Sizing Up Stalin’s Killing Machine

With chilling bureaucratic precision, the KGB has reported that it executed exactly 786,098 Soviet citizens between 1930 and 1953 for being “enemies of the state.” Among those shot were leading figures of the Communist Party, government officials, senior military officers, well-known scientists and cultural leaders and a great many ordinary people whose misfortune it was to be snared in the web of what one historian has called the Great Terror. They were among the 3,778,234 persons who are now officially acknowledged to have been sentenced for counter-revolutionary or anti-state activities in the 23 years that preceded Josef Stalin’s death. About those who were killed before and after the Stalin era, the KGB is silent.

Numbers are morally neutral. Those that are used to define the dimensions of the unprecedented mass killings of the 20th Century fail utterly to suggest the full horror of what they describe. Consider, though, just one implication of the KGB’s report on the executions it carried out as the instrument of Stalin’s will over the 267 months that ended when the dictator died in March, 1953. Those killings averaged nearly 3,000 a month, or just under 100 a day. Every 15 minutes, day in and day out for more than 22 years, in war and in peace, a man, woman or child caught up in the mad brutality of the Stalin years was deliberately put to death. The killing machine, once started, ran on and on.

These 786,098 victims were only a fraction of those killed by the state during the Stalin period. Historians calculate that deliberately induced deaths from other causes--starvation, torture, overwork and mistreatment in slave labor camps--numbered probably another 20 million. As time goes on, as greater glimpses are allowed into the archives of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries, much more is likely to be revealed about the human costs of communism. What has been admitted so far may be only a terrible foretaste of what’s to come.