Recommended optional background music, "The Orphan's Begging Song," author unknown, has been put in MIDI format by Comrade P.K. Volkov of VOkSovProlKompMuz.
This song was often sung by homeless orphans after the devastating "War Communism" famine of 1919-1921, and the "Collectivization" famine of 1932-1933.
Play "Besprizornik" (unaccompanied clarinet).
Play "Besprizornik" (piano, accompanied by piano).
The words and musical score are available at this site.
View Index of Songs for other background music selections.

"Revisionists" vs. anti-Soviets

Readers should be aware that, just as there are Nazi Holocaust "revisionists" who claimed the Holocaust of the Jews never happened (or was grossly exaggerated), there are also Stalin "revisionists" who would downsize his death toll from the commonly accepted 10-20 million to a few tens or hundreds of thousands. Stalin revisionists are to be found among nostalgic anti-"reform" Communists in Russia, and among some on the "academic left" in the USA, who wish to remove a principal moral justification for US anti-Communism in the Cold War.

Collectivization (1929-1933)

No reputable scholar disputes the bloody toll of Collectivization (1929-33), 6 to 10 million peasants, or even more. The losses came in two phases. The first wave was "dekulakization," the arrest, execution, and/or exile of all suspected political opponents in the villages, not only rich peasants ("kulaks"), but also many poorer peasants, eg those supporting the church or opposing Collectivization. The second wave was an artificial famine (1932-33), whose toll varied greatly by region. Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Lower Volga suffered terribly, while the highest death rate of all was among ethnic Kazakhs in the Kazakh S.S.R., perhaps 25% - 40%. Many other regions, eg around Moscow, suffered few if any famine deaths.

The proof came with the 1937 census, which came up with a population (163-164 million) 14 million less than what the government had projected (a 3 million [2%] per year increase from the 1926 figure of 147 million; modern readers should be aware that such high growth rates were normal in the decades before cheap and universally available birth control). 3 of the missing 14 million might simply be births that didn't take place in a time of trauma, but the other 11 million have a bloodier provenance. The 1937 census was suppressed, and its directors arrested as saboteurs.

A quote from the young Lenin on the advantages of famine

Churchill interviews Comrade Stalin on collectivization; Victor Kravchenko's testimony.

The Great Purge (1936-1938)

The evidence is less clear, however, about the toll from the Great Purge (1936-38). Conquest suggested 7 millions were arrested, of whom 1 million were shot, 2 million died of malnutrition and exposure in camps, an additional 3 million were sent to camps of whom a mere 10% would ever return, and 1 million remained in prison ["Terror," p. 485].

Others, while conceding the violence and hysteria of the Great Purge, nevertheless claim that it had little impact on many out-of-the-way backwaters. The "official" 1937-38 shooting toll from internal KGB tabulations in the Khrushchov era (1950s, though not published until the early 1990s) is 681,692. Conquest and other anti-Soviets consider this a deliberate underestimate. Numbers of non-criminals (political prisoners) sent to the GULag and their mortality are even more seriously disputed.

There is no independent census to check these claims. An official 1939 census was worthless, doctored by statisticians afraid of what happened to their predecessors in 1937. No further census was taken until after World War II (1941-45); it is not possible to distinguish between the huge losses of World War II and any lesser losses from the 1936-38 Great Purge.

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An article in "Pravda," 29 Nov 1938, sets the tone for the 1939 census: everything is glorious in the Socialist Motherland, and any census-taker who fails to demonstrate this is an enemy of the people.

Postscript, Jan 2001

In the West, disagreements between revisionist and anti-Stalinist scholars have become less sharp in recent years. Points formerly disputed have been conceded, eg by many revisionists the horrifying death toll of Collectivization and the role of Western Communists in Soviet espionage, and by many anti-Soviets a Great-Purge (1936-1938) death toll in the low rather than the mid-to-high millions. The receding of the Cold War has reduced the incentive for a new generation of anti-Soviet scholarship.

Even more significantly, the cruel economic disappointment of Russia's post-Communist decade has forced many anti-Soviets to drop a triumphalist tone. Robert Conquest had suggested extending the Collectivization toll up to 14 millions by including 3 million missing births, as mothers put off childbearing in a time of hopelessness. But how then is one to reckon a drastic and longterm fall in the Russian birthrate in the Yeltsin years?

In Russia itself, the failed hopes of the Yeltsin era, aggravated in 1999 by the immensely unpopular US-NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo and Serbia, have provoked a groundswell of anti-Western and anti-American sentiment, and with it a growth of pro-Stalin revisionism.

Who was worse -- Stalin or Hitler?

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