Stalin’s Genocides

“There is considerable disagreement about how many were killed as a result of Stalin’s policies and actions. This depends a great deal on what one counts as “mass killing”. Do we include, for example, the Ukrainian famine – the Holodomor – which took the lives of some three to five million Ukrainian peasants? Or the deaths by disease, hunger and exposure in the special settlements, which took the lives of millions more? Do we believe the recently available, and by now thoroughly analysed, NKVD [Soviet secret police] figures for the numbers killed and who died? There are some historians, myself included, who think that these figures do not represent the real numbers of those killed or who died as a consequence of Stalin’s policies in the Gulag and other internment facilities.

In Stalin’s Genocides, I used the fairly standard figure of up to 15 to 20 million dead as a result of Stalin’s policies from 1928 to 1953. Others use higher figures; Snyder estimates fewer. In the end, we need to go beyond the NKVD data to understand better the murderous character of the Stalinist regime. For that we need better access to the secret police archives and a deeper understanding of the processes of arrest, internment, interrogation, torture, exile, resettlement and forced labour – each of which had murderous dimensions, sometimes reported, sometimes not.”

Norman Naimark, interview on genocide, Five Books, November 15th, 2011