Talk:Gulag/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

Collection of publications and photo about Gulag - disputed?

I included an external link to http://gulag.ipvnews.org/ - Collection of publications and photo about Gulag by IPV News (Russian). The content is very interesting and very graphic. However, someone disputed correctness of the site's contents. I have checked what exactly was disputed. It is claimed that some of the photos published by IPV news were known previously, and there is nothing new about them - see http://a-dyukov.livejournal.com/22061.html?mode=reply (Russian). There was nothing else. There are no any doubts from any side that the photos are authentic. The site by IPV news includes also an interesting article about special KGB/FSB detachments who are responsible for "active measures" in the internet: http://gulag.ipvnews.org/article20060916_01.php Biophys 03:04, 1 November 2006 (UTC) .

Yes, their being authentic was disputed. Examples included a photo, claimed to be from a Soviet camp, but in fact -- from a Nazi camp.

The site itself. Hmm. A random article. [1] "Why did THIS happen?!" Let's look on it:

"This atrocity and slavery is eternally written in genes of Russians as the nation, it came in their subconsciousness during the centuries of Russian history."

"This nuclear dinosaur will of course share the fate of all different dinosaurus, it's doubtless, and it's this that will denote in the nearest future the historical progress of the humankind. The question is only in time and price -- how many will it manage to eat before it's death..."

Nice, don't you think so? Who is the author? Boris Stomakhin! Ah, Boris Stomakhin! He was recently jailed for fomenting national and religious strife, and calls for carrying out extremist activity. [2] Nice, don't you think so? ellol 11:57, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Where has he been jailed?In Russia?Celasson (talk) 04:13, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Not NPOV / Conditions

The GULAG was generally oriented towards keeping its labour force in humane condition ...

Are you kidding me? This article is a disaster and ought to be locked. It positively reeks of political agenda. As for the estimate of the number of victims, which is lower than those commonly cited, there should at the very least be a discussion of the difficulty in reaching a single number, and mention of the fact that reputable sources reach different conclusions on the subject. But suggesting that working conditions were "humane" goes beyond the pale. Is spending the night huddled against a corpse in the hopes of getting an extra bread ration in the morning, as my father did in 1944, 15 years old at the time, evidence of a humane working condition? 128.255.85.47 18:41, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Seconded - as I said at the end of the 'fatalaties' section of this talk page, the amount of defense and support of a ghastly soviet policy, perhaps equal to or perhaps surpassing the nazi holocaust depending which figures are cited, is shocking, and the evidence of this worrying bias is clear to see in the article. vwozone 21:59, 2 Jan 2006 (UTC)

Thirded if i may say so. After reading this article and still having a living grandfather who went through Solovki, this entire article simply disgusts me. It reads as a rebuttal and a denial of the fact that many millions of Russian people as well as Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanins and many others perished in the Gulags, in fact, a great many more then in the NS concentration camps and the fact is that Germans copied all of the elements and framework of the Soviet Gulags for their own system.

This article reads as if Mr. Putin had one of his new whitewash-stalin "historians" write it for him. To people who say that these were not concentration camps, you are disgraceful and brainwashed or hide a political agenda. If you deny that millions of people perished in purges and exterminations (the conditions were specifically kept as to have you last a certain number of days, after which a new shipment was made and you were dead and replaced, if you were not fit for labor, you were killed) in the Gulags, then you're also denying the Holocaust or you have a reason to spread your bias and propaganda. Please replace this article with something a little less NKVD censored.

On one occasion 6,114 peasants, described as "backward elements," were dumped on the uninhabited island of Nazino; after three months 4,000 of them were dead, and those who survived had become cannibals. Yet the conditions were "humane" in the Gulags the article states. People were tortured, maimed, killed, raped, turned into cannibals yet this article says the camps were not for extermination. Where did the author get this idea? Just because the Soviets said it was a labor camp means it was a labor camp? Nazis said the exact same thing, you will find nowhere in the German documents that Auschwitz was an extermination camp. Yet it is accepted as a death camp everywhere, but Soviet camps aren't? A double standard isn't it.

Regarding my edits in the "Conditions" section: while it is flattering to see one's own work quoted here, the use of the article authored by L. Borodkin and myself in this context stroke me as not quite appropriate. Our piece makes an argument about administrative policies and intentions and does not talk all that much about actual conditions in the camps. Also, whoever added this reference simply copied three various, almost arbitarily chosen paragraphs (verbatim, if one ignores some slight inaccuracies) without clarifying in which ways the information therein is of relevance in the given context.

Thus, I cut most of the quoted text and attempted to write instead some sentences containing some information a reader might actually expect in this section. These additions are preliminary and might well be modified or expanded. The last sentences in the section (about categories) are still highly unsatisfactory, but I don't have unlimited time so I just let them stand as they are. S. Ertz 19:05, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Your edit, while being a considerable improvement, deleted several details. In the future please don't do this. If you delete some fact, you better explain your deletion. `'mikka 22:01, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

You are right, I deleted/significantly cut some passages. Let me explain, then, that most of them simply gave a distorted picture of the findings of the article from which they were taken (and, in fact, of "conditions" in the camps as well).

In the original text of the article, the passage including details about regulations concerning the receipt of monetary bonuses, which I have cut, is followed by several paragraphs that (1) show just how paltry these sums actually were and (2) present a case study of how the administration of an important camp complex repeatedly diminished these payments to prisoners in order to save costs.

Also, after the sentences about the GULAG permanently sending out orders and regulations, which I have cut/qualified, our article goes on: "In contrast, camp managers (and their immediate subordinates) [...] in many cases appeared less interested in maintaining bearable living and working conditions, and often proved crude, cruel, and indifferent in their dealings with prisoners."

As I said, the article is mostly about administrative policies of the central agencies. Thus it focuses on the motivations prevailing at the top level rather than on conditions "on the ground". Yet this does not mean that it would lend itself easily to the construction of an argument that conditions in the camps were "just fine".

Finally, I now realize that I also deleted some details about the benefits of being a Stakhanovite in the camps. If others deem this information essential, one might well restore it. Yet as I understand, this ought to be an encyclopedia article that provides, first and foremost, the *key* facts about a phenomenon. One might argue what amount of more detailed information it might include in addition to those. However, I would argue that, in general, one should avoid including details about just one aspect while completely omitting other, more significant things, since the resulting overall picture will necessarily be a skewed one. From an enormous amount of sources and a vast literature we learn about hunger, exposure to severe climatic conditions, exhaustion, deprivation, humiliation, debasement, arbitrary and cruel treatment, violence, sickness, parasites, and, last not least, death. Not at all times and places and not for every single prisoner these were daily experiences. But in the system as a whole, most of them were quite common, and some were ubiquitous. I would suggest that readers should learn about this before they are told, for instance, whether prisoners were officially entitled to receive 100 or 150 rubles a month. S. Ertz 01:03, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Not disagreeing with what you said, any detail is a valid piece of information in an encyclopedia. If you feel that the "100-150" skews the picture, you may compare this number with an average salary at this time. Similarly in other cases. Once again, simply deleting is not an option. Wikipedia articles grow from multiple contributions, but this happens unevenly, and there is no reasons to panic when at some moment some pieces are out of balance. Surprisingly enough things eventually get worked out, even if not as fast as one might want. `'mikka 03:02, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I understand that you (as many of us) are a busy person and not always have the time to address some issue. If you are removing some pieces (rather than simply rephrasing them), you are advised to move them into the talk page, so that other editors may find better use of them (unless it is patent nonsense or lie). `'mikka 03:06, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Kolyma

Please take note of my comments below on the Kolyma page. If I am not mistaken, until an hour or two ago it was still under the Russian History project - like Gulag - but that category seems to have been removed. We need to resolve the NPOV dispute quickly in view of the high political importance of Kolyma in Europe.

I came to this page with no preconceived ideas. I saw the NPOV notice at the top and also the requirement for footnotes. I therefore decided to investigate the claims made and also look for counter arguments and evidence of a possible alternative interpretation. On this basis, I have undertaken a comprehensive edit of this article, in the light of other related articles, e.g. Gulag, other language pages, and links. In this connection, I have posted messages on the pages of Guinness man and of others involved in the hope that there would be some kind of reaction. I have also sent emails to some outside experts on the matter. Unfortunately, the only other contribution to the Kolyma page I am aware of has been a minor spelling change by Chris the speller. I have also followed up on the claim that there are no authentic references. I believe I have now provided all that can reasonably be expected - and certainly more than you can find on other pages relating to prison camps. Perhaps someone can tell me how I can have this page officially reviewed or how the warnings about neutrality and refernces at the top of the article can be removed. Ther may be a procedure that is not listed in the guidance. If I have no response on this within 24 hours, I will follow the guidance I have found and create new pages as follows:

A page on the Kolyma river (similar to those in most of the other language versions. (This will probably be the Kolyma (River) page.) A page on the Kolyma region (today's economy, industries, climate, relations with Alaska, future potential. A page on the Kolyma Gulag (with more or less the same philosophy as the Polish page on this but with much more detail and references. This may not be the optimal solution as there is also a notice on the Kolyma page that it is part of the Russian history project! I would like to point out that in Europe the Kolyma issue has reached a high level of attention and importance. The former Danish foreign minister, Mogens Lykketoft, - who has had years of experience with Russian policy - is about to launch a cross-party initiative to support the creation of a documentation centre/archive on Kolyma and the Soviet forced labour prison camps. When people go to our English-language Kolyma site and see the notice on lack of neutrality, it makes a very weak case for the reliabilty of Wikipedia. I hope there will be some reactions to this today or tomorrow. --Ipigott 00:05, 19 January 2007 (UTC)--Ipigott 00:31, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

I removed the tags and cleaned the text a bit. I believe that the issues are closed. `'mikka 02:34, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Mikka for your rapid response and clean-up. I contacted a number of contributors to Kolyma but you have been the only one to respond in a meaningful way. I also agree with you that the last section belongs more properly to the Gulag page. I'll try to find a citation on Stalin. If not, the sentence should simply be deleted unless the original contributor Yosef52 can come up with something himself.

z/k

Mr. Mikka You have deleted without comments my insert concerning originating of acronym zk (зек). That was developed by 1-st Chief of GULAG Lazar Kogan in the beginning of 1930-s. So I have a question: are you a volunteer of ADL? --83.237.166.246 18:54, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

What is the source of your claim? Not to say that Kogan was not "the first chief" of Gulag. `'mikka 00:33, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

z/k issue clarified. `'mikka 00:10, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

American Gulags

In the past few years it has become common to refer to the American Guantanamo prison as a "Gulag," due to the lack of due process and the indeterminate terms being visited upon prisoners there. Is a mention of this appropriate for this article? BushpigsGoneWild 05:41, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Not sure that it would. As far as I've read it Gulag prisoners served set terms, often extremely harsh (10 to 20 years) which given a fatality rate in the camps of 5% was sometimes a death sentence. If they did survive the term, they were frequently re-arrested and given another term. I don't think the legal limbo comparison helps. Under Soviet law, the gulag prisoners were guilty of political crimes - it was of course a travesty of justice as normally understood, but it's not really the same as the Guantanomo detainees. I think the observation about legal limbo for the detainees is interesting, but inserting it here really counts as original research and it's not supported by reliable sources. Isn't it going to end up being a very POV point about Guantanamo? Even thought the detainees there may not have due process, they aren't subject to forced labour, torture, rape or execution for minor infringements of rules. It's worth not reducing everything to 'being the same as the gulag'. Adamjamesbromley 15:14, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

• I see your points generally, but Gitmo IS being referred to as an American Gulag in many places, which is why I brought it up. I'm also not sure all Soviet gulag prisoners served definite terms. Gitmo also is seen as a travesty of justice by many, and I'm not sure you can really say prisoners there haven't been tortured, since it is well-established that waterboarding, hypothermia, sleep-deprivation, and "stress positions" have been used there. Sleep deprivation was one of the favorite Soviet methods per Solszhenitzyn. BushpigsGoneWild 01:11, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

• OK. But I don't this article is the right place to debate the issues surrounding Guantanamo. I'm sure it may have been described in the media as the 'American gulag', Tony Blair and George Bush have been called war criminals in plenty of newspapers but you wouldn't add that to their pages. Gitmo may well be a travesty of justice, but I think calling the American gulag will be misleading. For a start there's only one camp, so it's a gulag system of one. Granted there may be used of torture (but still nothing like as bad as the Soviet system), but let's be clear about the questions of degree. In the Soviet gulag, 1 in 20 prisoners died every year, in a good year. And also although it doesn't make it OK, there are a few 100 prisoners in Gitmo. The Gulags in Soviet states have 100,000s. The Gulag was a vast parallel state of prisoners and guards within the Soviet stae itself. I can appreciate your point, but it runs the risk of seriously skewing the article away from NPOV. That's all. Perhaps more about the Chinese lao gai or North Korean labour camps would add more? Wouldn't the better place to put that reference be in a piece on Guantanom, with the right references. Might work better there? Adamjamesbromley 08:34, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
  • Good points, but - 1. The controversies over the actions of Bush and Blair vis a vis the war are mentioned on their pages. 2. Even though Gitmo is just one camp, the US also ran secret prisons in Europe where detainees were also mistreated, and then there's Abu Ghraib. 3. Over a hundred of these prisoners have died in US custody. 4. I suppose the real question is how common the use of the phrase "gulag" has to become in order for it to be mentioned in this article. But on balance I agree with you, we're not there yet. BushpigsGoneWild 14:10, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
  • Picking up on your points, I think there are articles on detention, concentration camps etc where you could put that section. There is a reference to American gulag in the Camp Delta page, quoting Amnesty. So perhaps those pages are the right place to make those references? Why not add bits in there? Adamjamesbromley 17:58, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Numbers imprisoned / killed

I see: The total deaths shown by the declassified archives in the GULAG from 1931 to 1953 amount to about 1 million in "corrective labor camps." Another archival document contains the number of roughly 1.6 million deaths. I've just seen a Discovery-type program quoting former guards who suggest that during Stalin's rule (1927-53) some 40 million were imprisoned at one time or another, of whom 15 million died in the camps. Can anyone be more precise? The TV program could be wrong but seemed well made.86.42.202.69 20:52, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

I think the article is probably in need of some serious work. The numbers of inmates seem low, the deaths seem low. To be honest, a lot of the articles on 20th communism seeem a bit shaky. Jacob Peters, banned for numerous violations, went onto lots of stuff and put in spurious pro-Stalinist nonsense. Haven't got the figures immediately to hand but Anne Applebaum's book is pretty definitive.

I've only recently started contributing to articles and this feels like another one to add to my list that need some serious attention. The Stalinism one is filled with dialetic Marxism stuff that has no place in Wikipedia. You're right to flag this up.

Thing is with heavy subjects like this, it takes time to do it justice. Maybe this one should be no 2. Adamjamesbromley 21:28, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Please keep in mind that there are serious reasons to believe that the declassified documents contain correct data: gulag management had a number serious reasons to provide correct numbers in their internal reports and no reasons at all to minimize them. Old works, by Conquest, etc., were largely guesswork. Also, please keep in mind that there is the Memorial Society dedicated to document Stalinist repressions accurately, with numerous membership, and they produced a wealth of publications. I created many articles basing on them. So I would suggest instead of making a horror movie of this single article, let us write more articles about actual events and places, such as Kolyma, Kengir Uprising, or Japanese POWs in the Soviet Union. Bare facts and details say much more than some single number: 20 million prisoners is equally bad as 40 million. `'Míkka 23:47, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Míkka, I support your suggestion, but I doubt if Wikipedia should operate with categories "bad" and "good" in political and historical articles. If we take decimal logarithm of the estimate by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and round it to the nearest integer, this means 10⁵ direct victims, and currently there is no available information to get better precision. May be, after your work we'll be able to estimate better. The unwillness of KGB to publish the detailed data indicates, that the total number can be even larger. As soon as the KGB archieves will be published (perhaps, next year), everyone will be able to estimate the number of direct victims with own program, just counting the number of files in such a database. The named information on victims would allow easy check for completeness. In addition, It is correct to deal with humans naming each by name, not with total number and not with total weight. ("Hello,Beria? That is Frenkel. We just had an accident in our camp; about of a half of workers are killed; survivors will die soon. We need about 10 wagons of prisoners more, could you boost arrests?"). dima 01:01, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I checked Anne Applebaum's book, page 527, for deaths in the Gulag. She puts a very approximate estimate at 2.6 million, with some 15-17 million passing through the camps. In this section she refers to the declassified Gulag documents, but points out that up to half the prisoners were not included in that definition with a wide range of forced labour projects falling under different categories. From my own degree studies in history, I know one needs to be very careful handling raw primary sources. You can't just simply say becauase this Gulag document lists 1.2 million dead, therefore that was the number that died in the camps. It's surely goes without saying that the KGB archives cannot be considered a fully trustworthy source and it's worth deferring to the peer-reviewed recognised experts in this field, particularly those with the most up to date research.

Incidentally I completely agree that it no less a tragedy if a million die than 2 million and Applebaum was very keen to stress that in the section about the cost of the camps. Each statistic is person, sure. But I think Wikipedia ought to be able to provide accurate numbers wherever possible.

It's not really the place for original research and so I would worry about relying on direction interpretation by editors of primary sources. That is no disrespect to those concerned, simply that professional historians who've spent years analysing that kind of source are better filters. Frustatingly it's not the case a single primary source proves anything in isolation.

Seeing as we know that the security organs of the Soviet Union have been involved in murder, torture,assasinations - you name it, they've done it, I query the assumption that we can trust them when it comes to record keeping as well. All sorts of data was falsified in the SU, economic output, harvests, the census etc. This was a system where factual, empiricism was subsevient to political ideology. Adamjamesbromley 08:16, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Please let's not pretend that our own system is immune from this sort of thing. That would be a severe POV error. Obviously the SU was worse, and that's why one of the reasons it fell, but we have an administration in the US now which has fudged many facts in support of an ideology. This is human nature to some degree, but in some cases it is quite deliberate. BushpigsGoneWild 08:41, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

No of course not. But in the West we have the benefits of more open society -more press freedom etc. It's not perfect by any means. But it does tend to uncove falsifications and misdeeds much faster than in a closed society. George Bush is at least subject to some form of scrutiny and on leaving office, even more so. Sadly no such openess exists in Russia, where you now have the ex-head of the FSB in power. Putin described the fall of the Soviet Union as 'greatest tragedy of the 20th century'. That's why I think one needs to have extra caution dealing with any information produces by closed societies. I'm really just counselling against the use of primary sources by editors, who don't have the academic background, because of the major problems associated with them. Adamjamesbromley 09:02, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's accurate to say modern Russia is a "closed" society. It's certainly a lot more open than China is at this point. Westerners are all over Russia these days. BTW, you cite Anne Appelbaum as though she were an objective source - she isn't. She has her own very strong POV. Putin's an autocrat - he probably misses the order of the old SU, as opposed to the uncertainty and chaos going on in Central Asia these days - but he's no Stalin. BushpigsGoneWild 14:06, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Interestingly enough, Appelbaum is cited, but not Zemskov. Zemskov's number of total deaths in Gulag labor camps, if I remember correctly, is at around 1.6 mil, with about 1/2 of those being in three years (1933, 1942, 1943). With respect, Ko Soi IX 05:26, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

According Kurt W. Böhme: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges. 1964, ISBN 978-3769400045 there were 3.060.000 German POW and 1.094.250 from them died.Than were etnic Germans , about 380 000 from them died.( in special sttlements and labour crews of GULAG) That means that only Germans have been killed there or something else?Celasson (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 03:53, 30 January 2010 (UTC).

The Appelbaum numbers are based on precisely the same NKVD data as Zemskov. These numbers are disputed (see my comment below).Biophys (talk) 22:22, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

End of the Gulag?

I see the article current ends its 'History' section with the dissolution of the particular administrative entity in the late 1950's. However, I get the impression (from things like Anatoly Marchenko's My Testimony, etc) that the system was still really going concern in the 1960's, albeit with a lot less prisoners than under Stalin (particularly, a lot fewer political prisoners). Marchenko's detailed description of camp life, and the number of camps, prisons, etc make it clear that little else had changed since Stalin's day - which is why his book caused such a sensation, both in the USSR and in the West, when it came out.

Yes, the name of the organization running the camp system may have changed, but it will still much the same entity - just as the names changes from OGPU to NKVD to KGB, etc, didn't really change the nature of the security police. To me, "gulag" has always been synonomous with "Soviet penal camp system, used to hold both political and criminal prisoners", and a system of that form endured past the late 1950's. That being the case, shouldn't this article cover that later time period as well? I would say the Gulag possibly really only came to an end with Gorbachev's release of all political prisoners in 1987 - although there are clearly some people still being imprissoned today for political reasons. Noel (talk) 19:46, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

The article is about GULAG, not about what Americans understand under the word "gulag". `'Míkka 03:38, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps this article should be moved to GULAG then?. Also, the article has a "Latest developments" section which covers events in 1987, 27 years after GULAG was shut down. So I guess that section is in the wrong article, then?

But at the very least, if this article is only going to cover the labour camp system when it was run by GULAG, then there ought to be another article for the system after 1960 (because very little actually changed in 1960, other than the bureacratic structures; I'm pretty sure the total population in the labour camps was about the same in 1961 as it had been in 1959), and the 'History' section in this article ought to say, at the end, something like "After 1960, the labour camp system was taken over by {Foo}', so that people can easily click through and find the rest of the history of the Soviet labour camp system.

Right now, I haven't a clue where to look for it, if it's not under "Gulag", because that's the only term I've ever heard for it. This is the English-language Wikipedia, not the Russian one, so whatever the English-speaking world (which is more than the US, by the way) means by the generic term "Gulag" (as opposed to the specific organization GULAG) is what should be covered in the "Gulag" article. (And you can blame Solzhenitsyn for us all being confused about the term "Gulag", after his famous book!) Noel (talk) 05:02, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

No I cannot blame Solzhenitsyn, rather y'all, who mostly heard about the book but didn't actually read it. But enuf idle chat. Long time ago I suggested to start a detailed set of articles about Sovie penal labor, see Talk:Gulag/Archive#ITK, ITL, ITU, but obviously people are more interested in sensationalist topics or just adding more strongwords or millions of dead bodies for more drama, rather than to describe all systematically. `'Míkka 05:25, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Hey, it's Wikipedia - just do it! Sounds like a great idea for a series of articles, to me. Noel (talk) 10:23, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

You are probably not aware that I wrote about Stalin/Soviet repressions more wikipedia articles than the rest of you. And I will probably "just do it" as well, when I lay my hands on useful sources. `'Míkka 22:03, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

PS: Some of us actually did read "Gulag" - although I liked 'First Circle' a lot better. Noel (talk) 10:23, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Gen fixes = ?

Why did User:Lightmouse just unhyperlink all or most of the years & what does gen fixes mean? Thecurran 23:40, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Last line of the first section.

It reads "a further millions". I realise this is a tiny thing but I'm not sure whether it should read "a further million" or "further millions". The former seems more correct so I have changed it, if I'm wrong, please edit it back.Finewinescotland 08:21, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Here's your answer. Gatoclass 11:58, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Just wanted to add that the intro on this article encompasses a lot of material and should be broken down and more concise. I was reading above about someone wanting to relate Guantanamo Bay detention camp to Soviet style Gulags. The press has said this, fine, the press sensationalizes a great deal. I can see including it in an article about the Guantanamo Bay detention camp but not here. Guantanamo Bay holds al-qaeda and Taliban and thats about it. Think of the wide array of peoples from all backgrounds and ethnicities held in the gulags, not to mention the sheer numbers. There are not even 400 people detained at Guantanamo Bay currently. While abuses may occur at Guantanamo, detainees are fed about the same amount of food as US forces. How many people died of starvation at the gulags? And like someone mentioned above there are far better comparisons then Guantanamo. The camps set up due to the Malayan emergency would probably be a good choice. And there are numerous other examples of slave labor camps that would relate much better then Guantanamo. Odin1 04:13, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

RE: LAST LINE OF THE INTRO

Check the source: no academic reference. Vague. The article it is linked to says "free labour" , whatever that means, and is about an inmate art exhibition. Does its validity justify this comment? (I think not.) And note "Still" : can we really be sure exactly what is up to date, in 2009? This newspaper is already 4 years old.

WIKI : "The camps in Siberia still house a work force of about a million prisoners.[12]"

Someone got this info from this one line in the news article it sites:

"However the gulag legacy persists and the camps still house a free labour force of about a million prisoners."

^ Carl De Keyzer, Zona at the Impressions Gallery, BBC

12 June 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.35.144.2 (talk) 16:01, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

NKVD massacres

Deleted as irrelevant. Thius article is about gulag. There were plenty of various killings in Soviet Union outside gulag. `'Míkka>t 19:57, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Escapes

From RDH by Clio: from in Rebellion and Escape, chapter ten of Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History. There were, in short, escapes right from the beginning, though weather and location was a factor in determining their frequency. The proximity of many of the earlier camps to Finland was an important incentive in escape attempts. In 1932 alone over 7000 inmates were recaptured trying to cross into Finland. According to the official camp statistics some 45,575 people escaped over the whole system in 1933 alone, of whom 28,370 were recaptured. In Kolyma in the far east of Siberia escapees organised themselves into gangs, stealing weapons and terrorising the local population. -- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 03:37, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Introduction

Several figures in the introduction come from newspaper articles or non-scholarly online sources. It would be best to keep to scholarly sources - of which there are plenty - to the extent possible. This is an article on one of the key (and most ghastly) institutions of the twentieth century, and should be held to a higher standard than other pages. There is plenty in journalism that will contradict (in one way or the other) any given statement on the matter; let us keep to scholarly sources. Feketekave (talk) 10:48, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

• Please provide scholarly sources or prove that the cited sources are false or not reliable. Otherwise your deletion of sourced material is invalid. `'Míkka>t 16:20, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

about finnish gulag victims

--87.94.158.217 (talk) 09:59, 24 June 2008 (UTC)The article says, that after the second world war, there would have been a lot of finns in Gulags. I´d like to know, what is the basis of this information? in war against soviet union, about 2500 finnish soldiers vere taken as POWs, and the territories, finland lost in peace agreement, vere evaquated of finnish population. 400000 people from those territories vere resettled to other parts of finland. I have never heard, that there would have been huge number of finnish civilians or soldiers in Gulags, and couple thousand, (half a promille) in my mind, wouldnt suffice for high figure, if there has been about 7 million other people in those camps? There was finnish speaking russians and finnish communist refugees on those camps during the purges in 1930´s, but i think, most of them were killed before second world war, and in any case, their number hasnt been very high.

Fiction book as sources?

In the Literature section I found several citations that are neither memoirs nor scientific research, for instance, Chabua Amirejibi's book is definitely a fiction. I don't think it's correct to combine scientific books, memoirs and fiction in the same list. So, if nobody minds, I'll split the Literature section onto 3 sub section, accordingly.
Best regards
--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:09, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Zemskov'd data is a reliable sourse.

To everyone why question Zemskov's data. You can find these data in the American Historical Review: Getty, Rittersporn, Zemskov. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence. The American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 4. (Oct., 1993), pp. 1017-1049
Several other authors in their scholarly articles (Steven Rosefielde. Communist and Post-Communist Studies Volume 30, Issue 3, September 1997, Pages 321-331, MICHAEL ELLMAN, Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments, EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, Vol. 54, No. 7, 2002, 1151-1172, ROBERT CONQUEST. Victims of Stalinism: A Comment., EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, Vol. 49, No. 7, 1997, 1317-1319) argue about validity of some Zemskov's conclusions (criticism is generally focused on Zemskov's attempt to obtain Sovet population losses based on the Gulag population size), however, nobody dispute validity of Zemskov's data. Best regards --Paul Siebert (talk) 22:45, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

These Zemskov data, although used by many researchers, were disputed, for example by Antonov-Ovseenko in his book "Beria". The numbers of prisoners currently incarcerated in Gulag were produced by the NKVD/KGB itself. According to Antonov-Ovseenko (who refers to other NKVD documents), the number was actually 5 to 10 times higher, which also explains the high "turnover" of prisoners (1-2 millions per year). Soviet organizations are famous for producing bogus numbers, as supported by numerous sources. All economic production/successes data, for example were fake, and these "official" Gulag data are possibly not exception. One of problems: old Soviet military and intelligence archives are actually closed, so verification is not really possible. So, we should not represent these numbers as fact. They were actually disputed.Biophys (talk) 22:09, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Gulag prisoner mortality rate diagram (a figure) is also based on the same disputed KGB-produced data. It should be removed.Biophys (talk) 22:15, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, all these "data" remain guesswork, because the central NKVD/KGB archives were never really opened. The "organs" only showed a few selected documents to a few selected ("trusted") people like Zemskov. One should read the story of dissolved Ponomarev commission which tried to dig out something there (see a book by Yevgenia Albats who was a member of this commission). As soon as they published the materials about Alexius II, the commission was dissolved and the access was denied.Biophys (talk) 22:39, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi Biophys -

I just checked the 1,533,767 figure - it's not made up; it comes from Getty-Rittersporn-Zemskov (as does the 1934 figure). It's not, however, the highest figure given there - that "honour" corresponds to 1953 (and so I've put that instead).

If we are going to comment on the change in the number of prisoners, it obviously makes a lot of sense to compare numbers from the same source. I don't know what the source of the discrepancy between GRZ and Applebaum is; perhaps Applebaum is counting resettlements or other quasi-penal arrangements outside the GULAG system strictly speaking? Feketekave (talk) 00:22, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

PS. Obviously, the data used by Zemskov is not "official" in the sense of having been admitted by the KGB at the time; rather - unless there has been some very major funny business - it is the data used by the KGB for its own internal purposes. One would imagine that the agency would have wanted to keep track of its own doings accurately, just with logistics in mind. It is true that access to the archives became more difficult again after a brief period of liberalisation in the late 80s/early 90s; memory may serve me ill, but I seem to recall that a coauthor of Zemskov's was bemoaning the fact. Feketekave (talk) 00:27, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

NKVD definitely needed to keep track of its own doings, and I see no reason for them to conceal anything in their classified documents. In contrast, Solzhenitsyn or similar writer (I cannot tell for sure) pointed out that during 1937-38 local NKVD institutions had quotae they needed to fulfill. Therefore I can imagine a situation when they needed to exaggerate the number of arrested "people's enemies" rather than to conceal. In contrast, nobody could explain me the reason for NKVD to understate these numbers in their classified documents.
Another question is the real number of Stalin's victims, that seems to be much higher than about a million of executed "people's enemies", as well as Gulag prisoners. However, that concrete article deals with the latter category only. --Paul Siebert (talk) 02:34, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Feketekave, this is very interesting. I am looking at the book by Applebaum (page 579). She is using exactly the same source as Zemskov: the "official" numbers released by the KGB. It tells 510,30 for 1934 (exactly as Zemskov, which is not surprising - they "count" every single prisoner), but 2,561,351 for 1950, 2,525,146 for 1951, 2,468,524 for 1953 and so on. These numbers were published everywhere. So, if the numbers by Zemskov are different (which page of which book it was?), it means he contradicts his own KGB/NKVD sources. Of course, major point was made by Antonov-Ovseenko who wrote that all these numbers (2,525,146 and so on) are intentional disinformation by the KGB (see cited source). If you tell it was 1,533,767 for 1953, how many it was for 1950 and 1951?Biophys (talk) 02:48, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Biophys, despite you nickname, I am starting to doubt if you are a scientist in a real life. I, for instance, never use words like lying so blatantly when I am trying to establish a truth.

I am not sure Zemskov data to be an absolute truth. However, his papers look like carefully written scholarly article, so they deserve a careful analysis, not accusations. Here is a page 1045 from his article mentioned above (I cannot put all the text here for a copyright issues):

Note on sources

The GARF (TsGAOR) collection we used was that of the GULAG, the Main Camp Administration of the NKVD/MVD (the USSR Ministry of the Interior). This collection consists of nine inventories (opisi), the first of which, that of the Secretariat, contains the main body of accessible data on detainees. To be sure, it was not possible to scrutinize the more than 3,000 files of this opis', so we restricted ourselves to those that promised to tell the most about camp populations. Accurate overall estimates of numbers of victims are difficult to make because of the fragmentary and dispersed nature of record keeping. Generally speaking, we have runs of quantitative data of several types: on arrests, formal charges and accusations, sentences, and camp populations. But these "events" took place under the jurisdiction of a bewildering variety of institutions, each with its own statistical compilations and reports. These agencies included the several organi- zations of the secret police (NKVD special tribunals, known as troikas, special collegia, or the special conference [osoboe soveshchanie]), the procuracy, the regular police, and various types of courts and tribunals. For example, archival data on sentences for "anti-Soviet agitation" held in different archival collections may or may not have explicitly aggregated such events by the NKVD and the civilian courts. Summary data on "political" arrests or sentences may or may not explicitly tell us what specific crimes were so defined. Aggregate data on sentences sometimes include persons who were "sentenced" (to exile or banishment from certain cities) but never formally "arrested"; when we compare sentencing and arrest data, therefore, we do not always have the information necessary to sort apples from oranges. Similarly, our task is compli- cated, as shown above, by the fact that many agencies sentenced people to terms in the GULAG for many different types of crimes, which were variously defined and categorized."15 We believe, however, that despite the lack of this information, we now have enough large chunks of data to outline the parameters and to bring the areas for which we lack data within a fairly narrow range of possibility. Further research is needed to locate the origins of inconsistencies and possible errors, especially when differences are significant. We must note, however, that the accuracy of Soviet records on much less mobile populations does not seem to give much hope that we can ever clarify all the issues. For instance, the Department of Leading Party Cadres of the Central Committee furnished different figures for the total party membership and for its ethnic composition as of January 1, 1937, in two documents that were nevertheless compiled about the same time.16 Yet another number was given in published party statistics.17 The conditions of "perpetual movement" in the camp system created even greater difficulties than those posed by keeping track of supposedly disciplined party members who had just seen two major attempts to improve the bookkeeping practices of the party.1"8 At times, tens of thousands of inmates were listed in the category of "under way" in hard regime camp records," 9 although the likelihood that some of them would die before leaving jail or during the long and tortuous transportation made their departure and especially their arrival uncertain. The situation is even more complicated with labor colonies, where, at any given moment, a considerable proportion of prisoners was being sent or taken to other places of detention, where a large number of convicts served short terms, and where many people had been held pending their investigation, trial, or appeal of their sentences.120 The sources are fragmentary and scattered on colonies, but it seems that A. N. Dugin's attempt (see the Appendixes) to find figures for the beginning of each year- which was checked by V. N. Zemskov-yielded rather accurate results. Even so, we are not certain that errors have not slipped in. Moreover, we do not know at the time of this writing if camp commandants did not inflate their reports on camp populations to receive higher budgetary allocations by including people slated for transfer to other places, prisoners who were only expected to arrive, and even the dead. Conversely, they may have reported low figures in order to secure easily attainable production targets. We made extensive use of a series of statistics that were compiled about 1949 and that followed the evolution of a great number of parameters from 1934 up to 1948.121 We indicated some instances in which current periodic reports of the accounting department furnished slightly different figures from those of 1949 (see the notes to Tables 3, 4, and 6) and one case in which an NKVD document in 1936 gave data similar to but not entirely identical with those calculated after the war (note to Table 8). In these as well as in most other instances, the gaps are insignificant and do not call into question the orders of magnitude suggested by the postwar documents, whose figures are, as a rule, somewhat higher than the ones recorded in the 1930s. A notable exception concerns escapes, because a 1939 report mentioned almost twice as many fugitives for 1938 as the relevant table of 1949.122 Although we have no explanation for this discrepancy at this moment, we can speculate that the fact that a 1939 medical report showed lower mortality figures in hard regime camps in the years between 1934 and 1939 than the 1949 account may be because the latter also includes people who had been executed.123

As regards to Anne Appelbaum, my explanation is as follows.

According to Zemskov, page 1049 of the above mentioned article, by 1 January, 1953 the GULAG population was 1,727,970. At the same date, the population of colonies was 740,554.

1,727,970 (Gulag, Zemskov) + 740,554 (colonies, Zemskov) = 2,468,524 (Gulag, Appelbaum)

In other words, the discrepancy comes from combining Gulag and colony population, made by Appelbaum. Note, I don't claim Appelbaum was lying. The problem is that she seems to be not sufficiently educated to see a difference between a Gulag camp and a colony. And there is one thing I am sure about: Appelbaum, in contrast to Zemskov, didn't do her own research; she used Zemskov's data to criticize him. To my opinion, since this article is devoted to Gulag only, Zemskov's numbers should be used.

I am waiting for your comments on that account. Regards, --Paul Siebert (talk) 03:44, 3 October 2008 (UTC) P.S. And would you be so kind to but back the number of prisoners in the present day US. I think, such a comparison would be useful for the reader.

What??? http://www.demoscope.ru/popul/popul13.html. In the article for the School of Economics in Moscow state university Zemskovs states: The number of prisoners were 2.624.537(1731693 in camps, 740554 in colonies and 152290 in jails) People in the special settlements 2.819.776, 5.444.233 all together, without POWs and internees.Zemskov describes the system as 'similar to Auschwitz and Buchenwald'.Who made from this article such mess???98.166.128.202 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 20:04, 2 February 2010 (UTCCelasson (talk)

So figure for 1934 represented Camps+Colonies, but the figure for 1953 represented only Camps. But Gulag=Camps+Colonies (as in the book by Applebaum). So, the correct number of prisoners in Gulag was 2,468,524. As about Gulag and US, let's not compare apples and oranges. Death camps and modern prisons are different things.Biophys (talk) 04:12, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

• I expected you first to apologize for accusation of reputable researcher in a blatant lying, but you preferred to post factum edit your own comment from "it means he is lying so blatantly that he contradicts his own KGB/NKVD sources." (02:49, 3 October 2008) to "it means he contradicts his own KGB/NKVD sources. " (04:12, 3 October 2008). Since you did it after I have posted my comment and referred to your words, I cannot consider your behavior to be the best way to conduct a discussion.
• The decision to combine Gulag inmates with other prisoner or to count them separately should be made after discussion, not by you solely. I am waiting for your arguments supporting your POV.
• It is impossible to compare apples with oranges. But anybody can compare the number of apples with the number of oranges. I insist on returning the text removed by you back to the article. The reason is quite obvious. The story about NKVD crimes rests on two elephants. First elephants is: "the number of prisoners was immense", the second one is:" their sufferings were terrible". After I inserted the number of American prisoners, it became obvious that the first elephant in actuality was false: the number of Gulag prisoners (in the middle of brutal XX century) was lower than the number of prisoners today in the country that seems to be a stronghold of democracy.
  I think that by elimination of the first (false) elephant we can focus at the second, real problem: the suffering of Gulag inmates were really terrible. However, it is absolutely necessary to refute the first myth because, otherwise, it will be done by Stalin advocates who will use it as an argument to question real Stalin's crimes.
  --Paul Siebert (talk) 04:44, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

By the way, can I consider the fact that Anne Appelbaum relies on Zemskov numbers, not Antonov-Ovseenko's data, as an additional proof for validity of the former (in contrast to the latter)? In addition, can I consider your note about these numbers(according to you, These numbers were published everywhere), that are, in actuality, Zemskov's data, as your recognition of their validity?
Judging by the pages of the Antonov-Ovseenko's book available online [3], it is more fictional book than a scientific research. To my opinion, it should be either removed or accompanied by the explicit notion that these data are highly disputable.
Regards,
--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:59, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Apologize to whom? I guess you are not Zemskov? But let me explain. There are scientists and "scientists". People from the second category are involved in various misconduct like promoting the intentional disinformation, stealing bacterial cultures from the West for the Soviet program of biological weapons, or even testing deadly poisons on people, like Dr. Mairanovsky. Every graduate from the History department at the Moscow State University had a second "military" profession, and the official title of this profesion was "military disinformator" (this second occupation was considered a top secret). Many Soviet scientists lied. Academician Yuri Ovchinnikov published false data in a biological journals to misled his Western competitors. Academician Georgy Golitsyn promoted the "theory" of nuclear winter apparently because he was asked by the KGB. And of course some Soviet scientists blatantly lied to their military supervisers to get funding, including even such science fiction like as creation of the "seismic weapon" allegedly tested in Armenia or an accelerator of charged particles to shout US sattellites in space. So, I know what I am talking about. This is not to imply that Zemskov belongs to the "second category", I simply did not study this question. As about Applebaum, she wrote an exellent, honest and interesting book, very good research. But she relied on the official Soviet data, and we know what it is. The view of Antonoov-Ovseenko is most important because unlike Applebaum, he is not only a historian but someone who actually spend years in Gulag. So, he knows much better than her what he is writing about.Biophys (talk) 14:37, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

The problem is, that the information about possible involvement of Zemskov and other researchers of that type into a disinformation campaign is hardly verifiable. The fact that Ovchinnikov worked for KGB and obtained a tremendous amount of money from the latter is well known to anybody who had a relation to Soviet biophysics at that time. Judging by your nick name, I can propose you also had some relation to his institute, so theoretically I could extend your arguments to yourself and propose that you, being a former Soviet scientist, had also been involved into some disinformation campaign (and I see no way for you to refute my hypothetical accusations).
Please, none, I do not claim that. I just demonstrate that almost everyone can be blamed in that .
In contrast, I believe every researcher, who publish his articles in peer-reviewed journals, presents true data and he is honest in its conclusions unless the reverse has been demonstrated unequivocally. Neither Zemskov's papers nor the articles of his opponents (who question his conclusions, not data) contain anything that allow me to blame him in a deliberate lie.
A constructive and fruitful discussions ends immediately when one side put forward accusation in deliberate lying.
Regards, --Paul Siebert (talk) 18:19, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

What side? Are you talking about you? I did not accuse you of anything. I also did not tell that Ovchinnikov worked for KGB (this is irrelevant here); I only told about his article. I do not object to include Zemskov data and never objected, since these data were widely published.Biophys (talk) 18:56, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Ovchinnkov did not receive money from the KGB as you claim. He received money from the Soviet government, in part to develop program of biological weapons.Biophys (talk) 19:08, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

You are right. And a huge monster at Miklukho-Maclaya street was build to honor Ovchinnikov's enormous merits in development of Soviet molecular biology and biochemistry.... --Paul Siebert (talk) 19:15, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

His "enormous merit" was that he got a lot of funding by convincing Soviet leadership to develop program of biological weapons. But this should be discussed in article Yuri Ovchinnikov.Biophys (talk) 19:27, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Biophys:

you state that

So figure for 1934 represented Camps+Colonies, but the figure for 1953 represented only Camps.

Is this so, or does the figure for 1934 represent only inmates of camps (and the penal system in general; there is more than one category in Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov's tables)? In the former case, we should state comparable figures, and make clear that they stand for the total of camps and colonies; in the latter case, we should keep the figure for 1953 I inserted, to avoid comparing apples and apples+oranges.

As it stands, the article uses scholarly articles (including Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov), a well-written survey by a journalist (Appelbaum) and online newspaper articles as if they were equally reliable sources. At this stage, we can probably do without #3 in the list altogether. I do not know whether there is a clear Wikipedia rule on the matter, but it is probably something we can vaguely agree on.

By the way - if you wanted to condition or moderate some comments you made on Zemskov in the talk page, the standard Wikipedia procedure seems to be to make an edit so that your previous comments appeared literally crossed out but still legible. At least this is what other people do. Just saying.

Feketekave (talk) 22:08, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

PS. On the subject of Zemskov: scholars' reputations should be treated with care, especially if one wants to avoid weakening one's own position by making careless accusations. The political opinions of Zemskov as an individual are not relevant here, and neither does any of us have any right to presume anything on them. As it happens, there's an interview with him online that makes it perfectly clear that he is nothing vaguely resembling a Stalinist. (In case you were worried about that...) Feketekave (talk) 22:10, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

On Antonov-Ovseenko's wrightings
This article deals with earlier Antonov-Ovseenko book, however, it is natural to expect that sources Antonov-Ovseenko used for Beria as well as his manner of the data interpretation remained essencially the same.

Taken from: "A. Antonov-Ovseenko's Book on Stalin: Is It Reliable? A Note" Author(s): Leo Van Rossum
Source: Soviet Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Jul., 1984), pp. 445-447

In the highly interesting debate launched in Soviet Studies, January 1981, concerning the size of the population of the Gulag system, quite a few references have already been made to Antonov-Ovseenko's book on Stalin. According to Steven Rosefielde, the book is an important source for the question under discussion. Stephen Wheatcroft, on the other hand, is rather negative. Whichever of the two is right, a closer look at the book is certainly worthwhile.
Anton Antonov-Ovseenko is the son of a prominent member of the Bolshevik 'Old-Guard', who was liquidated in 1938. At that time Anton was an 18 year old history student in Moscow. He was himself arrested twice and he spent the years 1941-1953 in prisons and forced labour camps. So he acquired an intimate knowledge of the 'Stalinshchina' he is describing in his book. Antonov has without any doubt succeeded in tracing a number of fresh witnesses to and evidence of the crimes of Stalin and his henchmen: on the one hand his witnesses are Old Bolsheviks, who after the destalinisation in 1956 felt free to speak to the son of their former comrade-in-arms (A. Mikoyan, G. Petrovsky); on the other, his own acquaintances from the camps, and further victims of the terror. In addition, the author has been able to collect evidence from some of the accomplices of the Gulag system. The end result of his labours is a book rich in new material.
It says much for the world of dissident historians that, a mere twelve months after the publication of the Russian edition, the samizdat yearbook Pamyat' reviewed it at length. The review appeared under the nom-de-plume of M. Dovner, clearly someone sharing Menshevik Akselrod's interpretation of bolshevism. Dovner is highly critical. He stamps Antonov's treatment of his sources as totally lacking in discrimination. Antonov, according to Dovner, not only fails to examine or establish the proximity of witnesses to events-were they actually involved, or is their evidence hearsay?-but also frequently neglects to inform his readers when a given piece of evidence was collected. (It is worth noting that whilst truth was suppressed before 1956, after that date suppression was, on occasion, replaced by embroidery, a phenomenon insufficiently born in mind by various of Stalin's biographers.) Furthermore, according to Dovner, Antonov fails to compare his material with that collected by other historians.5 Hence, on p. 117 one reads that, in 1932, Stalin murdered his second wife with his own hands. This is presented as an established fact: no mention whatsoever is made of earlier accounts, in which the unfortunate woman is alleged to have committed suicide. Similarly, on p. 275, Antonov states that, in 1941, the Orel isolation prison contained some five thousand political prisoners. As the German advance grew close all were herded into the prison cellars, which were then flooded, the prisoners perishing to a man. His source is the wife of one of these prisoners. In contrast, reviewer Dovner says that mutually corroborative evidence, from a variety of sources, exists, which has it that most of the prisoners were transferred elsewhere; only a minority being executed, and they with the bullet, not by drowning. It is remarkable that elsewhere in the book (p. 207) the prisoners are indeed said to have been shot.
The cavalier manner in which Antonov treats easily verifiable facts does not inspire confidence in that portion of his evidence which is less readily attested. Thus, Bukharin's last signed contribution to Izvestiya appeared in January and not May 1937 (p. 217). Milyukov was never a tsarist minister (p. 277). The difference between life under the Romanovs and under Stalin was not that under the former regime people knew 'exactly which sections of the population were subject to extermination', whilst under the latter the terror was more catholic (p. 126).
Dovner's criticisms, abridged though they must necessarily be here, are born out by my own findings. Material I was able to locate at the International Institute of Social History not only confirms many of his allegations, but drew my attention to a number of further points. On p. 105 it is stated that, in 1917, Lenin included Socialist- Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in his government; p. 129 contains an extremely misleading biography of D. Ryazanov; on p. 288 we read that in 1951 half the population of Moldavia perished in a famine, a gross exaggeration. As an example of the writer's presentation of rumour as fact, I refer to his statement that Lenin had expressed the wish that Rudzutak should succeed Stalin as General Secretary. Roy Medvedev, who is also familiar with this story, refers to it as mere rumour in Let History Judge. However, in the second and far more comprehensive Russian edition of his work, he omits the story completely, presumably because re-examination had convinced him of its worthlessness.
Finally, two remarks on the statistics in Antonov's book which are, according to Rosefielde, so important for a more accurate estimate of the number of victims of the Gulag system. Firstly, Antonov does not present any source for his sensational figure of 156 million for the census population of 1937. Rosefielde's statement that Antonov learned the result of the suppressed census of 1937 directly from some of the incarcerated demographers who had been working on it is sheer speculation. My speculation would be that Rosefielde bases this statement on the circumstance that Antonov does give some biographical information on four demographers who worked on the census of 1937.
My second remark concerns Antonov's calculation of the human losses in the Ukraine between the census of 1926 and that of 1939. He fails to distinguish between two different categories which both censuses follow: the population as such of the Ukrainian republic and those having the Ukrainian nationality (speaking Ukrainian as their mother tongue). Antonov quotes from a Soviet demographic study the data concerning the Ukrainian nationality, which declined from 31.2 million in 1926 to 28.1 in 1939, a decrease of 3.1 million. These figures, however, are presented as reflecting the decline of the population of the Ukraine. Antonov then adds a natural increase of 600,000 a year to these 3 million '... or about 9 million over 14 years . . . Where did those 12 million Ukrainians go?' I am afraid this calculation is totally wrong. First, the definition of 'Ukrainian nationality' was narrower in 1939 than in 1926, as Russification was in full swing in 1939. Second, the Soviet study used by Antonov does contain the data on the population of the Ukraine as well: 29 million in 1926 and 30.9 in 1939.9 This is a rise of 1.9 million instead of a decline of 3.1, which makes a difference of 5 million people! Third, the multiplying factor to be used between both censuses should be 12 instead of 14 as the first one took place in December 1926 and the second one in January 1939. If we accept Antonov's estimate of the yearly natural increase, the correct total would be 7.2 million instead of Antonov's estimated 9 million over 14 years. The final result of my 'calculation' would be a population decrease of 5.2 million, a figure equally horrible in terms of the lives lost as the one presented by Antonov from a moral point of view. However, there is a difference between 12 million and 5.2 million deaths from a demographic point of view. All in all, my conclusion is that Antonov's book should be used with the utmost care. Stephen Cohen's introduction, which sets the book on a pedestal with the works of Roy Medvedev and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the enthusiastic reviews in The New Leader (5 October 1981) and Die Zeit (9 December 1983), continue to mystify me.

Another paper Glasnost' and the Gulag: New Information on Soviet Forced Labour around World War II
Author(s): Edwin Bacon
Source: Soviet Studies, Vol. 44, No. 6 (1992), pp. 1069-1086

also question the validity of some Antonov-Ovseenko's conclusions and sources.
Obviously one of the first questions to be addressed with regard to the newly published archival material on the size of the Gulag population is whether or not it is genuine. The statistics summarised in Table 2 are from documents found in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution. It has been charged by A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko, whose own estimates of prison and camp inmates in 1938 stand at some 16 million, that these documents are false and untrustworthy. Such a charge, however, is vigorously refuted by Zemskov, the Soviet academic at the forefront of the current spate of archival revelations. He argues that it would be impossible for whole archive collections to be falsified, otherwise each camp would have been required to have two administrative offices, one producing genuine records, and one false. This argument is based on the view that the central authorities must have had a correct record of the manpower available to them in the labour camps, and Zemskov notes that the figures which he reveals coincide with the evidence of documents signed by Ezhov, Beria and Stalin.

One more source Correspondence
Author(s): A. Maksudov, Jan Adam, Michael Rywkin
Source: Soviet Studies, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Oct., 1984), pp. 622-624
Antonov-Ovseenko is neither a demographer nor a scholar and he was not connected with the 1937 census; he has simply repeated rumours circulating in Moscow in 1937. In his book one finds a series of such rumours about events that transpired there; but, as was shown in the review of his book that appeared in the dissident journal Pamyat' (No. 5, 1983), Antonov-Ovseenko does not present a single historical fact that can be verified.
My conclusion is that Antonov-Ovseenko's works cannot be considered a reliable scholarly articles. They are a strange combination of memoirs and sociological poll.
--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:24, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

You are very welcome to place this information to article Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, or you can create an article about his book. However your personal conclusions are WP:OR. If you have concerns, you can ask at WP:RS noticeboard about this particular source.Biophys (talk) 18:31, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Most important, Antonov-Ovseenko simply cites a document from archives. This is not a result of his personal research. This document was not challenged in your sources, as far as I can see. They claim something different: that sources by Zemskov were not falsified". Well, that is something debatable and can be discussed. Biophys (talk) 18:33, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

• The decision to include or not to include certain source always is an WP:OR and reflects one's POV, therefore, the latter is always present in every WP article. You can try diminish it, but it always will be present there.
• I don't think obvious logical conclusions to be a WP:OR. Moreover, most of them were made not by myself; I just present opinions of reputable scholars. For instance, Maksudov, a renowned Western sovetologist, states clearly:"Antonov-Ovseenko is neither a demographer nor a scholar...as was shown in the review of his book that appeared in the dissident journal Pamyat' (No. 5, 1983), Antonov-Ovseenko does not present a single historical fact that can be verified.
  A numerous examples presented above demonstrate that Antonov-Ovseenko's conclusions should be theat with a great cautions, and that was clearly stated in the sources cited.
  These conclusions has not been challenged by you. As regards to the sources, Antonov-Ovseenko just tells he saw documents that contained those astronomic numbers. His word cannot be neither confirmed nor refuted, therefore they are beyond the scientific discource.
  By the way, WP:RS states Articles that compare views should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views, and will generally not include tiny-minority views at all--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:47, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Biophys - if I understand correctly, A-O states that sources exist that support his statements, and his statement cannot be shown to be untrue because these sources are not publicly available. I would agree with you that it is a disgrace that the access to the archives has become more restrictive than it was in the early 90s; however, a source that cannot be verified, for Wikipedia's purposes, is as good as no source at all. As it is, we can just take A-O's statements as being based on his scholarly reputation alone - and Paul Siebert's quoted statements on this are relevant. Feketekave (talk) 06:58, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Zemskov's data is not realizable, because he himself relies on the soviet data what is ridiculous. Translate this: http://www.antology.sfilatov.ru/work/proizv.php?idpr=0140005&num=1 maybe you understand little bit more. It is impossible that the article about GULAG has been written /edited from people who has no idea what it was like, GULAG.You need to read more survivor's accounts to get more understanding. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Celasson (talk • contribs) 18:11, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Please, familiarise yourself with the arguments and sources presented in this section. Please, note, that the sources that have been used during the present discussion were high quality articles in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, whereas that source used by you is not.
--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:19, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

My question: why Zemskov is a 'high quality scholar' scholar and Dr Olaf Mertelsmann Associate Professor in Contemporary History and Head of the Centre for the Study of Soviet History at the University of Tartu, Estonia is not a 'high quality scholar'. Who is responsible for awarding the title of scholar in this article?Boris Chavkin in the article for Institute for Central and Eastern European Studies) of the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt gives some figures about POWs during WWII.Official soviet statistics- 2.389.560 German POWs, 356.678 died. German sources ( among them German red Cross) about 3.500.000 POWs, 1.100.000-1.300.000 died.There is a defference 700.000- 1.000.000. So if Semskov gives 1.500.000 it could be 2.500.000, 3.000.000 or 5.500.000.

Celasson (talk)

It is simple. If a scholar's work has been vetted by scientific community (passed a peer-reviewing procedure and cited by other scholars) it is considered reputable. Zemskov's work meet this criteria.
With regards to your analysis, it is amateurish. Try to read the works of serious scholars and you will find that that they dissect the reliability issue with much higher degree of thoroughness, and they ruled out any possibility of forgery.
--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:57, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

I did not talk about any forgery, although fraud in soviet statistics took place and scholars should always remember about that. The idea that in labor camps all deaths were accurately registered seems to be .... let say weird. You say analysis is amateurish without checking my figures, it explains more the article has been written/edited.

http://www1.ku-eichstaett.de/ZIMOS/Netzwerk/Dateien/ChavkinKriegsgefangene.pdf Boris Chavkin (Russian Academy of Sciences, same as Zemskov) states that according official soviet statistic 356.678 German POWs died ( Center for storage of historic documents,f. 1/p. op. 30 e, d. 1), the document his not fake. But in lot of sources the numbers are different: there were about 3 mln German POWs and about 1 mln from them died. If you have some explanations we can leave Zemskov's data, other way here should be stated that the figures are not exact estimations. Regards Celasson (talk) 04:50, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Mortality rate redux

(aka arbitrary break) I find myself agreeing with Biophys, perhaps not so much on level of detail, but that a "rate" table is nearly useless when discussing the GULAG. If the article is to have a such a table, then what is required is a "scale" table, that is, absolute numbers: total # inmates, # inmates who died per year. A "rate" table is derived, not primary, information. —PētersV (talk) 04:26, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Feel free to create it. Frankly, I planned to do that as soon as I got some time. You can find the numbers here: http://www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/AHR/AHR.html --Paul Siebert (talk) 05:16, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Pressed for time here too, but yes, that is the source I was thinking of as well. I do have to ask, are we aware of other possible ranges of values based on other reputable sources? —PētersV (talk) 06:31, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

It was a surprise for me, but most Western scholars (including even Conquest) use these very numbers, although many of them criticize some conclusions the authors made in the article. However, the numbers themselves are generally considered trustworthy. --Paul Siebert (talk) 16:12, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Memoirs and fiction

Combining memoirs and fiction based on authors experiences leaves the impression that that all the books are fictional. Bobanni (talk) 14:21, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

The book by Antonov-Ovseenko about Beria is a solid non-fiction research, and no one ever disputed that. This is not his personal memories. Most important, he cite archive documents.Biophys (talk) 14:50, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Regarding Antonov-Ovseenko writing style, reliability of his sources and scientific community's opinion about him see my comments above.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:44, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Combining memoirs and scholarly books together leaves the impression that that all the books are scholarly. You probably know the famous aphorism: "He is lying as a eyewitness". At least, it is hardly possible to draw general conclusions from most memoirs, because non-scholar witnesses tend to unintentionally understate or exaggerate the scale of events they were involved into.
However, feel free to create a third separate section for memoirs as I proposed above. However, I have no idea what to do with Shalamov's and Solzhenitsyn books: they are not fully memoirs, although they are not pure fiction... Sincerely yours --Paul Siebert (talk) 17:00, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

This is called "primary sources" versus "secondary sources" per WP:Verifiability. Most writings by Shalamov qualify as memories (a primary source). Non-fiction writings by Solzenitsyn (like Gulag Archipelago) qualify as research, as he said himself - a secondary source.Biophys (talk) 19:05, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

I understand that Shalamov's stories were intended by him as exactly that, namely, fiction, though obviously they were based on his experiences in the camps, and may be said to reflect reality in this or that way better than X or Y, at least according to Z or W. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is subtitled "An experiment in literary investigation"; it may be difficult to figure out what to make of that. Feketekave (talk) 22:14, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

This does not really matter, by tales by Shalamov actually qualify as documentary, and Solzenitsyn called his work "an attempt of literary research".Biophys (talk) 22:34, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Some of Solzhenitsyn's material, from the people he interviewed or whose memories he received, is openly included and can be easily separated from the general flow of his novel/essay. I also think Solzhenitsyn qualifies as a good, a scholarly observer and he was a part of that strange wrold for many years, so he is more reliable in gauging the pressure and scale of something than someone who was just there for a few days. That's not to say he is infallible, of course!

On the other hand Applebaum imo is unreliable and sloppy in her attitude to sources, even though she's spoken to many people and done some serious archive researcxh. In an interview she put it that "the people who wrote books were probably the ones who got away lightly /they were nmot killed, eh?/ and the general survival of archive sources on death rates and so on is not great" so we should always assume that the scariest figures are in the right range. That's ridiculous, and very unscholarly; she mythifies history. /Strausszek (talk) 23:37, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Citations

Maybe it is just me, but I cannot find the following figures in the source given (namely, [4] a b c Anne Applebaum. "GULAG: a history" (HTML) (in English). Retrieved on 2007-12-21.):

"From 3 to 24% of Gulag prisoners died annually according to official KGB data [4].

More than 18 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, with a further 6 to 7 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR.[4][5][6] "

Are these figures from Appelbaum's book instead? If so, somebody should find them and give a correct reference with page numbers. As they stand, the citations seem to be erroneous. Feketekave (talk) 19:18, 6 October 2008 (UTC) [4]

To my opinion, since Appelbaum didn't do any original research, it makes sense to utilize the original source of these numbers (i.e. those derived from de-classified archives).

As regards to the official death rate, here they are:

Year 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943
Gulag
population 510,307 725,483 839,406 820,881 996,367 1,317,195 1,344,408 1,500,524 1,415,596 983,974
Died 26,295 28,328 20,595 25,376 90,546 50,502 46,665 100,997 248,877 166,967

Year 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953
Gulag
population 663,594 715,506 600,897 808,839 1,108,057 1,216,361 1,416,300 1,533,767 1,711,202 1,727,970
Died 60,948 43,848 18,154 35,668 27,605 15,739 14,703 15,587 10,604 5,825

You see that official mortality ranged from 91/thousand to 3/thousand. Source (!) Zemskov.

In actuality, the mortality was higher. Some researchers argue that considerable amount of those released from camps died soon after that, so probably because camp administration used premature releases to conceal real mortality. However, that is another story...

By the way, to finally close the A-O issue, let me reproduce a fragment of the Michael Ellman's paper "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments" Source: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54, No. 7 (Nov., 2002), pp. 1151-1172. Discussing the validity of indirect data (in contrast to official NKVD statistics) He states: Conquest's method is the utilisation of a wide variety of personal, first-hand, unofficial, so-called literary sources. Before glasnost' this was the only source available. As Wheatcroft has repeatedly acknowledged, its use enabled Conquest to generate estimates of NKVD killings ('executions') in 1937-38 much more accurately than the sceptics thought. They were also more accurate than the estimates of some Western academics. However, as a result first of glasnost' and then of the collapse of the USSR, we now have much better sources, the new demographic and NKVD data. The unofficial sources are now just one of three possible sources for studying repression, alongside the demographic and NKVD data. The unofficial sources can be of great value for providing a qualitative picture of what happened and for conveying the subjective impressions of those involved. However, when comparing the value of these three sources, it is important to realise that the use of the unofficial sources for generating numerical estimates suffers from a major weakness. It is well known that the unofficial sources are frequently very unreliable as sources of quantitative data. An example of this is Antonov-Ovseenko's underestimate of the USSR's 1937 population. Antonov-Ovseenko fell into the trap of using a (downward) approximation of the normally enumerated population as an estimate of the total population (which also included those enumerated by the NKVD and NKO and those not enumerated at all). Furthermore, the use of unofficial sources introduces an important bias into our study of Soviet repression and penal policy, in favour of politicals and against criminals

For another mistake in quantitative estimation by Antonov-Ovseenko, this time resulting from a misinterpretation of archival data (confusing monthly average with annual figures and hence producing estimates 12 times too high), see Ivanova, G.M. Ivanova, 'GULAG yazykom dokumentov', Novaya i noveishaya istoriya, 2001, 4, p. 152.

Therefore, a number of reputable researchers questioned A-O figures, and I found no sources supporting him. I conclude his book is a marginal research and, according to above mentioned WP rules, should be removed from the article.
All the best, --Paul Siebert (talk) 22:51, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I suppose we'll have to agree on that.

Where does the data for the bar graph come from? Feketekave (talk) 06:04, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

1952: 5,825/1,727,970=3.3 per thousand.

1939: 90,546/996,367=9.08 per thousand

1942: 248,877/1,415,596=17.6 per thousand

Therefore, they are Zemskov's data. By the way, they were calculated based on the Gulag numbers only. The difference between colonies and camps was that the terms in the formers were in between 1 and 3 yeras and conditions were much less severe. Therefore it is necessary to think if it is correct to combine them together.--Paul Siebert (talk) 11:00, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Per hundred, you mean. But yes, you are right, the graph seems to reflect the (camp deaths)/(camp population) ratios in Zemskov correctly. Not completely. It was 3.3 per thousand in 1952, 90.8 in 1939 and 176 in 1942--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:39, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I suppose we should simply state in a note what you have just said: the data comes from Getty-Rittersporn-Zemskov, and the ratios were calculated on camp numbers only - the terms in the colonies were much shorter and the conditions were less severe, etc. Feketekave (talk) 18:01, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I think, we need to also clarify categories, "camp", "colony" and "prison" (prison population amounted few hundred thousand), as well as "zakluchennyi", "ssyl'nyi", "spetsposelenets", "spetspereselenets" and "voennoposelenets". We need to do that in the article, not in the legend.

I also think, a parallel has to be made with other countries, because the number of prisoners in actuality was not too high: in today's USA the number is higher.
I can do that a little bit later. You can do it by youself using, for instance that: http://www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/AHR/AHR.html .
Regards, --Paul Siebert (talk) 18:39, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I wonder whether Zemskov has any data on the total number of people that went through the Gulag at one point or the other; surely that is much higher than the camp population at any given point? I read the article (accessible online) you refer to a long time ago, but I do not recall finding any such statistic. Feketekave (talk) 18:55, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

It is not easy to do beacuse some persons were sentensed twice. The number of polytical+other sentences was in between 15 and 20 millions, close to what the article state. I have to do some search to find the source these numbers come from. --Paul Siebert (talk) 19:10, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I think part of that should be introduced inth the artice

Conquest, who gave astronomical number of Stalin's victims in 1970s, concedes that: "We are all inclined to accept the Zemskov totals (even if not as complete) with their 14 million intake to Gulag 'camps' alone, to which must be added 4-5 million going to Gulag 'colonies', to say nothing of the 3.5 million already in, or sent to, 'labour settlements'. However taken, these are surely 'high' figures." (Victims of Stalinism: A Comment. Author(s): Robert Conquest Source: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 49, No. 7 (Nov., 1997), pp. 1317-1319).
Weathcroft (The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930-45 Author(s): Stephen Wheatcroft Source: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, No. 8 (Dec., 1996), pp. 1319-1353) concedes:

"The nature of Soviet repression and mass killing was clearly far more complex than normally assumed. Mass purposive killings in terms of executions were probably in the order of one million and probably as large as the total number of recorded deaths in the Gulag. In this narrowest category of purposefully caused deaths, the situation is exactly the opposite to that generally accepted. Hitler caused the murder of at least 5 million innocent people largely, it would appear, because he did not like Jews and communists. Stalin by contrast can be charged with causing the purposive death of something in the order of a million people. Furthermore the purposive deaths caused by Hitler fit more closely into the category of 'murder', while those caused by Stalin fit more closely the category of 'execution'. Stalin undoubtedly caused many innocent people to be executed, but it seems likely that he thought many of them guilty of crimes against the state and felt that the execution of others would act as a deterent to the guilty. He signed the papers and insisted on documentation. Hitler, by contrast, wanted to be rid of the Jews and communists simply because they were Jews and communists. He was not concerned about making any pretence at legality. He was careful not to sign anything on this matter and was equally insistent on no documentation.
It is only when we get into the broader categories of causing death by criminal neglect and ruthlessness that Stalin probably exceeds Hitler, but here we have to remember that the USSR was much larger than Germany and that death rates in the best of times had always been significantly higher in Russia than in Germany.
The Gulag was neither as large nor as deadly as it is often presented, it was not a death camp, although in cases of general food shortage (1932-33 and 1942-43) it would suffer significantly more than the population at large. There were not 12 million deaths in the camps as suggested by Maier; and it seems highly unlikely that there were as many as 7 million deaths between 1935 and 1941 as claimed by Conquest citing Mikoyan's son. With a maximum number of inmates of 1.5 million in 1941 the Gulag was nevertheless of demographic significance and more than twenty times as large as the prewar Nazi concentration camp system at its peak following Kristallnacht. But all the same, twenty times as large as pre-war Nazi concentration camps does not make anything like Auschwitz." —Preceding unsigned comment added by Paul Siebert (talk • contribs) 02:26, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

It seems that opinions and estimates are finally converging. Feketekave (talk) 03:22, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

http://www.demoscope.ru/popul/popul13.html. In the article for the School of Economics in Moscow state university Zemskovs states: The number of prisoners were 2.624.537(1731693 in camps, 740554 in colonies and 152290 in jails) People in the special settlements 2.819.776, 5.444.233 all together, without POWs and internees.Together with internees and POWs- 8-9 mln.And it is according Zemskov whos data is not so trustful since he does not seems to be a sholar who posses lot of knowledge about the subject. Celasson (talk) 05:01, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

GULAG refers to camps only. Internees (do you mean, e.g. Volga Germans?) were not prisoners: they even retained their membership in Communist party. POWs are relevant to the post-war period only, and were under jurisdiction of GUPVI, not GIULAG. BTW, the number of POWs in Western Allies' camps was comparable. This article is about GULAG only.--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:27, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

GULAG is the system of labor camps and people other than convicted were working in these camps, so if you are writing about GULAG you need to write about them too. Ethnic Germans were in so called Trudarmia and it was in GULAG system, lot of them died- the presence of communists among them did not help out very much. The Internees- Germans from Eastern Europe and probably somebody else (Polish people?).POWs- Germans, Japanese, Italians, Romanians, Finns. I have no idea why you are talking about Western Allies, the death rate in the British camps was 0.03% and in soviet camps it was 35.8% I do not think somebody would compare them- that is 1100 time higher.Celasson (talk) 06:10, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

To those who use the Appelbaum's data.

Please, stop replacing the numbers from scholarly articles with those taken from the Appelbaum's works. She didn't do her own archival research and she uses the numbers produced by others. Therefore, her papers are tertiary sources (that are less preferable then the secondary ones, according to WP:Primary, secondary and tertiary sources)
--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:50, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Not tertiary but secondary.Biophys (talk) 15:06, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

WP:Primary, secondary and tertiary sources states: "Tertiary sources are publications such as encyclopedias or other compendia that mainly summarize secondary sources. For example, Wikipedia itself is a tertiary source. Many introductory undergraduate-level textbooks may also be considered tertiary sources, to the extent that they sum up multiple secondary sources." We came to consensus (see above discussion) that Appelbaum used the numbers produced by others for her work, therefore, her works are compendia, not an original research, therefore, it is a tertiary source.
--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:39, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Applebaum's work is highly regarded and appears and is cited regularly in scholarly papers. Paul, by your interpretation the vast majority of sources cited in WP are tertiary sources and should therefore ostensibly be deleted. The synthesis of narrow interpretations of the letter of the WP:LAW per personal editorial interpretation is not sufficient to eliminate a source. Apologies for not commenting sooner. —PētersV (talk) 20:03, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

According to Google Scholar, Appelbaum's book has been cited in 5 articles recognized by Scholar as scientific ones. (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=3967137849091014386. )

GRZ's article has been cited 20 times (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&sa=G&oi=qs&q=zemskov+getty+author:v-zemskov)--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:11, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Don't straw man me. I didn't interpret anything. I didn't even propose that tertiary sources should be deleted. I only remind that, according to WP, priority should be given to secondary sources if possible. That concrete case is absolutely ridiculous: the secondary source has been replaced with tertiary one that took figures from that very secondary source(but interpret them in wrong way). If you read the discussion above you should be aware of the details.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:00, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

(I know what a straw man is, haven't heard it used as a verb.) So, about the numbers. There's the GULAG population, colony population, and also the resettled kulak population. "Gulag" is often taken to mean more than just the GULAG proper. Rather than some of the pointed discussions about right/wrong and Applebaum misinterpreting (I don't see that's necessarily the proper view as pertains to "Gulag" versus "GULAG"), wouldn't the proper solution be to include all three populations with a breakdown? —PētersV (talk) 02:37, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

I meant misinterpreting my position. In addition to "GULAG population, colony population, and also the resettled kulak population" there were spetsposelentsy, spetspereselentsy, voennoposelentsy, ssyl'noposelentsy, prison inmates, etc. However, this article is about Gulag system as a phenomenon specific for Stalinism, not about the whole penitentiary system of the USSR. Every country had prisons or something like katorga during that time, therefore combining everything together would be misleading. In colonies, for instance, the terms were in between 1-3 years, conditions were milder, and there were no political prisoners there, therefore they correspond to ordinary prisons in ordinary countries. Half a million of colony population is nothing taking into account that in the present days US prison population is in between 2 and 3 million.
Stalin and the system he created committed many crimes, but groundless exaggeration of these crimes wouldn't make our criticism stronger.--Paul Siebert (talk) 03:42, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. It might be useful then to always refer to it as the "GULAG" as opposed to Gulag or gulag which (I believe) has popularly come to connote something wider. I would suggest retitling to "GULAG" to set/reinforce the proper expectations of scope. —PētersV (talk) 23:38, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Penal units?

The paragraph :"There are no published figures for the numbers sentenced to penal units, but it is estimated that up to one million Gulag inmates were transferred to penal units during the war. However, according to military historian Lt Col Yuri Veremeev (Юрий Веремеев) in Russian, who quotes Gen Col G.F. Krivosheev, a total of 427,910 served in penal units from September 1942 to May 1945. These totals should be viewed in comparison to the nearly 34.5 million men and women who served in the Soviet armed forces during the entire period of the war.[25]"
is self contradictory, because, whereas in the beginning there is a claim that "here are no published figures for the numbers sentenced to penal units", the exact official number (with appropriate reference) is given in the end.
In addition, there is no sense to mention Veremeev, because one can cite Krivosheev's numbers directly (for instance, the online version of his book is available [4]).
To my opinion, the whole paragraph should be removed, because it has no relation to Gulag. Gulag was only a part of the Soviet penitentiary system, and penal units has no relation to it.
The last (unreferenced) sentence of the previous paragraphs should be removed also, because, according to Krivosheev, only military personnel convicted under Order No. 227 were sent to penal units. I saw no reputable sources (others that journalist articles) that state that penal units were formed bu Gulag inmates.--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:21, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Consistency

I have added the number of the dead to the introduction. It should be consistent to what is said later in the article, provided that the later figures include the number of the dead in labor colonies (which I am explicitly stating I am not including). Two questions:

(a) Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov state that they do not yet have any precise data (at the time of publication) on the number of the dead in labor colonies. When was such data obtained? (b) The 14 million figure for the number of people who went through the GULAG is, as the source says, "high". The GULAG has been called a revolving-door system, but it would be best not to give a possibly exaggerated idea of the extent to which this was the case. We were discussing before on this page that the figure stems from 14 million *sentences*, and that a possibly substantial number of people was sentenced more than once (with or without interruption). Can anybody hunt after the sources and see what is going on?

Feketekave (talk) 20:02, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Good. However, it is necessary to complement it with another work that comments on the GRZ study and points out that many sick camps inmates were liberated from camps just before their death. According to this article it was done to conceal excessive mortality. I'll provide the reference soon.--Paul Siebert (talk) 22:23, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good. Questions (a) and (b) still stand. Feketekave (talk) 22:56, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Stephen G. Wheatcroft, "Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word", Source: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Mar., 1999), pp. 315-345, gives the following numbers: During 1921-53, the number of sentences was (political convictions): sentences, 4,060,306; death penalties, 799,473; camps and prisons, 2,634397; excile, 413,512; other, 215,942. In addition, during 1937-52 there were 14,269,753 non-political sentences, among them 34,228 death penalties, 2,066,637 sentences for 0-1 year, 4,362,973 for 2-5 years, 1,611,293 for 6-10 years, and 286,795 for more than 10 years. Other sentences were non-custodial.
If these data are correct the number of sentences was ~18 million, however only 4 million were political, and about 10 million )including these 4) related to GULAG. (I do not consider sentences for less that 2 years because they were definitely not GULAG sentences). I have a feeling that many political journalists imply every sentence in the USSR was a sentence for GULAG and the terms were 10 years and more.
--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:28, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Do you have visibility into numbers dealing with the Soviet mass deportations from the Baltics? For example, my mother's family was deported for 15 years, then some re-arrested and deported for another 5. My cousin's husband was force marched to some camp above the Arctic Circle. In the former case, where do deported family units fit in terms of numbers? Are "sentenced" 3- and 5-year olds included in the numbers? I'm assuming the latter case is a genuine GULAG camp. —PētersV (talk) 05:12, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

P.S. Family was settled in what I guess is best described as a purpose-"built" camp/village outside Krasnoyarsk. That may help indicate what category they were in?

I have to analyze this and several other articles more carefully, however, it seems to me that the victims of mass deportation are not included into that numbers, whereas sentences for more than 2 years are included. In practice, those who were sentenced for 1-3 year terms were sent to colonies, not to GULAG camps. I'll try to elaborate a definition what concretely should be considered GULAG (and, therefore, has to be included into this article) and what should be left beyond the scope, and then we discuss it. Agree?
P.S. Sorry for my idle curiosity, but I didn't understand: if your mother's family had beed deported for 15 yeras in 1940 then the end of the 15 year term was 1955. Does it mean that deportations continued after Stalin's death? --Paul Siebert (talk) 14:42, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Paul please see Forced settlements in the Soviet Union, which will possibly explain some confusion between deportations and gulag. `'Míkka>t 20:18, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Have not looked at the link yet, Mikka, but to the point, yes, people would reasonably include all deportations as the gulag (small letters) as well. (Mother's deported family list here.) To Paul, yes, deported in 1940, those who didn't die allowed to return to Latvia in 1955 (but not to their former home). Two members, mother and daughter (6 when first deported), then arrested and re-deported again for five more years, until 1960. —PētersV (talk) 21:44, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Whoever has concerns in the number of 14 million (this is top number during the existence of Gulag), please keep in mind that turnover rate of prisoners in Gulag was ~ 1.5-2 million per year (per book by Applebeaum and other sources). One could hardly had 100% turnover rate per year.Biophys (talk) 22:55, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Free labour force

In the last sentence of the introduction, on the current population of penal camps - what exactly does it mean for there to be a "free labour force" in penal camps? We are speaking about prisoners, correct? Or are these paid labourers from the surrounding population? Feketekave (talk) 18:34, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

GULAG or Gulag

I prefer GULAG, but let's be consistent Smallbones (talk) 00:49, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

I think it should always be GULAG. It may look like a word, but it's an acronym. People who don't know Russian often don't realize this, but shouldn't Wikipedia gently remind them? LADave (talk) 12:58, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Remarks in introduction

The previous version of the page was the result of a great deal of arguments given by all sides on this talk page. Some recent changes have been made that make little sense.

"These figures however differ greatly from the most conservative figures presented by historians, who estimate the number of camp victims to be higher than 10 million [8] or even higher than 20 million[9][10][11]."

The people using the documentary data just before are reputable historians themselves. (Some people often referred to as "historians" in this context are in fact journalists.) Thus, the comment on "most conservative figures presented by historians" is evidently wrong.

"The death toll at Kolyma alone is estimated to be between 250 thousand and 1 million [12]."

Estimated by one source. We cannot adopt it as authoritative if it seems to conflict with other sources. (What is the documentary data on Kolyma?)

"Accordingly also the number of Gulag prisoners is generally considered to be much higher than the number presented by the Soviet secret police, reaching at least 6 million people at its height [13]"

"Generally considered" is another highly dubious set of words. There was some talk about a high turnover rate, however - what should we write on that, in the end? Feketekave (talk) 08:51, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

For what it is worth, the changes were made by an IP user ( netname: PL-UPC-20060222, descr: UPC Polska Sp. z o.o., country: PL ). Feketekave (talk) 09:27, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Agree with Feketekave. --Paul Siebert (talk) 19:07, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Gulag

Dear Ellol, thank you. My source which I lacked the time to quote yesterday is http://www.gariwo.net/eng_new/genocidi/gulag.php. Can you accept my contribution? Best regards, Carolina —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gariwo (talk • contribs) 18:41, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Dear Carolina. You probably noticed that the sources used in the introductions are mostly scholarly books and articles. Could you please provide more reliable source supporting the changes made by you? The present source seems questionable for two reasons: (i) it is a not-very-well-known web site, and (ii) the transliteration of the GULAG ("Gosudarstvenny Upravienje Lagerej") presented there is incorrect both factually (not "Gosudarstvenny" but "Glavnoe") and grammatically (wrong case).--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:21, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Dear Ellol,

Of course we base our knowledge on scholarly articles and books. You find some of them in the Lectures and Documents pages of Gariwo.net.

You are right on both the Glavnoe transliteration, which is there in many parts of the Gariwo site - see for example http://www.gariwo.net/file/RelazDundovich.pdf -, but unfortunately not in the specific page that I was drawing the information from, and on the fact that the gulag were used also to exploit manpower. Simply put, as you can easily check, I had left out a "not".

The other historical topics deserve much deeper a discussion, which we (you, me and the people in charge of the Gariwo site whom I talked to this morning) will have later.

Thank you,

Happy Easter,

Carolina

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Gariwo (talk • contribs) 08:49, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Inconsistency in capitalization of Gulag

In most of the article, the capitalization is Gulag, but in paragraph 4, it is GULAG. Should this be changed? --Tiddlydum (talk) 20:41, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I came here to make the same observation. By my reckoning its "Gulag" 38 times (most not at the beginning of a sentence, indicating we're treating it as a proper name), 4 as "gulag", and 14 as GULAG (stats based on the main body of the article and the index, not on refs or exlinks, which we shouldn't be retitling). I propose to change all three to "Gulag"; I'll do that in a day or two unless anyone objects. Hopper Mine (talk) 19:17, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

No objections. Just keep "GULAG" in the intro and double-check the usage in book/film/etc. titles-they must be preserved.- Altenmann >t 19:47, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Acronym

Capitalizing the letters on the full english translation makes no sense. The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps = CACAM? Wouldn't it make sense to have the Russian term in latin alphabet (Glavnoe Upravienje Lagerej) included to make it clear where it came from to those (majority of english speakers) that can't read Cyrilic? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 04:40, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Altenmann's reverstion

I fully support the reversion made by Altenmann. Clearly, the change made by user:Vadvir is blatant anti-semitism. If such incidents will repeat I'll make every effort to ban this user infinitely.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:50, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Unsupported paragraph removed

The para:

"Many Gulag inmates (as a rule, non-political) were released from camps and sent to Red Army penal battalions, where they performed extremely hazardous duties such as spearheading Russian offensives, often serving as tramplers, persons who marched or ran over German minefields to clear them for successive Red Army infantry formations.A total of 427,910 served in penal units from September 1942 to May 1945. These totals should be viewed in comparison to the nearly 34.5 million men and women who served in the Soviet armed forces during the entire period of the war."

contains the unsourced questionable statement (fact template was placed in Oct 2008). AFAIK, GULAG prisoners weren't being sent to penal units, and, if someone wants this statement to be in the article, the burden of proof rests with him. The remaining part of the paragraphs contains correct and properly sourced statements, however, these facts have no relation to the article's subject: Krivosheev didn't write about GULAG prisoners in penal units. --Paul Siebert (talk) 17:35, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

There is a lot of information that many Gulag inmates (as a rule, non-political) were released from camps and sent to the front. The question is whether they were sent to penal batalions or to normal units (or to both?). ru:Карпов, Владимир Васильевич was a political prisoner and, yet, he was released and sent to a penal batalion. Olegwiki (talk) 11:30, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

No. You provided an example. Memoirs are not too good source. The fact that Karpov was sent to the front doesn't mean that it was a normal practice. If you provided a concrete number we can speak about that seriously. --Paul Siebert (talk) 13:50, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

№ 191

ПРИКАЗ ЗАМЕСТИТЕЛЯ НАРОДНОГО КОМИССАРА ОБОРОНЫ

О ПОРЯДКЕ ПРИМЕНЕНИЯ ПРИМЕЧАНИЯ 2 К СТАТЬЕ 28 УК РСФСР (И СООТВЕТСТВУЮЩИХ СТАТЕЙ УК ДРУГИХ СОЮЗНЫХ РЕСПУБЛИК) И НАПРАВЛЕНИЯ ОСУЖДЕННЫХ В ДЕЙСТВУЮЩУЮ АРМИЮ

№004/0073/006/23 ее 26 января 1944 г.

This the order about the mobilization of convicted offenders who were sent to the penal units. Guys, I afraid have to insert back everything that you have willful deleted.

what do you mean and where you got this 'wisdom'?Celasson (talk)

Well, that is quite simple. Per WP:V, good (best) sources are the articles in peer-reviewed journals and similar publications the have been wetted by scientific community. Memoirs do not belong to such type sources. Moreover, I would say the memoirs are more primary rather than secondary sources. You should know that policy applies strict limitations on usage of primary sources in WP. Similarly, the document quoted by you is definitely a primary source, so it can only be quoted, however, it cannot be used as a support for the statement I deleted.
Speaking less formally, from memory, the text I deleted was supported by two sources, namely by memoirs of some dissident who was arrested, but was not sent to GULAG, therefore, his statement cannot be used as a proof of the claim that GULAG prisoners were sent to penal units. The second source is memoirs of on Russian general, who tells that his father was sent to penal battalion. The latter source is (hearsay)^2, so it is not reliable by no means.
With regards to your source, it is not sufficient to speak about a widespread practice to send GULAG prisoners to penal units. Firstly, the order was issued in 1944, secondly, it is not clear if it was observed (for instance, the notorious Stalin's order about barrier troops was quietly dropped in few month, so unspoken consensus was to sabotage it). We need some reputable scholar's to speak seriously about re-insertion of this material.
--Paul Siebert (talk) 03:02, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

I asked where you get this ridiculous statement Memoirs are not too good source? I have never heard about it? Of course memoirs are the primary documents for historian. Whom you mean if you say 'a scholar'? And what type of documants the scholar use?

About penal units and criminals who urged to join the Red Army at the end of the WWII mostly to taking part in lootings and robberies of European population. (That will be memoirs number three,I do not know how many you need for 'scholars ) Or Zemskov does not write about the criminals in the camps? Can you just explain why you delete texts without any discussion and without having any serious arguments ? Who teached you that?Celasson (talk) 05:35, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Re: "I asked where you get this ridiculous statement" Please, familiarise yourself with WP policy before attempting to continue this discussion. If you have any questions, please, ask me, or post your question at a reliable source noticeboard.

Re: "And what type of documants the scholar use?" Of course, by "scholars" I meant historians. They use primary and secondary sources for research they are doing. By contrast, Wikipedians cannot do their own research (I mean, they cannot post their own conclusions in WP articles). The only acceptable sources for Wikipadians are secondary sources written by scholars, and, in some cases, tertiary and primary sources. With regards to the latters, strict limitations exist on their usage. Look at the policy for further details.--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:50, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Gulag: a history‎ - Page 447 Anne Applebaum "prisoners released from the Gulag into the Red Army were assigned to penal battalions and sent directly to the most dangerous sections of the front."

The greatest battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the desperate struggle for Moscow ...‎ - Page 73 Andrew Nagorski "During the course of the war, the ranks of the penal battalions were also filled with hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag."

The economics of forced labor: the Soviet Gulag‎ - Page 39 Paul R. Gregory, Valeriĭ Vasilʹevich Lazarev "Many inmates were freed and dispatched to the front; others were sent into penal battalions. Many inmates also went voluntarily to the front"

Bobanni (talk) 06:52, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

To Paul Siebert. To my question I asked where you get this ridiculous statement Memoirs are not too good source'' you refer to policy and guess what I see? Primary sources are very close to an event, often accounts written by people who are directly involved'. The meaning of this phrase is that a Memoir is primary source and it is opposite to what you say.Celasson (talk) 18:17, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

To Paul Siebert. In the discussion above you name the article of the Russian historian for a German university (Boris Chavkin) 'amateurish'. My question 'why?' you left of course without answer. My advise to you- first read WP policies more carful and try to follow them:' Appropriate sourcing can be a complicated issue, and these are general rules. Deciding whether primary, secondary or tertiary sources are appropriate on any given occasion is a matter of common sense'. And stop the willful deleting.Celasson (talk) 18:17, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Re memoirs. That is exactly what I said (" I would say the memoirs are more primary rather than secondary sources." see above), just less categorically. With regards to usage of primary sources, the policy states clearly: " Reliable primary sources may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation." In other words, you can only verbatim quote memoirs, not to draw any conclusions from them. A secondary source that discusses this concrete memoir is absolutely necessary for non-verbatim usage of memoirs.

Re Chavkin. Please, remind me what concretely do you mean.

Re Bobani. Released GULAG inmates are not GULAG prisoners. Obviously, a mature man without any military speciality was very likely to be conscripted during the war, so it is not clear why former GULAG prisoners would be an exception. With regards to penal units, Krivosheev gives exact number of those who served there. This book is considered a reliable source in general by most western scholars, so you should have a serious ground to question that. With regards to Appelbaum, she used the figures obtained by other scholars (mostly by Zemskov), and sometimes does that incorrectly. BTW, on this talk page I already provided an example of incorrect interpretation of Zemskov's data by her.
Since other sources use vague wording, whereas Krivosheev provides exact numbers, much more weight should be given to the latter per policy.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:45, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

To Paul Siebert

What is your native language? Why do you think that is a defference between GULAG inmates and GULAG prisoners. That system works in Russia today as well. Before the conviction, during the trial people are staying in jails and after they are being transfered to colnoies(camps. Same was in the Stalin's time.

You have deleted text without any sensible reason and now just continue to debunk yourself as a human whos mind is mutilated from totalitarian thinking.

You always trying to find some support by 'western scholars'. But first you need to understand- nobody of them will delete sentence of others without a solid evidence.Celasson (talk) 06:55, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Re: " Why do you think that is a defference between GULAG inmates and GULAG prisoners." I see no appreciable difference between GULAG inmate and GULAG prisoner. However, the difference between released GULAG inmate/prisoner and GULAG prisoner is considerable: only the latter can be the article's subject.

Re: " That system works in Russia today as well. " Russia has colonies, but no camps (GULAG). You should know that colonies existed even during Stalin's era, and the difference between colonies and GULAG proper was considerable.

Re: "nobody of them will delete sentence of others without a solid evidence" Per WP:BURDEN a burden of proof lies with those who add/restore a material, i.e. with you.--Paul Siebert (talk) 07:22, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

To Paul Siebert I see no appreciable difference between GULAG inmate and GULAG prisoner. However, the difference between released GULAG inmate/prisoner and GULAG prisoner is considerable: only the latter can be the article's subject.

So you, Paul Siebert, have deleted the whole paragraph because you somehow interpreted that the citations is about released prisoners/inmates/convicts.But it not would would be better just make an addition?

and the difference between colonies and GULAG proper was considerable And what was the difference? That is my question to you.

a burden of proof lies with those who add/restore a materialThat why we have common sence and good practice. Somebody wrote a paragraph, two other users afterward confirmed the information. And you have deleted the information- that is just not polite.Not good practice.Celasson (talk) 17:08, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

I deleted the paragraph because it was unsupported by sources. Krivosheev's book cannot serve as a support because it tells not about GULAG prisoners/inmates, but about military convicted for some crimes.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:25, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

unsupported by sources means no source at all. In this case you somehow desided that source is not reliable, your explanationa are not acceptable - it is defenetely not the common sense. And please ansewer the question about the colonies (and the difference between colonies and GULAG proper was considerable) because it is very interesting to get more information about your sources?Celasson (talk) 19:50, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

The para removed by me had only one source, a Krivosheev's book that tells about quite different things. The source is a reliable per se, but it by no mean can be used to support the para's claims. Therefore, the para was unsourced.
Regarding colonies, several sources (e.g. Zemskov, Wheatcroft etc) separate colonies and GULAG camps: colony prisoners were convicted for minor crimes (obviously, not for political ones), the terms there were short (few years) and conditions were much less strict, so most this article's material has a relation to GULAG camps only.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:03, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Memorial

The photo of the memorial seems to be NOT the memorial on Lubyanka square (a stone from Solovki). See the photo in Lubyanka Square for comparing. I have personally seen the memorial on Lubyanka square and can say that the photo in this article is of another memorial (the buildings on the background confirm this). The inscription on the memorial on the photo is "Bortsam za svobodu" (To Fighters for Freedom) which is also confusing. It should be clarified where is the memorial on the photo (and whether it is related to GULAG at all!).

Olegwiki (talk) 10:17, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Nonu

Although Gulag originally was the name of a government agency, the acronym acquired the qualities of a noun

Names are nouns. 72.75.86.126 (talk) 23:04, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Political Red Cross

I'd like to know more about the Political Red Cross, an independent league of support groups much like Amnesty International which was active from sometime around the turn of the last century into the 1930s. Solzhnitsyn mentions it in passing in the last chapter of Pt 1 of The Gulag Archipelago, and seems to assume that his Rusaian readers will know. PRC was a kind of relief network for political prisoners during late Tsarist times and some groups survived into the 1930s, notably the Moscow group led by Maxim Gorky's wife Ekaterina Pehkova.

I am working on some Gulag/stalinism-related articles here and on the Swedish WP. Don't know Russian but have read a good deal about late Imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union, so could someone here who does know the language help me get in touch with people at the Russian WP who might want to cooperate on this? I'm fluent in English and French. Is there any article on PRC at the Russian Wikipedia? If so, what's the name of that article, in Cyrillic writing, so one could post a query like this over there? /Strausszek (talk) 14:39, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Danylo Shumuk

The para below is hardly relevant to this article:

"According to Danylo Shumuk's memoirs, some Gulag inmates were released from camps and sent to Red Army penal battalions, which were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front. Although the exact number of GULAG prisoners sent to penal units is unknown, the total amount of persons convicted to penal units from September 1942 to May 1945 was 427,910 (out of nearly 34.5 million men and women who served in the Soviet armed forces during the entire period of the war)."

Firstly, according to his memoirs he was arrested, but he was not a GULAG inmate by the moment he had been sent to Red Army (he was in a prison, not in GULAG).
Secondly, the described events took place in 1941, whereas penal battalions were formed later, see Order No. 227. Therefore, he could not be sent to a penal battalion because such units simply didn't exist by that moment.
My conclusion is that the paragraph is based on the memoirs of a single person, and these memoirs are inconsistent. This para is dubious, unsupported by sources and, therefore, must be removed.--Paul Siebert (talk) 04:45, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Please read WP:RS. Shumuk's memoirs constitute a realiable primary source. It is verifiable. His memoirs are referenced by scholars. Your reasoning is looking a bit like OR. Bobanni (talk) 14:17, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Couldn't he had like simply met former GULAG inmates there? Also, penal battallions article actually claims that they existed already in Winter War.--Staberinde (talk) 08:47, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Firstly, I never claimed the facts presented in Shumuk's memoirs were false. Without any doubts, he was arrested and, instead of being sent to GULAG, had been sent to some Red Army's military formation. However, these correct facts are totally irrelevant to the article, because, (i) Shumuk was not a GULAG inmate by that moment, (ii) the penal units "shtrafbaty" were formed in 1942 according to the Order No. 227. Lebed's memoirs or Suvorov's books are not too reliable sources (Lebed describes not his own experience, so it is a classical hearsay evidence, whereas the Suvorov's books have been extensivelly criticized by western scholars for the lack of evidentiary base), and (iii) the source (Shumuk's memoirs) doesn't allow such a degree of generalisation. The only thing we can say in the article is that, according to Shumuk's memoirs, he was arrested and, instead of being imprisoned in GULAG, was sent to some Red Army unit. Nothing else.
Please, change the text accordingly, otherwise I'll do that by myself.--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:31, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

PS. I checked the source again (p.38-39). According to the source, in Jan 1941 Shumuk was summoned by an NKVD officer, who requested him to testify against his brother, but he was not arrested. More interestingly, on 15 of May, 1941, Shumuk was conscripted and assigned to a construction battalion. Then, after 22 of June this battaloin was transformed to some penal unit (I believe, it was an improvisation of some local authority, because, again, the Order No. 227 would be issued one year later). Definitelly, Shumuk could not be considered a GULAG inmate in 1941.
In addition, (i)Shumuk was conscripted and not arrested, and (ii) he was not released, his construction battalion was transformed to something else. Therefore, the para's claim is not supported by the source. Sorry, but I have to remove this para as irrelevant, and, more important, unsupported.
Regards,
--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:46, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

gulag vs penal battalions

I deleted the text which was arbitrarily inserted in the middle of the sentence cited from other book. There are various statements about the amount of people released from gulag into army. Definitely not all of them went to penal battalions, and in any case the number given in the article is abnormally high and exceeds the estimates to penal battalions themselves. - Altenmann >t 20:00, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

The text you removed was not supported by any reliable source, therefore the removal was absolutely justified. The link to another WP article is not sufficient, because WP is not a good source for itself. In addition, the poorly written penal battalion article is based mostly on Suvorov's books that are not considered reliable sources by majority western historians. In addition, some sources claim that no GULAG prisoners were released to penal battalions.--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:49, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

GULAG prisoners paid for their job

There's a recent report saying that GULAG prisoners were paid for their work, up to about 1/3 of the worker's fee at that time. The rate of payment depended on one's work. Yet 10% of the maximal payment was guaranteed for every prisoner.

The report is a blog entry in Russian. Yet it refers to actual documents, which can be used as references in Wikipedia.

ellol (talk) 09:55, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

How many?

According to the section "Brief History":

"More than 140 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953"

I'm not clear what "passed through" means but I assume it means served time as prisoners. If so, we have an average of 140 million / 24 years = 5.83 million prisoners per year.

This seems unfeasilbly high - but I'm in no position to say for certain whether it is. However, further down the page is a graph showing the number of prisoners year-on-year from 1934 to 1953. It's never above 2 million, and often below 1 million. (Without number crunching, I'd guess an average of around 1.2 million.)

But the issue must be further understood by the fact that prisoners are not all released in the same year they are imprisoned - which is to say, if there are 1 million thus year and 1.2 million next, that's going to be significantly less than 2.2 million people, since lots will appear in both figures. Taking this into account, we need to adjust down the headcount of 1.2 million quite substantially, if we want a figure representing the number of individuals involved - we don't want to count the same person every year they are inside.

Hypothetically, let's say half of each year's head count are new prisoners. That's a VERY crude average of 0.6 million per year = about 14 million over 24 years.

So, what's going on? The figure quoted is "140 million". 86.179.230.100 (talk) 19:11, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

The incorrect 140 million figure was inserted by an anonymous user, and has since been undone. LokiiT (talk) 19:14, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Good work! very fast.

Out of interest, I was just reading the Wiki page on The Gulag Archepelago and read

"Figures apparently compiled by the Gulag administration itself, and released by Soviet historians in 1989, show that a total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947."

So the current "More than 14 million" seems more realistic. 86.179.230.100 (talk) 19:20, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Indeed. But the article are being systematic vandalized by user Paul Siebert. So, we are waiting till commodities prices will be going down...Celasson (talk) 17:39, 12 February 2010 (UTC)