Propaganda: Purging Stalin- a 1989 review

Purging Stalin (Alexander Cockburn, New Statesman and Society, 3/3/1989)
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 Marching arm in arm with the credulity of US journalists still swallowing
 nonsense from the State Department and Pentagon about "exposing the central
 front" to Soviet blitzkrieg, is their willingness to take at face value
 almost anything they are told by intellectuals in Moscow, so long as it is
 somehow associated with "reform" (which to American journalists means, in
 the last analysis, restoration of capitalist relations).
 
 And in these heady days in Moscow it seems that some of these Soviet
 intellectuals will say anything they think Americans want to hear. A friend
 of mine recently returned from a conference in Hawaii, where American
 historians associated with "revisionist" readings of the origins of the
 Cold War were increasingly irked to hear Soviet participants piously echoing
 all the most hawkish American constructions of Soviet behaviour in the
 postwar period, to the tremendous pleasure of the American right-wingers in
 attendance. At this stage in the process of _glasnost_, these Soviets
 plainly felt that any defence of Soviet deeds in the pre-Gorbachev years
 amounted to a betrayal of the new thinking.
 
 At the start of February, the tabloid _Argumenti i Fakti_ reported that
 the Soviet historian Roy Medvedev had proposed that Stalin's victims
 amounted to some 20 million. From Moscow, the _New York Times'_
 correspondent Bill Keller relayed this to his newspaper which on 4 February
 ran a front-page headline announcing "Major Soviet Paper Says 20 Million
 Died as Victims of Stalin", with the lead paragraph reiterating Medvedev's
 claim that "about 20 million died in labour camps, forced collectivisation,
 famine and executions".
 
 To me, the total figure seemed to have an insouciant roundness and also a
 suspect symmetry with the total - also 20 million - normally reckoned for
 Soviet losses in the war against Hitler. Looking through Medvedev's
 breakdown one could perceive that the word "million" really meant "a lot",
 with no substantive precision beyond the vague imputation of multitude. As
 relayed by Keller these volumes were expressed as "one million imprisoned
 or exiled from 1927 to 1929", or "nine or 10 million of the more prosperous
 peasants driven from their lands", and so on. In the end we were left with
 an overall figure of 40 million who, on Medvedev's account, had an awful or
 terminal time of it between 1927 and 1953, with 20 million actually killed. 
 
 All US reports of Medvedev's estimates told their readers that his was the
 most "precise" accounting thus far. No newspaper or TV programme that I
 saw, rang up any of the relevant scholars to get their reaction. When I
 started to do so myself, I was interested to find well-qualified historians
 and demographers in the US who regard Medvedev's claims as absurd. Sheila
 Fitzpatrick, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin,
 told me there was "no serious basis for his calculations" and that
 privately some Soviet demographers and historians find Medvedev's work in
 this area embarrassingly bad. She gave me a couple of examples to explain
 why she thought Medvedev's numbers ridiculous. 
 
 Medvedev concludes that nine to 11 million prosperous peasants were driven
 from their lands with another two to three million arrested or exiled in
 the forced collectivisation of the early 1930s. But, Fitzpatrick says,
 Medvedev makes no distinction between those who left their villages
 voluntarily and those who left by force. This was the era of
 industrialisation and many of Medvedev's millions were moving to the town.
 Medvedev also bases his figures on the assumption that the average peasant
 family in the late 1920s had eight members, whereas in fact five was the
 normal size. Fitzpatrick also cited the famous conversation between
 Churchill and Stalin as another flimsy source, often used by some to claim
 that Stalin told Churchill that ten million peasants died in
 collectivisation. The actual passage in _The Hinge of Fate_ makes it clear
 Stalin was talking about the total number of peasants he was dealing with,
 not those who died. According to Fitzpatrick, a respected estimate,
 concurred with by several historians in the West, is that of the historian
 Victor P Danilov, who recently wrote in _Pravda_ that approximately three
 to four million died in the famine of the early 1930s. But where does that
 leave us on the matter of the purges?
 
 In his 1946 survey, _The Population of the Soviet Union_, the demographer
 Frank Lorimer studied data from the Soviet census of 1925 and 1939 and all
 available information on fertility and mortality between these two dates.
 He calculated that what demographers call "excess deaths", that is, in
 Lorimer's method, a comparison of the reported total population in 1939
 with the expected population at that date - given the count in 1925 and
 everything known about fertility, mortality and emigration between those
 years - amounted to somewhere between 4.5 million and 5 million, though
 this total included perhaps several hundred thousand emigrants, such as
 those Central Asian nomads moving into Sinkiang to avoid collectivisation.
 
 In their 1979 volume _How the Soviet Union is Governed_, Professors Jerry
 Hough and Merle Fainsod generally supported Lorimer's calculation and
 concluded that the more extreme western estimates "cannot be sustained".
 Rather, "a smaller - but still horrifying - number" of "maybe some 3.5
 million" emerges as the direct or indirect result of collectivisation in
 the early 1930s. With respect to the purges of 1937 and 1938, Hough and
 Fainsod again criticise excessive Western estimates, and report that on the
 evidence of extant demographic data, "the number of deaths in the purge
 would certainly be placed in the hundreds of thousands rather than in
 excess of a million". Indeed, "a figure in the low hundreds of thousands
 seems much more probable than one in the high hundreds of thousands, and
 even George Kennan's estimate of 'tens of thousands' is quite conceivable,
 maybe even probable."
 
 At the far end of the spectrum from Hough and Fainsod, is Robert Conquest
 who had reckoned in excess of 20 million deaths under Stalin before 1939.
 In his essay _The Stalin Question Since Stalin_, Bukhtain's [sic -
 Bukharin?] biographer, Stephen Cohen cites Conquest's figure as
 "conservative", without mentioning lower numbers by other scholars and
 concludes by saying: "Judged only by the number of victims, and leaving
 aside important differences between the two regimes, Stalinism created a
 holocaust greater than Hitler's". 
 
 In this decade the most significant scholarly battle on the subject has
 been waged in the pages of the _Slavic Review_ between Stephen Wheatcroft
 and Steven Rosefielde, with Wheatcroft writing in 1985 that "these wildly
 unscholarly estimates [such as Cohen's] serve neither science nor
 morality", and "It is no betrayal of thm [the victims] nor an apologia for
 Stalin to state that there is no demographic evidence to indicate a
 population loss of more than six million between 1926 and 1939, or more
 than three to four million in the famine. Scholarship must be guided by
 reason and not emotion."
 
 In a widely noted essay, also in _Slavic Review_ for 1985, the demographers
 Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver supported Wheatcroft, reckoning "excess
 deaths" between 1926 and 1939, to those alive in 1926, at a median figure
 of 3.5 million. Conquest, now at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, says
 that Medvedev's numbers are "obviously in the right range" though "perhaps
 he spread them wrong", and "I'm not sure where he gets them from". He
 slighted Anderson and Silver's work as the product of demography rather
 than sovietology, and derided Hough and Fainsod's figures as "improbable".
 From the University of Michigan, Anderson responds that: "Conquest wouldn't
 know a number of it bit him." She thinks Medvedev's computations
 "ludicrous".
 
 No doubt some will be eager to conclude that the foregoing is somehow an
 attempt to exonerate Stalin, dismiss the purges as got up by western
 propaganda. The following observation by Hough and Fainsod is salutary:
 "Some persons seem instinctively to object to [our] figures on the grounds
 that the Great Purge was so horrible that the number of deaths cannot have
 been so 'low'. We must become so insensitive to the value of human life,
 however, that we dismiss tens of thousands of deaths as insignificant and
 need to exaggerate the number by ten, 20, 30, 40 times to touch our
 feelings of horror." 
 
 The task is obviously to arrive at truth, but many such estimates evidently
 have a regulatory ideological function with an exponential momentum so
 great that now any computation that does not soar past ten million is
 somehow taken as evidence of being soft on Stalin. One can find an analogy
 in current writing on the French Revolution, where the passionately anti-
 Jacobin Rene Sedillot has produced a book addressing the matter of the
 Revolution's (and Counter-Revolution's, though it's never quite put like
 that) human cost where he boils up, by very questionable means, a casualty
 figure far in excess of all previous estimates. 
 
 The symmetry that calculations, such as Medvedev's, seek to establish
 between Stalin and Hitler performs similar injury to history. Hitler
 wanted to exterminate the Jews and the gypsies, and though accuracy is
 important it does not alter the moral scale of this horror one iota to
 propose that, in pursuit of this design, Hitler may have, in reality,
 killed a million less or a million more than the conventional estimate. 
 
 Evil though he was, Stalin did not plan or seek to accomplish genocide,
 and to say that he and Hitler had the same project in mind (or as right-
 wing German historians now argue, that somehow Lenin and Stalin put Hitler
 up to it) is to do disservice to history and to truth. 
 
 ========== Jack Campin's Home Page: http://www.campin.me.uk ==========
 
category:Cold War