But darling. With your help . . .
When people claim that accounts of Stalin’s crimes are “CIA propaganda,” they are ignoring what Soviet records themselves reveal.
After the collapse of the USSR, official Soviet and post‑Soviet archives were opened to historians. These include NKVD execution orders, Gulag administrative records, internal Party reports, census data, and Politburo correspondence. The figures below come from the Soviet state’s own documentation, not Western intelligence agencies.
According to these records:
About 700,000 people were officially executed during the Great Terror of 1937–1938 alone, under quotas personally approved by Stalin.
Roughly 1 million people were executed over the full period of Stalin’s rule (1924–1953), based on sentencing and execution records.
Approximately 18 million people passed through the Gulag system between 1930 and 1953, according to camp intake records.
About 1.5–2 million people died in the Gulag, from starvation, disease, exposure, and overwork.
Millions more died from state‑imposed famine and mass deportations, particularly during forced collectivisation in the early 1930s.
Entire nationalities were collectively punished and deported by internal security orders preserved in Soviet files.
These numbers are not speculative. They come from the same bureaucratic apparatus that carried out the repression. Soviet historians, Russian demographers, and international scholars working independently have reached broadly similar conclusions using these materials.
Acknowledging these facts is not “red-baiting.” It is not anti‑communism. It is historical literacy.
If socialism cannot tell the truth about its own past, it cannot credibly claim to offer a freer future.
