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By Root 1209 0

general Western debate about Soviet history—was tainted, from the 1950s on, by the politics of the Cold War. Without archives, historians relied alternately on prisoners’ memoirs, defectors’ statements, official census figures, economic statistics, or even minor details which somehow became known abroad, such as the number of newspapers distributed to prisoners in 1931.1 Those more inclined to dislike the Soviet Union tended to choose the higher figures of victims. Those more inclined to dislike the American or Western role in the Cold War chose the lower figures. The numbers themselves ranged wildly. In The Great Terror , his then groundbreaking 1968 account of the purges, the historian Robert Conquest esimated that the NKVD had arrested seven million people in 1937 and 1938.2 In his 1985 “revisionist” account, Origins of the Purges, the historian J. Arch Getty wrote of merely “thousands” of arrests in those same two years.3

As it turned out, the opening of the Soviet archives gave neither school complete satisfaction. The first sets of figures released for Gulag prisoners seemed at first to show numbers lying squarely in the middle of the high and low estimates. According to widely published NKVD documents, these were the numbers of prisoners in Gulag camps and colonies from 1930 to 1953, as counted on January 1 of each year:

These numbers do reflect some things that we know, from many other sources, to be true. The inmate figures begin to rise in the late 1930s, as repression increased. They dip slightly during the war, reflecting the large numbers of amnesties. They rise in 1948, when Stalin clamped down once again. On top of all that, most scholars who have worked in the archives now agree that the figures are based on genuine compiliations of data provided to the NKVD by the camps. They are consistent with data from other parts of the Soviet government bureaucracy, tallying, for example, with data used by the People’s Commissariat of Finance.5 Nevertheless, they do not necessarily reflect the whole truth.

To begin with, the figures for each individual year are misleading, since they mask the camp system’s remarkably high turnover. In 1943, for example, 2,421,000 prisoners are recorded as having passed through the Gulag system, although the totals at the beginning and end of that year show a decline from 1.5 to 1.2 million. That number includes transfers within the system, but still indicates an enormous level of prisoner movement not reflected in the overall figures.6 By the same token, nearly a million prisoners left the camps during the war to join the Red Army, a fact which is barely reflected in the overall statistics, since so many prisoners arrived during the war years too. Another example: in 1947, 1,490,959 inmates entered the camps, and 1,012,967 left, an enormous turnover which is not reflected in the table either.7

Prisoners left because they died, because they escaped, because they had short sentences, because they were being released into the Red Army, or because they had been promoted to administrative positions. As I’ve written, there were also frequent amnesties for the old, the ill and for pregnant women—invariably followed by new waves of arrests. This massive, constant movement of prisoners meant that the numbers were in fact far higher than they seemed to be it first: by 1940, eight million prisoners had already passed through the camps.8 Using the inflow and outflow statistics available, and reconciling a variety of sources, the only complete reckoning I have seen estimates that eighteen million Soviet citizens passed through the camps and colonies between 1929 and 1953. This figure also tallies with other figures given by senior Russian security officials during the 1990s. According to one source, Khrushchev himself spoke of seventeen million passing through the labor camps between 1937 and 1953.9

Yet in a deeper sense, this figure is misleading too. As readers will also by now be aware, not every person condemned to forced labor in the Soviet Union actually served out his time in a concentration