Excess deaths and camp numbers: Some comments

Abstract

I DID NOT ANSWER Stephen Wheatcroft's article in the April 1990 issue even though part of its declared purpose was to expose the errors of my 'literary' evidence as compared with his own 'professional, objective' approach. This was because I had every hope that Soviet material would fairly soon discredit his supposedly weighty set of tables and this has, indeed, largely happened (in, for example, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, nos. 6-8, 1990; Vestnik statistiki, no. 7, 1990; and, though perhaps Wheatcroft did not have access to it, Rodina, no. 11, 1989). By 'literary' he meant no more than 'unofficial', and seemed unaware that, to put it mildly, official Soviet material was as likely to be false as any other; and that it is as easy to fake impressive tabulations as to invent a single figure. Thus he censures me for having 'claimed that the registration system for births and deaths was disbanded after October 1932', and that I offered 'no convincing evidence' of this. In fact I spoke not of a disbanding of the system but merely of 'nonregistration of deaths' at this time (as I have noted before, Wheatcroft's capacity to misquote me jibes ill with his devotion to rigour). My source was indeed literary-even emigre; it was credible in itself; there seemed no motive for falsification; and it fitted the general statistical picture. Also, as so often, it has now been confirmed. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, no. 6, 1990, prints a contemporary, hitherto unpublished, official census office report from Kurman to Kraval, that in the Ukraine and certain other areas 'a significant number of deaths were not registered'. These amounted in 1933 to 'about 1 million', (and in addition 'not less than 1-1 ! million' deaths were not in the registration books because they were unreported by the NKVD). Wheatcroft himself chiefly relies for his gross estimates on the TsUNKhU registration tables for the early 1930s which, though satisfactorily non-literary, are thus proven to be of little use in their present form. Similar objections now arise against Wheatcroft's two other sets of figures. For the 1939 census the figures arrived at by the Census Board were, we are told, 167 277 400. (I had accepted, in The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 302, a figure of 167.2 million: not bad!) The additional millions required to bring it up to the official figure of 170467 186 existed only on paper and, we are now informed, were distributed among areas (and no doubt age groups) which needed topping up. Wheatcroft's deductions are therefore of little use. The same applies (as Alec Nove points out), to his third set of figures-those given for the camp and prison population in the later period in recent Soviet publications, some of which have been repudiated by the KGB itself. For glasnost' has indeed extended to