Going through the material, it was clear that the claim of death totals came from one source, "The Great Terror" by Robert Conquest. So, it went on my reading list. Now, he released a few editions of the book, so I worked hard and dug out a First Edition, the original claim source, and sat down to read.
By the time I was finished, it was clear that there was a major problem with the claim. Instead of any facts, what Conquest had was a number, and be then worked backwards to explain the number. That number, 20 million, came from a series of CIA reports. Most of those reports remain classified, but other reports which reference the data within them are not. As a result, I could pull up and find out at least where the CIA had gotten the numbers for the claim.
It turned out that the numbers came not from a study of prison populations, or death totals, but from studies on Soviet abortion laws. Starting in 1920, the Soviet Union had open and available abortion access, under Section 140 of their penal code. According to these CIA reports, it appears that from 1920 until the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union had just over 5 million abortions.
What we can find now in a 1968 CIA paper titled "Soviet Concern over falling Birth Rate" is a reference to extrapolated population loss from these abortions. The total loss figures given in this report, which came out around the same time as Conquest's book, was roughly 20 million, from those aborted fetuses not growing up to have children of their own.
Conquest then took this 20 million figure out of context, and tried to tally out a source for this loss. At no point in his analysis was the abortion rate listed. It is unknown if he was handed this data out of context, or intentionally left this context off.
We can find elsewhere in The Great Terror other oddities of his numbers. For example, in discussing the population of the Ukraine, he cited the Ukraine's population in the 1926 census, but then used the population of the Ukrainian ethnic group from the 1939 census, failing to note the actual population of the Ukraine at all. As such, by first using the whole territories population and then only using a select subgroup of it to compare against, it creates a false impression of population loss.
Instead, using the same number for both, we find that the Ukraine grew in population during that period. By doing this, despite these numbers being clearly noted in both census reports, Conquest creates the desired narrative. This leads us to believe that the omission of the source for the "20 million" claim was intentional, and not accidental.
The entire book is riddled with such errors, yet it is the origin of so many claims on this era. As such, it makes it very difficult to engage in honest research on the Soviet Union. Any claim needs to be double checked due to the amount and volume of misleading information.
The Soviet Union collapsed over 20 years ago. Its records have since been opened up. Analyzing those numbers shows a far different story than what Conquest presented. Instead of tens of millions dead through a prison system, we find that the death total was an order of magnitude less, more in line with other nations of the era, which is to say still far higher than we would accept today.
According to the official documents from the Soviet Union as found in Rosefielde's "An assessment of the Sources and Uses of Gulag Forced Labor 1926-1956", the peak prison population stood at 1.7 million, in 1952. The peak for prison deaths stood at roughly 300,000 in 1942, mostly caused by the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Eliminating the war period, the highest reported death total for a year is 98,000 people. Hardly the tens of millions claimed by Conquest.
However, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands dead do not sell books in the post-Holocaust era. We find numerous examples attempting to exaggerate the number found under Stalin, which feeds into this preconception. When the numbers do not add up, or when a report is discovered to have been based not on prison deaths but on the abortion rate impact on the workforce, it becomes difficult to even dare broach this topic. I do not dare publish this for my job, despite it being newsworthy, because it would label us in a negative light.
It is tragic that there are subjects which are above reproach. We have historians releasing books which are nothing short of holocaust denial and being praised in the media. But if someone dares point out that a claim against Stalin was taken out of context, and as a result is incredibly misleading, they become the subject of attacks by otherwise rational people.
I cannot claim to know the "truth" here. What I do know is that this one book presented a number which was grossly misleading, one presented as killed as part of a prison system when in fact it was population loss from a poorly orchestrated family planning system. These kinds of errors make researching very difficult, and in turn makes it much harder for me to work on new topics for the future.
