Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!psuvm!CS!JACK From: jack@CS.GLASGOW.AC.UK (Jack Campin) Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history Subject: Re: mass murder statistics Message-ID: <5468.9002131424@lewis.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Date: 13 Feb 90 14:24:15 GMT Sender: History Reply-To: History Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie, No Mean City Lines: 50 Approved: NETNEWS@PSUVM.BITNET Gateway Via: UK.AC.GLA.CS; 13 FEB 90 14:23:43 GMT In-Reply-To: >> How many people did Stalin have killed during his purges? >> 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. Conquest's figures are the most extreme, which is not surprising given his fanatical Cold Warrior ideology. There is a short article about the way he and Medvedev inflated the Stalinist death toll by Alexander Cockburn in New Statesman and Society, 3 March 1989 (it was also published in The Nation at around the same time). Cockburn cites the following: Frank Lorimer: The Population of the Soviet Union (1946) Jerry Hough & Merle Fainsod: How the Soviet Union is Governed (1979) articles by Steven Rosefielde (pro-Conquest) and Stephen Wheatcroft (anti) in Slavic Review in the mid-80s article by Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver, Slavic Review 1985 conversations with Sheila Fitzpatrick (professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin) The upshot seems to be that the total death toll from famine and purges together cannot have been above 6 million and was probably around 4 million, that Medvedev was unbelievably slapdash and Conquest indulging in sick wishful thinking. Jack Campin * Computing Science Department, Glasgow University, 17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, SCOTLAND. 041 339 8855 x6044 wk 041 556 1878 ho INTERNET: jack%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk USENET: jack@glasgow.uucp JANET: jack@uk.ac.glasgow.cs PLINGnet: ...mcvax!ukc!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack