Here is a section from Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martens that I think is vital for a number of reasons. It shows how exaggerated the claims of oppression during Stalin's times are, and it shows the utter dishonesty of academics like Conquest. They have to lie through their teeth about socialism and its history, otherwise they know they could never get people to support the murderous, disastrous system of capitalism.

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Here is the passage:

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We would now like to address the Gulag and the more general problem of the number of imprisoned and dead in the corrective work camps, the word Gulag meaning Principal Administration of the camps.

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Armed with the science of statistics and extrapolation, Robert Conquest makes brilliant calculations: 5 million interned in the Gulag at the beginning of 1934; more than 7 million arrested during the 1937--1938 purges, that makes 12 million; from this number one million executed and two million dead of different causes during those two years. That makes exactly 9 million politically detained in 1939 `not counting the common law'.

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Conquest's figures and those that refute his claims all come from Nicolas Werth, `Goulag: les vrais chiffres', op. cit. . See also Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov, op. cit. .

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Now, given the size of the repression, Conquest starts to count cadavers. Between 1939 and 1953, there was an average annual mortality `of around 10 per cent'. But, during all these years, the number of detained remained stable, around 8 million. That means that during those years, 12 million persons were assassinated in the Gulag by Stalinism.

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The Medvedez brothers, those `Communists' of the Bukharin--Gorbachev school, essentially confirmed those revealing figures.

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There were 12 to 13 million people thought to have been in concentration camps during Stalin's time'. Under Khrushchev, who reawoke hopes for democratization', things went much better, of course: in the Gulag, there were only some 2 million common law criminals left.

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Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 19.

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Up to now, no problem. Everything was going just fine for our anti-Communists. Their word was taken for granted. Then the USSR split up and Gorbachev's disciples were able to grab the Soviet archives. In 1990, the Soviet historians Zemskov and Dugin published the unedited statistics for the Gulag. They contain the arrivals and departures, right down to the last person.

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Unexpected consequence: These accounting books made it possible to remove Conquest's scientific mask.

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In 1934, Conquest counted 5 million political detainees. In fact there were between 127,000 and 170,000. The exact number of all detained in the work camps, political and common law combined, was 510,307. The political prisoners formed only 25 to 35 per cent of the detainees. To the approximately 150,000 detainees, Conquest added 4,850,000. Small detail!

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Annually, Conquest estimated an average of 8 million detainees in the camps. And Medvedev 12 to 13 million. In fact, the number of political detainees oscillated between a minimum of 127,000 in 1934 and a maximum of 500,000 during the two war years, 1941 and 1942.

The real figures were therefore multiplied by a factor of between 16 and 26. When the average number of detainees was somewhere between 236,000 and 315,000 political detainees, Conquest `invented' 7,700,000 extra!

Marginal statistical error, of course. Our school books, our newspapers, do not give the real figure of around 272,000, but the horror of 8,000,000!

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Conquest, the fraud, claims that in 1937--1938, during the Great Purge, the camps swelled by 7 million `politicals' and there were in addition 1 million executions and 2 million other deaths.

In fact, from 1936 to 1939, the number of detained in the camps increased by 477,789 persons (passing from 839,406 to 1,317,195). A falsification factor of 14. In two years, there were 115,922 deaths, not 2,000,000. For the 116,000 dead of various causes, Conquest adds 1,884,000 `victims of Stalinism'.

Gorbachev's ideologue, Medvedev, refers to 12 to 13 million in the camps; under the liberal Khrushchev, there remained 2 million, all common law. In fact, during Stalin's time, in 1951, the year of the greatest number of detained in the Gulag, there were 1,948,158 common law prisoners, as many as during Khrushchev's time. The real number of political prisoners was then 579,878. Most of these `politicals' had been Nazi collaborators: 334,538 had been convicted for treason.

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According to Conquest, between 1939 and 1953, there was, in the work camps, a 10 percent death rate per year, some 12 million `victims of Stalinism'. An average of 855,000 dead per year.

In fact, the real figure in peace time was 49,000. Conquest invented a figure of 806,000 deaths per year. During the four years of the war, when Nazi barbarity was imposing unbearable conditions on all Soviets, the average number of deaths was 194,000. Hence, in four years, the Nazis caused an excess of 580,000 deaths, for which, of course, Stalin is responsible.

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Werth, who denounces Conquest's falsifications, still does his best to maintain as much as possible the myth of Stalinist `crimes'.

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`In fourteen years (1934--1947), 1 million deaths were registered in the work camps alone.' So Werth also blames socialism for the 580,000 extra deaths caused by the Nazis!