We present translations of two article in the newspaper “Argumenty i Fakty”:

– “The history of repressions devoid of emotion. Viktor Zemskov’s arguments and facts” from July 25, 2015, dispelling one of the myths surrounding Stalin – that of “tens of millions of repressed”, replacing it instead with impartial historical research.

– This is followed by a translation of an earlier article from 1989, “‘The Gulag Archipelago’: through the eyes of a writer and a statistician”, where Zemskov counters the misinformation in Solzhenicin’s work.

Read also: Myths about Stalin. Where do legs grow from? Reblog of a detailed research article!

Victor Nikolaevich Zemskov

The man who believed the facts

The official website of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences reported that on July 21, 2015, Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Scientific Secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia, died suddenly at the age of 70.

“Viktor Nikolaevich’s whole life was inextricably linked with the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked for more than 50 years,” the report says. — Viktor Nikolaevich became especially famous for his archival research. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was the discoverer of archival funds on the history of political repression in the USSR that had previously been closed to scientists.

Viktor Zemskov’s name won’t say much to a wide audience. His books were not published in millions of copies, they were not decorated with catchy titles. He preferred painstaking work with historical documents, rather than a pursuit of high-profile sensations.

In 1989, at the peak of “perestroika”, Zemskov joined the commission for determining population losses at the Department of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, headed by Corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Yuri Polyakov. The Commission gained access to the statistical reports of the OGPU-NKVD-MVD-MGB, stored in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution.

These previously classified documents contained all the factual information about the real history of political repression during the Soviet period.

As already mentioned, Viktor Zemskov did not chase after sensations, but the research materials he published overturned ideas about the scale of political repression in the USSR.

The secret that has become disclosed

The historian, who had never hidden his negative attitude towards the Stalinist repressions, came to the conclusion that the data on tens and hundreds of millions of repressed people, which appeared in foreign studies and in media materials from the time of “perestroika”, do not reflect the reality.

Having thoroughly studied all the materials, Zemskov established that in the period from 1921 to 1953 in the USSR, 4,060,306 people were convicted of “counterrevolutionary and other particularly dangerous state crimes”, of which 799,455 people were sentenced to capital punishment.

Zemskov also refuted the popular statement about “a country where every second person went through prison camps”. According to the results of the study, it was found that the maximum total number of prisoners in camps in the entire Soviet history was recorded as of January 1, 1950 — 2,760,095 people, while the average number of prisoners ranged from 1.5 to 2.5 million people. At the same time, we are talking about both political prisoners and those convicted of criminal offences.

For comparison, the number of prisoners in the United States reached 2.2 million in 2013.
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