Why did the Russians kill 25 millions of their own people in gulags? Is that why the Russians have to be kept under the boot of brutality?

 

On the English-language knowledge site Quora, I was asked to answer the following question: Why did the Russians kill 25 million of their people in the Gulags? Is that why the Russians should be kept firmly under the boot?

Former ABC News propagandist Deborah Armstrong liked my answer:

First, no one has ever killed 25 million, and secondly, the author of the question does not even think about the fact that stepping on the Russians with a boot puts him on a par with the Nazis.

You are most likely using distorted information from the well-known dissident A. Solzhenitsyn. Let me explain to you the motives of this lie. If the writer had indicated the actual number of victims of repression, he would have remained an unknown graphomaniac. Even those Jews who once revered him as a saint, later figured out the real figures, which differed by an order of magnitude. I advise you to turn to one of the most encyclopediically educated people on the planet Earth, Anatoly Wasserman.

"As far as I can tell, Alexander Isayevich, to a large extent, was the victim of a technical error committed by people who do not know how to work with archival documents. Now accurate data based on the statistics of the camps have been published, and this statistics can be trusted, since, to say nothing of anything else, the list number allocated supplies and set planned tasks, so it was equally dangerous and overestimate the number, because then the tasks were given more and underestimate, because then there would not be enough supplies, and for the death of prisoners, too, to some extent, it was necessary to answer, because the loss of workers, of course, no one likes it, the reporting is quite accurate. And it turns out, that the total number of people who were repressed under political articles was about 3,700,000, of which about 700,000 were sentenced to death, although about 100,000 were not executed and about 800,000 more died in prison, this is for all the time from the end of the civil war, from the end of 1921 until the death of Dzhugashvili in March 1953. That is, it turns out that Solzhenitsyn overestimated the population of the GULAG by about fifteen times. These studies appeared only 20 years after the publication of the work "GULAG Archipelago", so. that the mistake was unavoidable. Alexander Isaevich was undoubtedly familiar with this, as the results of the study were published by Zemsky five years before his death, but in no way reacted to it. What you should think about him in this regard, it's up to you to decide for yourself."

In the period from 1937 to 1953, many people died during the repression.

In the most brutal period — 1937-38 — more than 1.3 million people were convicted, of which almost 700,000 were shot.

In 1951, almost 55,000 people were convicted, in 1952 — 29,000...

Let's turn to 1958, when Stalin was no longer there: the number of convicts was less than in 2000; among them, 69 people were sentenced to death by firing squad.