Political Repression in The Soviet Union - Difficulties in Counting The Repressed

Difficulties in Counting The Repressed

Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who deeply studied this problem, considers that 66 million 700 thousand people became victims to the state repression and terrorism from 1917 to 1959. Analogous figure — over 66 million people — was announced by Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, the chairman of the commission for rehabilitation of repressed persons. According to Viktor Luneyev, actual struggle against dissent was manyfold larger than it was registered in sentences, and we do not know how many persons were kept under surveillance of secret services, held criminally liable, arrested, sent to psychiatric hospitals, expelled from their work, restricted in their rights everyway. No objective counting of repressed persons is possible without fundamental analysis of archival documents. The difficulty of this method is that the required data are very diverse and are not in one archive. They are in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, in the archive of the Goskomstat of Russia, in the archives of the MVD of Russia, the FSB of Russia, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, in the Russian Military and Historical Archive, in archives of constituent entities of the Russian Federation, in urban and regional archives, as well as in archives of the former Soviet Republics that now are independent countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltics. Where, for example, can one determine the number of people shot in the second half of the 1930s and in the early 1940s in the Kurapaty hole (estimate for them is from 30 to 100 thousand people or, by some estimates, up to 200 thousand)? Only in Belarus. The same can be said of other mass shootings and other forms of repression of victims of Soviet regime.