Gulag

I realize, of course, that this figure will not satisfy everybody. Some will object that not all of those arrested or deported count as “victims,” since some were criminals, or even war criminals. Yet although it is true that millions of these prisoners had criminal sentences, I do not believe that anything close to the majority were actually “criminals,” in any normal sense of the word. A woman who has picked a few pieces of grain from a field which has already been harvested is not a criminal, nor is a man who has been late to work three times, as was the father of the Russian General Alexander Lebed, who received a camp sentence for precisely that. For that matter, a prisoner of war who has been deliberately kept in a forced-labor camp many years after the war has come to an end, is not a legitimate prisoner either. By all accounts, the number of genuine professional criminals in any camp was tiny—which is why I prefer to leave the numbers as they are.

Others, however, will be unsatisfied with this figure on different grounds. Certainly in the course of writing this book, I have been asked the same question many, many times: Of these 28.7 million prisoners, how many died?

This answer is complicated too. To date, no completely satisfactory death statistics for either the Gulag or the exile system have yet appeared. ¹⁵ In the coming years, some more reliable numbers may emerge: at least one former MVD officer has personally taken it upon himself to comb methodically through the archives, camp by camp and year by year, trying to compile authentic numbers. With perhaps somewhat different motives, the Memorial Society, which has already produced the first reliable guide to the numbers of camps themselves, has set itself the task of counting the victims of repression too.

Until these compilations appear, however, we have to rely upon what we have: a year-by-year account of Gulag death rates, based on the archives of the Department of Prisoner Registration. This account seems to exclude deaths in prisons and deaths during transport. It has been compiled using overall NKVD reports, not the records of individual camps. It does not include special exiles at all. Nevertheless, I record it here, reluctantly:

Like the official prisoner statistics, the table also shows some patterns which can be reconciled with other data. The sudden spike in 1933, for example, surely represents the impact of the famine which killed six to seven million “free” Soviet citizens as well. The smaller rise in 1938 must reflect the mass executions which took place in some camps that year. The major rise in death rates during the war—nearly a quarter of prisoners in 1942— also tallies with the memoirs and recollections of people who lived through the camps in that year, and reflects the wider food shortages throughout the USSR.

Yet even if and when these numbers are improved, the question “How many died?” will still be difficult to answer with ease. In truth, no death figures compiled by Gulag authorities can ever be considered completely reliable. The culture of camp inspection and reprimand meant, among other things, that individual camp commanders had a vested interest in lying about how many of their prisoners died: both archives and memoirs indicate that it was common practice in many camps to release prisoners who were on the point of dying, thereby lowering camp death statistics.¹⁷ Although exiles moved around less frequently, and were not released when half-dead, the nature of the exile system—prisoners lived in distant villages, far from regional authorities—means that statistics on exile death rates can never be considered completely reliable either.

More important, however, the question itself has to be asked a bit more carefully. “How many died?” is in fact an imprecise question, in the case of the Soviet Union, and those who ask such a question should first consider what it is that they really want to know. Do they want to know, for example, simply how many died in the camps of the Gulag and in the exile villages in the Stalinist era, from 1929 to 1953? If so, a number based on archival sources is available, although even the historian who compiled it points out that it is incomplete, and does not cover all categories of prisoner in every year. Again, I reluctantly cite it: 2,749,163.¹⁸