During the entire 1921-53 period, some 4.1mn people were condemned for counter-revolutionary activities, of them 0.8mn to death and 1.1mn of whom died in camps and prisons. After adding the 3.5-5.0mn excess deaths from the collectivization famines, it is hard to see how Stalin could have been responsible for more than ten million deaths at the absolute maximum.

Nonetheless, some ideologues continue pushing the figure of 62mn victims of “the communist dictators in the former Soviet Union”.

I don’t personally know anyone who personally knows anyone who was jailed or executed under Stalin though. Certainly no known family members. In the past I’ve tried to make the same point you made there to people who have no family history in the former USSR. I’m sure they thought I was crazy and/or a liar, which, ironically, told me something about the power of propaganda.

Yes, people were jailed and executed by the Soviet state for political reasons under Stalin. How many people? I don’t know, but it couldn’t have been in the tens of millions. Was it in the millions? One would have to study the actual data, which I haven’t. Talking to people, being immersed in the culture, knowing one’s family history, having some common sense – those things can give you a good idea of the order of manitude of an event, but nothing more than that. The order of magnitude of the currently repeated number of Stalin’s victims is wrong. Common sense tells me that the Revolution and the 1918-1920 Civil War also killed more people than Stalin, though obviously fewer than did the German invasion.

I have a vague recollection of once reading somewhere that Khruschov came up with his own number of Stalin’s victims during his anti-Stalin campaign. Does anyone here know what it was?

When I was growing up, Stalin was not mentioned frequently, but when he was, it was often in the context of nostalgia. I can practically see eyes rolling at this, but it’s the freaking truth. What sort of nostalgia? Let’s say somebody, most likely an older person, is ranting about a piece of shoddy work they’ve just discovered or about bribery or stealing on the job or about someone’s laziness. “Oh, that wouldn’t have flown under Stalin, another Stalin is what this country needs (or “you people need”)”, etc., etc. It was the “trains used to run on time” sentiment. This came from the most ordinary people imaginable. Now, everything, including state authority, can be overdone or underdone. I’m not necessarily endorsing or condemning the trains-running-on-time sentiment here, and I didn’t live under Stalin anyway.

But the modern Western official view seems to deny that such a sentiment could even exist. And I’m sure that if he really did kill 30 million people, then it wouldn’t exist.

Another interesting thing about the story – it makes the point that Holocaust denial isn’t really new; it began just after the war ended.

No, no,” said the Colonel. “The great Russian people has waked up and my country is again a great country. We had three great leaders. We had Ivan, whom his enemies called Terrible, then we had Peter the Great, and now we have Joseph Stalin. I am a White Russian and have served in the Imperial Guards, but also I am a Russian patriot and a Russian Christian. Today, in every word that comes out of Russia, I feel the power, I feel the splendor of old Mother Russia. She is again a country of soldiers, religion, and true Slavs. Also, I know that when the Red Army entered German towns, not a single hair fell from German shoulders.

http://www.ined.fr/fichier/t_publication/47/publi_pdf1_pop.et.soc.francais.413.pdf

The figure that they use is for Ukraine within its current frontiers, excluding the then-Polish and Romanian territories, making the death toll all the proportionately higher.

11. Alberta has considered building nuclear reactors in order to extract oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta. The good sense of this has seemed to escape me–yes, oil’s more portable than nuclear energy, but what about the costs of investing in the plants–so it’s interesting to see other polities considering this route.

12. Hee.

Closed borders: yes, Milosevic declared Bosnia “under embargo” in early 1993. This was a PR move meant for Western consumption. It had exactly zero effect on the ground. Serbia continued to supply and arm the Bosnian Serbs with both hands, even while piously decrying the violence. If you google around for articles from this period, you’ll quickly turn up a bunch discussing the “embargo” and just how effective it was (viz., not at all) — fuel, food, ammunition and troops continued to flow freely across the border, even while Milosevic was loudly proclaiming that Serbia had cut off everything but humanitarian aid. At various points in 1993 and 1994 there were initiatives to send an international monitoring mission to watch the Serb-Bosnian border; none of them came to anything, and then the war ended in 1995.

Srebrenica genocide: I agree that the ‘genocide’ label complicates things. Unfortunately, there’s a disjunct between the legal definition (which is broad, and certainly includes Srebrenica) and the popular imagination (which has been powerfully influenced by the Holocaust).

Srebrenica certainly involved the the deliberate and systematic mass murder of civilian members of an ethnic, religious, or national group. So legally it qualifies. Both the ICTY and the International Court of Justice have agreed on this point. You can decry the alleged partiality of the ICTY — if you’re sympathetic to the Serbs, it’s almost de rigeur — but the ICJ is something else again; everyone takes them pretty seriously, and the Serbs have appealed to them to negate Kosovo’s declaration of independence. (Decision expected later this year.)

So, it’s not the “EU/US” line — it’s been formally found such, repeatedly, by the relevant tribunals. If you say that Srebrenica was /not/ genocide, then you have a medium-small mountain of evidence and legal reasoning to get past.

“Too much was done to enable” — well, too much was done to enable. The Srebrenica killers were certainly under Belgrade’s influence and to some extent under its control. A number of them were actually Serbs from Serbia, not Bosnia. Some were paramilitaries, including the famous Scorpions, who were recruited, trained and armed in Serbia and then sent across that “closed” border for the express purpose of killing as many non-Serbs as possible. (A number of the Scorpions were police or ex-police, and it was a fairly open secret that they were operating under the direct instructions of MUP, Serbia’s Interior Ministry). And without Serbia’s direct assistance — fuel, ammunition, training, funding — the Bosnian Serb units would have been incapable of doing what they did.

So I’m not really seeing the problem there. The resolution is very milk-and-water, and doesn’t really do much of anything; it’s another step in the elaborate dance of triangulation the Tadic administration is doing with the EU and its own voting public. In fact, the final language ends up tracking the ICJ decision of 2006 — which found that Srebrenica was genocide, that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Belgrade of it, but that the Milosevic administration did breach international law by failing to act to prevent it. I have trouble seeing how that’s “too much” in any meaningful sense.

BTW: Srebrenica denialism is a small but vigorous cottage industry. In some cases — Lewis McKenzie, Philip Corwin — it’s coming from people who had some direct involvement in Bosnia. In other cases its ideological (Diane Johnstone, who wants to make a point about ‘discourse’.) And then of course there are the Serb nationalists. So there’s a fair amount of disinformation out there. So if you’re interested in this topic — and it is interesting, if not for the squeamish — check all references.)

cheers,

Doug M.

2. 30,000 from illegal drugs which they freely chose to indulge in…. compared to around 2mn annual deaths in total, of which around a third can be attributed to alcohol over-consumption. The comparison with Afghan War casualties is frankly asinine.

3. Please read more carefully. Quote from myself just above: “it would not surprise me if some of it were requisitioned by US / Britain intelligence services to fund black operations”. As I said, the CIA might well be skimming off the drug profits, but it has better things to do with the money than paying the Chechens, such as funding Iranian separatist groups or plugging up the financial system.

About 30,000 people die in Russia every year due to illegal drugs, with (Afghan) heroin being the deadliest of illegal drugs. For comparison, about 15,000 Soviet soldiers died in ten years of Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, the CIA’s involvement in illegal drug trade isn’t a theory but a known fact, look up the CIA-Contras cocaine affair.