Editing Gulag (section)

== Death toll ==

Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, estimates of Gulag victims ranged from 2.3 to 17.6 million (see [[#History of Gulag population estimates|History of Gulag population estimates]]). Mortality in Gulag camps in 1934–40 was 4–6 times higher than average in the Soviet Union. Post-1991 research by historians accessing archival materials brought this range down considerably.<ref>{{cite journal|author1=Getty, J. A. |author2=Rittersporn, G. T.|author3=Zemskov, V. N.|year=1993|title=Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years |url=http://www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/AHR/AHR.html|journal=American Historical Review|volume=98|issue=4 |pages=1017–1049|doi=10.2307/2166597|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080611064213/http://www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/AHR/AHR.html |archive-date=11 June 2008 |quote=The long-awaited archival evidence on repression in the period of the Great Purges shows that levels of arrests, political prisoners, executions, and general camp populations tend to confirm the orders of magnitude indicated by those labeled as "revisionists" and mocked by those proposing high estimates.|jstor=2166597}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|author=Wheatcroft, Stephen G. |title=Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word|journal= [[Europe-Asia Studies]]|volume= 51|issue= 2 |year=1999|url=http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-Secret_Police.pdf|pages=340–342|doi=10.1080/09668139999056}}
:''Quote:'' "For decades, many historians counted Stalin' s victims in 'tens of millions', which was a figure supported by Solzhenitsyn. Since the collapse of the USSR, the lower estimates of the scale of the camps have been vindicated. The arguments about excess mortality are far more complex than normally believed. R. Conquest, ''The Great Terror: A Re-assessment'' (London, 1992) does not really get to grips with the new data and continues to present an exaggerated picture of the repression. The view of the 'revisionists' has been largely substantiated (J. Arch Getty & R. T. Manning (eds), ''Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives'' (Cambridge, 1993)). The popular press, even TLS and The Independent, have contained erroneous journalistic articles that should not be cited in respectable academic articles."</ref> In a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.<ref name="GRZ" />{{rp|1024}}

It was common practice to release prisoners who were either suffering from incurable diseases or near death,<ref name="Ellman_SRS">Michael Ellman. [http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments.] ''Europe-Asia Studies'', Vol. 54, No. 7 (Nov. 2002), pp. 1151–1172</ref><ref name="Applebaum583">[[Anne Applebaum|Applebaum, Anne]] (2003) ''[[Gulag: A History]].'' [[Doubleday (publisher)|Doubleday]]. {{ISBN|0-7679-0056-1}} pg 583: "both archives and memoirs indicate that it was a common practice in many camps to release prisoners who were on the point of dying, thereby lowering camp death statistics."</ref> so a combined statistics on mortality ''in the camps'' and mortality ''caused by the camps'' was higher. The tentative historical consensus is that, of the 18 million people who passed through the gulag from 1930 to 1953, between 1.6 million<ref name="Wheatcroft1999"/><ref name="Rosefielde7677">[[Steven Rosefielde|Rosefielde, Steven]]. 2009. ''[[Red Holocaust (2009 book)|Red Holocaust]].'' [[Routledge]]. {{ISBN|0-415-77757-7}}. p. 67 "...more complete archival data increases camp deaths by 19.4 percent to 1,258,537"; pg 77: "The best archivally-based estimate of Gulag excess deaths at present is 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953."</ref> and 1.76 million<ref name=Vish/> perished as a result of their detention,<ref name="Healey"/> and about half of all deaths occurred between 1941 and 1943 following the German invasion.<ref name=Vish>[http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2007/0313/tema06.php "Demographic Losses Due to Repressions"], by [[Anatoly Vishnevsky]], Director of the Centre for Human Demography and Ecology, [[Russian Academy of Sciences]], {{in lang|ru}}</ref><ref>[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300092844 "The History of the GULAG"] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100622052449/http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300092844 |date=June 22, 2010 }}, by [[Oleg V. Khlevniuk]]</ref> [[Timothy Snyder]] writes that "with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive".<ref>{{cite news |last1=Snyder |first1=Timothy |title=Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse? |url=https://www.nybooks.com/online/2011/01/27/hitler-vs-stalin-who-was-worse/#:~:text=Mass%20murder%20in%20the%20Soviet,disconcertingly%20close%20to%20Nazi%20motivations.&text=It%20turns%20out%20that%2C%20with,entered%20the%20Gulag%20left%20alive. |work=[[New York Review of Books]] |date=27 January 2011}}</ref> If prisoner deaths from [[Corrective labor colony#Soviet Union|labor colonies]] and [[Forced settlements in the Soviet Union|special settlements]] are included, the death toll rises to 2,749,163, according to J. Otto Pohl's incomplete data.<ref name="Applebaum583" /><ref name= pohl>Pohl, ''The Stalinist Penal System'', p. 131.</ref>

In her 2018 study, Golfo Alexopoulos attempted to challenge this consensus figure by encompassing those whose life was shortened due to GULAG conditions.<ref name="Healey">{{cite journal |last1= Healey|first1=Dan|author-link=Dan Healey|date=1 June 2018|title=GOLFO ALEXOPOULOS. Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag|url=https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/ou_press/golfo-alexopoulos-illness-and-inhumanity-in-stalin-s-gulag-i363rKPYOp|journal=[[The American Historical Review]]|volume=123 |issue=3 |pages=1049–1051|doi=10.1093/ahr/123.3.1049|quote="New studies using declassified Gulag archives have provisionally established a consensus on mortality and "inhumanity." The tentative consensus says that once secret records of the Gulag administration in Moscow show a lower death toll than expected from memoir sources, generally between 1.5 and 1.7 million (out of 18 million who passed through) for the years from 1930 to 1953."}}</ref> Alexopoulos concluded from her research that a systematic practice of the Gulag was to release sick prisoners on the verge of death; and that all prisoners who received the health classification "invalid", "light physical labor", "light individualised labor", or "physically defective" that together according to Alexopoulos encompassed at least one third of all inmates who passed through the Gulag died or had their lives shortened due to detention in the Gulag in captivity or shortly after release.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Golfo Alexopoulos |title=Medicine and Mortality in the Gulag |date=April 12, 2019 |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwUgqHthjTs?t=50m25s |publisher=NYUJordanCenter}}</ref>

The GULAG mortality estimated in this way yields the figure of 6 million deaths.<ref name="alexgula">{{Cite book|title=Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag|last=Alexopoulos|first=Golfo|publisher=Yale University Press|year=2017|isbn=978-0-300-17941-5}}</ref> Historian Orlando Figes and Russian writer Vadim Erlikman have posited similar estimates.<ref name=":1"/><ref name=vadim>Erlikman, Vadim (2004). ''Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke: spravochnik''. Moscow 2004: Russkaia panorama. {{ISBN|5-93165-107-1}}.</ref> The estimate of Alexopoulos, however, has obvious methodological difficulties<ref name = "Healey"/> and is supported by misinterpreted evidence, such as presuming that hundreds of thousands of prisoners "directed to other places of detention" in 1948 was a euphemism for releasing prisoners on the verge of death into labor colonies, when it was really referring to internal transport in the Gulag rather than release.<ref name=Hardjal>{{cite journal |last1=Hardy |first1=Jeffery |title=Slavic Review, Volume 77, Issue 1 Spring 2018 pp.269–270 |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/illness-and-inhumanity-in-stalins-gulag-by-golfo-alexopoulos-new-haven-yale-university-press-2007-xi-308-pp-notes-index-maps-6500-hard-bound/130C12D73C6AE10333805FF0AD847790/core-reader |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190429033750/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/illness-and-inhumanity-in-stalins-gulag-by-golfo-alexopoulos-new-haven-yale-university-press-2007-xi-308-pp-notes-index-maps-6500-hard-bound/130C12D73C6AE10333805FF0AD847790/core-reader |archive-date=29 April 2019 |journal=Slavic Review |date=April 2018 |volume=77 |issue=1 |pages=269–270 |publisher=© Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2018 |doi=10.1017/slr.2018.57 |access-date=29 July 2019}}</ref>

In a University of Oxford doctoral dissertation, in 2020, the problem of medical release ({{'}}''aktirovka''{{'}}) and of mortality among 'certified invalids' ({{'}}''aktirovannye''{{'}}) was considered in detail by Mikhail Nakonechnyi. He concluded that the number of terminally ill people discharged early on medical grounds from the Gulag was about 1 million. Mikhail added 800,000–850,000 excess deaths to the death toll directly caused by the results of GULAG incarceration, which brings the death toll to 2.5 million people.<ref>{{cite thesis |last1=Nakonechnyi |first1=Mikhail |title='Factory of invalids': Mortality, disability and early release on medical grounds in GULAG, 1930–1955 |date=2020 |publisher=University of Oxford |url=https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f81e082c-a3b1-46a8-993c-4a134c199d89}}</ref>

=== Mortality rate ===
In 2009, [[Steven Rosefielde]] stated more complete archival data increases camp deaths by 19.4 percent to 1,258,537, "the best archivally-based estimate of Gulag excess deaths at present is 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953."<ref name="Rosefielde7677" /> [[Dan Healey]] in 2018 also stated the same thing "New studies using declassified Gulag archives have provisionally established a consensus on mortality and "inhumanity." The tentative consensus says that once secret records of the Gulag administration in Moscow show a lower death toll than expected from memoir sources, generally between 1.5 and 1.7 million (out of 18 million who passed through) for the years from 1930 to 1953."<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Healey|first=Dan|date=2018-06-01|title=Golfo Alexopoulos. Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag.|url=https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/123/3/1049/5025385|journal=The American Historical Review|volume=123|issue=3|pages=1049–1051|doi=10.1093/ahr/123.3.1049|issn=0002-8762}}</ref>

Certificates of death in the Gulag system for the period from 1930 to 1956<ref name="mortality">{{Cite book|title=Документ № 103. Справка о смертности заключённых в системе ГУЛага за период 1930—1956 гг.|publisher=Mezhdunarodnyi Fond "Demokratiia"|isbn=5-85646-046-4|url=http://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/1009320|date=2000}}</ref> 

{| class="wikitable"
 !Year 
 !Deaths
 ! Mortality rate %
 |-
 |1930
 | align="right" | 7,980
 | align="right" | 4.20
 |-
 |1931
 | align="right" | 7,283
 | align="right" | 2.90
 |-
 |1932
 | align="right" | 13,197
 | align="right" | 4.80
 |-
 |1933
 | align="right" | 67,297
 | align="right" | 15.30
 |-
 |1934
 | align="right" | 25,187
 | align="right" | 4.28
 |-
 |1935
 | align="right" | 31,636
 | align="right" | 2.75
 |-
 |1936
 | align="right" | 24,993
 | align="right" | 2.11
 |-
 |1937
 | align="right" | 31,056
 | align="right" | 2.42
 |-
 |1938
 | align="right" | 108,654
 | align="right" | 5.35
 |-
 |1939
 | align="right" | 44,750
 | align="right" | 3.10
 |-
 |1940
 | align="right" | 41,275
 | align="right" | 2.72
 |-
 |1941
 | align="right" | 115,484
 | align="right" | 6.10
 |-
 |1942
 | align="right" | 352,560
 | align="right" | 24.90
 |-
 |1943
 | align="right" | 267,826
 | align="right" | 22.40
 |-
 |1944
 | align="right" | 114,481
 | align="right" | 9.20
 |-
 |1945
 | align="right" | 81,917
 | align="right" | 5.95
 |-
 |1946
 | align="right" | 30,715
 | align="right" | 2.20
 |-
 |1947
 | align="right" | 66,830
 | align="right" | 3.59
 |-
 |1948
 | align="right" | 50,659
 | align="right" | 2.28
 |-
 |1949
 | align="right" | 29,350
 | align="right" | 1.21
 |-
 |1950
 | align="right" | 24,511
 | align="right" | 0.95
 |-
 |1951
 | align="right" | 22,466
 | align="right" | 0.92
 |-
 |1952
 | align="right" | 20,643
 | align="right" | 0.84
 |-
 |1953
 | align="right" | 9,628
 | align="right" | 0.67
 |-
 |1954
 | align="right" | 8,358
 | align="right" | 0.69
 |-
 |1955
 | align="right" | 4,842
 | align="right" | 0.53
 |-
 |1956
 | align="right" | 3,164
 | align="right" | 0.40
 |-
 !Total
 |1,606,748
 | align="right" | 8.88
|}