The ‘war of numbers’ reignited
For decades, omnipresent state censorship obscured every aspect of Soviet repressions between 1917, the October Revolution, and 1953, the death of Joseph Stalin. By the early 1930s, the quantitative data on the subject had turned into a highly classified state secret. The authorities thwarted any independent research efforts within the country. The Soviet academic community and the general population were kept in the dark. Even the inadvertent leak of a single digit into the public domain guaranteed prosecution.
In the West, the inaccessibility of penal archives before 1991 elicited an outright ‘war of numbers’ among scholars. The ‘war’ took the shape of a politicized, divisive and increasingly vituperative debate on the scope and demographic consequences of Soviet repression. The scant source base, predominately anecdotal in nature, forced scholars to adduce wildly contradictory estimates on the size of the prison population, the ratio between ‘politic...