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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31650 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The deaths of tens of millions in the Gulag Archipelago just plain isn't the current records-based expert consensus. (It bears mentioning that the records of Gulag system camps were opened up during the post-90s thaw and the efforts by Yeltsin government to categorize CPSU crimes for political benefit against the still-strong CPRF, and were then studied fairly extensively by Russian and Western researchers). Wikipedia summary:

Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher.[5][6][7] After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[8] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[9][10] some 390,000[11] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[12] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[13] According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility.[2] The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million[14] persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes, though not always, included with the victims of the Stalin era.[2][15]

Of course, if you include the higher estimate of famine deaths into account, you get a bit over 10 million of total deaths, but that still isn't tens of millions, and the specification of Gulag Archipelago leads one to understand we are specifically referring to the claims concerning camp deaths made by Soltzhenitzyn, among the others.

To steal an idea from Timothy Snyder, if you look at mass killings of civilians in Europe from 1933-45 you can divide them into three principal and roughly even groups: the German killings of Jews, the German killing of non-Jews, and the Soviet killing of Soviet citizens

I've sometimes observed that one of the things about the way Holocaust is discussed is that it often leads to people underestimating Nazi deaths, since, upon hearing the question "How many people did the Nazis kill", the number that automatically comes to mind and is hard to unlodge is "six million", even though that leaves out at least the equal amount of non-Jews killed.

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