Gulag

Even if it were complete, however, this figure still would not reflect all of the victims of the Stalinist judicial system. As I say in the Introduction, the Soviet secret police did not, for the most part, use their camps in order to kill people. When they wanted to kill people, they carried out mass executions in forests: surely these are victims of Soviet justice too, and there were many of them. Using archives, one set of researchers cites a figure of 786,098 political executions from 1934 to 1953.¹⁹ Most historians consider this more or less plausible, but the haste and chaos which accompanied mass executions may well mean that we will never know. Yet even this number— which, in my view, is actually too precise to be reliable—still does not include those who died on the trains to the camps; those who died during interrogation; those whose executions were not technically “political” but were nevertheless carried out on spurious grounds; the more than 20,000 Polish officers who died in the Katyn massacres; and, most of all, those who died within a few days of release. If that is the number we really want, then it will be higher—probably far higher—although estimates will again vary greatly.

But even these numbers, I’ve found, do not always provide the answer to what people really want to know. Much of the time, when I am asked “How many died?” what the questioner really wants to know is how many people died, unnecessarily, as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution. That is, how many died in the Red Terror and the Civil War, the famines which followed in the wake of the brutal policy of collectivization, the mass deportations, the mass executions, the camps of the 1920s, the camps of the 1960s through the 1980s—as well as in the camps and mass murders of Stalin’s reign. In that case, the numbers are not only far larger, but they really are a matter of pure conjecture. The French authors of The Black Book of Communism quote a figure of twenty million deaths. Others cite numbers closer to ten or twelve million.²⁰

A single round number of dead victims would be extremely satisfying, particularly since it would allow us to compare Stalin directly with Hitler or with Mao. Yet even if we could find one, I’m not sure it would really tell the whole story of suffering either. No official figures, for example, can possibly reflect the mortality of the wives and children and aging parents left behind, since their deaths were not recorded separately. During the war, old people starved to death without ration cards: had their convict son not been digging coal in Vorkuta, they might have lived. Small children succumbed easily to epidemics of typhus and measles in cold, ill-equipped orphanages: had their mothers not been sewing uniforms in Kengir, they might have lived too.

Nor can any figures reflect the cumulative impact of Stalin’s repressions on the life and health of whole families. A man was tried and shot as an “enemy of the people”; his wife was taken to a camp as a “member of an enemy’s family”; his children grew up in orphanages and joined criminal gangs; his mother died of stress and grief; his cousins and aunts and uncles cut off all contact from one another, in order to avoid being tainted as well. Families broke apart, friendships ended, fear weighed heavily on those who remained behind, even when they did not die.

In the end, statistics can never fully describe what happened. Neither can the archival documents upon which so much of this book has been based. All of those who have written most eloquently on the subject of the Gulag have known this to be true—which is why I would like to give one of them the last word on the subject of “statistics” and “archives” and “files.”

In 1990, the writer Lev Razgon was allowed to see his own archival file, a thin collection of documents describing his arrest and the arrests of his first wife, Oksana, as well as several members of her family. He read through it, and later wrote an essay on its contents. He reflected eloquently on the contents of the file; on the sparsity of the evidence; on the ludicrous nature of the charges; on the tragedy which befell his wife’s mother; on the opaque motives of his father-in-law, the Chekist Gleb Boky; on the strange absence of repentance on the part of those who had destroyed all of them. But what struck me most about his experience of working in the archives was his description of how ambivalent he felt when he had finished reading: