New house of the dead
Sir: Surely it is time somebody put a stop to the obsessive anti-Soviet ravings which are all Mr Tibor Szamuely seems capable of writing in the capitalist press. Predict- ably they have reached their final absurdity in his claim (23 August) that over 'seven million' people occupy corrective-labour colonies and prisons in the USSR under regulations worse than those of Stalin! This is not only without factual evidence, but is wilder than anything from other 'Kremlin- ologists'. Even the Times editorial (19 July, 1969). using his same process of 'calcula- tion', suggested merely 'over a million'.
These assumptions rest entirely on a state- ment from a Russian politician that 99 per cent of convicts are in corrective-labour institutions, instead of the very few remain- ing prisons which are now used for interro- gation, transit and the isolation of incor- rigible recidivists or dangerous criminals. Now this magic percentage would not be accepted literally by Mr Szamuely if it were used to describe the reductions in cer-
tain ---- o-(1^- oc'-•"-- (e.g. armed
robbery, brothel-keeping, etc, almost elimin- ated today), let alone the pro-communist vote in soviet elections, so why take it as anything other than a boast to the effect that progressive penology has made the vast majority of criminals amenable to reform through honest and productive work?
Better statisticians have tried guessing- games before. Professor N. S. Timasheff estimated the numbers in 'slave-camps' during 1937, from the difference between the election registers and the adult popula- tion figures, as under three million. Later, Dr Naum Jasny analysed the 1941 State Plan (from Nazi files, incidentally) and con- cluded that there were about 3.5 million `forced' labourers in that year. So even at the height of the Stalin 'terror' in the pre- war purges, the prisoners (according to these anti-Soviet propagandists) apparently num- bered less than half the total attributed by Mr Szamuely to the present more 'liberal' regime! His current total is also twice the figure suggested for Stalin's final years by correspondents like Henry Shapiro and Alexander Werth.
Try another test. The Daily Mail (2 April, 1969) published an estimate by released Ger- mans, giving 9,390 inmates in eleven 'camps' near Potma—less than a tenth the figure given by Mr Szamuely in the SPECTATOR two years ago. The NTS émigré press recently listed a few dozen postal addresses of cor- rective institutions elsewhere. If accurate, these would bring the convict population, at an average rate of a thousand per camp, to perhaps a couple of hundred thousand at the outside in a total Soviet society of over 229 millions (1965 census). The special camps on Arctic islands are a figment of Mr Szamuely's overheated imagination.
He can display an abundance of verbal wit, but let him answer this challenge to his facts.
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