World: Major Soviet Paper Says 20 Million Died As Victims of Stalin – by Bill Keller

A Soviet weekly newspaper today published the most detailed accounting of Stalin’s victims yet presented to a mass audience here, indicating that about 20 million died in labor camps, forced collectivization, famine and executions.




The estimates, by the historian Roy Medvedev, were printed in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti, which has a circulation of more than 20 million.
The estimated number of deaths is about equal to the number of Soviet soldiers and civilians believed killed in World War II.
Mr. Medvedev’s grim arithmetic was reported in a less detailed version last November in Moscow News, a limited-circulation weekly, which sells about 200,000 copies in Russian, but today’s article marked the first time the numbers have been disclosed to a nationwide audience.
In all, Mr. Medvedev calculated about 40 million victims of Stalin’s repressions, including those arrested, driven from their land or blacklisted.
Although the bookkeeping of Stalin’s terror is an inexact and contentious science, Mr. Medvedev’s estimates are generally in line with Western calculations that have long been disparaged by more official Soviet historians.
”It’s important that they published it, although the numbers themselves are horrible,” Mr. Medvedev said in an interview tonight. ”Those numbers include my father.”
Mr. Medvedev, a dissident Marxist who has recently been rescued from official obscurity and honored as a leading authority on dark corners of Soviet history, said the weekly newspaper solicited the article and presumably showed the contents to officials before publishing it.
Mr. Medvedev said he had no special access to official archives, but relied on his own compilations of material over the years and recent publications in the Soviet press.
Under a headline proclaiming ”The Number of Victims of Stalinism Is About 40 Million People,” in a terse, question-and answer format, Mr. Medvedev cited the human cost of Stalin’s leadership year by year, leaving it to the reader to complete the arithmetic.
Mr. Medevedev’s accounting included these victims:
* One million imprisoned or exiled from 1927 to 1929, falsely accused of being saboteurs or members of opposition parties.
* Nine million to 11 million of the more prosperous peasants driven from their lands and another two million to three million arrested or exiled in the early 1930′s campaign of forced farm collectivization. Many of these were believed to have been killed.
* Six million to seven million killed in the punitive famine inflicted on peasants in 1932 and 1933.
* One million exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935 for belonging to families of former nobility, merchants, capitalists and officials.
* About one million executed in the ”great terror” of 1937-38, and another four million to six million sent to forced labor camps from which most, including Mr. Medvedev’s father, did not return.
* Two million to three million sent to camps for violating absurdly strict labor laws imposed in 1940.
* At least 10 million to 12 million ”repressed” in World War II, including millions of Soviet-Germans and other ethnic minorities forcibly relocated.
* More than one million arrested on political grounds from 1946 to Stalin’s death in 1953.
The Soviet press has left little unsaid about Stalin’s shortcomings, probing into sacred myths like his conduct of World War II, likening him to Hitler, dissecting his cruelties period by period. But official historians have shied away from putting a number to it all..
Mr. Medvedev acknowledged in Argumenti i Fakti, and repeated tonight, that many periods of repression will never be fully measured because records have been lost or never existe