What proportion of the population of Soviet Union were taken into custody by the state during Stalin's time?

score:6

Accepted answer

The following is taken from the book

Richard Overy, "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia." Penguin Books, 2006.

From pages 194-196:

Those arrested, convicted and sentenced by the NKVD agencies between 1930 and 1953 total 3,851,450. The total executed, according to these figures, was 776,074, which is very close to the figure of 786,098 for those sentenced for execution between 1930 and 1953 published under Gorbachev in 1990. The full record is set out in Table 5.1. These figures are substantially lower than the more speculative pre-glasnost estimates. The statistics for those sent to camps are consistent with what is now known from the archives of the GUlag, about the size and composition of the camp population. In 1940 there were 4 million in the various penal institutions: approximately 1.3 million in the GUlag camps, 300,000 in prison, 997,000 in special settlements and 1.5 million in deportee camps.

By 1950 there were 6.45 million in the various parts of the camp empire. Total deaths in the GUlag camps from 1934 (when accurate records start) to 1953 numbered 1,053,829, in the most part from disease, overwork, frostbite and malnutrition. Some of the NKVD executions were carried out in the camps, and may be double counted in the global total of NKVD killings. More difficult to assess is just how many of the cases tried under the security agencies were in fact criminal cases (like the case of two unfortunate peasant boys sent to mind the collective farm cows, who were caught eating three cucumbers and were each sentenced to eight years in a camp). Nor is it possible to calculate how many cases in the ordinary justice system were in fact raised under Article 58 and punished by execution or imprisonment. The numbers who died in transit to camps, in overcrowded wagons, short of food and water, in sub-zero temperatures can only be hazarded. The full reckoning of the victims of Soviet repression is certainly larger than the figures show, though by hundreds of thousands rather than millions. Executions and camp deaths between them total 1,829,903; this figure should be treated as a minimum. It need hardly be said that aggregate figures mask millions of stories of human suffering beyond the immediate circle of victims: women and men left without a partner, children without parents, families uprooted and loyal friendships obliterated. For the traumas of repression, statistical exactitude is an irrelevance.

Regarding these numbers as the percentage of the Soviet population, according to the official Soviet statistics, the numbers varied between about 150 million (1926) and 180 million (1951).

Thus, the answer to your question is something like 1 in 40.

Lastly, as for "Timur and His Squad," it is just a propaganda lit. (And not bad, if you ignore the backdrop.) A bit more "realistic," is the "The fate of a drummer-boy," by the same author, Arkady Gaidar, and written at about the same time. There, the main character discovers that people pretending to be his relatives are actually spies and is almost killed when he tries to stop them. The moral that this book is designed to convey is that "even your close relatives might be people's enemies." If you want an even scarier macabre story with the same message, read about this boy. Ironically, Arkady Gaidar's grandson, Yegor Gaidar, was the main architect of the controversial shock therapy and market economy reforms administered in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Sometimes, life is stranger than fiction.

Upvote:1

I cannot remember the book unfortunately so may be criticised for offering this as an answer at all. However, years ago I read an estimate of combined deaths from Stalin's purges plus the famine associated with collectivization of agriculture based on the age structure of the population recorded by Post-World War II Soviet census figures.

Not surprisingly, the number of people in age group most likely to have fought in World War II was noticeably less than one would expect compared to most other age groups, indicating the great loss of life in the war. However, there was an even bigger shortfall in the age group born immediately before them, suggesting that combined deaths from the purges and famines may actually have been greater even than the enormous Soviet losses in World War II. Sorry I cannot be more specific but that could indicate one way to approach this question.

Upvote:1

The numbers of those who were arrested and of those who died is heavily disputed among historians. Some believe the numbers were in the low millions, others put them in the tens of millions. (Some Marxists insist the numbers were negligible, only a few thousand, and say that these happened only because of overzealous local officials.) It comes down to who seems to make the most credible case for their particular number but we all have different ways of assessing credibility.

I do know that Solzhenitsyn and his fellow survivor of the gulag Igor Shafareevich, a mathematician, wrote in Under the Rubble that they were absolutely certain that twenty million people perished under Stalin - I think that excluded those who died in WWII but I'm not positive - and may have been as high as 120 million. I also know that it used to be widely said in the Soviet Union - when it became safe to speak of such things - that not a single family in the entire Soviet Union was untouched by Stalin's secret police. Apparently every single family had a least one person arrested at the very least. (I'm not sure what definition of family they were using; I suspect they may have meant more than just the immediate family living in the same home and counted aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and so forth but that's just a guess; they may indeed have meant immediate family in the same home.)

In other words, this was not an event that touched only a handful (or relative handful) of Soviet citizens.

Upvote:5

Just browsing quickly through some WP articles:

  • ~10M kulaks were repressed
  • 3-10M Ukrainians died in the famines Stalin intentionally created
  • 6M underwent internal exile, and of these maybe 1-1.5M died
  • there was genocide and deportation of Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and Ingush

The total population in the 1930's was about 29M for Ukraine, 160M for the USSR as a whole.

So perhaps 1 in 10 suffered one of these consequences over all, but the proportion would be higher if you belonged to certain groups.

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