My last post on this thread Is there irrefutable evidence for Stalin's crimes?
Distinguishing settled facts from genuinely contested debates. Yes—and the evidentiary situation is unusual in that the strongest material comes from the regime's own paperwork, written for internal use and never intended to be read by anyone outside it. The single most damning category is the documents Stalin personally signed. The rasstrel'nye spiski—the shooting lists—are albums of names compiled by the NKVD and sent to the Politburo for pre-approval of sentence before any trial occurred. There are around 380 of them, carrying roughly 44,000 names; Stalin signed about 357, and Molotov a comparable number, with Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov close behind. Memorial published them in facsimile. NKVD Order No. 00447 of July 1937 is the operational order for the kulak operation, with numerical quotas broken down by region into a category for execution and a category for camps, and the files contain the regional requests to raise those quotas along with the Politburo's approvals. The Beria memo of 5 March 1940 proposing execution of the Polish prisoners carries Stalin's signature across the top; Shelepin's 1959 note to Khrushchev gives the total as 21,857. Then the national operations orders, the January 1933 directive over Stalin's and Molotov's signatures sealing the Ukrainian and North Caucasus borders against fleeing peasants, the GKO decrees for the wartime deportations, and the 1939 telegram confirming that "physical pressure" had been authorized by the Central Committee since 1937. What makes this irrefutable rather than merely strong is that the streams are independent and they converge. The bureaucratic record is one. Soviet self-investigation is another—the Secret Speech, the Shvernik commission of 1963, and then the rehabilitation commissions after 1987, which processed millions of cases against the original files. Forensic archaeology is a third: Butovo, Kuropaty, Sandarmokh, Bykivnia, and the Katyn-complex sites at Mednoye and Kharkiv. Demography is a fourth—the 1937 census was suppressed, and its organizers shot for returning a population figure some eight million short of what Stalin had publicly claimed. Survivor testimony is a fifth. You would have to posit a forgery operation spanning the NKVD's own accounting, Khrushchev's apparatus, Gorbachev's, Yeltsin's, and several thousand graves. There's a point here that cuts against the usual polemical framing. The archival opening resolved a numbers quarrel in favor of the lower estimates—Zemskov's work on the NKVD statistics, Getty and Rittersporn's 1993 piece, and the Pavlov memo's figure of 681,692 executed in 1937–38—well below Conquest's projections. But those are the perpetrator's own books, and they describe a state shooting close to seven hundred thousand of its citizens in two years by administrative quota. The revision narrowed the magnitude and hardened the fact. What remains genuinely open is narrower than either side of the argument usually admits: the total mortality figure, particularly for the famine, where excess-death estimates depend on contested demographic modeling; whether the 1932–33 famine meets the intent standard for genocide, which is a live scholarly dispute (Snyder, Applebaum, and Graziosi against Davies and Wheatcroft, roughly); how much of the terror's dynamic was central command versus regional initiative competing to overfulfill; and whether Stalin ordered Kirov's murder, on which no document has ever surfaced and probably none exists. Those are real questions. They are not questions about whether the crimes occurred. If you're running into the denialist material—Furr is the usual source—the method is worth naming rather than arguing with point by point. Documents that incriminate are declared forgeries; documents that exculpate are taken at face value; no consistent criterion distinguishes the two. The Katyn forgery claim in particular has been tested forensically and graphologically and failed, and it has to explain away the 1990 Soviet admission, which was made against the state's own interest. Sources Searched the web Grouped by what they establish and by whether you'd be citing a document or a scholar. Document collections (the primary material) ------------------------------------------- *The shooting lists.* Сталинские расстрельные списки , prepared by Memorial with the Presidential Archive, CD-ROM 2002, web version at stalin.memo.ru. The 2002 publication covers the 383 lists surviving in the Presidential Archive (AP RF) from 1936–38, carrying 44,465 names, bound in 11 volumes running from 27 February 1937; the 2021 revision raised the total to 388 lists spanning 1936–1950 and roughly 45,000 people. On signatures: Stalin's "za" and autograph survive on 357 lists, and Molotov's on 372—he leads—Kaganovich 188, Voroshilov 185, Zhdanov 176, Mikoyan 8, and Kosior, himself later shot, 5. Worth noting for provenance arguments: the lists were located because Kruglov reported their discovery in the MVD archive to Khrushchev on 3 February 1954. Roginsky's afterword in Расстрельные списки. Москва, 1937–1941. «Коммунарка» — Бутово (Звенья, 2000), pp. 494–96, is the methodological account. Сталинские списки. Часть первая: antistalinism—LiveJournal +3 ( https://antistalinism.livejournal.com/903.html ) *Order No. 00447 and the terror mechanism.* Лубянка. Сталин и Главное управление госбезопасности НК ВД, 1937–1938 (Демократия, 2004)—the order, the regional limit requests, and the Politburo approvals. English documentary equivalent: Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (Yale, Annals of Communism, 1999). For the operation studied as such, Marc Junge and Rolf Binner, Как террор стал «большим» (2003), and Nicolas Werth's "The Mechanism of a Mass Crime" in Gellately and Kiernan, eds., The Specter of Genocide (2003). *Katyn.* Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment , eds. Cienciala, Lebedeva, and Materski (Yale, Annals of Communism, 2007)—the fullest English documentary edition. Earlier: Materski, ed., Katyń: Documents of Genocide (PAN, 1993), the materials Yeltsin handed Wałęsa in October 1992. The two documents that matter most: Beria's March 1940 proposal to shoot 25,700, from "Package No. 1," AP RF f. 3, op. 24; and Shelepin's March 1959 note to Khrushchev reporting 21,857 executed and proposing destruction of the files, RGASPI f. 17, op. 166, d. 621, ll. 138–139. The Shelepin breakdown: 4,421 at Katyn, 3,820 at Kharkiv, 6,311 at Mednoye, and 7,305 in Belorussian and Ukrainian NKVD prisons—note that sources date the memo variously to 3 or 9 March. Military Wiki ( https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre ) Sciences Po ( https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/katyn-massacres-1940.html ) *Collectivization and the famine.* Трагедия советской деревни: Коллективизация и раскулачивание, 1927–1939 , 5 vols. (РОССПЭН, 1999–2006) — Danilov, Manning, Viola. The 22 January 1933 directive over Stalin's and Molotov's signatures sealing the Ukrainian and North Caucasus borders is in vol. 3. English selections in The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930 (Yale, 2005). For the deportations: Viola, The Unknown Gulag (2007); Polian, Against Their Will (2004). Self-investigation by the Soviet state -------------------------------------- The Secret Speech, full Russian text in Известия ЦК КПСС , no. 3 (1989). The Pospelov commission report of February 1956 and the Shvernik commission materials of 1963 are in Реабилитация: как это было , 3 vols. (Демократия, 2000–2004). The 1990 TASS admission on Katyn, the 2010 State Duma declaration, and the ECHR's Janowiec and Others v. Russia (Grand Chamber, 2013) form the later official record. The statistics and the revisionist turn --------------------------------------- Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence," American Historical Review 98:4 (October 1993), 1017–49. The 681,692 figure for 1937–38 executions comes from the MVD First Special Department's own December 1953 accounting, GARF f. 9401, op. 1, d. 4157; the series total is 799,455 recorded executions for 1921–53. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag (Yale, 2004), is the best synthesis of the camp statistics; Zemskov's Russian articles in Социологические исследования (1991) are the original data publications. Oxford Academic ( https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/98/4/1017/126966 ) Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin ) On the census: Merridale, "The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule," Historical Journal 39:1 (1996); Tolts on the demography; the census itself published as Всесоюзная перепись населения 1937 г.: краткие итоги (1991). The gap was against a projected 186.4 million; actual growth since 1926 came to 7.2 million, and CSD chief Kraval was shot. Three successive heads of the Central Statistical Administration were executed during 1937–39. My "eight million" was a comparison to Stalin's public claims rather than to the internal projection—the projection gap is far larger, and the precise figure depends on which claim you measure against. MSU ( https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1939/the-lost-census/ ) Iussp ( https://iussp.org/sites/default/files/Brazil2001/s00/S07_02_tolts.pdf ) The famine-as-genocide dispute ------------------------------ Davies and Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (2004), against Snyder, Bloodlands (2010), Applebaum, Red Famine (2017), and Graziosi's essays. Tauger sits further out on the harvest-failure side. This is where the honest scholarly disagreement is. On the denialism ---------------- Furr's arguments haven't been dismantled in a single canonical rebuttal, which is partly why they circulate. The load-bearing counters are the 1990–92 Soviet and Russian admissions made against state interest, the Russian Chief Military Prosecutor's investigation of 1990–2004, and the physical exhumations at Mednoye and Kharkiv—sites the Germans never occupied in the relevant period, which alone disposes of the Nazi-forgery thesis. The Polish IPN's publications are the systematic treatment. If you want one book to hold the whole thing together rather than a stack of them, Khlevniuk's Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (Yale, 2015) is built directly on the Politburo and personal-archive material and cites down to the fond. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43389): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43389 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121137801/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
