Victim of repression in the 1930s. Stalinist repressions - causes, lists of repressed and rehabilitated victims

One of the blackest pages in the history of the entire post-Soviet space was the years from 1928 to 1952, when Stalin was in power. Biographers for a long time hushed up or tried to distort some facts from the tyrant's past, but it turned out to be quite possible to restore them. The fact is that the country was ruled by a recidivist convict who was in prison 7 times. Violence and terror, forceful methods of solving the problem were well known to him from early youth. They are also reflected in his policies.

Officially, the course was taken in July 1928 by the Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. It was there that Stalin spoke, declaring that the further advancement of communism would meet with increasing resistance from hostile, anti-Soviet elements, and they must be fought hard. Many researchers believe that the repressions of the 30s were a continuation of the policy of the Red Terror, adopted as early as 1918. It is worth noting that no one includes those who suffered during the Civil War from 1917 to 1922 among the victims of repression, because no census was conducted after the First World War. And it is not clear how to establish the cause of death.

The beginning of Stalin's repressions was directed at political opponents, officially - at saboteurs, terrorists, spies engaged in subversive activities, at anti-Soviet elements. However, in practice, there was a struggle with wealthy peasants and entrepreneurs, as well as with certain peoples who did not want to sacrifice their national identity for the sake of dubious ideas. A lot of people dispossessed themselves of the kulak and were forced to resettle, but usually this meant not only the loss of their homes, but also the threat of death.

The fact is that such settlers were not provided with food and medicine. The authorities did not take into account the time of year, so if it happened in winter, people often froze and died of hunger. The exact number of victims is still being established. In society, and now there are disputes about this. Some defenders of the Stalinist regime believe that we are talking about hundreds of thousands of "all". Others point to millions of forcibly displaced, and of them died due to the complete absence of any conditions for life, from about 1/5 to a half.

In 1929, the authorities decided to abandon the usual forms of imprisonment and move on to new ones, reform the system in this direction, and introduce corrective labor. Preparations began for the creation of the Gulag, which many rightly compare with the German death camps. It is characteristic that the Soviet authorities often used various events, for example, the assassination of Voikov's plenipotentiary representative in Poland, to crack down on political opponents and simply objectionable ones. In particular, Stalin reacted to this by demanding the immediate liquidation of the monarchists by any means. At the same time, no connection was even established between the victim and those to whom such measures were applied. As a result, 20 representatives of the former Russian nobility were shot, about 9 thousand people were arrested and subjected to repression. The exact number of victims has not yet been established.

Sabotage

It should be noted that the Soviet regime was completely dependent on specialists trained in the Russian Empire. Firstly, not much time had passed at the time of the 1930s, and in fact, our own specialists were absent or were too young and inexperienced. And without exception, all scientists received training in monarchical educational institutions. Secondly, very often science frankly contradicted what the Soviet government was doing. The latter, for example, denied genetics as such, considering it too bourgeois. There was no study of the human psyche, psychiatry had a punitive function, that is, in fact, it did not fulfill its main task.

As a result, the Soviet authorities began to accuse many specialists of sabotage. The USSR did not recognize such concepts as incompetence, including those that arose due to poor training or incorrect appointment, mistake, miscalculation. The real physical condition of the employees of a number of enterprises was ignored, due to which common mistakes were sometimes made. In addition, mass repressions could arise on the basis of suspiciously frequent, according to the authorities, contacts with foreigners, the publication of works in the Western press. A vivid example is the Pulkovo case, when a huge number of astronomers, mathematicians, engineers and other scientists suffered. And in the end, only a small number were rehabilitated: many were shot, some died during interrogations or in prison.

The Pulkovo case very clearly demonstrates another terrible moment of Stalinist repressions: the threat to loved ones, as well as slandering others under torture. Not only scientists suffered, but also the wives who supported them.

Grain procurement

Constant pressure on the peasants, a half-starved existence, weaning of grain, a shortage of labor negatively affected the pace of grain procurement. However, Stalin did not know how to admit mistakes, which became official state policy. By the way, it is for this reason that any rehabilitation, even of those who were convicted by accident, by mistake or instead of a namesake, took place after the death of the tyrant.

But back to the topic of grain procurement. For objective reasons, it was far from always and not always possible to fulfill the norm. And in connection with this, the “guilty” were punished. Moreover, in some places, completely entire villages were repressed. Soviet power also fell on the heads of those who simply allowed the peasants to keep grain for themselves as an insurance fund or for sowing the next year.

Cases were for almost every taste. The affairs of the Geological Committee and the Academy of Sciences, Vesna, the Siberian Brigade ... A complete and detailed description can take many volumes. And this despite the fact that all the details have not yet been disclosed, many documents of the NKVD continue to remain classified.

Some relaxation that came in 1933 - 1934, historians attribute primarily to the fact that the prisons were overcrowded. In addition, it was necessary to reform the punitive system, which was not aimed at such mass character. This is how the Gulag was born.

Great terror

The main terror occurred in 1937-1938, when, according to various sources, up to 1.5 million people suffered, and more than 800 thousand of them were shot or killed in some other way. However, the exact number is still being established, there are quite active disputes on this matter.

Characteristic was the order of the NKVD No. 00447, which officially launched the mechanism of mass repression against former kulaks, socialist-revolutionaries, monarchists, re-emigrants, and so on. At the same time, everyone was divided into 2 categories: more and less dangerous. Both groups were subject to arrest, the first had to be shot, the second was given a term of 8 to 10 years on average.

Among the victims of Stalin's repressions there were quite a few relatives taken into custody. Even if family members could not be convicted of anything, they were still automatically registered, and sometimes forcibly relocated. If the father and (or) mother were declared "enemies of the people", then this put an end to the opportunity to make a career, often - to get an education. Such people often found themselves surrounded by an atmosphere of horror, they were subjected to a boycott.

The Soviet authorities could also persecute on the basis of nationality and the presence, at least in the past, of the citizenship of certain countries. So, only in 1937, 25 thousand Germans, 84.5 thousand Poles, almost 5.5 thousand Romanians, 16.5 thousand Latvians, 10.5 thousand Greeks, 9 thousand 735 Estonians, 9 thousand Finns, 2 thousand Iranians were shot, 400 Afghans. At the same time, people of the nationality against which the repressions were carried out were dismissed from the industry. And from the army - persons belonging to a nationality not represented on the territory of the USSR. All this happened under the leadership of Yezhov, but, which does not even require separate evidence, no doubt, it was directly related to Stalin, constantly personally controlled by him. Many of the hit lists are signed by him. And we are talking about, in total, hundreds of thousands of people.

Ironically, recent stalkers have often been the victim. So, one of the leaders of the described repressions Yezhov was shot in 1940. The verdict was put into effect the very next day after the trial. Beria became the head of the NKVD.

Stalinist repressions spread to new territories along with the Soviet government itself. Purges were going on constantly, they were an obligatory element of control. And with the onset of the 40s, they did not stop.

Repressive mechanism during the Great Patriotic War

Even the Great Patriotic War could not stop the repressive machine, although it partially extinguished the scale, because the USSR needed people at the front. However, now there is a great way to get rid of objectionable - sending to the front line. It is not known exactly how many died following such orders.

At the same time, the military situation became much tougher. Just a suspicion was enough to shoot even without the appearance of a trial. This practice was called "unloading prisons." It was especially widely used in Karelia, in the Baltic States, in Western Ukraine.

The arbitrariness of the NKVD intensified. So, the execution became possible not even by the verdict of the court or some extrajudicial body, but simply by order of Beria, whose powers began to increase. They do not like to cover this moment widely, but the NKVD did not stop its activities even in Leningrad during the blockade. Then they arrested up to 300 students of higher educational institutions on trumped-up charges. 4 were shot, many died in isolation wards or in prisons.

Everyone is able to say unequivocally whether detachments can be considered a form of repression, but they definitely made it possible to get rid of unwanted people, and quite effectively. However, the authorities continued to persecute in more traditional forms. All those who were in captivity were waiting for the filtration detachments. Moreover, if an ordinary soldier could still prove his innocence, especially if he was captured wounded, unconscious, sick or frostbitten, then the officers, as a rule, were waiting for the Gulag. Some were shot.

As Soviet power spread across Europe, intelligence was engaged there, returning and judging emigrants by force. Only in Czechoslovakia, according to some sources, 400 people suffered from its actions. Quite serious damage in this regard was caused to Poland. Often, the repressive mechanism affected not only Russian citizens, but also Poles, some of whom were shot extrajudicially for resisting Soviet power. Thus, the USSR violated the promises that it gave to the allies.

Post-war developments

After the war, the repressive apparatus turned around again. Too influential military men, especially those close to Zhukov, doctors who were in contact with the allies (and scientists) were under threat. The NKVD could also arrest Germans in the Soviet zone of responsibility for trying to contact residents of other regions that were under the control of Western countries. The unfolding campaign against persons of Jewish nationality looks like a black irony. The last high-profile trial was the so-called "Doctors' Case", which fell apart only in connection with the death of Stalin.

Use of torture

Later, during the Khrushchev thaw, the Soviet prosecutor's office itself was engaged in the study of cases. The facts of mass falsification and obtaining confessions under torture were recognized, which were used very widely. Marshal Blucher was killed as a result of numerous beatings, and in the process of extracting evidence from Eikhe, his spine was broken. There are cases when Stalin personally demanded that certain prisoners be beaten.

In addition to beatings, sleep deprivation, placement in a too cold or, conversely, excessively hot room without clothes, and a hunger strike were also practiced. The handcuffs were periodically not removed for days, and sometimes for months. Forbidden correspondence, any contact with the outside world. Some were “forgotten”, that is, they were arrested, and then they did not consider the cases and did not make any specific decision until Stalin's death. This, in particular, is indicated by the order signed by Beria, which ordered amnesty for those who were arrested before 1938, and for whom no decision has yet been made. We are talking about people who have been waiting for the decision of their fate for at least 14 years! This can also be considered a kind of torture.

Stalinist statements

Understanding the very essence of Stalinist repressions in the present is of fundamental importance, if only because some people still consider Stalin an impressive leader who saved the country and the world from fascism, without which the USSR would have been doomed. Many try to justify his actions by saying that in this way he raised the economy, ensured industrialization or defended the country. In addition, some try to downplay the number of victims. In general, the exact number of victims is one of the most contested points today.

However, in reality, to assess the personality of this person, as well as all those who carried out his criminal orders, even the recognized minimum of those convicted and shot is enough. During the fascist regime of Mussolini in Italy, a total of 4.5 thousand people were repressed. His political enemies were either expelled from the country or placed in prisons where they were given the opportunity to write books. Of course, no one says that Mussolini is getting better from this. Fascism cannot be justified.

But what assessment at the same time can be given to Stalinism? And taking into account the repressions that were carried out on a national basis, he, at least, has one of the signs of fascism - racism.

Characteristic signs of repression

Stalinist repressions have several characteristic features that only emphasize what they were. It:

1. mass character. Accurate figures depend heavily on estimates, whether relatives are taken into account or not, internally displaced persons or not. Depending on the method of counting, we are talking about 5 to 40 million.
2. Cruelty. The repressive mechanism did not spare anyone, people were subjected to cruel, inhuman treatment, starved to death, tortured, their relatives were killed before their eyes, loved ones were threatened, forced to abandon family members.
3. Orientation to protect the power of the party and against the interests of the people. In fact, we can talk about genocide. Neither Stalin nor his other henchmen were at all interested in how the constantly decreasing peasantry should provide everyone with bread, which is actually beneficial to the production sector, how science will move forward with the arrest and execution of prominent figures. This clearly demonstrates that the real interests of the people were ignored.
4. Injustice. People could suffer simply because they had property in the past. Wealthy peasants and the poor, who took their side, supported, somehow protected. Persons of "suspicious" nationality. Relatives who returned from abroad. Sometimes academics, prominent scientists, who contacted their foreign colleagues to publish data on invented drugs after they received official permission from the authorities, could be punished.
5. Connection with Stalin. The extent to which everything was tied to this figure is eloquently evident even from the termination of a number of cases immediately after his death. Lavrenty Beria was rightly accused by many of cruelty and inappropriate behavior, but even he, by his actions, recognized the false nature of many cases, the unjustified cruelty used by the NKVD. And it was he who forbade physical measures against prisoners. Again, as with Mussolini, this is not about justification. It's just about underlining.
6. illegality. Some executions were carried out not only without a trial, but also without the participation of the judiciary as such. But even when there was a trial, it was only about the so-called "simplified" mechanism. This meant that the consideration was carried out without defense, only with the hearing of the prosecution and the accused. There was no practice of reviewing cases, the court decision was final, often carried out the next day. At the same time, widespread violations of even the legislation of the USSR itself, which was in force at that time, were observed.
7. inhumanity. The repressive apparatus violated the basic human rights and freedoms proclaimed in the civilized world at that time for several centuries. Researchers do not see a difference between the treatment of prisoners in the dungeons of the NKVD and how the Nazis behaved towards the prisoners.
8. groundlessness. Despite the attempts of the Stalinists to demonstrate the existence of some underlying reason, there is not the slightest reason to believe that anything was directed to any good goal or helped to achieve it. Indeed, a lot was built by the forces of the prisoners of the Gulag, but it was the forced labor of people who were greatly weakened due to the conditions of detention and the constant lack of food. Consequently, production errors, defects and a generally very low level of quality - all this inevitably arose. This situation also could not but affect the pace of construction. Given the costs that the Soviet government incurred for the creation of the Gulag, its maintenance, as well as such a large-scale apparatus in general, it would be much more rational to simply pay for the same work.

The assessment of Stalin's repressions has not yet been finally made. However, beyond any doubt it is clear that this is one of the worst pages of world history.

Original taken from takoe_sky in

"The concept of dictatorship means nothing more than power unrestricted by any laws, absolutely not constrained by any rules, based directly on violence."
V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin). Sobr. Op. T. 41, p. 383

"As we move forward, the class struggle will intensify, and the Soviet government, whose strength will grow more and more, will pursue a policy of isolating these elements." I.V. Dzhugashvili (Stalin). Works, vol. 11, p. 171

Vladimir Putin: “Repressions crushed people without considering nationalities, beliefs, or religions. Entire estates in our country became their victims: Cossacks and priests, ordinary peasants, professors and officers, teachers and workers.
There can be no justification for these crimes.” http://archive.government.ru/docs/10122/

How many people in Russia / USSR were destroyed by the communists under Lenin-Stalin?

Foreword

This is a subject of constant controversy, and this extremely important historical topic needs to be sorted out. For several months I studied all the possible and available materials on the network, at the end of the article there is an extensive list of them. The picture turned out to be more than sad.

There are a lot of words in the article, but now you can confidently poke any communist face into it (mild pardon for my French), broadcasting that "there were no mass repressions and deaths in the USSR."

For those who do not like long texts: according to dozens of studies, the Leninist-Stalinist communists destroyed at least 31 million people (direct irretrievable losses without emigration and the Second World War), a maximum of 168 million (including emigration and, most importantly, demographic losses from the unborn ). See the section "Statistics of total numbers". The most reliable figure seems to be direct losses of 34.31 million people - the arithmetic average of the sums of several of the most serious works on actual losses, which in general do not differ very much from each other. Not counting the unborn. See "Average figure" section.

For ease of reference, this article is divided into several sections.

"Pavlov's Help" - an analysis of the most important myth of the neo-Commies and Stalinists about "less than 1 million people were repressed."
"Average figure" - calculation of the number of victims by years and topics, with the ghost of the corresponding minimum and maximum figures from sources, from which the arithmetic average figure of losses is derived.
"Statistics of total numbers" - statistics on total numbers from the 20 most serious studies found.
"Used materials" - quotes and links in the article.
"Other important related materials" - interesting and useful links and information on the topic, not included in this article or not directly mentioned in it.

I would be grateful for any constructive criticism and additions.

Pavlov's help

The minimum figure of the dead, which all neo-communists and Stalinists adore, “only” 800 thousand people were shot (and no one else was killed according to their mantras) - is given in a 1953 certificate. It is called "Reference of the special department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR on the number of those arrested and convicted by the bodies of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD of the USSR in 1921-1953." and is dated December 11, 1953. The certificate is signed by acting. the head of the 1st special department, Colonel Pavlov (the 1st special department was the accounting and archival department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), which is why its name “Pavlov’s certificate” is found in modern materials.

This reference in itself is false and absurd a little more than completely,, and because. it is the main and main argument of the neocomms - it must be analyzed in detail. True, there is a second document, no less beloved by the neo-Communists and the Stalinists, a memorandum to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Comrade Khrushchev N.S. dated February 1, 1954, signed by the Prosecutor General R. Rudenko, the Minister of Internal Affairs S. Kruglov and the Minister of Justice K. Gorshenin. But the data in it practically coincides with the Help and, unlike the Help, does not contain any details, so it makes sense to analyze the Help.

So, according to this Certificate from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR for the years 1921-1953, a total of 799.455 were shot. Excluding the years 1937 and 1938, 117,763 people were shot. 42.139 shot in the years 1941-1945. Those. during the years 1921-1953 (excluding the years 1937-1938 and the years of the war), during the struggle against the White Guards, against the Cossacks, against priests, against kulaks, against peasant uprisings, ... a total of 75,624 people were shot (according to "quite reliable" data). Only in the 37s under Stalin did they slightly increase activity in purges of "enemies of the people". And so, according to this information, even in the bloody times of Trotsky and the cruel "Red Terror", it turns out, it was quiet.

I will give for consideration an excerpt from this certificate for the period 1921-1931.

Let us first pay attention to the data on those convicted for anti-Soviet (counter-revolutionary) propaganda. In 1921-1922, at the height of the fiercest struggle against counter-terrorism and the officially declared "Red Terror", when people were seized only for belonging to the bourgeoisie (bespectacled man and white hands), no one was arrested for counter-revolutionary, anti-Soviet propaganda (according to the Help). Openly agitate against the Soviets, speak at rallies against the surplus appraisal and other actions of the Bolsheviks, curse the blasphemous new government from church ambos, and nothing will happen to you. Direct freedom of speech! In 1923, however, 5,322 people were arrested for propaganda, but then again (until 1929) complete freedom of speech for anti-Sovietists, and only starting from 1929 did the Bolsheviks finally begin to “tighten the screws” and persecute counter-revolutionary propaganda. And such freedom and patient perception of anti-Soviet people (according to an honest document, for many years NOT A SINGLE one imprisoned for anti-government propaganda) occurs during the officially declared "Red Terror", when the Bolsheviks closed down all opposition newspapers and parties, imprisoned and shot clergymen for what they said is not what is needed ... As an example of the complete falsity of these data, one can cite a surname index of those shot in the Kuban (75 pages, of those surnames that I read - all were acquitted after Stalin).

For 1930, on the item convicted for anti-Soviet agitation, it is generally modestly noted that "There is no information." Those. The system worked, people were condemned, shot, but no information was received!
This certificate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the “No information” in it directly openly confirms and is documentary evidence that many information about the punishments carried out were not registered and generally disappeared.

Now I want to analyze the point of the fascinating Help on the number of executions (VMN - Capital Punishment). In the Certificate for 1921, 9,701 were shot. In 1922, only 1,962 people, and in 1923, in general, only 414 people (12,077 people were shot in 3 years).

Let me remind you that this is still the time of the "Red Terror" and the ongoing civil war (which ended only in 1923), a terrible famine that claimed several million lives and was organized by the Bolsheviks, who took almost all the bread from the "class alien" breadwinners - the peasants, and also the time of peasant uprisings caused by this surplus and famine, and the most severe suppression of those who dared to be indignant.
At a time when, according to the official Information, the number of executions was already small in 1921, in 1922 it was still greatly reduced, and in 1923 it almost stopped altogether, in reality, due to the most severe requisitioning, a terrible famine reigned in the country, dissatisfaction with the Bolsheviks intensified and the opposition became more active, everywhere peasant uprisings broke out. The unrest of the dissatisfied, opposition and uprisings, the Bolshevik leadership demands to be suppressed in the most severe way.

Church sources give data on those killed as a result of the implementation of the wisest "general plan" in 1922: 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks, 3,447 nuns were (Russian Orthodox Church and Communist State, 1917-1941, M., 1996, p. 69). In 1922, 8,100 clergymen were killed (and the most honest Information claims that in total, including criminals, 1,962 people were shot in 1922).

The suppression of the Tambov uprising of 1921-22. If we recall how this was reflected in the surviving documents of that time, then Uborevich reported to Tukhachevsky: "1000 people were taken prisoner, 1000 were shot", then "500 people were taken prisoner, all 500 were shot." And how many of these documents were destroyed? And how many such executions were not reflected in the documents at all?

Note (curious comparison):
According to official figures, 24,422 people were sentenced to death in the peaceful USSR from 1962 to 1989. An average of 2,754 people over 2 years in a very calm, peaceful time of golden stagnation. In 1962, 2,159 people were sentenced to death. Those. in the benevolent times of the "golden stagnation" they were shot, it turns out more than during the cruelest "red terror". According to the Information for 2 years 1922-1923, only 2,376 were shot (almost as many as in 1962 alone).

In the Certificate from the 1st Special Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR on repressions, only those convicts who were officially registered as "contra" are included. Bandits, criminals, violators of labor discipline and public order, of course, were not included in the statistics of this Certificate.
For example, in the USSR in 1924, 1,915,900 people were officially convicted (see: Results of the Decade of Soviet Power in Figures. 1917-1927. M, 1928. S. 112-113), and according to the Information through the special departments of the Cheka-OGPU this year only 12,425 people were convicted (and only they can officially be considered as repressed; the rest are just criminals).
Do I need to remind you that in the USSR they tried to declare that we do not have political people, there are only criminals. Trotskyists were sued as wreckers and saboteurs. The rebellious peasants were suppressed as bandits (even the Commission under the RVSR, which led the suppression of peasant uprisings, was officially called the “Commission for Combating Banditry”), etc.

I will give two more facts to the wonderful statistics of the Help.

According to the well-known archives of the NKVD, which are cited by those who refute the scale of the Gulags, the number of prisoners in prisons, camps and colonies at the beginning of 1937 was 1.196 million people.
However, in the census conducted on January 6, 1937, 156 million people were received (without the population rewritten by the NKVD and the NPO (that is, without the special contingent of the NKVD and the army), and without passengers on trains and ships). The total population according to the census was 162,003,225 people (including contingents of the Red Army, NKVD and passengers).

Considering the size of the army at that time 2 million (specialists give the figure 1.645.983 on 1.01.37) and assuming that there were about 1 million passengers, we get approximately that the NKVD special contingent (prisoners) by the beginning of 1937 was about 3 million. Close to our calculated specific number of 2.75 million prisoners was indicated in the certificate of the NKVD provided by the TsUNKhU for the 1937 census. Those. according to another OFFICIAL certificate (and also, of course, true), the actual number of prisoners was 2.3 times higher than the generally accepted one.

And one more, last example from official, truthful information about the number of prisoners.
In a report on the use of prisoner labor in 1939, it is reported that there were 94,773 of them in the UZHDS system at the beginning of the year, and 69,569 at the end of the year. (In principle, everything is fine, it is these data that the researchers simply reprint and make up the total amount of prisoners from them. But the trouble is, another interesting figure is given in the same report) The prisoners worked, as stated in the same report, 135,148,918 people days. Such a combination is impossible, since if 94 thousand people worked every day without days off during the year, then the number of days worked by them would be only 34.310 thousand (94 thousand for 365). If we agree with Solzhenitsyn, who claims that the prisoners were supposed to have three days off per month, then 135,148,918 man-days could be provided by approximately 411 thousand workers (135,148,918 for 329 working days). Those. and here the OFFICIAL distortion of reporting is about 5 times.

Summing up, it can be emphasized once again that the Bolsheviks / Communists far from recorded all their crimes, and what was nevertheless recorded was then repeatedly subjected to purges: Beria destroyed compromising evidence on himself, Khrushchev cleared the archives in his favor, Trotsky, Stalin, Kaganovich also did not they were very fond of keeping “ugly” materials for themselves; similarly, the leaders of the republics, regional committees, city committees, and departments of the NKVD cleaned out the local archives for themselves. ,

And yet, knowing full well about the then-existing practice of executions without trial or investigation, about the numerous purges of archives, the neo-Commies sum up the remnants of the lists found and give the final figure of less than 1 million executed from 1921 to 1953, this includes criminals sentenced to capital punishment. The falsity and cynicism of these statements "beyond good and evil" ...

Average figure

Now about the real numbers of communist victims. These numbers of people killed by the communists are made up of several main points. The numbers themselves are listed as the minimum and maximum I have encountered in various studies, with an indication of the study / author. The numbers in the items marked with an asterisk are for reference only and are not included in the final calculation.

1. "Red Terror" from October 1917 - 1.7 million people (Commission Denikin, Melgunov), - 2 million.

2. Epidemics of 1918-1922 - 6-7 million,

3. Civil war of 1917-1923, losses on both sides, soldiers and officers killed and died of wounds - 2.5 million (Polyakov) - 7.5 million (Aleksandrov)
(For reference: even the minimum figures are more than the death toll for the entire First World War - 1.7 million.)

4. The first artificial famine of 1921-1922, 1 million (Polyakov) - 4.5 million (Aleksandrov) - 5 million (with 5 million indicated in the TSB)
5. Suppression of peasant uprisings of 1921-1923 - 0.6 million (own calculations)

6. Victims of forced Stalinist collectivization of 1930-1932 (including victims of extrajudicial repressions, peasants who died of starvation in 1932 and special settlers in 1930-1940) - 2 million.

7. The second artificial famine of 1932-1933 - 6.5 million (Aleksandrov), 7.5 million, 8.1 million (Andreev)

8. Victims of political terror in the 1930s - 1.8 million

9. Those who died in places of detention in the 1930s - 1.8 million (Aleksandrov) - more than 2 million

ten*. "Lost" as a result of Stalin's corrections of the population censuses of 1937 and 1939 - 8 million - 10 million.
According to the results of the first census, 5 TsUNKhU leaders were shot in a row, as a result, the statistics were "improved" - "increased" the population by several million. These figures are probably distributed in paragraphs. 6, 7, 8 and 9.

11. Finnish War 1939-1940 - 0.13 million

12*. Irretrievable losses in the war of 1941-1945 - 38 million, 39 million according to Rosstat, 44 million according to Kurganov.
The criminal mistakes and orders of Dzhugashvili (Stalin) and his henchmen led to colossal and unjustified casualties among the personnel of the Red Army and the civilian population of the country. At the same time, there were no massacres of the civilian non-belligerent population by the Nazis (except for Jews). Moreover, it is only known about the targeted destruction of communists, commissars, Jews and partisan saboteurs by the Nazis. The civilian population was not subjected to genocide. But of course, it is impossible to isolate from these losses the part in which the communists are directly to blame, so this is not taken into account. Nevertheless, the death rate of prisoners in Soviet camps over the years is known, according to various sources, this is about 600,000 people. This is entirely on the conscience of the communists.

13. Repressions 1945-1953 - 2.85 million (together with paragraphs 13 and 14)

14. Famine of 1946-47 - 1 million

15. In addition to deaths, the country's demographic losses also include irretrievable emigration as a result of the actions of the communists. In the period after the coup of 1917 and the beginning of the 1920s, it accounted for 1.9 million (Volkov) - 2.9 million (Ramsha) - 3 million (Mikhailovsky). As a result of the war of 41-45, 0.6 million - 2 million people did not want to return to the USSR.
The arithmetic average of losses is 34.31 million people.

Used materials.

Calculation of the number of victims of the Bolsheviks according to the official methodology of the USSR State Statistics Committee http://www.slavic-europe.eu/index.php/articles/57-russia-articles/255-2013-05-21-31

The well-known incident of the summary statistics of the repressed in cases of the State Security Service ("Pavlov's certificate") in terms of the number of executions in 1933 (although this is actually defective statistics from the summary certificates of the State Security Service, deposited in the 8th of the Central Administration of the FSB), disclosed by Alexei Teplyakov http://corporatelie.livejournal .com/53743.html
It resulted in an underestimation of the number of those shot by at least 6 times. And perhaps more.

Repressions in the Kuban, a surname index of the executed (75 pages) http://ru.convdocs.org/docs/index-15498.html?page=1 (of those that I read, everyone was rehabilitated after Stalin).

Stalinist Igor Pykhalov. "What are the scales of the 'Stalinist repressions'?" http://warrax.net/81/stalin.html

Census of the USSR (1937) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%8C_ %D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0 %A0_%281937%29
Red Army before the war: organization and personnel http://militera.lib.ru/research/meltyukhov/09.html

Archival materials on the number of prisoners in the late 30s. Central State Archive of the National Economy (TSGANKh) of the USSR, Fund of the People's Commissariat - Ministry of Finance of the USSR http://scepsis.net/library/id_491.html

Article by Oleg Khlevnyuk on massive distortions of the statistics of the Turkmen NKVD in 1937-1938. Hlevnjuk O. Les mecanismes de la "Grande Terreur" des annees 1937-1938 au Turkmenistan // Cahiers du Monde russe. 1998. 39/1-2. http://corporatelie.livejournal.com/163706.html#comments

A special investigative commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, the Commander-in-Chief of the All-Union Socialist Republic, General Denikin, cites the numbers of victims of the Red Terror only for 1918-19. - 1.766.118 Russians, of which 28 bishops, 1.215 clergymen, 6.775 professors and teachers, 8.800 doctors, 54.650 officers, 260.000 soldiers, 10.500 policemen, 48.650 police agents, 12.950 landowners, 355.250 representatives of the intelligentsia, 193.015.350 peasants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0 %B4%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B8 %D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%BF%D0%BE_%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0 %B4%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8E_%D0%B7%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%8F %D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0 %BE%D0%B2#cite_note-Meingardt-6

Suppression of peasant uprisings 1921-1923

The number of victims during the suppression of the Tambov uprising. A large number of Tambov villages and villages were wiped off the face of the earth as a result of sweeps (as punishment for supporting the "bandits"). As a result of the actions of the occupying and punitive army and the Cheka in the Tambov region, according to Soviet data, at least 110 thousand people were killed. Many analysts call the figure of 240 thousand people. How many “Antonovites” were destroyed later from organized famine
The Tambov security officer Goldin said: “For the execution, we do not need any evidence and interrogations, as well as suspicions and, of course, useless, stupid office work. We find it necessary to shoot and shoot.”

At the same time, almost all of Russia was engulfed in peasant uprisings. In Western Siberia and the Urals, the Don and Kuban, the Volga region and the central provinces, the peasants came out against the Soviet power, who had fought yesterday against the whites and interventionists. The scale of the performances was enormous.
book Materials for the study of the history of the USSR (1921 - 1941), Moscow, 1989 (compiled by Dolutsky I.I.)
The largest of them was the West Siberian uprising of 1921-22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%BE-%D0%A1%D0%B8% D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%80%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D1%82%D0% B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%281921%E2%80%941922%29
And all of them were suppressed by this government with approximately the same extreme measure of cruelty, briefly described on the example of the Tambov province. I will give only one extract from the protocols on the methods of suppressing the West Siberian uprising: http://www.proza.ru/2011/01/28/782

Fundamental research of the largest historian of the revolution and the Civil War S.P. Melgunov “Red Terror in Russia. 1918-1923" is a documentary evidence of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, committed under the slogan of the fight against class enemies in the first years after the October Revolution. It is based on testimonies collected by the historian from various sources (the author was a contemporary of those events), but primarily from the printed organs of the Cheka itself (VChK Weekly, Red Terror magazine), even before his expulsion from the USSR. Published according to the 2nd, supplemented edition (Berlin, Vataga publishing house, 1924). You can buy on Ozone.
The human losses of the USSR in the Second World War - 38 million. A book by a team of authors with an eloquent title - "Washed with blood"? Lies and truth about losses in the Great Patriotic War". Authors: Igor Pykhalov, Lev Lopukhovsky, Viktor Zemskov, Igor Ivlev, Boris Kavalerchik. Publishing house "Yauza" - "Eksmo, 2012. Volume - 512 pages, of which by authors: And Pykhalov - 19 pp., L. Lopukhovsky in collaboration with B. Kavalerchik - 215 pp., V. Zemskov - 17 pp., I. Ivlev - 249 pp. Circulation 2000 copies.

The anniversary collection of Rosstat, dedicated to the Second World War, indicates the figure of the country's demographic losses in the war at 39.3 million people. http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/doc_2015/vov_svod_1.pdf

Genby. "The Demographic Cost of Communist Rule in Russia" http://genby.livejournal.com/486320.html.

The terrible famine of 1933 in figures and facts http://historical-fact.livejournal.com/2764.html

Underestimated by 6 times the statistics of executions in 1933, detailed analysis http://corporatelie.livejournal.com/53743.html

Calculation of the number of victims of the communists, Kirill Mikhailovich Alexandrov - Candidate of Historical Sciences, Senior Researcher (major in History of Russia) of the Encyclopedic Department of the Institute of Philological Research, St. Petersburg State University. Author of three books on the history of anti-Stalinist resistance during World War II and more than 250 publications on national history of the 19th-20th centuries. http://www.white-guard.ru/go.php?n=4&id=82

Repressed census of 1937. http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema07.php

Demographic losses from repressions, A. Vishnevsky http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema06.php

Censuses 1937 and 1939 Demographic losses by the balance method. http://genby.livejournal.com/542183.html

Red terror - documents.

On May 14, 1921, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) supported the expansion of the rights of the Cheka in relation to the application of capital punishment (CMN).

On June 4, 1921, the Politburo decided "to give the Cheka a directive to intensify the struggle against the Mensheviks in view of the intensification of their counter-revolutionary activities."

Between January 26 and 31, 1922. V.I. Lenin - I.S. Unshlikht: “The publicity of revolutionary tribunals is not always; to strengthen their composition with “your” [i.e. VChK - G.Kh.] people, to strengthen their connection (any) with the Cheka; to increase the speed and force of their repressions, to increase the attention of the Central Committee to this. The slightest increase in banditry, etc. should entail martial law and executions on the spot. The Council of People's Commissars will be able to quickly carry it out if you do not miss it, and it is possible by telephone ”(Lenin, PSS, vol. 54, p. 144).

In March 1922, in a speech at the 11th Congress of the RCP(b), Lenin declared: "Our revolutionary courts must be shot for public proof of Menshevism, otherwise these are not our courts."

May 15, 1922. "vol. Kursk! In my opinion, it is necessary to expand the application of shooting ... to all types of activities of the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, etc. ... ”(Lenin, PSS, vol. 45, p. 189). (According to the figures from the Reference, it follows that the use of executions, on the contrary, was rapidly reduced in these years)

Telegram dated August 11, 1922, signed by Deputy Chairman of the State Political Administration of the Republic I. S. Unshlikht and Head of the Secret Department of the GPU. T. P. Samsonov, ordered the gubernatorial departments of the GPU: "immediately liquidate all active Socialist-Revolutionaries in your area."

March 19, 1922 Lenin, in a letter addressed to members of the Politburo, explains the need right now, using a terrible famine, to launch an active campaign to expropriate church property and inflict a "mortal blow on the enemy" - the clergy and the bourgeoisie: The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie will succeed we shoot on this occasion, so much the better: it is necessary right now to teach this public a lesson so that for several decades they will not even dare to think about any resistance<...>» RTSKHIDNI, 2/1/22947/1-4.

Pandemic "Spanish flu" 1918-1920. in the context of other influenza pandemics and "bird flu", M.V. Supotnitsky, Ph.D. Sciences http://www.supotnitskiy.ru/stat/stat51.htm

S.I. Zlotogorov, "Typhus" http://sohmet.ru/books/item/f00/s00/z0000004/st002.shtml

Statistics on the total numbers from the studies found:

I. The most minimal direct victims of the Bolsheviks according to the official methodology of the USSR State Statistics Committee, without emigration - 31 million http://www.slavic-europe.eu/index.php/articles/57-russia-articles/255-2013-05-21- 31
If it is impossible to establish the number of victims of military "communism" through the Bolshevik archives, then is it possible to establish here, apart from speculation, anything corresponding to reality? It turns out that it is possible. Moreover, quite simply - through the bed and the laws of ordinary physiology, which no one has yet canceled. Men sleep with women regardless of who has snuck into the Kremlin.
Note that it is in this way (and not by compiling lists of the dead) that all serious scientists (and the State Commission of the USSR State Statistics Committee, in particular) calculate the loss of life during the Second World War.
Total losses of 26.6 million people - the calculation was made by the Department of Demographic Statistics of the USSR State Statistics Committee in the course of work as part of a comprehensive commission to clarify the number of human losses of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War. - Mobupravlenie GOMU of the General Staff of the AFRF, d.142, 1991, inv. No. 04504, sheet 250. (Russia and the USSR in the wars of the twentieth century: Statistical research. M., 2001. p. 229.)
31 million people seems to be the lowest point in the regime's death toll.
II. In 1990, statistician O.A. Platonov: “According to our calculations, the total number of people who did not die of their own death from mass repression, famine, epidemics, wars amounted to more than 87 million people in 1918-1953. And in total, if we add up the number of people who died not of their own death, who left their homeland, as well as the number of children that could be born to these people, then the total human damage to the country will be 156 million people.

III. Outstanding philosopher and historian Ivan Ilyin, "The size of the Russian population".
http://www.rus-sky.com/gosudarstvo/ilin/nz/nz-52.htm
"All this is only for the years of the Second World War. Adding this new shortfall to the previous one of 36 million, we will get a monstrous sum of 72 million lives. This is the price of the revolution."

IV. Calculation of the number of victims of the communists, Kirill Mikhailovich Alexandrov - Candidate of Historical Sciences, Senior Researcher (major in History of Russia) of the Encyclopedic Department of the Institute of Philological Research, St. Petersburg State University. Author of three books on the history of anti-Stalinist resistance during World War II and more than 250 publications on national history of the 19th-20th centuries. http://www.white-guard.ru/go.php?n=4&id=82
"Civil War 1917-1922 7.5 million.
The first artificial famine of 1921-1922 over 4.5 million people.
Victims of the Stalinist collectivization of 1930-1932 (including victims of extrajudicial repressions, peasants who starved to death in 1932 and special settlers in 1930-1940) ≈ 2 million
Second artificial famine of 1933 - 6.5 million
Victims of political terror - 800 thousand people
1.8 million died in places of detention.
The victims of the Second World War ≈ 28 million people.
Total ≈ 51 million."

V. Data from the article by A. Ivanov "Demographic losses of Russia-USSR" - http://ricolor.org/arhiv/russkoe_vozrojdenie/1981/8/:
"... All this makes it possible to judge the total losses of the country's population with the formation of the Soviet state, caused by its internal policy, its conduct of civil and world wars during 1917-1959. We have identified three periods:
1. The establishment of Soviet power - 1917-1929, the number of casualties - over 30 million people.
2. The costs of building socialism (collectivization, industrialization, liquidation of the kulaks, the remnants of the "former classes") - 1930-1939. - 22 million people.
3. World War II and post-war difficulties - 1941-1950 - 51 million people; Total - 103 million people.
As you can see, this approach, using the latest demographic indicators, leads to the same assessment of the amount of human casualties suffered by the peoples of our country during the years of the existence of Soviet power and the communist dictatorship, which was reached by different researchers who used different methods and different demographic statistics. This once again indicates that 100-110 million human victims of building socialism is the real "price" of this "building."
VI. The opinion of the liberal historian R. Medvedev: ““Thus, the total number of victims of Stalinism reaches, according to my calculations, figures of about 40 million people” (R. Medvedev “Tragic Statistics // Arguments and Facts. 1989, February 4-10. No. 5 (434), p. 6.)

VII. Opinion of the commission for the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions (headed by A. Yakovlev): "According to the most conservative estimates of the specialists of the commission for rehabilitation, our country lost about 100 million people during the years of Stalin's rule. This number includes not only the repressed themselves, but also those doomed to the death of their family members and even children who could have been born, but never were born. (Mikhailova N. Underpants of counter-revolution // Prime Minister Vologda, 2002, July 24-30. No. 28 (254). P. 10.)

VIII. Fundamental demographic research of the team led by Doctor of Economic Sciences Professor Ivan Koshkin (Kurganov) “Three figures. About human losses for the period from 1917 to 1959. http://slavic-europe.eu/index.php/comments/66-comments-russia/177-2013-04-15-1917-1959 http://rusidea.org/?a=32030
"Nevertheless, the widespread belief in the USSR that all or most of the human losses in the USSR are associated with military events is wrong. The losses associated with military events are grandiose, but they far from cover all the losses of the people during the Soviet period. They, contrary to popular belief in the USSR, they account for only a part of these losses.Here are the corresponding figures (in million people):
The total number of casualties in the USSR during the dictatorship of the Communist Party from 1917 to 1959 110.7 million - 100%.
Including:
Losses in wartime 44.0 million - 40%.
Losses in non-military revolutionary times 66.7 million - 60%.

P.S. It was this work that Solzhenitsyn mentioned in a famous interview with Spanish television, which is why it causes especially fierce hatred of the Stalinists and neo-Commi.

IX. The opinion of the historian and publicist B. Pushkarev is about 100 million.

X. The book edited by the leading Russian demographer Vishnevsky "Demographic Modernization of Russia, 1900-2000". The demographic loss from the communists is 140 million (mainly due to unborn generations).
http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema07.php

XI. O. Platonov, the book "Memoirs of the national economy", losses in total 156 million people.
XII. Russian emigrant historian Arseny Gulevich, book "Tsarism and Revolution", the direct losses of the revolution amounted to 49 million people.
If we add to them the losses due to the birth deficit, then with the victims of the two world wars, we get the same 100-110 million people destroyed by communism.

XIII. According to the documentary series "History of Russia of the XX century", the total number of direct demographic losses suffered by the peoples of the former Russian Empire from the actions of the Bolsheviks from 1917 to 1960. is about 60 million people.

XIV. According to the documentary "Nicholas II. A thwarted triumph", the total number of victims of the Bolshevik dictatorship is about 40 million people.

XV. According to the forecasts of the French scientist E. Teri, the population of Russia in 1948, without unnatural deaths and taking into account normal population growth, should have been 343.9 million people. At that time, 170.5 million people lived in the USSR, i.e. demographic losses (including unborn) for 1917-1948. - 173.4 million people

XVI. Genby. the demographic cost of communist rule in Russia is 200 million http://genby.livejournal.com/486320.html.

XVII. Summary tables of victims of Lenin-Stalin repressions

The question of the repressions of the thirties of the last century is of fundamental importance not only for understanding Russian socialism and its essence as a social system, but also for assessing the role of Stalin in the history of Russia. This question plays a key role in the accusations not only of Stalinism, but, in fact, of the entire Soviet government.

To date, the assessment of the “Stalinist terror” has become in our country a touchstone, a password, a milestone in relation to the past and future of Russia. Do you judge? Decisively and irrevocably? Democrat and common man! Any doubts? - Stalinist!

Let's try to deal with a simple question: did Stalin organize the "great terror"? Maybe there are other causes of terror, about which common people - liberals prefer to remain silent?

So. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to create a new type of ideological elite, but these attempts stalled from the very beginning. Mainly because the new "people's" elite believed that by their revolutionary struggle they fully earned the right to enjoy the benefits that the "elite" anti-people had by birthright. In the noble mansions, the new nomenclature quickly settled in, and even the old servants remained in place, they only began to call them servants. This phenomenon was very wide and was called "kombarstvo".

Even the right measures proved ineffective, thanks to massive sabotage by the new elite. I am inclined to attribute the introduction of the so-called "party maximum" to the correct measures - a ban on party members receiving a salary greater than the salary of a highly skilled worker.

That is, a non-party plant director could receive a salary of 2000 rubles, and a communist director only 500 rubles, and not a penny more. In this way, Lenin sought to avoid the influx of careerists into the party, who use it as a springboard in order to quickly break into the grain places. However, this measure was half-hearted without the simultaneous destruction of the system of privileges attached to any position.

By the way, V.I. Lenin opposed in every possible way the reckless growth in the number of party members, which was later taken up in the CPSU, starting with Khrushchev. In his work The Childhood Disease of Leftism in Communism, he wrote: We are afraid of an excessive expansion of the party, because careerists and rogues inevitably strive to cling to the government party, who deserve only to be shot».

Moreover, in the conditions of the post-war shortage of consumer goods, material goods were not so much bought as distributed. Any power performs the function of distribution, and if so, then the one who distributes, he uses the distributed. Especially clingy careerists and crooks. Therefore, the next step was to update the upper floors of the party.

Stalin stated this in his usual cautious manner at the XVII Congress of the CPSU (b) (March 1934). In his Report, the Secretary General described a certain type of workers interfering with the party and the country: “... These are people with well-known merits in the past, people who believe that party and Soviet laws were written not for them, but for fools. These are the same people who do not consider it their duty to carry out the decisions of Party bodies... What do they count on, violating Party and Soviet laws? They hope that the Soviet authorities will not dare to touch them because of their old merits. These arrogant nobles think that they are irreplaceable and that they can violate the decisions of the governing bodies with impunity ...».

The results of the first five-year plan showed that the old Bolshevik-Leninists, with all their revolutionary merits, are not able to cope with the scale of the reconstructed economy. Not burdened with professional skills, poorly educated (Yezhov wrote in his autobiography: education - unfinished primary), washed in the blood of the Civil War, they could not "saddle" the complex production realities.

Formally, the real power in the localities belonged to the Soviets, since the party did not have any legal authority. But the party bosses were elected chairmen of the Soviets, and, in fact, they appointed themselves to these positions, since the elections were held on a non-alternative basis, that is, they were not elections. And then Stalin undertakes a very risky maneuver - he proposes to establish real, and not nominal, Soviet power in the country, that is, to hold secret general elections in party organizations and councils at all levels on an alternative basis. Stalin tried to get rid of the party regional barons, as they say, in a good way, through elections, and really alternative ones.

Considering Soviet practice, this sounds rather unusual, but it is true nonetheless. He expected that the majority of this public would not overcome the popular filter without support from above. In addition, according to the new constitution, it was planned to nominate candidates to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR not only from the CPSU (b), but also from public organizations and groups of citizens.

What happened next? On December 5, 1936, the new Constitution of the USSR was adopted, the most democratic constitution of that time in the whole world, even according to the ardent critics of the USSR. For the first time in Russian history, secret alternative elections were to be held. By secret ballot. Despite the fact that the party elite tried to put a spoke in the wheel even at the time when the draft constitution was being created, Stalin managed to bring the matter to an end.

The regional party elite understood very well that with the help of these new elections to the new Supreme Soviet, Stalin plans to carry out a peaceful rotation of the entire ruling element. And there were about 250 thousand of them. By the way, the NKVD was counting on about this number of investigations.

Understand something they understood, but what to do? I don't want to part with my chairs. And they perfectly understood one more circumstance - in the previous period they had done such a thing, especially during the Civil War and collectivization, that the people with great pleasure would not only not have chosen them, but also would have broken their heads. The hands of many high regional party secretaries were up to the elbows in blood. During the period of collectivization in the regions there was complete arbitrariness. In one of the regions Khataevich, this nice man, actually declared a civil war in the course of collectivization in his particular region. As a result, Stalin was forced to threaten him that he would shoot him immediately if he did not stop mocking people. Do you think that comrades Eikhe, Postyshev, Kosior and Khrushchev were better, were less "nice"? Of course, the people remembered all this in 1937, and after the elections, these bloodsuckers would have gone into the woods.

Stalin really planned such a peaceful rotation operation, he openly told the American correspondent in March 1936, Howard Roy, about this. He stated that these elections would be a good whip in the hands of the people to change the leadership, he said it directly - "a whip." Will yesterday's "gods" of their districts tolerate the whip?

The Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, held in June 1936, directly aimed the party elite at new times. When discussing the draft of the new constitution, A. Zhdanov spoke quite unambiguously in his extensive report: “ The new electoral system ... will give a powerful impetus to the improvement of the work of Soviet organs, the elimination of bureaucratic organs, the elimination of bureaucratic shortcomings and distortions in the work of our Soviet organizations. And these shortcomings, as you know, are very significant. Our party organs must be ready for the electoral struggle...". And he went on to say that these elections would be a serious, serious test of Soviet workers, because the secret ballot gives ample opportunities to reject candidates who are undesirable and objectionable to the masses, that party organs are obliged to distinguish such criticism FROM HOSTILE ACTIVITY, that non-party candidates should be treated with all support. and attention, because, to put it delicately, there are several times more of them than party members.

In Zhdanov's report, the terms "intra-party democracy", "democratic centralism", "democratic elections" were publicly voiced. And demands were put forward: to ban the "nomination" of candidates without elections, to ban voting at party meetings by a "list", to ensure "an unlimited right to reject candidates nominated by party members and an unlimited right to criticize these candidates." The last phrase referred entirely to the elections of purely party bodies, where there had not been a shadow of democracy for a long time. But, as we see, the general elections to the Soviet and party bodies have not been forgotten either.

Stalin and his people demand democracy! And if this is not democracy, then explain to me what, then, is considered democracy ?!

And how do the party nobles who gathered at the plenum react to Zhdanov's report - the first secretaries of the regional committees, regional committees, the Central Committee of the national communist parties? And they miss it all! Because such innovations are by no means to the taste of the very “old Leninist guard”, which has not yet been destroyed by Stalin, but is sitting at the plenum in all its grandeur and splendor. Because the vaunted "Leninist guard" is a bunch of petty satrapchiks. They are used to living in their estates as barons, single-handedly managing the life and death of people.

The debate on Zhdanov's report was practically disrupted.

Despite Stalin's direct calls to discuss the reforms seriously and in detail, the old guard with paranoid persistence turns to more pleasant and understandable topics: terror, terror, terror! What the hell are reforms?! There are more urgent tasks: beat the hidden enemy, burn, catch, reveal! The people's commissars, the first secretaries - all talk about the same thing: how they recklessly and on a large scale reveal the enemies of the people, how they intend to raise this campaign to cosmic heights ...

Stalin is losing patience. When the next speaker appears on the podium, without waiting for him to open his mouth, he ironically throws: - Have all the enemies been identified or are there still? The speaker, the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Committee, Kabakov, (another future "innocent victim of the Stalinist terror") passes the irony on deaf ears and habitually crackles about the fact that the electoral activity of the masses, so you know, just " quite often used by hostile elements for counter-revolutionary work».

They are incurable!!! They just don't know how! They don't want reforms, they don't want secret ballots, they don't want a few candidates on the ballot. Foaming at the mouth, they defend the old system, where there is no democracy, but only the "boyar volushka" ...
On the podium - Molotov. He says practical, sensible things: you need to identify real enemies and pests, and not throw mud at all, without exception, "captains of production." We must finally learn to DIFFERENTIATE THE GUILTY FROM THE INNOCENT. It is necessary to reform the bloated bureaucratic apparatus, IT IS NECESSARY TO EVALUATE PEOPLE ON THEIR BUSINESS QUALITIES AND DO NOT LIST THE PAST ERRORS. And the party boyars are all about the same thing: to look for and catch enemies with all the ardor! Eradicate deeper, plant more! For a change, they enthusiastically and loudly begin to drown each other: Kudryavtsev - Postysheva, Andreev - Sheboldaeva, Polonsky - Shvernik, Khrushchev - Yakovlev.

Molotov, unable to stand it, openly says:
- In a number of cases, listening to the speakers, one could come to the conclusion that our resolutions and our reports went past the ears of the speakers ...
Exactly! They didn't just pass - they whistled... Most of those gathered in the hall do not know how to work or reform. But they perfectly know how to catch and identify enemies, they adore this occupation and cannot imagine life without it.

Doesn't it seem strange to you that this "executioner" Stalin directly imposed democracy, and his future "innocent victims" ran away from this democracy like hell from incense. Yes, and demanded repression, and more.

In short, it was not the “tyrant Stalin,” but precisely the “cosmopolitan Leninist party guard,” who ruled the roost at the June 1936 plenum, buried all attempts at a democratic thaw. She did not give Stalin the opportunity to get rid of them, as they say, in a GOOD way, through the elections.

Stalin's authority was so great that the party barons did not dare to openly protest, and in 1936 the Constitution of the USSR was adopted, and nicknamed Stalin's, which provided for the transition to real Soviet democracy.

However, the party nomenklatura reared up and carried out a massive attack on the leader in order to convince him to postpone the holding of free elections until the fight against the counter-revolutionary element was completed.

Regional party bosses, members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, began to whip up passions, referring to the recently uncovered conspiracies of the Trotskyists and the military: they say, one has only to give such an opportunity, as former white officers and nobles, hidden kulak underdogs, clergy and Trotskyists-saboteurs will rush into politics .

They demanded not only to curtail any plans for democratization, but also to strengthen emergency measures, and even introduce special quotas for mass repressions by region, supposedly in order to finish off those Trotskyists who escaped punishment. The party nomenklatura demanded the powers to repress these enemies, and it won these powers for itself. And then the small-town party barons, who made up the majority in the Central Committee, frightened for their leadership positions, begin repressions, first of all, against those honest communists who could become competitors in future elections by secret ballot.

The nature of the repressions against honest communists was such that the composition of some district committees and regional committees changed two or three times in a year. Communists at party conferences refused to be members of city committees and regional committees. We understood that after a while you can be in the camp. And that's the best...

In 1937, about 100,000 people were expelled from the party (24,000 in the first half of the year and 76,000 in the second). About 65,000 appeals accumulated in district committees and regional committees, which there was no one and no time to consider, since the party was engaged in the process of denunciation and expulsion.

At the January plenum of the Central Committee in 1938, Malenkov, who made a report on this issue, said that in some areas the Party Control Commission restored from 50 to 75% of those expelled and convicted.

Moreover, at the June 1937 Plenum of the Central Committee, the nomenklatura, mainly from among the first secretaries, actually delivered an ultimatum to Stalin and his Politburo: either he approves the lists submitted "from below" subject to repression, or he himself will be removed.

The party nomenklatura at this plenum demanded authority for repression. And Stalin was forced to give them permission, but he acted very cunningly - he gave them a short time, five days. Of these five days, one day is Sunday. He expected that they would not meet in such a short time.

But it turns out that these scoundrels already had lists. They simply took lists of kulaks who had previously served time, and sometimes not even served time, former white officers and nobles, wrecking Trotskyites, priests and simply ordinary citizens classified as class alien elements. Literally on the second day, telegrams from the localities went: the first were comrades Khrushchev and Eikhe.

Then Nikita Khrushchev was the first to rehabilitate his friend Robert Eikhe, who was shot in justice for all his cruelties in 1939, in 1954.

Ballot papers with several candidates were no longer discussed at the Plenum: reform plans were reduced solely to the fact that candidates for elections would be nominated “jointly” by communists and non-party people. And from now on, there will be only one candidate in each ballot - for the sake of rebuffing intrigues. And in addition - another verbose verbiage about the need to identify the masses of entrenched enemies.

Stalin also made another mistake. He sincerely believed that N.I. Yezhov is a man of his team. After all, for so many years they worked together in the Central Committee, shoulder to shoulder. And Yezhov has long been the best friend of Evdokimov, an ardent Trotskyist. For 1937-38 troikas in the Rostov region, where Evdokimov was the first secretary of the regional committee, 12,445 people were shot, more than 90 thousand were repressed. These are the figures carved by the "Memorial" society in one of the Rostov parks on the monument to the victims of ... Stalinist (?!) repressions. Subsequently, when Yevdokimov was shot, an audit found that in the Rostov region he lay motionless and more than 18.5 thousand appeals were not considered. And how many of them were not written! The best party cadres, experienced business executives, intelligentsia were destroyed ... But what, was he the only one like that?

In this regard, the memoirs of the famous poet Nikolai Zabolotsky are interesting: “ A strange certainty was growing in my head that we were in the hands of the Nazis, who, under the nose of our government, had found a way to destroy the Soviet people, acting in the very center of the Soviet punitive system. I told this guess of mine to an old party member who was sitting with me, and with horror in his eyes he confessed to me that he himself thought the same thing, but did not dare to hint about it to anyone. And indeed, how else could we explain all the horrors that happened to us ...».

But back to Nikolai Yezhov. By 1937, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, G. Yagoda, staffed the NKVD with scum, obvious traitors and those who replaced their work with hack work. N. Yezhov, who replaced him, followed the lead of the hacks and, in order to distinguish himself from the country, turned a blind eye to the fact that NKVD investigators opened hundreds of thousands of hack cases against people, mostly completely innocent. (For example, Generals A. Gorbatov and K. Rokossovsky were sent to prison.)

And the flywheel of the “great terror” began to spin with its infamous extrajudicial triples and limits on the highest measure. Fortunately, this flywheel quickly crushed those who initiated the process itself, and Stalin's merit is that he made the most of the opportunities to clean up the upper echelons of power of all kinds of crap.

Not Stalin, but Robert Indrikovich Eikhe proposed the creation of extrajudicial reprisals, the famous "troikas", similar to the "Stolypin" ones, consisting of the first secretary, the local prosecutor and the head of the NKVD (city, region, region, republic). Stalin was against it. But the Politburo voted. Well, in the fact that a year later it was precisely such a trio that leaned Comrade Eikhe against the wall, there is, in my deep conviction, nothing but sad justice.

The party elite directly enthusiastically joined in the massacre!

And let's take a closer look at him, the repressed regional party baron. And, in fact, what were they like, both in business and moral, and in purely human terms? What did they cost as people and specialists? ONLY THE NOSE FIRST CLAMP, I RECOMMEND SOULLY. In short, party members, military men, scientists, writers, composers, musicians and everyone else, right up to noble rabbit breeders and Komsomol members, ate each other with rapture. Who sincerely believed that he was obliged to exterminate the enemies, who settled scores. So there is no need to talk about whether the NKVD beat on the noble physiognomy of this or that “innocently injured figure” or not.

The party regional nomenklatura has achieved the most important thing: after all, in conditions of mass terror, free elections are impossible. Stalin was never able to carry them out. The end of a brief thaw. Stalin never pushed through his block of reforms. True, at that plenum he said remarkable words: “Party organizations will be freed from economic work, although this will not happen immediately. This takes time."

But let's get back to Yezhov. Nikolai Ivanovich was a new man in the "bodies", he started well, but quickly fell under the influence of his deputy: Frinovsky (former head of the Special Department of the First Cavalry Army). He taught the new People's Commissar the basics of Chekist work right "in production." The basics were extremely simple: the more enemies of the people we catch, the better. You can and should hit, but hitting and drinking is even more fun.
Drunk on vodka, blood and impunity, the People's Commissar soon frankly "floated".
He did not particularly hide his new views from others. " What are you afraid of? he said at one of the banquets. After all, all power is in our hands. Whom we want - we execute, whom we want - we pardon: - After all, we are everything. It is necessary that everyone, starting from the secretary of the regional committee, walk under you».

If the secretary of the regional committee was supposed to go under the head of the regional department of the NKVD, then who, one wonders, was supposed to go under Yezhov? With such personnel and such views, the NKVD became mortally dangerous for both the authorities and the country.

It is difficult to say when the Kremlin began to realize what was happening. Probably somewhere in the first half of 1938. But to realize - they realized, but how to curb the monster? It is clear that by that time the People's Commissar of the NKVD had become deadly dangerous, and it had to be "normalized". But how? What, raise the troops, bring all the Chekists to the courtyards of the administrations and line them up against the wall? There is no other way, because, having barely sensed the danger, they would simply have swept away the authorities.

After all, the same NKVD was in charge of protecting the Kremlin, so the members of the Politburo would have died without even having time to understand anything. After that, a dozen “blood-washed” would be put in their places, and the whole country would turn into one large West Siberian region with Robert Eikhe at the head. The peoples of the USSR would have perceived the arrival of the Nazi troops as happiness.

There was only one way out - to put your man in the NKVD. Moreover, a person of such a level of loyalty, courage and professionalism that he could, on the one hand, cope with the management of the NKVD, and on the other, stop the monster. It is unlikely that Stalin had a large selection of such people. Well, at least one was found. But what - Beria Lavrenty Pavlovich.

Elena Prudnikova is a journalist and writer who has devoted several books to researching the activities of L.P. Beria and I.V. Stalin, in one of the TV programs she said that Lenin, Stalin, Beria are three titans whom the Lord God in His great mercy sent to Russia, because, apparently, he still needed Russia. I hope that she is Russia and in our time He will need it soon.

In general, the term "Stalin's repressions" is speculative, because it was not Stalin who initiated them. The unanimous opinion of one part of the liberal perestroika and current ideologists that Stalin thus strengthened his power by physically eliminating his opponents is easily explained. These wimps simply judge others by themselves: if they have such an opportunity, they will readily devour anyone they see as a danger.

No wonder Alexander Sytin, a political scientist, doctor of historical sciences, a prominent neo-liberal, in one of the recent TV programs with V. Solovyov, argued that in Russia it is necessary to create a DICTATORY OF TEN PERCENT LIBERAL MINORITY, which then will definitely lead the peoples of Russia into a bright capitalist tomorrow. He was modestly silent about the price of this approach.

Another part of these gentlemen believes that supposedly Stalin, who wanted to finally turn into the Lord God on Soviet soil, decided to crack down on everyone who had the slightest doubt about his genius. And, above all, with those who, together with Lenin, created the October Revolution. Like, that's why almost the entire "Leninist guard" innocently went under the ax, and at the same time the top of the Red Army, who were accused of a never-existing conspiracy against Stalin. However, a closer study of these events raises many questions that cast doubt on this version. In principle, thinking historians have had doubts for a long time. And doubts were sown not by some Stalinist historians, but by those eyewitnesses who themselves did not like the "father of all Soviet peoples."

For example, the memoirs of the former Soviet intelligence officer Alexander Orlov (Leiba Feldbin), who fled our country in the late 1930s, having taken a huge amount of state dollars, were published in the West at one time. Orlov, who knew well the "inner kitchen" of his native NKVD, wrote directly that a coup d'état was being prepared in the Soviet Union. Among the conspirators, according to him, were both representatives of the leadership of the NKVD and the Red Army in the person of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the commander of the Kyiv military district, Iona Yakir. The conspiracy became known to Stalin, who took very tough retaliatory actions ...

And in the 80s, the archives of Joseph Vissarionovich's main opponent, Lev Trotsky, were declassified in the United States. From these documents it became clear that Trotsky had an extensive underground network in the Soviet Union. Living abroad, Lev Davidovich demanded from his people decisive action to destabilize the situation in the Soviet Union, up to the organization of mass terrorist actions.
In the 1990s, our archives already opened up access to the protocols of interrogations of the repressed leaders of the anti-Stalinist opposition. By the nature of these materials, by the abundance of facts and evidence presented in them, today's independent experts have drawn three important conclusions.

First, the overall picture of a broad conspiracy against Stalin looks very, very convincing. Such testimonies could not somehow be staged or faked to please the "father of nations." Especially in the part where it was about the military plans of the conspirators. Here is what the well-known historian and publicist Sergei Kremlev said about this: “Take and read the testimony of Tukhachevsky given to him after his arrest. The very confessions of conspiracy are accompanied by a deep analysis of the military-political situation in the USSR in the mid-30s, with detailed calculations on the general situation in the country, with our mobilization, economic and other capabilities.

The question is whether such testimony could have been invented by an ordinary NKVD investigator who was in charge of the marshal's case and who allegedly set out to falsify Tukhachevsky's testimony?! No, these testimonies, and voluntarily, could only be given by a knowledgeable person no less than the level of the deputy people's commissar of defense, which was Tukhachevsky.

Secondly, the very manner of the conspirators' handwritten confessions, their handwriting spoke of what their people wrote themselves, in fact voluntarily, without physical influence from the investigators. This destroyed the myth that the testimony was rudely knocked out by the force of "Stalin's executioners", although this was also the case.

Thirdly, Western Sovietologists and the emigre public, having no access to archival materials, had to actually suck their judgments about the scale of repressions. At best, they contented themselves with interviews with dissidents who either themselves had been imprisoned in the past, or cited the stories of those who had gone through the Gulag.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn set the highest bar in assessing the number of "victims of communism" when he announced in 1976 in an interview with Spanish television about 110 million victims. The ceiling of 110 million announced by Solzhenitsyn was systematically reduced to 12.5 million people of the Memorial society. However, based on the results of 10 years of work, Memorial managed to collect data on only 2.6 million victims of repression, which is very close to the figure announced by Zemskov almost 20 years ago - 4 million people.

After the archives were opened, the West did not believe that the number of repressed people was much less than R. Conquest or A. Solzhenitsyn indicated. In total, according to archival data, for the period from 1921 to 1953, 3,777,380 were convicted, of which 642,980 people were sentenced to capital punishment. Subsequently, this figure was increased to 4,060,306 people at the expense of 282,926 shot under paragraphs. 2 and 3 Art. 59 (especially dangerous banditry) and Art. 193 - 24 (military espionage). This included the blood-washed Basmachi, Bandera, the Baltic "forest brothers" and other especially dangerous, bloody bandits, spies and saboteurs. There is more human blood on them than there is water in the Volga. And they are also considered "innocent victims of Stalin's repressions." And Stalin is blamed for all this. (Let me remind you that until 1928, Stalin was not the sole leader of the USSR. AND HE RECEIVED FULL POWER OVER THE PARTY, THE ARMY AND THE NKVD ONLY FROM THE END OF 1938).

These figures are at first glance scary. But only for the first. Let's compare. On June 28, 1990, an interview with the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR appeared in the national newspapers, where he said: “We are literally being overwhelmed by a wave of criminality. Over the past 30 years, 38 MILLION OUR CITIZENS have been under trial, investigation, in prisons and colonies. It's a terrible number! Every ninth…”.

So. A crowd of Western journalists came to the USSR in 1990. The goal is to get acquainted with open archives. We studied the archives of the NKVD - they did not believe it. They demanded the archives of the People's Commissariat of Railways. We got acquainted - it turned out four million. They did not believe it. They demanded the archives of the People's Commissariat of Food. We got acquainted - it turned out 4 million repressed. We got acquainted with the clothing allowance of the camps. It turned out - 4 million repressed. Do you think that after that, articles with the correct numbers of repressions appeared in the Western media in batches. Yes, nothing of the sort. They still write and talk about tens of millions of victims of repressions.

I want to note that the analysis of the process called “mass repressions” shows that this phenomenon is extremely multi-layered. There are real cases there: about conspiracies and espionage, political trials against hard-nosed oppositionists, cases about the crimes of the presumptuous owners of the regions and the Soviet party officials who “floated” from power. But there are also many falsified cases: settling scores in the corridors of power, sitting around at work, communal squabbles, literary rivalry, scientific competition, persecution of clergymen who supported the kulaks during collectivization, squabbles between artists, musicians and composers.

AND THERE IS CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY - THE MILLNESS OF THE INVESTIGATORS AND THE MILLNESS OF THE INFORMERS (four million denunciations were written in 1937-38). But what has not been found is the cases concocted at the direction of the Kremlin. There are reverse examples - when, at the will of Stalin, someone was taken out from under execution, or even released altogether.

There is one more thing to be understood. The term “repression” is a medical term (suppression, blocking) and was introduced specifically to remove the question of guilt. Imprisoned in the late 30s, which means he is innocent, as he was “repressed”. In addition, the term "repressions" was put into circulation to be used initially in order to give an appropriate moral coloring to the entire Stalinist period, without going into details.

The events of the 1930s showed that the main problem for the Soviet government was the party and state "apparatus", which consisted to a large extent of unprincipled, illiterate and greedy co-workers, leading party members-talkers, attracted by the fat smell of revolutionary robbery. Such an apparatus was exceptionally inefficient and uncontrollable, which was like death for the totalitarian Soviet state, in which everything depended on the apparatus.

It was from then on that Stalin made repression an important institution of state administration and a means of keeping the "apparatus" in check. Naturally, the apparatus became the main object of these repressions. Moreover, repression has become an important instrument of state building.

Stalin assumed that it was possible to make a workable bureaucracy out of the corrupted Soviet apparatus only after SEVERAL STAGES of repressions. Liberals will say that this is the whole of Stalin, that he could not live without repressions, without the persecution of honest people. But here is what American intelligence officer John Scott reported to the US State Department about who was repressed. He caught these repressions in the Urals in 1937.

“The director of the construction office, who was engaged in the construction of new houses for the workers of the plant, was not satisfied with his salary, which amounted to a thousand rubles a month, and a two-room apartment. So he built himself a separate house. The house had five rooms, and he was able to furnish it well: he hung silk curtains, set up a piano, covered the floor with carpets, etc. Then he began to drive around the city in a car at a time (this happened in early 1937) when there were few private cars in the city. At the same time, the annual construction plan was completed by his office by only about sixty percent. At meetings and in the newspapers, he was constantly asked questions about the reasons for such poor performance. He answered that there were no building materials, not enough labor, and so on.

An investigation began, during which it turned out that the director embezzled state funds and sold building materials to nearby collective farms and state farms at speculative prices. It was also discovered that there were people in the construction office whom he specially paid to do his "business".
An open trial took place, lasting several days, at which all these people were judged. They talked a lot about him in Magnitogorsk. In his accusatory speech at the trial, the prosecutor spoke not about theft or bribery, but about sabotage. The director was accused of sabotaging the construction of workers' housing. He was convicted after he fully admitted his guilt, and then shot.”

And here is the reaction of the Soviet people to the purge of 1937 and their position at that time. “Often, workers are even happy when they arrest some “important bird”, a leader whom they for some reason disliked. Workers are also very free to express their critical thoughts both in meetings and in private conversations. I've heard them use the strongest language when talking about bureaucracy and poor performance by individuals or organizations. ... in the Soviet Union, the situation was somewhat different in that the NKVD, in its work to protect the country from the intrigues of foreign agents, spies and the onset of the old bourgeoisie, counted on the support and assistance from the population and basically received them.

Well, and: “... During the purges, thousands of bureaucrats trembled for their seats. Officials and administrative employees who had previously come to work at ten o'clock and left at half past five and only shrugged their shoulders in response to complaints, difficulties and failures, now sat at work from sunrise to sunset, they began to worry about the successes and failures of the led enterprises, and they actually began to fight for the implementation of the plan, savings and for good living conditions for their subordinates, although before this they did not bother at all.

Readers interested in this issue are aware of the incessant moaning of liberals that during the years of the purge, the "best people", the most intelligent and capable, perished. Scott also hints at this all the time, but, nevertheless, he seems to sum it up: “After the purges, the administrative apparatus of the entire plant was almost one hundred percent young Soviet engineers. There are practically no specialists from among the prisoners, and foreign specialists have actually disappeared. However, by 1939 most of the departments, such as the Railroad Administration and the coking plant of the plant, began to work better than ever before.

In the course of party purges and repressions, all prominent party barons, drinking away the gold reserves of Russia, bathing in champagne with prostitutes, seizing noble and merchant palaces for personal use, all disheveled, drugged revolutionaries disappeared like smoke. And this is FAIR.

But to clean out the snickering scoundrels from the high offices is half the battle, it was also necessary to replace them with worthy people. It is very curious how this problem was solved in the NKVD.

Firstly, a person was placed at the head of the department who was alien to the kombartvo, who had no ties with the capital's party top, but a proven professional in business - Lavrenty Beria.

The latter, secondly, ruthlessly cleared out the Chekists who had compromised themselves,
thirdly, he carried out a radical downsizing, sending people to retire or to work in other departments of people who seemed to be not vile, but unsuitable for professional use.

And, finally, the Komsomol conscription to the NKVD was announced, when completely inexperienced guys came to the bodies instead of deserved pensioners or shot scoundrels. But ... the main criterion for their selection was an impeccable reputation. If in the characteristics from the place of study, work, place of residence, along the Komsomol or party line, there were at least some hints of their unreliability, a tendency to selfishness, laziness, then no one invited them to work in the NKVD.

So, here is a very important point that you should pay attention to - the team is formed not on the basis of past merits, professional data of applicants, personal acquaintance and ethnicity, and not even on the basis of the desire of applicants, but solely on the basis of their moral and psychological characteristics.

Professionalism is a gainful business, but in order to punish any bastard, a person must be absolutely not dirty. Well, yes, clean hands, a cold head and a warm heart - this is all about the youth of the Beria draft. The fact is that it was at the end of the 1930s that the NKVD became a truly effective special service, and not only in the matter of internal cleansing.

During the war, the Soviet counterintelligence outplayed German intelligence with a devastating score - and this is the great merit of those very Beria Komsomol members who came to the bodies three years before the start of the war.

Purge 1937-1939 played a positive role - now not a single boss felt his impunity, there were no more untouchables. Fear did not add intelligence to the nomenklatura, but at least warned it against outright meanness.

Unfortunately, immediately after the end of the great purge, the world war that began in 1939 prevented the holding of alternative elections. And again, the question of democratization was put on the agenda by Iosif Vissarionovich in 1952, shortly before his death. But after the death of Stalin, Khrushchev returned the leadership of the entire country to the party, without answering for anything. And not only.

Almost immediately after Stalin's death, a network of special distributors and special rations appeared, through which the new elites realized their predominant position. But in addition to formal privileges, a system of informal privileges quickly formed. Which is very important.

Since we touched on the activities of our dear Nikita Sergeevich, let's talk about it in a little more detail. With a light hand or language of Ilya Ehrenburg, the period of Khrushchev's rule is called the "thaw". Let's see, what did Khrushchev do before the thaw, during the "great terror"?

The February-March Plenum of the Central Committee of 1937 is underway. It is from him, as it is believed, that the great terror began. Here is the speech of Nikita Sergeevich at this plenum: “... These villains must be destroyed. Destroying a dozen, a hundred, a thousand, we are doing the work of millions. Therefore, it is necessary that the hand does not tremble, it is necessary to step over the corpses of enemies for the benefit of the people».

But how did Khrushchev act as First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee and the Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks? In 1937-1938. out of 38 top leaders of the Moscow City Committee, only three people survived, out of 146 party secretaries - 136 were repressed. Where he found 22,000 kulaks in the Moscow region in 1937, you can’t explain soberly. In total, for 1937-1938, only in Moscow and the Moscow region. he personally repressed 55,741 people.

But, perhaps, speaking at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev was worried that innocent ordinary people were shot? Yes, Khrushchev did not care about the arrests and executions of ordinary people. His entire report at the 20th Congress was devoted to Stalin's accusations that he imprisoned and shot prominent Bolsheviks and marshals. Those. elite. Khrushchev in his report did not even mention the repressed ordinary people. What kind of people should he worry about, “women are still giving birth”, but the cosmopolitan elite, the lapotnik Khrushchev, was oh, what a pity.

What were the motives for the appearance of the revealing report at the 20th Party Congress?

First, without trampling his predecessor in the dirt, it was unthinkable to hope for Khrushchev's recognition as a leader after Stalin. Not! Stalin, even after his death, remained a competitor for Khrushchev, who had to be humiliated and destroyed by any means. Kicking a dead lion, as it turned out, is a pleasure - it does not give back.

The second motive was Khrushchev's desire to return the party to managing the economic activities of the state. To lead everything, for nothing, without answering and not obeying anyone.

The third motive, and perhaps the most important, was the terrible fear of the remnants of the "Leninist Guard" for what they had done. After all, all of their hands, as Khrushchev himself put it, were up to the elbows in blood. Khrushchev and people like him wanted not only to rule the country, but also to have guarantees that they would never be dragged on the rack, no matter what they did while in leadership positions. The 20th Congress of the CPSU gave them such guarantees in the form of indulgence for the release of all sins, both past and future. The whole riddle of Khrushchev and his associates is not worth a damn thing: it is THE IRRESSIBLE ANIMAL FEAR SITTING IN THEIR SOULS AND THE PAINFUL THIRST FOR POWER.

The first thing that strikes the de-Stalinizers is their complete disregard for the principles of historicism, which everyone seems to have been taught in the Soviet school. No historical figure can be judged by the standards of our contemporary era. He must be judged by the standards of his era - and nothing else. In jurisprudence, they say this: "the law has no retroactive effect." That is, the ban introduced this year cannot apply to last year's acts.

Historicism of assessments is also necessary here: one cannot judge a person of one era by the standards of another era (especially the new era that he created with his work and genius). For the beginning of the 20th century, the horrors in the position of the peasantry were so commonplace that many contemporaries practically did not notice them. The famine did not begin with Stalin, it ended with Stalin. It seemed like forever - but the current liberal reforms are again dragging us into that swamp, from which we seem to have already got out ...

The principle of historicism also requires the recognition that Stalin had a completely different intensity of political struggle than in later times. It is one thing to maintain the existence of the system (although Gorbachev failed to do so), but it is another thing to create a new system on the ruins of a country ravaged by civil war. The resistance energy in the second case is many times greater than in the first.

It must be understood that many of those shot under Stalin themselves were going to quite seriously kill him, and if he hesitated even for a minute, he himself would have received a bullet in the forehead. The struggle for power in the era of Stalin had a completely different sharpness than now: it was the era of the revolutionary "Praetorian Guard" - accustomed to rebellion and ready to change emperors like gloves. Trotsky, Rykov, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and a whole crowd of people who were accustomed to killings, as to peeling potatoes, claimed the supremacy.

For any terror, not only the ruler is responsible before history, but also his opponents, as well as society as a whole. When the outstanding historian L. Gumilyov, already under Gorbachev, was asked if he was angry at Stalin, under whom he was in prison, he answered: “ But it was not Stalin who imprisoned me, but colleagues in the department»…

Well, God bless him with Khrushchev and the 20th Congress. Let's talk about what the liberal media are constantly talking about, let's talk about Stalin's guilt.
Liberals accuse Stalin of shooting about 700,000 people in 30 years. The logic of the liberals is simple - all the victims of Stalinism. All 700 thousand.

Those. at that time there could be no murderers, no bandits, no sadists, no molesters, no swindlers, no traitors, no wreckers, etc. All victims for political reasons, all crystal clear and decent people.

Meanwhile, even the CIA analytical center Rand Corporation, based on demographic data and archival documents, calculated the number of repressed people in the Stalin era. This center claims that less than 700,000 people were shot between 1921 and 1953. At the same time, no more than a quarter of cases fall to the share of those sentenced to an article under the political article 58. By the way, the same proportion was observed among the prisoners of the labor camps.

“Do you like it when they destroy their people in the name of a great goal?” the liberals continue. I will answer. THE PEOPLE - NO, BUT THE BANDITS, THIVES AND MORAL FRACTIONS - YES. But I DON'T LIKE anymore when their own people are destroyed in the name of filling their pockets with loot, hiding behind beautiful liberal-democratic slogans.

Academician Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a great supporter of reforms, who at that time was part of the administration of President Yeltsin, admitted a decade and a half later that in just three years of shock therapy in Russia alone, middle-aged men died 8 million (!!!). Yes, Stalin stands on the sidelines and nervously smokes a pipe. Didn't improve.

However, your words about Stalin's non-involvement in the massacres of honest people are not convincing, the LIBERALS continue. Even if this is allowed, then in this case he was simply obliged, firstly, to honestly and openly admit to the whole people the iniquities committed against innocent people, secondly, to rehabilitate the unjustly victims and, thirdly, to take measures to prevent similar iniquities in the future. None of this has been done.

Again a lie. Dear. You just do not know the history of the USSR.

As for the first and second, the December Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1938 openly recognized the lawlessness committed against honest communists and non-party people, adopting a special resolution on this matter, published, by the way, in all central newspapers. Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, noting "provocations on an all-Union scale", demanded: Expose careerists who seek to distinguish themselves ... on repression. To expose a skillfully disguised enemy ... seeking to kill our Bolshevik cadres by carrying out measures of repression, sowing uncertainty and excessive suspicion in our ranks.

Just as openly, the entire country was told about the harm caused by unjustified repressions at the XVIII Congress of the CPSU (b) held in 1939. Immediately after the December Plenum of the Central Committee in 1938, thousands of illegally repressed people, including prominent military leaders, began to return from places of detention. All of them were officially rehabilitated, and Stalin personally apologized to some.

Well, and about, thirdly, I have already said that the NKVD apparatus almost suffered the most from repressions, and a significant part was held accountable precisely for abuse of official position, for reprisals against honest people.

What are the liberals not talking about? About the rehabilitation of innocent victims.
Immediately after the December Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1938, they began to revise
criminal cases and release from the camps. It was produced: in 1939 - 330 thousand,
in 1940 - 180 thousand, until June 1941 another 65 thousand.

What liberals are not talking about yet. About how they fought the consequences of the great terror.
With the advent of Beria L.P. In November 1938, 7,372 operational officers, or 22.9% of their payroll, were dismissed from the state security agencies for the post of People's Commissar of the NKVD in November 1938, of which 937 went to jail. And since the end of 1938, the country's leadership has achieved the prosecution of more than 63 thousand NKVD workers who allowed falsification and created far-fetched, fake counter-revolutionary cases, OF WHICH EIGHT THOUSAND WAS SHOT.

I will give only one example from the article by Yu.I. Mukhin: "Minutes No. 17 of the Meeting of the Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on Judicial Cases." There are more than 60 photographs. I will show in the form of a table a piece of one of them. (http://a7825585.hostink.ru/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=752.)

In this article Mukhin Yu.I. writes: " I was told that this kind of documents had never been posted on the Web due to the fact that they were very quickly denied free access to them in the archive. And the document is interesting, and something interesting can be gleaned from it ...».

Lots of interesting things. But most importantly, the article shows what the NKVD officers were shot for after L.P. Beria. Read. The names of those shot in the photographs are shaded.

Top secret
P O T O C O L No. 17
Meetings of the Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on Judicial Affairs
dated February 23, 1940
Chairman - comrade Kalinin M.I.
Present: t.t.: Shklyar M.F., Ponkratiev M.I., Merkulov V.N.

1. Listened
G ... Sergey Ivanovich, M ... Fedor Pavlovich, by the decision of the military tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Moscow Military District of December 14-15, 1939, were sentenced to death under Art. 193-17 p. b of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for making unreasonable arrests of command and Red Army personnel, actively falsifying investigation cases, conducting them using provocative methods and creating fictitious K / R organizations, as a result of which a number of people were shot according to the fictitious ones they created materials.
Decided.
Agrees with the use of execution to G ... S.I. and M…F.P.

17. Listened
And ... Fedor Afanasyevich was sentenced to death under Art. 193-17 p.b of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for being an employee of the NKVD, making mass illegal arrests of citizens of railway workers, falsifying interrogation protocols and creating artificial C/R cases, as a result of which over 230 people were sentenced to death and to various terms of imprisonment for more than 100 people, and of the latter, 69 people have been released at this time.
Decided
Agree with the use of execution against A ... F.A.

Have you read? Well, how do you like the dearest Fedor Afanasyevich? One (one!!!) investigator-falsifier summed up 236 people under execution. And what, he was the only one like that, how many of them were such scoundrels? I gave the number above. That Stalin personally set tasks for these Fedors and Sergeys to destroy innocent people? What conclusions suggest themselves?

Conclusion N1. Judging Stalin's time only by repressions is the same as judging the activities of the chief physician of a hospital only by the hospital's morgue - there will always be corpses there. If you approach with such a measure, then every doctor is a bloody ghoul and a murderer, i.e. deliberately ignore the fact that the team of doctors successfully cured and prolonged the life of thousands of patients and blame them only for a small percentage of those who died due to some inevitable misdiagnosis or died during serious operations.

The authority of Jesus Christ with Stalin's is incomparable. But even in the teachings of Jesus, people see only what they want to see. Studying the history of world civilization, one has to observe how wars, chauvinism, the "Aryan theory", serfdom, and Jewish pogroms were substantiated by Christian doctrine. This is not to mention the executions "without the shedding of blood" - that is, the burning of heretics. And how much blood was shed during the crusades and religious wars? So, maybe because of this, to ban the teachings of our Creator? Just like today, some wimps propose to ban the communist ideology.

If we consider the mortality graph of the population of the USSR, no matter how hard we try, we cannot find traces of “cruel” repressions, and not because they did not exist, but because their scale is exaggerated. What is the purpose of this exaggeration and inflation? The goal is to instill in the Russians a guilt complex similar to the guilt complex of the Germans after the defeat in World War II. The "pay and repent" complex. But the great ancient Chinese thinker and philosopher Confucius, who lived 500 years before our era, said even then: “ Beware of those who want to make you feel guilty. For they want power over you».

Do we need it? Judge for yourself. When the first time Khrushchev stunned all the so-called. truth about Stalin's repressions, then the authority of the USSR in the world immediately collapsed to the delight of the enemies. There was a split in the world communist movement. We have quarreled with great China, AND TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD HAVE LEFT THE COMMUNIST PARTIES. Eurocommunism appeared, denying not only Stalinism, but also, what is scary, the Stalinist economy. The myth of the 20th Congress created distorted ideas about Stalin and his time, deceived and psychologically disarmed millions of people when the question of the fate of the country was being decided. When Gorbachev did this for the second time, not only the socialist bloc collapsed, but our Motherland - the USSR collapsed.

Now Putin's team is doing this for the third time: again, they only talk about repressions and other "crimes" of the Stalinist regime. What this leads to is clearly seen in the Zyuganov-Makarov dialogue. They are told about development, new industrialization, and they immediately begin to switch arrows to repression. That is, they immediately break off a constructive dialogue, turning it into a squabble, a civil war of meanings and ideas.

Conclusion N2. Why do they need it? To prevent the restoration of a strong and great Russia. It is more convenient for them to rule a weak and fragmented country, where people will pull each other's hair at the mention of the name of Stalin or Lenin. So it is more convenient for them to rob and deceive us. The policy of "divide and conquer" is as old as the world. Moreover, they can always dump from Russia to where their stolen capital is stored and where children, wives and mistresses live.

Conclusion N3. And why do the patriots of Russia need it? It’s just that we and our children don’t have another country. Think about this first before you start cursing our history for repressions and other things. After all, we have nowhere to fall and retreat. As our victorious ancestors said in similar cases: there is no land for us behind Moscow and beyond the Volga!

Only, after the return of socialism to Russia, taking into account all the advantages and disadvantages of the USSR, one must be vigilant and remember Stalin's warning that as the socialist state is built, the class struggle intensifies, that is, there is a threat of degeneration. And so it happened, and certain segments of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Central Committee of the Komsomol and the KGB were among the first to be reborn. The Stalinist party inquisition did not work properly.

Repressions in the Stalin period

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

“In February 1954,” the text reads later, “a certificate was prepared in the name of N. S. Khrushchev, signed by the Prosecutor General of the USSR R. Rudenko, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR S. Kruglov and the Minister of Justice of the USSR K. Gorshenin, in which the number of those convicted for 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 Collegium of the OGPU, "troikas" of the NKVD, the Special Conference, 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 or less - 2,369,220, to exile and exile - 765,180 people.

Repression after 1953

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

According to historian V.P. Popov, the total number of those convicted for 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 ... If we subtract people under 14 and over 60 from the total population as incapable of criminal activity, then it turns out that within the life of one generation - from 1923 to 1953 - almost every third capable member of society was convicted. In the RSFSR alone, general courts passed sentences on 39.1 million people, and in different years, from 37 to 65% of convicts were sentenced to real terms of imprisonment (not including those repressed by the NKVD, without sentences pronounced by judicial collegiums in criminal cases Supreme, regional and regional courts and permanent sessions that operated at the camps, without sentences of military tribunals, without exiles, without deported 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 long periods"(in camps, special settlements, etc.) from the end of the 20th to the year" amounted to at least 25-30 million people"(that is, those convicted under all articles of the Criminal Code of the USSR, including also special settlers). According to him, with reference to Zemskov, “only in 1934-1947, 10.2 million people entered the camps (minus those returned from the run). However, Zemskov himself does not write 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 Arseniy Roginsky, Chairman of the Board of the International Society "Memorial", for the period from 1918 to 1987, according to the surviving documents, there were 7 million 100 thousand people arrested by security agencies in the USSR. Some of them were arrested not on political grounds, as security agencies arrested in different years 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 that existed in those years.

The topic of political repressions in the USSR under Stalin is one of the most discussed historical topics of our time. First, let's define the term "political repression". That's what the dictionaries say.

Repression (lat. repressio - suppression, oppression) - a punitive measure, punishment used by state bodies, the state. Political repressions are coercive measures applied on the basis of political motives, such as imprisonment, expulsion, exile, deprivation of citizenship, forced labor, deprivation of life, etc.

Obviously, the reason for the emergence of political repression is the political struggle in the state, causing some "political motives" for punitive measures. And the more fierce this struggle is, the greater the scope of repression. Thus, in order to explain the causes and scope of the repressive policy pursued in the USSR, it is necessary to understand what political forces acted at this historical stage. What goals did they pursue? And what did they achieve? Only such an approach can lead us to a deep understanding of this phenomenon.

In domestic historical journalism, regarding the issue of repressions of the 1930s, two directions have developed, which can be conditionally called “anti-Soviet” and “patriotic”. Anti-Soviet journalism presents this historical phenomenon in a simplified black and white picture, attributing b about most of the causal relationships to the personal qualities of Stalin. A purely philistine approach to history is used, which consists in explaining events only by the actions of individuals.

From the patriotic camp, the vision of the process of political repression also suffers from bias. This position, in my opinion, is objective and is due to the fact that pro-Soviet historians were initially in the minority and, as it were, on the defensive. They constantly had to defend and justify, and not put forward their own version of events. Therefore, their works, as an antithesis, contain only the signs "+". But thanks to their criticism of anti-Sovietism, it was possible to somehow understand the problem areas of Soviet history, to see outright lies, to get away from myths. Now, it seems to me, the time has come to restore an objective picture of events.

Doctor of Historical Sciences Yuri Zhukov

Regarding the political repressions of the pre-war USSR (the so-called "great terror"), one of the first attempts to recreate this picture was the work "Another Stalin" by Doctor of Historical Sciences Yuri Nikolayevich Zhukov, published in 2003. I would like to talk about his conclusions in this article, as well as express some of my thoughts on this issue. Here is what Yuri Nikolayevich himself writes about his work.

“Myths about Stalin are far from new. The first, apologetic, began to take shape as early as the thirties, taking on finished outlines by the beginning of the fifties. The second, revelatory, - after that, after Khrushchev's closed report at the XX Congress of the CPSU. It actually was a mirror image of the previous one, it simply turned from “white” to “black”, without changing its nature at all...
... Far from claiming completeness and therefore indisputability, I will venture only one thing: to get away from both preconceived points of view, from both myths; try to restore the old, once well known, and now carefully forgotten, decidedly unnoticed, ignored by everyone.

Well, a very commendable desire for a historian (without quotes).

"I'm just a student of Lenin..."- I. Stalin

To begin with, I would like to talk about Lenin and Stalin, as his successor. Both liberal and patriotic historians frequently oppose Stalin to Lenin. Moreover, if the former oppose the portrait of the cruel dictator Stalin, as it were, to the more democratic Lenin (after all, he introduced the NEP, etc.). The latter, on the contrary, expose Lenin as a radical revolutionary as opposed to the statesman Stalin, who removed the unbelted "Leninist guard" from the political scene.

In fact, it seems to me that such oppositions are incorrect, tearing the logic of the formation of the Soviet state into two opposing stages. It would be more correct to speak of Stalin as the successor of what Lenin started (especially since Stalin always spoke about this, and by no means out of modesty). And try to find common features in them.

Here is what, for example, the historian Yuri Emelyanov says about this:

"First of all, Stalin was constantly guided by the Leninist principle of the creative development of Marxist theory, rejecting "dogmatic marxism". Constantly making adjustments to the daily implementation of the policy so that it corresponded to the real situation, Stalin at the same time followed the main Leninist guidelines. Putting forward the task of building a socialist society in one single country, Stalin consistently continued the activities of Lenin, which led to the victory of the world's first socialist revolution in Russia. Stalin's five-year plans followed logically from Lenin's GOELRO plan. The Stalinist program of collectivization and modernization of the countryside met the tasks of mechanization of agriculture set by Lenin.

Yuri Zhukov agrees with him (, p. 5): “To understand Stalin's views, his approach to solving all problems without exception is important - “concrete historical conditions”. It was they, and not someone's authoritative statement, that official dogmas and theories became the main ones for Stalin. They, and nothing else, explain his adherence to the policy of the same pragmatist Lenin as he himself, explain his own hesitations and fractures, his readiness, under the influence of real conditions, not at all embarrassed, to abandon previously expressed proposals and insist on other sometimes diametrically opposed.

There are good reasons to assert that Stalin's policy was a continuation of Lenin's. Perhaps, if Lenin were in Stalin's place, in the same "concrete historical conditions" he acted in a similar way. In addition, it is worth noting the phenomenal performance of these people, and the constant desire for development and self-learning.

The struggle for the Leninist legacy

Even during Lenin's lifetime, but when he was already seriously ill, a struggle for leadership in the party unfolded between Trotsky's group and the "left" (Zinoviev, Kamenev), as well as the "right" (Bukharin, Rykov) and Stalin's "centrist group". We will not particularly go into the vicissitudes of this struggle, but note the following. In the turbulent process of party discussions, it was the Stalinist group that stood out and received the support of the party, which initially occupied much worse “starting positions”. Anti-Soviet historians say that Stalin's special cunning and cunning contributed to this. He, they say, skillfully maneuvered among opponents, pushed them against each other, used their ideas, and so on.

We will not deny Stalin's ability to play a political game, but the fact remains that the Bolshevik Party supported him. And this was facilitated, firstly, by the position of Stalin, who, despite all the differences, tried to prevent a split in the party at this difficult time. And, secondly, the focus and ability of the Stalinist group for practical state activity, the thirst for which, apparently, was very strongly felt among the Bolsheviks who won the civil war.

Stalin and his associates, unlike their opponents, having objectively assessed the current situation in the world, understood the impossibility of a world revolution at this historical stage and, proceeding from this, began to consolidate the successes achieved in Russia, and not “export” them outside. From Stalin's report to the 17th Congress: "We were oriented in the past and are oriented in the present to the USSR and only to the USSR".

It is impossible to say exactly from what date the full-fledged domination of the Stalinist group in the country's leadership began. Apparently, this is the period of 1928-1929, when it can be said that this political force began to pursue an independent policy. At this stage, the repressions against the party opposition were rather mild. Usually, for opposition leaders, defeat ended in removal from leadership positions, expulsion from Moscow or the country, expulsion from the party.

The scale of repression

Now it's time to talk about numbers. What were the scales of political repressions in the Soviet state? According to discussions with anti-Sovietists (see "The Court of History" or "The Historical Trial"), it is precisely this question that causes a painful reaction on their part and accusations of "justification, inhumanity", etc. But talking about numbers really matters, as the number often says a lot about the nature of the repression. At the moment, the most widely known studies have received Dr. V. N. Zemskova.

Table 1 shows Zemskov's data obtained from two sources: the statistical reporting of the OGPU-NKVD-MVD-MGB and data from the I Special Department of the former USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs.

V. N. Zemskov:

“In early 1989, by decision of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, a commission of the Department of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR was established, headed by Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences Yu.A. Polyakov to determine the loss of the population. As part of this commission, we were among the first historians to have access to the statistical reporting of the OGPU-NKVD-MVD-MGB, which had not previously been issued to researchers ...

...The vast majority of them were convicted under the famous 58th article. There is a rather significant discrepancy in the statistical calculations of these two departments, which, in our opinion, is not at all explained by the incompleteness of the information of the former KGB of the USSR, but by the fact that employees of the 1st Special Department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs interpreted the concept of "political criminals" more widely and in the statistics compiled by them there was a significant "criminal admixture".

It should be noted that so far among historians there is no unity in assessing the process of dispossession. Should the dispossessed be classified as politically repressed? Table 1 includes only those dispossessed of the 1st category, that is, those who were arrested and convicted. Those deported to a special settlement (category 2) and simply dispossessed but not expelled (category 3) were not included in the table.

Now let's use these data to identify some special periods. This is 1921, 35,000 were convicted, of which 6,000 were sentenced to the highest measure - the end of the civil war. 1929 - 1930 - carrying out collectivization. 1941 - 1942 - the beginning of the war, the increase in the number of those shot to 23-26 thousand is associated with the elimination of "particularly dangerous elements" in prisons that fell under occupation. And a special place is occupied by 1937-1938 (the so-called "great terror"), it is during this period that a sharp surge of political repressions occurs, especially those sentenced to VMN 682 thousand (or over 82% for the entire period). What happened during this period? If everything is more or less clear with other years, then 1937 looks truly very terrifying. The work of Yury Zhukov is devoted to the explanation of this phenomenon.

Such a picture emerges from archival data. And there is a lot of controversy about these numbers. Very much they do not coincide with the tens of millions of victims voiced by our liberals.

Of course, one cannot say that the scale of repressions was very low, based only on the fact that the real number of those repressed turned out to be an order of magnitude smaller than the number of liberals. The repressions were significant in the indicated special years, when large-scale events were committed for the whole country, compared with the level of "calm" years. But at the same time, we must understand that being repressed for political reasons does not automatically mean innocent. There were those convicted of serious crimes against the state (robbery, terror, espionage, etc.).

Stalin's course

Now, after talking about numbers, let's move on to describing historical processes. However, I would like to make one digression. The topic of the article is very painful and gloomy: political intrigues and repression inspire few people. However, we must understand that the life of the Soviet people in these years was by no means filled with this. In the 1920s and 1930s, truly global changes took place in Soviet Russia, in which the people took a direct part. The country has developed at an incredible pace. The breakthrough was not only industrial: public education, health care, culture and labor rose to a qualitatively new level, and the citizens of the USSR saw it with their own eyes. The "Russian miracle" of the Stalinist five-year plans was rightly perceived by the Soviet people as the fruit of their own efforts.

What was the policy of the new leadership of the country? First of all, the strengthening of the USSR. This was expressed in the accelerated collectivization and industrialization. In raising the country's economy to a whole new level. Creation of a modern army based on a new military industry. For these purposes, all the resources of the country were thrown. The source was agricultural products, minerals, forests, and even cultural and church values. Stalin here was the toughest conductor of such a policy. And, as history has shown, not in vain ...

In international politics, the new course consisted in curtailing the activity of "exporting the world revolution", normalizing relations with the capitalist countries, and searching for allies before the war. First of all, this was due to the growing tension in the international arena and the expectation of a new war. The USSR, at the "proposal" of a number of countries, joins the League of Nations. These steps, at first glance, run counter to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism.

Lenin once spoke of the League of Nations:

“An undisguised instrument of the imperialist Anglo-French desires ... The League of Nations is a dangerous instrument directed with its tip against the country of the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

Whereas Stalin in an interview:

“Despite the withdrawal of Germany and Japan from the League of Nations - or perhaps precisely for this reason - the League can become a kind of brake in order to delay the outbreak of hostilities or prevent them. If this is so, if the League can turn out to be a kind of bump on the road to at least somewhat complicating the cause of war and to some extent facilitating the cause of peace, then we are not against the League. Yes, if this is the course of historical events, then it is possible that we will support the League, the nations, despite its colossal shortcomings..

Also in international politics, there is an adjustment in the activities of the Comintern, an organization called upon to carry out a world proletarian revolution. Stalin, with the help of G. Dimitrov, who returned from Nazi dungeons, calls on the Communist Parties of European countries to join the "People's Fronts" with the Social Democrats, which again can be interpreted as "opportunism." From Dimitrov's speech at the 7th World Congress of the Communist International:

“Let the communists recognize democracy, come out in defense of it, then we are ready for a united front. We are supporters of Soviet democracy, the democracy of the working people, the most consistent democracy in the world. But we defend and will continue to defend in the capitalist countries every inch of bourgeois democratic freedoms that are encroached upon by fascism and bourgeois reaction, because this is dictated by the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat!”

At the same time, the Stalinist group (in foreign policy it is Molotov, Litvinov) went to the creation of the Eastern Pact as part of the USSR, France, Czechoslovakia, England, suspiciously similar in composition to the former Entente.

Such a new course in foreign policy could not but cause protest moods in some party circles, but the Soviet Union objectively needed it.

Within the country, there was also a normalization of public life. The New Year holidays with the Christmas tree and the carnival returned, the activities of the communes were curtailed, officer ranks were introduced in the army (oh horror!), And much more. Here is one illustration that I think captures the atmosphere of that time. From the decision of the Politburo:

[in the Internet] .