Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

Appendix H

Loss of Life in the Stalin Era

321

Alexander Yakovlev in a recent book, A Century of Violence in Soviet

Russia(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), put the num-

ber of deaths due to the Soviet system at 60 million. Yakovlev, who

along with Mikhail Gorbachev was an architect of glasnost, called the

Soviet tragedy a “democide.” Despite research done over the past

decades by Russian and other scholars, there are no exact numbers for

those who perished in the years 1928–1953. The following account of

repression is taken from a variety of primary and secondary sources; it

deals with only 10 major incidents of repression in the Stalinist period.

Collectivization and the Famine of 1933–1934.A figure of 7–10 mil-

lion deaths is probably as accurate an estimate as can be provided.

This includes the loss of 2–3 million peasants during collectiviza-

tion, the death of approximately 500,000 Kazakh nomads, and the

death by starvation of approximately 5 million Ukrainians.

The Yezhovshchina.The KGB provided the Communist Party Central

Committee with information during the Nikita Khrushchev years

that there had been approximately 1.5 million arrests and 650,000

executions in 1937–1938. This figure is almost certainly too low:

the Memorial organization has established that there were more

than 40,000 executions in Leningrad alone in that period, and no

less than 20,000 people were shot at Butovo near Moscow in just

14 months. Moreover, the figure may not include thousands shot

without trial or interrogation, or those murdered in provincial jails.

In 1953–1956, the newly minted KGB had every reason to provide

the leadership with a very low figure.

Incorporation of Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. A noted

Western historian, Jan Gros, places the loss of life in Poland be-

tween 750,000 and 1 million in his Revolution from Abroad

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