TOWARDS A MORE CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE STATISTICAL INDICATORS OF SOVIET REPRESSION AND WHAT THEY TELL US

Abstract

Professor Khlevniuk’s article ‘Who and how many’ claims that there is an absence of knowledge or interest on the question of the overall number of victims of Stalinist terror and state repression, and he offers his explanation for this paucity of work or interest, before he attempts to fill the gap by producing a series of aggregate figures for different types of repression amongst different circles of victims. His first circle has 23-26 million victims who he claims directly experienced exec...