New house of the dead Sir: Mr R. I. Close
(Letters, 6 September) dares me to answer his 'challenge' to my facts. The task is not as difficult as he seems to believe. First, he completely distorts the text of my article. I was quoting, not 'a statement from a Russian politician', but the official report of the Chairman of the Legislative Commission of the Supreme Soviet's second chamber; the latter stated, not that '99 per cent of convicts are held in corrective-labour institutions', but that over 99 per cent of convicts are held in corrective-labour colonies, with the remain- der (which I generously rounded up to I per cent) in prisons and 'educational- labour colonies' for minors. Mr Close omits all mention of this last type of institution, and thereby completely falsifies my argu- ment.
Secondly, Mr Close carefully chooses the lowest possible estimates of Soviet convict population under Stalin. With regard to the four authorities he cites, Alexander Werth proudly proclaimed two years ago that he had systematically lied about Soviet camp figures, for ideological reasons (`pulling punches' and 'stretching points' were his more elegant expressions), and Dr Naum Jasny himself conceded that his figure was too low, and later raised it to 4.5 million. I have never heard of Henry Shapiro's calculations. As for Professor Timasheff, what he actually calculated was the number not of prisoners but of disfranchised persons in 1937.
As against these figures, let me quote the following carefully documented (and not widely divergent) calculations of slave- labour population": David Dallin—about
10 million for 1944; Professor Wiles-9 million for 1941; Robert Conquest-8 million for 1938; Professor Swianewicz-7 million for 1941; Warren Eason-10 million for 1939; Mora and Zwerniak-10 million for 1941; the AFL-14 million for 1951; David Floyd- 15 million for 1952.
The figures that have recently come out of the USSR provide an astonishing con- firmation of these calculations. Solzhenitsyn says that in 1949 there were 'only' 12-15 million in camps (The First Circle); Academician Varga, in his illegally printed posthumous work (Grani, No. 69, 1968), states that Stalin kept one tenth of the Population behind bars.
Mr Close announces that there are only a very few remaining prisons'. How few? And what are his sources of informatiog? Within a short space of time I passed through ten Soviet prisons—a minute fraction of the total. As far as I know, none of them have been demolished
Unlike Mr Close, I am utterly opposed to any limitations on the freedom of expres- sion—even for blatant purveyors of pro- Soviet propaganda. The job of making slave-labour palatable to Western opinion is hard enough as it is.
Tibor Szamuely
Department of Politics, University of Read- ing, Whiteknights, Reading
Sir: I am not concerned here with the size of the prison population in the USSR now or in the 1930s, but I wish to protest most energetically against the implication in Mr R. 1. Close's letter (6 September) that Dr Naum Jasny made his estimates from in- formation obtained 'from Nazi files'. His calculations were based on his own un- rivalled knowledge of the Soviet economy and on the figures given in the volume on the Soviet economic plan for 1940. This volume was never put on public sale, and copies did not reach the West until some were found among the material captured by the Allies after Germany's defeat.
Nobody was more scrupulous or ob- jective in the use of Soviet statistics than the late Dr Jasny.
Jane Depras 68 Elm Park Gardens, London sw10
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