http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/jun99/msg01982.html
But, I agree with Lou on this one...!!!
Michael
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thursday, August 16, 2001 9:52 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:15935] Re: Re: Re: Fw: The Fall of 'Challenge'?
Please, the mere mention of body counts and the like can reignite past
flames on this subject.
On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 09:41:46AM -0700, Michael Pugliese wrote:
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> From: John Lacny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Tue Jun 13, 2000 8:29 pm
> Subject: Re: [marxist] Re: "Inside the Gulag"
>
>
> I am pleased that we on this listserv appear to be adopting a
> considered tone when discussing historical questions. As a history major
> myself, I would be the last person to argue that such questions are
> unimportant or not worth discussing. The problem is that so many on the
> left have so attached themselves to one school of thought on particular
> historical questions -- usually a dogmatic "line" of some sort, which is
> passed off as "analysis" -- that line struggle over interpretations of
> historically distant events overwhelms the necessity for both unity and
> honest discussions of political differences in the here and now. If we
were
> to have a debate between anarchists and Marxists on this list, for
example,
> the last thing we would need would be a back-and-forth flame war about the
> Spanish Civil War or Kronstadt.
>
> So with all of that said, I should give my own take on the discussion
> of the crimes of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union which we have been
> engaged in so far. (Most of the discussion has actually been cross-posts
by
> Michael Pugliese from another list, although Jason Schulman has weighed in
> with his own contribution.) As one can see from the cross-posted article
> from Steve Rosenthal, it is fairly easy to refute the arguments of
> apologists for Stalin. One aspect of the article which I am surprised that
> Jason Schulman did not cease upon is the discussion of the various smaller
> nationalities of Eastern Europe (Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc.). Here
> is the relevant paragraph from Rosenthal:
>
> "Who made up the population of the prison camps? The majority
> consisted of prisoners of war, not only Germans but soldiers of many other
> Eastern European nationality who fought with the Nazis: Poles,
Lithuanians,
> Latvians, Estonians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Ukranian and Byelo-Russian
> nationalists. Large fascist organizations existed in all these countries
> in 1939 when Stalin and Hitler signed the pact that provided the Soviets
> with almost two more years to prepare for the Nazi invasion, while
> imperialists sort of fought each other. The Soviets rounded up many of
> these Nazis, killed some of them, and put others in prison. If that had
> been done elsewhere, the Nazis would not have been welcomed by large
'fifth
> column' forces when they invaded other countries. But, of course, no
> capitalist country was going to suppress its own fascists."
>
> Jason Schulman has already demonstrated the specious nature of claims
> that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was far-sighted and purely defensive. But that
> aside, if a historical novice were to take this paragraph from Rosenthal
on
> its surface, it may seem a ruthless yet rational and realistic argument:
in
> order to stave off the horrors of fascism, it was to be expected that the
> Soviets would have to use harsh measures, and therefore we can't blame
them
> for it. But at even slightly closer inspection, it's obvious that this
> argument doesn't hold water. Note how Rosenthal subtly switches
timeframes:
> he wants to talk about "prisoners of war" from 1939 afterwards. But what
is
> really at issue is an earlier period of time, specifically, the Purges of
> 1937-38, when the Gulag and the Terror were really at their height. And if
> we study the Purges, we discover that while foreigners were a primary
> target, the kind of people who were victimized were not fascist fifth
> columnists. The largest number of foreign victims were exiled members of
> the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe, thousands upon thousands of whom
> had fled from fascist and other right-wing regimes to what they thought
> would be the safety of the Soviet Union. Instead, they were caught up in
> the xenophobic hysteria which accompanied the Purges. Those who were
> especially suspect were people who had been imprisoned by the fascists:
> instead of being a badge of honor, it became a source of suspicion, on the
> conjecture that the fascists had granted such people their release in
> exchange for engaging in espionage in the Soviet Union. Thousands of
> foreign Communists were shot. The entire Polish Communist Party was
> disbanded on orders from the Comintern on the grounds that it was nothing
> more than an espionage center for the Polish military regime.
>
> But as I said, refuting the claims of people like Rosenthal in this
> fashion is extraordinarily easy, and hardly worth the effort. However,
some
> of what Rosenthal says contains a grain of truth. I will return to this in
> a moment, but first I think it would be a good idea to establish some
> historical facts. I have culled the following from "Table 5: Secret Police
> (GPU, OGPU, NKVD) Arrests and Sentences, 1921-39" in J. Arch Getty's and
> Oleg V. Naumov's _The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destructon of
the
> Bolsheviks_, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 588. Getty and Naumov rely on
> a huge swath of the Soviet archives which have been released since 1991,
> and their numbers are authoritative; I know of no serious refutation of
> them, from any "side." For what they're worth, these are the facts. The
> statistics below cover the relevant period under discussion, 1929-1939. I
> have not reproduced the entire chart here; keep in mind that not all of
> these are for political offenses, although the majority are (for
> "counterrevolutionary crimes" and "anti-Soviet agitation").
>
> I've devised a key as follows:
>
> (1) Year
> (2) Total Arrests
> (3) Convictions
> (4) Shot
> (5) Camps and prison
> (6) Exiled
>
> **********************************************************************
> (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
>
> 1929 162,726 56,220 2,109 25,853 24,517
> 1930 331,544 208,069 20,201 114,443 58,816
> 1931 479,065 180,696 10,651 105,683 63,269
> 1932 410,433 141,919 2,278 73,946 36,017
> 1933 505,256 239,664 2,154 138,903 54,262
> 1934 205,173 78,999 2,056 59,451 5,994
> 1935 193,083 267,076 1,229 185,846 33,601
> 1936 131,168 274,670 1,118 219,418 23,719
> 1937 936,750 790,665 353,074 429,311 1,366
> 1938 638,509 554,258 328,618 205,509 16,842
> 1939 2,552 54,666 3,783
>
> **********************************************************************
>
> You can notice a period of particularly vicious repression in 1930-31
> during the most turbulent years of the Five Year Plan and
collectivization;
> then, in the Purges of 1937-38, an unparralleled orgy of arrests and
> executions.
>
> Getty and Naumov write further that "The population of all labor
> camps, labor colonies, and prisons on 1 January 1939, near the end of the
> Great Purges, was 2,022,976. This gives us a total increase in the camp
and
> prison population in 1937-38 of 1,006,030." (p. 590) Some may wince at the
> comparison, but the prison population in the United States today is around
> 2 million.
>
> Moreover: "According to the NKVD archival material currently
> available, 681,692 people were shot in 1937-38 (compared with 1,118
persons
> in 1936). These archival figures, coming from a statistical report 'on the
> quantity of people convicted upon cases of NKVD bodies,' include victims
> who had not been arrested for political reasons, whereas the KGB press
> release concerns only persons persecuted for 'counterrevolutionary
> offenses.' In any event, the data available at this point make it clear
> that the number shot in the two worst purge years was more likely in the
> hundreds of thousands than in the millions. The only period between 1930
> and the outbreak of the war when the number of death sentences for
> nonpolitical crimes outstripped the ones meted out to
> 'counterrevolutionaries' was from August 1932 to the last quarter of 1933.
>
> "Aside from executions in the terror of 1937-38, many others died in
> the regime's custody during the 1930s. If we add the figure we have for
> executions up to 1940 to the number of persons who died in GULAG camps and
> the few figures we found on mortality in prisons and labor colonies, then
> add to this the number of peasants known to have died in exile, we reach a
> figure of nearly 1.5 million deaths directly due to repression in the
> 1930s." (p. 591)
>
> Any way you slice it, these are some appalling figures. But while
> Jason Schulman is expressing a decent humanitarian impulse when he advises
> against playing the numbers game, I find myself agreeing with him in the
> abstract but unable to carry out the recommendation in practice. This gets
> us to the grain of truth which Rosenthal's polemic contains: there ARE
> people who have made an ideological cottage industry out of exaggerating
> the figures of deaths under Stalin. They are unsatisfied with the level of
> ideological service that the truth would perform, so they proceed to make
> up wild figures about 8-10 million or even 20 to 30 million deaths. Their
> purpose is to make the Communism seem "worse" than Nazism. In doing so,
> they play fast and loose with the historical facts, and sometimes simply
> lie. When certain people get this dishonest with the numbers, it's hard to
> avoid a serious attempt to determine the real numbers in response. To do
so
> you don't have to make excuses. It's only by the prodigious standards of
> twentieth-century evil that one and a half million deaths can look more
> like a statistic than a tragedy.
>
> John Lacny
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> "Paul" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >...Derogatory labels instead of documented facts and reasonable
> argumentation.
> Where do you get that 200 million figure?
>
> Hmm, the , "Black Book of Communism, " the editor S. Courtois, Harvard
> Univ. Press, comes up with "only" 100 million, a figure disputed by other
> contributors to that book like A. Werth.
> Likewise, the figures bandied about by R.J. Rummel, are disputed too in
> his book on genocide.
> A thread on Rummel here,
> http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/jun99/msg01982.html
> http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/jun99/msg01972.html
> http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/jun99/msg02011.html
>
> Michael Pugliese
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Thursday, August 16, 2001 9:34 AM
> Subject: [PEN-L:15932] Re: Fw: The Fall of 'Challenge'?
>
>
> >
> >
> >"J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote:
> >>
> >> ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Charles Mueller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >> When I mentioned on that other list the conventional
> >> > 'body-count' of 20th century communism
> >
> >"Conventional 'body-count'" tells it all. Anyone who questions a
> >conventional count of any kind must be a certifiable fruitcake.
> >
> >Carrol
> >
>
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
