Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [345]
The first two groups are relatively easy to count: from several reliable sources, we know that the number of POWs exceeded four million. 10 We also know that between December 27, 1941, and October 1, 1944, the NKVD investigated 421,199 detainees in filtration camps, and that on May 10, 1945, over 160,000 detainees were still living in them, engaged in forced labor. In January 1946, the NKVD abolished the camps and repatriated a further 228,000 to the USSR for further investigation.11 A total of about 700,000 seems, therefore, a fair guess.
The special exiles are somewhat harder to count, if only because there were so many different exile groups being sent to so many different places at so many different times for so many different reasons. In the 1920s, many of the Bolsheviks’ early opponents—Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and the like—were exiled by administrative decree, which meant they were not technically part of the Gulag, but were certainly being punished. In the early 1930s, 2.1 million kulaks were exiled, although an unknown number, certainly in the hundreds of thousands, were sent not to Kazakhstan or Siberia, but to other parts of their native province or to bad land at the edges of their collective farms: since many seem to have escaped, it is hard to know whether to count them or not. Much clearer is the position of the national groups exiled during and after the war to the “special exile” villages. Equally clear, yet much easier to forget, are odd groups like the 17,000 “former people” expelled from Leningrad after Kirov’s murder. There were also Soviet Germans who were not physically deported, but whose villages in Siberia and central Asia were turned into “special settlements”—the Gulag came to them, as it were—as well as babies born to exiles, who surely count as exiles too.
As a result, those who have tried to collate the many statistics that have been published about each of these different groups have come up with slightly different numbers. In Ne po svoei vole, published by Memorial in 2001, the historian Pavel Polyan has added up the numbers of special exiles and got a figure of 6,015,000.12 In a survey of archival publications, Otto Pohl, on the other hand, counts just over seven million special exiles from 1930 to 1948.13 He gives the postwar figures for people living in “special settlements” as follows:
Still, on the principle that the low estimate will satisfy the more fastidious, I have decided to choose Polyan’s number: six million exiles. Adding the numbers together, the total number of forced laborers in the USSR comes to 28.7 million.
I realize, of course, that this figure will not satisfy everybody. Some will object that not all of those arrested or deported count as “victims,” since some were criminals, or even war criminals. Yet although it is true that millions of these prisoners had criminal sentences, I do not believe that anything close to the majority were actually “criminals,” in any normal sense of the word. A woman who has picked a few pieces of grain from a field which has already been harvested is not a criminal, nor is a man who has been late to work three times, as was the father of the Russian General Alexander Lebed, who received a camp sentence for precisely that. For that matter, a prisoner of war who has been deliberately kept in a forced-labor camp many years after the war has come to an end, is not a legitimate prisoner either. By all accounts, the number of genuine professional criminals