How Many Prisoners?

Abstract

An overview of the long-running debate concerning the total number of prisoners in the Gulag system during the Stalin years has already been given. In Chapter 1 the Western debate of the 1980s was shown to be inconclusive. The new Soviet/Russian revelations of the late 1980s and early 1990s discussed in Chapter 2 represented the breakthrough for which scholars had been waiting, in that they were based on documents originally kept in the archives of the Gulag. Unfortunately the revelations were poorly presented by those Soviet historians given access to them. A clear stance was taken against the range of estimates which had appeared in the West over many years, and an evidently polemical approach was too often adopted. Therefore both the style and the history-writing skills of those presenting the archival information led to a lack of clarity with regard to the coverage of the figures quoted.