Medvedev Orders Precise Soviet WWII Death Toll

[IndianaGreen]

Source: Huffington Post

Medvedev Orders Precise Soviet WWII Death Toll

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday ordered officials to determine the precise Soviet death toll in World War II as the nation marked the 65th anniversary of the battle that broke the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

Russia, which suffered hugely in the conflict it calls the Great Patriotic War, places substantial importance on commemorating its sacrifices. An estimated 27 million Soviet civilians and soldiers died in the war. Much of the western part of the country was ravaged during four years of epic battles.

"Data about our losses haven't been revealed yet," Medvedev said at a meeting with officials and veterans in the Konstantin Palace near St. Petersburg. "We must determine the historical truth."

Medvedev said that a special panel involving officials from various government agencies will be created for the purpose.

He said that more than 2.4 million people are still officially considered missing in action. Of the 9.5 million buried in mass graves, 6 million are unidentified, he said. Remains are still being found across western Russia and other ex-Soviet republics.

<snip>

Medvedev used the occasion to condemn what he described as efforts to rehabilitate Nazis in some neighboring nations. Russia has harshly criticized authorities in the ex-Soviet Baltic nations of Estonia and Latvia for allowing gatherings of local veterans of Nazi SS units.


Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/27/medvedev-orders-precise-s_n_161433.html

[Ikonoklast]

1. I wonder if they'll count those murdered by their own government.

Doubt it.


40 million dead has been a figure offered up by some historians, but that includes minority groups, slave laborers, convicts, and political prisoners slaughtered by Stalin while no one was looking during the war.

[IndianaGreen]

3. The Auschwitz survivors liberated by Red Army would not have made such a stupid statement

The figure of 20 million plus killed by Stalin was made up out of thin air by William Randolph Hearst, a Hitler admirer.

The Famine That Never Was

A lot of noise has been made in the past few weeks about the 70th anniversary of the so-called "Ukrainian famine" of 1933-34. The media has been full of stories about the millions of Ukrainians who supposedly died in this famine and the Asper family has agreed to include a section on the "Ukrainian famine" in the planned Museum of Human Rights to be built in Winnipeg.

However, the "Ukrainian famine" is an event which never happened. It was entirely the creation of the Hearst newspaper chain and was exposed as a hoax at the time. Photos of the alleged Ukrainian famine victims published in the Hearst newspapers were discovered to have been taken in Hungary during the First World War. Dozens of American and British newspaper reporters spent weeks criss-crossing Ukraine during the height of the alleged famine and found no evidence of widespread hunger or deaths.

What was going on in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union in 1933 and 1934 was a virtual civil war between the rich peasants - the Kulaks - and the Soviet system over the issue of the collectivization of agriculture. The kulaks, armed and financed by Nazi Germany and various Nazi sympathizers in the West, including William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford, had organized a systematic campaign of assassination of local Soviet government officials. The kulaks also gave a call for an agricultural strike in the spring of 1933, urging supporters not to plant crops and to destroy existing stocks of food. Their hope was to create food shortages in the cities and undermine support for the Soviet government. In areas where large numbers of peasants took up this call, localized food shortages did result. However, the vast majority of the Soviet peasantry, including the Ukrainian peasants, supported collectivization and produced bumper crops in those years, so widespread hunger was avoided. The kulak revolt never did enjoy much support from the peasantry and ended in 1934.

On the basis of massive amounts of evidence that no famine existed, during the 1930s claims of famine in Ukraine were dismissed as right-wing propaganda by all but the most rabid anti-communists and fascists. However, with the unleashing of the Cold War in the late 1940s, all of the Nazi propaganda of the 1930s was dredged up once again with the objective of discrediting communism. In North America, fertile ground for this propaganda was found among the million or so Ukrainian refugees and war criminals who had collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War and who were given safe haven in the United States and Canada. The thousands of Nazi war criminals who were recruited by the American and British intelligence services following the war also played a key role in the Cold War propaganda machine.

During the early 1950s, several books were churned out in Britain and the United States claiming to "prove" the existence of a Ukrainian famine in 1933-34. All of them shared a number of characteristics. First, they all claimed that more Ukrainians died in Joseph Stalin's "engineered famine" than the number of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, with the numbers ranging from seven million to over 20 million. This was done in order to claim that communism was even worse than Nazism, as well as to attempt to minimize the Holocaust. The fact is that the entire Ukrainian population within the Soviet Union at the time amounted to some 25 million people. If these claims about the number of deaths were accurate, it would mean that from 25 to 80 percent of all Soviet Ukrainians died in a matter of less than two years. However, the first post-war census in the Soviet Union, taken during the late 1940s, shows the population of Ukrainians at about 40 million. In the interim, Ukraine suffered extremely high casualties during the Nazi occupation and also lost at least another million people to post-war emigration. So, these figures of Ukrainian deaths are clearly fictitious, as no population could recover so rapidly from such a major loss.

Another characteristic of all of these books is that they openly admit that there is a total absence of credible eye-witness testimony about the Ukrainian famine. This would be inconceivable if the number of victims were even a fraction of the alleged seven to 20 million. Given the fact that approximately one million anti-communist Ukrainian refugees poured into North America in the late 1940s, the inability of numerous famine researchers to find a single credible eye-witness is simply too much to believe if the famine had actually occurred.

http://www.modern-communism.ca/mc43803.htm

[Jim Sagle]

5. And we should believe a Red progaganda site because?

[IndianaGreen]

7. Because it tells the truth

Those Reds in Manitoba are pretty cool and very wise.

[Jim Sagle]

15. Why should anyone believe you or them?

A non-Communist cite would help.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

26. Modern marxists have to hide the legacy of Stalin or they loose what little credibility they have

[provis99]

20. having actually met Manitoba Ukrainian survivors

I would say you are the most gullible fool alive. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are full of Ukrainian survivors of the Stalinist famine. Denying this famine is akin to denying the Holocaust.

[emilyg]

10. It's the truth.

[Jim Sagle]

16. Because you said so, huh?

[emilyg]

17. Because I lived through it. My part of the world.

[Jim Sagle]

30. Well, I guess that settles it.

:rofl:

[SergeyDovlatov]

36. Did you look how 40,000,000 killed by Stalin was calculated?

First, they added all 30,000,000 death in the WWII.
Then they added people died due to malnutrition or typhoid attributed to collectivisation.
Those who died or were sent to prison camps.

If you strip away, you end up with about 600,000 people executed by Stalin during purges.
It is huge number, it is horrible number, but is quite different from 40mil killed by Stalin.

A whole variety of different breakdown in here:

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin

[Anarcho-Socialist]

6. In Robert Conquest's 'Black Book of Communism'

he used sources from Nazi German officials and from propaganda of the Ukrainian puppet government of Nazi Germany. It's a piece of old Cold War propaganda, and Conquest did have links with the CIA and right-wing anti-communist movement.

I recall that Conquest's statistical hyperbole also used guesstimates from natural disasters and even lower fertility rates (he added children who would have been born, but were not conceived due to the drop of conceptions to his figures).

[Journeyman]

11. According to Boris Souvarine, author of "Stalin: A Critical Survey. . .

of Bolshevism" (1939), in the late '30s, Walter Krivitsky, "whose excellent source is the GPU: 'Instead of the 171 million inhabitants calculated for 1937, only 145 million were found; thus nearly 30 million people in the USSR are missing.'" And this, keep in mind, occurred after the dekulakization of the early thirties which cost an estimated 8 million human lives.*


*Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Book 3: "Totalitarianism," Chapter 10: "A Classless Society," (1973) p 310 fn15
Souvarine, op cit, p. 669


Hmm. . . contemporary European and Soviet Communist authors, citing Soviet state security sources, writing before the war, referenced in the seminal work on totalitarianism by one of the foremost leftist political philosophers of the 20th century. Could be they were just joshing us all because hey, an unattributed article published on an obscure regional website of the Canadian Marxist-Leninist political party -- yeah, that could be correct.

[Ikonoklast]

13. Anyone that apologizes for one of the greatest mass murderers

in history is an idiot.

[IMPERIUM V]

19. In Search of a Soviet Holocaust

A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right

By Jeff Coplon

Originally published in the Village Voice (New York City), January 12, 1988.

There was indeed a famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. It appears likely that hundreds of thousands, possibly one or two million, Ukrainians died -- the minority from starvation, the majority from related diseases. By any scale, this is an enormous toll of human suffering. By general consensus, Stalin was partially responsible. By any stretch of an honest imagination, the tragedy still falls short of genocide.

In 1932, the Soviet Union was in crisis. The cities had suffered food shortages since 1928. Grain was desperately needed for export and foreign capital, both to fuel the first Five-Year Plan and to counter the growing war threat from Germany. In addition, the Communist Party's left wing, led by Stalin, had come to reject the New Economic Plan, which restored market capitalism to the countryside in the 1920s.

In this context, collectivization was more than a vehicle for a cheap and steady grain supply to the state. It was truly a "revolution from above," a drastic move towards socialism, and an epochal change in the mode of production. There were heavy casualties on both sides -- hundreds of thousands of kulaks (rich peasants) deported to the north, thousands of party activists assassinated. Production superseded politics, and many peasants were coerced rather than won to collective farms. Vast disruption of the 1932 harvest ensued (and not only in the Ukraine), and many areas were hard-pressed to meet the state's grain requisition quotas.

Again, Stalin and the Politburo played major roles. "But there is plenty of blame to go around," as Sovietologist John Arch Getty recently noted in The London Review of Books. "It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest."

Such a balanced analysis, however, has never satisfied Ukrainian nationalists in the United States and Canada, for whom the "terror-famine" is an article of faith and communal rallying point. For decades after the fact, their obsession was confined to émigré journals. Only of late has it achieved a sort of mainstream credibility -- in Harvest of Despair, shown on PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and at numerous college campuses; in The Harvest of Sorrow, an Oxford University Press account by Robert Conquest; in a "human rights" curriculum, now available to every 10th-grade social studies teacher in New York State; and in the federally-funded Ukraine Famine Commission, now into its second year of "hearings."

After 50 years on the fringe, the Ukraine famine debate is finally front and center. While one-note faminologists may teach us little real history, they reveal how our sense of history is pulled by political fashion until it hardens into the taffy of conventional wisdom. And how you can fool most of the people most of the time -- especially when you tell them what they want to hear.

http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html

[originalpckelly]

35. You know they had to bury the people.

It's probably possible to find the graves. If 20 million people die, I'm pretty there's going to be some kind of evidence somewhere.

[blindpig]

37. "some historians" are full of shit.

Lots of information in thread linked below:

Our attempt to examine the repression of the Stalin period from the point of view of social history and penology is not meant to trivialize the suffering it inflicted or to imply that it was “no better or worse” than in other authoritarian states. Althbugh repression and terror imply issues of politics and morality, above all for those who perpetrate orjustify them, we believe that scholars can also study them as a question of historical precision. The availability of new data permits us to establish more accurately the number and character of victims of the terror and to analyze the Stalinist repressive system on the basis of specific data rather than relying on the impressions and speculations of novelists and poets. We are finally in a position to begin a documented analysis of this dismal aspect of the Soviet past.

http://socialistindependent.org/board/index.php?topic=38.0

[Journeyman]

2. Etched on the wall beside the eternal flame at Piskarevsky, the words of Olga Berggolts. . .

Here lie the people of Leningrad,
Here are the citizens -- men, women, children --
And beside them the soldiers of the Red Army. . .
We cannot number the noble
Ones who lie beneath the eternal granite,
But of those honored by this stone
Let no one forget, let nothing be forgotten.

It isn't the numbering of the dead (impossible, even when the death was fresh), it's the remembrance, and the dedication required to minimize the need for further memorials such as Piskarevsky, "largest cemetery in the world by the number buried therein."

[Endangered Specie]

4. I don't suppose they'd like to count the number of Chechen, Georgian, and

Afghani civilians theyve killed over the years?

[Tartiflette]

8. I would hazard a guess

that it is less than the number of vietnamese, cambodians, iraqis, afghanis, serbians, guatemalans, haitians etc, than the US has killed over those same years. But who among the major powers counts civilian deaths?

[IndianaGreen]

9. Your ignorance of Afghanistan's history is amazing!

The Soviets came into Afghanistan at the request of the existing Marxist government, a government that had given women full equality and university education BTW. They nearly defeated the forerunners of the Taleban and Al-Qaeda until the US, blinded by anti-communist ideology and itching to "get even" for Vietnam, decided to back the very Islamic fundamentalists that are killing our troops today. How clever was that?

Communists had nothing to do with the war in Chechnya, a war started by oligarchs Boris Yeltsin and continued by Putin.

As to Georgia, they started the war in South Ossetia while peace negotiations were ongoing. Don't you read the British press, or do you rely on MSM for your information?

[provis99]

22. your ignorance of the soviet invasion is amazing

The Russian KGB assassinated the leader of Afghanistan, Amin, and put a rich thug in his place, Babrak Karmal. When the people of Afghanistan revolted against this thug, the Russians invaded to suppress the popular uprising. You seem to be weak on facts when defending communists.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

29. the Carter Administration had a part to play

Zbigniew Brzezinski has boasted since the 1990s that the Soviet-Afghan War was because of a trap he laid for them in Afghanistan so the Soviets could have "their Vietnam."

[Posteritatis]

12. Sorta on topic...

A friend plugged http://fima-psuchopadt.livejournal.com/2564781.html at me today.

Some guy took photos of wartime Leningrad (I think it's the siege, at least; I recognize barrage balloons and the city's name in the first picture), took photos from the exact same spots in modern Leningrad, and composited them together.

It's pretty impressive work, and also surprising how much endured given what happened to the city.

[Journeyman]

14. Fascinating photos, very well-composited. . .

thanks for sharing the link.

[IMPERIUM V]

18. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the Soviet people

for their heroic struggle to the death against fascism. They sacrificed so much, but for all of that, they don't get nearly enough credit for actually DEFEATING the NAZIS. Especially from Americans for some reason.

[provis99]

21. they don't get credit, because

they started off as collaborators with Nazi Germany, not enemies. Stalin's Soviet Union brutalized Poland, Romania, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia before their Nazi allies turned on them. They fought the Nazis out of survival instincts, not out of some great moral idealism. No wonder the western allies were cynically happy to see communism and Nazism slug it out in Russia; they were both rotten, imperialist societies.

[IMPERIUM V]

23. "they started off as collaborators with Nazi Germany, not enemies."

Stalin 'planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'

Stalin was 'prepared to move more than a million Soviet troops to the German border to deter Hitler's aggression just before the Second World War'

Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.

Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history, preventing Hitler's pact with Stalin which gave him free rein to go to war with Germany's other neighbours.

The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.

The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin's generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.

But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, came on August 23 - just a week before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby sparking the outbreak of the war. But it would never have happened if Stalin's offer of a western alliance had been accepted, according to retired Russian foreign intelligence service Major General Lev Sotskov, who sorted the 700 pages of declassified documents.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/3223834/Stalin-planned-to-send-a-million-troops-to-stop-Hitler-if-Britain-and-France-agreed-pact.html

[argyl]

24. 80% of all German casualties were incurred on the Eastern Front,fighting the Soviets.

While the Brits and Americans were fighting in North Africa Friedrich Pauling was surrendering the 6th German Army to the Red Army in Stalingrad.

When a Western Front was established we were up against 60 German divisions. There were 250 German divisions against the Red Army,desperately trying to keep them out of Germany.

Say what you want about what an SOB Stalin was and you won't get much objection from me. But Russia was always Hitler's objective and the nonaggression pact he signed with Stalin was one he never had any intention of honoring.

His aggression was always to the East; a willing Austria,Czechoslovakia and then Poland.Never made any noise about German citizenry under foreign control in,for example,the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. Had the European Allies acquiesced to the Polish invasion he may have begun making demands on territories to Germany's West but as that triggered World War II we'll never know.

So as far as fighting the Nazis we owe the Soviets a large debt of gratitude. Not only were they bled white by Hitler's Army,they also had to contend with Stalin's oppression.

And while the Red Army was brutalizing lands it had conquered American GIs were handing out candy bars to cute little European street urchins. The whole world loved the USA at WWII's end.

And that was almost 65 years ago. Since then we've accumulated more blood on our hands than any other country has by far. We've lost the moral high ground. What does that say for our society?

[Thothmes]

25. The figure that I have always heard is that

9 our of every 10 German soldiers killed, we killed on the Eastern Front.

[LanternWaste]

38. There was a saying in the Soviet Army circa '44-'45 that went...

There was a saying in the Soviet Army circa '44-'45 that went, "The Western Democracies bought victory with American Spam (referring to the Lend-Lease programs) and paid for it with Russian blood."

Difficult for me to argue with that...

[Posteritatis]

27. No, they don't get credit because they were the Bad Guys in the Cold War

It pretty much is that simple. The Soviets won the war in Europe, and no amount of disliking their leadership can really change that.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

28. Your recollection of history is a little off

While the Soviet Union did pursue shameful aggressive policies against Finland and the Baltic States, Slovakia was invaded by Nazi Germany and made a German puppet. Romania's democratically-elected government was toppled in a Nazi-backed coup (the government had hitherto been friendly to the West and Soviet Union).

The Soviet Union had continuously asked Britain and France for an alliance against Nazi Germany since the mid-1930s. The Western Allies turned their backs and watched Spain's democratically-elected government get toppled by Nazi and Italian Fascist-backed forces. The West rubberstamped Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia because Western elites admired Hitler for his anti-communism and his guarantee of property rights and big business.

Britain, France and USA were also hardly innocent in the imperialist stakes either.

[emilyg]

31. You know your history.

[SergeyDovlatov]

34. exactly right!

[SergeyDovlatov]

33. and why Russian made a non-aggression pact with Germans?

Becase Britain and France refused to sign a mutual defense pact with Russia against germany earlier.

You see Britain and France hoped that Germany will attack Russia, both countries weaken each other, and then Britain and France can divide the spoils. So, after they refused, Russia signed up the pact with Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact

Starting in mid-March of 1939, the Soviet Union, Britain and France traded a flurry of suggestions and counterplans regarding a potential political and military agreement.<16> The Soviet Union feared Western powers and the possibility of a "capitalist encirclements", had little faith either that war could be avoided or in the Polish army, and wanted guaranteed support for a two-pronged attack on Germany.<17><18> Britain and France believed that war could still be avoided and the Soviet Union, weakened by purges,<19> could not serve as a main military participant.<17> The French, as a continental power, were more anxious for an agreement with the USSR than the British, were more willing to make concessions, and more aware of the dangers of an agreement between the USSR and Germany.<20> On April 17, Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov outlined a French–British–Soviet mutual assistance pact between the three powers for five to 10 years, including military support, if any of the powers were the subject of aggression.<16> Although informal consultations started immediately after that, the main negotiations began in May.<16>

For months, Germany had secretly hinted to Soviet diplomats that it could offer the better terms for a political agreement than could Britain and France.<21><22><23> On April 17, the same day as Litvinov's proposal to Britain and France, the German Deputy Foreign Minister's account states that the Soviet ambassador told him, in their first conversation in a year, that "there exists for Russia no reason why she should not live with us on a normal footing" and "from normal, the relations might become better and better",<24> though this could be an exaggeration or inaccurate recounting of the Soviet officials' statement.<25> Future conversations on the topic in Berlin were made with lower level officials working under the cover of a Soviet trade mission.<26>

[emilyg]

32. They get credit from me.