Immediately after Stalin’s death, the changes were accelerated and the inevitable decision to destroy the very basis of the MVD’s system of forced labour was finally taken. On 18 March 1953 the Prime Minister, Malenkov, transferred most of the MVD’s industrial directorates to civilian ministries, while the penal establishments, with their inmates, reverted to the Justice Ministry, restoring the pre-1934 situation. On 27 March a further decree freed 1 million detainees out of a total of 2.5 million. During the same month, the order was given to discontinue several major MVD projects: the Turkmenistan grand canal, the Volga-Baltic network of canals, several hydro-electric dams and major irrigation systems. These enormous construction sites – especially the canals – used huge quantities of forced labour and, in its reports, the MVD continually prided itself on its role in such chimerical wonders, which pandered to Stalin’s penchant for the gargantuan. Khlevniuk surmises that higher governmental circles must have realized that such projects were ruinously expensive. And it was for the same reason that as early as 1950 Beria, responsible for the MVD in his capacity as Deputy Prime Minister, had envisaged reforming the huge ministry. But as long as Stalin was alive, no one dared put the issue on the official agenda. The only thing to do was to let factors inducing spontaneous decay do their work, as well as the courageous protests of unjustly imprisoned people. Only with Stalin’s death were many of these glorious ventures liquidated as useless for economic development, dealing a decisive blow to the forced-labour system.
OMINOUS FIGURES
We now know a lot more about the number of Gulag inmates and other relevant data.[10] For a long time, wild speculation raged over the issue, sometimes giving rise to amazing exaggerations. We shall leave it to the authors of such hyperbole to explain what purpose they served. In addition to the human losses attributable to the camp system, we are now in a position to tackle another question statistically: namely, the number of political arrests per year for virtually the whole pre- and post-Stalinist periods, as well as the sentences imposed on the accused.
The toll in human life due to events such as the famines, the forced exile of the kulaks, and other calamities is more difficult to quantify precisely and uncontroversially. The best way of assessing it is via demographic studies that calculate excess deaths for the relevant periods. Such studies encompass all the events and political measures that might have caused such deaths. They also allow us to identify losses caused not by increased mortality, but by reduced birth rates. These are losses too. Yet the unborn cannot be directly included among the regime’s victims, since they did not endure the terror. Readers can refer to the statistics and other data provided in the appendices.
I shall restrict myself to synthesizing the statistical material available for the period from 1921 to mid-1953 (the details can be found in Appendix 1).[11] Over the course of these thirty-three years, the total number of arrests for primarily political reasons (the charge of ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’) was 4,060,306 persons. Of these, 799,455 were sentenced to death; 2,634,397 were sent to camps, colonies and prison; 423,512 were banished – in other words, either forbidden to reside in some specified place (vysylka) or deported to a particular settlement (ssylka); and 215,942 fell into the category of ‘others’. Given the enormous increase in the number of arrests from 1930 onwards, we may legitimately separate the figures for 1921–9 from the specifically Stalinist toll. In 1929, the number of arrests, already higher than in the previous year, reached 54,211 and included 2,109 death sentences. But it was not of the same order as the figure for the subsequent year, which leapt to 282,926 and included 20,201 death sentences.
We also possess other data, calculated by the KGB under Khrushchev, for the period 1930–53: 3,777,380 people had been arrested for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ and the number of death sentences was around 700,000 – the majority during the 1937–8 purges.
The intensity of the persecution, the criminalization of activities hitherto regarded as legal, and the inflation in the number of utterly fictitious crimes are no doubt good indicators of the degree of ‘social peace’ enjoyed by the system and the level of composure that prevailed in the state. Notwithstanding a surge in repression in 1928, and especially 1929, the total for 1921–9 is inferior – or just slightly superior – to that for 1930 alone.
In the first half of 1953, the repressive apparatus was suddenly checked and the figures become comparatively low: 8,403 arrests, with 198 death sentences, 7,894 prison sentences of various sorts, 38 exile or deportation sentences, and 273 ‘others’. At Stalin’s death, 600,000 political prisoners were still detained in camps or prisons. By the end of 1954 the figure had fallen to 474,950. On Khrushchev’s initiative, the regime had begun to review the Stalinist policy of terror.
According to some estimates, between 1934 and 1953 about 1.6 million inmates, including common-law prisoners, died in captivity. Mortality was somewhat higher among political prisoners, of whom half a million died in these twenty years. Thus, over a period of thirty-three years, around 4 million people were sentenced for political crimes and 20 per cent of them shot – the overwhelming majority from 1930 onwards.
Detailed calculation of Stalin’s other victims is more difficult, but there are nevertheless reliable data. In 1930–2, some 1,800,000 peasants regarded as kulaks were exiled to the so-called ‘resettlement areas for kulaks’ (kulakskaia ssylka) supervised by the secret police. At the beginning of 1932, only 1,300,000 were still there: the remaining half a million had died, fled, or been released after review of their sentences. Between 1932 and 1940, these ‘kulak settlements’ registered 230,000 births and 389,521 deaths; 629,042 people had escaped, of whom 235,120 were caught and returned to their settlement. From 1935 onwards, birth rates exceeded mortality rates: between 1932 and 1934 there were 49,168 births and 271,367 deaths, but between 1935 and 1940 181,090 births were recorded as against 108,154 deaths.[12]
Without going into details, we might add that the great majority of kulaks did not perish. Most fled their villages and scattered throughout the country among Russians or Ukrainians. They got themselves hired on the major projects of the five-year plan, which were constantly short of labour and ready to accept anyone without asking too many questions. The exiles gradually had their rights restored to them and their case was closed. Some went into the army, while others were simply rehabilitated. By 1948 the kulak resettlement colonies under police surveillance had been closed.
10
I have published various tables in the appendix to my