The number of victims of Stalinist repressions. Chronology, statistics and geography of repressions

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Stalinist repressions:
What was it?

To the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repressions

In this material, we have collected the memories of eyewitnesses, fragments from official documents, figures and facts provided by researchers in order to provide answers to questions that excite our society again and again. The Russian state has not been able to give clear answers to these questions, so until now, everyone is forced to look for answers on their own.

Who was affected by the repression

Representatives of various groups of the population fell under the flywheel of Stalinist repressions. The most famous are the names of artists, Soviet leaders and military leaders. About peasants and workers often only the names from the execution lists and camp archives are known. They did not write memoirs, tried unnecessarily not to recall the camp past, their relatives often refused them. The presence of a convicted relative often meant an end to a career, study, because the children of arrested workers, dispossessed peasants might not know the truth about what happened to their parents.

When we heard about another arrest, we never asked, “Why was he taken?”, but there were few like us. Crazed with fear, people asked each other this question for pure self-consolation: they take people for something, which means they won’t take me, because there’s nothing for it! They refined themselves, coming up with reasons and justifications for each arrest, - “She really is a smuggler”, “He allowed himself such a thing”, “I myself heard him say ...” And one more thing: “You should have expected this - he has such terrible character”, “It always seemed to me that something was wrong with him”, “This is a complete stranger”. That is why the question: “Why did they take him?” has become taboo for us. It's time to understand that people are taken for nothing.

- Nadezhda Mandelstam , writer and wife of Osip Mandelstam

From the very beginning of terror to this day, attempts have not stopped to present it as a fight against "sabotage", enemies of the fatherland, limiting the composition of the victims to certain classes hostile to the state - kulaks, bourgeois, priests. The victims of terror were depersonalized and turned into "contingents" (Poles, spies, wreckers, counter-revolutionary elements). However, political terror was total in nature, and representatives of all groups of the population of the USSR became its victims: “the cause of engineers”, “the cause of doctors”, persecution of scientists and entire areas in science, personnel purges in the army before and after the war, deportation of entire peoples.

Poet Osip Mandelstam

He died in transit, the place of death is not known for certain.

Directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold

Marshals of the Soviet Union

Tukhachevsky (executed), Voroshilov, Egorov (executed), Budeny, Blucher (died in Lefortovo prison).

How many people were hurt

According to the estimates of the Memorial Society, there were 4.5-4.8 million people convicted for political reasons, 1.1 million people were shot.

Estimates of the number of victims of repression vary and depend on the method of counting. If we take into account only those convicted under political articles, then according to an analysis of the statistics of the regional departments of the KGB of the USSR, carried out in 1988, the bodies of the Cheka-GPU-OGPU-NKVD-NKGB-MGB arrested 4,308,487 people, of which 835,194 were shot. According to the same data, about 1.76 million people died in the camps. According to the calculations of the Memorial Society, there were more people convicted for political reasons - 4.5-4.8 million people, of which 1.1 million people were shot.

The victims of Stalinist repressions were representatives of some peoples who were subjected to forcible deportation (Germans, Poles, Finns, Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars and others). This is about 6 million people. One in five did not live to see the end of the journey - about 1.2 million people died during the difficult conditions of the deportations. During dispossession, about 4 million peasants suffered, of which at least 600 thousand died in exile.

In general, about 39 million people suffered as a result of Stalin's policies. The victims of repression include those who died in the camps from disease and harsh working conditions, the dispossessed, the victims of hunger, the victims of the unjustifiably cruel decrees "on absenteeism" and "on three spikelets" and other groups of the population who received excessively severe punishment for minor offenses due to repressive the nature of the legislation and the consequences of that time.

Why was it necessary?

The worst thing is not that you are suddenly suddenly taken away from a warm, well-established life, not Kolyma and Magadan, and hard labor. At first, a person desperately hopes for a misunderstanding, for a mistake by the investigators, then painfully waits for them to call, apologize, and let them go home, to their children and husband. And then the victim no longer hopes, does not painfully search for an answer to the question of who needs all this, then there is a primitive struggle for life. The worst thing is the meaninglessness of what is happening ... Does anyone know what it was for?

Evgenia Ginzburg,

writer and journalist

In July 1928, speaking at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Joseph Stalin described the need to fight "foreign elements" as follows: "As we move forward, the resistance of the capitalist elements will increase, the class struggle will intensify, and Soviet power, forces which will grow more and more, will pursue a policy of isolating these elements, a policy of disintegrating the enemies of the working class, and finally, a policy of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters, creating a basis for the further advancement of the working class and the bulk of the peasantry.

In 1937, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR N. Yezhov published Order No. 00447, in accordance with which a large-scale campaign was launched to destroy "anti-Soviet elements." They were recognized as the culprits of all the failures of the Soviet leadership: “Anti-Soviet elements are the main instigators of all kinds of anti-Soviet and sabotage crimes, both on collective farms and state farms, and in transport, and in some areas of industry. The state security organs are faced with the task of crushing this entire gang of anti-Soviet elements in the most merciless way, protecting the working Soviet people from their counter-revolutionary intrigues, and finally, once and for all, putting an end to their vile subversive work against the foundations of the Soviet state. In accordance with this, I order - from August 5, 1937, in all republics, territories and regions, to begin an operation to repress former kulaks, active anti-Soviet elements and criminals. This document marks the beginning of an era of large-scale political repression, which later became known as the Great Terror.

Stalin and other members of the Politburo (V. Molotov, L. Kaganovich, K. Voroshilov) personally compiled and signed execution lists - pre-trial circulars listing the number or names of victims to be convicted by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court with a predetermined punishment. According to researchers, under the death sentences of at least 44.5 thousand people are Stalin's personal signatures and resolutions.

The myth of the effective manager Stalin

Until now, in the media and even in textbooks, one can find the justification of political terror in the USSR by the need for industrialization in a short time. Since the release of the decree obliging convicts to serve their sentences in labor camps for more than 3 years, prisoners have been actively involved in the construction of various infrastructure facilities. In 1930, the Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps of the OGPU (GULAG) was created and huge flows of prisoners were sent to key construction sites. During the existence of this system, from 15 to 18 million people have passed through it.

During the 1930-1950s, the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow Canal, was carried out by the forces of the Gulag prisoners. The prisoners built Uglich, Rybinsk, Kuibyshev and other hydroelectric power stations, erected metallurgical plants, facilities of the Soviet nuclear program, the longest railways and highways. Gulag prisoners built dozens of Soviet cities (Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Dudinka, Norilsk, Vorkuta, Novokuibyshevsk and many others).

The effectiveness of the work of prisoners was not highly characterized by Beria himself: “The existing ration in the Gulag of 2000 calories is designed for a person sitting in prison and not working. In practice, this underestimated norm is also released by supplying organizations only by 65-70%. Therefore, a significant percentage of the camp labor force falls into the category of weak and useless people in production. In general, the labor force is used no more than 60-65 percent.”

To the question "Is Stalin needed?" we can only give one answer - a firm "no". Even without taking into account the tragic consequences of famine, repression and terror, even considering only the economic costs and benefits - and even making every possible assumption in favor of Stalin - we get results that clearly show that Stalin's economic policy did not lead to positive results. Forced redistribution significantly worsened productivity and social welfare.

- Sergei Guriev , economist

The economic efficiency of Stalinist industrialization by the hands of prisoners is extremely lowly assessed by modern economists. Sergey Guriev cites the following figures: by the end of the 1930s, productivity in agriculture had only reached the pre-revolutionary level, while in industry it was one and a half times lower than in 1928. Industrialization led to huge losses in welfare (minus 24%).

Brave new world

Stalinism is not only a system of repression, it is also the moral degradation of society. The Stalinist system made tens of millions of slaves - morally broke people. One of the most terrible texts that I have read in my life is the tortured "confessions" of the great biologist Academician Nikolai Vavilov. Only a few can endure torture. But many - tens of millions! – were broken and became moral freaks out of fear of being personally repressed.

- Alexey Yablokov , corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Philosopher and historian of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt explains that in order to turn Lenin's revolutionary dictatorship into a fully totalitarian government, Stalin had to artificially create an atomized society. For this, an atmosphere of fear was created in the USSR, and whistleblowing was encouraged. Totalitarianism did not destroy real "enemies", but imaginary ones, and this is its terrible difference from ordinary dictatorship. None of the destroyed sections of society were hostile to the regime and probably would not become hostile in the foreseeable future.

In order to destroy all social and family ties, the repressions were carried out in such a way as to threaten the same fate with the accused and everyone in the most ordinary relations with him, from casual acquaintances to closest friends and relatives. This policy penetrated deeply into Soviet society, where people, out of selfish interests or fearing for their lives, betrayed neighbors, friends, even members of their own families. In their desire for self-preservation, the masses of people abandoned their own interests, and became, on the one hand, a victim of power, and on the other, its collective embodiment.

The corollary of the simple and ingenious device of "guilt for association with the enemy" is such that, as soon as a person is accused, his former friends immediately turn into his worst enemies: in order to save their own skin, they hasten to jump out with unsolicited information and denunciations, supplying non-existent data against accused. Ultimately, it was by developing this device to its latest and most fantastic extremes that the Bolshevik rulers succeeded in creating an atomized and fragmented society, the like of which we have never seen before, and whose events and catastrophes in such a pure form would hardly have happened without it.

- Hannah Arendt, philosopher

The deep disunity of Soviet society, the lack of civil institutions were inherited by the new Russia, and became one of the fundamental problems hindering the creation of democracy and civil peace in our country.

How the state and society fought the legacy of Stalinism

To date, Russia has experienced "two and a half attempts at de-Stalinization." The first and largest was deployed by N. Khrushchev. It began with a report at the 20th Congress of the CPSU:

“They arrested without the sanction of the prosecutor... What else could be a sanction when everything was allowed by Stalin. He was the chief prosecutor in these matters. Stalin gave not only permission, but also instructions on arrests on his own initiative. Stalin was a very suspicious person, with morbid suspicion, as we were convinced while working with him. He could look at a person and say: “something your eyes are running around today,” or: “why do you often turn away today, don’t look directly into your eyes.” Painful suspicion led him to sweeping distrust. Everywhere and everywhere he saw "enemies", "double-dealers", "spies". Having unlimited power, he allowed cruel arbitrariness, suppressed a person morally and physically. When Stalin said that such and such should be arrested, one should have taken it on faith that he was an "enemy of the people." And the gang of Beria, who was in charge of the state security organs, climbed out of their skin to prove the guilt of the arrested persons, the correctness of the materials they fabricated. And what evidence was put into play? Confessions of the arrested. And the investigators got these "confessions".

As a result of the fight against the cult of personality, sentences were revised, more than 88 thousand prisoners were rehabilitated. Nevertheless, the era of the “thaw” that came after these events turned out to be very short-lived. Soon, many dissidents who disagree with the policy of the Soviet leadership will become victims of political persecution.

The second wave of de-Stalinization occurred in the late 80s - early 90s. Only then did the public become aware of at least approximate figures characterizing the scale of the Stalinist terror. At this time, sentences passed in the 30s and 40s were also reviewed. In most cases, the convicted were rehabilitated. Half a century later, posthumously dispossessed peasants were rehabilitated.

A timid attempt at a new de-Stalinization was made during the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev. However, it did not bring significant results. Rosarkhiv, at the direction of the president, posted on its website documents about 20,000 Poles shot by the NKVD near Katyn.

Programs to preserve the memory of the victims are being phased out due to lack of funding.

The history of Russia, as well as other former post-Soviet republics in the period from 1928 to 1953, is called the “Stalin era”. He is positioned as a wise ruler, a brilliant statesman, acting on the basis of "expediency." In fact, they were driven by completely different motives.

Talking about the beginning of the political career of the leader who became a tyrant, such authors shyly hush up one indisputable fact: Stalin was a recidivist convict with seven “walkers”. Robbery and violence were the main form of his social activity in his youth. Repression became an integral part of the state course pursued by him.

Lenin received in him a worthy successor. “Creatively developing his teachings,” Iosif Vissarionovich came to the conclusion that he should rule the country by methods of terror, constantly instilling fear in his fellow citizens.

The generation of people whose mouths can speak the truth about Stalin's repressions is leaving... Are the newfangled articles that whiten the dictator a spit on their suffering, on their broken life...

Leader who sanctioned torture

As you know, Iosif Vissarionovich personally signed the death lists for 400,000 people. In addition, Stalin toughened repression as much as possible, authorizing the use of torture during interrogations. It was they who were given the green light to complete lawlessness in the dungeons. It was directly related to the notorious telegram of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated January 10, 1939, which literally unleashed the hands of the punitive authorities.

Creativity in introducing torture

Let us recall excerpts from the letter of commander Lisovsky, who is being abused by the satraps of the leader ...

"... A ten-day conveyor interrogation with a cruel vicious beating and no opportunity to sleep. Then - a twenty-day punishment cell. Then - forcing to sit with arms raised up, and also to stand bent over, with his head hidden under the table, for 7-8 hours ..."

The desire of the detainees to prove their innocence and their failure to sign fabricated charges caused an increase in torture and beatings. The social status of the detainees did not play a role. Recall that Robert Eikhe, a candidate member of the Central Committee, had his spine broken during interrogation, and Marshal Blucher died from beatings during interrogations in Lefortovo prison.

Leader's motivation

The number of victims of Stalin's repressions was not tens, not hundreds of thousands, but seven million starved to death and four million arrested (general statistics will be presented below). Only the number of those shot was about 800 thousand people ...

How did Stalin motivate his actions, boundlessly striving for the Olympus of power?

What does Anatoly Rybakov write about this in Children of the Arbat? Analyzing the personality of Stalin, he shares with us his judgments. “A ruler who is loved by the people is weak because his power is based on the emotions of other people. Another thing is when people are afraid of him! Then the power of the ruler depends on him. This is a strong ruler!” Hence the leader's credo - to inspire love through fear!

Steps adequate to this idea were taken by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Repression became his main competitive tool in his political career.

Beginning of revolutionary activity

Iosif Vissarionovich became interested in revolutionary ideas at the age of 26 after meeting V. I. Lenin. He was engaged in robbery of funds for the party treasury. Fate took him 7 links to Siberia. Stalin was distinguished by pragmatism, prudence, promiscuity in means, rigidity towards people, egocentrism from a young age. Repressions against financial institutions - robberies and violence - were his. Then the future leader of the party participated in the Civil War.

Stalin in the Central Committee

In 1922, Joseph Vissarionovich received a long-awaited career opportunity. Sick and weakening, Vladimir Ilyich introduces him, along with Kamenev and Zinoviev, to the Central Committee of the party. Thus, Lenin creates a political counterbalance to Leon Trotsky, who really claims to be the leader.

Stalin simultaneously heads two party structures: the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee and the Secretariat. In this post, he brilliantly studied the art of party undercover intrigues, which was useful to him later in the fight against competitors.

Stalin's position in the system of red terror

The red terror machine was launched even before Stalin came to the Central Committee.

09/05/1918 The Council of People's Commissars issues a Decree "On the Red Terror". The body for its implementation, called the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK), operated under the Council of People's Commissars from December 7, 1917.

The reason for such a radicalization of domestic politics was the assassination of M. Uritsky, chairman of the St. Petersburg Cheka, and the attempt on the life of V. Lenin, Fanny Kaplan, acting from the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. Both events took place on August 30, 1918. Already this year, the Cheka unleashed a wave of repression.

According to statistics, 21,988 people were arrested and imprisoned; 3061 hostages taken; 5544 shot, imprisoned in concentration camps 1791.

By the time Stalin came to the Central Committee, gendarmes, policemen, tsarist officials, entrepreneurs, and landlords had already been repressed. First of all, a blow was dealt to the classes that are the backbone of the monarchical structure of society. However, "creatively developing the teachings of Lenin", Iosif Vissarionovich outlined new main directions of terror. In particular, a course was taken to destroy the social base of the village - agricultural entrepreneurs.

Stalin since 1928 - the ideologist of violence

It was Stalin who turned repression into the main instrument of domestic policy, which he substantiated theoretically.

His concept of the intensification of the class struggle formally becomes the theoretical basis for the constant escalation of violence by state authorities. The country shuddered when it was first voiced by Iosif Vissarionovich at the July Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1928. Since that time, he actually becomes the leader of the Party, the inspirer and ideologist of violence. The tyrant declared war on his own people.

Hidden by slogans, the real meaning of Stalinism is manifested in the unrestrained pursuit of power. Its essence is shown by the classic - George Orwell. The Englishman showed very clearly that power for this ruler was not a means, but an end. Dictatorship was no longer perceived by him as a defense of the revolution. The revolution became a means to establish a personal unlimited dictatorship.

Iosif Vissarionovich in 1928-1930 began by initiating the fabrication by the OGPU of a number of public trials that plunged the country into an atmosphere of shock and fear. Thus, Stalin's cult of personality began to form with trials and instilling horror in the whole society ... Mass repressions were accompanied by public recognition of those who committed non-existent crimes as "enemies of the people." People were brutally tortured into signing accusations fabricated by the investigation. The cruel dictatorship imitated the class struggle, cynically violating the Constitution and all norms of universal morality...

Three global lawsuits were rigged: the “Union Bureau Affair” (putting managers at risk); "The Case of the Industrial Party" (the wrecking of the Western powers against the economy of the USSR was imitated); "The Case of the Labor Peasant Party" (obvious falsification of damage to the seed fund and delays with mechanization). Moreover, they all united in a single cause in order to create the appearance of a single conspiracy against the Soviet government and provide scope for further falsifications of the OGPU - NKVD.

As a result, the entire economic management of the national economy was replaced from the old "specialists" to "new cadres" ready to work on the instructions of the "leader".

Through the mouths of Stalin, who provided the state apparatus loyal to repressions with the courts, the Party's adamant determination was further expressed: to oust and ruin thousands of entrepreneurs - industrialists, merchants, small and medium; destroy the basis of agricultural production - the prosperous peasantry (indiscriminately calling it "kulaks"). At the same time, the new voluntarist party position was masked by "the will of the poorest strata of workers and peasants."

Behind the scenes, parallel to this "general line", the "father of the peoples" consistently, with the help of provocations and false evidence, began to implement the line of liquidating their party competitors for the highest state power (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev).

Forced collectivization

The truth about Stalin's repressions of the period 1928-1932. testifies that the main social base of the village - an efficient agricultural producer - became the main object of repression. The goal is clear: the entire peasant country (which in fact at that time was Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic and Transcaucasian republics) was to turn under the pressure of repression from a self-sufficient economic complex into an obedient donor for the implementation of Stalin's industrialization plans and the maintenance of hypertrophied power structures.

In order to clearly indicate the object of his repressions, Stalin went on an obvious ideological forgery. Economically and socially unjustified, he managed to ensure that party ideologists obedient to him singled out a normal self-supporting (profitable) producer into a separate "class of kulaks" - the target of a new blow. Under the ideological leadership of Joseph Vissarionovich, a plan was developed for the destruction of the social foundations of the village that had developed over the centuries, the destruction of the rural community - the Decree "On the liquidation of ... kulak farms" of 01/30/1930

The Red Terror came to the village. Peasants who fundamentally disagreed with collectivization were subjected to Stalinist trials - "troikas", in most cases ending in executions. Less active “kulaks”, as well as “kulak families” (any persons subjectively defined as “rural activists” could fall into the category) were subjected to forcible confiscation of property and eviction. A body of permanent operational management of the eviction was created - a secret operational management under the leadership of Efim Evdokimov.

Settlers in the extreme regions of the North, victims of Stalin's repressions, were previously identified on a list basis in the Volga region, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Siberia, and the Urals.

In 1930-1931. 1.8 million were evicted, and in 1932-1940. - 0.49 million people.

Organization of hunger

However, executions, ruin and eviction in the 30s of the last century are not all Stalin's repressions. Their brief enumeration should be supplemented by the organization of famine. The real reason for it was the inadequate approach of Joseph Vissarionovich personally to insufficient grain procurements in 1932. Why was the plan fulfilled by only 15-20%? The main reason was crop failure.

His subjective plan for industrialization was under threat. It would be wise to reduce plans by 30%, postpone them, and first stimulate the agricultural producer and wait for the harvest year ... Stalin did not want to wait, he demanded immediate provision of food for the swollen power structures and new gigantic construction projects - Donbass, Kuzbass. The leader made a decision - to withdraw from the peasants the grain intended for sowing and for consumption.

On October 22, 1932, two extraordinary commissions led by the odious personalities Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov launched a misanthropic campaign of “fighting the kulaks” to seize bread, which was accompanied by violence, quick to punish by troika courts and the eviction of wealthy agricultural producers to the regions of the Far North. It was genocide...

It is noteworthy that the cruelty of the satraps was actually initiated and not stopped by Joseph Vissarionovich himself.

Known fact: correspondence between Sholokhov and Stalin

Mass repressions of Stalin in 1932-1933. are documented. M. A. Sholokhov, the author of The Quiet Flows the Don, addressed the leader, defending his countrymen, with letters, exposing lawlessness during the confiscation of grain. In detail, with an indication of the villages, the names of the victims and their tormentors, the famous resident of the village of Veshenskaya stated the facts. Bullying and violence against the peasants are horrifying: brutal beatings, breaking out of joints, partial strangulation, mock execution, eviction from houses ... In a response letter, Joseph Vissarionovich only partially agreed with Sholokhov. The real position of the leader can be seen in the lines where he calls the peasants saboteurs, "quietly" trying to disrupt the provision of food...

Such a voluntaristic approach caused famine in the Volga region, Ukraine, the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Siberia, and the Urals. A special Statement of the State Duma of Russia, published in April 2008, disclosed to the public previously classified statistics (previously, propaganda concealed these repressions of Stalin in every possible way.)

How many people died of starvation in the above regions? The figure set by the State Duma commission is appalling: more than 7 million.

Other areas of pre-war Stalinist terror

We will also consider three more directions of Stalinist terror, and in the following table we will present each of them in more detail.

With the sanctions of Joseph Vissarionovich, a policy was also pursued to oppress freedom of conscience. A citizen of the Land of Soviets had to read the Pravda newspaper, and not go to church ...

Hundreds of thousands of families of formerly productive peasants, fearful of dispossession and exile to the North, became an army supporting the country's gigantic construction projects. In order to limit their rights, to make them manipulated, it was at that time that passportization of the population in cities was carried out. Only 27 million people received passports. Peasants (still the majority of the population) remained without passports, did not enjoy the full range of civil rights (freedom to choose their place of residence, freedom to choose work) and were “tied” to the collective farm at their place of residence with the obligatory condition that they fulfill workday norms.

Antisocial policy was accompanied by the destruction of families, an increase in the number of homeless children. This phenomenon has acquired such a scale that the state was forced to respond to it. With the sanction of Stalin, the Politburo of the Land of Soviets issued one of the most inhuman decrees - punitive in relation to children.

The anti-religious offensive as of 04/01/1936 led to a reduction in Orthodox churches to 28%, mosques - to 32% of their pre-revolutionary number. The number of clergy decreased from 112.6 thousand to 17.8 thousand.

Passportization of the urban population was carried out for repressive purposes. More than 385 thousand people did not receive passports and were forced to leave the cities. 22.7 thousand people were arrested.

One of the most cynical crimes of Stalin is his sanctioning of the secret resolution of the Politburo of 04/07/1935, which allows teenagers from 12 years old to be brought to trial and determines their punishment up to the death penalty. In 1936 alone, 125,000 children were placed in NKVD colonies. As of April 1, 1939, 10,000 children were exiled to the Gulag system.

Great terror

The state flywheel of terror was gaining momentum ... The power of Joseph Vissarionovich, starting in 1937, as a result of repressions over the whole society, became comprehensive. However, their biggest leap was just ahead. In addition to the final and already physical reprisal against former party colleagues - Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev - mass "purges of the state apparatus" were carried out.

Terror has gained unprecedented proportions. The OGPU (since 1938 - the NKVD) responded to all complaints and anonymous letters. A person's life was broken for one carelessly dropped word ... Even the Stalinist elite was repressed - statesmen: Kosior, Eikhe, Postyshev, Goloshchekin, Vareikis; military leaders Blucher, Tukhachevsky; Chekists Yagoda, Yezhov.

On the eve of the Great Patriotic War, leading military personnel were shot on fabricated cases “under an anti-Soviet conspiracy”: 19 qualified commanders at the corps level - divisions with combat experience. The cadres who replaced them did not possess the proper operational and tactical art.

Stalin's cult of personality was characterized not only by the showcase facades of Soviet cities. The repressions of the “leader of the peoples” gave rise to the monstrous system of Gulag camps, providing the Land of Soviets with free labor, a mercilessly exploited labor resource for extracting wealth from the underdeveloped regions of the Far North and Central Asia.

The dynamics of the increase in those held in camps and labor colonies is impressive: in 1932 it was about 140 thousand prisoners, and in 1941 - about 1.9 million.

In particular, ironically, the convicts of Kolyma mined 35% of the allied gold, being in terrible conditions of detention. We list the main camps that are part of the GULAG system: Solovetsky (45 thousand prisoners), logging camps - Svirlag and Temnikovo (respectively 43 and 35 thousand); oil and coal production - Ukhtapechlag (51 thousand); chemical industry - Bereznyakov and Solikamsk (63 thousand); development of the steppes - Karaganda camp (30 thousand); construction of the Volga-Moscow canal (196 thousand); construction of BAM (260 thousand); gold mining in Kolyma (138 thousand); Nickel mining in Norilsk (70 thousand).

For the most part, people stayed in the Gulag system in a typical way: after a night of arrest and an ill-judged prejudiced trial. And although this system was created under Lenin, but it was under Stalin that political prisoners began to enter it en masse after mass trials: “enemies of the people” - kulaks (in fact, an effective agricultural producer), or even entire deported nationalities. Most served a sentence of 10 to 25 years under Article 58. The process of investigation on it involved torture and a break in the will of the convict.

In the case of the resettlement of kulaks and small peoples, the train with prisoners stopped right in the taiga or in the steppe, and the convicts themselves built a camp and a special prison (TON). From the 1930s, the labor of prisoners was mercilessly exploited to fulfill five-year plans - 12-14 hours a day. Tens of thousands of people died from overwork, poor nutrition, poor medical care.

Instead of a conclusion

The years of Stalin's repressions - from 1928 to 1953. - changed the atmosphere in a society that has ceased to believe in justice, which is under the pressure of constant fear. Since 1918, people were accused and shot by the revolutionary military tribunals. An inhuman system developed... The Tribunal became the Cheka, then the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, then the OGPU, then the NKVD. The executions as part of the 58th article were valid until 1947, and then Stalin replaced them with 25 years of serving in camps.

In total, about 800 thousand people were shot.

Moral and physical torture of the entire population of the country, in fact, lawlessness and arbitrariness, was carried out on behalf of the workers' and peasants' power, the revolution.

The disenfranchised people were terrorized by the Stalinist system constantly and methodically. The beginning of the process of restoring justice was laid by the 20th Congress of the CPSU.

(excerpt from O. Matveychev's book "Imperative Mood of History")

But here the question of repressions arises: they say, millions of people died in them, and quite innocently, and the magnitude of these victims makes Stalin’s victory a “pyrrhic victory”: they say, we ourselves killed our own people more than our enemies ...

At the same time, not only the enemies of Russia, but also its greatest patriots compete in hatred for Stalin. In one of the most "Russian" encyclopedias, compiled with great love by the most terrific patriots, it is written that 60 million citizens died from the Bolshevik regime, and Stalin personally is responsible for as many as 17 million! Like this: not 18 and not 16, but 17!

The figures of the so-called Stalinist repressions were called different. Ask 10 people, and they will give you 10 different numbers, from 4 to 100 million shot and repressed... Although it would seem that it is not difficult to calculate for so many years, at least orders of magnitude... Although it would seem that it is not difficult to calculate for so many years, at least orders of magnitude...

In fact, everything has been calculated for a long time.

The world's most recognized specialist in the field of repression, anti-Stalinist, but a decent scientist Viktor Zemskov, who began to deal with this issue back in perestroika, having studied the volumes of Stalin's accountants, for any mistake in which these accountants themselves would have gone to prison, back in 1991 in the Sotsis magazine published genuine data on the scale of repressions (see. Nos. 6 and 7). Here is a summary of the data from these studies:

“The Soviet and foreign public, for the most part, is still under the influence of far-fetched statistical calculations that do not correspond to historical truth, contained both in the works of foreign authors (R. Conquest, S. Cohen, etc.), and in the publications of a number of Soviet researchers ( R. A. Medvedev, V. A. Chalikova and others). Moreover, in the works of all these authors, the discrepancy with genuine statistics never goes in the direction of understatement, but exclusively only in the direction of multiple exaggeration. One gets the impression that they are competing with each other to amaze readers with numbers, so to speak, more astronomically ...

Here is what, for example, S. Cohen writes (with reference to the book by R. Conquest "The Great Terror", published in 1968 in the USA): "... By the end of 1939, the number of prisoners in prisons and separate concentration camps increased to million people (compared to 30 thousand in 1928 and 5 million in 1933-1935)”.

In reality, in January 1940, there were 1,334,408 prisoners in the Gulag camps, 315,584 in the Gulag colonies, and 190,266 in prisons. In total, there were then 1,850,258 prisoners in the camps, colonies and prisons, i.e. the statistics given by R. Conquest and S. Cohen are exaggerated by almost five times.

R. Conquest and S. Cohen are echoed by the Soviet researcher V. A. Chalikova, who writes: “Based on various data, calculations show that in 1937-1950 there were 8-12 million people in camps that occupied vast spaces.” .. In fact, for the period 1934-1953. the maximum number of prisoners in the Gulag, falling on January 1, 1950, was 2,561,351 people. Consequently, V. A. Chalikova ... exaggerates the true number of prisoners by about five times.

N. S. Khrushchev also contributed to confusing the issue of the statistics of GULAG prisoners, who, apparently in order to present his own role as a liberator of the victims of Stalinist repressions on a larger scale, wrote in his memoirs: “... When Stalin died, there were up to 10 million people”. In reality, on January 1, 1953, there were 2,468,524 prisoners in the Gulag: 1,727,970 in camps and 740,554 in colonies. The TsGAOR of the USSR keeps copies of the memos of the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR addressed to N. S. Khrushchev, indicating the exact number of prisoners, including at the time of I. V. Stalin's death. Consequently, N. S. Khrushchev was well informed about the true number of Gulag prisoners and deliberately exaggerated it four times.

Available publications about the repressions of the 30s - early 50s, as a rule, contain distorted, greatly exaggerated data on the number of those convicted for political reasons or, as it was then officially called, for "counter-revolutionary crimes", i.e. under the infamous article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. This also applies to the data cited by R. A. Medvedev on the scope of repressions in 1937-1938. Here is what he wrote: “In 1937-1938, according to my calculations, from 5 to 7 million people were repressed: about a million party members and about a million former party members as a result of party purges of the 20s and the first half of the 30s , the remaining 3-5 million people are non-partisan, belonging to all segments of the population. Most of those arrested in 1937-1938. ended up in forced labor camps, a dense network of which covered the whole country. According to R. A. Medvedev, the number of prisoners in the Gulag for 1937-1938. should have increased by several million people, but this was not observed. From January 1937 to January 1, 1938, the number of Gulag prisoners increased from 1,196,369 to 1,881,570, and by January 1, 1939, it had dropped to 1,672,438. For 1937-1938. in the Gulag, there was indeed a surge in the growth of the number of prisoners, but by several hundred thousand, and not by several million. And it was natural, because. in fact, the number of those convicted for political reasons (for "counter-revolutionary crimes") in the USSR for the period from 1921 to 1953, i.e. for 33 years, amounted to about 3.8 million people. The statements of R. A. Medvedev that, as if only in 1937-1938. 5-7 million people were repressed, do not correspond to the truth. The statement of the chairman of the KGB of the USSR V. A. Kryuchkov that in 1937-1938. no more than a million people were arrested, which is in full agreement with the current Gulag statistics that we studied in the second half of the 1930s.

In February 1954, in the name of N. S. Khrushchev, a certificate was prepared, signed by the Prosecutor General of the USSR R. Rudenko, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR S. Kruglov and the Minister of Justice of the USSR K. Gorshenin, in which the number of those convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes over the period from 1921 to February 1, 1954. In total, during this period, 3,777,380 people were convicted by the Collegium of the OGPU, the “troikas” of the NKVD, the Special Meeting, the Military Collegium, courts and military tribunals, including capital punishment - 642,980, to detention in camps and prisons for a period of 25 years or less - 2,369,220, in exile and exile - 765,180 people.

It must be emphasized that from the above official state document it follows that for the period from 1921 to 1953. less than 700,000 of those arrested for political reasons were sentenced to capital punishment. In this regard, we consider it our duty to refute the statement of the former member of the Party Control Committee under the Central Committee of the CPSU O. G. Shatunovskaya, who, referring to a certain document of the KGB of the USSR, which subsequently allegedly mysteriously disappeared, writes: “... From January 1, 1935 to On June 22, 1941, 19 million 840 thousand "enemies of the people" were arrested. Of these, 7 million were shot. Most of the rest died in the camps.” In this information, O. G. Shatunovskaya allowed more than a 10-fold exaggeration of both the scope of the repressions and the number of those executed. She also assures that most of the rest (presumably 7-10 million people) died in the camps. We have absolutely accurate information that during the period from January 1, 1934 to December 31, 1947, 963,766 prisoners died in the Gulag labor camps, and this number includes not only “enemies of the people”, but also criminals ... In In the pre-war years, mortality among Gulag prisoners had a noticeable downward trend. In 1939, in the camps, it remained at the level of 3.29% of the annual contingent, and in the colonies - 2.30% ...

During the first three years of the war, more than 2 million GULAG prisoners worked at construction sites subordinate to the NKVD, including 448 thousand people were transferred to the construction of railways, 310 thousand to industrial construction, 320 thousand to forest industry camps, and 171 thousand to mining and metallurgical industry. , airfield and highway construction - 268 thousand. In the first period of the war, 200 thousand prisoners were transferred to work on the construction of defensive lines by the Gulag.

In addition, in the middle of 1944, 225 thousand Gulag prisoners were used at enterprises and construction sites of other people's commissariats, including the arms and ammunition industry - 39 thousand, ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy - 40 thousand, aviation and tank industry - 20 thousand. , coal and oil - 15 thousand, power plants and the electrical industry - 10 thousand, timber - 10 thousand, etc. From the beginning of the war until the end of 1944, the NKVD of the USSR transferred about 3 billion rubles to the state income received from other People's Commissariats for the labor force provided to them.

By the beginning of the war, the number of prisoners in the camps and colonies of the Gulag amounted to 2.3 million people. As of June 1, 1944, their number dropped to 1.2 million. During the three years of the war (until June 1, 1944), 2.9 million left the camps and colonies of the Gulag and 1.8 million convicts again arrived ... In general of those convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes, 57.7% were serving sentences on charges of treason, 17.1% - anti-Soviet agitation, 8.0% - participation in anti-Soviet conspiracies, anti-Soviet organizations and groups, 6.4% - counter-revolutionary sabotage, 3, 2 - espionage, 2.2% - rebellion and political banditry, 1.7% - terror and terrorist intentions, 0.8% - sabotage and sabotage activities, 0.6% - family members of traitors to the Motherland. The remaining 2.3% of the "counter-revolutionaries" were serving sentences in the ITL and ITK on a number of other charges of a political nature.

Let's add here an excerpt from an interview with Viktor Zemskov:

“- What can you say about the number of repressed and dead in the USSR, which were called during the Cold War?

It was about discrediting the enemy. Western Sovietologists argued that the victims of repression, collectivization, famine, etc. became 50-60 million people. Solzhenitsyn stated in 1976 that 110 million people died in the USSR between 1917 and 1959. It is difficult to comment on this stupidity. In fact, the population growth rate was more than 1%, which exceeded that of England or France. In 1926, the USSR had 147 million inhabitants, in 1937 - 162 million, and in 1939 - 170.5 million. These figures are credible, and they are not consistent with the murder of tens of millions of citizens.

- What was the reaction to the numbers you mentioned?

The well-known writer Lev Razgon entered into a controversy with me. He claimed that in 1939 there were more than 9 million prisoners in the camps, while the archives give another figure: 2 million. He was driven by emotions, but he had access to television, and I was not invited there. Later they realized that I was right and fell silent.

- And in the West?

In the forefront of my critics was Robert Conquest, whose number of repressed was five times higher than documented evidence. In general, the reaction from historians was recognition. Now universities are already studying according to my figures.

- To what extent are the archives of the Gulag, the NKVD, etc., to which you first got access thanks to Gorbachev, accurate?

The GULAG statistics are considered by our historians to be one of the best.”

Here is another brief quote from V. Zemskov, his reaction to the publication of the famous anti-Stalinist Antonov-Ovseenko, who, referring to some documents, writes that after the war 16 million people were in the Gulag: “In the list of people who used this document (about 16 million prisoners), the name of Antonov-Ovseenko is missing. Consequently, he did not see this document and quotes it from someone else's words, and with the grossest distortion of meaning. If A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko had seen this document, he would certainly have paid attention to the comma between the numbers 1 and 6, since in reality in the fall of 1945, not 16 million, but 1.6 million were kept in the camps and colonies of the Gulag. prisoners ”(see V.N. Zemskov. Prisoners, special settlers, exiled settlers, exiles and deportees (Statistical geographical aspect) // History of the USSR. 1991, No. 5. P. 151-152).

This is how "Stalin's whistleblowers" are caught in lies, and even what - as much as 10 times!

A few more quotes from V. Zemskov's answer to the American historian S. Maksudov, who was indignant at Zemskov's publication in the Sotsis magazine:

“Mr. Maksudov's reaction ... to the publication of my articles can hardly be called otherwise than a pathological deviation from the general rule. Instead of gratitude for the introduction into scientific circulation of a whole complex of new sources, which historical science was in dire need of, we observe a reaction that can hardly be called an expression of gratitude even with the most daring flight of fancy ...

Determining the increased decline in the Soviet population at 40-50 million, Mr. Maksudov concludes: "This huge figure is the price of a monstrous experiment of power over the population." Of course, we are not going to deny the obvious fact that a certain part of these people became victims of repressions and all kinds of “experiments” ... But my opponent includes in this number 10-12 million dead and dead during the civil war, and even all the casualties during the period Great Patriotic War (26.6 million). I wonder since when did human losses in heavy and bloody wars begin to be included in the category of “the price of a monstrous experiment of power over the population”?

Or, perhaps, Mr. Maksudov believes that in 1941 the ruling circles of the USSR deliberately unleashed a war with Germany and its allies in order to exterminate their own population more in this way? Only under the assumption of this absurd thought can we seriously talk about including human losses in the Great Patriotic War in the category of victims of the regime. However, the Soviet leadership, of course, never set such a goal. One can discuss the issue of the possible expansion of the Soviet Union under the guise of fanning the fire of the “world proletarian revolution” (in contrast, one can draw a number of statements by Lenin and his associates, indicating their negative attitude towards the idea of ​​exporting the revolution, and as for Stalin, he generally avoided using the term "world revolution"). The fact remains that it was not the Soviet Union that unleashed this war.

We cannot agree with the inclusion of total human losses during the civil war among the victims of repression. There is no reason to assert that the Soviet government deliberately unleashed a civil war precisely for the purpose of exterminating its own people. On the contrary, the facts show that the political forces that came to power in October 1917 tried to avoid any war - both with Germany or the countries of the Entente, and within the country.

A large-scale civil war began 2-3 months after the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with a series of White Guard rebellions. As a result of the civil war, the population of the country (within the borders of the USSR until September 17, 1939) decreased by 1922 by almost 13 million. The vast majority of these losses were those who died from hunger, cold, diseases (especially from typhus), who died on the fronts of the war on all warring sides. Among the components of the decline in the population of the country is white emigration. All these losses were the result of the war with all its costs.

In our opinion, only those arrested and convicted by the punitive bodies of the Soviet government for political reasons, including victims of lynching of "counter-revolutionaries", can be considered victims of the Bolshevik regime (Red Terror). The victims of the Red Terror numbered many tens of thousands, but in the total mass of human losses they were far from the first place and were significantly inferior to the loss components indicated above.

Mr. Maksudov is ironic about my exposure of the total losses (40 million) that Roy Medvedev spoke about. In this case, the author did R. A. Medvedev a disservice. The fact is that the latter published in Arguments and Facts (1989, No. 5) an article on the statistics of Stalinist repressions for the period from the late 1920s to 1953, which cited these 40 million and a number of other figures (none of them were not true). Subsequently, the editorial board of the publication from various sources found out that they had made a mistake by publishing this article, since the entire Roymedvedev figure (including, of course, the mentioned 40 million) is a complete "bullshit". In order to somehow rehabilitate itself in the eyes of more or less competent readers, the editorial board of Arguments and Facts published (Nos. 38, 39, 40, 45 for 1989 and No. 5 for 1990) a series of my articles containing genuine, documented confirmed statistics of those convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes, prisoners, special settlers, exiled settlers, etc. Roy Medvedev himself, even before the publication of my articles, placed in one of the issues of Arguments and Facts for 1989 an explanation that his article in No. 5 for the same year is invalid ... Mr. Maksudov is probably not entirely aware of this story, otherwise he would hardly have undertaken to defend the calculations far from the truth, from which their author himself, realizing his mistake, publicly renounced ...

During the Cold War, Western historiography, which studies the repressive policy in the USSR, developed a whole system of templates, clichés and stereotypes, beyond which it was considered indecent. If, for example, the total number of victims of repression in the USSR was taken to be 40 million or more, the number of prisoners in the Gulag at the end of the 30s was 8 million or more, the number of those repressed in 1937-1938. - from 7 million and above, etc., then calling smaller numbers was actually tantamount to committing an indecent act.

The very fact of the publication of statistics, the reliability of which Mr. Maksudov doubts, has already ceased to be a purely Soviet or Russian phenomenon. In 1993, these statistics were published on the pages of the authoritative American journal American Historical Review. It is important to emphasize that neither the members of the editorial board of this journal, nor my co-authors A. Getty (USA) and G. Rittersporn (France) can be suspected of being interested in downplaying the scale of repressions in the USSR.

I cannot agree with the inclusion of all 900,000 servicemen who were subjected to judicial punishment in the army during the war. After all, here we are talking mainly about punishments for crimes and misdemeanors of a purely criminal or domestic nature. In the armies of other states, the corresponding judicial bodies also acted, passing sentences on military personnel for certain crimes. As for the soldiers of the Red Army, who faced serious charges of a political nature, they were often dealt with not by the judiciary in the army, but by completely different departments (NKVD, NKGB, Special Meeting, Military Collegium of the Supreme Court). Take, for example, the story of the condemnation of AI Solzhenitsyn. Arrested at the front by SMERSH counterintelligence officers on charges of conducting anti-Soviet agitation, he was escorted to Moscow, where he was subsequently convicted by a Special Meeting. Military tribunals also handed down sentences against military personnel who were charged with a political nature (most often with the wording "treason"). All military personnel convicted under the political Article 58 and equivalent articles are included in the summary statistics of those convicted for counter-revolutionary and other especially dangerous crimes against the state.

And, finally, Mr. Maksudov receives the required 10 million victims in 1941-1946. from the repressive machine of the NKVD, including almost 5 million Soviet displaced persons, who, in his words, passed "through the filtration camps of the NKVD with a stay of several weeks to several months." In fact, in 1944-1946. more than 4.2 million repatriates entered the USSR, of which only 6.5% (the so-called special contingent of the NKVD) passed through the NKVD check-filtration camps (PFL). The remaining 93.5% of the repatriates (they were not a special contingent of the NKVD) passed through front-line and army camps and collection points (CPP) of NPOs, as well as through checkpoints and filtration points (PFP) of the NKVD. This bulk of repatriates was not repressed either politically or criminally. The fact that they were for some time in the camps and the SPP of the NPO and the PFP of the NKVD meant only their concentration in the network of collection points (the term "camp" in this case corresponds to the term "collection point"), without which the organized dispatch of such large masses of people was impossible to the motherland.

However, Mr. Maksudov does not limit himself to this and includes several million more people among the victims of the repressive machine of the NKVD in 1941-1946. Who are these people? It turns out that German and Japanese prisoners of war who "ended up in special camps." Where, then, should they be kept? As far as I know, it is not customary in any country to keep prisoners of war in fashionable hotels. It is a common practice to keep this category of persons in special camps. German, Japanese and other prisoners of war were exactly where they were supposed to be. As for the German prisoners of war, they partly compensated for the enormous damage inflicted on our country with their work and thus to some extent atoned for their guilt. Compared to how the Nazis treated Soviet prisoners of war, the treatment of German and other prisoners of war in Soviet captivity was in all respects more humane.

Until now, the issue of the extent of mortality from starvation in 1932-1933 remains debatable. The fact that the data I have cited by the TsUNKhU of the State Planning Committee of the USSR on fertility and mortality in Ukraine (in 1932, 782 thousand were born and 668 thousand died, in 1933, respectively, 359 thousand and 1309 thousand) are incomplete, I know without Maksudov, since the poor work of registry offices at that time is a well-known fact for a specialist. The allied TsUNKhU was not directly involved in counting deaths in Ukraine and built its statistics on the basis of reports from the Ukrainian UNKhU. For Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, under favorable conditions (without war, famine, epidemics, etc.), the birth rate was approximately two times higher than the death rate. In 1932, there was still a positive balance between births and deaths, but by no means by a factor of two; the consequences of the famine made themselves felt, and in 1933 the death rate was almost 4 times higher than the birth rate. This suggests that in 1933 some kind of catastrophe struck Ukraine. Which one, Maksudov and I know very well.

Let me remind you once again that here we are talking only about registered births and deaths ... As for mortality from starvation in 1932-1933 in the USSR as a whole, I consider the data and calculations carried out by V.V. Tsaplin, the former director of the Central State Archive of the National Economy of the USSR. According to his information, obtained on the basis of the study of archival documents, in 1932-1933. in the USSR, at least 2.8 million people died of starvation and its consequences (with registration in the registry offices). Unrecorded deaths in 1933 were estimated at about 1 million people. How many deaths were not taken into account in 1932 is unknown, but clearly significantly less than in 1933. In our opinion, the death rate from starvation in 1932-1933 in the USSR amounted to 4-4.5 million people (of course, these figures are not final and need to be clarified) ... In the light of this, we have reason to assert that estimates that significantly exceed these figures are greatly exaggerated. Doesn't Mr. Maksudov think that the corresponding data in the propaganda materials of the Ukrainian RUH - up to 11-12 million supposedly died of starvation in 1932-1933 can be called unexaggerated! And this is only in Ukraine. And if in the same spirit to determine mortality from starvation in other regions of the USSR? You can imagine what a fantastic figure it will turn out to be. It is possible that it will exceed the total number of the then population of the USSR.

S. Maksudov and I are in unequal conditions. I studied a huge layer of such sources as the statistical reporting of the OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD for the period of the 30-50s, but he did not work with these sources at all. I recommend S. Maksudov to arrange a scientific trip to Moscow and work with these documents himself in the special depository of the State Archives of the Russian Federation. The Directorate of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, no doubt, not only will not create obstacles, but will also assist in this goal.(Published in Sociological Research, 1995, No. 9).

In addition, the above-mentioned newspaper "AiF" (No. 5, 1990) contains a table "Movement of the GULAG camp population." "Political" accounted for, for example, in the "famous" 1937 12.8%, in 1947 - 38%. "Members of the families of traitors to the Motherland" before the Great Patriotic War, there were 12 thousand, after the war: in 1945 - 6000, in 1947 - a little over a thousand.

The following objection is undoubted: some historians have some figures, others have others, where is the evidence that these figures are genuine, and new ones will not emerge in five years?

Let's imagine that all the numbers are initially false, biased. That the Stalinists underestimate the scale of repression, and the anti-Stalinists overestimate it. Nobody can be trusted. Let's just connect our common sense without numbers!

In the book "Antimyth" by S. G. Kara-Murza and his co-authors, there is an interesting text that dispels the myth of a large number of repressed people, based on common sense:

“In order to prove that the king is naked, it is not at all necessary to be a professional tailor. It is enough to have eyes and not be afraid to think at least a little. After repeatedly rewriting history and trumping with abstruse statistical techniques that prove anything, people no longer believe anything. Therefore, I will not bore the reader with statistical calculations, but simply turn to common sense. Speaking about the repressions that took place in the Stalin years, anti-Soviet propaganda claims the following:

- 10 million people were shot;

- 40, 50, 60 up to 120 (!) Millions who passed through the camps;

- almost all those arrested were innocent, they were imprisoned because the mother plucked 5 spikelets in the field for hungry children or took away a spool of thread from production and received 10 years for it;

- almost all those arrested were driven to camps for the construction of canals and logging, where most of the prisoners died.

When asked why the people did not rise up when they were exterminated, they usually answer: "The people did not know this." At the same time, the fact that the people did not suspect the scale of the repressions is confirmed not only by almost all the people who lived at that time, but also by numerous written sources. Only Solzhenitsyn, 20 years later, told the "truth"!

In this regard, it makes sense to note several important questions to which there are not only intelligible, but generally no answers.

1. It is known, and this is not questioned even by the most ardent anti-Soviet, that the overwhelming majority of the repressed were arrested between 1936 and 1939, which means that several tens of millions of people must have been in camps and prisons at the same time! The fact of the arrest and transportation of several thousand (!!!) Ingush and Chechens was noted by contemporaries of the deportation as a shocking event, and this is understandable. Why was the arrest and transportation of many times more people not noted by eyewitnesses?

2. During the famous evacuation to the east in 41-42. 10 million people were transported to the deep rear. The evacuees lived in schools, makeshift houses, anywhere. This fact is remembered by all the older generation. It was 10 million, how about 40 and even more so 50, 60 and so on?

3. Almost all eyewitnesses of those years note the mass movement and work on the construction sites of captured Germans, they could not be overlooked. The people still remember that, for example, captured Germans built this road. There were about 4 million prisoners on the territory of the USSR, this is a lot, and it is impossible not to notice the fact of the activities of such a large number of people. What can be said about the number of prisoners in about 10 times more? Only that the very fact of moving and working at construction sites of such an incredible number of prisoners should simply shock the population of the USSR. This fact would be passed from mouth to mouth even decades later. Was it? No.

4. How to transport such a huge number of people off-road to remote areas, and what kind of transport available in those years was used? Large-scale construction of roads in Siberia and the North began much later. The movement of huge multi-million (!) human masses in the taiga and without roads is generally unrealistic, there is no way to supply them during a multi-day journey. 5. Where were the prisoners housed? It is assumed that in the barracks, hardly anyone will build skyscrapers for prisoners in the taiga. However, even a large barracks cannot accommodate more people than an ordinary five-story building, which is why they build multi-story buildings, and 40 million are 10 cities the size of Moscow at that time. Inevitably, traces of gigantic settlements were to remain. Where are they? Nowhere. If, however, such a number of prisoners were scattered over a huge number of small camps located in hard-to-reach sparsely populated areas, then it would be impossible to supply them. In addition, transport costs, taking into account off-road conditions, will become unimaginable. If they are placed close to roads and large settlements, then the entire population of the country will immediately know about the huge number of prisoners. Indeed, around the cities there should be a large number of very specific structures that cannot be overlooked or confused with anything else.

6. The famous White Sea Canal was built by 150 thousand prisoners, the Kirov hydroelectric complex - 90 thousand. The whole country knew about the fact that these facilities were built by convicts. And these numbers are nothing compared to tens of millions. Tens of millions of slave prisoners were to leave behind truly cyclopean buildings. Where are these structures and what are they called? Questions that will not be answered can be continued.

7. How were such huge masses of people supplied in remote, difficult areas? Even if we assume that the prisoners were fed according to the norms of besieged Leningrad, this means that at least 5 million kilograms of bread a day, 5,000 tons, is needed to supply the prisoners. And this is assuming that the guards do not eat or drink anything and do not need weapons and uniforms at all. Probably everyone has seen the photos of the famous Road of Life. One and a half and three-ton trucks follow one after another in an endless line - practically the only vehicle of those years outside the railways (it makes no sense to consider horses as a vehicle for such transportation). The population of besieged Leningrad was about 2 million people. The road through Lake Ladoga is about 60 kilometers, but the delivery of goods even over such a short distance has become a serious problem. And the point here is not the German bombing, the Germans failed to interrupt the supply for a day. The trouble is that the capacity of the country road (which, in fact, was the Road of Life) is small. How do supporters of the hypothesis of mass repressions imagine the supply of 10-20 cities the size of Leningrad, located hundreds and thousands of kilometers from the nearest roads?

8. How were the products of the labor of so many prisoners exported, and what mode of transport available at the time was used for this? You can not wait for answers, they will not.

9. Where were the detainees placed? Detainees are rarely kept together with those serving their sentences; for this purpose, there are special pre-trial detention centers. It is impossible to keep detainees in ordinary buildings, special conditions are needed, therefore, in each city, a large number of remand prisons, designed for tens of thousands of prisoners each, had to be built. These were supposed to be structures of monstrous proportions, because even the famous Butyrka contained a maximum of 7,000 prisoners. Even if we assume that the population of the USSR was stricken with sudden blindness and did not notice the construction of gigantic prisons, then a prison is such a thing that you cannot hide and imperceptibly not be converted into other structures. Where did they go after Stalin? After the Pinochet coup, 30 thousand arrested people had to be placed in stadiums. By the way, the very fact of this was immediately noticed by the whole world. What about millions?

10. To the question: “Where are the mass graves of the innocently killed, in which millions of people are buried?”, You will not hear any intelligible answer at all. After perestroika propaganda, it would be natural to open secret mass grave sites for millions of victims, obelisks and monuments should have been erected in these places, but there is nothing of this in sight. Please note that the burial in Babi Yar is now known to the whole world. According to various estimates, from seventy to two hundred thousand people were killed there. It is clear that if it was not possible to hide the fact of the execution and the burial of such a scale, what can we say about numbers 50-100 times greater? I believe that the above facts and reasoning are more than enough. Nobody has been able to refute them. Even if some of the above facts could be explained in some way by far-fetched data, they cannot be explained in their entirety. The simultaneous fulfillment of not only all, but even part of the conditions that we spoke about is impossible in principle..

Let's summarize what has been said and dwell on the most significant figures.

1. For 33 years from 1921 to 1954, 642,980 people were sentenced to death by all possible courts for political reasons.

2. Between 1934 and 1947, 963,766 people died in the camps, including criminals. If we take into account that there were from 12% political, as, for example, in 1937, to 38% as in 1947, then we can assume that about 250,000 more “political” will be added directly to those sentenced to death. If you increase the time amplitude, also from 1921 to 1954, then, most likely, you will need to double this figure. Thus, we will get no more than 1 million 300 thousand people destroyed in total. Wherein to say that they were all innocent is absurd. Surely there was a certain percentage of truly innocent people, several thousand people.

3. There were 3 million 777 thousand 380 people sentenced to various terms for 33 years for political reasons.

4. The number of convicts in the Gulag was on average 1.5 million people at a time, only closer to the 1950s it rose to a maximum of 2.5 million people, and this is due to the fact that there are criminals, and spies, and traitors, and deserters , and pests, and saboteurs, and marauders, and so on. At the same time, it must be remembered that criminals in the total mass of prisoners always ranged from 60% to 90%!

5. And finally, the myth that “the whole country was built by prisoners, their slave labor made industrialization” and so on has no basis. A little more than 2 million people were attracted from the Gulag to the national economy, and the able-bodied population in the USSR then was over 70 million, the work of convicts was a drop in the ocean. There are even figures that their contribution to GDP never exceeded 4%.

6. All the data of the Conquests, Cohens, Medvedevs, Kurganovs, Solzhenitsyns, Razgonovs, Antonovs-Ovseyenkos and others, exceeding the real figures by 5-10-50 times, are pure falsifications, which are deliberately rigged in order to present the USSR no less, even more evil than Hitler. President Medvedev has declared a fight against the falsification of history, but this means that all books by Solzhenitsyn and those like him, practically all political authors who wrote during the era of perestroika and in the 1990s, should be removed from libraries and other funds.

Here are the numbers. To some they will seem terribly large, to others terribly small, but to understand their true meaning, let's use the old saying: "everything is known in comparison."

For example, such a comparison: only during the Yeltsin reforms, the excess unplanned mortality in Russia amounted to 3 million! But Stalin was preparing for war, tripled the GDP and created and created a great power, and won the war. And why did Yeltsin put 3 million? For the GDP to become half as much? For the fact that the territory of the country has decreased? It was people like Yeltsin, potential Yeltsins and Chubais who were shot then, in the 1930s, basically.

Or here's another wonderful comparison: Today, there are about 2.4 million people in prison in the United States. The population of the United States is more than the population of the Stalinist USSR by one third. If we take that, on average, 1.5 million people were in the Gulag a year, it turns out that in the United States today there are as many sedentary per capita as under Stalin. Where we had a higher figure in different years - this is justified, it was a post-war case, there are always a bunch of marauders, deserters and traitors. But why is no one writing about the American Gulag now? Where are the American Solzhenitsyns? Why aren't they given the Nobel Prize? I will not remind you at all about the blood of American history, about tens of millions of killed blacks and Indians, this is a thing of the past, but right now there is a Gulag on the planet, and everyone is silent!

So, out of 1,300 people who were shot and died in the camps, a certain percentage was probably "innocent". Let's say that it is even 10-20% (contrary to the talk that they were shot "for nothing", it must be said that the investigation was carried out very carefully: a simple denunciation, especially for execution, was not enough, as well as a simple confession). Thus, the innocent can be up to 200 thousand people in all 30 years. Maximum. But the United States for two bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed 250 thousand people. Really innocent civilians. Far from the front. And this is in two days. Not in 30 years. And no one considers Truman a symbol of totalitarianism and cruelty. And if now the different Balts are demanding the condemnation of Hitlerism and Stalinism, then let's add the condemnation of Trumanism. Although it was he who said in the US Senate: "We must alternately help the Russians, then the Germans, and they kill as many as possible." It was the United States that influenced England and Poland so that they condoned Hitler and did not conclude a non-aggression pact with the USSR. It was the United States that delayed the opening of the Second Front. It was the United States that could have stopped Hitler back in 1939, and there would have been no casualties of 60 million.

And finally, consider the main comparison, the comparison with Nazi Germany.

According to the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders and Their Accomplices (ChGK), the number of Soviet citizens who were victims of the fascist genocide in the occupied territory of the USSR is 10.7 million.

Historian V. Zemskov writes:

“The war of fascist Germany against the USSR had a destructive character. In this, it fundamentally differed from previous military campaigns of 1939-1941. in Europe. Although the Nazis did not formally extend the methods of "solving the Jewish and Gypsy issues" to "solving the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian", but in practice they were approaching this. On the occupied Soviet lands, they purposefully exterminated millions of people ... It should be borne in mind that ... the data of the ChGK relate only to the occupied Soviet territory. This does not take into account the millions of deported Soviet citizens (civilians and prisoners of war), killed and tortured in fascist captivity outside the USSR. In total, the victims of the fascist genocide firmly occupy the first place among all the components of the human losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War. They far exceed even the irretrievable losses of the Soviet armed forces, which are also by no means small ...

The summary data of the ChGK are built on the basis of primary and consolidated materials from a wide network of district, regional, regional, republican ChGKs, which carried out a truly titanic work to identify the murdered and tortured Soviet citizens in the occupied territory. Before, I had a doubt whether the total human losses were hidden under the term “killed and tortured”. However, in the process of working with acts and protocols of district and regional ChGKs, this doubt disappeared. The term “killed and tortured by the fascist invaders and their accomplices” is adequate to its content, since the acts of the district and regional ChGK did not include those who died of natural causes, the loss of collaborators, etc. The total results of this work - 10.7 million victims of the fascist genocide in the occupied Soviet territory - are confirmedgiven by numerous documents and testimonies. This means that it is this figure that is documented.”

So, only killed and tortured nearly 11 million. And not in 33 years, but in four. And this is only the beginning of what they wanted to do, only the beginning of the implementation of the Ost plan. This does not include those killed outside the USSR, driven into slavery, as well as the combat losses of our army. According to various sources, the total losses of the USSR range from 20 to 26 million people.

In total, the victims of World War II, unleashed by Hitler, are about 60 million. Some call figure and in 70 million. The history of the Earth has not yet known such blood, and this is not surprising: Hitler set himself a lot of blood and the destruction of quantity for the sake of the survival of quality. And if it took several times less blood to stop the maniac, then this is how the world works: it was impossible to do it in any other way than through sacrifices.

There will be those who want to exclaim: "How can you count corpses so cynically?" They say that the grief of one person (the notorious “tear of a child”) is already grief, and there is no difference: 10 million or 100 thousand were killed. If there is no difference, great! Then write down all the English kings and all American presidents as the great dictators of mankind ... And as for the “tear of a child”, it was not Dostoevsky, but Ivan Karamazov who came up with this topic, and he, as you know, was in communion with the devil.

It is impossible to put Hitler next to Stalin, not only because on the conscience of one there are about 60 million victims, and on the conscience of the other less: one or two hundred thousand really innocent. It's not just that. The very projects of fascism and communism are fundamentally opposed. Fascism is a project of turning all nations into a resource for one, and Stalinist communism is a project of sacrificing one nation for the sake of saving the rest, it recognizes the Christian commandment: he will be saved "who lays down his life for his friends."

Of course, communism has its shortcomings, along with fascism and liberalism, it is one of the versions of the philosophical and socio-political problems of the New Age and must be overcome along with all this problems. The true shortcomings of communism are a matter for a separate work, but for the time being we are getting rid of slander.

The figures mentioned above have been partly known for half a century, and partly became known in the early 1990s. But who remembers the publications in Aif almost 20 years ago? Who read the magazine "Sotsis", produced in a small circulation? But slander circulates in millions of copies. Until now, it is difficult to imagine at least one liberal or democrat who would not share the myth of Stalin's multimillion-dollar repressions. Echo of Moscow and Radio Liberty talk about these tens of millions killed by the regime every day, as if there were no publications by Zemskov!

The "Yeltsin Fund" began financing the huge publication "History of Stalinism", financing 100 volumes of slander and dirt on Stalin. Why can't they all settle down? Why was it so important both during perestroika and now to go about your filthy business? They are not fighting the past… No. They are fighting our future!

During the voting on the “Name of Russia” project, our broadcast stars and public opinion leaders did not hesitate to say that they were shocked that so many people choose Stalin, because Stalin destroyed some millions of fellow citizens, naturally innocent ...

The anti-Stalinist films "Children of the Arbat" and "Doctor Zhivago" based on the novels by Rybakov and Pasternak were filmed and aired. This also happened after Zemskov's publications, when, it would seem, historical consultants just have to stop the slander ... No one stopped and no artistic councils on TV channels banned this ...

The well-known defector V. Suvorov-Rezun, who used English money to shock the reader with stories that Stalin really wanted to attack Hitler and the unfortunate Hitler was simply forced to defend himself with an attack. This wild nonsense was read and absorbed by millions, but in the end the wave of reasoned criticism against Suvorov turned out to be greater, and even he changed his mind, wrote the book “I take my words back”. And what? Has he become objective? No, he refused only the most ridiculous fictions, but still on every page he continues to inspire that Stalin killed more people than Hitler. And this is in 2007, and again it is published in huge editions and sold in our stores!

OK… this is journalism, and it comes from an English spy. But in 2008, the novelist, perhaps the most popular in Russia, Boris Akunin, aka Chkhartishvili, wrote the novel Quest, where as<одного из>Goodies are brought out by Rockefeller, who sends a sabotage group to the USSR to take away Stalin's "serum of genius." They arrived in the 1930s to stop Stalin from preparing for war with Hitler. Readers are invited to root for them, because Stalin is both paranoid, and a tyrant, and a monster, and the USSR is generally a cancerous tumor that needs to be cut out of the body of humanity. Then the goodie Rockefeller passes the "serum of genius" to Hitler to stop Stalin... This is published in the country that saved the world from fascism!

This is now being swallowed up in thousands of copies, just like Akunin's other books, each of which falsifies history, breathes Russophobia in its conception and in every single line and poisons our historical consciousness. It's amazing: an author has been living in Russia for 10 years, who is published in large editions, films are made based on his books ... And this author frankly spoils our entire history, primarily through a description of small details, customs, life, speech of characters, and the entire elite and the intelligentsia don't even notice it!

Well, this is a petty demon, but according to the books of a big demon - Solzhenitsyn - Russian state television channels put on serials and show them in prime time (“In the First Circle” was shown in 2007). Until now, the Russian elite does not know the true numbers and thinks that in the Second World War, simply "two evils collided." And if the elite knows and allows historical slander, then it puts itself in opposition to Stalin and thus on the same side with Hitler, there can be no middle way. not without reason and Suvorov and Solzhenitsyn they don’t just write that, they say, “both were bad”, only “one with a mustache, the other with a mustache”, no, they stubbornly try to rehabilitate those who fought on the side of Hitler, for example, Vlasov and Bandera. Dedicate the warmest lines to them.

Excuse me, if both Stalin and Hitler are "totalitarian evil" and you hate everyone who served, for example, Stalin, then why don't you hate those who served Hitler with equal success? No, it doesn’t work: the Vlasovites come out almost like saints, Hitler’s atrocities are always downplayed, and even some kind of fascist humanitarian activity is pushed out in every possible way: here, they say, there and there the Fritz built a road that the Soviet government could not for 10 years build, what good fellows!

This is no coincidence: everyone must understand that speaking out against Stalin, he stands for Hitler - this is an extreme situation in which there is no middle ground. That is the tragedy of the tragic moments of history.

It is always difficult to argue on this issue with those who have affected relatives. By the way, there are few of them. Much less than, for example, relatives who died at the front. In my class at school, almost everyone in the family had someone killed in the war, and those who had someone repressed turned out to be a couple of people. Moreover, he was repressed, not shot. This indicates a much smaller scale of repression than the numbers of victims of the war, at least an order of magnitude.

Half of those who say so, in fact, have no affected relatives. It was just that in the early 1990s it was fashionable to show off and call oneself a descendant of the repressed and dispossessed. Now you can also trace your origins to nobles or kulaks. Well, in fact, should an intelligent person not brag about the fact that his ancestors were simple bastard peasants?

Not all of the repressed and victims really suffered innocently. As already mentioned, all kinds of Khrushchev commissions were given the task of rehabilitating everyone in a row precisely in order to specifically show how large the number of innocent victims was. By the way, so far the number of those rehabilitated has not exceeded 2 million (counting together with the Khrushchev era), which once again indicates that there were simply no 20 million repressed.

I personally had the opportunity to see the criminal cases of the rehabilitated repressed a couple of times. These are pure pests, criminals and speculators, people who in difficult years really profited from the grief of the people. They planted them correctly, but rehabilitated in vain. Naturally, it is difficult for the descendants of these people to admit that their grandfathers were scoundrels, while the rest of the country performed a feat. It would be better for them to take an objective position, and not try to be against the country, but with relatives.

I also came across a couple of people, relatives of the victims quite “innocently”, that is, not for themselves, but simply for the company. One is a descendant of the dispossessed, and said: “We were evicted from the house, and in this beautiful house made some kind of hospital "... Well, in fact, aren't they bastards? They would have guessed to do a school or a kindergarten! Is there a limit to the cynicism of these Stalinist Bolsheviks?

With those who argue like this, I see no reason to argue. I think their distant ancestors reasoned the same way, for which they were "tenderly loved" by their fellow villagers. Most of the kulaks, by the way, thanks to the eviction, were saved from lynching, and the community knew better who was a good person in the village and who was a world eater. Let us remember that the community did not consist of cheapskates, those who could be gnawed by envy of someone else's good (as they often like to explain to us), but those who actually later died in the war without sparing their lives, in whom the remnants of Christian morality and communal morality were still preserved.

Finally, I had a chance to communicate with a girl whose Ingush parents were born in deportation, and she was very indignant that her people were deported. To this I could answer her only one thing: my grandfather's three brothers did not return from the war and they had no children at all, but from her ancestors, who were to be drafted into the Red Army in 1942, in the Chechen-Ingush Republic, out of 3000, they came to draft items only 200 people. As they say, feel the difference.

Whose cross was heavier - those who ran away from the army, flirted with the Fritz, and then were deported (instead of being shot, by the way) away from the fighting and had the opportunity to give birth to children, or the cross of those who shed blood and defended the country? By the way, the same applies to those who were in the camps. Not much of their fate (and even to be honest, many were ready to be in the camp rather than die at the front) differed from those who remained at large during this difficult time.

And one more vivid memory, read by me in the memoirs of a priest who went through the war. He describes a case when a special officer shot a soldier for absolutely no reason, while not only the special officers but also the members of the field court did not begin to understand the topic for a long time. So: the next day there was a mortal battle, and everyone who shot them themselves died, moreover, the special officer died heroically. For a short time he survived his sacrifice and redeemed everything with a feat.

What does all this say? About the tragic era that ground people in its millstones, about the era where such events took place every day that today one of them would be enough for a six-month discussion in the media. Who is right, who is wrong, why and why. It was not a time of reflection and abstract moralizing, but a time of quick decisions. And the decision lies in the fact that it was necessary to quickly determine who you are with, otherwise the decision will be made for you. Trying to "not choose" threw you into the wrong camp, even if you didn't want to. It was possible to be with Stalin or against, there is no third way. This was the imperative of fate. Anyone who did not understand him, going to a conscious betrayal, or simply deciding that “my hut is on the edge” or frivolously poisoned jokes about the leader in wartime, they all ended up in the same camp - the camp of historical outcasts and losers.

Joseph Stalin died 65 years ago, but his personality and his policies are still the subject of fierce debate among historians, politicians, and ordinary people. The scale and ambiguity of this historical figure are so great that until now the attitude towards Stalin and the Stalin era for some citizens of our country is a kind of indicator that determines the political and social position.

One of the darkest and most tragic pages in the country is political repression, which peaked in the 1930s and early 1940s. It is the repressive policy of the Soviet state during the years of Stalin's rule that is one of the main arguments of the opponents of Stalinism. After all, on the other side of the coin is industrialization, the construction of new cities and enterprises, the development of transport infrastructure, the strengthening of the armed forces and the formation of a classical model of education, which still works “by inertia” and is one of the best in the world. But collectivization, the deportation of entire peoples to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, the extermination of political opponents and opponents, as well as random people attributed to them, excessive harshness towards the country's population - this is another part of the Stalin era, which also cannot be erased from people's memory.

However, recently there have been more and more publications that the scale and nature of political repression during the reign of I.V. Stalin were greatly exaggerated. It is interesting that not so long ago this position was voiced, it seemed by those who were in no way interested in “whitewashing” Joseph Vissarionovich - employees of the US CIA analytical center. By the way, it was in the United States that Alexander Solzhenitsyn once lived in exile - the main exposer of Stalinist repressions, and it was he who owns the frightening figures - 70 million repressed. The US CIA analytical center Rand Corporation calculated the number of those repressed during the years of the Soviet leader's rule and got somewhat different figures - about 700 thousand people. Perhaps the scale of the repressions was greater, but obviously not as much as Solzhenitsyn's followers say.

The international human rights organization "Memorial" claims that from 11-12 million to 38-39 million people became victims of Stalin's repressions. The spread, as you can see, is very large. Yet 38 million is 3.5 times more than 11 million. The "Memorial" refers to the victims of Stalinist repressions: 4.5-4.8 million convicted for political reasons, 6.5 million deported since 1920, about 4 million disenfranchised under the Constitution of 1918 and the decree of 1925, about 400 500 thousand were repressed on the basis of a number of decrees, 6-7 million died of starvation in 1932-1933, 17.9 thousand victims of "labor decrees".

As you can see, the concept of "victims of political repression" in this case is expanding to the maximum. But political repression is still specific actions aimed at arresting, imprisoning or physically destroying dissidents or those suspected of dissent. Is it possible to refer to the victims of political repressions those who died of starvation? Especially considering that at that difficult time, most of the world's population was starving. Millions of people died in the African and Asian colonies of European powers, and in the "prosperous" United States of America, it was not for nothing that these years were called the "Great Depression".

Go ahead. Another 4 million people were deprived of the right to vote during the Stalinist period. However, can the loss of rights be considered as a full-fledged political repression? In this case, the multi-million African-American population of the United States, which in the first half of the 20th century not only did not have voting rights, but was also segregated along racial lines, is also the victim of political repression by Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and other American presidents. That is, approximately 10-12 million people out of those identified by Memorial as victims of repression are already in question. Victims of time - yes, not always a well-thought-out economic policy - yes, but not targeted political repressions.

If we approach the issue strictly, then only persons convicted under “political” articles and sentenced to death or certain terms of imprisonment can be called directly victims of political repression. And here the fun begins. Not only “politicians” were classified as repressed, but also many real criminals who were convicted of ordinary criminal offenses, or who, for certain reasons (not repaid card debt, for example), tried to get over from criminals by initiating a new “political” article to the political. The former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky writes about such a story, which only took place in the Brezhnev era, in his memoirs - an ordinary criminal was sitting with him, who, in order not to answer to other prisoners for gambling debt, deliberately scattered anti-Soviet leaflets in the barracks. Of course, these cases were not isolated.

In order to understand who can be classified as politically repressed, it is necessary to take a closer look at the Soviet criminal legislation of the 1920s-1950s - what it was like, who could be subjected to the most severe measures and who could and who could not become a victim " firing squad" articles of the criminal code.

Lawyer Vladimir Postanyuk notes that when the Criminal Code of the RSFSR was adopted in 1922, Article 21 of the main criminal law of the Soviet republic emphasized that in order to combat the most serious types of crimes that threaten the foundations of Soviet power and the Soviet system, as an exceptional measure to protect the state of workers firing is used.

For what crimes, according to the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, other union republics, was the death penalty imposed in the Stalin years (1923-1953)? Could they be sentenced to death under Article 58 of the Criminal Code?

V.Postanyuk: Crimes punishable by an exceptional measure of punishment - the death penalty - were included in the Special Part of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. First of all, these were the so-called. "counter-revolutionary" crimes. Among the crimes for which the death penalty was due, the criminal law of the RSFSR listed the organization of armed uprisings for counter-revolutionary purposes or the invasion of Soviet territory by armed detachments or gangs, attempts to seize power (Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR); communication with foreign states or their individual representatives with the aim of inducing them to military intervention in the affairs of the Republic; participation in an organization operating for the purpose of committing the crimes referred to in Art. 58 of the Criminal Code; opposition to the normal activities of state institutions and enterprises; participation in or assistance to an organization acting in the direction of helping the international bourgeoisie; organization for counter-revolutionary purposes of terrorist acts directed against representatives of the Soviet government or figures; organizing for counter-revolutionary purposes the destruction or damage by explosion, arson or other means of railway or other means of communication, means of public communication, water pipes, public warehouses and other structures or structures, as well as participation in the performance of these crimes (Article 58 of the Criminal Code). The death penalty could also be received for active opposition to the revolutionary and working-class movement while serving in responsible or highly secret positions in tsarist Russia and with counter-revolutionary governments during the Civil War. The death penalty followed for the organization of gangs and gangs and participation in them, for counterfeiting by conspiracy of persons, for a number of malfeasances. For example, article 112 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR emphasized that execution could be ordered for abuse of power, abuse of power or inaction and negligence, followed by the collapse of the managed structure. Misappropriation and embezzlement of state values, unjust sentence by a judge, taking a bribe under aggravating circumstances - all these crimes could also be punished up to the death penalty.

Could juveniles be shot during the Stalin period, and for what crimes? Were there such examples?

V. Postanyuk: During the period of its operation, the code was repeatedly subjected to changes. In particular, they extended to issues of criminal liability of minors and were associated with the mitigation of liability measures that could be applied to juvenile offenders. The norms on punishment also changed: the use of execution for minors and pregnant women was prohibited, short-term imprisonment was introduced for a period of 1 month (Law of July 10, 1923), and later for a period of 7 days (Law of October 16, 1924) .

In 1935, the famous Decree "On measures to combat juvenile delinquency" was adopted. According to this regulation, minors over 12 years of age were allowed to be prosecuted for theft, violence and bodily harm, mutilation, murder or attempted murder. The decree stated that all criminal penalties could be applied to juvenile offenders over 12 years old. This wording, which was not very clear, gave rise to numerous allegations about the facts of the execution of children in the Soviet Union. But these claims, at least from a legal point of view, are not true. After all, the rule on the impossibility of imposing the death penalty on persons under the age of 18, contained in Art. 13 Fundamentals and in Art. 22 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, has not been canceled.

Wasn't there a single case of execution of minors in the Soviet Union?

V. Postaniuk: There was such a case. And this is the only reliably known case of the execution of a teenager in Soviet times. 15-year-old Arkady Neiland was shot on August 11, 1964. As you can see, this is far from Stalin's time. Neiland was the first and only minor officially sentenced by a Soviet court to capital punishment - execution. The guilt of this criminal was that he hacked to death with an ax a woman and her three-year-old son. The request for pardon for the teenager was rejected, and Nikita Khrushchev himself spoke out in support of capital punishment for him.

Thus, we see that Soviet criminal law did indeed provide for the death penalty under the “anti-Soviet” Article 58. However, as the lawyer noted in his interview, among the "execution" anti-Soviet acts were crimes that would be called terrorist in our time. For example, one can hardly call a “prisoner of conscience” a person who organized sabotage on a railway track. As for the use of execution as the ultimate punishment for corrupt officials, this practice still exists in a number of countries around the world, for example, in China. In the Soviet Union, the death penalty was seen as a temporary and exceptional, but effective measure to combat crime and the enemies of the Soviet state.

If we talk about the victims of political repression, then the vast majority of those convicted under the anti-Soviet article were just saboteurs, spies, organizers and members of armed and underground groups and organizations that acted against the Soviet regime. Suffice it to recall that in the 1920s and 1930s the country was in a hostile environment, and the situation was not particularly stable in a number of regions of the Soviet Union. For example, in Central Asia, individual groups of Basmachi continued to resist the Soviet regime in the 1930s.

Finally, do not miss another very interesting nuance. A significant part of the Soviet citizens repressed under Stalin were senior officials of the party and the Soviet state, including law enforcement and security agencies. If we analyze the lists of the top leaders of the NKVD of the USSR at the union and republican levels in the 1930s, then most of them were subsequently shot themselves. This indicates that tough measures were applied not only to the political opponents of the Soviet government, but, to a much greater extent, to its representatives themselves, guilty of abuse of power, corruption or any other official crimes.