The Great Terror

4. In prison, late 1938: 1 million. This rough estimate was based on the known prison accommodation and many reports of the level of overcrowding, together with figures of inmates for particular prisons. These last are now confirmed in Soviet accounts.⁶

5. In camps, late 1938: approximately 8 million. This is based in the main on multifarious reports from ex-prisoners. The assumption that 5 million were already in camps at the beginning of 1937 was derived merely from the estimates by other students of the matter, and may be too high. I should be inclined to reduce the 8 million at the end of 1938 to 7 million, or even a little less. Such a figure is consonant with the 12 million now given in Moscow for the camp population in 1952.⁷

The above are, in any case, only approximations.

The Great Terror

was only peripherally concerned with the total casualties of the Stalin epoch. But it reckoned the dead as no fewer than 20 million. This figure is now given in the USSR. And the general total of “repressed” is now stated (e.g., in the new high-school textbooks) as around 40 million, about half of them in the peasant terror of 1929 to 1933 and the other half from 1937 to 1953.⁸

Thus it would now be accepted almost everywhere that the estimates given above cannot be far wrong. But it is just worth recording that, though it has long been clear that the victims ran into the millions or tens of millions, Western misconceptions of the sort we discussed in Chapter 15 recently had a brief revival. Over the years, a vast amount of true information had established itself in the Western consciousness. But by an inexplicable development, when such notions no longer seemed possible, a few Western Sovietologists began to assert that the Terror had claimed far fewer victims, and that ordinary life was not affected. The writer of a Western Sovietological textbook concerned to reduce the estimates to, as he put it, a few hundred thousand or even a few tens of thousands, wrote, “Surely we don’t want to hypothesise 3 million executions or prison deaths in 1937–1938 or anything like this figure, or we are assuming most improbable percentages of men dying.”⁹

The key word here is “improbable.” The Stalin epoch is replete with what appear as improbabilities to minds unfitted to deal with the phenomena. Similarly with the argument that Stalin could not have killed millions of peasants, since that would have been “economically counterproductive.” Following such leads, a new group of Westerners came forward, with singularly bad timing, in the mid-1980s and told us (in the words of one of them) that the terror had only killed “thousands” and imprisoned “many thousands.”¹⁰ Such views could only be formed by ignoring, or actively rejecting, the earlier evidence. This was accomplished by saying that those who produced it were opposed to Stalin and Stalinism, and therefore prejudiced, and that some of the material was secondhand. Thus it was not merely a matter of mistaken assessment of the evidence. It was, contrary to the duties of a historian, a refusal to face it.

There were even demographers who, among other errors, accepted the faked census of 1939. A Soviet demographer, deploring this, explains that that census was unacceptable on three grounds. First (as I had already registered in Chapter 16 of The Harvest of Sorrow)

, the earlier 1937 census had been suppressed and the Census Board shot as spies who had “exerted themselves to diminish the population,” thus providing a certain incentive to their successors to find higher figures than were justified. Second, the 1939 totals were announced by Stalin before the new Census Board had examined the material. Third, censuses of the period omitted the deaths of those who had “died in custody.”¹¹ It is unfortunate that implausibly benign assessments should have appeared in one or two Western textbooks and periodicals and that students should thus have been methodically misinformed. Soviet professionals with whom I have discussed this are, naturally, especially outraged. And, indeed, it is worth noting of glasnost that it has produced a number of articles attacking Western apologists for the regime, from the Webbs on.