, first of all, books by O.V. Khlevnyuk (as far as I know, it exists only in English), E. Applebaum, E. Bacon and J. Paul, as well as the multi-volume " History of Stalin's Gulag" and a number of other publications. Let's try to comprehend the data given in them.
3.2. Sentence statistics
Statistics were kept by different departments, and today it is not easy to make ends meet. Thus, the Certificate of the Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR on the number of those arrested and convicted by the bodies of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MGB of the USSR, compiled by Colonel Pavlov on December 11, 1953 (hereinafter - Pavlov's certificate), gives the following figures: for the period 1937-1938. 1,575,000 people were arrested by these bodies, of which 1,372,000 were for counter-revolutionary crimes, and 1,345,000 were convicted, including 682,000 sentenced to capital punishment. Similar figures for 1930-1936. amounted to 2,256 thousand, 1,379 thousand, 1,391 thousand and 40 thousand people. In total, for the period from 1921 to 1938. 4,836,000 people were arrested, 3,342,000 of them for counter-revolutionary crimes, and 2,945,000 were convicted, including 745,000 sentenced to death. From 1939 to mid-1953, 1,115,000 people were convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes, of which 54,000 were sentenced to death. In total, in 1921-1953. 4,060,000 were convicted under political articles, including 799,000 sentenced to death.
However, these data relate only to those convicted by the system of "extraordinary" bodies, and not to the entire repressive apparatus as a whole. So, this does not include those convicted by ordinary courts and military tribunals of various kinds (not only the army, navy and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but also railway and water transport, as well as camp courts). For example, a very large discrepancy between the number of arrests and the number of those convicted is due not only to the fact that some of the arrested were released, but also to the fact that some of them died under torture, while others were transferred to ordinary courts. As far as I know, there are no data to judge the relationship between these categories. The statistics of arrests of the NKVD were better than the statistics of sentences.
Let us also pay attention to the fact that in the “Rudenko reference”, quoted by V.N. Zemskov, the data on the number of those convicted and executed by the verdicts of all types of courts turn out to be lower than the data of Pavlov’s certificate only on “emergency” justice, although Pavlov’s certificate was supposedly only one of the documents used in Rudenko’s certificate. The reasons for such discrepancies are unknown. However, on the original of Pavlov's certificate, stored in the State Archive Russian Federation(GARF), to the figure of 2,945 thousand (the number of convicts for 1921-1938), an unknown hand made a note in pencil: “30% angle. = 1062". "Injection." They are, of course, criminals. Why 30% of 2,945 thousand amounted to 1,062 thousand, one can only guess. Probably, the postscript reflected some stage of "data processing", and in the direction of underestimation. It is obvious that the figure of 30% was not derived empirically based on a generalization of the initial data, but represents either an “expert assessment” given by a high rank, or an estimated “by eye” equivalent of the figure (1,062 thousand), by which the specified rank considered it necessary to reduce reference data. Where such an expert assessment could come from is unknown. Perhaps it reflected the ideologeme widespread among high officials, according to which criminals were actually condemned “for politics” in our country.
With regard to the reliability of statistical materials, the number of those convicted by "extraordinary" bodies in 1937-1938. is generally confirmed by the research conducted by Memorial. However, there are cases when the regional departments of the NKVD exceeded the "limits" allocated to them by Moscow for convictions and executions, sometimes having time to get a sanction, and sometimes not having time. In the latter case, they risked getting into trouble and therefore might not show the results of excessive diligence in their reports. According to a rough estimate, such “unrevealed” cases could be 10-12% of the total number of convicts. However, it should be noted that the statistics do not reflect repeated convictions, so these factors could well be approximately balanced.
The number of those repressed in addition to the bodies of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-MGB can be judged by the statistics collected by the Department for the preparation of petitions for pardon under the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for 1940 - the first half of 1955. ("Babukhin's reference"). According to this document, 35,830 thousand people were convicted by ordinary courts, as well as military tribunals, transport and camp courts during the specified period, including 256 thousand people sentenced to death, 15,109 thousand to imprisonment and 20,465 thousand to imprisonment. person to corrective labor and other types of punishment. Here, of course, we are talking about all types of crimes. 1,074 thousand people (3.1%) were sentenced for counter-revolutionary crimes - slightly less than for hooliganism (3.5%), and twice as many as for serious criminal offenses (banditry, murder, robbery, robbery, rape together give 1.5%). Those convicted for military crimes amounted to almost the same number as those convicted under political articles (1,074 thousand or 3%), and some of them can probably be considered politically repressed. Robbers of socialist and personal property - including an unknown number of "non-bearers" - accounted for 16.9% of those convicted, or 6,028 thousand. 28.1% accounted for "other crimes." Punishments for some of them could well be in the nature of repressions - for the unauthorized seizure of collective farm lands (from 18 to 48 thousand cases a year between 1945 and 1955), resistance to the authorities (several thousand cases a year), violation of the feudal passport regime (from 9 to 50 thousand cases per year), failure to meet the minimum workdays (from 50 to 200 thousand per year), etc. The largest group was made up of punishments for unauthorized leaving work - 15,746 thousand or 43.9%. At the same time, the statistical collection of the Supreme Court of 1958 speaks of 17,961 thousand sentenced under wartime decrees, of which 22.9% or 4,113 thousand were sentenced to imprisonment, and the rest to fines or labor labor. However, not all those sentenced to short terms actually reached the camps.
So, 1,074,000 convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes by military tribunals and ordinary courts. True, if we add up the figures of the Department of Judicial Statistics of the Supreme Court of the USSR (“Khlebnikov’s certificate”) and the Office of Military Tribunals (“Maximov’s certificate”) for the same period, we get 1,104 thousand (952 thousand convicted by military tribunals and 152 thousand - ordinary courts), but this, of course, is not a very significant discrepancy. In addition, Khlebnikov's certificate contains an indication of another 23,000 convicts in 1937-1939. Taking this into account, the total sum of Khlebnikov's and Maksimov's certificates gives 1,127,000. However, the materials of the statistical collection of the Supreme Court of the USSR allow us to speak (if we summarize different tables) either about 199,000, or about 211,000 convicted by ordinary courts for counter-revolutionary crimes for 1940–1955 and, respectively, about 325 or 337 thousand for 1937-1955, but even this does not change the order of the numbers.
The available data do not allow us to determine exactly how many of them were sentenced to death. Ordinary courts in all categories of cases handed down death sentences relatively rarely (as a rule, several hundred cases a year, only for 1941 and 1942 we are talking about several thousand). Even long prison terms in large numbers(an average of 40-50 thousand per year) appear only after 1947, when the death penalty was abolished for a short time and penalties for theft of socialist property were toughened. There is no record of military tribunals, but presumably in political cases they were more likely to resort to harsh punishments.
These data show that to 4,060 thousand convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes by the organs of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-MGB for 1921-1953. one should add either 1,074 thousand convicted by ordinary courts and military tribunals for 1940-1955. according to Babukhin’s certificate, or 1,127 thousand convicted by military tribunals and ordinary courts (the aggregate result of Khlebnikov’s and Maksimov’s certificates), or 952 thousand convicted for these crimes by military tribunals for 1940-1956. plus 325 (or 337) thousand convicted by ordinary courts for 1937-1956. (according to the statistical collection of the Supreme Court). This gives respectively 5,134 thousand, 5,187 thousand, 5,277 thousand or 5,290 thousand.
However, ordinary courts and military tribunals did not sit idly by until 1937 and 1940, respectively. So, there were mass arrests, for example, during the period of collectivization. Given in " Stories of Stalin's Gulag"(Vol. 1, p. 608-645) and in" Stories of the Gulag» O.V. Khlevniuk (pp. 288-291 and 307-319) statistical data collected in the mid-50s. do not concern (with the exception of data on those repressed by the organs of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-MGB) this period. Meanwhile, O.V. Khlevnyuk refers to a document stored in the GARF, which indicates (with a reservation about incomplete data) the number of those convicted by ordinary courts of the RSFSR in 1930-1932. - 3,400 thousand people. For the USSR as a whole, according to Khlevniuk (p. 303), the corresponding figure could be at least 5 million. This gives approximately 1.7 million per year, which is in no way inferior to the average annual result of the courts of general jurisdiction of the 40s and early 50s gg. (2 million per year - but population growth should be taken into account).
Probably, the number of those convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes for the entire period from 1921 to 1956 was hardly less than 6 million, of which hardly many less than 1 million (but rather more) were sentenced to death.
But along with 6 million "repressed in the narrow sense of the word" there were a considerable number of "repressed in the broad sense of the word" - primarily those convicted under non-political articles. It is impossible to say how many of the 6 million "nesuns" were convicted under the decrees of 1932 and 1947, and how many of the approximately 2-3 million deserters, "invaders" of collective farm lands, who did not fulfill the norm of workdays, etc. should be considered victims of repression, i.e. punished unfairly or disproportionately to the gravity of the crime due to the terrorist nature of the regime. But 18 million convicted under serf decrees in 1940-1942. all were repressed, even if "only" 4.1 million of them were sentenced to imprisonment and ended up, if not in a colony or camp, then in prison.
3.2. Gulag population
The assessment of the number of repressed people can be approached in another way - through the analysis of the "population" of the Gulag. It is generally accepted that in the 1920s prisoners for political reasons numbered rather in the thousands or a few tens of thousands. There were about the same number of exiles. The year of the creation of the "real" Gulag was 1929. After that, the number of prisoners quickly exceeded one hundred thousand and by 1937 had grown to about a million. Published data show that from 1938 to 1947. it was, with some fluctuations, about 1.5 million, and then exceeded 2 million and in the early 1950s. amounted to about 2.5 million (including colonies). However, the turnover of the camp population (due to many reasons, including high mortality) was very high. Based on the analysis of data on the entry and exit of prisoners, E. Bacon suggested that between 1929 and 1953. about 18 million prisoners passed through the Gulag (including the colonies). To this we must add those held in prisons, of whom at any given moment there were about 200-300-400 thousand (minimum 155 thousand in January 1944, maximum 488 thousand in January 1941). A significant part of them probably ended up in the Gulag, but not all. Some were released, while others could receive minor sentences (for example, most of the 4.1 million people sentenced to imprisonment under wartime decrees), so it did not make sense to send them to camps and perhaps even to colonies. Therefore, probably, the figure of 18 million should be slightly increased (but hardly more than 1-2 million).
How reliable are the Gulag statistics? Most likely, it is quite reliable, although it was carried out carelessly. Factors that could have led to gross distortions, both exaggerated and understated, roughly balanced each other, not to mention that, with the partial exception of the Great Terror period, Moscow took seriously the economic role of the forced labor system, monitored statistics and demanded a reduction in the very high death rate among prisoners. Camp commanders had to be prepared for accountability checks. Their interest, on the one hand, was to underestimate the mortality and escape rates, and on the other hand, not to overestimate the total contingent so as not to get unrealistic production plans.
What percentage of prisoners can be considered "political", both de jure and de facto? E. Applebaum writes about this: “Although indeed millions of people were convicted under criminal articles, I do not believe that any significant part of the total number were criminals in any normal sense of the word” (p. 539). Therefore, she considers it possible to speak of all 18 million as victims of repression. But the picture was probably more complex.
Table of data on the number of Gulag prisoners, cited by V.N. Zemskov, gives a wide variety of percentage of "political" of the total number of prisoners in the camps. Minimum indicators(12.6 and 12.8%) belong to 1936 and 1937, when the wave of victims of the Great Terror simply did not have time to reach the camps. By 1939, this figure increased to 34.5%, then decreased slightly, and from 1943 it began to grow again to reach its apogee in 1946 (59.2%) and again decrease to 26.9% in 1953 The percentage of political prisoners in the colonies also fluctuated quite significantly. Attention is drawn to the fact that the highest rates of the percentage of "political" fall on the war and especially the first post-war years, when the Gulag was somewhat depopulated due to the especially high death rate of prisoners, their sending to the front, and some temporary "liberalization" of the regime. In the "full-blooded" Gulag of the early 50s. the proportion of "political" was from a quarter to a third.
If you go to absolute indicators, then usually there were about 400-450 thousand political prisoners in the camps, plus several tens of thousands in the colonies. This was the case in the late 30's and early 40's. and again in the late 40s. In the early 1950s, the number of political figures was rather 450-500 thousand in the camps, plus 50-100 thousand in the colonies. In the mid 30s. in the Gulag, which had not yet gained strength, there were about 100 thousand political prisoners a year, in the mid-40s. - about 300 thousand. According to V.N. Zemskov, as of January 1, 1951, there were 2,528,000 prisoners in the Gulag (including 1,524,000 in camps and 994,000 in colonies). Of these, 580 thousand were “political” and 1,948 thousand “criminal”. If we extrapolate this proportion, then out of the 18 million prisoners of the Gulag, hardly more than 5 million were political.
But even this conclusion would be a simplification: after all, some of the criminal cases were still de facto political. Thus, among 1,948 thousand prisoners convicted under criminal articles, 778 thousand were convicted of embezzlement of socialist property (in the vast majority - 637 thousand - by Decree of June 4, 1947, plus 72 thousand - by Decree of June 7, 1947). August 1932), as well as for violations of the passport regime (41 thousand), desertion (39 thousand), illegal border crossing (2 thousand) and unauthorized leaving the place of work (26.5 thousand). In addition to this, in the late 30s - early 40s. there were usually about one percent of “family members of traitors to the motherland” (by the 50s there were only a few hundred people left in the Gulag) and from 8% (in 1934) to 21.7% (in 1939) “socially harmful and socially dangerous elements” (they almost disappeared by the 1950s). All of them were not officially included in the number of those repressed under political articles. One and a half to two percent of the prisoners were serving a camp term for violating the passport regime. Convicted for theft of socialist property, whose share in the population of the Gulag was 18.3% in 1934 and 14.2% in 1936, decreased to 2-3% by the end of the 30s, which is appropriate to associate with a special role persecution of "nesuns" in the mid-30s. If we assume that the absolute number of thefts over the 30s. has not changed dramatically, and given that the total number of prisoners by the end of the 30s. increased approximately three times compared with 1934 and one and a half times compared with 1936, then, perhaps, there is reason to assume that the victims of repression among the plunderers of socialist property were at least two-thirds.
If we sum up the number of de jure political prisoners, their family members, socially harmful and socially dangerous elements, violators of the passport regime and two-thirds of the embezzlers of socialist property, it turns out that at least a third, and sometimes more than half of the population of the Gulag were actually political prisoners. E. Applebaum is right that there were not so many “real criminals”, namely those convicted of serious criminal offenses such as robbery and murder (2-3% in different years), but still, in general, hardly less than half of the prisoners cannot be considered political.
So, the rough proportion of political and non-political prisoners in the Gulag is about fifty to fifty, and of the political ones, about half or a little more (that is, about a quarter or a little more of the total number of prisoners) were political de jure, and half or a little less - political de facto.
3.3. How do the statistics of sentences and the statistics of the population of the Gulag agree?
A rough calculation gives approximately the same result. Of the approximately 18 million prisoners, about half (about 9 million) were de jure and de facto political, and about a quarter or slightly more were de jure political. It would seem that this coincides quite accurately with the data on the number of those sentenced to imprisonment under political articles (about 5 million). However, the situation is more complicated.
Despite the fact that the average number of de facto political in the camps at a certain moment was approximately equal to the number of de jure political ones, in general, over the entire period of repression, de facto political repressions should have been significantly more than de jure political ones, because usually the terms for criminal cases were significantly shorter. Thus, about a quarter of those convicted under political articles were sentenced to terms of imprisonment of 10 years or more, and another half - from 5 to 10 years, while in criminal cases most of the terms were less than 5 years. It is clear that various forms of prisoner turnover (first of all, mortality, including executions) could somewhat smooth out this difference. Nevertheless, de facto political ones should have been more than 5 million.
How does this compare with a rough estimate of the number of those sentenced to imprisonment under criminal articles for actually political reasons? The 4.1 million wartime convicts probably did not make it to the camps for the most part, but some of them could well have made it to the colonies. On the other hand, out of 8-9 million convicted of military and economic crimes, as well as for various forms of disobedience to the authorities, the majority made it to the Gulag (mortality in transit was, presumably, quite high, but there is no exact estimate of it). If it is true that about two-thirds of these 8-9 million were in fact political prisoners, then together with those convicted under wartime decrees who reached the Gulag, this probably gives at least 6-8 million.
If this figure was closer to 8 million, which is in better agreement with our understanding of the relative length of prison terms under political and criminal articles, then it should be assumed that either the estimate of the total population of the Gulag during the period of repression at 18 million is somewhat underestimated, or the estimate the total number of de jure political prisoners of 5 million is somewhat overestimated (perhaps both of these assumptions are correct to some extent). However, the figure of 5 million political prisoners, it would seem, exactly matches the result of our calculations of the total number of those sentenced to imprisonment under political articles. If, in fact, there were less than 5 million de jure political prisoners, then this most likely means that many more death sentences were handed down for war crimes than we assumed, and also that death in transit was a particularly frequent fate. namely de jure political prisoners.
Probably, such doubts can be resolved only on the basis of further archival research and at least a selective study of “primary” documents, and not just statistical sources. Be that as it may, the order of magnitude is obvious - we are talking about 10-12 million convicted under political articles and under criminal articles, but for political reasons. To this must be added about a million (and possibly more) executed. This gives 11-13 million victims of repression.
3.4. In total, the repressed were ...
To 11-13 million shot and imprisoned in prisons and camps should be added:
About 6-7 million special settlers, including more than 2 million “kulaks”, as well as “suspicious” ethnic groups and entire nations (Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, etc.), as well as hundreds of thousands of "socially alien" expelled from those captured in 1939-1940. territories, etc. ;
About 6-7 million peasants who died as a result of an artificially organized famine in the early 1930s;
About 2-3 million peasants who left their villages in anticipation of dispossession, often declassed or, at best, actively involved in the "building of communism"; the number of dead among them is unknown (O.V. Khlevniuk. p.304);
The 14 million who received sentences to labor and fines under wartime decrees, as well as most of the 4 million who received short sentences under these decrees, allegedly served them in prisons and therefore were not taken into account in the statistics of the population of the Gulag; in general, this category probably adds at least 17 million victims of repression;
Several hundred thousand arrested on political charges, but for various reasons acquitted and not arrested subsequently;
Up to half a million servicemen who were captured and, after being released, passed through the NKVD filtration camps (but not convicted);
Several hundred thousand administrative exiles, some of whom were subsequently arrested, but by no means all (O.V. Khlevniuk, p.306).
If the last three categories taken together are estimated at approximately 1 million people, then the total number of victims of terror, at least approximately taken into account, will be for the period 1921-1955. 43-48 million people. However, this is not all.
The Red Terror did not begin in 1921, and it did not end in 1955. True, after 1955 it was relatively sluggish (by Soviet standards), but still the number of victims of political repression (suppression of riots, the fight against dissidents and etc.) after the 20th Congress is calculated as a five-digit figure. The most significant wave of post-Stalinist repression took place in 1956-69. The period of revolution and civil war was less "vegetarian". There are no exact figures here, but it is assumed that we can hardly talk about less than one million victims - counting the dead and repressed during the suppression of numerous popular uprisings against the Soviet regime, but not counting, of course, forced emigrants. Forced emigration, however, took place after the Second World War, and in each case it was calculated in the seven-figure figure.
But that's not all. The number of people who lost their jobs and became outcasts, but happily escaped a worse fate, as well as people whose world collapsed on the day (or more often on the night) of the arrest of a loved one, does not lend itself to any precise calculation. But "not countable" does not mean that there were none. In addition, some considerations can be made about the last category. If the number of those repressed under political articles is estimated at 6 million people and if we consider that only in a minority of families more than one person was shot or imprisoned (for example, the proportion of “members of the family of traitors to the motherland” in the population of the Gulag, as we have already noted, did not exceed 1%, while we estimated the proportion of the “traitors” themselves at approximately 25%), then we should be talking about several million more victims.
In connection with the assessment of the number of victims of repressions, one should dwell on the question of those who died during the Second World War. The fact is that these categories partly intersect: we are talking primarily about people who died in the course of hostilities as a result of the terrorist policy of the Soviet government. Those who were convicted by the military justice authorities are already included in our statistics, but there were also those whom commanders of all ranks ordered to be shot without trial or even personally shot, based on their understanding of military discipline. Examples are probably known to everyone, and there are no quantitative estimates here. Here we do not touch upon the problem of the justification of purely military losses - the senseless frontal attacks, which many famous commanders of the Stalinist era were eager for, were also, of course, a manifestation of the state’s complete disregard for the lives of citizens, but their consequences, of course, have to be taken into account in the category of military losses.
The total number of victims of terror during the years of Soviet power can thus be approximately estimated at 50-55 million people. The vast majority of them, of course, account for the period up to 1953. Therefore, if the former chairman of the KGB of the USSR V.A. Kryuchkov, with whom V.N. Zemskov, did not distort the data on the number of those arrested during the Great Terror, not too much (only by 30%, in the direction of underestimation, of course), then in general assessment scale of repression A.I. Solzhenitsyn was, alas, closer to the truth.
By the way, I wonder why V.A. Kryuchkov was talking about a million, and not about a million and a half repressed in 1937-1938? Maybe he did not so much fight for the improvement of the indicators of terror in the light of perestroika, but simply shared the above-mentioned "expert assessment" of the anonymous reader of Pavlov's reference, who was convinced that 30% of the "political" ones were actually criminals?
We said above that the number of those executed was hardly less than a million people. However, if we talk about those who died as a result of terror, then we get a different figure: death in the camps (at least half a million in the 1930s alone - see O.V. Khlevniuk, p. 327) and in transit (which is incalculable), death under torture, suicides of those awaiting arrest, death of special settlers from starvation and disease both in places of settlements (where about 600 thousand kulaks died in the 1930s - see O.V. Khlevniuk. С.327), and on the way to them, executions "alarmists" and "deserters" without trial or investigation, and finally, the death of millions of peasants as a result of a provoked famine - all this gives a figure hardly less than 10 million people. "Formal" repressions were only the surface part of the iceberg of the terrorist policy of the Soviet government.
Some readers - and, of course, historians - are wondering what percentage of the population were victims of repression. O.V. Khlevnyuk in the above book (p. 304) in relation to the 30s. says that among the adult population of the country, one in six suffered. However, he proceeds from an estimate of the total population according to the 1937 census, not taking into account the fact that the total number of people living in the country for ten years (and even more so during the entire almost thirty-five years of mass repression from 1917 to 1953 .) was greater than the number of people living in it at any given moment.
How can you estimate the total population of the country in 1917-1953? It is well known that Stalin's population censuses are not entirely reliable. Nevertheless, for our purpose - a rough estimate of the scale of repression - they serve as a sufficient guideline. The 1937 census gives a figure of 160 million. Probably, this figure can be taken as the "average" population of the country in 1917-1953. 20s - first half of the 30s. characterized by "natural" demographic growth, significantly exceeding the losses as a result of wars, famines and repressions. After 1937, growth also took place, including due to the accession in 1939-1940. territories with a population of 23 million people, but repression, mass emigration and military losses to a greater extent balanced it.
In order to move from the “average” number of people living in the country at a time to the total number of people living in it for a certain period, it is necessary to add to the first number the average annual birth rate multiplied by the number of years that make up this period. The birth rate, which is understandable, varied quite significantly. Under the conditions of the traditional demographic regime (characterized by the predominance of large families) it is usually 4% per year of the total population. The majority of the population of the USSR ( middle Asia, the Caucasus, and indeed the Russian village itself) still lived to a large extent under the conditions of such a regime. However, in some periods (the years of wars, collectivization, famine), even for these regions, the birth rate should have been somewhat lower. During the war years, it was about 2% of the national average. If we estimate it at 3-3.5% on average over the period and multiply it by the number of years (35), it turns out that the average "one-time" indicator (160 million) should be increased by a little more than two times. This gives about 350 million. In other words, during the period of mass repressions from 1917 to 1953. every seventh inhabitant of the country, including minors (50 out of 350 million), suffered from terror. If adults accounted for less than two-thirds of the total population (100 out of 160 million, according to the 1937 census), and among the 50 million victims of repression we counted there were “only” a few million, then it turns out that at least one in five the adult was a victim of a terrorist regime.
4. What does it all mean today?
It cannot be said that fellow citizens are poorly informed about the mass repressions in the USSR. The answers to the question of our questionnaire about how it is possible to estimate the number of repressed were distributed as follows:
- less than 1 million people - 5.9%
- from 1 to 10 million people - 21.5%
- from 10 to 30 million people - 29.4%
- from 30 to 50 million people - 12.4%
- over 50 million people - 5.9%
- find it difficult to answer - 24.8%
As you can see, the majority of respondents have no doubt that the repressions were large-scale. True, every fourth respondent is inclined to look for objective reasons for repression. This, of course, does not mean that such respondents are ready to remove any responsibility from the executioners. But they are hardly ready to unequivocally condemn these latter.
In modern Russian historical consciousness, the desire for an “objective” approach to the past is very noticeable. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the word "objective" is not accidentally put in quotation marks. The point is not that complete objectivity is hardly achievable in principle, but that the call for it can mean very different things - from the honest desire of a conscientious researcher - and any interested person - to understand that complex and contradictory process that we call history, to the irritated reaction of the layman planted on the oil needle to any attempts to embarrass his peace of mind and make him think that he inherited not only valuable minerals that ensure his - alas, fragile - well-being, but also unresolved political, cultural and psychological problems , generated by seventy years of experience of "endless terror", his own soul, which he fears to look into - perhaps not without reason. And, finally, the call for objectivity may hide the sober calculation of the ruling elites, who are aware of their genetic connection with the Soviet elites and are not at all inclined to "let the lower classes in a row engage in criticism."
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the phrase from our article, which aroused the indignation of readers, concerns not just an assessment of repressions, but an assessment of repressions in comparison with the war. The myth of the "Great Patriotic war"In recent years, as once in the Brezhnev era, it has again become the main unifying myth of the nation. However, in its genesis and functions, this myth is largely a "protective myth", trying to replace the tragic memory of repressions with an equally tragic, but still partly heroic memory of the "nationwide feat". We will not go into a discussion of the memory of the war here. We only emphasize that the war was not least a link in the chain of crimes committed by the Soviet government against own people which aspect of the problem is almost completely obscured today by the "unifying" role of the war myth.
Many historians believe that our society needs “cliotherapy”, which will save it from an inferiority complex and convince it that “Russia is a normal country”. This experience of "normalizing history" is by no means a unique Russian attempt to create a "positive self-image" for the heirs of the terrorist regime. Thus, in Germany, attempts were made to prove that fascism must be considered "in its era" and in comparison with other totalitarian regimes in order to show the relativity of the "national guilt" of the Germans - as if the fact that there was more than one killer justified them. In Germany, however, this position is held by a significant minority of public opinion, while in Russia it has become predominant in recent years. Only a few will decide to name Hitler among the sympathetic figures of the past in Germany, while in Russia, according to our survey, every tenth respondent names Stalin among his sympathetic historical characters, and 34.7% believe that he played a positive or rather positive role in the history of the country (and another 23.7% find that “today it is difficult to unequivocal assessment"). Other recent polls speak of close - and even more positive - assessments by compatriots of the role of Stalin.
Russian historical memory today is turning its back on repressions, but this, alas, does not mean at all that "the past has passed." The structures of Russian everyday life to a large extent reproduce the forms social relations, behavior and consciousness that came from the imperial and Soviet past. This, it seems, is not to the liking of the majority of respondents: more and more imbued with pride in their past, they perceive the present quite critically. So, to the question of our questionnaire, is it inferior to modern Russia The West in terms of culture or surpasses it, the second answer was chosen by only 9.4%, while the same indicator for all previous historical eras (including Muscovite Russia, the Soviet period) ranges from 20 to 40%. Fellow citizens probably do not bother to think that the "golden age of Stalinism", as well as the subsequent, albeit somewhat more faded period of Soviet history, may have something to do with what does not suit them in our society today. Turning to the Soviet past in order to overcome it is possible only on the condition that we are ready to see the traces of this past in ourselves and recognize ourselves as the heirs not only of glorious deeds, but also of the crimes of our ancestors.