Talk:Gulag

I see that there has been a Redirect from "Penal Colony" to Gulag.

Why? They're two separate things. The gulags were prison settlements within Russia. they were not colonies.

If you want "penal colonies", come Down Under. We have a range of them. Sydney (Port Jackson) was founded purely as a convict settlement in 1788. It was followed by Hobart in 1804, then Launceston - both in Tasmania - then Brisbane in 1824. I think that by 1825 Norfolk Island had been tried as a prison twice. The first major non-convict colony in Australia was Adelaide in 1836.

Can we please have "Penal Colony" released from the strictures of "Gulag" please? AlanE (talk) 21:18, 6 November 2016 (EST)

AlanE, I fixed it. Conservative (talk) 21:47, 6 November 2016 (EST)

Thanks mate. AlanE (talk) 22:04, 6 November 2016 (EST)

Many Gulag were in fact founded as penal colonies. The City of Magadan, fot instance. Long before Hitler, the communists did not herd people into gas ovens, they simply dumped hundreds and thousands off the Tran Siberian Railroad in the wilderness, out in the middle of nowhere, marked out on the ground were blocks and barracks were to built, and told to get to work. Many of these gulag/penal colonies did not need barbed wire fences as there was nowhere to go for an escapee.RobS^{#NeverHillary} 08:03, 8 November 2016 (EST)

Rob, if you squint and hold your head just right you may just catch a glimpse of the word "colony" in amongst the horrors of the labour camps that were the Gulag. But if you can describe a penal colony as being within the borders of its parent country and its inhabitants arriving there by train, you're stretching things.

Anyway, my aim in wanting change was not to deny Gulag as a penal colony so much as deny penal colony the need to be described as a gulag. Which they weren't.

AlanE (talk) 23:10, 8 November 2016 (EST)

Khrushchev amnesty 1953-1957

Many of those released under Khrushchev were German POWs. This is a central theme of the Gulag Archipelago - the fact that Solzhenitsyn, a Red Army Capitan in the War against fascism who defeated fascism, was held in the Gulag under Khrushchev, not Stalin, while the Germans who fought for fascism were allowed to go home. Is this point about justice, ideology, and the Khrushchev reform era articulated in article? RobS^{Deep Six the Deep State!} 14:06, 6 October 2018 (EDT)

Rob, you do whatever you think best. VargasMilan (talk) 13:36, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

Transmission error discovered

I discovered an overestimating numerical error in the transmission of a reliable count of the population of the targets of the Soviet terror apparatus in a routine check of my accuracy. It looks like a factor of 1.5, and it's nobody's fault. The range I will be using, which I will make an effort to describe here, will still be among the highest recorded estimates (by conservatives) and [this correction] places those estimates closer together, so they will be easier to associate together in rendering the [potential fruits of the] account. VargasMilan (talk) 13:31, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

Good. I'm following you. Will you have figures on both estimated internees and deaths between a certain timeframes, and will the timeframes of the two categories match up? `RobS^{Deep Six the Deep State!} 13:43, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

Also, there were penal battallions that served with the Red Army during WWII who served with a shovel rather than a rifle. These may have existed before the war, and continued after the war. They mostly dug trenches and tank traps. They had a high casualty rate from hunger, disease, exhaustion, and combat fatalities. Being they were constantly on they move, and sometimes not directly under control of the KGB, not much is known. But Solzhenitsyn mentions them from third hand testimony, and the losses evidentially are high. RobS^{Deep Six the Deep State!} 13:50, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

I'm not a particularly good literary digger or filler of holes myself; I can refer you to a few sources by conservatives as I am able to pull them together, but some of these are quoted by a person who believes and has published together every damaging generalization [in the form of a mortality statistic, credible or not] people [have made] about Christianity, but on the other hand his quoting these conservatives lends him credibility, so I don't feel too guilty about not mentioning him specifically but just the sources.

Our militant atheism expert User:Conservative has found one of the conservative sources independently, [Rudolph J.] Rummel, and quotes from him extensively, so he seems to find his reporting and sources pretty reliable.

I'd like to do an itemized accounting like your suggestion would entail, but I don't know what the sources look like, and how difficult it would be to pull something like that together from them. Maybe there should be a transition period when just the correction of the FIGURES that were already there are replaced by more accurate ones and an allowing of that to "sink in" for a while. VargasMilan (talk) 15:03, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

In the March 20, 2005 issue of The Washington Times, Richard W. Rahn, adjunct scholar of the libertarian Cato Institute, recounted: "I happened to be at the Kremlin in Moscow in August 1992, when the Russia demographers announced they had determined there were 63 million “excess deaths” in the Soviet Union during Josef Stalin’s reign — 1923-53."

Rahn was the husband of Peggy Noonan, one of the Top Conservatives on Twitter that I located, vouching for the provenance of the information.

Actually, this had been determined ten years prior as quoted by a Russian university organization reported 56 to 62 million "unnatural deaths" for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin.

This university organization republished this [1983] account [in a book copyrighted] 1993 [and possibly published the year before, or the University organization may have publicized the findings in a press release] and may have been the very book mentioned by Richard Rahn. It may have been misquoted in a Pravda article—if Pravda published it at all and was the mode of transmission—and picked up by Rahn or misunderstood by Rahn. In 1993 this may have been the first official acknowledgement by Moscow of these figures or the first time Pravda had reported them.

Seven years after Dyadkin's book (1990), R. J. Rummel did extensive calculations and had written in 1990: 61,911,000 democides in the USSR 1917-87, of which 51,755,000 occurred during the Stalin years.

There is that 62-63 million figure again for the third time. But each time refers to different intervals.

In 1983 it was from 1928-1954. In 1990 it stretched from 1917-1987. In 1993 it was back down to 1923-1953.

The 1993 transmission error, the hypothetical Pravda article, probably had two sources: 62 million by R. J. Rummel (1917-1987) and 56-62 million by Dyadkin, [one of the transmitters] thinking 1928-1954 was the only significant period where the gulag executed prisoners in the millions.

This would have resulted in a two-sourced figure of 62 million about during the time of Stalin (1928-1954 is close to 1923-1953).

So in closing: To correct the error I think we should take Rummel's seven-years-more-researched 62 million [as right] for [the broader period] 1917 to 1987 together with a weighted combination of Rummel's 51.8 million and the less-researched, but more-intensely researched for that time period of 34-49 million of Dyadkin for the Stalin era (1923-1953). VargasMilan (talk) 17:54, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

Sounds reasonable. If possible, depending on the source, a statement what it all included (for example, WWII penal battallions if possible).

Rahn I think may be an economist formerly with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. If so, I'd have good confidence in his findings. RobS^{Deep Six the Deep State!} 19:16, 10 October 2018 (EDT)

Thank you for the encouragement/confirmation of data. VargasMilan (talk) 02:11, 11 October 2018 (EDT)

You may be in luck. A gulag history expert named James B. Edwards has researched gulag populations, and in a 2004 edition of his book, his working assumption is that the most likely proportion of those who died unnatural deaths from 1917 to 1987 from those died premature deaths as a result of the Gulag was 81.1%.

Although I don't like to criticize him, he counts deaths in an unorthodox way: He includes in his tallies children not born. I actually agree they deserve to be counted, but it simply doesn't match the way these kinds of atrocities are actually and consistently counted and removes an important ability to compare the figures with other mass killings. But fortunately his proportion percentages (which include yearly proportion percentages) are central to his calculations, and he insists they can work with different total populations.

Another thing he adds in his 2004 book are what he calls newly discovered evidence of more Ukrainian massacres. This corroborates those who agree with the higher Dyadkin estimates of the fatalities of the Stalin era.

So the "you're in luck" part—the author, Rummel, I mentioned earlier, includes some breakdown of his unnatural death figures like those who died in transit to the gulags, those who died in government-designed famines and a category called "war-related democides" (13.1 million)—subtracting Edwards' 10.0 million who died in the gulag during that time (assuming 51 million gulag deaths total) which looks like your answer (3.1 million). For those who think that Conservapedia uses biased sources to support a conservative case, Rummel's figures are actually on the low-side of the range of experts' estimated total fatalities. On the other hand it contradicts estimates that these casualties of Stalin were due to his prosecution of the war and not the execution of his terror apparatus. VargasMilan (talk) 04:26, 11 October 2018 (EDT)

Solzhenitsyn

In 1973, in his Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn cited Kurganov, who counted 66 million lives that "internal repression cost us" between 1917 and 1959 Solzhenitsyn later reduced his estimate to 60 million. So the earliest and primary acknowledged public expert (and related 1970 Nobel Prize winner) on the history of the Gulags is a fourth investigator who straddles nearly the same range of the total government depopulation in the Soviet Union. VargasMilan (talk) 12:04, 11 October 2018 (EDT)

Yearly share of gulag fatalities 1917-1988

James B. Edwards

Share of Soviet gulag fatalities per year

1917-1988

Year	% Share of total fatalities accrued	Year	% Share of total fatalities accrued	Year	% Share of total fatalities accrued	Year	% Share of total fatalities accrued
		1940	2.87%	1960	0.97%	1980	0.63%
		1941	2.87%	1961	0.86%	1981	0.53%
1922	0.03%	1942	3.54%	1962	0.63%	1982	0.59%
1923	0.01%	1943	3.73%	1963	0.65%	1983	0.61%
1924	0.03%	1944	3.91%	1964	0.59%	1984	0.55%
1925	0.05%	1945	4.44%	1965	0.71%	1985	0.62%
1926	0.04%	1946	3.76%	1966	0.54%	1986	0.58%
1927	0.06%	1947	3.76%	1967	0.81%	1987	0.52%
1928	0.06%	1948	4.01%	1968	0.62%	1988	0.58%
1929	0.07%	1949	4.03%	1969	0.68%
1930	0.23%	1950	4.10%	1970	0.70%
1931	0.80%	1951	4.30%	1971	0.76%
1932	0.43%	1952	3.93%	1972	0.56%
1933	1.84%	1953	3.94%	1973	0.76%
1934	1.06%	1954	2.22%	1974	0.61%
1935	1.07%	1955	2.01%	1975	0.64%
1936	1.59%	1956	1.70%	1976	0.65%
1937	2.93%	1957	1.77%	1977	0.68%
1938	3.82%	1958	1.36%	1978	0.57%
1939	3.32%	1959	1.38%	1979	0.71%
1940	2.87%	1960	0.97%	1980	0.63%

These percentages reflect most likely percentages according to the author and are not rounded to appropriate degrees of accuracy in order to be useful for comparison or gradually lowering precision calculation purposes.

Excellent! Excellent! (except the figures for 1943 probably do not include penal battallions cause, as Solzhenitsyn said, the figures are hard to come by and may never be known. All we know is they were able bodied males, likely 18 years old up, and hardened violent criminals. You'd probably have to look at comparative career, non-property crime, males in other populations to arrive at an estimate. These were disposed of in military penal battallions I misread the chart, taking the figure from the wrong column). And yes, using a figure like the "unborn" corrupts methodology; it's like saying how many jobs could have been created in America if the Social Security Act of 1936 were not passed. Nonetheless, we still could place this chart in the article with a link citation, and simply say, "According to James B. Whatever blah blah blah...." and let the reader discover the notes on methodology themselves. RobS^{Deep Six the Deep State!} 12:36, 11 October 2018 (EDT)

You caught my interest about the methodology. I suddenly asked myself, while I hadn't before, "Am I giving shares to a lot of unborn children?"

It turns out he uses a "dummy" function that broadly sketches the proportions of the population shifts he must get from comparing all kinds of yearly data and data ranges. If he has low estimates in the same proportion to each other as the high estimates, he's already ahead of a method that uses only counts (because of the wide error range). Then he refines the various coefficients by trials of which ones fit the population size best when plugged in.

Now, moving those coefficients he took as his basis simultaneously, the total population is fairly sensitive to small changes to those coefficients. (Hopefully) the shape isn't too distorted and can be retained for larger or smaller hypothetical populations.

To guard this, there is probably one coefficient (close to the beginning of the series of the basis equations) that impacts the population the most. That one can be employed in shifting its value to prevent distortions caused by the other coefficients.

The overall effect is somewhat like a mapping the earth on a flat surface; if you draw a graph of the values, you'll see the contour sizes may be a bit off, but the shapes made from the new proportions are visibly recognizable. VargasMilan (talk) 14:55, 11 October 2018 (EDT)

Opponents of Marxism

Why I removed this phrase: the notion that the gulags were only used to imprison opponents of Marxism becomes outdated after 1934. Those among the 98% of the delegates of the Communist Party who weren't outright killed were not opponents of Marxism even if it was suggested as much on their indictments. Nor were Party members who believed differently than whatever Stalin's arbitrary prioritization of Marxist principles and virtues in seeking to achieve his personal goal of attaining complete world domination by means of arranging for his own complete personal national and Communist Party domination. Likewise the officers of the Red Army were not opponents of Marxism on the sole basis that they happened to occupy high command and knew things that Stalin found inconvenient for them to be knowing. AbelBanquo (talk) 09:08, January 4, 2022 (EST)