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From: J_CERNY@UNHH
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Subject: mass murder statistics
Message-ID: <HISTORY%90021215471693@FINHUTC>
Date: 12 Feb 90 13:41:00 GMT
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This is in response to the questions:

>1)  How many people did Stalin have killed during his purges?
>2)  How many Armenians were killed inm Turkey earlier in this century?
>I hear wildly different numbers and I am a Social Studies teacher and would
>appreciate the info, and any commentary anyone could give.

In fact no one will ever know how many people were killed in each
of these mass murders.  Estimates range widely and you will probably
want to go by the conservative estimates of respected scholars,
realizing (as these scholars usu. note) that the true figures could
be as much as 50% higher.

For Stalin, there are issues of definition as to what counts as
a purge and what counts as some other form of death sentence (I'm
thinking of the estimated 7 million Ukranians starved to death
in 1932-33 by deliberately removing all food and sealing the
borders -- not really a purge).  Anyway, probably the most basic
single source is
        Robert Conquest, 1968, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge
                of the Thirties.
For details on  the northern death camps see
        Robert Conquest, 1978, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps.

For the Armenian genocide it is more difficult to identify one single
scholarly source.  I highly recommend the non-scholarly, but very
readable and reflective
        Michael J. Arlen, 1982, Passage to Ararat.
        (avail. in Penguin paperback)
esp. since Arlen quotes extensively from the eyewitness accounts.  I
regard 1 million as probably the best estimate we will ever have,
but you will see estimates as high as 1.5 to 2 million.  Regarding
the Armenian genocide consider these interesting points:
(1) The Turkish government has consistently denied there was a genocide
    right to this day, despite overwhelming other evidence and the USA
    has quietly acquiesed because of the Realpolitik of our having
    listening posts on the Soviet Union in Turkey.
(2) The parallels between the Armenian genocide and The Holocaust are
    striking and have been developed by some authors (there are
    important differences, too).
(3) The fact that the US Ambassador, Henry Morganthau, Jr., was in
    Turkey during the genocide and impotently tried to interceded with
    the top government officials (he was told not to worry about it,
    after all, the Turks were not bothering the Jews) and published
    a book on it immediately afterwards.
(4) Germans were important advisers to the Turkish government and some
    of these Germans are recorded as making some statements that
    foreshadow The Holocaust.
(5) Richard Hovannisian, Armenian scholar at UCLA, has been conducting
    a program to videotape eyewitness testimony from the very few
    eyewitnesses still alive.  (an analogous program to record the
    eyewitness testimony of Holocaust survivors is underway at Yale,
    conducted by Professor Langer)

I can supply a lot more bibliographic information, with my own
annotations, if there is interest on HISTORY.

Jim Cerny, University of New Hampshire
(non-historian and not of either Soviet or Armenian background!!!)