How many died during the Stalinist repressions. The scale of Stalin's repressions - exact numbers
The results of Stalin's rule speak for themselves. To devalue them, form them into public consciousness negative assessment of the Stalin era, the fighters against totalitarianism willy-nilly have to whip up horrors, attributing monstrous atrocities to Stalin.
In a contest of liars
In a accusatory rage, the writers of anti-Stalinist horror stories seem to be competing to see who will lie more strongly, vying with each other naming the astronomical numbers of those who died at the hands of the “bloody tyrant”. Against their background, the dissident Roy Medvedev, who limited himself to a “modest” figure of 40 million, looks like some kind of black sheep, a model of moderation and conscientiousness:
"Thus, total number According to my calculations, the number of victims of Stalinism reaches about 40 million people.
And in fact, it's inappropriate. Another dissident, the son of the repressed revolutionary Trotskyist A.V. Antonov-Ovseenko, without a shadow of embarrassment, names twice the figure:
“These calculations are very, very approximate, but I am sure of one thing: the Stalinist regime bled the people, destroying more than 80 million of his best sons.”
Professional "rehabilitators" led by the former member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU A. N. Yakovlev are already talking about 100 million:
“According to the most conservative estimates of the specialists of the rehabilitation commission, our country has Stalinist rule lost about 100 million people. This number includes not only the repressed themselves, but also members of their families doomed to death and even children who could have been born, but never were born.
However, according to Yakovlev, the notorious 100 million include not only direct “victims of the regime”, but also unborn children. But the writer Igor Bunich, without hesitation, claims that all these "100 million people were ruthlessly exterminated."
However, this is not the limit. The absolute record was set by Boris Nemtsov, who announced on November 7, 2003 in the program "Freedom of Speech" on the NTV channel about 150 million people allegedly lost by the Russian state after 1917.
Who are these fantastically absurd figures, willingly replicated by Russian and foreign mass media, intended for? For those who have forgotten how to think for themselves, who are accustomed to uncritically take on faith any nonsense rushing from the TV screens.
It is easy to see the absurdity of the multimillion-dollar figures of "victims of repression". It is enough to open any demographic directory and, picking up a calculator, make simple calculations. For those who are too lazy to do this, I will give a small illustrative example.
According to the population census conducted in January 1959, the population of the USSR amounted to 208,827 thousand people. By the end of 1913, 159,153 thousand people lived within the same borders. It is easy to calculate that the average annual population growth of our country in the period from 1914 to 1959 was 0.60%.
Now let's see how the population of England, France and Germany grew in those same years - countries that also took an active part in both world wars.
So, the population growth rate in the Stalinist USSR turned out to be almost one and a half times higher than in the Western "democracies", although for these states we excluded the extremely unfavorable demographic years of World War I. Could this have happened if the “bloody Stalinist regime” had destroyed 150 million or at least 40 million inhabitants of our country? Of course no!
They say archival documents
To find out the true number of those executed under Stalin, it is absolutely not necessary to engage in guesswork on coffee grounds. It is enough to familiarize yourself with the declassified documents. The most famous of them is a memorandum addressed to N. S. Khrushchev dated February 1, 1954:
"To the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU
To Comrade Khrushchev N.S.
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, and the Special Meeting. By the Military Collegium, courts and military tribunals, and in accordance with your instructions on the need to reconsider the cases of persons convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes and now held in camps and prisons, we report:
According to the data available in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, for the period from 1921 to the present, 3,777,380 people were convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes by the Collegium of the OGPU, troikas of the NKVD, the Special Meeting, the Military Collegium, courts and military tribunals, including:
Of the total number of those arrested, approximately 2,900,000 people were convicted by the OGPU Collegium, NKVD troikas and the Special Conference, and 877,000 people by courts, military tribunals, the Special Collegium and the Military Collegium.
…
Prosecutor General R. Rudenko
Minister of Internal Affairs S. Kruglov
Minister of Justice K. Gorshenin
As is clear from the document, from 1921 to the beginning of 1954, 642,980 people were sentenced to death on political charges, 2,369,220 to imprisonment, and 765,180 to exile. However, there are more detailed data on the number of those convicted
Thus, between 1921 and 1953, 815,639 people were sentenced to death. In total, in 1918–1953, 4,308,487 people were prosecuted on matters of state security agencies, of which 835,194 were sentenced to capital punishment.
So, the “repressed” turned out to be somewhat more than indicated in the report dated February 1, 1954. However, the difference is not too great - the numbers are of the same order.
In addition, it is quite possible that a fair number of criminals were among those who received sentences under political articles. On one of the references stored in the archive, on the basis of which the above table was compiled, there is a pencil mark:
“Total convicts for 1921-1938. - 2,944,879 people, of which 30% (1062 thousand) are criminals "
In this case, the total number of "victims of repression" does not exceed three million. However, in order to finally clarify this issue, additional work with sources is needed.
It should also be borne in mind that not all sentences were carried out. For example, out of 76 death sentences pronounced by the Tyumen District Court in the first half of 1929, by January 1930, 46 were changed or canceled by higher authorities, and only nine of the remaining ones were carried out.
From July 15, 1939 to April 20, 1940 for disorganization camp life and production, 201 prisoners were sentenced to capital punishment. However, then some of them the death penalty was replaced by imprisonment for terms of 10 to 15 years.
In 1934, 3849 prisoners were kept in the NKVD camps, sentenced to the highest measure with the replacement of imprisonment. In 1935 there were 5671 such prisoners, in 1936 - 7303, in 1937 - 6239, in 1938 - 5926, in 1939 - 3425, in 1940 - 4037 people.
Number of prisoners
Initially, the number of prisoners in forced labor camps (ITL) was relatively small. So, on January 1, 1930, it amounted to 179,000 people, on January 1, 1931 - 212,000, on January 1, 1932 - 268,700, on January 1, 1933 - 334,300, on January 1, 1934 - 510 307 people.
In addition to the ITL, there were corrective labor colonies (NTCs), where convicts were sent for short periods. Until the autumn of 1938, the penitentiaries, together with the prisons, were subordinate to the Department of Places of Confinement (OMZ) of the NKVD of the USSR. Therefore, for the years 1935–1938, so far only joint statistics have been found. 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 of the USSR.
How reliable are these numbers? All of them are taken from the internal reporting of the NKVD - secret documents not intended for publication. In addition, these summary figures are quite consistent with the initial reports, they can be expanded monthly, as well as by individual camps:
Let us now calculate the 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 between 190–195 million.
Thus, we get from 1230 to 1260 prisoners for every 100 thousand of the population. On January 1, 1950, the number of prisoners in the USSR was 2,760,095 people - the maximum figure for the entire period of Stalin's rule. The population of the USSR at that moment totaled 178 million 547 thousand. We get 1546 prisoners per 100 thousand of the population, 1.54%. This is the highest figure ever.
Let's calculate a similar indicator for the modern USA. Currently, there are two types of places of deprivation of liberty: jail - an approximate analogue of our temporary detention facilities, jail contains persons on remand, as well as those sentenced to short terms, and prison - the prison itself. At the end of 1999, there were 1,366,721 people in prisons and 687,973 in jails (see the website of the Bureau of Legal Statistics of the US Department of Justice), which gives a total of 2,054,694. The population of the United States at the end of 1999 was approximately 275 million , therefore, we get 747 prisoners per 100,000 population.
Yes, half as much as Stalin, but not ten times. It is somehow undignified for a power that has taken upon itself the protection of "human rights" on a global scale.
Moreover, this is a comparison of the peak number of prisoners in the Stalinist USSR, which is also due first to the civil and then the Great Patriotic War. And among the so-called "victims of political repression" there will be a fair share of supporters of the white movement, collaborators, Hitler's accomplices, members of the ROA, policemen, not to mention ordinary criminals.
There are calculations that compare the average number of prisoners over a period of several years.
The data on the number of prisoners in the Stalinist USSR exactly match those given above. In accordance with these data, it turns out that on average for the period from 1930 to 1940, there were 583 prisoners per 100,000 people, or 0.58%. Which is much less than the same indicator in Russia and the USA in the 90s.
What is the total number of people who were in places of detention under Stalin? Of course, if you take a table with the annual number of prisoners and add up the lines, as many anti-Soviet people do, the result will turn out to be incorrect, since most of them were sentenced to more than a year. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate this by the amount of not sitting, but by the amount of convicts, which was given above.
How many of the prisoners were "political"?
As we can see, until 1942, the “repressed” made up no more than a third of the prisoners held in the Gulag camps. And only then did their share increase, having received a worthy "replenishment" in the person of Vlasov, policemen, elders and other "fighters against communist tyranny." Even smaller was the percentage of "political" in corrective labor colonies.
Mortality of prisoners
The available archival documents make it possible to shed light on this issue as well.
In 1931, 7,283 people died in the ITL (3.03% of the average annual number), in 1932 - 13,197 (4.38%), in 1933 - 67,297 (15.94%), in 1934 - 26,295 prisoners (4.26%).
Data for 1953 are given for the first three months.
As we can see, the death rate in places of detention (especially in prisons) did not at all reach those fantastic values that accusers like to talk about. But still, its level is quite high. It increases especially strongly in the first years of the war. As stated in the certificate of mortality according to the OITK of the NKVD for 1941, compiled by acting. Head of the Sanitary Department of the GULAG of the NKVD I. K. Zitserman:
Basically, mortality began to increase sharply from September 1941, mainly due to the transfer of conscripts from units located in the front-line areas: from the LBC and Vytegorlag to the OITK of the Vologda and Omsk region, from OITK of the Moldavian SSR, Ukrainian SSR and Leningrad region. in OITK Kirov, Molotov and Sverdlovsk regions. As a rule, the stages of a significant part of the journey, several hundred kilometers before loading into the wagons, were on foot. On the way, they were not provided with the minimum necessary food at all (they did not receive bread and even water completely), as a result of such transportation, s / c gave a sharp exhaustion, a very large%% of beriberi, in particular pellagra, which gave significant mortality along the way and along the way. arriving at the respective OITKs that were not prepared to receive a significant number of replenishments. At the same time, the introduction of reduced food allowances by 25–30% (orders No. 648 and 0437) with an increased working day up to 12 hours, often the absence of basic food products, even at reduced rates, could not but affect the increase in morbidity and mortality
However, since 1944, mortality has been significantly reduced. By the beginning of the 1950s, in the camps and colonies, it fell below 1%, and in prisons - below 0.5% per year.
Special Camps
Let's say a few words about the notorious Special Camps (special charges) created in accordance with the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 416-159ss of February 21, 1948. These camps (as well as the Special Prisons that already existed by that time) were supposed to concentrate all those sentenced to imprisonment for espionage, sabotage, terror, as well as Trotskyists, rightists, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, anarchists, nationalists, white émigrés, members of anti-Soviet organizations and groups and "individuals who pose a danger through their anti-Soviet connections." Prisoners of special services should be used for hard physical work.
As we can see, the death rate of prisoners in special camps was only slightly higher than the death rate in ordinary labor camps. Contrary to popular belief, special services were not "death camps" in which the color of dissident intelligentsia was allegedly destroyed, moreover, the most numerous contingent of their inhabitants were "nationalists" - forest brothers and their accomplices.
Notes:
1. Medvedev R. A. Tragic statistics // Arguments and facts. 1989, February 4–10. No. 5(434). P. 6. A well-known researcher of repression statistics V. N. Zemskov claims that Roy Medvedev immediately retracted his article: 38 for 1989. - I.P.) placed in one of the issues of "Arguments and Facts" for 1989 an explanation that his article in No. 5 for the same year is invalid. Mr. Maksudov is probably not entirely aware of this story, otherwise he would hardly have undertaken to defend the calculations far from the truth, from which their author himself, realizing his mistake, publicly renounced ”(Zemskov V.N. On the issue of the scale of repressions in USSR // Sociological Research, 1995, No. 9, p. 121). However, in reality, Roy Medvedev did not even think of disavowing his publication. In No. 11 (440) for March 18-24, 1989, his answers to the questions of the correspondent of Arguments and Facts were published, in which, confirming the “facts” stated in the previous article, Medvedev merely clarified that it was not the entire communist party as a whole, but only its leadership.
2. Antonov-Ovseenko A. V. Stalin without a mask. M., 1990. S. 506.
3. Mikhailova N. Underpants of counter-revolution // Premier. Vologda, 2002, July 24–30. No. 28(254). P. 10.
4. Bunich I. Sword of the President. M., 2004. S. 235.
5. Population of the countries of the world / Ed. B. Ts. Urlanis. M., 1974. S. 23.
6. Ibid. S. 26.
7. GARF. F.R-9401. Op.2. D.450. L.30–65. Cit. Quoted from: Dugin A.N. Stalinism: legends and facts // Slovo. 1990. No. 7. S. 26.
8. Mozokhin O. B. VChK-OGPU Punishing sword of the dictatorship of the proletariat. M., 2004. S. 167.
9. Ibid. S. 169
10. GARF. F.R-9401. Op.1. D.4157. L.202. Cit. by: Popov V.P. State terror in Soviet Russia. 1923–1953: sources and their interpretation // Otechestvennye archives. 1992. No. 2. S. 29.
11. On the work of the Tyumen District Court. Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR of January 18, 1930 // Court practice of the RSFSR. 1930, February 28. No. 3. P. 4.
12. Zemskov VN GULAG (historical and sociological aspect) // Sociological research. 1991. No. 6. S. 15.
13. GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D. 1155. L.7.
14. GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D. 1155. L.1.
15. The number of prisoners in the ITL: 1935–1948 - GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D.1155. L.2; 1949 - Ibid. D.1319. L.2; 1950 - Ibid. L.5; 1951 - Ibid. L.8; 1952 - Ibid. L.11; 1953 - Ibid. L. 17.
In correctional colonies and prisons (average for the month of January):. 1935 - GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D.2740. L. 17; 1936 - Ibid. L. ZO; 1937 - Ibid. L.41; 1938 - There. L.47.
In ITK: 1939 - GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D.1145. L.2ob; 1940 - Ibid. D.1155. L.30; 1941 - Ibid. L.34; 1942 - Ibid. L.38; 1943 - Ibid. L.42; 1944 - Ibid. L.76; 1945 - Ibid. L.77; 1946 - Ibid. L.78; 1947 - Ibid. L.79; 1948 - Ibid. L.80; 1949 - Ibid. D.1319. L.Z; 1950 - Ibid. L.6; 1951 - Ibid. L.9; 1952 - Ibid. L. 14; 1953 - Ibid. L. 19.
In prisons: 1939 - GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D.1145. L.1ob; 1940 - GARF. F.R-9413. Op.1. D.6. L.67; 1941 - Ibid. L. 126; 1942 - Ibid. L.197; 1943 - Ibid. D.48. L.1; 1944 - Ibid. L.133; 1945 - Ibid. D.62. L.1; 1946 - Ibid. L. 107; 1947 - Ibid. L.216; 1948 - Ibid. D.91. L.1; 1949 - Ibid. L.64; 1950 - Ibid. L.123; 1951 - Ibid. L. 175; 1952 - Ibid. L.224; 1953 - Ibid. D.162.L.2rev.
16. GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D.1155. L.20–22.
17. Population of the countries of the world / Ed. B. Ts. Urlaiis. M., 1974. S. 23.
18. http://lenin-kerrigan.livejournal.com/518795.html | https://de.wikinews.org/wiki/Die_meisten_Gefangenen_weltweit_leben_in_US-Gef%C3%A4ngnissen
19. GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D. 1155. L.3.
20. GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D.1155. L.26–27.
21. Dugin A. Stalinism: legends and facts // Word. 1990. No. 7. S. 5.
22. Zemskov VN GULAG (historical and sociological aspect) // Sociological research. 1991. No. 7. S. 10–11.
23. GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D.2740. L.1.
24. Ibid. L.53.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid. D. 1155. L.2.
27. Mortality in ITL: 1935–1947 - GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D.1155. L.2; 1948 - Ibid. D. 1190. L.36, 36v.; 1949 - Ibid. D. 1319. L.2, 2v.; 1950 - Ibid. L.5, 5v.; 1951 - Ibid. L.8, 8v.; 1952 - Ibid. L.11, 11v.; 1953 - Ibid. L. 17.
Penitentiaries and prisons: 1935–1036 - GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D.2740. L.52; 1937 - Ibid. L.44; 1938 - Ibid. L.50.
ITC: 1939 - GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1. D.2740. L.60; 1940 - Ibid. L.70; 1941 - Ibid. D.2784. L.4ob, 6; 1942 - Ibid. L.21; 1943 - Ibid. D.2796. L.99; 1944 - Ibid. D.1155. L.76, 76v.; 1945 - Ibid. L.77, 77v.; 1946 - Ibid. L.78, 78v.; 1947 - Ibid. L.79, 79v.; 1948 - Ibid. L.80: 80rev.; 1949 - Ibid. D.1319. L.3, 3v.; 1950 - Ibid. L.6, 6v.; 1951 - Ibid. L.9, 9v.; 1952 - Ibid. L.14, 14v.; 1953 - Ibid. L.19, 19v.
Prisons: 1939 - GARF. F.R-9413. Op.1. D.11. L.1ob.; 1940 - Ibid. L.2v.; 1941 - Ibid. L. Goiter; 1942 - Ibid. L.4ob.; 1943 - Ibid., L. 5ob.; 1944 - Ibid. L.6ob.; 1945 - Ibid. D.10. L.118, 120, 122, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133; 1946 - Ibid. D.11. L.8ob.; 1947 - Ibid. L.9ob.; 1948 - Ibid. L.10v.; 1949 - Ibid. L.11ob.; 1950 - Ibid. L.12v.; 1951 - Ibid. L.1 3v.; 1952 - Ibid. D.118. L.238, 248, 258, 268, 278, 288, 298, 308, 318, 326rev., 328rev.; D.162. L.2v.; 1953 - Ibid. D.162. Sheet 4ob., 6ob., 8ob.
28. GARF. F.R-9414. Op.1.D.1181.L.1.
29. The system of labor camps in the USSR, 1923–1960: A Handbook. M., 1998. S. 52.
30. Dugin A. N. Unknown GULAG: Documents and Facts. M.: Nauka, 1999. S. 47.
31. 1952 - GARF.F.R-9414. Op.1.D.1319. L.11, 11v. 13, 13rev.; 1953 - Ibid. L. 18.
The question of the repressions of the thirties of the last century is of fundamental importance not only for understanding the history of Russian socialism and its essence as a social system, but also for assessing the role of Stalin in the history of Russia. This question plays a key role in the accusations not only of Stalinism, but, in fact, of the entire Soviet government.
To date, the assessment of the “Stalinist terror” has become in our country a touchstone, a password, a milestone in relation to the past and future of Russia. Do you judge? Decisively and irrevocably? Democrat and common man! Any doubts? - Stalinist!
Let's try to deal with simple question: Did Stalin organize the "great terror"? Maybe there are other causes of terror, about which common people - liberals prefer to remain silent?
So. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to create a new type of ideological elite, but these attempts stalled from the very beginning. Mainly because the new "people's" elite believed that by their revolutionary struggle they fully earned the right to enjoy the benefits that the "elite" anti-people had by birthright. In the noble mansions, the new nomenclature quickly settled in, and even the old servants remained in place, they only began to call them servants. This phenomenon was very wide and was called "kombarstvo".
Even the right measures proved ineffective, thanks to massive sabotage by the new elite. I am inclined to attribute the introduction of the so-called "party maximum" to the correct measures - a ban on party members receiving a salary greater than the salary of a highly skilled worker.
That is, a non-party plant director could receive a salary of 2000 rubles, and a communist director only 500 rubles, and not a penny more. In this way, Lenin sought to avoid the influx of careerists into the party, who use it as a springboard in order to quickly break into the grain places. However, this measure was half-hearted without the simultaneous destruction of the system of privileges attached to any position.
By the way, V.I. Lenin opposed in every possible way the reckless growth in the number of party members, which was later taken up in the CPSU, starting with Khrushchev. In his work The Childhood Disease of Leftism in Communism, he wrote: We are afraid of an excessive expansion of the party, because careerists and rogues inevitably strive to cling to the government party, who deserve only to be shot».
Moreover, in the conditions of the post-war shortage of consumer goods, material goods were not so much bought as distributed. Any power performs the function of distribution, and if so, then the one who distributes, he uses the distributed. Especially clingy careerists and crooks. Therefore, the next step was to update the upper floors of the party.
Stalin stated this in his usual cautious manner at the XVII Congress of the CPSU (b) (March 1934). In his Report, the Secretary General described a certain type of workers interfering with the party and the country: “... These are people with well-known merits in the past, people who believe that party and Soviet laws were written not for them, but for fools. These are the same people who do not consider it their duty to carry out the decisions of Party bodies... What do they count on, violating Party and Soviet laws? They hope that the Soviet authorities will not dare to touch them because of their old merits. These arrogant nobles think that they are irreplaceable and that they can violate the decisions of the governing bodies with impunity ...».
The results of the first five-year plan showed that the old Bolshevik-Leninists, with all their revolutionary merits, are not able to cope with the scale of the reconstructed economy. Not burdened with professional skills, poorly educated (Yezhov wrote in his autobiography: education - unfinished primary), washed in the blood of the Civil War, they could not "saddle" the complex production realities.
Formally, the real power in the localities belonged to the Soviets, since the party did not have any legal authority. But the party bosses were elected chairmen of the Soviets, and, in fact, they appointed themselves to these positions, since the elections were held on a non-alternative basis, that is, they were not elections. And then Stalin undertakes a very risky maneuver - he proposes to establish real, and not nominal, Soviet power in the country, that is, to hold secret general elections in party organizations and councils at all levels on an alternative basis. Stalin tried to get rid of the party regional barons, as they say, in a good way, through elections, and really alternative ones.
Considering Soviet practice, this sounds rather unusual, but it is true nonetheless. He expected that the majority of this public would not overcome the popular filter without support from above. In addition, according to the new constitution, it was planned to nominate candidates to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR not only from the CPSU (b), but also from public organizations and groups of citizens.
What happened next? On December 5, 1936, the new Constitution of the USSR was adopted, the most democratic constitution of that time in the whole world, even according to the ardent critics of the USSR. For the first time in Russian history, secret alternative elections were to be held. By secret ballot. Despite the fact that the party elite tried to put a spoke in the wheel even at the time when the draft constitution was being created, Stalin managed to bring the matter to an end.
The regional party elite understood very well that with the help of these new elections to the new Supreme Soviet, Stalin plans to carry out a peaceful rotation of the entire ruling element. And there were about 250 thousand of them. By the way, the NKVD was counting on about this number of investigations.
Understand something they understood, but what to do? I don't want to part with my chairs. And they perfectly understood one more circumstance - in the previous period they had done such a thing, especially during the Civil War and collectivization, that the people with great pleasure would not only not have chosen them, but also would have broken their heads. The hands of many high regional party secretaries were up to the elbows in blood. During the period of collectivization in the regions there was complete arbitrariness. In one of the regions Khataevich, this nice man, actually declared a civil war in the course of collectivization in his particular region. As a result, Stalin was forced to threaten him that he would shoot him immediately if he did not stop mocking people. Do you think that comrades Eikhe, Postyshev, Kosior and Khrushchev were better, were less "nice"? Of course, the people remembered all this in 1937, and after the elections, these bloodsuckers would have gone into the woods.
Stalin really planned such a peaceful rotation operation, he openly told the American correspondent in March 1936, Howard Roy, about this. He stated that these elections would be a good whip in the hands of the people to change the leadership, he said it directly - "a whip." Will yesterday's "gods" of their districts tolerate the whip?
The Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, held in June 1936, directly aimed the party elite at new times. When discussing the draft of the new constitution, A. Zhdanov spoke quite unambiguously in his extensive report: “ The new electoral system ... will give a powerful impetus to the improvement of the work of Soviet organs, the elimination of bureaucratic organs, the elimination of bureaucratic shortcomings and distortions in the work of our Soviet organizations. And these shortcomings, as you know, are very significant. Our party organs must be ready for the electoral struggle...". And he went on to say that these elections would be a serious, serious test of Soviet workers, because the secret ballot gives ample opportunities to reject candidates who are undesirable and objectionable to the masses, that party organs are obliged to distinguish such criticism FROM HOSTILE ACTIVITY, that non-party candidates should be treated with all support. and attention, because, to put it delicately, there are several times more of them than party members.
In Zhdanov's report, the terms "intra-party democracy", "democratic centralism", "democratic elections" were publicly voiced. And demands were put forward: to ban the "nomination" of candidates without elections, to ban voting at party meetings by a "list", to ensure "an unlimited right to reject candidates nominated by party members and an unlimited right to criticize these candidates." The last phrase referred entirely to the elections of purely party bodies, where there had not been a shadow of democracy for a long time. But, as we see, the general elections to the Soviet and party bodies have not been forgotten either.
Stalin and his people demand democracy! And if this is not democracy, then explain to me what, then, is considered democracy ?!
And how do the party nobles who gathered at the plenum react to Zhdanov's report - the first secretaries of the regional committees, regional committees, the Central Committee of the national communist parties? And they miss it all! Because such innovations are by no means to the taste of the very “old Leninist guard”, which has not yet been destroyed by Stalin, but is sitting at the plenum in all its grandeur and splendor. Because the vaunted "Leninist guard" is a bunch of petty satrapchiks. They are used to living in their estates as barons, single-handedly managing the life and death of people.
The debate on Zhdanov's report was practically disrupted.
Despite Stalin's direct calls to discuss the reforms seriously and in detail, the old guard with paranoid persistence turns to more pleasant and understandable topics: terror, terror, terror! What the hell are reforms?! There are more urgent tasks: beat the hidden enemy, burn, catch, reveal! The people's commissars, the first secretaries - all talk about the same thing: how they recklessly and on a large scale reveal the enemies of the people, how they intend to raise this campaign to cosmic heights ...
Stalin is losing patience. When the next speaker appears on the podium, without waiting for him to open his mouth, he ironically throws: - Have all the enemies been identified or are there still? The speaker, the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Committee, Kabakov, (another future "innocent victim of the Stalinist terror") passes the irony on deaf ears and habitually crackles about the fact that the electoral activity of the masses, so you know, just " quite often used by hostile elements for counter-revolutionary work».
They are incurable!!! They just don't know how! They don't want reforms, they don't want secret ballots, they don't want a few candidates on the ballot. Foaming at the mouth, they defend the old system, where there is no democracy, but only the "boyar volushka" ...
On the podium - Molotov. He says practical, sensible things: you need to identify real enemies and pests, and not throw mud at all, without exception, "captains of production." We must finally learn to DIFFERENTIATE THE GUILTY FROM THE INNOCENT. It is necessary to reform the bloated bureaucratic apparatus, IT IS NECESSARY TO EVALUATE PEOPLE ON THEIR BUSINESS QUALITIES AND DO NOT LIST THE PAST ERRORS. And the party boyars are all about the same thing: to look for and catch enemies with all the ardor! Eradicate deeper, plant more! For a change, they enthusiastically and loudly begin to drown each other: Kudryavtsev - Postysheva, Andreev - Sheboldaeva, Polonsky - Shvernik, Khrushchev - Yakovlev.
Molotov, unable to stand it, openly says:
- In a number of cases, listening to the speakers, one could come to the conclusion that our resolutions and our reports went past the ears of the speakers ...
Exactly! They didn't just pass - they whistled... Most of those gathered in the hall do not know how to work or reform. But they perfectly know how to catch and identify enemies, they adore this occupation and cannot imagine life without it.
Doesn't it seem strange to you that this "executioner" Stalin directly imposed democracy, and his future "innocent victims" ran away from this democracy like hell from incense. Yes, and demanded repression, and more.
In short, it was not the “tyrant Stalin,” but precisely the “cosmopolitan Leninist party guard,” who ruled the roost at the June 1936 plenum, buried all attempts at a democratic thaw. She did not give Stalin the opportunity to get rid of them, as they say, in a GOOD way, through the elections.
Stalin's authority was so great that the party barons did not dare to openly protest, and in 1936 the Constitution of the USSR was adopted, and nicknamed Stalin's, which provided for the transition to real Soviet democracy.
However, the party nomenklatura reared up and carried out a massive attack on the leader in order to convince him to postpone the holding of free elections until the fight against the counter-revolutionary element was completed.
Regional party bosses, members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, began to whip up passions, referring to the recently uncovered conspiracies of the Trotskyists and the military: they say, one has only to give such an opportunity, as former white officers and nobles, hidden kulak underdogs, clergy and Trotskyists-saboteurs will rush into politics .
They demanded not only to curtail any plans for democratization, but also to strengthen emergency measures, and even introduce special quotas for mass repressions by region, supposedly in order to finish off those Trotskyists who escaped punishment. The party nomenklatura demanded the powers to repress these enemies, and it won these powers for itself. And then the small-town party barons, who made up the majority in the Central Committee, frightened for their leadership positions, begin repressions, first of all, against those honest communists who could become competitors in future elections by secret ballot.
The nature of the repressions against honest communists was such that the composition of some district committees and regional committees changed two or three times in a year. Communists at party conferences refused to be members of city committees and regional committees. We understood that after a while you can be in the camp. And that's the best...
In 1937, about 100,000 people were expelled from the party (24,000 in the first half of the year and 76,000 in the second). About 65,000 appeals accumulated in district committees and regional committees, which there was no one and no time to consider, since the party was engaged in the process of denunciation and expulsion.
At the January plenum of the Central Committee in 1938, Malenkov, who made a report on this issue, said that in some areas the Party Control Commission restored from 50 to 75% of those expelled and convicted.
Moreover, at the June 1937 Plenum of the Central Committee, the nomenklatura, mainly from among the first secretaries, actually delivered an ultimatum to Stalin and his Politburo: either he approves the lists submitted "from below" subject to repression, or he himself will be removed.
The party nomenklatura at this plenum demanded authority for repression. And Stalin was forced to give them permission, but he acted very cunningly - he gave them a short time, five days. Of these five days, one day is Sunday. He expected that they would not meet in such a short time.
But it turns out that these scoundrels already had lists. They simply took lists of kulaks who had previously served time, and sometimes not even served time, former white officers and nobles, wrecking Trotskyites, priests and simply ordinary citizens classified as class alien elements. Literally on the second day, telegrams from the localities went: the first were comrades Khrushchev and Eikhe.
Then Nikita Khrushchev was the first to rehabilitate his friend Robert Eikhe, who was shot in justice for all his cruelties in 1939, in 1954.
Ballot papers with several candidates were no longer discussed at the Plenum: reform plans were reduced solely to the fact that candidates for elections would be nominated “jointly” by communists and non-party people. And from now on, there will be only one candidate in each ballot - for the sake of rebuffing intrigues. And in addition - another verbose verbiage about the need to identify the masses of entrenched enemies.
Stalin also made another mistake. He sincerely believed that N.I. Yezhov is a man of his team. After all, for so many years they worked together in the Central Committee, shoulder to shoulder. And Yezhov has long been the best friend of Evdokimov, an ardent Trotskyist. For 1937-38 troikas in the Rostov region, where Evdokimov was the first secretary of the regional committee, 12,445 people were shot, more than 90 thousand were repressed. These are the figures carved by the "Memorial" society in one of the Rostov parks on the monument to the victims of ... Stalinist (?!) repressions. Subsequently, when Yevdokimov was shot, an audit found that in the Rostov region he lay motionless and more than 18.5 thousand appeals were not considered. And how many of them were not written! The best party cadres, experienced business executives, intelligentsia were destroyed ... But what, was he the only one like that?
In this regard, the memoirs of the famous poet Nikolai Zabolotsky are interesting: “ A strange certainty was ripening in my head that we were in the hands of the Nazis, who, under the noses of our government, had found a way to destroy Soviet people, acting at the very center of the Soviet punitive system. I told this guess of mine to an old party member who was sitting with me, and with horror in his eyes he confessed to me that he himself thought the same thing, but did not dare to hint about it to anyone. And indeed, how else could we explain all the horrors that happened to us ...».
But back to Nikolai Yezhov. By 1937, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, G. Yagoda, staffed the NKVD with scum, obvious traitors and those who replaced their work with hack work. N. Yezhov, who replaced him, followed the lead of the hacks and, in order to distinguish himself from the country, turned a blind eye to the fact that NKVD investigators opened hundreds of thousands of hack cases against people, mostly completely innocent. (For example, Generals A. Gorbatov and K. Rokossovsky were sent to prison.)
And the flywheel of the “great terror” began to spin with its infamous extrajudicial triples and limits on the highest measure. Fortunately, this flywheel quickly crushed those who initiated the process itself, and Stalin's merit is that he made the most of the opportunities to clean up the upper echelons of power of all kinds of crap.
Not Stalin, but Robert Indrikovich Eikhe proposed the creation of organs extrajudicial execution, the famous "troikas" of the "Stolypin" type, consisting of the first secretary, the local prosecutor and the head of the NKVD (city, region, region, republic). Stalin was against it. But the Politburo voted. Well, in the fact that a year later it was precisely such a trio that leaned Comrade Eikhe against the wall, there is, in my deep conviction, nothing but sad justice.
The party elite directly enthusiastically joined in the massacre!
And let's take a closer look at him, the repressed regional party baron. And, in fact, what were they like, both in business and moral, and in purely human terms? What did they cost as people and specialists? ONLY THE NOSE FIRST CLAMP, I RECOMMEND SOULLY. In short, party members, military men, scientists, writers, composers, musicians and everyone else, right up to noble rabbit breeders and Komsomol members, ate each other with rapture. Who sincerely believed that he was obliged to exterminate the enemies, who settled scores. So there is no need to talk about whether the NKVD beat on the noble physiognomy of this or that “innocently injured figure” or not.
The party regional nomenklatura has achieved the most important thing: after all, in conditions of mass terror, free elections are impossible. Stalin was never able to carry them out. The end of a brief thaw. Stalin never pushed through his block of reforms. True, at that plenum he said remarkable words: “Party organizations will be freed from economic work, although this will not happen immediately. This takes time."
But let's get back to Yezhov. Nikolai Ivanovich was a new person in the “organs”, he started well, but quickly fell under the influence of his deputy: Frinovsky (former head of the Special Department of the First cavalry). He taught the new People's Commissar the basics of Chekist work right "in production." The basics were extremely simple: the more enemies of the people we catch, the better. You can and should hit, but hitting and drinking is even more fun.
Drunk on vodka, blood and impunity, the People's Commissar soon frankly "floated".
He did not particularly hide his new views from others. " What are you afraid of? he said at one of the banquets. After all, all power is in our hands. Whom we want - we execute, whom we want - we pardon: - After all, we are everything. It is necessary that everyone, starting from the secretary of the regional committee, walk under you».
If the secretary of the regional committee was supposed to go under the head of the regional department of the NKVD, then who, one wonders, was supposed to go under Yezhov? With such personnel and such views, the NKVD became mortally dangerous for both the authorities and the country.
It is difficult to say when the Kremlin began to realize what was happening. Probably somewhere in the first half of 1938. But to realize - they realized, but how to curb the monster? It is clear that by that time the People's Commissar of the NKVD had become deadly dangerous, and it had to be "normalized". But how? What, raise the troops, bring all the Chekists to the courtyards of the administrations and line them up against the wall? There is no other way, because, having barely sensed the danger, they would simply have swept away the authorities.
After all, the same NKVD was in charge of protecting the Kremlin, so the members of the Politburo would have died without even having time to understand anything. After that, a dozen “blood-washed” would be put in their places, and the whole country would turn into one large West Siberian region with Robert Eikhe at the head. The peoples of the USSR would have perceived the arrival of the Nazi troops as happiness.
There was only one way out - to put your man in the NKVD. Moreover, a person of such a level of loyalty, courage and professionalism that he could, on the one hand, cope with the management of the NKVD, and on the other, stop the monster. It is unlikely that Stalin had a large selection of such people. Well, at least one was found. But what - Beria Lavrenty Pavlovich.
Elena Prudnikova is a journalist and writer who has devoted several books to researching the activities of L.P. Beria and I.V. Stalin, in one of the TV programs she said that Lenin, Stalin, Beria are three titans whom the Lord God in His great mercy sent to Russia, because, apparently, he still needed Russia. I hope that she is Russia and in our time He will need it soon.
In general, the term "Stalin's repressions" is speculative, because it was not Stalin who initiated them. The unanimous opinion of one part of the liberal perestroika and current ideologists that Stalin thus strengthened his power by physically eliminating his opponents is easily explained. These wimps simply judge others by themselves: if they have such an opportunity, they will readily devour anyone they see as a danger.
No wonder Alexander Sytin, a political scientist, doctor of historical sciences, a prominent neo-liberal, in one of the recent TV programs with V. Solovyov, argued that in Russia it is necessary to create a DICTATORY OF TEN PERCENT LIBERAL MINORITY, which then will definitely lead the peoples of Russia into a bright capitalist tomorrow. He was modestly silent about the price of this approach.
Another part of these gentlemen believes that supposedly Stalin, who wanted to finally turn into the Lord God on Soviet soil, decided to crack down on everyone who had the slightest doubt about his genius. And, above all, with those who, together with Lenin, created the October Revolution. Like, that's why almost the entire "Leninist guard" innocently went under the ax, and at the same time the top of the Red Army, who were accused of a never-existing conspiracy against Stalin. However, a closer study of these events raises many questions that cast doubt on this version. In principle, thinking historians have had doubts for a long time. And doubts were sown not by some Stalinist historians, but by those eyewitnesses who themselves did not like the "father of all Soviet peoples."
For example, the memoirs of the former Soviet intelligence officer Alexander Orlov (Leiba Feldbin), who fled our country in the late 1930s, having taken a huge amount of state dollars, were published in the West at one time. Orlov, who knew well the "inner kitchen" of his native NKVD, wrote directly that a coup d'état was being prepared in the Soviet Union. Among the conspirators, according to him, were both representatives of the leadership of the NKVD and the Red Army in the person of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the commander of the Kyiv military district, Iona Yakir. The conspiracy became known to Stalin, who took very tough retaliatory actions ...
And in the 80s, the archives of Joseph Vissarionovich's main opponent, Lev Trotsky, were declassified in the United States. From these documents it became clear that Trotsky had an extensive underground network in the Soviet Union. Living abroad, Lev Davidovich demanded from his people decisive action to destabilize the situation in the Soviet Union, up to the organization of mass terrorist actions.
In the 1990s, our archives already opened up access to the protocols of interrogations of the repressed leaders of the anti-Stalinist opposition. By the nature of these materials, by the abundance of facts and evidence presented in them, today's independent experts have drawn three important conclusions.
First, the overall picture of a broad conspiracy against Stalin looks very, very convincing. Such testimonies could not somehow be staged or faked to please the "father of nations." Especially in the part where it was about the military plans of the conspirators. Here is what the well-known historian and publicist Sergei Kremlev said about this: “Take and read the testimony of Tukhachevsky given to him after his arrest. The very confessions of conspiracy are accompanied by a deep analysis of the military-political situation in the USSR in the mid-30s, with detailed calculations on general situation in the country, with our mobilization, economic and other opportunities.
The question is whether such testimony could have been invented by an ordinary NKVD investigator who was in charge of the marshal's case and who allegedly set out to falsify Tukhachevsky's testimony?! No, these testimonies, and voluntarily, could only be given by a knowledgeable person no less than the level of the deputy people's commissar of defense, which was Tukhachevsky.
Secondly, the very manner of the conspirators' handwritten confessions, their handwriting spoke of what their people wrote themselves, in fact voluntarily, without physical influence from the investigators. This destroyed the myth that the testimony was rudely knocked out by the force of "Stalin's executioners", although this was also the case.
Thirdly, Western Sovietologists and the emigre public, having no access to archival materials, had to actually suck their judgments about the scale of repressions. At best, they contented themselves with interviews with dissidents who either themselves had been imprisoned in the past, or cited the stories of those who had gone through the Gulag.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn set the highest bar in assessing the number of "victims of communism" when he announced in 1976 in an interview with Spanish television about 110 million victims. The ceiling of 110 million announced by Solzhenitsyn was systematically reduced to 12.5 million people of the Memorial society. However, based on the results of 10 years of work, Memorial managed to collect data on only 2.6 million victims of repression, which is very close to the figure announced by Zemskov almost 20 years ago - 4 million people.
After the archives were opened, the West did not believe that the number of repressed people was much less than R. Conquest or A. Solzhenitsyn indicated. In total, according to archival data, for the period from 1921 to 1953, 3,777,380 were convicted, of which 642,980 people were sentenced to capital punishment. Subsequently, this figure was increased to 4,060,306 people at the expense of 282,926 shot under paragraphs. 2 and 3 Art. 59 (especially dangerous banditry) and Art. 193 - 24 (military espionage). This included the blood-washed Basmachi, Bandera, the Baltic "forest brothers" and other especially dangerous, bloody bandits, spies and saboteurs. There is more human blood on them than there is water in the Volga. And they are also considered "innocent victims of Stalin's repressions." And Stalin is blamed for all this. (Let me remind you that until 1928, Stalin was not the sole leader of the USSR. AND HE RECEIVED FULL POWER OVER THE PARTY, THE ARMY AND THE NKVD ONLY FROM THE END OF 1938).
These figures are at first glance scary. But only for the first. Let's compare. On June 28, 1990, an interview with the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR appeared in the national newspapers, where he said: “We are literally being overwhelmed by a wave of criminality. Over the past 30 years, 38 MILLION OUR CITIZENS have been under trial, investigation, in prisons and colonies. It's a terrible number! Every ninth…”.
So. A crowd of Western journalists came to the USSR in 1990. The goal is to get acquainted with open archives. We studied the archives of the NKVD - they did not believe it. They demanded the archives of the People's Commissariat of Railways. We got acquainted - it turned out four million. They did not believe it. They demanded the archives of the People's Commissariat of Food. We got acquainted - it turned out 4 million repressed. We got acquainted with the clothing allowance of the camps. It turned out - 4 million repressed. Do you think that after that, articles with the correct numbers of repressions appeared in the Western media in batches. Yes, nothing of the sort. They still write and talk about tens of millions of victims of repressions.
I want to note that the analysis of the process called “mass repressions” shows that this phenomenon is extremely multi-layered. There are real cases there: about conspiracies and espionage, political trials against hard-nosed oppositionists, cases about the crimes of the presumptuous owners of the regions and the Soviet party officials who “floated” from power. But there are also many falsified cases: settling scores in the corridors of power, sitting around at work, communal squabbles, literary rivalry, scientific competition, persecution of clergymen who supported the kulaks during collectivization, squabbles between artists, musicians and composers.
AND THERE IS CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY - THE MILLNESS OF THE INVESTIGATORS AND THE MILLNESS OF THE INFORMERS (four million denunciations were written in 1937-38). But what has not been found is the cases concocted at the direction of the Kremlin. Reverse examples there is - when, at the will of Stalin, someone was taken out from under execution, or even completely released.
There is one more thing to be understood. The term “repression” is a medical term (suppression, blocking) and was introduced specifically to remove the question of guilt. Imprisoned in the late 30s, which means he is innocent, as he was “repressed”. In addition, the term "repressions" was put into circulation to be used initially in order to give an appropriate moral coloring to the entire Stalinist period, without going into details.
The events of the 1930s showed that the main problem for the Soviet government was the party and state "apparatus", which consisted to a large extent of unprincipled, illiterate and greedy co-workers, leading party members-talkers, attracted by the fat smell of revolutionary robbery. Such an apparatus was exceptionally inefficient and uncontrollable, which was like death for the totalitarian Soviet state, in which everything depended on the apparatus.
It was from then that Stalin made repressions important institution state administration and a means of keeping the "apparatus" in check. Naturally, the apparatus became the main object of these repressions. Moreover, repression has become an important instrument of state building.
Stalin assumed that it was possible to make a workable bureaucracy out of the corrupted Soviet apparatus only after SEVERAL STAGES of repressions. Liberals will say that this is the whole of Stalin, that he could not live without repressions, without the persecution of honest people. But here is what American intelligence officer John Scott reported to the US State Department about who was repressed. He caught these repressions in the Urals in 1937.
“The director of the construction office, who was engaged in the construction of new houses for the workers of the plant, was not satisfied with his salary, which amounted to a thousand rubles a month, and a two-room apartment. So he built himself a separate house. The house had five rooms, and he was able to furnish it well: he hung silk curtains, set up a piano, covered the floor with carpets, etc. Then he began to drive around the city in a car at a time (this happened in early 1937) when there were few private cars in the city. At the same time, the annual construction plan was completed by his office by only about sixty percent. At meetings and in the newspapers, he was constantly asked questions about the reasons for such poor performance. He answered that there were no building materials, not enough labor, and so on.
An investigation began, during which it turned out that the director embezzled state funds and sold building materials to nearby collective farms and state farms at speculative prices. It was also discovered that there were people in the construction office whom he specially paid to do his "business".
An open trial took place, lasting several days, at which all these people were judged. They talked a lot about him in Magnitogorsk. In his accusatory speech at the trial, the prosecutor spoke not about theft or bribery, but about sabotage. The director was accused of sabotaging the construction of workers' housing. He was convicted after he fully admitted his guilt, and then shot.”
And here is the reaction of the Soviet people to the purge of 1937 and their position at that time. “Often, workers are even happy when they arrest some “important bird”, a leader whom they for some reason disliked. Workers are also very free to express their critical thoughts both in meetings and in private conversations. I've heard them use the strongest language when talking about bureaucracy and poor performance by individuals or organizations. ... in the Soviet Union, the situation was somewhat different in that the NKVD, in its work to protect the country from the intrigues of foreign agents, spies and the onset of the old bourgeoisie, counted on the support and assistance from the population and basically received them.
Well, and: “... During the purges, thousands of bureaucrats trembled for their seats. Officials and administrative employees who had previously come to work at ten o'clock and left at half past five and only shrugged their shoulders in response to complaints, difficulties and failures, now sat at work from sunrise to sunset, they began to worry about the successes and failures of the led enterprises, and they actually began to fight for the implementation of the plan, savings and for good living conditions for their subordinates, although before this they did not bother at all.
Readers who are interested in this issue are aware of the incessant moaning of liberals that during the years of the purge, " the best people, the smartest and most capable. Scott also hints at this all the time, but, nevertheless, he sort of sums it up: “After the purges administrative apparatus management of the entire plant was almost one hundred percent young Soviet engineers. There are practically no specialists from among the prisoners, and foreign specialists have actually disappeared. However, by 1939 most of the departments, such as the Railroad Administration and the coking plant of the plant, began to work better than ever before.
In the course of party purges and repressions, all prominent party barons, drinking away the gold reserves of Russia, bathing in champagne with prostitutes, seizing noble and merchant palaces for personal use, all disheveled, drugged revolutionaries disappeared like smoke. And this is FAIR.
But to clean out the snickering scoundrels from the high offices is half the battle, it was also necessary to replace them with worthy people. It is very curious how this problem was solved in the NKVD.
Firstly, a person was placed at the head of the department who was alien to the kombartvo, who had no ties with the capital's party top, but a proven professional in business - Lavrenty Beria.
The latter, secondly, ruthlessly cleared out the Chekists who had compromised themselves,
thirdly, he carried out a radical downsizing, sending people to retire or to work in other departments of people who seemed to be not vile, but unsuitable for professional use.
And, finally, the Komsomol conscription to the NKVD was announced, when completely inexperienced guys came to the bodies instead of deserved pensioners or shot scoundrels. But ... the main criterion for their selection was an impeccable reputation. If in the characteristics from the place of study, work, place of residence, along the Komsomol or party line, there were at least some hints of their unreliability, a tendency to selfishness, laziness, then no one invited them to work in the NKVD.
So here's a very important point, which you should pay attention to - the team is formed not on the basis of past merits, professional data of applicants, personal acquaintance and ethnic background, and not even on the basis of the desire of applicants, but solely on the basis of their moral and psychological characteristics.
Professionalism is a gainful business, but in order to punish any bastard, a person must be absolutely not dirty. Well, yes, clean hands, a cold head and a warm heart - this is all about the youth of the Beria draft. The fact is that it was at the end of the 1930s that the NKVD became a truly effective special service, and not only in the matter of internal cleansing.
During the war, the Soviet counterintelligence outplayed German intelligence with a devastating score - and this is the great merit of those very Beria Komsomol members who came to the bodies three years before the start of the war.
Purge 1937-1939 played a positive role - now not a single boss felt his impunity, there were no more untouchables. Fear did not add intelligence to the nomenklatura, but at least warned it against outright meanness.
Unfortunately, immediately after the end of the great purge, the world war that began in 1939 prevented the holding of alternative elections. And again, the question of democratization was put on the agenda by Iosif Vissarionovich in 1952, shortly before his death. But after the death of Stalin, Khrushchev returned the leadership of the entire country to the party, without answering for anything. And not only.
Almost immediately after Stalin's death, a network of special distributors and special rations appeared, through which the new elites realized their predominant position. But in addition to formal privileges, a system of informal privileges quickly formed. Which is very important.
Since we touched on the activities of our dear Nikita Sergeevich, let's talk about it in a little more detail. With a light hand or language of Ilya Ehrenburg, the period of Khrushchev's rule is called the "thaw". Let's see, what did Khrushchev do before the thaw, during the "great terror"?
The February-March Plenum of the Central Committee of 1937 is underway. It is from him, as it is believed, that the great terror began. Here is the speech of Nikita Sergeevich at this plenum: “... These villains must be destroyed. Destroying a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, we are doing the work of millions. Therefore, it is necessary that the hand does not tremble, it is necessary to step over the corpses of enemies for the benefit of the people».
But how did Khrushchev act as First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee and the Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks? In 1937-1938. out of 38 top leaders of the Moscow City Committee, only three people survived, out of 146 party secretaries - 136 were repressed. Where he found 22,000 kulaks in the Moscow region in 1937, you can’t explain soberly. In total, for 1937-1938, only in Moscow and the Moscow region. he personally repressed 55,741 people.
But, perhaps, speaking at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev was worried that innocent ordinary people were shot? Yes, Khrushchev did not care about the arrests and executions of ordinary people. His entire report at the 20th Congress was devoted to Stalin's accusations that he imprisoned and shot prominent Bolsheviks and marshals. Those. elite. Khrushchev in his report did not even mention the repressed ordinary people. What kind of people should he worry about, “women are still giving birth”, but the cosmopolitan elite, the lapotnik Khrushchev, was oh, what a pity.
What were the motives for the appearance of the revealing report at the 20th Party Congress?
First, without trampling his predecessor in the dirt, it was unthinkable to hope for Khrushchev's recognition as a leader after Stalin. No! Stalin, even after his death, remained a competitor for Khrushchev, who had to be humiliated and destroyed by any means. Kicking a dead lion, as it turned out, is a pleasure - it does not give back.
The second motive was Khrushchev's desire to return the party to managing the economic activities of the state. To lead everything, for nothing, without answering and not obeying anyone.
The third motive, and perhaps the most important, was the terrible fear of the remnants of the "Leninist Guard" for what they had done. After all, all of their hands, as Khrushchev himself put it, were up to the elbows in blood. Khrushchev and people like him wanted not only to rule the country, but also to have guarantees that they would never be dragged on the rack, no matter what they did while in leadership positions. The 20th Congress of the CPSU gave them such guarantees in the form of indulgence for the release of all sins, both past and future. The whole riddle of Khrushchev and his associates is not worth a damn thing: it is THE IRRESSIBLE ANIMAL FEAR SITTING IN THEIR SOULS AND THE PAINFUL THIRST FOR POWER.
The first thing that strikes the de-Stalinizers is their complete disregard for the principles of historicism, which everyone seems to have been taught in the Soviet school. No historical figure cannot be judged by the standards of our contemporary era. He must be judged by the standards of his era - and nothing else. In jurisprudence, they say this: "the law has no retroactive effect." That is, the ban introduced this year cannot apply to last year's acts.
Here, historicism of assessments is also necessary: one cannot judge a person of one era by the standards of another era (especially of that new era, which he created with his work and genius). For the beginning of the 20th century, the horrors in the position of the peasantry were so commonplace that many contemporaries practically did not notice them. The famine did not begin with Stalin, it ended with Stalin. It seemed forever - but the current liberal reforms again they are pulling us into that swamp, from which we seem to have already climbed out ...
The principle of historicism also requires the recognition that Stalin had a completely different intensity of political struggle than in later times. It is one thing to maintain the existence of the system (although Gorbachev failed to cope with this), and another to create new system on the ruins of a country ravaged by civil war. The resistance energy in the second case is many times greater than in the first.
It must be understood that many of those shot under Stalin themselves were going to quite seriously kill him, and if he hesitated even for a minute, he himself would have received a bullet in the forehead. The struggle for power in the era of Stalin had a completely different sharpness than now: it was the era of the revolutionary "Praetorian Guard" - accustomed to rebellion and ready to change emperors like gloves. Trotsky, Rykov, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and a whole crowd of people who were accustomed to killings, as to peeling potatoes, claimed the supremacy.
For any terror, not only the ruler is responsible before history, but also his opponents, as well as society as a whole. When the outstanding historian L. Gumilyov, already under Gorbachev, was asked if he was angry at Stalin, under whom he was in prison, he answered: “ But it was not Stalin who imprisoned me, but colleagues in the department»…
Well, God bless him with Khrushchev and the 20th Congress. Let's talk about what the liberal media are constantly talking about, let's talk about Stalin's guilt.
Liberals accuse Stalin of shooting about 700,000 people in 30 years. The logic of the liberals is simple - all the victims of Stalinism. All 700 thousand.
Those. at that time there could be no murderers, no bandits, no sadists, no molesters, no swindlers, no traitors, no wreckers, etc. All victims for political reasons, all crystal clear and decent people.
Meanwhile, even the CIA analytical center Rand Corporation, based on demographic data and archival documents, calculated the number of repressed people in the Stalin era. This center claims that less than 700,000 people were shot between 1921 and 1953. At the same time, no more than a quarter of cases fall to the share of those sentenced to an article under the political article 58. By the way, the same proportion was observed among the prisoners of the labor camps.
“Do you like it when they destroy their people in the name of a great goal?” the liberals continue. I will answer. THE PEOPLE - NO, BUT THE BANDITS, THIVES AND MORAL FRACTIONS - YES. But I DON'T LIKE anymore when their own people are destroyed in the name of filling their pockets with loot, hiding behind beautiful liberal-democratic slogans.
Academician Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a great supporter of reforms, who at that time was part of the administration of President Yeltsin, admitted a decade and a half later that in just three years of shock therapy in Russia alone, middle-aged men died 8 million (!!!). Yes, Stalin stands on the sidelines and nervously smokes a pipe. Didn't improve.
However, your words about Stalin's non-involvement in the massacres of honest people are not convincing, the LIBERALS continue. Even if this is allowed, then in this case he was simply obliged, firstly, to honestly and openly admit to the whole people the iniquities committed against innocent people, secondly, to rehabilitate the unjustly victims and, thirdly, to take measures to prevent similar iniquities in the future. None of this has been done.
Again a lie. Dear. You just do not know the history of the USSR.
As for the first and second, the December Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1938 openly recognized the lawlessness committed against honest communists and non-party people, adopting a special resolution on this matter, published, by the way, in all central newspapers. Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, noting "provocations on an all-Union scale", demanded: Expose careerists who seek to distinguish themselves ... on repression. To expose a skillfully disguised enemy ... seeking to kill our Bolshevik cadres by carrying out measures of repression, sowing uncertainty and excessive suspicion in our ranks.
Just as openly, the entire country was told about the harm caused by unjustified repressions at the XVIII Congress of the CPSU (b) held in 1939. Immediately after the December Plenum of the Central Committee in 1938, thousands of illegally repressed people, including prominent military leaders, began to return from places of detention. All of them were officially rehabilitated, and Stalin personally apologized to some.
Well, and about, thirdly, I have already said that the NKVD apparatus almost suffered the most from repressions, and a significant part was held accountable precisely for abuse of official position, for reprisals against honest people.
What are the liberals not talking about? About the rehabilitation of innocent victims.
Immediately after the December Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1938, they began to revise
criminal cases and release from the camps. It was produced: in 1939 - 330 thousand,
in 1940 - 180 thousand, until June 1941 another 65 thousand.
What liberals are not talking about yet. About how they fought the consequences of the great terror.
With the advent of Beria L.P. In November 1938, 7,372 operational officers, or 22.9% of their payroll, were dismissed from the state security agencies for the post of People's Commissar of the NKVD in November 1938, of which 937 went to jail. And since the end of 1938, the country's leadership has achieved the prosecution of more than 63 thousand NKVD workers who allowed falsification and created far-fetched, fake counter-revolutionary cases, OF WHICH EIGHT THOUSAND WAS SHOT.
I will give only one example from the article by Yu.I. Mukhin: "Minutes No. 17 of the Meeting of the Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on Judicial Cases." There are more than 60 photographs. I will show in the form of a table a piece of one of them. (http://a7825585.hostink.ru/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=752.)
In this article Mukhin Yu.I. writes: " I was told that this kind of documents had never been posted on the Web due to the fact that they were very quickly denied free access to them in the archive. And the document is interesting, and something interesting can be gleaned from it ...».
Lots of interesting things. But most importantly, the article shows what the NKVD officers were shot for after L.P. Beria. Read. The names of those shot in the photographs are shaded.
Top secret
P O T O C O L No. 17
Meetings of the Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on Judicial Affairs
dated February 23, 1940
Chairman - comrade Kalinin M.I.
Present: t.t.: Shklyar M.F., Ponkratiev M.I., Merkulov V.N.
1. Listened
G ... Sergey Ivanovich, M ... Fedor Pavlovich, by the decision of the military tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Moscow Military District of December 14-15, 1939, were sentenced to death under Art. 193-17 p. b of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for making unreasonable arrests of command and Red Army personnel, actively falsifying investigation cases, conducting them using provocative methods and creating fictitious K / R organizations, as a result of which a number of people were shot according to the fictitious ones they created materials.
Decided.
Agrees with the use of execution to G ... S.I. and M…F.P.
17. Listened
And ... Fedor Afanasyevich was sentenced to death under Art. 193-17 p.b of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for being an employee of the NKVD, making mass illegal arrests of citizens of railway workers, falsifying interrogation protocols and creating artificial C/R cases, as a result of which over 230 people were sentenced to death and to various terms of imprisonment for more than 100 people, and among the latter in given time 69 people were released.
Decided
Agree with the use of execution against A ... F.A.
Have you read? Well, how do you like the dearest Fedor Afanasyevich? One (one!!!) investigator-falsifier summed up 236 people under execution. And what, he was the only one like that, how many of them were such scoundrels? I gave the number above. That Stalin personally set tasks for these Fedors and Sergeys to destroy innocent people? What conclusions suggest themselves?
Conclusion N1. Judging Stalin's time only by repressions is the same as judging the activities of the chief physician of a hospital only by the hospital's morgue - there will always be corpses there. If you approach with such a measure, then every doctor is a bloody ghoul and a murderer, i.e. deliberately ignore the fact that the team of doctors successfully cured and prolonged the life of thousands of patients and blame them only for a small percentage of those who died due to some inevitable misdiagnosis or died during serious operations.
The authority of Jesus Christ with Stalin's is incomparable. But even in the teachings of Jesus, people see only what they want to see. Studying the history of world civilization, one has to observe how wars, chauvinism, the "Aryan theory", serfdom, and Jewish pogroms were substantiated by Christian doctrine. This is not to mention the executions "without the shedding of blood" - that is, the burning of heretics. And how much blood was shed during crusades and religious wars? So, maybe because of this, to ban the teachings of our Creator? Just like today, some wimps propose to ban the communist ideology.
If we consider the mortality graph of the population of the USSR, no matter how hard we try, we cannot find traces of “cruel” repressions, and not because they did not exist, but because their scale is exaggerated. What is the purpose of this exaggeration and inflation? The goal is to instill in the Russians a guilt complex similar to the guilt complex of the Germans after the defeat in World War II. The "pay and repent" complex. But the great ancient Chinese thinker and philosopher Confucius, who lived 500 years before our era, said even then: “ Beware of those who want to make you feel guilty. For they want power over you».
Do we need it? Judge for yourself. When the first time Khrushchev stunned all the so-called. truth about Stalin's repressions, then the authority of the USSR in the world immediately collapsed to the delight of the enemies. There was a split in the world communist movement. We have quarreled with great China, AND TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD HAVE LEFT THE COMMUNIST PARTIES. Eurocommunism appeared, denying not only Stalinism, but also, what is scary, the Stalinist economy. The myth of the 20th Congress created distorted ideas about Stalin and his time, deceived and psychologically disarmed millions of people when the question of the fate of the country was being decided. When Gorbachev did this for the second time, not only the socialist bloc collapsed, but our Motherland - the USSR collapsed.
Now Putin's team is doing this for the third time: again, they only talk about repressions and other "crimes" of the Stalinist regime. What this leads to is clearly seen in the Zyuganov-Makarov dialogue. They are told about development, new industrialization, and they immediately begin to switch arrows to repression. That is, they immediately break off a constructive dialogue, turning it into a squabble, a civil war of meanings and ideas.
Conclusion N2. Why do they need it? To prevent the restoration of a strong and great Russia. It is more convenient for them to rule a weak and fragmented country, where people will pull each other's hair at the mention of the name of Stalin or Lenin. So it is more convenient for them to rob and deceive us. The policy of "divide and conquer" is as old as the world. Moreover, they can always dump from Russia to where their stolen capital is stored and where children, wives and mistresses live.
Conclusion N3. And why do the patriots of Russia need it? It’s just that we and our children don’t have another country. Think about this first before you start cursing our history for repressions and other things. After all, we have nowhere to fall and retreat. As our victorious ancestors said in similar cases: there is no land for us behind Moscow and beyond the Volga!
Only, after the return of socialism to Russia, taking into account all the advantages and disadvantages of the USSR, one must be vigilant and remember Stalin's warning that as the socialist state is built, the class struggle intensifies, that is, there is a threat of degeneration. And so it happened, and certain segments of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Central Committee of the Komsomol and the KGB were among the first to be reborn. The Stalinist party inquisition did not work properly.
MASS REPRESSIONS OF THE 1920s EARLY 1950s in the USSR - coercive measures against large groups of the population, used by the Soviet government and the Communist Party in solving economic and political problems, to suppress dissent and speeches against the authorities, non-economic coercion to work.
For-tro-well-whether all social-qi-al-nye, in-li-tich., Confessional-nal-nye and nat. groups. Pro-in-di-lis both in co-ot-vet-st-wii with an angle-lov-ny for-no-da-tel-st-vom, and according to special. in a hundred-nov-le-ni-yam part. and owls. or-ga-nov, in the form of-me for-key-che-niya in prison-we, on-right-le-niya in right-vi-tel-no-work-to-vye la-ge-rya (ITL), links and you-syl-ki to from-da-len-ny districts of the country, de-port-ta-tion, you-syl-ki abroad. A big role in the development of M. p. syg-ra-whether in-li-ti-che-sky pro-cesses of the 1920s - on-cha-la of the 1950s Osu-sche-st-in-la-li-su-deb-ny-mi, as well as outside-su-deb-ny-mi or-ha-na-mi (Kol-le-gi-her GPU - OGPU , A special co-thing with the OGPU - the NKVD of the USSR, through-you-tea-we-mi "three-ka-mi", "double-koy" - ko-miss-si-her NKVD and pro-ku-ra-tu-ry).
Stalinist repressions:
What was it?
To the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repressions
In this material, we have collected the memories of eyewitnesses, fragments from official documents, figures and facts provided by researchers to provide answers to questions that again and again excite our society. The Russian state has not been able to give clear answers to these questions, so until now, everyone is forced to look for answers on their own.
Who was affected by the repression
Representatives of various groups of the population fell under the flywheel of Stalinist repressions. The most famous are the names of artists, Soviet leaders and military leaders. About peasants and workers often only the names from the execution lists and camp archives are known. They did not write memoirs, tried unnecessarily not to recall the camp past, their relatives often refused them. The presence of a convicted relative often meant an end to a career, study, because the children of arrested workers, dispossessed peasants might not know the truth about what happened to their parents.
When we heard about another arrest, we never asked, “Why was he taken?”, but there were few like us. Crazed with fear, people asked each other this question for pure self-consolation: they take people for something, which means they won’t take me, because there’s nothing for it! They refined themselves, coming up with reasons and justifications for each arrest, - “She really is a smuggler”, “He allowed himself such a thing”, “I myself heard him say ...” And one more thing: “You should have expected this - he has such terrible character”, “It always seemed to me that something was wrong with him”, “This is a complete stranger”. That is why the question: “Why did they take him?” has become taboo for us. It's time to understand that people are taken for nothing.
- Nadezhda Mandelstam , writer and wife of Osip Mandelstam
From the beginning of the terror to today attempts to present it as a fight against "sabotage", enemies of the fatherland, do not stop, limiting the composition of the victims to certain classes hostile to the state - kulaks, bourgeois, priests. The victims of terror were depersonalized and turned into "contingents" (Poles, spies, wreckers, counter-revolutionary elements). However, political terror was total in nature, and representatives of all groups of the population of the USSR became its victims: “the cause of engineers”, “the cause of doctors”, persecution of scientists and entire areas in science, personnel purges in the army before and after the war, deportation of entire peoples.
Poet Osip Mandelstam
He died in transit, the place of death is not known for certain.
Directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold
Marshals Soviet Union
Tukhachevsky (executed), Voroshilov, Egorov (executed), Budeny, Blucher (died in Lefortovo prison).
How many people were hurt
According to the estimates of the Memorial Society, there were 4.5-4.8 million people convicted for political reasons, 1.1 million people were shot.
Estimates of the number of victims of repression vary and depend on the method of counting. If we take into account only those convicted under political articles, then according to an analysis of the statistics of the regional departments of the KGB of the USSR, carried out in 1988, the bodies of the Cheka-GPU-OGPU-NKVD-NKGB-MGB arrested 4,308,487 people, of which 835,194 were shot. According to the same data, about 1.76 million people died in the camps. According to the calculations of the Memorial Society, there were more people convicted for political reasons - 4.5-4.8 million people, of which 1.1 million people were shot.
The victims of Stalinist repressions turned out to be representatives of some peoples who were subjected to forced deportation(Germans, Poles, Finns, Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and others). This is about 6 million people. One in five did not live to see the end of the journey - about 1.2 million people died during the difficult conditions of the deportations. During dispossession, about 4 million peasants suffered, of which at least 600 thousand died in exile.
In general, about 39 million people suffered as a result of Stalin's policies. The victims of repression include those who died in the camps from disease and harsh working conditions, the dispossessed, the victims of hunger, the victims of the unjustifiably cruel decrees "on absenteeism" and "on three spikelets" and other groups of the population who received excessively severe punishment for minor offenses due to repressive the nature of the legislation and the consequences of that time.
Why was it necessary?
The worst thing is not that you are suddenly suddenly taken away from a warm, well-established life, not Kolyma and Magadan, and hard labor. At first, a person desperately hopes for a misunderstanding, for a mistake by the investigators, then painfully waits for them to call, apologize, and let them go home, to their children and husband. And then the victim no longer hopes, does not painfully search for an answer to the question of who needs all this, then there is a primitive struggle for life. The worst thing is the meaninglessness of what is happening ... Does anyone know what it was for?
Evgenia Ginzburg,
writer and journalist
In July 1928, speaking at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Joseph Stalin described the need to fight "foreign elements" as follows: "As we move forward, the resistance of the capitalist elements will increase, the class struggle will intensify, and Soviet power, forces which will grow more and more, will pursue a policy of isolating these elements, a policy of disintegrating the enemies of the working class, and finally, a policy of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters, creating a basis for the further advancement of the working class and the bulk of the peasantry.
In 1937, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR N. Yezhov published Order No. 00447, in accordance with which a large-scale campaign was launched to destroy "anti-Soviet elements." They were recognized as the culprits of all the failures of the Soviet leadership: “Anti-Soviet elements are the main instigators of all kinds of anti-Soviet and sabotage crimes, both on collective farms and state farms, and in transport, and in some areas of industry. The state security organs are faced with the task of crushing this entire gang of anti-Soviet elements in the most merciless way, protecting the working Soviet people from their counter-revolutionary intrigues, and finally, once and for all, putting an end to their vile subversive work against the foundations of the Soviet state. In accordance with this, I order - from August 5, 1937, in all republics, territories and regions, to begin an operation to repress former kulaks, active anti-Soviet elements and criminals. This document marks the beginning of an era of large-scale political repression, which later became known as the Great Terror.
Stalin and other members of the Politburo (V. Molotov, L. Kaganovich, K. Voroshilov) personally compiled and signed hit lists- pre-trial circulars listing the number or names of victims subject to conviction by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court with a predetermined penalty. According to researchers, under the death sentences of at least 44.5 thousand people are Stalin's personal signatures and resolutions.
The myth of the effective manager Stalin
Until now in the media and even in teaching aids one can meet the justification of political terror in the USSR by the need to carry out industrialization in a short time. Since the release of the decree obliging convicts to serve their sentences in labor camps for more than 3 years, prisoners have been actively involved in the construction of various infrastructure facilities. In 1930, the Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps of the OGPU (GULAG) was created and huge flows of prisoners were sent to key construction sites. During the existence of this system, from 15 to 18 million people have passed through it.
During the 1930-1950s, the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow Canal, was carried out by the forces of the Gulag prisoners. The prisoners built Uglich, Rybinsk, Kuibyshev and other hydroelectric power stations, erected metallurgical plants, facilities of the Soviet nuclear program, the longest railways and highways. Gulag prisoners built dozens of Soviet cities (Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Dudinka, Norilsk, Vorkuta, Novokuibyshevsk and many others).
The effectiveness of the work of prisoners was not highly characterized by Beria himself: “The existing ration in the Gulag of 2000 calories is designed for a person sitting in prison and not working. In practice, this underestimated norm is also released by supplying organizations only by 65-70%. Therefore, a significant percentage of the camp labor force falls into the category of weak and useless people in production. In general, the labor force is used no more than 60-65 percent.”
To the question "Is Stalin needed?" we can only give one answer - a firm "no". Even without taking into account the tragic consequences of famine, repression and terror, even considering only the economic costs and benefits - and even making every possible assumption in favor of Stalin - we get results that unequivocally say that economic policy Stalin did not lead to positive results. Forced redistribution significantly worsened productivity and social welfare.
- Sergei Guriev , economist
The economic efficiency of Stalinist industrialization by the hands of prisoners is extremely lowly assessed by modern economists. Sergei Guriev cites the following figures: by the end of the 1930s, productivity in agriculture had only reached the pre-revolutionary level, while in industry it was one and a half times lower than in 1928. Industrialization led to huge losses in welfare (minus 24%).
Brave new world
Stalinism is not only a system of repression, it is also the moral degradation of society. The Stalinist system made tens of millions of slaves - morally broke people. One of the most terrible texts that I have read in my life is the tortured "confessions" of the great biologist Academician Nikolai Vavilov. Only a few can endure torture. But many - tens of millions! – were broken and became moral freaks out of fear of being personally repressed.
- Alexey Yablokov , corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Philosopher and historian of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt explains that in order to turn Lenin's revolutionary dictatorship into a fully totalitarian government, Stalin had to artificially create an atomized society. For this, an atmosphere of fear was created in the USSR, and whistleblowing was encouraged. Totalitarianism did not destroy real "enemies", but imaginary ones, and this is its terrible difference from ordinary dictatorship. None of the destroyed sections of society were hostile to the regime and probably would not become hostile in the foreseeable future.
In order to destroy all social and family ties, the repressions were carried out in such a way as to threaten the same fate with the accused and everyone in the most ordinary relations with him, from casual acquaintances to closest friends and relatives. This policy penetrated deeply into Soviet society, where people, out of selfish interests or fearing for their lives, betrayed neighbors, friends, even members of their own families. In their desire for self-preservation, the masses of people abandoned their own interests, and became, on the one hand, a victim of power, and on the other, its collective embodiment.
The corollary of the simple and ingenious device of "guilt for association with the enemy" is such that, as soon as a person is accused, his former friends immediately turn into his worst enemies: in order to save their own skin, they hasten to jump out with unsolicited information and denunciations, supplying non-existent data against accused. Ultimately, it was by developing this technique to its latest and most fantastic extremes that the Bolshevik rulers succeeded in creating an atomized and fragmented society the like of which we had never seen before, and whose events and catastrophes in such pure form unlikely to have happened without it.
- Hannah Arendt, philosopher
The deep disunity of Soviet society, the lack civil institutions were inherited by the new Russia, have become one of the fundamental problems hindering the creation of democracy and civil peace in our country.
How the state and society fought the legacy of Stalinism
To date, Russia has experienced "two and a half attempts at de-Stalinization." The first and largest was deployed by N. Khrushchev. It began with a report at the 20th Congress of the CPSU:
“They arrested without the sanction of the prosecutor... What else could be a sanction when everything was allowed by Stalin. He was the chief prosecutor in these matters. Stalin gave not only permission, but also instructions on arrests on his own initiative. Stalin was a very suspicious person, with morbid suspicion, as we were convinced while working with him. He could look at a person and say: “something your eyes are running around today,” or: “why do you often turn away today, don’t look directly into your eyes.” Painful suspicion led him to sweeping distrust. Everywhere and everywhere he saw "enemies", "double-dealers", "spies". Having unlimited power, he allowed cruel arbitrariness, suppressed a person morally and physically. When Stalin said that such and such should be arrested, one should have taken it on faith that he was an "enemy of the people." And the gang of Beria, who was in charge of the state security organs, climbed out of their skin to prove the guilt of the arrested persons, the correctness of the materials they fabricated. And what evidence was put into play? Confessions of the arrested. And the investigators got these "confessions".
As a result of the fight against the cult of personality, sentences were revised, more than 88 thousand prisoners were rehabilitated. Nevertheless, the era of the “thaw” that came after these events turned out to be very short-lived. Soon, many dissidents who disagree with the policy of the Soviet leadership will become victims of political persecution.
The second wave of de-Stalinization occurred in the late 80s - early 90s. Only then did the public become aware of at least approximate figures characterizing the scale of the Stalinist terror. At this time, sentences passed in the 30s and 40s were also reviewed. In most cases, the convicted were rehabilitated. Half a century later, posthumously dispossessed peasants were rehabilitated.
A timid attempt at a new de-Stalinization was made during the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev. However, it did not bring significant results. Rosarkhiv, at the direction of the president, posted on its website documents about 20,000 Poles shot by the NKVD near Katyn.
Programs to preserve the memory of the victims are being phased out due to lack of funding.
This post is interesting as an indication, probably, of all irresponsible sources, the names of their authors, as well as numbers according to the principle: who is more?
Briefly speaking: good stuff for memory and reflection!
Original taken from takoe_sky in
"The concept of dictatorship means nothing more than power unrestricted by any laws, absolutely not constrained by any rules, based directly on violence."
V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin). Sobr. Op. T. 41, p. 383
"As we move forward, the class struggle will intensify, and the Soviet government, whose strength will grow more and more, will pursue a policy of isolating these elements." I.V. Dzhugashvili (Stalin). Works, vol. 11, p. 171
Vladimir Putin: “Repressions crushed people without considering nationalities, beliefs, or religions. Entire estates in our country became their victims: Cossacks and priests, ordinary peasants, professors and officers, teachers and workers.
There can be no justification for these crimes.” http://archive.government.ru/docs/10122/
How many people in Russia / USSR were destroyed by the communists under Lenin-Stalin?
Foreword
This is a subject of constant controversy, and this extremely important historical topic needs to be sorted out. For several months I studied all the possible and available materials on the network, at the end of the article there is an extensive list of them. The picture turned out to be more than sad.
There are a lot of words in the article, but now you can confidently poke any communist face into it (mild pardon for my French), broadcasting that "there were no mass repressions and deaths in the USSR."
For those who do not like long texts: according to dozens of studies, the Leninist-Stalinist communists destroyed at least 31 million people (direct irretrievable losses without emigration and the Second World War), a maximum of 168 million (including emigration and, most importantly, demographic losses from the unborn ). See the section "Statistics of total numbers". The most reliable figure seems to be direct losses of 34.31 million people - the arithmetic average of the sums of several of the most serious works on actual losses, which in general do not differ very much from each other. Not counting the unborn. See "Average figure" section.
For ease of use this article consists of several sections.
"Pavlov's Help" - an analysis of the most important myth of the neo-Commies and Stalinists about "less than 1 million people were repressed."
"Average figure" - calculation of the number of victims by years and topics, with the ghost of the corresponding minimum and maximum figures from sources, from which the arithmetic average figure of losses is derived.
"Statistics of total numbers" - statistics on total numbers from the 20 most serious studies found.
"Used materials" - quotes and links in the article.
"Other important related materials" - interesting and useful links and information on the topic, not included in this article or not directly mentioned in it.
I would be grateful for any constructive criticism and additions.
Pavlov's help
The minimum figure of the dead, which all neo-communists and Stalinists adore, “only” 800 thousand people were shot (and no one else was killed according to their mantras) - is given in a 1953 certificate. It is called "Reference 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 of the USSR in 1921-1953." and is dated December 11, 1953. The certificate is signed by acting. head of the 1st special department, Colonel Pavlov (the 1st special department was the accounting and archival department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), which is why modern materials there is its name "Pavlov's help".
This reference in itself is false and absurd a little more than completely,, and because. it is the main and main argument of the neocomms - it must be analyzed in detail. True, there is a second document, no less beloved by the neo-Communists and the Stalinists, a memorandum to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Comrade Khrushchev N.S. dated February 1, 1954, signed by the Prosecutor General R. Rudenko, the Minister of Internal Affairs S. Kruglov and the Minister of Justice K. Gorshenin. But the data in it practically coincides with the Help and, unlike the Help, does not contain any details, so it makes sense to analyze the Help.
So, according to this Certificate from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR for the years 1921-1953, a total of 799.455 were shot. Excluding the years 1937 and 1938, 117,763 people were shot. 42.139 shot in the years 1941-1945. Those. during the years 1921-1953 (excluding the years 1937-1938 and the years of the war), during the struggle against the White Guards, against the Cossacks, against priests, against kulaks, against peasant uprisings, ... only 75,624 people were shot (according to "quite reliable" data). Only in the 37s under Stalin did they slightly increase activity in purges of "enemies of the people". And so, according to this information, even in the bloody times of Trotsky and the cruel "Red Terror", it turns out, it was quiet.
I will give for consideration an excerpt from this certificate for the period 1921-1931.
Let us first pay attention to the data on those convicted for anti-Soviet (counter-revolutionary) propaganda. In 1921-1922, at the height of the fiercest struggle against counter-terrorism and the officially declared "Red Terror", when people were seized only for belonging to the bourgeoisie (bespectacled man and white hands), no one was arrested for counter-revolutionary, anti-Soviet propaganda (according to the Help). Openly agitate against the Soviets, speak at rallies against the surplus appraisal and other actions of the Bolsheviks, curse the blasphemous new government from church ambos, and nothing will happen to you. Direct freedom of speech! In 1923, however, 5,322 people were arrested for propaganda, but then again (until 1929) complete freedom of speech for anti-Sovietists, and only starting from 1929 did the Bolsheviks finally begin to “tighten the screws” and persecute counter-revolutionary propaganda. And such freedom and patient perception of anti-Soviet people (according to an honest document, for many years NOT A SINGLE one imprisoned for anti-government propaganda) occurs during the officially declared "Red Terror", when the Bolsheviks closed down all opposition newspapers and parties, imprisoned and shot clergymen for what they said is not what is needed ... As an example of the complete falsity of these data, one can cite a surname index of those shot in the Kuban (75 pages, of those surnames that I read - all were acquitted after Stalin).
For 1930, on the item convicted for anti-Soviet agitation, it is generally modestly noted that "There is no information." Those. The system worked, people were condemned, shot, but no information was received!
This certificate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the “No information” in it directly openly confirms and is documentary evidence that many information about the punishments carried out were not registered and generally disappeared.
Now I want to analyze the point of the fascinating Help on the number of executions (VMN - Capital Punishment). In the Certificate for 1921, 9,701 were shot. In 1922, only 1,962 people, and in 1923, in general, only 414 people (12,077 people were shot in 3 years).
Let me remind you that this is still the time of the "Red Terror" and the ongoing civil war (which ended only in 1923), a terrible famine that claimed several million lives and was organized by the Bolsheviks, who took almost all the bread from the "class alien" breadwinners - the peasants, and also the time of peasant uprisings caused by this surplus and famine, and the most severe suppression of those who dared to be indignant.
At a time when, according to the official Information, the number of executions was already small in 1921, in 1922 it was still greatly reduced, and in 1923 it almost stopped altogether, in reality, due to the most severe requisitioning, a terrible famine reigned in the country, dissatisfaction with the Bolsheviks intensified and the opposition became more active, everywhere peasant uprisings broke out. The unrest of the dissatisfied, opposition and uprisings, the Bolshevik leadership demands to be suppressed in the most severe way.
Church sources give data on those killed as a result of the implementation of the wisest "general plan" in 1922: 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks, 3,447 nuns were (Russian Orthodox Church and Communist State, 1917-1941, M., 1996, p. 69). In 1922, 8,100 clergymen were killed (and the most honest Information claims that in total, including criminals, 1,962 people were shot in 1922).
suppression Tambov uprising 1921-22 If we recall how this was reflected in the surviving documents of that time, then Uborevich reported to Tukhachevsky: "1000 people were taken prisoner, 1000 were shot", then "500 people were taken prisoner, all 500 were shot." And how many of these documents were destroyed? And how many such executions were not reflected in the documents at all?
Note (curious comparison):
According to official figures, 24,422 people were sentenced to death in the peaceful USSR from 1962 to 1989. An average of 2,754 people over 2 years in a very calm, peaceful time of golden stagnation. In 1962, 2,159 people were sentenced to death. Those. in the benevolent times of the "golden stagnation" they were shot, it turns out more than during the cruelest "red terror". According to the Information for 2 years 1922-1923, only 2,376 were shot (almost as many as in 1962 alone).
In the Certificate from the 1st Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR on repressions, only those convicts who were officially registered as "contra" are included. Bandits, criminals, violators of labor discipline and public order, of course, were not included in the statistics of this Certificate.
For example, in the USSR in 1924, 1,915,900 people were officially convicted (see: Results of the Decade of Soviet Power in Figures. 1917-1927. M, 1928. S. 112-113), and according to the Information through the special departments of the Cheka-OGPU this year only 12,425 people were convicted (and only they can officially be considered as repressed; the rest are just criminals).
Do I need to remind you that in the USSR they tried to declare that we do not have political people, there are only criminals. Trotskyists were sued as wreckers and saboteurs. The rebellious peasants were suppressed as bandits (even the Commission under the RVSR, which led the suppression of peasant uprisings, was officially called the “Commission for Combating Banditry”), etc.
I will give two more facts to the wonderful statistics of the Help.
According to the well-known archives of the NKVD, which are cited by those who refute the scale of the Gulags, the number of prisoners in prisons, camps and colonies at the beginning of 1937 was 1.196 million people.
However, in the census conducted on January 6, 1937, 156 million people were received (without the population rewritten by the NKVD and the NPO (that is, without the special contingent of the NKVD and the army), and without passengers on trains and ships). The total population according to the census was 162,003,225 people (including contingents of the Red Army, NKVD and passengers).
Considering the size of the army at that time 2 million (specialists give the figure 1.645.983 on 1.01.37) and assuming that there were about 1 million passengers, we get approximately that the NKVD special contingent (prisoners) by the beginning of 1937 was about 3 million. Close to our calculated specific number of 2.75 million prisoners was indicated in the certificate of the NKVD provided by the TsUNKhU for the 1937 census. Those. according to another OFFICIAL certificate (and also, of course, true), the actual number of prisoners was 2.3 times higher than the generally accepted one.
And one more, last example from official, truthful information about the number of prisoners.
In a report on the use of prisoner labor in 1939, it is reported that there were 94,773 of them in the UZHDS system at the beginning of the year, and 69,569 at the end of the year. (In principle, everything is fine, it is these data that the researchers simply reprint and make up the total amount of prisoners from them. But the trouble is, another interesting figure is given in the same report) The prisoners worked, as stated in the same report, 135,148,918 people days. Such a combination is impossible, since if 94 thousand people worked every day without days off during the year, then the number of days worked by them would be only 34.310 thousand (94 thousand for 365). If we agree with Solzhenitsyn, who claims that the prisoners were supposed to have three days off per month, then 135,148,918 man-days could be provided by approximately 411 thousand workers (135,148,918 for 329 working days). Those. and here the OFFICIAL distortion of reporting is about 5 times.
Summing up, it can be emphasized once again that the Bolsheviks / Communists far from recorded all their crimes, and what was nevertheless recorded was then repeatedly subjected to purges: Beria destroyed compromising evidence on himself, Khrushchev cleared the archives in his favor, Trotsky, Stalin, Kaganovich also did not they were very fond of keeping “ugly” materials for themselves; similarly, the leaders of the republics, regional committees, city committees, and departments of the NKVD cleaned out the local archives for themselves. ,
And yet, knowing full well about the then-existing practice of executions without trial or investigation, about the numerous purges of archives, the neo-Commies sum up the remnants of the lists found and give the final figure of less than 1 million executed from 1921 to 1953, this includes criminals sentenced to capital punishment. The falsity and cynicism of these statements "beyond good and evil" ...
Average figure
Now about the real numbers of communist victims. These numbers of people killed by the communists are made up of several main points. The numbers themselves are listed as the minimum and maximum I have encountered in various studies, with an indication of the study / author. The numbers in the items marked with an asterisk are for reference only and are not included in the final calculation.
1. "Red Terror" from October 1917 - 1.7 million people (Commission Denikin, Melgunov), - 2 million.
2. Epidemics of 1918-1922 - 6-7 million,
3. Civil war of 1917-1923, losses on both sides, soldiers and officers killed and died of wounds - 2.5 million (Polyakov) - 7.5 million (Aleksandrov)
(For reference: even the minimum figures are more than the death toll for the entire First World War - 1.7 million.)
4. The first artificial famine of 1921-1922, 1 million (Polyakov) - 4.5 million (Aleksandrov) - 5 million (with 5 million indicated in the TSB)
5. Suppression of peasant uprisings of 1921-1923 - 0.6 million (own calculations)
6. Victims of forced Stalinist collectivization of 1930-1932 (including victims of extrajudicial repressions, peasants who died of starvation in 1932 and special settlers in 1930-1940) - 2 million.
7. The second artificial famine of 1932-1933 - 6.5 million (Aleksandrov), 7.5 million, 8.1 million (Andreev)
8. Victims of political terror in the 1930s - 1.8 million
9. Those who died in places of detention in the 1930s - 1.8 million (Aleksandrov) - more than 2 million
10*. "Lost" as a result of Stalin's corrections of the population censuses of 1937 and 1939 - 8 million - 10 million.
According to the results of the first census, 5 TsUNKhU leaders were shot in a row, as a result, the statistics were "improved" - "increased" the population by several million. These figures are probably distributed in paragraphs. 6, 7, 8 and 9.
11. Finnish War 1939-1940 - 0.13 million
12*. Irretrievable losses in the war of 1941-1945 - 38 million, 39 million according to Rosstat, 44 million according to Kurganov.
The criminal mistakes and orders of Dzhugashvili (Stalin) and his henchmen led to colossal and unjustified casualties among the personnel of the Red Army and the civilian population of the country. At the same time, there were no massacres of the civilian non-belligerent population by the Nazis (except for Jews). Moreover, it is only known about the targeted destruction of communists, commissars, Jews and partisan saboteurs by the Nazis. The civilian population was not subjected to genocide. But of course, it is impossible to isolate from these losses the part in which the communists are directly to blame, so this is not taken into account. Nevertheless, the death rate of prisoners in Soviet camps over the years is known, according to various sources, this is about 600,000 people. This is entirely on the conscience of the communists.
13. Repressions 1945-1953 - 2.85 million (together with paragraphs 13 and 14)
14. Famine of 1946-47 - 1 million
15. In addition to deaths, the country's demographic losses also include irretrievable emigration as a result of the actions of the communists. In the period after the coup of 1917 and the beginning of the 1920s, it accounted for 1.9 million (Volkov) - 2.9 million (Ramsha) - 3 million (Mikhailovsky). As a result of the war of 41-45, 0.6 million - 2 million people did not want to return to the USSR.
The arithmetic average of losses is 34.31 million people.
Used materials.
Calculation of the number of victims of the Bolsheviks according to the official methodology of the USSR State Statistics Committee http://www.slavic-europe.eu/index.php/articles/57-russia-articles/255-2013-05-21-31
The well-known incident of the summary statistics of the repressed in cases of the State Security Service ("Pavlov's certificate") in terms of the number of executions in 1933 (although this is actually defective statistics from the summary certificates of the State Security Service, deposited in the 8th of the Central Administration of the FSB), disclosed by Alexei Teplyakov http://corporatelie.livejournal .com/53743.html
It resulted in an underestimation of the number of those shot by at least 6 times. And perhaps more.
Repressions in the Kuban, a surname index of the executed (75 pages) http://ru.convdocs.org/docs/index-15498.html?page=1 (of those that I read, everyone was rehabilitated after Stalin).
Stalinist Igor Pykhalov. "What are the scales of the 'Stalinist repressions'?" http://warrax.net/81/stalin.html
Census of the USSR (1937) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%8C_ %D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0 %A0_%281937%29
Red Army before the war: organization and personnel http://militera.lib.ru/research/meltyukhov/09.html
Archival materials on the number of prisoners in the late 1930s. Central state archive of the National Economy (TsGANKh) of the USSR, fund of the People's Commissariat - Ministry of Finance of the USSR http://scepsis.net/library/id_491.html
Article by Oleg Khlevnyuk on massive distortions of the statistics of the Turkmen NKVD in 1937-1938. Hlevnjuk O. Les mecanismes de la "Grande Terreur" des annees 1937-1938 au Turkmenistan // Cahiers du Monde russe. 1998. 39/1-2. http://corporatelie.livejournal.com/163706.html#comments
A special investigative commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, the Commander-in-Chief of the All-Union Socialist Republic, General Denikin, cites the numbers of victims of the Red Terror only for 1918-19. - 1.766.118 Russians, of which 28 bishops, 1.215 clergymen, 6.775 professors and teachers, 8.800 doctors, 54.650 officers, 260.000 soldiers, 10.500 policemen, 48.650 police agents, 12.950 landowners, 355.250 representatives of the intelligentsia, 193.015.350 peasants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0 %B4%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B8 %D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%BF%D0%BE_%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0 %B4%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8E_%D0%B7%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%8F %D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0 %BE%D0%B2#cite_note-Meingardt-6
Suppression of peasant uprisings 1921-1923
The number of victims during the suppression of the Tambov uprising. A large number of Tambov villages and villages were wiped off the face of the earth as a result of sweeps (as punishment for supporting the "bandits"). As a result of the actions of the occupying and punitive army and the Cheka in the Tambov region, according to Soviet data, at least 110 thousand people were killed. Many analysts call the figure of 240 thousand people. How many “Antonovites” were destroyed later from organized famine
The Tambov security officer Goldin said: “For the execution, we do not need any evidence and interrogations, as well as suspicions and, of course, useless, stupid office work. We find it necessary to shoot and shoot.”
At the same time, almost all of Russia was engulfed in peasant uprisings. In Western Siberia and the Urals, the Don and Kuban, the Volga region and the central provinces, the peasants came out against the Soviet power, who had fought yesterday against the whites and interventionists. The scale of the performances was enormous.
book Materials for the study of the history of the USSR (1921 - 1941), Moscow, 1989 (compiled by Dolutsky I.I.)
The largest of them was the West Siberian uprising of 1921-22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%BE-%D0%A1%D0%B8% D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%80%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D1%82%D0% B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%281921%E2%80%941922%29
And all of them were suppressed by this government with approximately the same extreme measure of cruelty, briefly described on the example of the Tambov province. I will give only one extract from the protocols on the methods of suppressing the West Siberian uprising: http://www.proza.ru/2011/01/28/782
Basic research the largest historian of the revolution and the Civil War S.P. Melgunov “Red Terror in Russia. 1918-1923" is a documentary evidence of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, committed under the slogan of the fight against class enemies in the first years after the October Revolution. It is based on testimonies collected by a historian from different sources(the author was a contemporary of those events), but first of all from the printed organs of the Cheka itself (VChK Weekly, Red Terror magazine), even before his expulsion from the USSR. Published according to the 2nd, supplemented edition (Berlin, Vataga publishing house, 1924). You can buy on Ozone.
The human losses of the USSR in the Second World War - 38 million. A book by a team of authors with an eloquent title - "Washed with blood"? Lies and truth about losses in the Great Patriotic War". Authors: Igor Pykhalov, Lev Lopukhovsky, Viktor Zemskov, Igor Ivlev, Boris Kavalerchik. Publishing house "Yauza" - "Eksmo, 2012. Volume - 512 pages, of which by authors: And Pykhalov - 19 pp., L. Lopukhovsky in collaboration with B. Kavalerchik - 215 pp., V. Zemskov - 17 pp., I. Ivlev - 249 pp. Circulation 2000 copies.
The anniversary collection of Rosstat, dedicated to the Second World War, indicates the figure of the country's demographic losses in the war at 39.3 million people. http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/doc_2015/vov_svod_1.pdf
Genby. "The Demographic Cost of Communist Rule in Russia" http://genby.livejournal.com/486320.html.
The terrible famine of 1933 in figures and facts http://historical-fact.livejournal.com/2764.html
Underestimated by 6 times the statistics of executions in 1933, detailed analysis http://corporatelie.livejournal.com/53743.html
Calculation of the number of victims of the communists, Kirill Mikhailovich Alexandrov - Candidate of Historical Sciences, Senior Researcher (major in History of Russia) of the Encyclopedic Department of the Institute of Philological Research, St. Petersburg State University. Author of three books on the history of anti-Stalinist resistance during the Second World War and more than 250 publications on the national history XIX-XX centuries.http://www.white-guard.ru/go.php?n=4&id=82
Repressed census of 1937. http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema07.php
Demographic losses from repressions, A. Vishnevsky http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema06.php
Censuses 1937 and 1939 Demographic losses by the balance method. http://genby.livejournal.com/542183.html
Red terror - documents.
On May 14, 1921, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) supported the expansion of the rights of the Cheka in relation to the application of capital punishment (CMN).
On June 4, 1921, the Politburo decided "to give the Cheka a directive to intensify the struggle against the Mensheviks in view of the intensification of their counter-revolutionary activities."
Between January 26 and 31, 1922. V.I. Lenin - I.S. Unshlikht: “The publicity of revolutionary tribunals is not always; to strengthen their composition with “your” [i.e. VChK - G.Kh.] people, to strengthen their connection (any) with the Cheka; to increase the speed and force of their repressions, to increase the attention of the Central Committee to this. The slightest increase in banditry, etc. should entail martial law and executions on the spot. The Council of People's Commissars will be able to quickly carry it out if you do not miss it, and it is possible by telephone ”(Lenin, PSS, vol. 54, p. 144).
In March 1922, in a speech at the 11th Congress of the RCP(b), Lenin declared: "Our revolutionary courts must be shot for public proof of Menshevism, otherwise these are not our courts."
May 15, 1922. "vol. Kursk! In my opinion, it is necessary to expand the application of shooting ... to all types of activities of the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, etc. ... ”(Lenin, PSS, vol. 45, p. 189). (According to the figures from the Reference, it follows that the use of executions, on the contrary, was rapidly reduced in these years)
Telegram dated August 11, 1922, signed by Deputy Chairman of the State Political Administration of the Republic I. S. Unshlikht and Head of the Secret Department of the GPU. T. P. Samsonov, ordered the gubernatorial departments of the GPU: "immediately liquidate all active Socialist-Revolutionaries in your area."
March 19, 1922 Lenin, in a letter addressed to members of the Politburo, explains the need right now, using a terrible famine, to launch an active campaign to expropriate church property and inflict a "mortal blow on the enemy" - the clergy and the bourgeoisie: The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie will succeed we shoot on this occasion, so much the better: it is necessary right now to teach this public a lesson so that for several decades they will not even dare to think about any resistance<...>» RTSKHIDNI, 2/1/22947/1-4.
Pandemic "Spanish flu" 1918-1920. in the context of other influenza pandemics and "bird flu", M.V. Supotnitsky, Ph.D. Sciences http://www.supotnitskiy.ru/stat/stat51.htm
S.I. Zlotogorov, "Typhus" http://sohmet.ru/books/item/f00/s00/z0000004/st002.shtml
Statistics on the total numbers from the studies found:
I. The most minimal direct victims of the Bolsheviks according to the official methodology of the USSR State Statistics Committee, without emigration - 31 million http://www.slavic-europe.eu/index.php/articles/57-russia-articles/255-2013-05-21- 31
If it is impossible to establish the number of victims of military "communism" through the Bolshevik archives, then is it possible to establish here, apart from speculation, anything corresponding to reality? It turns out that it is possible. Moreover, quite simply - through the bed and the laws of ordinary physiology, which no one has yet canceled. Men sleep with women regardless of who has snuck into the Kremlin.
Note that it is in this way (and not by compiling lists of the dead) that all serious scientists (and state commission Goskomstat of the USSR, in particular) human losses during the Second World War.
Total losses of 26.6 million people - the calculation was made by the Department of Demographic Statistics of the USSR State Statistics Committee in the course of work as part of a comprehensive commission to clarify the number of human losses of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War. - Mobupravlenie GOMU of the General Staff of the AFRF, d.142, 1991, inv. No. 04504, sheet 250. (Russia and the USSR in the wars of the twentieth century: Statistical research. M., 2001. p. 229.)
31 million people seems to be the lowest point in the regime's death toll.
II. In 1990, statistician O.A. Platonov: “According to our calculations, the total number of people who did not die of their own death from mass repression, famine, epidemics, wars amounted to more than 87 million people in 1918-1953. And in total, if we add up the number of people who died not of their own death, who left their homeland, as well as the number of children that could be born to these people, then the total human damage to the country will be 156 million people.
III. Outstanding philosopher and historian Ivan Ilyin, "The size of the Russian population".
http://www.rus-sky.com/gosudarstvo/ilin/nz/nz-52.htm
"All this is only for the years of the Second World War. Adding this new shortfall to the previous one of 36 million, we will get a monstrous sum of 72 million lives. This is the price of the revolution."
IV. Calculation of the number of victims of the communists, Kirill Mikhailovich Alexandrov - Candidate of Historical Sciences, Senior Researcher (major in History of Russia) of the Encyclopedic Department of the Institute of Philological Research, St. Petersburg State University. Author of three books on the history of anti-Stalinist resistance during World War II and more than 250 publications on national history XIX-XX centuries.http://www.white-guard.ru/go.php?n=4&id=82
"Civil War 1917-1922 7.5 million.
The first artificial famine of 1921-1922 over 4.5 million people.
Victims of the Stalinist collectivization of 1930-1932 (including victims of extrajudicial repressions, peasants who starved to death in 1932 and special settlers in 1930-1940) ≈ 2 million
Second artificial famine of 1933 - 6.5 million
Victims of political terror - 800 thousand people
1.8 million died in places of detention.
The victims of the Second World War ≈ 28 million people.
Total ≈ 51 million."
V. Data from the article by A. Ivanov "Demographic losses of Russia-USSR" - http://ricolor.org/arhiv/russkoe_vozrojdenie/1981/8/:
"... All this makes it possible to judge the total losses of the country's population with the formation of the Soviet state, caused by its internal policy, its conduct of civil and world wars during 1917-1959. We have identified three periods:
1. The establishment of Soviet power - 1917-1929, the number of casualties - over 30 million people.
2. The costs of building socialism (collectivization, industrialization, liquidation of the kulaks, the remnants of the "former classes") - 1930-1939. - 22 million people.
3. World War II and post-war difficulties - 1941-1950 - 51 million people; Total - 103 million people.
As you can see, this approach, using the latest demographic indicators, leads to the same assessment of the amount of human casualties suffered by the peoples of our country during the years of the existence of Soviet power and the communist dictatorship, which was reached by various researchers who used different methods and various demographic statistics. This once again indicates that 100-110 million human victims of building socialism is the real "price" of this "building."
VI. The opinion of the liberal historian R. Medvedev: ““Thus, the total number of victims of Stalinism reaches, according to my calculations, figures of about 40 million people” (R. Medvedev “Tragic Statistics // Arguments and Facts. 1989, February 4-10. No. 5 (434), p. 6.)
VII. Opinion of the commission for the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions (headed by A. Yakovlev): "According to the most conservative estimates of the specialists of the commission for rehabilitation, our country lost about 100 million people during the years of Stalin's rule. This number includes not only the repressed themselves, but also those doomed to the death of their family members and even children who could have been born, but never were born. (Mikhailova N. Underpants of counter-revolution // Prime Minister Vologda, 2002, July 24-30. No. 28 (254). P. 10.)
VIII. Fundamental demographic research of the team led by Doctor of Economic Sciences Professor Ivan Koshkin (Kurganov) “Three figures. About human losses for the period from 1917 to 1959. http://slavic-europe.eu/index.php/comments/66-comments-russia/177-2013-04-15-1917-1959 http://rusidea.org/?a=32030
"Nevertheless, the widespread belief in the USSR that all or most of the human losses in the USSR are associated with military events is wrong. The losses associated with military events are grandiose, but they far from cover all the losses of the people during the Soviet period. They, contrary to popular belief in the USSR, they account for only a part of these losses.Here are the corresponding figures (in million people):
The total number of casualties in the USSR during the dictatorship communist party from 1917 to 1959 110.7 million - 100%.
Including:
Losses in war time 44.0 million, - 40%.
Losses in non-military revolutionary times 66.7 million - 60%.
P.S. It was this work that Solzhenitsyn mentioned in a famous interview with Spanish television, which is why it causes especially fierce hatred of the Stalinists and neo-Commi.
IX. The opinion of the historian and publicist B. Pushkarev is about 100 million.
X. The book edited by the leading Russian demographer Vishnevsky "Demographic Modernization of Russia, 1900-2000". The demographic loss from the communists is 140 million (mainly due to unborn generations).
http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema07.php
XI. O. Platonov, book "Memories of national economy", losses in the aggregate 156 million people.
XII. Russian emigrant historian Arseny Gulevich, book "Tsarism and Revolution", the direct losses of the revolution amounted to 49 million people.
If we add to them the losses due to the birth deficit, then with the victims of the two world wars, we get the same 100-110 million people destroyed by communism.
XIII. According to the documentary series "History of Russia of the XX century", the total number of direct demographic losses suffered by the peoples of the former Russian Empire from the actions of the Bolsheviks from 1917 to 1960. is about 60 million people.
XIV. According to the documentary "Nicholas II. A thwarted triumph", the total number of victims of the Bolshevik dictatorship is about 40 million people.
XV. According to the forecasts of the French scientist E. Teri, the population of Russia in 1948, without unnatural deaths and taking into account normal population growth, should have been 343.9 million people. At that time, 170.5 million people lived in the USSR, i.e. demographic losses (including unborn) for 1917-1948. - 173.4 million people
XVI. Genby. the demographic cost of communist rule in Russia is 200 million http://genby.livejournal.com/486320.html.
XVII. Summary tables of victims of Lenin-Stalin repressions
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