GULAG stats

[uberjude]

I can't find where Oleg presented that figure--do you have a link?

[michael mills]

A guard who murdered a prisoner might not write "I murdered a prisoner," but he would still have to record the prisoner's death, which would still get registered as a death.

Not necessarily.

The guard did not have to record the prisoner as having died. He could have recorded the prisoner as having "escaped".

For example, NKVD statistics from the 1930s relating to members of ethnic minorities compulsorily "resettled" in places like Kazakhstan show extraordinarily high numbers of "escapes".

Did all those "resettlers" really escape? If so, where did they escape to?

The suspicion exists that the category "escaped" is in many cases simply an invention, a case of "cooking the books" to explain the large gap between the number of "resettlers" originally deported from their homes in the western or eastern borderlands and the number still living in the penal settlements. In most cases the so-called "escapees" had simply died, but the NKVD wanted to conceal that fact.

I read about the above in a book called "A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland", dealing with the short-lived Markhlevsk Polish Autonomous District in the western Ukrainian borderlands. The author, Kate Brown, described the life of the deportees in exile in Kazakhstan, and stated that NKVD reports on the exiles sometimes referred to "mass escapes"; she raised the possibility that the term "mass escapes" was a euphemism for the deaths of deportees from starvation and disease, basing that on a reference to a book in Russian about the deportation of Koreans. Apparently the NKVD did not want to admit that large numbers of deportees had died while under their control, so it claimed that the missing deportees had "escaped".

That may have been a standard line in Soviet statistics; Stalin famously claimed that the missing Polish officers had "escaped across the border to Manchuria".

Of course, the men at the top of the NKVD reading the reports coming in from their branch offices in Kazakhstan must have realised that their underlings were lying to them when they reported huge numbers of "escapes". But Soviet statistics and other documentary material has been tellingly described as "liars telling lies to other liars".

The same consideration applies to the extraordinarily high number of "releases" reported in the statistics of the camps and penal settlements. Again the suspicion exists that a large proportion of the persons recorded as "released" had actually died of exhaustion or malnutrition, but on their death or just before it had been given an offical "release" which was then recorded on the books, for the purpose of concealing the actual death rate.

The conclusion must be that the actual number of deaths in the GULag camps and penal settlements must be higher by an unknown factor than the officially recorded number of deaths, with the excess deaths concealed as "escapes" and "releases".

Of course, there may well have been genuine escapes and releases, but not on the suspicious scale suggested by the official NKVD statistics.

[Topspeed]

I can't find where Oleg presented that figure--do you have a link?

No I was looking for them myself..they seem to be here no more. Maybe a new search with differnet words could bring result...they looked authentic really. I wonder where they are.

[David Thompson]

See Roberto Muehlenkamp's post at:

Some NKVD/GULAG statistics
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 78#p497978

[john h]

David excuse my ignorance but after going on the thread above in all the 5 pages i carnt find anyone with the name Roberto Muehlenkamps

[john h]

Topspeed the figure you are looking for is on page one of this thread and it was not Oleg who gave the figure it was Jack Carter

[uberjude]

Michael, I absolutely agree with you--I've seen figures for hundreds of thousands of registered "escapes" in the 1930's, which seems pretty high, but again, it becomes a matter of scale. Let's look at the numbers:
Escapes
Releases--I actually posted a pretty good article on page 6 of this thread that discusses this stuff; it does seem that there were actually large numbers of releases during the 1930's, precisely because the prisoners were in bad shape and the NKVD didn't want to have to feed them if they couldn't work and so forth. Presumably, many of them died after release, but many were probably able to survive in hopefully better conditions outside of the camps.
Unregistered deaths--like mass shootings at Katyn.

so I'm happy to retract a bit and say that there are more killings than the records show, but we're still talking about hundreds of thousands more, not millions more. The 1993 article by Getty and Zemskov notes about 2.3 million Soviet citizens who died in various forms of NKVD custody in the 1930's and '40's. If you add on various other categories mentioned above, it's pretty easy to get into the 3 million and change range of Snyder (for the GULAG), but nowhere near the numbers proposed by Conquest.

[David Thompson]

john h -- You wrote:

David excuse my ignorance but after going on the thread above in all the 5 pages i carnt find anyone with the name Roberto Muehlenkamps

Sorry, my mistake -- the poster was Sergey Romanov, not Roberto (the two are hosts at the Holocaust Controversies website at http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/). The link I gave should take you right to the post. The statistics are in green,

[Topspeed]

john h -- You wrote:

David excuse my ignorance but after going on the thread above in all the 5 pages i carnt find anyone with the name Roberto Muehlenkamps

Sorry, my mistake -- the poster was Sergey Romanov, not Roberto (the two are hosts at the Holocaust Controversies website at http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/). The link I gave should take you right to the post. The statistics are in green,

That is correct..it was Sergey Romanow about 7 years ago.

[Topspeed]

I am afraid the numbers of died and escaped may have nothing to do with the real numbers.

It is like poor book keeping...only if the people who check them are held responsible of their counting it starts to become an issue for the head of the Gulag. Seems that also this who made the memoirs was nearly discharged or even worse. I find the criminals violence ( nail in the head procedures ) against the political prisoners as one very hard factor and poor conditions inflicted diseases as another.

In Finland what was called as the "White Terror" it was the Spanish Flu killed major part of the inmates kept in the camps.

As the job of the prison chef was to have good results and possibly low death rate, I would assume is had become a habit to sent low figures to Moscow to ensure the next term as a prison chef. Only if the productivity fell below average the NKVD possibly sent someone to investigate. My opinion of course...based on the moral values found on the books written about the camps.

[michael mills]

The question is whether prisoners who were recorded in the GULag statistics as having been released before expiration of their sentences due to being too sick to work indeed were released and returned home, or whether they actually died in the camps.

Why would the GULag have incurred the cost of shipping thousands of sick and dying men all the way back from Kolyma to their homes west of the Urals?

It would have been simpler and cheaper just to dump them into a shed in the camp and leave them to perish, and record them as "released". Or even to get rid of them in a more active way.

Survivors of the GULag camps such as Solzhenitsyn may well have wildly exaggerated when they claimed that many millions of their fellow prisoners had died. But there is no reason to disbelieve their reports of large numbers of prisoners being regularly taken out of the camps into the forest and shot. Perhaps those prisoners were recorded in the books as "released" or "escaped", in order to explain their disappearance.

That does not mean that there were not genuine releases of course. But the problem for historians today is that the personnel who ran the GULag camps were never interrogated, never brought before non-Soviet courts, where they could have been made to explain what really happened to the prisoners who were recorded as "escaping", or the sick prisoners who were recorded as "released". Those personnel all died long ago, and can no longer be questioned. All that remains are the GULag documents, which may conceal as much as they reveal.

In that respect, our knowledge of the Soviet camps can never be as exact as our knowledge of the German camps, since in the latter case it was possible to seize documentation and question perpetrators immediately after the atrocities occurred, not some 70 years after the fact.

[Topspeed]

Also came to me when thinkg about certain Ingrian group that was executed in arrival that there may have been certain stigma on different arrivals..some were "enemies of the state " that were supposed to get killed there and those possibly weren't even supposed to be marked in the records/books. Some may have been with lower years sentenced etc.

[uberjude]

I agree we'll never know the full details, but those figures give some basis, and they don't add up to 20 million. And while some counter-explanations make some sense, there are problems with them as well.

Let's look at escapes--the argument is that camp officials were registering deaths as escapes, which may be true in some cases. But keep in mind, this is data used for official, internal purposes. By and large, the last thing that a prison guard, or prison warden, wants on his record is escapes. Why would they think it preferable that their superiors think that 100 prisoners escaped, rather than died? Especially when the simple, elegant and ubiquitous solution is "killed while escaping," which keeps the numbers accurate, makes the prison officials look more effective, and places the responsibility for the deaths on the prisoners themselves?

And as for releases, Michael, who are the records trying to fool, the population, which wouldn't see them, or the higher ups? You agree that they don't want to have excess deaths on their hands, so for the cost of what must have been a pretty cheap train ticket, the problem is resolved. At any rate, as I'm sure you'd agree when it comes to certain 20th century genocides, when you have official, internal documentation like this, its the obligation of the doubter to provide evidence to the contrary. Right now we have official documents that say one thing, and we have you, with no evidence, but an explanation, saying another. And it's not necessarily a very compelling explanation, for the simple reason that a release probably requires a whole other stream of paperwork with the family of the inmate. Does anybody have any info on that? When a prisoner was released, who was notified, and how? Because obviously, if the family of a prisoner registered as released was notified, it would complicate the whole thing if these hundreds of thousands of prisoners weren't being sent home. Keep in mind, the "releases" would be an effort to fool the higher-ups, so which would be worse for a camp commandant-releasing a few hundred sick prisoners and registering them as releases, or lying to his superiors and risk having someone in their families ask the wrong question to the wrong person?

I don't know, but at any rate, it's not as simple as you present. I agree we won't know all the details, but from a historical perspective, it's not enough to simply say you don't believe the documents if you don't have evidence to the contrary.

[Topspeed]

I agree we'll never know the full details, but those figures give some basis, and they don't add up to 20 million.

I think the figure 20 million comes from the total toll of the Soviet regime..Gulag is just a minor factor in it. NKVD and KGB interrogation centers and pure assassinations etc cover the most. Katyn killing etc are no Gulag deaths. A spy sticking a poisonous nerv toxic into your body through a gadget hidden in an umbrella etc.

[David Thompson]

Let's get back on topic -- GULAG statistics.