What proportion of the population of Soviet Union were taken into custody by the state during Stalin's time?
score:6
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.
More post
- 📝 How well were the African soldiers equipped in the civil war?
- 📝 How much is known about the Punic language (of classical Carthage)?
- 📝 When was the idea of a unified India conceived?
- 📝 Were there any high-ranking female soldiers during the Middle ages?
- 📝 Why did cavalry keep becoming a thing if spears were always around?
- 📝 Did the US promise to save Romania from the Soviets?
- 📝 What was the total megatonnage of all munitions expended in World War 2?
- 📝 Why are the "Three Musketeers" called musketeers?
- 📝 Why was James II and VII (same person), the last Roman Catholic monarch of Britain, not forced to convert to Anglicanism?
- 📝 Did the Soviet Union or its satellite states have any broadcast propaganda media for an international audience?
- 📝 Why did fighter pilots wear their hats lopsided during the World Wars?
- 📝 How large were Bronze Age settlements?
- 📝 Why is the border between Myanmar and Thailand so long?
- 📝 Why was Archbishop of Carthage, Cyriacus, arrested?
- 📝 Did the Vikings practice voluntary human sacrifice?
- 📝 How many non-jews did Nazis kill?
- 📝 Did the Germans invent "Unexpected Pot-Shots"?
- 📝 Why did the the US House of Representatives stop reading George Washington's farewell address on his birthday?
- 📝 In the context of Ancient Egypt, what could "Priest of On" mean?
- 📝 What was the military equipment of a soldier of the Cholan Empire at its peak?
- 📝 Why didn't the Japanese develop air defenses after the bombing of Tokyo?
- 📝 Is strategic bombing as ineffective as this math suggests?
- 📝 Why was the Federal government's assumption of state debt so significant?
- 📝 Was the Wehrmacht a mechanized army?
- 📝 What name was given to this ancient Roman custom involving a broken pot to show a pact between individuals?
- 📝 Where can I find more details about "historian" André Du Nay?
- 📝 Did the defense of the Brest fortress make sense?
- 📝 Why Europe became more developed although metal was first discovered and used in Asia/Africa?
- 📝 Was arson prominent in the Kingdom of Hawaii?
- 📝 What historical evidence do we have regarding the Lost Colony of Roanoke?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 What proportion of the population of Soviet Union were taken into custody by the state during Stalin's time?
- 📝 What alternate north-south supply routes did the Soviet Union have when the Volga and Stalingrad were under attack?
- 📝 What was the lowest available population to the Soviet Union in WW2?
- 📝 What was the ratio women to men after World War 2 in the Soviet Union
- 📝 What determined which companies went to which post-Soviet republics after the fall of the Soviet Union as everything was centralized in Moscow?
- 📝 What were the most common reasons why draft-age men were not conscripted for the Union Army?
- 📝 At the time of Sputnik, what kind of radios were common in the Soviet Union?
- 📝 To what extent were religious groups persecuted in the Soviet Union?
- 📝 What were the limitations on possession of wealth in Soviet Russia and how were they enforced?
- 📝 What was the Soviet reasoning for developing their Airborne Forces (VDV) into a powerful military branch?
- 📝 What are some major military successes the Soviet Union achieved against the Western World?
- 📝 What percentage of the population in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776 were first/second generation immigrants?
- 📝 What proportion of the Arab population of Palestine pre-1948 came from families that lived there before 1880?
- 📝 What kind of heating did Moscow have in the early Soviet Union (1917 - 1930)?
- 📝 What was the strategic importance of Moscow to the Soviet Union in Dec 1941?
- 📝 To what extent were practitioners of Judaism persecuted during the Soviet Union?
- 📝 Were some groups in the Soviet Union more likely to collaborate with the Germans than others?
- 📝 What were the population demographics in the South during the Hayes/Tilden election?
- 📝 What were the demographics of the ancient Greek colonies of Cyprus (any population estimates from 500BCE to 1BCE will do)?
- 📝 What was the basis for the Nazis to support various ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union and elsewhere over the majority populations?
- 📝 What were the main centres of population in South America in 1500 AD?
- 📝 What incentives were there for Soviet and Chinese politicians to try climb to the top when there was so much history of deposing their own?
- 📝 What percent of the Roman Republic's population were citizens in various centuries?
- 📝 What percentage of the population were serfs by region/year?
- 📝 What steps were taken at the end of WW2 to prevent a WW3?
- 📝 What are the reasons for the failure of Soviet Union at agriculture?
- 📝 What measures were taken by the Bolsheviks to consolidate their position?
- 📝 Why did Hitler attack the Soviet Union when he was still busy fighting the United Kingdom?
- 📝 Why didn't Imperial Japan attack the Soviet Union during World War 2?
- 📝 What drugs were used in England during the High Middle Ages?