Discussion of Stalinism

[Sarmatian]

The man is a professor, and is often referenced on the issue by others. Though the website may look like a blog, it is from a fairly prominent university. But he isn't the only source - there are many, many others, and just looking at his source list will start you down that road if you are so inclined.

That by itself doesn't mean anything. Radovan Karadzic is also a professor and Dr. Mengele, too (or did he only have a phd?). Also, I don't know if I would take University of Hawaii as a fairly prominent university, although "fairly prominent" is hardly definable.

It's not about him, it's about sources he uses. Every single source he uses is before 1990. He puts 49% of the dead to gulags. Now, tell me how could possibly any of the pre-1990's research accurately assess how many gulags there were, where they were, how many people were in them and how many died in them? Satellites didn't exist back then, and even if they did, I doubt NATO would use them to constantly monitor gulags. Just a simple logical explanation how's that possible, because I really don't see it. Don't tell me they just know because that's precisely what I'm arguing - they don't know and there was no possible way for them to know. Based on what information they had they could only make a guess. An educated guess perhaps, but a guess nevertheless.

Furthermore, how is it possible for them to know how many people in the Gulags were innocent? Not only political prisoners were sent to Siberia, criminals got sent there, too. For example, during the WW2, there were tens of thousands of Russian fighting in the German army. That Soviet general that was captured by the Wehrmacht, Vlassov, even tried to organize Russian Liberation Army that would fight alongside Germans against USSR. He was never truly allowed to do that, Russians mostly fought in the various SS divisions, but he was allowed to form one division made of Russians. After the war, Vlassov and other higher officers were shot and most of the soldiers and lower officers were sent to Siberia. Not a most humane punishment but not a really harsh one for the traitors. I sincerely doubt French who fought in the SS got a hero's welcome in France after the war. Those that didn't die or managed to run away, anyway. Were people like that counted in the dead or not? If they were, we're back on square one - how did they (western researchers) possibly had the information needed to make that distinction?

First, keep in mind that many of these were NKVD archives, and that records were not kept of every murder, even large ones.

About the archives not answering everything - even if they did "yield everything they contain," which the article makes it quite clear that they did not do:

It's impossible for archives to contain every bit of information about everything, true, but generally they contain a lot, even the "embarrassing" bits. That's probably the reason why UK and US archives aren't opened to the public still. Actually, I know they weren't a couple of years ago, maybe that changed in the meantime. Anyway, not really the point. I'm willing to accept that Russian archives may not be complete or 100% accurate, but they still seem much more sensible starting point for any research than research conducted 20-80 years ago from 10,000 km away.

Nothing we don't already know. Applebaum really makes the case for this - the history of the Soviet retouching of history gives us no reason to believe their records, and plenty of reason to disbelieve them. Also, there are problems with trusting any archives of any dictatorial regime which murdered, regardless of their attempts at keeping accurate records, as has been pointed out before. There were always plenty of off-the-record kills.

I don't disagree really. History is often the victim of nationalism, ideologies, conspiracies etc.. As Churchill said - History will be kind to me because I intend to write it. What I don't understand is why you're considering NATO countries as totally guiltless of the same. Why is every western source automatically considered 100% accurate and free of bias, nationalism and similar stuff? I have yet to see a Hundred Years War discussion where French and English are in agreement and that's something that ended 6 centuries ago. Obviously, there are disagreements still. How history can history in Germany from 1933-1945 can be considered free of bias? How can western politicians be considered totally free of this? What McCarthy did was nothing short of witch hunt and a lot of sources about the issue at hand come from the US from that time period. I don't consider western or nato countries free of bias and propaganda and I can't accept anything as 100% accurate without critical evaluation, just because it comes from the west. Maybe you can, but I can't.

That's why I'm asking all these questions. Why are western sources considered perfect just because they are western when they come from a period when there was mutual bias, fear and even paranoia? How it was possible to conduct serious scholarly work in the USSR back then? Why isn't new research conducted? If I tried to research the issue now, the first thing I'd do is head to Russia, instead of relying on papers written in 50's. Starting from the archives, trying to find as many as possible live people and question them directly. There's bound to be a good number of them. IIRC, just last year the last Serbian soldier involved in the breakthrough of the Macedonian Front in the WW1 died. Try to get my hands on as many documents from the Gulags as I can. Visit and check them out directly etc... That guy, that professor from the University of Hawaii, wrote several books in the nineties, even after 2000 about this issue and yet not single one contains any original research, just rehash of old, Cold War sources.

P.S. I'm sorry I used so much the terms"west" (or "westerners" or "western", for that matter). I find it pretty distasteful and don't like to use it, but I don't know other short way of referring to countries that made up NATO during the Cold War.