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How many people were exposed to Soviet repression?

Basically, we do have exact figures for those, who suffered under reprisals (citizens of the USSR, as well as citizens of other countries), however, they depend on which of the regime's actions are defined as repressions and which are not. As from the legal point of view depriving people of food (by force, of course!) is not reckognized as an act of repressionl: since those concerned were not chased out of their houses, as happened during the "dispossession of kulaks"! On the other hand millions of children were born in exile, and under section 1 of the Rehabilitation Law currently in force, they are accepted as victims of repression, even though they were not chased away under escort. This means, that the existing legislation even acknowledges that keeping people in exile is quoted an act of reprisal and not just the act of sending them there.

Moreover, not even half of these acts of reprisal were documented. The shooting of peaceful demonstrators, which started in January 1918 (the execution of demon-strators in defense of the Constituent Assembly) and included the suppression of the "Kronstadt Revolt" (which, in fact, was nothing else than a peaceful protest, too, as long as the bolsheviks did not start to train the guns on Kronstadt), as well as the shootings of the year 1962 (not only in Novocherkassk), resulted in thousands of nameless victims, killed and wounded. It is obvious that the wounded should also be included in the number of victims. There is only poor documentary evidence on the executions during the so-called "Civil War" period; the estimated number of victims (including those of the Leninist concentration camps, in which people were died of typhoid fever), vary between a hundred thousand and several million.

Official data, based on Soviet archives, indicate two million people were executed in the period 1929 - 1953. But this number appears to us 1,5 to 2 times less than the real figure. The number of prisoners kept in prisons and camps (including those who lost their lives there) doubles or even triples the number of shot persons. Evidently, the number of those, who experienced exile (including those born in exile) amounts to no less than 20 million.

The crucial point, however, is not just the terror aspect, but the fact that the Communists wiped out the nation's best, put them behind barbed wire, into god-forsaken swamps and into the tundra: the most industrious and skilled farmers, the most competent, able to read and write workers, the most honest-minded and bright jurists, economists, historians, the most talented and upright writers, poets and artists ... and so on, and so on... 


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