This Appendix to Vadim Rogovin's work, “Stalin's Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR” uses official archival data to reveal the true scale of the Great Terror. We are publishing this as a supplementary text to the lecture given by Fred Williams to the Socialist Equality Party (US) 2025 Summer School, and encourage our readers to purchase the full volume by Rogovin, as well as his other works on the Left Opposition, through Mehring Books.
1. Myths. For several decades, Soviet and Western societies have remained under the influence of statistical computations in which the number of those repressed for political reasons in the USSR has been exaggerated, as a rule, by an order of magnitude. In this process, the statistical data wandering from one work to another belonged not to specialists—statisticians or demographers—but to dilettantes in this area, who remained silent about the sources and methods which guided them in making their calculations.
Overestimating the number of victims of political repression is a phenomenon which has been encountered earlier in history. In the novel The Priest from Tours, Balzac wrote: “People of an ironic frame of mind would probably receive no small pleasure from the strange statements made by abbé Birotteau and Mademoiselle Gamard… Who would not laugh upon hearing them claim, while relying on truly curious evidence, … that more than one million three hundred thousand people perished on the scaffold during the revolution.” Balzac’s characters, however, were content to discuss their “evidence” in private conversations; they did not circulate them in print throughout the entire world.
That has not been the case with contemporaries of Stalin’s repressions. Staggered by their unprecedented scale, they published figures they invented and presented them as reliable. Thus, in 1945, Alexander Barmine stated that 12 million people were in the concentration camps of the USSR.
Similarly fantastic numbers figure in the “samizdat” or “tamizdat” works which were written in the 1950s and 1960s by Soviet authors, particularly by those who passed through the camps themselves. Thus, in the novel The Department of Useless Things, Yuri Dombrovsky writes as if it were obvious and beyond any need of proof that, in 1937–1938, “according to the most modest estimates, the number of prisoners exceeded 10 million.”
In his novel The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn discussed the political reasons for the frequent exaggeration of the number of camp inhabitants by the prisoners themselves. He noted with a certain amount of irony: “The prisoners were sure that no men remained at liberty besides the authorities and the MVD.” These personal conceptions of people who were repeatedly being sent from one transfer prison or camp to another, and who met there an enormous number of ever newer faces, gave rise to the myths that circulated among the prisoners. Solzhenitsyn wrote that “in the prisons people were generally inclined to exaggerate the number of prisoners, and when in actual fact there were only 12 to 15 million behind bars, the prisoners were certain that there were 20, and even 30, million.” This last sentence was a “slight deception” on Solzhenitsyn’s part. It was intended to create the impression that the “objective” author, who was pointing out the exaggerations of the prisoners, was himself providing an absolutely reliable figure. However, if the prisoners were naming a figure only one and a half to two times greater than the figure given by Solzhenitsyn, the latter increased his number by a factor of five to six times over the true number of prisoners.
A significant contribution to the circulation of falsified statistics was made by A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko, who displays in his works on Stalinism an unusual glibness when dealing with facts. In his book Portrait of a Tyrant, which came out in 1994, he claims that the peak of the repressions was in 1938, when 16 million prisoners were in the camps. A bit later he indicates that the same number of camp inmates existed in 1933. His book repeatedly asserts that, from 1935 through 1940, 19,840,000 people were arrested, of whom seven million were shot. In order to increase the believability of these figures, Antonov-Ovseenko declares, without a shade of hesitation, that they are contained in a report from the KGB presented after the Twentieth Congress to the Central Committee of the CPSU.
Figures that are closer to the truth, but also inflated, are contained in recent publications by D. Volkogonov and R. Medvedev. Thus, Medvedev writes that no less than five million people were arrested for political reasons in 1936-1938 alone. Even stranger is his assertion that “the general number of prisoners in the USSR in 1941–1942 was approximately equal to the number of soldiers in the active army. And the losses of people at that time in the East [i.e., in the camps – V. R.] and in the West [i.e., at the front – V. R.] were also approximately equal.”
Khrushchev also made a contribution to misinforming the public about the scale of Stalin’s repressions when he asserted in his memoirs that, at the time of Stalin’s death, the camps held about 10 million people. He needed to raise the true figure four times over, apparently in order to make his role in freeing political prisoners seem more significant (a role which would have been judged in the manner it deserved by his contemporaries and successors even without this exaggeration).
In order to refute such “miscalculations,” it would be necessary to cite statistics which were at the disposal of the authorities, for the organs of the OGPU–NKVD–MGB kept a careful bureaucratic count of the number of people arrested, shot, and located in the camps. However, the lying, sluggish, and cowardly ruling bureaucracy did not remove the seal of secrecy from the statistics of repression even in the first years of the unfolding offensive in the USSR of anti-communist forces who relied on fantastic figures of tens of millions of victims of the “Bolshevik terror.” The Gorbachev leadership decided to counterpose true figures to these fabrications only at the end of its reign.
Despite the appearance in the 1990s of many publications disclosing the true number of those arrested for political motives, the “democratic” journalists continue to operate with arbitrary numbers, pursuing transparent political goals as they do so. Thus, the journalist Yu. Feofanov, in “surpassing” all the falsifiers who preceded him, announced on the eve of the presidential elections of 1996 that, in the 1930s alone, 16 to 20 million people died from repressions, and “God alone knows how many souls were squandered by the Soviet communist regime.”
2. The number of those convicted for political reasons. Soon after Stalin’s death, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU demanded that the law-enforcement agencies provide data about the number of people convicted for “counter-revolutionary crimes.” The report presented in February 1954 by General Prosecutor of the USSR Rudenko, Minister of Internal Affairs Kruglov, and Minister of Justice Gorshenin, states that, from 1921 through 1 February 1954, 3,777,380 people were convicted on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes, which includes 642,980 people who were sentenced to death; 2,369,220 who were confined in camps and prisons; and 765,180 who were sentenced to exile or deportation. Of this number, approximately 2.9 million people were convicted by extrajudicial organs (by a collegium of the OGPU, by “troikas,” and by Special Boards), and about 900,000 people were convicted by courts, military tribunals, the Special Collegium, and the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. Numbers close to this (3,778,234 arrested, including 786,098 shot) were first made public at the beginning of the 1990s by leading members of the KGB.
We should note that in these figures some people, but by no means the majority, are counted more than once, insofar as many political prisoners, primarily from among the oppositionists, were convicted during this period from two to five times.
In 1992, the head of the department of registration and archival forms at the Ministry of Security for the Russian Federation released data covering all the years of the Soviet regime. According to these figures, for the years 1917–1990, 3,853,900 people were convicted on charges of state crimes and other similar articles in the Criminal Code; out of these 827,995 people were sentenced to death. These figures also tend to confirm the veracity of the data contained in the report of 1954. Differences in the number of people sentenced to death can be explained by the fact that, in the last instance, the concept of “political prisoners” is interpreted more widely (“those convicted according to several other similar articles of the Criminal Code”), and also by the fact that some of the death sentences were not carried out. Upon review, they were replaced by sentences of long periods of incarceration.
The dynamics of political repression were reflected in the table compiled in 1954 by officials of the MVD, which presents the number of those convicted in cases falling under the jurisdiction of the VChK-OGPU-NKVD in the period 1921–1940. These figures raise slightly the number of those convicted in political cases in the 1920s, since the organs of the VChK-OGPU conducted investigations during this period into several other types of crimes, for instance, economic ones.
According to the table’s data, in 1921, when part of Soviet territory was still embroiled in military activity and there were many White Guard bands, the number of convictions reached 35,800 people. It sharply fell over the next two years (6,000 in 1922 and 4,800 in 1923), and then began to rise, reaching 17,800 in 1926, and 33,800 in 1928. The next, more significant growth reflects the increased repressions with regard to oppositionists, non-party specialists and peasants, in particular, who fought back with arms in hand against the extraordinary measures and forced collectivization. In comparison with 1929 (56,200 people), the number of victims of political repressions increased almost fourfold in 1930, reaching 209,000 people. Over the next three years, the number of people arrested was measured in six-digit figures (180,700; 141,900; and 239,700 people). After decreasing in 1934 three times over in comparison with 1933, in the wake of Kirov’s assassination, the number exceeded the indicators of the period of forced collectivization (267,100 in 1935, and 274,700 in 1936).
In 1937–1938, there was a qualitative leap, which we will address in section 6.
3. The number of people located in places of confinement and in special settlements. The first sources of statistical data concerning this issue are the results of the census of 1937 (declared to be falsified and the work of saboteurs because it reflected the unpleasant picture of the demographic development of the USSR during the 1930s) and the census of 1939. According to the figures from these censuses, the prisons, camps, and special settlements contained on 1 January 1937 no less than 1.8 million people, and on 21 February 1939 no less than 2.6 million people. Of this number, about a million people lived in special settlements, i.e., they were former kulaks who had been subjected to deportation. At the end of the 1930s, this category had its civil rights restored, as a result of which the living standards in the special settlements approached the general standards throughout the nation.
More detailed statistics are contained in the statistical reports of the GULAG, in reports from the directors of the GULAG to the People’s Commissars of Internal Affairs, and in the reports of the latter to Stalin. These figures of the statistical counts made with bureaucratic accuracy in the bowels of the very machinery of repression can be considered reliable for good reason. After all, the leaders of the NKVD were not interested in underestimating the number of prisoners if for no other reason than the fact that production plans in the camps were calculated according to the number of prisoners located there.
In 1940, the centralized card index of the GULAG contained statistics for almost eight million people, including 1) people who were then in prison; 2) people who had finished their sentences and had been released; and 3) those who had died in the camps. Taken together, as follows from the archival material of the GULAG, from 1921 to 1953 about 10 million people passed through the camps.
The dynamics of the movement of prisoners can be seen from data about their total number which were compiled on 1 January of each year. On this date in 1930, the camps held 175,000; in 1933—334,300 people. The number of prisoners in the camps and corrective-labor colonies in 1934 reached 510,300 people; in 1935—965,700; in 1936—1,296,000; in 1937—1,196,000; in 1938—1,882,000; in 1939—1,672,000; and in 1940—1,660,000.
Therefore, even in the years of the Great Purge, the number of prisoners did not exceed one percent of the country’s population. This portion is two to three times greater than the corresponding indicator in 1994, when the prisons, corrective-labor and education colonies in the Russian Federation contain more than 600,000 prisoners.
Before the start of Stalin’s repressions, the number of prisoners was much lower. In September 1923, the RSFSR counted 79,947 prisoners, of whom 4.8 percent (i.e., around 4,000 people) had been convicted of state crimes. These figures testify to the onset of civil peace and a sharp reduction of general criminal activity in the nation, which had just emerged from a seven-year period of wars.
In 1926 the places of incarceration in the Russian Federation held 97,300 convicted prisoners, which comprised a bit more than 0.1 percent of the total population of the RSFSR (92.8 million people). This proportion is about five times lower than the corresponding figure in the USA today.
By the beginning of the war, the number of prisoners in the camps and colonies of the GULAG stood at 2.3 million people (the growth in 1940–1941 occurred as a result of the repression on territories added in 1939–1940 to the USSR, and as a result of the introduction of criminal penalties for absenteeism and other violations of labor discipline).
From the beginning of the war through December 1944, 2,550,000 people came into the camps, and 3,440,000 left the camps. The decrease in the number of prisoners is explained primarily by the fact that hundreds of thousands of men were freed before completing their sentences (mainly among those convicted of absenteeism, common and petty economic crimes, and crimes of malfeasance) and sent to bring the Red Army up to full strength. Just according to the Decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR on 12 June and 24 October 1941, 600,000 men were freed from places of imprisonment, of whom 175,000 were mobilized into the Red Army. At the same time, during the war years a halt was put to releasing Trotskyists and others convicted of “especially serious state crimes,” even if they had finished their sentences.
After the end of the war, the number of prisoners began to climb once again. For the entire time that the GULAG existed, the maximum number of prisoners was reached in 1950 (2,561,000 people). The same year witnessed the greatest number of people who were located in places of partial confinement—around three million people. This contingent, which included people in special settlements, exile settlements, exile, and deportation, was largely made up of nationalities deported during the war years.
The average monthly number of prisoners in jails fluctuated from 350,500 in January 1939 (the maximum figure) to 155,200 in January 1944 (the minimum figure).
4. The death rate among prisoners. In the period from 1 January 1934 through 31 December 1947, 962,100 people died in the camps. In 1937–1938, the number who died reached 5.5–5.7 percent, and in 1939—3.29 percent of the yearly contingent of prisoners. In absolute figures, the number of those who died reached 25,400 people in 1937; in 1938—90,500; in 1939—50,500; and in 1940—46,700 people. The mortality rate was particularly high in 1941–1943, when 516,000 people died. The peak of mortality (248,900 people) came in 1942.
5. The number of political prisoners in the camps. The previous sections have cited figures about the entire number of prisoners, including those convicted of violent, mercenary, work-place, economic, and other crimes. The number of prisoners who were convicted on charges of counter-revolutionary (state, political) crimes comprised (according to the figure on January 1 of each year) in 1934—135,200 people; in 1935—118,300; in 1936—105,900; in 1937—104,800; in 1938—185,300; and in 1939—454,400 people. For the duration of 1940–1941, it remained approximately on the same level as in 1939, then fell to 268,900 in 1944 and rose once again to 579,000 in 1950.
Some of those arrested for political reasons were convicted under criminal statutes. At the same time, criminals were often convicted under article 58, when their criminal activities were classified as wrecking, sabotage, and so forth. In view of these circumstances, V. N. Zemskov, the most serious researcher of statistics on Stalin’s repressions, thinks that the “relationship between political prisoners and criminals is highly relative, but in principle it corresponds to the real composition of the prisoners in the GULAG.”
One of the foulest Stalinist amalgams consisted of the fact that, after the war, those who fought against Stalinism and those innocently convicted were united in one category of state criminals along with Vlasovites, Polizei, members of punitive detachments, and other stooges of the forces of occupation, i.e., with collaborationists who were severely punished not only in the USSR, but in other countries liberated from Fascism.
6. Number of those repressed during the years of the Great Purge. Data about the number of people repressed in 1937–1938 were not declassified until the beginning of the 1990s. The only thing that Khrushchev dared to do on this plane was to announce at the Twentieth Congress that the number of people arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes increased in 1937 by ten times in comparison with 1936.
The first data about the number of victims of the Great Terror were cited at the June Plenum of the Central Committee in 1957, where it was announced that in 1937–1938, more than one and a half million people were arrested, of whom 681,692 people were shot. More exact data about the number of people arrested (1,372,329) were contained in the report from Shvernik, the chairman of the Commission of the Presidium of the CC, which was compiled at the beginning of 1963.
Thus, about a third of the acts of political repression committed during all the years of Soviet power were carried out in these two terrible years.
What appears even more striking is the dynamics of those sentenced to be shot (in cases involving the VChK-OGPU-NKVD). In the seven years of the New Economic Policy (1922–1928), their number reached 11,271 people. In 1930, the number of people shot rose to 20,201 and then began to decrease, reaching 10,651 people in 1931 and 9,285 people in the next five years (1932–1936). In 1936, 1,118 people were shot on political charges. In 1937, the number of people shot was 315 times (!) greater than the previous year, reaching 353,074 victims. Almost the same number were shot (328,618 people) in 1938, after which this indicator sharply fell, reaching 4,201 people for 1939 and 1940 combined.
The number of people shot in 1937–1938 exceeds by more than seven times the number shot in the remaining 22 years of Stalin’s reign (from 1930 to 1936 and 1939 to 1953, 94,390 people were executed). The scale of state terror during the years of the Great Purge has no equal in human history.
7. Statistics about rehabilitation. By 1954, in the prisons and camps there were 467,946 and in exile 62,462 people convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes. As a result of the early release and rehabilitation of people belonging to this category, by the beginning of 1959, 11,000 people who had been convicted of political offenses remained in places of incarceration.
Over the course of 1954–1961, 737,182 people were rehabilitated (including those posthumously), and 208,448 people who had been convicted were refused rehabilitation upon review of their cases. Rehabilitation continued in the 1960s–1980s, although at a slower pace.
A new stage of rehabilitation began in the third year of “perestroika.” From 1987 to 1989, 838,630 people were rehabilitated, and 21,333 were denied rehabilitation. The last group included traitors to the fatherland and members of punitive detachments from the time of the Second World War; participants in and accomplices of nationalist bands; and former officials of administrative organs who had been caught falsifying criminal cases. At the time the Soviet Union disintegrated, about 1.5 million cases remained unreviewed in its republics.
Thus, the statistics of rehabilitation coincide with the figures cited in section 5.
8. The number of party members repressed. In 1991, Katkov, the senior official of the Party Control Commission of the CC CPSU, announced that among the people repressed in 1937–1938 there were 116,885 communists. This figure is clearly an underestimation for at least two reasons.
First of all, a significant portion of those repressed during those years were expelled from the party before their arrest. The picture portrayed by A. Milchakov was typical: in the prelude to the arrest of a communist, members of his party organization would be called into the regional committee and told: “You have to expel him from the party, otherwise he will be arrested with a party card.” Therefore, while these people underwent investigation or were being sentenced, they figured as non-party persons.
Secondly, among those repressed were hundreds of thousands of people who had been expelled from the party during previous party purges. At the February–March Plenum of the Central Committee in 1937, Stalin announced that there were 1.5 million people who had been expelled from the party nationwide since 1922. Moreover, in several regions and at many factories the number of those expelled exceeded the number of party members. For instance, at the Kolomenskoe engine-building works there were two thousand former communists compared to the 1,400 party members. It is natural that special attention of the NKVD organs was directed at this category of people, and especially at those expelled for participation in opposition groups.
The figures presented by A. D. Sakharov in his article “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” are close to the truth. Here he notes that in 1936–1939, more than 1.2 million communists, who made up half the general number of party members, were arrested. Of these, according to Sakharov’s figures, 50,000 were eventually released, and the rest were either shot (600,000) or perished in the camps.
A more detailed picture of the number of repressed communists can be given by a comparison of these figures with party statistics. At the time of the Seventeenth Congress (February 1934) the party had 1,872,488 members and 935,298 candidate-members; at the time of the Eighteenth Congress (March 1939) there were 1,588,852 members and 888,814 candidate-members. If, in 1934–1938, there had not been mass party purges and repressions, and all candidates had been promoted to full members of the party, then by the time of the Eighteenth Congress the party would have had around 2.8 million members (adjustments for natural deaths would not be significant, since in 1934 approximately 90 percent of party members and almost 100 percent of candidate-members were people less than 50 years of age). Besides this, acceptance into the party, which had been closed in 1933, had been renewed starting 1 November 1936. From this time until March 1939, hundreds of thousands of people became party members who had not been candidate-members at the Seventeenth Congress. Since most of the people expelled from the party in 1933–1938 were subjected to political repression, it is not hard to come to the conclusion that communists made up, according to the most conservative calculations, more than half of the victims of the Great Terror.
In several regions, the losses of communists as a percentage were greater than in the country as a whole. Thus, in the Communist Party of Ukraine, the number of party members shrank from 456,000 in 1934 to 286,000 in 1938, i.e., by almost 40 percent.
The figures cited show the justness of Trotsky’s observation: “To establish the regime which is correctly called Stalinist, what was needed was not the Bolshevik Party, but the extermination of the Bolshevik Party.”
This idea is confirmed in the fate of those communists who managed to survive in Stalin’s prisons and camps. As A. D. Sakharov notes, “only a handful of those rehabilitated were allowed to work at responsible posts, and even fewer were able to participate in investigating the crimes of which they had been witnesses and victims.” Meanwhile, at the time of their rehabilitation, many communists who had occupied responsible positions in the past were no older than the current party bosses. For instance, the former general secretary of the Central Committee of the VLKSM, A. Milchakov, who was rehabilitated in 1955, was one year younger than Suslov and four years younger than Pelshe. It would have been natural to expect that this man, who had great political experience, would have been offered responsible work in the party or state apparatus. However, after his rehabilitation, Milchakov was put on a pension, whereas Suslov and Pelshe stayed in power for 25 years more. The “recruits of 1937” who occupied key posts in the apparatus in the 1950s were not inclined to waive even a tiny portion of their power to the benefit of Bolsheviks who had been released from prisons and the camps.