Public interest in the Stalinist repression continues to exist, and this is no coincidence.
Many feel that today's political problems are somewhat similar.
And some people think that Stalin's recipes might work.

This is, of course, a mistake.
But it is still difficult to substantiate why this is a mistake by scientific rather than journalistic means.

Historians have dealt with the repression itself, with how it was organized and what was its scale.

Historian Oleg Khlevnyuk, for example, writes that "... now professional historiography has reached high level consensus based on in-depth research of archives ".
https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2017/06/29/701835-fenomen-terrora

However, from his other article it follows that the reasons for the "Great Terror" are still not fully understood.
https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2017/07/06/712528-bolshogo-terrora

I have an answer, rigorous and scientific.

But first, about what the "agreement of professional historiography" looks like according to Oleg Khlevnyuk.
We immediately discard the myths.

1) Stalin had nothing to do with it, he, of course, knew everything.
Stalin not only knew, he directed the "Great Terror" in real time, down to the smallest detail.

2) The "Great Terror" was not an initiative of regional authorities, local party secretaries.
Stalin himself never tried to shift the blame for the repression of 1937-1938 onto the regional party leadership.
Instead, he proposed the myth of "enemies who made their way into the ranks of the NKVD" and "slanderers" from ordinary citizens who wrote statements against honest people.

3) The "Great Terror" of 1937-1938 was not at all the result of denunciations.
Denunciations of citizens against each other did not have a significant impact on the course and scale of the repressions.

Now about what is known about the "Great Terror of 1937-1938" and its mechanism.

Terror and repression under Stalin were a constant phenomenon.
But the wave of terror in 1937-1938 was exceptionally large.
In 1937-1938. at least 1.6 million people were arrested, of whom more than 680,000 were shot.

Khlevnyuk gives a simple quantitative calculation:
"Taking into account that the most intensive repression was applied for a little over a year (August 1937 - November 1938), it turns out that every month about 100,000 people were arrested, of which more than 40,000 were shot."
The scale of the violence was monstrous!

The opinion that the terror of 1937-1938 consisted in the destruction of the elite: party workers, engineers, military men, writers, etc. not entirely correct.
For example, Khlevnyuk writes that there were several tens of thousands of executives at various levels. Of the 1.6 million victims.

Here attention!
1) The victims of the terror were ordinary Soviet people who did not hold office and were not members of the party.

2) Decisions to conduct mass operations were made by the leadership, more precisely by Stalin.
The "Great Terror" was a well-organized, planned procession and went on orders from the center.

3) The goal was "to physically liquidate or isolate in the camps those groups of the population that the Stalinist regime considered potentially dangerous - the former" kulaks ", former officers Tsarist and White armies, clergymen, former members of parties hostile to the Bolsheviks - Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and other "suspicious", as well as "national counter-revolutionary contingents" - Poles, Germans, Romanians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Afghans, Iranians, Chinese, Koreans.

4) All "hostile categories" were taken into account in the authorities, according to the available lists, and the first repressions took place.
Later, a chain was launched: arrest-interrogation - testimony - new hostile elements.
That is why the limits on arrests have been increased.

5) Stalin personally directed the repression.
Here are some of his orders the historian quotes:
"Krasnoyarsk. Regional Committee. The arson of the mill must be organized by the enemies. Take all measures to uncover the arsonists. The guilty ones are to be tried expeditiously. The verdict is execution"; "Beat Unshlicht for not handing over agents to Poland in the regions"; "T. Yezhov. Dmitriev seems to be acting sluggishly. We must immediately arrest all (both small and large) members of the" rebel groups "in the Urals"; "T. Yezhov. It is very important. You need to walk through the Udmurt, Mari, Chuvash, Mordovian republics, walk with a broom"; "T. Yezhov. Very good! Dig and clean up this Polish-spy dirt in the future"; "T. Yezhov. The line of Socialist-Revolutionaries (left and right together) is not unwound<...>It must be borne in mind that we have a lot of Socialist-Revolutionaries in our army and outside the army. Does the NKVD have a record of the SRs ("former") in the army? I would like to get it and soon<...>What has been done to identify and arrest all Iranians in Baku and Azerbaijan? "

I think there can be no doubts after reading such orders.

Now back to the question - why?
Khlevnyuk points out several possible explanations and writes that the controversy continues.
1) At the end of 1937, the first elections to the Soviets were held on the basis of secret ballot, and Stalin insured himself against surprises in a way that he could understand.
This is the weakest explanation.

2) repression was a social engineering tool
The society was subject to unification.
A fair question arises - why exactly in 1937-1938 unification needed to be drastically accelerated?

3) "The Great Terror" pointed to the cause of the hardships and hard life of the people, at the same time letting off steam.

4) It was necessary to provide labor for the growing economy of the GULAG.
This is a weak version - there are too many executions of able-bodied people, while the GULAG was unable to master the new human income.

5) Finally, the version that is widely popular today: the threat of war emerged, and Stalin cleaned up the rear, destroyed the "fifth column".
However, after Stalin's death, the overwhelming majority of those arrested in 1937-1938 were found not guilty.
They were not the "fifth column" at all.

My explanation allows us to understand not only why there was this wave and why it was in 1937-1938.
It also explains well why Stalin and his experience have not yet been forgotten, but at the same time they have not been implemented.

The "Great Terror" of 1937-1938 took place in a period similar to ours.
In the USSR in 1933-1945 there was a question about the subject of power.
V modern history Russia is solving a similar issue in 2005-2017.

The subject of power can be either the ruler or the elite.
At that time, the sole ruler had to win.

Stalin inherited a party in which this very elite existed - Lenin's heirs, equal to Stalin or even more eminent than himself.
Stalin successfully fought for formal leadership, but he became the undisputed sole ruler only after the Great Terror.
As long as the old leaders - the recognized revolutionaries, Lenin's heirs - continued to live and work, the preconditions for challenging Stalin's power as the sole ruler remained.
The "Great Terror" of 1937-1938 was a means of destroying the elite and establishing the power of the sole ruler.

Why did the repressions affect people with a cold, and did not confine themselves to the top?
You need to understand the ideological base, the Marxist paradigm.
Marxism does not recognize loners and the initiative of the elite.
In Marxism, any leader expresses the ideas of a class or social group.

Why is the peasantry dangerous, for example?
Not at all because it can rebel and start a peasant war.
The peasants are dangerous because they are the petty bourgeoisie.
This means that they will always support and / or push from their environment political leaders who will fight against the dictatorship of the proletariat, the power of the workers and the Bolsheviks.
It is not enough to root out well-known leaders with questionable views.
It is necessary to destroy their social support, those very taken into account "hostile elements".
This explains why the terror affected ordinary people.

Why exactly in 1937-1938?
Because during the first four years of each period of social reorganization, a basic plan is formed and the driving force of the social process emerges.
This is a law of cyclical development.

Why are we interested in this today?
And why do some dream about the return of the practices of Stalinism?
Because we are going through the same process.
But he:
- ends,
- has opposite vectors.

Stalin established his sole power, actually fulfilling the historical social order, albeit with very specific methods, even excessively.
He deprived the elite of subjectivity and approved the only subject of power - the elected ruler.
Such imperious subjectivity existed in our Fatherland right up to Putin.

However, Putin, rather unconsciously than consciously, fulfilled a new historical social order.
We now have the power of the sole elected ruler being replaced by the power of the elected elite.
In 2008, just in the fourth year of the new period, Putin gave the presidency to Medvedev.
The sole ruler was de-subjectivized, there were at least two rulers.
And it’s impossible to return everything back.

Now it is clear why some part of the elite dreams of Stalinism?
They do not want many leaders, they do not want collective power, under which it is necessary to seek and find compromises, they want the restoration of sole rule.
And this can be done only by unleashing a new "great terror", that is, by destroying the leaders of all other groups, from Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky to Navalny, Kasyanov, Yavlinsky and our modern Trotsky - Khodorkovsky (although perhaps Trotsky new Russia was Berezovsky after all), and out of habit of systemic thinking, their social base, at least some kreaklov and protest-opposition intelligentsia).

But none of this will happen.
The current vector of development is the transition to power of the elected elite.
The elected elite is a set of leaders and power as their interaction.
If someone tries to regain the sole power of an elected ruler, he will end his political career almost instantly.
Putin sometimes looks like the only, sole ruler, but he certainly isn't.

Practical Stalinism does not and will not have a place in the modern social life of Russia.
And that's great.

Ours with D.R. Khapaeva's article “ Have pity people, executioners"Dedicated to the collective ideas of post-Soviet people about Soviet history summoned a number of letters to the editorial office demanding to refute the following phrase contained in it:

“73% of respondents are in a hurry to take their place in the military-patriotic epic, pointing out that their families had those who died during the war. And although twice as many people suffered from Soviet terror than died during the war , 67% deny the presence of victims of repression in their families. "

Some readers a) considered it incorrect to compare the quantity affected from repression with the number dead during the war, b) found the very concept of victims of the repressions blurred and c) were outraged by the extremely overestimated, in their opinion, estimate of the number of repressed. If we assume that 27 million people died during the war, then the number of victims of the repressions, if it were twice as large, should have amounted to 54 million, which contradicts the data given in the well-known article by V.N. Zemskov's "GULAG (Historical and Sociological Aspect)", published in the journal "Sociological Research" (No. 6 and 7 for 1991), which says:

“... In fact, the number of people convicted of political reasons(for "counter-revolutionary crimes") in the USSR for the period from 1921 to 1953, i.e. for 33 years, amounted to about 3.8 million people ... Statement ... of the chairman of the KGB of the USSR V.A. Kryuchkov that in 1937-1938. no more than a million people were arrested, which is quite consistent with the current Gulag statistics we have studied in the second half of the 1930s.

In February 1954, in the name of N.S. Khrushchev prepared a certificate signed by the Prosecutor General of the USSR R. Rudenko, Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR S. Kruglov and Minister of Justice of the USSR K. Gorshenin, which named the number of people convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes for the period from 1921 to 1 February 1954. this period was condemned by the Collegium of the OGPU, the "troikas" of the NKVD, the Special Conference, the Military Collegium, courts and military tribunals 3,777,380 people, including to capital punishment - 642,980, to detention in camps and prisons for a term of 25 years and below - 2,369,220, in exile and deportation - 765,180 people. "

In the article by V.N. Zemskov also cites other data based on archival documents (first of all, on the number and composition of the GULAG prisoners), which do not in any way confirm the estimates of the victims of terror by R. Conquest and A. Solzhenitsyn (about 60 million). So how many victims were there? This is worth understanding, and not only for the sake of evaluating our article. Let's start in order.

1.Is the quantity comparison correct affected from repression with the number dead during the war?

It is clear that the victims and the victims are different things, but whether they can be compared depends on the context. We were interested not in what cost the Soviet people more - repression or war - but in how much more intense the memory of the war today than the memory of the repressions. Let us set aside in advance a possible objection - the intensity of memory is determined by the strength of the shock, and the shock from mass death is stronger than from mass arrests. First, it is difficult to measure the intensity of the shock, and it is not entirely known what the victims' relatives suffered more from - from the “shameful” one - and carrying them a very real threat - the fact of the arrest of a loved one or from his glorious death. Secondly, the memory of the past is a complex phenomenon, and it only partially depends on the past itself. It depends no less on the conditions of its own functioning in the present. I believe that the question in our questionnaire was formulated quite correctly.

Indeed, the concept of “victims of repression” is vague. Sometimes you can use it without comment, and sometimes you can't. We could not specify it for the same reason that we could compare the killed with the injured - we were interested in whether compatriots remember the victims of terror in their families, and by no means what percentage of them had injured relatives. But when it comes to how many “in fact” there were victims, who should be considered victims, it is necessary to stipulate.

Hardly anyone will argue that those who were shot and imprisoned in prisons and camps were victims. But what about those who were arrested, subjected to "interrogation with partiality," but by a happy coincidence they were released? Contrary to the usual opinion, there were quite a few of them. They were not always re-arrested and convicted (in this case, they are included in the statistics of convicts), but they, as well as their families, certainly retained their impressions of the arrest for a long time. Of course, one can see the triumph of justice in the fact of the release of some of the arrested, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that they were only touched, but not crushed, by the machine of terror.

It is also appropriate to ask the question whether it is necessary to include in the statistics of repression those convicted under criminal articles. One of the readers said that he was not ready to consider criminals as victims of the regime. But not everyone who was convicted by the regular courts on criminal charges was criminals. In the Soviet kingdom of crooked mirrors, almost all the criteria were shifted. Looking ahead, let us say that V.N. Zemskov in the passage cited above, the data relate only to those convicted under political offenses and therefore deliberately underestimated (the quantitative aspect will be discussed below). In the course of rehabilitation, especially during the perestroika period, some convicted under criminal charges were rehabilitated as actually victims of political repression. Of course, in many cases it is possible to sort it out only individually, however, as you know, numerous "thugs" who picked up spikelets on a collective farm field or took home a pack of nails from the factory were also classified as criminals. During campaigns to protect socialist property at the end of collectivization (the famous Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of August 7, 1932) and in post-war period(Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of June 4, 1947), as well as in the course of the struggle to increase labor discipline in the pre-war and war years (the so-called wartime decrees), millions were convicted under criminal articles. True, the majority of those convicted by the Decree of June 26, 1940, which introduced serfdom in enterprises and prohibited unauthorized leaving work, received short terms of corrective labor (ITR) or were sentenced conditionally, but a rather significant minority (22.9% or 4,113 thousand people in 1940-1956, judging by the statistical report of the Supreme Court of the USSR in 1958) were sentenced to imprisonment. With these latter, everything is clear, but what about the first? Some of the readers think that they were just treated a little toughly, and not repressed. But repression is a way out of the generally accepted severity, and, of course, there was such an excess in terms of engineering staff for absenteeism. Finally, in some cases, the number of which cannot be estimated, those sentenced to engineering and technical personnel due to a misunderstanding or due to excessive zeal of the guardians of the law still ended up in the camps.

A special question is about war crimes, including desertion. It is known that the Red Army to a large extent held on by methods of intimidation, and the concept of desertion was interpreted extremely broadly, so that some, but it is not known which part of those convicted under the relevant articles, is quite appropriate to be considered victims of a repressive regime. The same victims, undoubtedly, can be considered the servicemen who made their way out of the encirclement, escaped or freed from captivity, who usually immediately, due to the prevailing spy mania and for "educational purposes" - so that others were discouraged to surrender, - fell into the filtration camps of the NKVD, and often further to the Gulag.

Further. Victims of deportations, of course, can also be classified as repressed, as well as administratively deported. And what about those who, without waiting for dispossession or deportation, in a hurry overnight put down what they could carry, and fled until dawn, and then wandered, sometimes they were caught and convicted, and sometimes started a new life? Again, everything is clear with those who were caught and convicted, but with those who were not? In the broadest sense, they also suffered, but here again it is necessary to look at it individually. If, for example, a doctor from Omsk, warned of the arrest by his former patient, an NKVD officer, took refuge in Moscow, where it was quite possible to get lost, if the authorities announced only the regional wanted list (this happened with the author's grandfather), then it may be more correct to say about him that he narrowly escaped repression. There were, apparently, many such miracles, but it is impossible to say exactly how many. But if - and this is just a well-known figure - two or three million peasants flee to the cities, fleeing dispossession, then this is more likely repression. After all, they were not only deprived of their property, which, at best, sold in a hurry, for as much as they could, but were also forcibly torn out of their habitual habitat (it is known what it means for the peasant) and often actually declassed.

A special question is about “members of families of traitors to the motherland”. Some of them were "unambiguously repressed", someone - a lot of children - were exiled to penal colonies or imprisoned in orphanages. Where are these children to be counted? Where are the people, most often the wives and mothers of convicts, who have not only lost loved ones, but also been evicted from their apartments, deprived of work and registration, who were under supervision and awaiting arrest? Shall we say that terror - that is, the policy of intimidation - did not touch them? On the other hand, it is difficult to include them in statistics - their number is simply not taken into account.

It is fundamentally important that different forms of repression were elements of a single system, and that is how they were perceived (or, more precisely, experienced) by their contemporaries. For example, local punitive bodies often received orders to toughen the fight against enemies of the people from among those exiled to their subordinate districts, condemning such and such a number of them “in the first category” (that is, to execution) and such and such - in the second (to imprisonment ). Nobody knew on what step of the staircase leading from the "study" at the meeting of the labor collective to the Lubyanka basement, he was destined to stay - and for how long. Propaganda instilled into the mass consciousness the idea of ​​the inevitability of the beginning of the fall, since the bitterness of the defeated enemy is inevitable. It was only by virtue of this law that the class struggle could intensify as socialism was built. Colleagues, friends, and sometimes relatives recoiled from those who set foot on the first step of the staircase leading down. Dismissal from work or even simply "working through" in conditions of terror had a completely different, much more formidable meaning than they might have in ordinary life.

3. How can you assess the scale of the repression?

3.1. What do we know and where do we come from?

For a start - about the state of the sources. Many documents of the punitive departments were lost or deliberately destroyed, but many secrets are still kept in the archives. Of course, after the fall of communism, many archives were declassified, and many facts were made public. Many - but not all. Moreover, in recent years there has been a reverse process - re-classification of archives. With the noble goal of protecting the sensitivity of the descendants of the executioners from exposing the glorious deeds of their fathers and mothers (and now more likely grandparents), the dates for declassification of many archives have been pushed back into the future. It is amazing that a country with a history like ours cherishes the secrets of its past. Probably because it is still the same country.

In particular, the result of this situation is the dependence of historians on statistics collected by the "relevant authorities", which can be verified on the basis of primary documents in the rarest of cases positive result). These statistics were presented in different years different departments, and it is not easy to bring it together. In addition, it concerns only the “officially” repressed and therefore is fundamentally incomplete. For example, the number of repressed under criminal articles, but for actually political reasons, in principle, could not be indicated in it, since it proceeded from the categories of understanding reality by the above-mentioned authorities. Finally, there are hard-to-explain inconsistencies between different "references". Estimates of the scale of repression based on available sources can be very rough and conservative.

Now about the historiographic context of the work of V.N. Zemskov. The cited article, as well as the even better-known joint article by the same author with the American historian A. Getty and the French historian G. Rittersporn, written on its basis, are characteristic of what was formed in the 1980s. the so-called "revisionist" direction in the study of Soviet history. Young (then) Western historians of leftist views tried not so much to whitewash the Soviet regime, but to show that the "right" "anti-Soviet" historians of the older generation (such as R. Conquest and R. Pipes) wrote unscientific history, since they were not allowed into the Soviet archives. Therefore, if the "right" exaggerated the scale of repression, then the "left", partly from a dubious youth, finding much more modest figures in the archives, rushed to make them public and did not always ask themselves whether everything was reflected - and could be reflected - in the archives. Such "archival fetishism" is generally characteristic of the "tribe of historians", including the most qualified. It is not surprising that the data of V.N. Zemskov, who reproduced the figures cited in the documents he found, in the light of a more careful analysis, turn out to be underestimated indicators of the scale of repression.

By now, new publications of documents and studies have appeared, which, of course, give a far from complete, but still a more detailed picture of the scale of repression. These are, first of all, the books of O.V. Khlevnyuk (it still exists, as far as I know, only in English), E. Applebaum, E. Bacon and J. Paul, as well as the multivolume " History of the Stalinist Gulag»And a number of other publications. Let's try to comprehend the data given in them.

3.2. Sentence statistics

The statistics were kept by different departments, and today it is not easy to make ends meet. So, the Certificate of the Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR on the number of arrested and convicted by the organs of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD-MGB of the USSR, compiled by Colonel Pavlov on December 11, 1953 (hereinafter referred to as Pavlov's certificate), gives the following figures: for the period 1937-1938. These bodies arrested 1,575 thousand people, of whom 1,372 thousand were arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes, and 1,345 thousand were convicted, including 682 thousand sentenced to capital punishment. Similar figures for 1930-1936. amounted to 2,256 thousand, 1,379 thousand, 1,391 thousand and 40 thousand people. In total, for the period from 1921 to 1938. 4 836 thousand people were arrested, of whom 3 342 thousand were for counter-revolutionary crimes, and 2 945 thousand were convicted, including 745 thousand people sentenced to death. From 1939 to mid-1953, 1,115 thousand people were convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes, of whom 54 thousand were sentenced to death. 4,060 thousand were convicted under political articles, including 799 thousand sentenced to death.

However, these data apply only to those convicted by the system of "emergency" bodies, and not to the entire repressive apparatus as a whole. So, this does not include those convicted by ordinary courts and military tribunals of various kinds (not only the army, navy and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but also railway and water transport, as well as camp courts). For example, a very significant discrepancy between the number of those arrested and the number of those convicted is explained not only by the fact that some of those arrested were released, but also by the fact that some of them died under torture, and the cases of others were transferred to ordinary courts. As far as I know, there are no data to judge the ratio of these categories. The NKVD authorities kept statistics on arrests better than statistics on sentences.

Let us also pay attention to the fact that in the "reference of Rudenko" quoted by V.N. Zemskov, the data on the number of those convicted and executed in accordance with sentences of all types of courts are lower than the data of Pavlov's certificate only for "emergency" justice, although presumably Pavlov's certificate was only one of the documents used in Rudenko's certificate. The reasons for this discrepancy are unknown. However, on the original Pavlov's certificate, stored in the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF), to the figure 2 945 thousand (the number of convicts in 1921-1938), an unknown hand in pencil made a note: “30% angle. = 1,062 ". "Injection." - these are, of course, criminals. Why 30% of 2,945,000 were 1,062,000 is anyone's guess. Probably, the postscript reflected some stage of "data processing", and in the direction of underestimation. Obviously, the 30% indicator is not derived empirically on the basis of generalization of the initial data, but represents either an "expert assessment" given by a high rank, or an estimated "by eye" the equivalent of the figure (1,062 thousand) by which the said rank considered it necessary to reduce help data. Where such an expert assessment could have come from is unknown. Perhaps, it reflected the ideologeme widespread among high officials, according to which criminals were actually condemned for “politics” in our country.

As for the reliability of statistical materials, the number of those convicted by the "emergency" authorities in 1937-1938. is generally confirmed by the research carried out by Memorial. However, there are cases when the regional departments of the NKVD exceeded the "limits" allocated to them by Moscow on convictions and executions, sometimes having time to get a sanction, and sometimes not having time. In the latter case, they risked getting into trouble and therefore may not show the results of excessive diligence in their reports. According to a rough estimate, such “not shown” cases could be 10-12% of the total number of convicts. However, it should be borne in mind that statistics do not reflect repeated convictions, so these factors could well be roughly balanced.

The number of repressed in addition to the organs of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-MGB can be judged by the statistics collected by the Department for the preparation of petitions for clemency under the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for 1940 - the first half of 1955. ("Babukhin's certificate"). According to this document, 35,830 thousand people were convicted by ordinary courts, as well as military tribunals, transport and camp courts during the specified period, including 256 thousand people sentenced to death, 15 109 thousand to imprisonment and 20 465 thousand people. a person to correctional labor and other types of punishment. Here, of course, we are talking about all types of crimes. 1,074 thousand people (3.1%) were sentenced for counter-revolutionary crimes - slightly less than for hooliganism (3.5%), and twice as many as for serious criminal offenses (banditry, murder, robbery, robbery, rape together give 1.5%). The number of convicts for military crimes was almost the same as those convicted under political offenses (1,074 thousand or 3%), and some of them, probably, can be considered politically repressed. The plunderers of socialist and personal property - including an unknown number of "thugs" - accounted for 16.9% of convicts or 6,028 thousand. 28.1% accounted for "other crimes". The punishments for some of them could well have been in the nature of repression - for the unauthorized seizure of collective farm lands (from 18 to 48 thousand cases a year between 1945 and 1955), resistance to the authorities (several thousand cases a year), violation of the serf passport regime (from 9 to 50 thousand cases per year), failure to meet the minimum workdays (from 50 to 200 thousand per year), etc. The largest group was made up of punishments for unauthorized departure from work - 15,746 thousand or 43.9%. At the same time, the 1958 statistical collection of the Supreme Court speaks of 17,961 thousand people sentenced by wartime decrees, of which 22.9% or 4,113 thousand were sentenced to imprisonment, and the rest - to fines or engineers. However, not all of those sentenced to short terms actually made it to the camps.

So, 1,074 thousand people were convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes by military tribunals and ordinary courts. True, if we add up the figures of the Department of Judicial Statistics of the Supreme Court of the USSR ("Khlebnikov's certificate") and the Office of military tribunals ("Maksimov's certificate") for the same period, we get 1,104 thousand (952 thousand convicted by military tribunals and 152 thousand - conventional courts), but this, of course, is not a very significant discrepancy. In addition, Khlebnikov's certificate contains an indication of 23 thousand more convicted in 1937-1939. Taking this into account, the cumulative total of Khlebnikov's and Maksimov's certificates gives 1,127 thousand.However, the materials of the statistical collection of the Supreme Court of the USSR allow us to speak (if we summarize different tables) either about 199 thousand, or about 211 thousand convicted by ordinary courts for counter-revolutionary crimes for 1940-1955 and, accordingly, about 325 or 337 thousand for 1937-1955, but even this does not change the order of the figures.

The available data do not allow us to determine exactly how many of them were sentenced to death. Ordinary courts in all categories of cases passed death sentences relatively rarely (as a rule, several hundred cases a year, only for 1941 and 1942 we are talking about several thousand). Even long prison terms in large numbers (on average 40-50 thousand per year) appear only after 1947, when the death penalty was abolished for a short time and the punishment for theft of socialist property was toughened. There is no data on military tribunals, but presumably on political matters they more often resorted to harsh punishments.

These data show that to 4,060 thousand people convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes by the organs of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-MGB for 1921-1953. either 1,074 thousand convicted by ordinary courts and military tribunals for 1940-1955 should be added. according to Babukhin's certificate, or 1,127 thousand convicted by military tribunals and ordinary courts (the cumulative total of Khlebnikov's and Maksimov's certificates), or 952 thousand convicted for these crimes by military tribunals in 1940-1956. plus 325 (or 337) thousand convicted by ordinary courts for 1937-1956. (according to the statistical collection of the Supreme Court). This gives 5,134 thousand, 5,187 thousand, 5,277 thousand, or 5,290 thousand, respectively.

However, ordinary courts and military tribunals did not sit idly by until 1937 and 1940, respectively. So, there were mass arrests, for example, during the period of collectivization. Given in " Stories of the Stalinist Gulag"(V.1, p.608-645) and in" Gulag stories»OV Khlevnyuk (pp. 288-291 and 307-319) statistical data collected in the mid-50s. do not apply (with the exception of data on those repressed by the organs of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-MGB) of this period. Meanwhile, O.V. Khlevnyuk refers to a document stored in the GARF, which indicates (with the proviso of incompleteness of data) the number of people convicted by ordinary courts of the RSFSR in 1930-1932. - 3,400 thousand people. For the USSR as a whole, according to Khlevnyuk (p. 303)., The corresponding figure could be at least 5 million. This gives approximately 1.7 million per year, which is in no way inferior to the average annual result of courts of general jurisdiction 40 - early 50s biennium (2 million per year - but the population growth should be taken into account).

Probably, the number of those convicted for counter-revolutionary crimes for the entire period from 1921 to 1956 was hardly many less than 6 million, of which hardly many less than 1 million (or rather more) were sentenced to death.

But along with the 6 million "repressed in the narrow sense of the word" there was a considerable number of "repressed in the broad sense of the word" - first of all, convicted under non-political articles. It is impossible to say how many of the 6 million "thugs" were convicted by decrees from 1932 and 1947, and how many of the approximately 2-3 million deserters, "invaders" of collective farm lands who did not fulfill the workday quota, etc. should be considered victims of repression, i.e. punished unjustly or disproportionately to the gravity of the crime due to the terrorist nature of the regime. But 18 million were convicted by serfdom decrees of 1940-1942. all were repressed, even if "only" 4.1 million of them were sentenced to imprisonment and ended up, if not in a colony or a camp, then in prison.

3.2. Gulag population

The estimation of the number of repressed can be approached in another way - through the analysis of the "population" of the Gulag. It is believed that in the 20s. prisoners for political reasons numbered rather in the thousands or a few tens of thousands. There were about the same number of exiles. The year of the creation of the "real" Gulag was 1929. After that, the number of prisoners quickly exceeded one hundred thousand and by 1937 had grown to about a million. Published data show that from 1938 to 1947. it was, with some fluctuations, about 1.5 million, and then exceeded 2 million and in the early 1950s. amounted to about 2.5 million (including colonies). However, the turnover of the camp population (due to many reasons, including high mortality) was very high. Based on the analysis of data on the arrival and departure of prisoners, E. Bacon suggested that between 1929 and 1953. about 18 million prisoners passed through the Gulag (including the colonies). To this must be added those held in prisons, of whom there were about 200-300-400 thousand at any given moment (minimum 155 thousand in January 1944, maximum 488 thousand in January 1941). Most of them probably ended up in the Gulag, but not all. Some were released, while others could receive short sentences (for example, most of the 4.1 million people sentenced to imprisonment by wartime decrees), so it made no sense to send them to camps and, possibly, even to colonies. Therefore, it is likely that the figure of 18 million should be slightly increased (but hardly more than 1-2 million).

How reliable are Gulag statistics? Most likely, it is quite reliable, although it was conducted inaccurately. The factors that could lead to gross distortions in the direction of both exaggeration and understatement, roughly counterbalanced each other, not to mention the fact that, with the partial exception of the Great Terror period, Moscow took seriously the economic role of the forced labor system, monitored statistics and demanded a reduction in the very high mortality rate among prisoners. Camp leaders had to be prepared for reporting checks. Their interest, on the one hand, was to underestimate the rates of mortality and shoots, and on the other, not to overestimate the total contingent, so as not to get unrealizable production plans.

What percentage of prisoners can be considered “political”, both de jure and de facto? E. Applebaum writes in this regard: “Although millions of people were really convicted under criminal articles, I do not believe that any significant part of the total were criminals in any normal sense of the word” (p. 539). Therefore, she considers it possible to speak of all 18 million as victims of repression. But the picture was probably more complex.

The table of data on the number of prisoners in the Gulag, given by V.N. Zemskov, gives a wide variety of "political" percentage of the total number of prisoners in the camps. The minimum figures (12.6 and 12.8%) refer to 1936 and 1937, when the wave of victims of the Great Terror simply did not have time to reach the camps. By 1939, this figure increased to 34.5%, then decreased slightly, and from 1943 it began to grow again in order to reach a climax in 1946 (59.2%) and again decline to 26.9% in 1953. The percentage of political prisoners in colonies also fluctuated quite significantly. Attention is drawn to the fact that the highest percentage of "political" falls on the war and especially the first post-war years, when the Gulag became somewhat depopulated due to the particularly high mortality rate of prisoners, their sending to the front and some temporary "liberalization" of the regime. In the "full-blooded" Gulag of the early 50s. the share of "political" ones ranged from a quarter to a third.

If we go to absolute figures, then usually there were about 400-450 thousand political prisoners in the camps, plus several tens of thousands in the colonies. This was the case in the late 1930s and early 1940s. and again in the late 40s. In the early 1950s, the political population was more likely 450-500 thousand in the camps, plus 50-100 thousand in the colonies. In the mid-30s. in the still not strong Gulag there were about 100 thousand political prisoners a year, in the mid-40s. - about 300 thousand. According to V.N. Zemskov, as of January 1, 1951, there were 2,528 thousand prisoners in the Gulag (including 1,524 thousand in camps and 994 thousand in colonies). Of them, 580 thousand were “political” and 1 948 thousand were “criminal”. If we extrapolate this proportion, out of 18 million prisoners of the Gulag, hardly more than 5 million were political.

But even this conclusion would be oversimplification: after all, some of the criminals were, after all, de facto political. So, among 1,948 thousand prisoners convicted under criminal articles, 778 thousand were convicted of embezzlement of socialist property (in the vast majority - 637 thousand - by the Decree of June 4, 1947, plus 72 thousand - by the Decree of 7 August 1932), as well as for violations of the passport regime (41 thousand), desertion (39 thousand), illegal border crossing (2 thousand) and unauthorized leaving the place of work (26.5 thousand). In addition to this, in the late 30s - early 40s. usually there were about one percent of "family members of traitors to the motherland" (by the 1950s only a few hundred of them remained in the Gulag) and from 8% (in 1934) to 21.7% (in 1939) "socially harmful and socially dangerous elements ”(by the 50s they were almost gone). All of them were not officially included in the number of repressed on political charges. One and a half to two percent of prisoners served a camp term for violation of the passport regime. Convicted for theft of socialist property, whose share in the population of the Gulag was 18.3% in 1934 and 14.2% in 1936, decreased to 2-3% by the end of the 30s, which is appropriate to associate with a special role persecution of "thugs" in the mid-30s. If we assume that the absolute number of thefts during the 30s. has not changed dramatically, and if we consider that the total number of prisoners by the end of the 30s. increased approximately threefold compared with 1934 and one and a half times compared with 1936, then, perhaps, there is reason to assume that the victims of repression among the plunderers of socialist property were at least two-thirds.

If we sum up the number of political prisoners de jure, members of their families, socially harmful and socially dangerous elements, violators of the passport regime and two-thirds of plunders of socialist property, it turns out that at least a third, and sometimes more than half of the population of the Gulag were actually political prisoners. E. Applebaum is right that there were not so many “real criminals”, namely those convicted of grave crimes such as robbery and murder (2-3% in different years), but still, in general, hardly less than half of the prisoners cannot considered political.

So, the rough proportion of political and non-political prisoners in the Gulag is about fifty to fifty, and of the political prisoners, about half or a little more (that is, about a quarter or a little more of the total number of prisoners) were political de jure, and half or a little less - political de facto.

3.3. How do the sentencing statistics and the statistics of the Gulag population agree?

A rough calculation gives something like this. Of the approximately 18 million prisoners, about half (about 9 million) were de jure and de facto political, and about a quarter or slightly more were de jure political. It would seem that this quite accurately coincides with the data on the number of people sentenced to imprisonment on political charges (about 5 million). However, the situation is more complicated.

Despite the fact that the average number of de facto political in the camps at a certain moment was approximately equal to the number of de jure political ones, in general, for the entire period of de facto political repressions, there should have been significantly more than de jure political ones, because usually the terms in criminal cases were significantly shorter. Thus, about a quarter of those convicted under political offenses were sentenced to terms of imprisonment of 10 years or more, and another half - from 5 to 10 years, while in criminal cases most of the terms were less than 5 years. It is clear that various forms of the turnover of prisoners (primarily mortality, including executions) could somewhat smooth this difference. Nevertheless, de facto there should have been more than 5 million political figures.

How does this compare with an approximate estimate of the number of people sentenced to imprisonment under criminal charges on de facto political grounds? 4.1 million convicted by wartime decrees, probably, most of them did not make it to the camps, but some of them could well make it to the colonies. But out of 8-9 million convicted for military and economic crimes, as well as for various forms of disobedience to the authorities, the majority made it to the Gulag (the mortality rate during the shipment was, presumably, quite high, but there are no exact estimates for it). If it is true that about two-thirds of these 8-9 million were actually political prisoners, then together with those convicted by wartime decrees who reached the Gulag, this probably gives at least 6-8 million.

If this figure was closer to 8 million, which is in better agreement with our ideas about the comparative length of prison terms under political and criminal offenses, then it should be assumed that either the estimate of the total population of the Gulag for the period of repression of 18 million is somewhat underestimated, or the estimate the total number of de jure political prisoners of 5 million is somewhat overestimated (perhaps both of these assumptions are to some extent correct). However, the figure of 5 million political prisoners, it would seem, exactly coincides with the result of our calculations of the total number of those sentenced to imprisonment on political charges. If, in reality, de jure political prisoners were less than 5 million, then this most likely means that many more death sentences were passed on war crimes than we assumed, as well as the fact that deaths in transit was an especially frequent fate. it is de jure of political prisoners.

Probably, such doubts can be resolved only on the basis of further archival research and at least sampling"Primary" documents, not just statistical sources. Be that as it may, the order of magnitude is obvious - we are talking about 10-12 million. Convicted under political and criminal offenses, but for political reasons. To this must be added about a million (and possibly more) of those executed. This gives 11-13 million victims of repression.

3.4. The total number of repressed were ...

To the 11-13 million people who were shot and imprisoned in prisons and camps should be added:

About 6-7 million special settlers, including more than 2 million "kulaks", as well as "suspicious" ethnic groups and entire nations (Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, etc.), as well as hundreds of thousands of "socially alien" deported from those captured in 1939-1940. territories, etc. ;

About 6-7 million peasants who died as a result of the artificially organized famine in the early 1930s;

About 2-3 million peasants who left their villages in anticipation of dispossession, often declassed or, at best, actively involved in the "building of communism"; the number of those killed among them is unknown (O.V. Khlevniuk. p.304);

14 million who received sentences of engineering and technical personnel and fines under wartime decrees, as well as most of those 4 million who received short sentences under these decrees, allegedly served them in prisons and therefore were not included in the statistics of the Gulag population; overall, this category is likely to add at least 17 million victims of repression;

Several hundred thousand arrested on political charges, but acquitted for various reasons and not subsequently arrested;

Up to half a million servicemen who were captured and after their release passed through the filtration camps of the NKVD (but not convicted);

Several hundred thousand administrative exiles, some of whom were subsequently arrested, but not all (O.V. Khlevniuk. P.306).

If the last three categories taken together are estimated at approximately 1 million people, then the total number of at least approximately counted victims of terror will be for the period 1921-1955. 43-48 million people. However, this is not all.

The Red Terror did not begin in 1921, and it did not end in 1955. True, after 1955 it was relatively sluggish (according to soviet scale), but still the number of victims of political repressions (suppression of riots, the fight against dissidents, etc.) after the XX Congress is calculated in five figures. The most significant wave of post Stalinist repression took place in 1956-69. Period of revolution and civil war was less "vegetarian". There are no exact figures here, but it is assumed that we can hardly talk about less than one million victims - including those killed and repressed during the suppression of numerous popular uprisings against Soviet power, but not counting, of course, forced emigrants. Forced emigration, however, also took place after the Second World War, and in each case it was calculated in seven figures.

But that's not all. The number of people who lost their jobs and became outcasts, but happily escaped a worse fate, as well as people whose peace collapsed on the day (or more often at night) of the arrest of a loved one, cannot be accurately counted. But “unaccountable” does not mean that there were none. In addition, some considerations can be made about the latter category. If the number of repressed on political charges is estimated at 6 million people and if we assume that only in a minority of families more than one person was shot or imprisoned (for example, the share of “family members of traitors to the motherland” in the Gulag population, as we have already noted, did not exceed 1%, while the share of the "traitors" themselves we estimated at 25%), then we should talk about several million more victims.

In connection with the assessment of the number of victims of repressions, one should dwell on the question of those who died during the Second World War. The fact is that these categories partly overlap: we are talking primarily about people who died in the course of hostilities as a result of the terrorist policy of the Soviet government. Those who were convicted by the military justice authorities are already included in our statistics, but there were also those who were ordered by commanders of all ranks to be shot without trial or even shot personally, based on their understanding of military discipline. The examples are probably known to everyone, but quantitative estimates do not exist here. Here we do not touch upon the problem of justifying purely military losses - senseless frontal attacks, which many famous Stalinist generals were eager for, were, of course, a manifestation of the state's complete disregard for the life of citizens, but their consequences, naturally, have to be taken into account in the category of military losses.

The total number of victims of terror during the years of Soviet power can thus be approximately estimated at 50-55 million people. The vast majority of them, of course, fall on the period up to 1953. Therefore, if the former chairman of the KGB of the USSR V.A. Kryuchkov, with whom V.N. Zemskov, not too much (only by 30%, towards underestimation, of course) distorted the data on the number of those arrested during the Great Terror, then in the general assessment of the scale of repressions A.I. Solzhenitsyn was, alas, closer to the truth.

By the way, I wonder why V.A. Kryuchkov spoke about a million, not about one and a half million repressed in 1937-1938? Maybe he was not so much fighting to improve the indicators of terror in the light of perestroika, but simply shared the aforementioned “expert assessment” of an anonymous reader of the “Pavlov's certificate”, who is convinced that 30% of “political” ones are in fact criminals?

We said above that the number of those executed was hardly less than a million people. However, if we talk about those who died as a result of terror, then we get a different figure: death in camps (no less than half a million in the 1930s alone - see OV Khlevniuk. P. 327) and in transit (which cannot be calculated), death under torture, suicides awaiting arrest, deaths of special settlers from hunger and disease both in places of settlements (where about 600 thousand kulaks died in the 1930s - see OV Khlevniuk. p. 327), and on the way to them, executions "Alarmists" and "deserters" without trial and investigation, and finally, the death of millions of peasants as a result of provoked famine - all this gives a figure hardly less than 10 million people. "Formal" repressions were only the tip of the iceberg of the terrorist policy of the Soviet regime.

Some readers - and, of course, historians - wonder what percentage of the population were victims of repression. O.V. Khlevnyuk in the above book (p.304) in relation to the 30s. says that among the adult population of the country, one in six suffered. However, he proceeds from an estimate of the total population according to the 1937 census, without taking into account the fact that the total number of people who have lived in the country for ten years (and even more so throughout the almost thirty-five-year period of mass repressions from 1917 to 1953 .) was more than the number of people living in it at any given moment.

How can you estimate the total population of the country in 1917-1953? It is well known that Stalin's population censuses are not entirely reliable. Nevertheless, for our purpose - a rough estimate of the scale of the repression - they serve as a sufficient reference point. The 1937 census gives a figure of 160 million. Probably, this figure can be taken as the “average” population of the country in 1917-1953. 20s - first half of the 30s characterized by "natural" demographic growth, significantly exceeding losses as a result of war, hunger and repression. After 1937, growth also took place, including due to the annexation in 1939-1940. territories with a population of 23 million people, but repression, mass emigration and military losses to a greater extent balanced it.

In order to move from the “average” number of people living in the country at a time to the total number of people living in it for a certain period, it is necessary to add to the first number the average annual birth rate, multiplied by the number of years that make up this period. The birth rate, understandably, varied quite significantly. Under the conditions of the traditional demographic regime (characterized by the predominance of large families), it usually makes up 4% of the total population per year. The majority of the population of the USSR (Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Russian village itself) still lived to a large extent under such a regime. However, in some periods (years of war, collectivization, famine), even for these areas, the birth rate should have been somewhat lower. During the war years, it was about 2% on the national average. If we estimate it at 3-3.5% on average over the period and multiply it by the number of years (35), it turns out that the average "one-time" indicator (160 million) should be doubled. This gives about 350 million. In other words, during the period of mass repressions from 1917 to 1953. every seventh citizen of the country, including minors (50 out of 350 million), suffered from terror. If adults accounted for less than two-thirds of the total population (100 out of 160 million, according to the 1937 census), and among the 50 million we counted as victims of repression, there were “only” a few million, then it turns out that at least one in five an adult was a victim of a terrorist regime.

4. What does all this mean today?

It cannot be said that fellow citizens are poorly informed about the massive repressions in the USSR. The answers to the question in our questionnaire about how to estimate the number of repressed were distributed as follows:

• less than 1 million people - 5.9%
• from 1 to 10 million people - 21.5%
• from 10 to 30 million people - 29.4%
• from 30 to 50 million people - 12.4%
• over 50 million people - 5.9%
• find it difficult to answer - 24.8%

As you can see, the majority of respondents do not doubt that the repressions were large-scale. True, every fourth respondent is inclined to look for objective reasons for repression. This, of course, does not mean that such respondents are ready to remove any responsibility from the executioners. But they are unlikely to be ready and unequivocally to condemn these latter.

In modern Russian historical consciousness, the striving for an "objective" approach to the past is quite noticeable. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it was not by chance that we put the word “objective” in quotation marks. The point is not that complete objectivity is hardly achievable in principle, but that a call to it can mean very different things - from the honest desire of a conscientious researcher - and any interested person - to understand the complex and contradictory process that we call history, before the irritated reaction of a man in the street put on an oil needle to any attempts to embarrass his peace of mind and make him think that he inherited not only valuable minerals that ensure his - alas, fragile - well-being, but also unresolved political, cultural and psychological problems , generated by seventy years of experience of "endless terror", his own soul, to look into which he fears - perhaps not without reason. And, finally, the call for objectivity may hide the sober calculation of the ruling elites, who are aware of their genetic connection with the Soviet elites and are not at all inclined to "let the lower classes engage in criticism in a row."

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the phrase from our article, which aroused the outrage of readers, concerns not just an assessment of repression, but an assessment of repression in comparison with the war. The myth of the "Great Patriotic War”In recent years, as once in the Brezhnev era, has again become the main unifying myth of the nation. However, in its genesis and functions, this myth is to a large extent a “protective myth” trying to replace the tragic memory of the repressions with the equally tragic, but still partly heroic memory of the “nationwide feat”. We will not go into a discussion of the memory of the war here. Let us only emphasize that the war was not least of all a link in the chain of crimes committed by the Soviet government against its own people, which aspect of the problem is almost completely obscured today by the “unifying” role of the myth of war.

Many historians believe that our society needs "cleotherapy", which will relieve it of its inferiority complex and convince it that "Russia is a normal country." This experience of "normalizing history" is by no means a unique Russian attempt to create a "positive image of oneself" for the heirs of the terrorist regime. For example, in Germany, attempts were made to prove that fascism should be viewed “in its era” and in comparison with other totalitarian regimes in order to show the relativity of the “national guilt” of the Germans, as if the fact that there are more than one murderer justified them. In Germany, however, this position is held by a significant minority of public opinion, while in Russia it has become predominant in recent years. Only a few will dare to name Hitler among the sympathetic figures of the past in Germany, while in Russia, according to our survey, every tenth respondent names Stalin among his sympathetic historical characters, and 34.7% believe that he played a positive or rather positive role in the history of the country (and another 23.7% find that “today it is difficult to give an unambiguous assessment”). Other recent polls speak of close - and even more positive - assessments of Stalin's role by compatriots.

Russian historical memory today is turning away from repression - but, alas, this does not mean at all that "the past has passed." The structures of Russian everyday life to a large extent reproduce the forms of social relations, behavior and consciousness that came from the imperial and Soviet past. This, it seems, is not to the liking of the majority of respondents: more and more imbued with pride in their past, they are quite critical of the present. So, to the question of our questionnaire, whether modern Russia is inferior to the West in terms of culture or exceeds it, only 9.4% chose the second answer option, while the same indicator for all previous historical epochs (including Muscovite Russia, the Soviet period) ranges from 20 to 40 %. Fellow citizens probably do not take the trouble to think that the "golden age of Stalinism", as well as the subsequent, albeit somewhat faded period of Soviet history, may have something to do with what they are not satisfied with in our society today. It is possible to turn to the Soviet past in order to overcome it only on condition that we are ready to see the traces of this past in ourselves and recognize ourselves as heirs not only of glorious deeds, but also of the crimes of our ancestors.

In the USSR, both ordinary citizens and prominent figures of science and art fell under the Stalinist repressions. Under Stalin, political arrests were the norm, and very often cases were fabricated and based on denunciations, without any other evidence. Next, let us recall the Soviet celebrities who felt the horror of the repressions on themselves.

Ariadne Efron. A translator of prose and poetry, a memoirist, artist, art critic, poetess ... The daughter of Sergei Efron and Marina Tsvetaeva was the first of her family to return to the USSR.

After returning to the USSR, she worked in the editorial office of the Soviet magazine "Revue de Moscou" (on French); wrote articles, essays, reports, made illustrations, translated.

On August 27, 1939, she was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced under Article 58-6 (espionage) to 8 years in forced labor camps; under torture she was forced to testify against her father.

Georgy Zhzhenov, People's Artist of the USSR. During the filming of the film "Komsomolsk" (1938) Georgy Zhzhenov went by train to Komsomolsk-on-Amur. During the trip, on the train, I met an American diplomat who was traveling to Vladivostok to meet a business delegation.

This acquaintance was noticed by the cinema workers, which was the reason for his accusation of espionage. On July 4, 1938, he was arrested on charges of espionage and sentenced to 5 years in forced labor camps.

In 1949 Zhzhenov was again arrested and exiled to the Norilsk labor camp (Norillag), from where he returned to Leningrad in 1954, and in 1955 he was fully rehabilitated.

Alexander Vvedensky. Russian poet and playwright from the OBERIU association, together with other members of which he was arrested at the end of 1931.

Vvedensky received a denunciation that he made a toast in memory of Nicholas II; there is also a version that the reason for the arrest was the performance of the "former anthem" by Vvedensky at one of the friendly parties.

He was exiled in 1932 to Kursk, then he lived in Vologda, in Borisoglebsk. In 1936 the poet was allowed to return to Leningrad.

On September 27, 1941, Alexander Vvedensky was arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary agitation. According to one of the latest versions, in connection with the approach of German troops to Kharkov, he was convoyed in an echelon to Kazan, but on the way on December 19, 1941 he died of pleurisy.

Osip Mandelstam. In November 1933, one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century wrote the anti-Stalinist epigram "We live without feeling the country ..." ("The Kremlin Highlander"), which is read by fifteen people. Boris Pasternak called this act suicide.

Some of the listeners reported on Mandelstam, and on the night of May 13-14, 1934, he was arrested and sent into exile in Cherdyn (Perm Territory).

After a short-term release on the night of May 1–2, 1938, Osip Emilievich was arrested a second time and taken to Butyrka prison.

On August 2, a special meeting at the NKVD of the USSR sentenced Mandelstam to five years in a forced labor camp. On September 8, he was sent in stages to Far East.

On December 27, 1938, Osip died in a transit camp. Until spring, Mandelstam's body lay unburied along with the other deceased. Then the entire "winter pile" was buried in a mass grave.

Vsevolod Meyerhold. The theorist and practitioner of theatrical grotesque, the author of the "Theater October" program and the creator of the acting system, called "biomechanics", also fell victim to repression.

On June 20, 1939, Meyerhold was arrested in Leningrad; at the same time, a search was carried out in his apartment in Moscow. The search report contains a complaint from his wife Zinaida Reich, who protested against the methods of one of the NKVD agents. Soon (15 July) she was killed by unidentified persons.

"... They beat me here - a sick sixty-six-year-old man, laid me face down on the floor, beat me on the heels and on the back with a rubber band, when I sat on a chair, beat me on my legs with the same rubber [...] the pain was such that it seemed to sore sensitive places boiling water was poured on the feet ... "- he wrote.

After three weeks of interrogation, accompanied by torture, Meyerhold signed the testimony required by the investigation, and the board sentenced the director to be shot. On February 2, 1940, the sentence was carried out. In 1955, the Supreme Court of the USSR posthumously rehabilitated Meyerhold.

Nikolay Gumilyov. The Russian poet of the Silver Age, the founder of the school of acmeism, prose writer, translator and literary critic did not hide his religious and political views- he was openly baptized in churches, declared his views. So, at one of the poetry evenings he answered a question from the audience - "What are your political convictions?" answered - "I am a convinced monarchist."

On August 3, 1921, Gumilyov was arrested on suspicion of participation in the conspiracy of the "Petrograd military organization of V. N. Tagantsev." For several days, the comrades tried to help out a friend, but, despite this, the poet was soon shot.

Nikolay Zabolotsky. The poet and translator was arrested on March 19, 1938 and then convicted in the case of anti-Soviet propaganda.

As the accusatory material in his case appeared spiteful critical articles and a slanderous review "review", which distorted the essence and ideological orientation of his work. He was saved from the death penalty by the fact that, despite torture during interrogations, he did not admit the accusations of creating a counter-revolutionary organization.

He served his term from February 1939 to May 1943 in the Vostoklag system in the Komsomolsk-on-Amur region, then in the Altaylag system in the Kulundinsky steppes.

Sergey Korolev. On June 27, 1938, Korolev was arrested on charges of sabotage. He was tortured, according to some reports, during which both of his jaws were broken.

The future aircraft designer was sentenced to 10 years in the camps. He will go to the Kolyma, to the Maldyak gold mine. Neither hunger, nor scurvy, nor unbearable conditions of existence could break the Queen - he will calculate his first radio-controlled missile right on the wall of the barrack.

In May 1940, Korolev returned to Moscow. At the same time, in Magadan, he did not get on the steamer "Indigirka" (due to the occupation of all places). This saved his life: following from Magadan to Vladivostok, the steamer sank off the island of Hokkaido during a storm.

After 4 months, the designer is again sentenced to 8 years and sent to a special prison, where he works under the leadership of Andrey Tupolev.

The inventor spent a year in prison, since the USSR needed to build up its military power in the pre-war period.

Andrey Tupolev. The legendary creator of the plane also fell under the machine of Stalinist repression.

Tupolev, who in his entire life developed over a hundred types of aircraft, on which 78 world records were set, was arrested on October 21, 1937.

He was accused of sabotage, belonging to a counter-revolutionary organization, and of transferring plans for Soviet aircraft to foreign intelligence.

So the great scientist "backfired" on a working trip to the United States. Andrei Nikolaevich was sentenced to 15 years in the camps.

Tupolev was released in July 1941. He created and headed one of the main "sharashki" of that time - TsKB-29 in Moscow. Andrey Tupolev was fully rehabilitated on April 9, 1955.

The great designer died in 1972. The main design bureau of the country bears his name. Tu planes are still among the most demanded in modern aviation.

Nikolay Likhachev. The famous Russian historian, paleographer and art critic at his own expense Likhachev created a unique historical and cultural museum, which he then donated to the state.

Likhachev was expelled from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, of course, he was fired from his job.

The verdict did not say a word about confiscation, but the OGPU took away absolutely all valuables, including books and manuscripts that belonged to the academician's family.

In Astrakhan, the family was literally starving to death. In 1933, the Likhachevs returned from Leningrad. Nikolai Petrovich was not hired anywhere, even for the position of an ordinary researcher.

Nikolay Vavilov. At the time of his arrest in August 1940, the great biologist was a member of the Academies in Prague, Edinburgh, Halle and, of course, in the USSR.

In 1942, when Vavilov, who dreamed of feeding the whole country, was dying of hunger in prison, he was accepted in absentia as a Member of the Royal Society of London.

The investigation into Nikolai Ivanovich's case lasted 11 months. He had to endure about 400 interrogations with a total duration of about 1,700 hours.

In between interrogations, the scientist wrote a book "History of the Development of Agriculture" in prison ("The World Resources of Agriculture and Their Use"), but everything Vavilov wrote in prison was destroyed by an investigator - a lieutenant of the NKVD as "of no value."

For "anti-Soviet activity" Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was sentenced to death. At the last moment, the sentence was mitigated - 20 years in prison.

The great scientist died of hunger in the Saratov prison on January 26, 1943. He was buried in a common grave with other deceased prisoners. The exact burial site is unknown.

Repression during the Stalinist period

In the second case, the scale of mortality from hunger and repression can be judged by demographic losses, which only in the period 1926-1940. amounted to 9 million people.

“In February 1954,” it appears later in the text, “a certificate was prepared in the name of N. S. Khrushchev, signed by the Prosecutor General of the USSR R. Rudenko, Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR S. Kruglov and Minister of Justice of the USSR K. Gorshenin, in which the number of persons convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes for the period from 1921 to February 1, 1954 was called. In total, during this period, 3,777,380 people were convicted by the OGPU Collegium, the NKVD troikas, a Special Meeting, the Military Collegium, courts and military tribunals, including to capital punishment - 642,980, to detention in camps and prisons for a term of 25 years and below - 2,369,220, to exile and deportation - 765,180 people.

Repression after 1953

After Stalin's death, general rehabilitation began, the scale of the repressions sharply decreased. At the same time, people of alternative political views (the so-called "dissidents") continued to be persecuted by the Soviet regime until the end of the 1980s. Criminal liability for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda was lifted only in September 1989.

According to the historian V.P. Popov, the total number of those convicted of political and criminal offenses in 1923-1953 is at least 40 million. In his opinion, this estimate “is very approximate and greatly underestimated, but it fully reflects the scale of the repressive state policy ... - from 1923 to 1953 - almost every third capable member of society was convicted. " In the RSFSR alone, general courts passed sentences against 39.1 million people, and in different years, from 37 to 65% of convicts were sentenced to real terms of imprisonment (not including those who were repressed by the NKVD, without sentences passed by the judicial collegiums for criminal cases Supreme, regional and regional courts and permanent sessions operating at the camps, without the sentences of military tribunals, without exiles, without expelled peoples, etc.).

According to Anatoly Vishnevsky, “ the total number of citizens of the USSR who were subjected to repression in the form of deprivation or significant restriction of freedom for more or less lengthy periods"(In camps, special settlements, etc.) from the end-s to the city." amounted to at least 25-30 million people"(That is, those convicted under all articles of the USSR Criminal Code, including also special settlers). According to him, with reference to Zemskov "in 1934-1947 alone, 10.2 million people entered the camps (minus those returned from the fugitives)." However, Zemskov himself writes not about the newly arrived contingents, but describes the general movement of the GULAG camp population, that is, this number includes both newly arrived convicts and those who are already serving sentences.

According to the chairman of the board of the international society "Memorial" Arseny Roginsky, from 1918 to 1987, according to the preserved documents, there were 7 million 100 thousand people arrested by the security organs in the USSR. Some of them were arrested not on political charges, since the security organs were arrested in different years and for such crimes as banditry, smuggling, counterfeiting. These calculations, although they were made by him by 1994, were deliberately not published by him, since they contradicted the significantly large numbers of arrests prevailing in those years.

The repressions of the 1930s occupy a special place in the history of Russia in the 20th century. Criticism of the Soviet regime is often based on the condemnation of this particular period, as evidence of the brutality and unprincipled actions of the leaders at this time. The chronological order of events that occurred at this time, we can find in any history textbook. Many historians argued on this topic, but expressing their personal point of view about certain events, they invariably relied on those goals that were pursued by the authorities in this period, and also analyzed the results of this bloody time in the history of Russia and the USSR.

It is believed that the era of violence and repression began with the very seizure of power in 1917. However, it was in the 30s. there was a peak, at this time the largest number of people were imprisoned in camps and shot. History testifies that at this time every third person was either repressed or a relative of the repressed.

The first thing that was done during this period was to conduct show trials, the purpose of which appears in the very name is to demonstrate the punitive power of power, and the fact that everyone can be punished for opposition. It is noteworthy that the cases for these trials were fabricated, and for greater clarity, it was stated that all the accused themselves confessed to their crime.

On the one hand, the desire of the authorities to gain a foothold in their dominant position is understandable and natural, on the other hand, a too immoral, from a human point of view, and cruel path was chosen for this.

Now we understand that the ruling power always needs some kind of counterbalance, which allows to achieve balance in the opinions and views of statesmen who are responsible for the contagious aspects of the life of a citizen of the state. Soviet authority desperately tried to completely destroy and remove this counterweight.

Stalinist political repressions of the 30s

Stalin's refers to the political repressions carried out in the Soviet Union during the period when the country's government was headed by J.V. Stalin.

Political persecution acquired a mass character with the beginning of collectivization and forced industrialization, and reached its peak in the period from 1937-1938. - Great terror.

During the Great Terror, the NKVD services arrested about 1.58 million people, of which 682 thousand were sentenced to death.

Until now, historians have not come to a consensus regarding the historical background of the Stalinist political repressions of the 1930s and their institutional basis.

But for most researchers it is indisputable that it was the political figure of Stalin who played a decisive role in the punitive department of the state.

According to the declassified archival materials, mass repressions on the ground were carried out in accordance with the planned targets issued from above to identify and punish the enemies of the people. Moreover, on many documents, the requirement to shoot or beat everyone was still written by the hand of the Soviet leader.

It is believed that the ideological basis for the Great Terror was the Stalinist doctrine of strengthening the class struggle. The very mechanisms of terror were borrowed from the time of the civil war, during which non-judicial executions were widely used by the Bolsheviks.

A number of researchers assess the Stalinist repressions as a perversion of the policy of Bolshevism, emphasizing that among the repressed there were many members of the Communist Party, leaders and the military.

For example, in the period from 1936 to 1939. more than 1.2 million communists were repressed - half of the total number of the party. Moreover, according to the existing data, only 50 thousand people were released, the rest died in the camps or were shot.

In addition, according to Russian historians, Stalin's repressive policy, based on the creation of extrajudicial bodies, was a gross violation of the laws of the Soviet Constitution in force at that time.

Researchers identify several main reasons for the Great Terror. Chief among them is the Bolshevik ideology itself, which tends to divide people into friends and foes.

It should be noted that it was advantageous for the current government to explain the difficult economic situation that developed in the country in the period under review as a result of the sabotage activities of the enemies of the Soviet people.

In addition, the presence of millions of prisoners made it possible to solve serious economic problems, for example, the provision of cheap labor for large-scale construction projects in the country.

Finally, many are inclined to consider one of the reasons for political repression mental illness Stalin, who suffered from paranoia. The fear, sown among the masses, became a reliable foundation for the complete submission of the central government. Thus, thanks to the total terror in the 30s, Stalin managed to get rid of possible political opponents and turn the remaining employees of the apparatus into thoughtless executors.

The Great Terror policy caused enormous damage to the economy and military power of the Soviet state.

Sources: prezentacii.com, www.skachatreferat.ru, revolution.allbest.ru, rhistory.ucoz.ru, otherreferats.allbest.ru

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