Timeline of Zionist Terror

[PatrickSMcNally]

Solzhenitsyn is interesting indeed. Here is what what we can find about him

The brave Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian writer who has been called the "Conscience of the 20th Century," served eight long years in the Soviet Gulag prison system. Today, he is hated by top-level Jews in America and around the world because he exposed the Jewish leadership of the genocide of 66 million Communist Gulag victims.

That 66 million lie is a discredited Cold War hoax. It pretty well got off the ground with the LETTER TO THE SOVIET LEADERS where Solzhenitsyn announced that:

-----
In addition to the toll of two world wars, we have lost, as a result of civil strife and tumult alone--as a result of internal political and economic "class" extermination alone-- 66 (sixty-six) million people!!! That is the calculation of a former Leningrad professor of statistics, I. A. Kurganov, and you can have it brought to you whenever you wish. I am no trained statistician, I cannot undertake to verify it; and anyway all statistics are kept secret in our country and this is an indirect calculation. But it's true: a hundred million are no more (exactly a hundred, just as Dostoyevsky prophesied!), and with and without wars we have lost one-third of the population we could now have had and almost half of the one we in fact have!
-----
--Alexander Solzhenitsyn, LETTER TO THE SOVIET LEADERS, p. 30.

Notice also how Solzhenitsyn casually jumps from "66 million" to "a hundred million," "exactly a hundred" without indicating that he knows what a hundred minus 66 equals? Then Dostoyevsky becomes the source, and THE POSSESSED does refer to "chopping off a hundred millons heads," except that the book is a novel.

For awhile I wasn't even certain if this Kurganov person existed, but I have since been reassured that at least such a person was real. In any event, nothing of the sort is at all consistent with the demographic data on the Soviet Union which has become available since 1991, especially not when compared with that of Czarist Russia and Yeltsinite Russia:

Year__________Deaths per thousand among the population
1899__________33.4
1900__________32.3
1901__________33.6
1902__________33.1
1903__________31.1
1904__________31.1
1905__________33.2
1906__________31.6
1907__________30.2
1908__________30.2
1909__________31.6
1910__________33.3
1911__________29.2
1912__________28.7
1913__________30.9
1923__________29.1
1924__________27.6
1925__________28.7
1926__________25.5
1927__________26.5
1928__________25.3
1929__________26.5
1930__________27.0
1934__________21.7
1935__________20.6
1936__________20.0
1937__________21.7
1938__________20.9
1939__________20.1
1940__________21.7
1946__________15.8
1947__________20.3
1948__________13.6
1949__________12.6
1950__________11.7
1951__________11.6
1952__________11.4
1953__________11.0
1954__________10.3
1955___________9.3
1956___________8.7
1957___________9.1
1958___________8.0
1989__________32.0
1990__________32.9
1991__________33.7
1992__________38.1
1993__________47.2
1994__________52.5
1995__________50.5
1996__________45.3
1997__________40.8
1998__________39.6
1999__________43.3

All of the data for this and related matters can be found in:

Frank Lorimer, THE POPULATION OF THE SOVIET UNION;
R.W. Davies, Mark Harrison, & Stephen Wheatcroft, THE ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION OF THE SOVIET UNION, 1913-1945;
Michael Haynes & Rumy Rusan, A CENTURY OF STATE MURDER?: DEATH AND POLICY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUSSIA.

The comment by Solzhenitsyn about "just as Dostoyevsky prophesied" relates to Dostoyevsky's novel THE POSSESSED which does have a few scenes in it which refer to "chopping off a hundred million heads." While it's certainly true that hundreds of thousands of executions took place in the 1930s, the myth of "20 million" murdered in a few years is just a Cold War hangover. One can get some more details by first reading the online version of an article from the American Historical Review, October 1993:

http://www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/AHR/AHR.html

More details can be found in the book by Archibald Getty & Oleg Naumov, THE ROAD TO TERROR: STALIN AND THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF THE BOLSHEVIKS, 1932-1939. Although the purges were certainly ugly, the myth of "tens of millions" is a derivative of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel THE POSSESSED. That novel has about 3 scens where reference is made to "chopping off a hundred million heads."

Solzhenitsyn even contradicts the above when describing his experiences in THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO:

-----
Twenty-five years later we could think: Well, yes, we understood the sort of arrests that were being made at the time, and the fact that they were torturing people in prisons, and the slime they were trying to drag us into. But it isn't true! After all, the Black Marias were going through the streets at night, and we were the same young people who were parading with banners during the day. How could we know anything about those arrests and why should we think about them? All the provincial leaders had been removed, but as far as we were concerned it didn't matter. Two or three professors had been arrested, but after all they hadn't been our dancing partners, and it might even be easier to pass our exams as a result. Twenty-year olds, we marched in the ranks of those born the year the Revolution took place, and because we were the same age as the Revolution, the brightest of futures lay ahead.
-----
-- Solzhenitsyn, GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, pp. 160-1.

That sort of talk is perfectly consistent with the reduced documentable figures of executions and labor camp deaths such as appear in Archibald Getty et al. When multiple hundreds of thousands of deaths are distributed across such a large population it is possible for most of them to simply fade in with the details so that an honest person may not really be aware of anything strange happening. But if we tried applying Solzhenitsyn's absurd "66 million" then it would be impossible to explain how he could be so indifferent and unaware while such a major demographic catastrophe occurred. It's a basic demographic fact that people in Russia lived longer because of the development of the planned economy. You don't have to like all, or even most, of what constituted "human rights" within the Soviet Union in order to realize that the "tens of millions murdered" claim is simply Cold War tripe.

 

[Laura]

Excellent! Now we have something to work with. And, as the page cited says:

We propose to deal here only with quantitative elements of the terror, with what we can now document of the scale of the repression. Of course, such a cold numerical approach risks overshadowing the individual personal and psychological horror of the event. Millions of lives were unjustly taken or destroyed in the Stalin period; the scale of suffering is almost impossible to comprehend. The horrifying irrationality of the carnage involves no debatable moral questions - destruction of people can have no pros and cons. There has been a tendency to accuse “low estimators” of somehow justifying or defending Stalin (as if the deaths of 3 million famine victims were somehow less blameworthy than 7 million).

and:

Turning to executions and custodial deaths in the entire Stalin period, we know that, between 1934 and 1953, 1,053,829 persons died in the camps of the GULAG. We have data to the effect that some 86,582 people perished in prisons between 1939 and 1951. (We do not yet know exactly how many died in labor colonies.) We also know that, between 1930 and 1952-1953, 786,098 “counter-revolutionaries” were executed (or, according to another source, more than 775,866 persons “on cases of the police” and for “political crimes”). Finally, we know that, from 1932 through 1940, 389,521 peasants died in places of “kulak” resettlement. Adding these figures together would produce a total of a little more than 2.3 million, but this can in no way be taken as an exact number. First of all, there is a possible overlap between the numbers given for GULAG camp deaths and “political” executions as well as between the latter and other victims of the 1937-1938 mass purges and perhaps also other categories falling under police jurisdiction. Double-counting would deflate the 2.3 million figure. On the other hand, the 2.3 million does not include several suspected categories of death in custody. It does not include, for example, deaths among deportees during and after the war as well as among categories of exiles other than “kulaks.” Still, we have some reason to believe that the new numbers for GULAG and prison deaths, executions as well as deaths in peasant exile, are likely to bring us within a much narrower range of error than the estimates proposed by the majority of authors who have written on the subject.

And then:

Of course, aside from executions in the terror of 1937-1938, many others died in the regime’s custody in the decade of the 1930s. If we add the figure we have for executions up to 1940 to the number of persons who died in GULAG camps and the few figures we have found so far on mortality in prisons and labor colonies, then add to this the number of peasants known to have died in exile, we reach the figure of 1,473,424.

To be sure, of 1,802,392 alleged kulaks and their relatives who had been banished in 1930-1931, only 1,317,022 were still living at their places of exile by January 1, 1932. (Many people escaped: their number is given as 207,010 only for the year of 1932.) But even if we put at hundreds of thousands the casualties of the most chaotic period of collectivization (deaths in exile, rather than from starvation in the 1932 famine), plus later victims of different categories for which we have no data, it is unlikely that “custodial mortality” figures of the 1930s would reach 2 million: a huge number of “excess deaths” but far below most prevailing estimates. Although the figures we can document for deaths related to Soviet penal policy are rough and inexact, the available sources provide a reliable order of magnitude, at least for the pre-war period.

and

Turning to executions and custodial deaths in the entire Stalin period, we know that, between 1934 and 1953, 1,053,829 persons died in the camps of the GULAG. We have data to the effect that some 86,582 people perished in prisons between 1939 and 1951. (We do not yet know exactly how many died in labor colonies.)

We also know that, between 1930 and 1952-1953, 786,098 “counter-revolutionaries” were executed (or, according to another source, more than 775,866 persons “on cases of the police” and for “political crimes”).

Finally, we know that, from 1932 through 1940, 389,521 peasants died in places of “kulak” resettlement. Adding these figures together would produce a total of a little more than 2.3 million, but this can in no way be taken as an exact number. First of all, there is a possible overlap between the numbers given for GULAG camp deaths and “political” executions as well as between the latter and other victims of the 1937-1938 mass purges and perhaps also other categories falling under police jurisdiction. Double-counting would deflate the 2.3 million figure. On the other hand, the 2.3 million does not include several suspected categories of death in custody. It does not include, for example, deaths among deportees during and after the war as well as among categories of exiles other than “kulaks.”

This item is interesting: (might want to keep it in mind in case you consider yourself an intellectual in the growing totalitarian regime in the US):

The hypothesis of an increasingly anti-elite orientation of the penal policy is supported by data on the educational levels of labor camp inmates. Table 5 shows the educational background of hard regime camp inmates on January 1, 1937, alongside educational levels for the population as a whole in 1937. Even allowing for the rise in educatiorial levels in the general population between 1937 and 1940, it seems clear that the purge hit those with higher educational levels more severely. Although less educated common folk heavily outnumbered the “intelligentsia” in the camps, those who had studied in institutions of higher or secondary education were proportionally nearly twice as numerous in the GULAG system as they were in society at large, while those with elementary (or no) education were under-represented.

And:

The long-awaited archival evidence on repression in the period of the GreatPurges shows that levels of arrests, political prisoners, executions, and general camp populations tend to confirm the orders of magnitude indicated by those labeled as “revisionists” and mocked by those proposing high estimates.

Some suspicions about the nature of the terror cannot be sustained, others can now be confirmed.

Thus inferences that the terror fell particularly hard on non-Russian nationalities are not borne out by the camp population data from the 1930s. The frequent assertion that most of the camp prisoners were “political” also seems not to be true. On the other hand, the new evidence can support the View, reached previously by statistical study and evidence of other types, that the terror was aimed at the Soviet elite.

Yet it is also important to highlight three specific features. For the first, the use of, capital punishment among the “measures of social defense” sets Soviet penal practices apart from those of other systems, even though the number of executions shows a sharp decrease after the dreadful dimensions in 1937-1938. Second, the detention system in the second half of the 1930s (and perhaps at other times) was directed against educated members of the elite. Third, it had a clearly political purpose and was used by the regime to silence real and imagined opponents.

And finally:

Accurate overall estimates of numbers of victims are difficult to make because of the fragmentary and dispersed nature of record keeping. Generally speaking, we have runs of quantitative data of severM~types: on arrests, formal charges and accusations, sentences, and camp populations. But these “events” took place under the jurisdiction of a bewildering variety of institutions, each with its own statistical compilations and reports. These agencies included the several organizations of the secret police (NKVD special tribunals, known as troikas, special collegia, or the special conference [osoboe soveshchanie]), the procuracy, the regular police, and various types of courts and tribunals. [...]

We must note, however, that the accuracy of Soviet records on much less mobile populations does not seem to give much hope that we can ever clarify all the issues. For instance, the Department of Leading Party Cadres of the Central Committee furnished different figures for the total party membership and for its ethnic composition as of January 1, 1937, in two documents that were nevertheless compiled about the same time. Yet another number was given in published party statistics. The conditions of “perpetual movement” in the camp system created even greater difficulties than those posed by keeping track of supposedly disciplined party members who had just seen two major attempts to improve the bookkeeping practices of the party.

[...]

We cannot stress enough the fact that this is only the first exploration of a huge and complex set of sources; little more than scales, ranges, and main trends of evolution can now be established.

You know, even though it is valuable to have accurate information, there is something disturbing about people who concentrate on the numbers to the exclusion of the crux of the matter: the existence and activity of pathological elements in society.

Societies, as a whole, tend to mythicize traumatic events. This tendency seems to serve a psychological function that is not well understood. For example, an "old timer" might exaggerate the death and destruction of a certain event while telling the story to a child: "Oh, back in those times, millions were killed by _________ (fill in the blank.) It seems that the purposes of this way of mythicizing is to imprint on the minds of the young ones the dangers and horrors of whatever system they are chronicling.

Techniques adopted by storytellers that some accuse of being "fictionalized" are most often an effort to give force and point to their narratives. The crux of the matter is that such individuals wish to convey adequately the impressions made upon them by terrible, horrifying events.

It is almost impossible to give a neutral account of horror and terror that an individual has personally experienced. And so, at the simplest level, such accounts are given in order to create the effect on the listener/reader that was experienced by the teller of the story.

While I understand the need for historical accuracy, I also have tremendous sympathy for the "terror of history" as perceived by individuals.

Let us not allow our concern for counting the trees to interfere with our ability to see the forest. That is an even greater disservice to humanity.

 

[PatrickSMcNally]

Well unfortunately, numbers play a major role in propaganda. For example, the issue of how many Kurds may have been killed by Saddam Hussein has been played up as a major reason for war in Iraq. Numbers are a part of the claims, for better or worse.

If one is interested in the more general questions, it is certainly worth going through some of Mark Tauger's essays on the famine of 1931-3:

http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/Tauger/soviet.htm

Classical Cold War propaganda used to portray the events as merely a "manmade famine" occurring amidst an otherwise adequate crop. Today it's well-documented that real major crop failure occurred due to natural causes and was made worse by the lack of understanding of this fact. There was no plan to create a famine, but the response to the actual crop failure was worsened by miscomprehension at all levels.