Melgunov's work can't be taken seriously as it is the pre-eminent 1920s Russian emigre propaganda piece published in the West. His work at best is a polemec on behalf of the White Guards. There is an absence of bibliography and footnotes in his work about the so-called "Red Terror". Melgunov even came from an aristocratic family showing how inherently partisan his views were. Melgunov claims that tens of thousands were executed in Krym without putting forth any serious evidence. What especially casts doubts on these sensational claims is that Lenin distinctly said that 300,000 captured bourgeois in the Krym would be spared:
For instance, there are at present 300,000 bourgeois in the Crimea. These are a source of future profiteering, espionage and every kind of aid to the capitalists. However, we are net afraid of them. We say that we shall take and distribute them, make them submit, and assimilate them.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/w ... dec/06.htm
**Nine million repression deaths [Executions: 1.5 million, Gulag: 5 million, Deportations: 1.7 million {out of 7.5 million deported}, and POW's and German civilians: 1 million] (citing Vadim Erlikman’s Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke : spravochnik. Moscow 2004. ISBN 5931651071)
Erlikman's estimates are unsubstantiated. His figure for the GULAG is five times too high. His number of executions is about three times too high. As Pavel Polyan has clearly demonstrated, the deportation of Soviet civilians and Poles from annexed territories was about 4 million as opposed to Erlikman's baseless 7.5 million. Moreover, the deportees did not die because of the process of resettlement but because of the economic catastrophe brought by the war.
to perhaps 15-20 million deaths attributable to the regime overall (citing The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois et al
This is not a valid source.
A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia by Alexander Yakovlev; Autopsy of an Empire:
Yakovlev does not cite a source for his claim. It is difficult to take someone seriously like Yakovlev who is considered to have been the architect of the perestroika which allowed for the IMF to to destroy the Russian economy. Yakovlev became an ardent right-wing neoliberal politician in the 1990s who regularly slandered the communists.
The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime by Dmitri Volkogonov
Volkogonv fails to substantiate his claim that 7 to to million died from collectivization and dekulakization. It is difficult to take someone like Volkogonov seriously when he became an adviser to Boris Yeltsin whose policies brought the largest catastrophe in Russia not seen since the second world war.
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore
This work contains numerous factual errors particularly in regard to the famine. Montefiore is not a historian but is instead a sort of literary writer. He does not have the credentials of a historian. Much of what he purports are derived from often faulty, sensationalist sources from the likes of Anthony Beevor, Robert Conquest, etc.
The numerous mass graves discovered all over the former USSR and various satellite countries from the late 80’s to today are by far the most damning evidence of the sheer criminality of the Soviet regime:
These "mass graves" do not provide an indication of factual statistics which is all you are ever interested in. Moreover there really is no way to verify whether the communists were responsible for these "mass graves".
*Some 100,000 (citing Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War by W. Bruce Lincoln) to 250,000-300,000 (citing The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police by George Leggett) murdered by Lenin’s Bolsheviks during the "Red Terror" and Russian civil war.
That is false. Based on a misunderstanding that there were actually executions in the Crimea and that the Kronshtadt battle took a heavy toll, the scholar Mozohin has confirmed that no more than 50,000 were shot. You distort Leggett's work as he favours a figure of 140,000. The Cheka's documents show that about 18 thousand were executed between 1918-1921. This is contrast to the 25,000 workers slaughtered by the German-backed regime between February-May 1918.
http://www.fsb.ru/history/read/1998/mozohin.html
*Between 300,000 and 500,000 Cossacks killed or deported in 1919 and 1920 out of a population of no more than a few million (known as "De-Cossackization"; not sure how many of these deaths overlap with the aforementioned Cheka murders - if at all).
That is false. Polyan shows that no more than 45,000 Cossacks were deported. Moreover, the Cossacks were a major element of the Whites and obviously endured fatalities in battle. As Reds and Whites combined endured some 300 thousand deaths in battle, it is implausible that the Cossacks endured 500,000 losses. There are today millions of Russians of "Cossack" ancestry. A large portion of Cossacks were guilty of having collaborated with mass murderer proto-Nazi Denikin whose forces slaughtered up to 100,000 Jews. Propaganda dessiminated by the whites painted the power of the soviet workers councils as a lunatic Jewish conspiracy. Nevertheless, the Cossacks did not endure demographic losses implicated by the work you've cited. The records show only 40,000 deportations of Terek Cossacks in order to make space for the Chechens and Ingush.
http://www.memo.ru/history/deport/polyan1.htm#_VPID_13
*5 million perished in the famine of 1921-22, in which the Bolshevik policy of "war communism" (which included forced requisitioning of food and deportation and even execution of peasants who refused to comply) made the famine much worse than it had to be. Compare this to previous Russian famines under the autocratic Tsars which killed no where near as many. (citing A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime by Richard Pipes)
The policy of grain collections were neither excessive nor did they originate with the Bolsheviks. The Whites and even the Greens collected grains from the regions they controlled. Grain collections drastically reduced in 1921 when the New Economic Policy was implemented. In 1918 and much of 1919, the Bolsheviks did not have control of the relevant agricultural regions including Ukraine, the North Caucasus, Sibir, and much of the Volga. Stephen Wheatcroft and the pre-eminent scholar on the Soviet economy Robert Davies wrote in their 2004 "Years of Hunger":
The urban food shortages began to emerge during the First World War in 1916 and led to major food riots in the spring of 1917. The shortages turned into a major crisis following the 1917 harvest. The Soviet government succeeded in collecting only a fraction of the grain which was transferred from village to town in normal years. The disintegration of the army was largely caused by the food shortage. A severe drought in 1921, following poor weather and a poor harvest in 1920, was the immediate background to the famine. According to Soviet data, the grain harvest in 1920 was only 60% of the pre-war level, and it was even smaller in 1921.
The following effectively discredits these absurd claims about excessive grain procurements. Unlike the literary fairy tales that have been incessantly been cited, this data actually has scientific, economic basis:
1914: 67.8 milllion tons produced; 5 million tons collected
1915: 74.3 million tons produced; 8.2 million tons collected
1916: 62.5 to 65.5 million tons produced; 8.9 million collected
1918: 1.8 million tons collected
1919: 3.5 million tons collected
1920: 44.5 million tons produced; 5.9 million tons collected
1921: 38 million tons produced; 3.8 million tons collected
Source:
The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, ed. R.W Davies, Mark Harrison, and S.G Wheatcroft
*Between 7.2 to 9.5 million deaths during dekulakization/collectivization and the massive famine caused by these draconian policies (citing Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed For Him by Donald Rayfield and Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime by Dmitri Volkogonov)
2 million died from famine according to Soviet documents while perhaps 200,000 kulaks died during the process of resettlement. You are blatantly incorrect about famine having resulted from Stalin's policies. The sources you have cited incorrectly claim that the harvest in 1932 was no worse than in previous years. However, research conducted by Mark Tauger, Stephen Wheatcroft and the pre-eminent scholar of Soviet economics R.W Davies show that both the 1931 and 1932 harvests were disastrous caused primarily by drought, poor weather, rust, smut, and an inadequate supply of horses. Moreover, the Soviet government with its rationing system fed more than 60 million people.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econo ... deaths.xls
http://www.thewalls.ru/truth/kulak.htm
http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/T ... ctions.pdf
*Around 700,000 executed during the Great Terror of 1937-38
This is inaccurate. The historian A.Dugin found that there were 640,000+ executions total in the period 1921-53. It must be stressed that the "Great Terror" was limited to foreign and domestic parties, the state, and burreacuracy. The proper source is: А.Дугин. Сталинизм: легенды и факты // Слово. 1990, №7. С.25.
*Over 1 million Polish citizens deported by November 1940; 30% of whom were dead by 1941
This is false. Polyan found that 275,000 ethnic Poles were deported between 1939-41. When relations were restored with the illegitimate Polish regime in London, Polish prisoners of war were promptly repatriated. There is no evidence to this claim that Polish deportees endured that high of a death rate.
http://www.memo.ru/history/deport/
(citing Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore) and over 20,000 reserve officers and intellectuals executed outright (i.e. Katyn) by the NKVD during the
That is highly disputed. Russia confirmed that 1,803 of the officers died. You are also incorrect in calling them reserve officers as all reserves become active when under invasion.
*A total of 34,250 Latvians and around 60,000 Estonians and 75,000 Lithuanians murdered or deported during Nazi-Soviet pact (citing Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore) Gruesome pictures of Latvian victims of the NKVD can be found here
That is false. 45,000 total from the Baltic states were deported between 1939-41 according to the archival documents cited by Polyan. Never did executions exceed repression in the form of imprisonment of deportation.
http://www.memo.ru/history/deport/
An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 were slaughtered during the "prison massacres," in which the NKVD murdered Ukrainian and Polish political prisoners (this does not include the aforementioned 20,000 killed) wholesale as they retreated from the advancing Wehrmacht in 1941. Most were machine-gunned to death in batches, but sometimes prisons were set on fire and the helpless prisoners burned to death, in other cases grenades were tossed into crowded cells and prisoners were blown to pieces. (citing wikipedia article NKVD massacres of prisoners)
Wikipedia is not a valid source as it is edited by wannabe scholars with an internet connection.
*The ethnic cleansing of minorities during WW2 within the USSR - such as the Crimean Taters, Chechens, Kalmyks, Volga Germans and others where deported wholesale into exile for "collaborating" with the Germans
That is a misleading statement that there was not collaboration by any one of these groups. It is an established fact that 10% of the entire Crimean Tatar population collaborated with the Germans. This can distinctly be found by a scholarly article published by Alexander Statiev:
http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi? ... atiev.html
In regard to the Chechens, historian Igor Pykhalov documented internal rebellion and massive desertion:
http://www.specnaz.ru/archive/10_2001/7.htm
Statiev wrote:
"Collaboration with the invaders in Crimea spread wider than in any of the republics in the North Caucasus; in total, 20,000 persons enlisted in Tatar batallions and self-defense units."
Conscription to the Red Army and the wartime labor draft provoked an uprising in the mountain districts of Chechnya in October-November 1941. Police, with the use of air force among other means, suppressed about 800 rebels, but a small-scale insurgency continued.
When the authorities attempted to conscript Chechens into the army in the spring of 1942, the police reported that "all the male population fled to the mountains". Out of 14,000 Chechens liable for conscription, only 4395 were enlisted, and of those 2365 deserted. The government, despite all its efforts, could conscript only 17500 Checnes during the war, but many of them deserted. At one point, the number of deserters and draft-evaders among the recruits reached 13,000 men. From Nov. 1941 to June 1943, the 141st NKVD Security Regiment deployed in Chechnya killed 973 and captured 1167 bandits and arrested 1413 insurgents.
with hundreds of thousands dying in transit or of privation while in exile.
That is a faulty observation. Death among the resettled German population in adjacent Kazakhstan were not any different than what the Soviet population endured. It was not because of the resettlement why they died but because of the effects brought by war. With some 860 thousand deported Germans, there were 774 Germans located in the settlements in 1946. Eventually, the Soviet German population increased to 2 million in 1989. Germans and other groups were never sent into some sort of isolated exile but lived just like anyone else in the region. Germans in Kazakhstan had schools and media in their own language and were by far more prosperous than the indigenous population. Moreover, Soviet documents have shown the following in which there was an effort to accomodate the deportees:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/l2tartar.html
. By 1 June of this year, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Uzbekistan, comrade Iusupov, the Chairman of the Uzbek SSR Council of People's Commissars, comrade Abdurakhmanov, and the Uzbek SSR People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, comrade Kobulov, are to carry out the following steps in regard to the acceptance and settlement of the special settlers:
a) To accept and settle within the Uzbek SSR 140 to 160 thousand special settlers -- Tatars, sent by the USSR NKVD from the Crimean ASSR. The settlement of the special settlers will occur in state farm communities, existing collective farms, farms affiliated with
enterprises, and in factory communities, for employment in agriculture and industry
b) To establish commissions in oblasts where the special settlers are resettled, consisting of the chairman of the oblast executive committee, secretary of the oblast committee, and chief of the NKVD administration, charging them with the implementation of all measures in connection with the acceptance and distribution of the newly arrived special settlers;
c) To organize raion troikas, consisting of the chairman of the raion executive committee, secretary of the raion committee, and chief of the raion branch of the NKVD, charging them with preparation for the distribution and organization of the acceptance of the newly arrived special settlers;
d) To arrange the automotive transport of the special settlers, mobilizing the vehicles of any enterprises or institutions for this purpose;
e) To grant plots of farm land to the newly arrived special settlers and to help them build homes by providing construction materials;
f) To organize special NKVD commandant's headquarters, to be maintained by the USSR NKVD, in the raions of settlement;
g) By 20 May of this year, the Uzbek SSR Central Committee and Council of People's Commissars are to submit to the USSR NKVD (comrade Beria) a plan for the settlement of the special settlers in the oblasts and raions, indicating the destination points of the trains.
4. Seven-year loans of up to 5,000 rubles per family, for the construction and setting up of homes, are to be extended by the Agricultural Bank (comrade Kravtsov) to special settlers sent to the Uzbek SSR, in their places of settlement.
5. Every month during the June-August 1944 period, equal quantities of flour, groats, and vegetables will be allocated by the USSR People's Commissariat of Procurement (comrade Subbotin) to the Uzbek SSR Council of People's Commissars for distribution to
the special settlers, in accordance with Appendix No. 2.
Flour, groats, and vegetables are to be distributed free of charge to the special settlers during the June-August period, as repayment for the agricultural production and livestock received from them in the areas from which they were evicted.
6. To augment the automotive transport capacity of the NKVD troops, garrisoned in the raions of settlement in the Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kirgiz SSR's, the People's Commissariat of Defense (comrade Khrulev) is to provide 100 recently repaired "Willys"3 motor vehicles and 250 trucks during the May-June 1944 period.
7. By 20 May 1944, the Main Administration for the Transport and Supply of Petroleum and Petroleum Products (comrade Shirokov) is to allocate and supply 400 tons of gasoline to locations specified by the USSR NKVD, and 200 tons of gasoline are to be
placed at the disposal of the Uzbek SSR Council of People's Commissars.
The supply of gasoline [for this purpose] is to be carried out in conjunction with a corresponding reduction of supplies to all other consumers.
8. By 15 May of this year, the Main Supply Administration of the USSR Ministry of Forestry, USSR Council of People's Commissars (comrade Lopukhov), is to deliver 75,000 2.75-meter railroad car boards to the People's Commissariat of Railroads, using any means
at its disposal.
9. In May of this year, the People's Commissariat of Finance (comrade Zverev) is to transfer 30 million rubles from the reserve fund of the USSR Council of People's Commissars to the USSR NKVD, for the implementation of special measures
(citing The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin)
Mitrokhin's archives have largely been discredited. If they were anything reliable then people implicated would have been prosecuted. He did not have the original documents with him when he somehow under the watchful eye of the ubiquitous KGB managed to flee from a Baltic state to England. With regard to Andrew's work, he himself does not conduct any breakthrough research but instead employs the most militantly anti-communist sources. According to Andrew's partisanship, it was unscrupulous for the KGB to have funded foreign media. But when the CIA did the exact same thing it was a crusade for freedom.
http://in.rediff.com/news/2005/sep/28raman.htm
*The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the scorched earth campaigns against the Mujahadeen claimed between 1.5 and 2 million lives, 90% of whom were civilians
There was never a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as the Afghan government repeatedly requested the assistance of the Soviet government. It is impossible to blame the USSR for economic catastrophe in Afghanistan given the fact that the US-backed mujahideen controlled 80% of the country. When the USSR withdrew, tens of thousands were murdered by the US-backed mujahideen in Kabul alone. Hundreds of thousands became refugees.
After a month, the DRA requests were no longer for individual crews and subunits, but were for regiments and larger units. On 19 July, the Afghan government requested that two motorized rifle divisions be sent to Afghanistan. The following day, they requested an airborne division in addition to the earlier requests. They repeated these requests and variants to these requests over the following months right up to December 1979. However, the Soviet government was in no hurry to grant these requests. http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/grasovintroduction.html
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
I'll take this as a satirical joke. Everything claimed on that web site is crude propaganda.