“The whole life of Viktor Nikolayevich was inextricably linked with the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked for more than 50 years,” the report says. - Viktor Nikolayevich became especially famous for his archival research, in the late 1980s and early 1990s he was the discoverer of archival funds previously closed to scientists on the history of political repressions in the USSR.
The name of Viktor Zemskov will say little to a wide audience. His books were not published in millions of copies, they were not decorated with catchy titles. He preferred painstaking work with historical documents to the pursuit of high-profile sensations.
In 1989, at the peak of perestroika, Zemskov joined the commission to determine the population losses of the Department of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, headed by Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences Yuri Polyakov. The commission received access to the statistical reports of the OGPU-NKVD-MVD-MGB, stored in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution.
These previously classified documents contained all factual information about the real history of political repressions of the Soviet period.
As already mentioned, Viktor Zemskov was not chasing sensations, but the research materials he published turned the notion of the scale of political repression in the USSR upside down.
Secret made clear
The historian, who never concealed his negative attitude towards the Stalinist repressions, came to the conclusion that the data on tens and hundreds of millions of the repressed, which appeared in foreign studies, in media materials from the time of perestroika, do not correspond to reality.Having thoroughly studied all the materials, Zemskov established that in the period from 1921 to 1953, 4,060,306 people were convicted in the USSR “for counter-revolutionary and other especially dangerous state crimes”, of which 799,455 people were sentenced to capital punishment.
Zemskov also refuted the commonplace statement about "a country where every second went through camps." According to the results of the study, it was found that the maximum total number of prisoners in the camps in the entire Soviet history was recorded as of January 1, 1950 - 2,760,095 people, and the average number of prisoners ranged from 1.5 to 2.5 million people. This includes both political prisoners and those convicted of criminal offences.
For comparison: in the United States in 2013, the number of prisoners reached 2.2 million people.
Documents against emotions
The results of Viktor Zemskov's research did not at all correspond to those ideas about repressions in the USSR, which were formed under the influence of the book Alexandra Solzhenitsyn"The Gulag Archipelago" and various exposing journalistic materials of the perestroika era.
Zemskov was accused of "falsification" and tried to refute his conclusions. But the historian calmly, with facts in hand, parried all the arguments of his opponents.
For example, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Director of the State Museum of Gulag History a, the son of the executed revolutionary and Soviet statesman Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, accusing Zemskov of distorting reality, stated that in 1946 there were 16 million prisoners in the Gulag. Antonov-Ovseenko claimed that these figures were based on the number of food rations issued.
“It must be understood that on the date that Antonov-Ovseenko (1946) has in mind, not 16 million, but 1.6 million prisoners were kept in the camps and colonies of the Gulag. You should still pay attention to the comma between the numbers, ”Viktor Zemskov coolly objected in his work “On the Scale of Political Repressions in the USSR”, noting in passing that there are no the names of his respected opponent, which means that he is familiar with the material by hearsay.
Very soon it became obvious that against Zemskov's factual material, his opponents could only present emotions and evidence in the style of "one knowledgeable person told me."
Life's work
In the end, lovers of reasoning about "tens of millions of victims of the Soviet regime" decided that the work of Viktor Zemskov was the easiest to ignore.
And Zemskov continued his work, leaving no stone unturned from a huge number of myths about Soviet history formed over the past decades.
There is no doubt that in due time this outstanding historian will be given credit for his work, which is important not only for understanding the past, but also for the future of our country.
Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov has repeatedly spoken from the pages of Arguments and Facts.
The famous historian Viktor Zemskov has died.
The Directorate and trade union committee of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences announce with deep regret that on July 21, 2015, at the age of 70, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academic Secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia, died suddenly
VICTOR NIKOLAEVICH ZEMSKOV
Viktor Nikolayevich's entire life was inextricably linked with the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked for more than 50 years.
In 1974 he graduated from the Moscow State University, in the same year he joined the Institute, having passed all the steps in his scientific career. Viktor Nikolayevich became especially famous for his archival research; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was the discoverer of archival funds on the history of political repressions in the USSR that were previously closed to scientists.
VN Zemskov made a significant contribution to the development of historical science. He studied the history of the Soviet working class, political repressions in the USSR, the statistics of the Gulag prisoners, the history of special settlers, the fate of repatriates of the Second World War, etc. His monographs “Special Settlers in the USSR. 1930-1960" (M., 2003), "People and War: Pages in the history of the Soviet people on the eve and during the Great Patriotic War, 1938-1945" (M., 2014) and others.
For many years, Viktor Nikolayevich was a member of the Academic and Dissertation Councils of the IRI RAS, was a member of the Association of Historians of the Second World War, was a member of the Scientific Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences on problems of military history under the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, scientific secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia of the IRI RAS.
Viktor Nikolaevich was not only an excellent scientist, but also a wonderful person - an optimist by nature, kind and sympathetic to colleagues, and a great worker. He also earned respect for the fact that he did not compromise his principles and was not afraid to defend his point of view. This is a huge loss for the staff of the Institute of Russian History.
We express our most sincere condolences to the family and friends of the deceased.
BRIGHT MEMORY
Farewell to V.N. Zemskov will be held on July 25, Saturday at 10.30. in the morgue of Hospital No. 81 (Lobnenskaya St., 10).
Directions: metro station "Petrovsko-Razumovskaya", bus 672.
PS. What can I say. The current mass popularity of Stalin is a merit, including the works of Zemskov.
There is a certain irony in the fact that it was Zemskov, who positioned himself as an anti-Stalinist, who dealt a death blow to the myth of "millions of those who were shot." Within the framework of elementary scientific conscientiousness and working with the primary documents of the NKVD and the Gulag, he approached the assessment of repressions in the USSR from the standpoint of facts, and not ideological preferences, showing history in the style of "as it was", and not as one would like in the style of well-known myths " everyone was imprisoned and shot without guilt" and "everyone was imprisoned and shot for a cause." As a result, his work in the mid-noughties actually buried a whole bunch of black myths about Stalin and the USSR and contributed to the historical rehabilitation of Stalin in Russia. When you now see a young man who ridicules a liberal with his cries about "hundreds of millions of victims of Stalinism", this is also the work of Zemskov, who gave the texture, which to a large extent made it possible to overcome part of the Khrushchev and perestroika chernukha.
On July 21, 2015, at the age of 70, Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov, one of the few Russian historians whose research on the history of the USSR can be called scientific, died.
Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov - Russian historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences (2005), researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Researcher of political repressions in the USSR in 1917-1954. In 1981 he defended his Ph.D. thesis "The contribution of the working class to strengthening the material and technical base of agriculture in the USSR in the 1960s." In 1989, he became a member of the commission for determining the population losses of the Department of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, headed by Yu. A. Polyakov, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The commission received access to the statistical reports of the OGPU-NKVD-MVD-MGB, stored in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR). In 2005 he defended his doctoral dissertation “Special settlers in the USSR. 1930-1960". Thanks to V. N. Zemskov’s archival research, the public, who had previously scooped information about repressions in the USSR from A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, finally got the opportunity to find out the true extent of repressions.
Zemskov's scientific career is somewhat mysterious. At almost 30, he graduated from Moscow State University (1974), in 1989, most likely as a workhorse, as part of a commission to determine population losses, he was admitted to secret state security documents. Zemskov essentially buried the black myth about Stalin's repressions, proving that they were exaggerated dozens of times by anti-Sovietists. At the same time, the scientist for a long time maintained political correctness in relation to the anti-Stalinist nonsense that was poured down by state propaganda on the disoriented population and youth in a dirty stream.
In 2014 a book was published "Stalin and the people: Why there was no uprising", in which Viktor Zemskov, probably anticipating his death, threw off the mask of political correctness and, in fact, left his will to his readers:
1) “Thus, based on our version of the total number of those repressed for political reasons, the share of those in the population living in 1918-1958 is 2.5% (about 10 million in relation to over 400 million). This means that 97.5% of the population of the USSR was not subjected to political repression in any form.” Let me clarify that the scientist considers a broad interpretation of the concept of “repressed for political reasons”, including deported, dispossessed, subjected to “purges” for social reasons, etc.
2) “The entire power of the propaganda machine has been directed to concealing this indisputable fact in the last almost a quarter of a century. Everything possible and impossible is being done to preserve the false idea embedded in the mass consciousness that allegedly all or almost all the people were subjected to various repressions. On this "black myth" the younger generation of our people was brought up and the older generations were fairly propagated in the appropriate spirit. (p.103)
3) Realizing the reverence of Russian society for the West, Zemskov advises listening to the conclusions of the American historian Robert Thurgston: the system of Stalinist terror in the form in which it was described by previous generations of [Western] researchers never existed; the influence of terror on Soviet society during the Stalin years was not significant; there was no mass fear of reprisals in the 1930s in the Soviet Union; the repressions were limited and did not affect the majority of the Soviet people; Soviet society supported the Stalinist regime rather than feared it; For most people, the Stalinist system provided the opportunity to move up and participate in public life" (p. 100).
4) “... ordinary Soviet citizens for the most part knew little or nothing at all about the repressions, the victims of which were many thousands of innocent people, and for the first time they heard about it only after the famous speech of N.S. Khrushchev at the XX Congress of the CPSU in 1956” (p. 120).
5) “It is incomprehensible to them, for example, how it was possible to fight for the land that the Soviet government“ took away ”,“ seized ”,“ confiscated ”,“ expropriated ”, etc. from the peasants. Meanwhile, all this argumentation would be fair only if the “selected” land went to some other owners, but it, after all, remained in the collective possession of the same peasants. The entire array of historical sources that we have irrefutably testifies that the Soviet peasants for the most part did not consider the collective farm land as allegedly alien and were by no means going to give it away to foreign invaders without a fight ”(p. 123).
6) “Of course, there were anti-Soviet, anti-Bolshevik and anti-Stalinist sentiments in society. But do not exaggerate their scale. The socio-political system that had developed in the USSR had massive support - most people were devoted to it. It was personified with the embodied ideals of the October Revolution of 1917, and the Soviet state itself was perceived in the minds of millions of people as the only state of workers and peasants in the world. Therefore, Soviet citizens for the most part, in the event of a military danger, were ready to defend not only their homeland, their state, regardless of its political structure, but also the socio-political system that had developed in the USSR, its social and political system ”(p. 114)
7) “In fact, a new civilization has developed on a sixth of the globe. It was a unique civilization, which had no analogues in the history of mankind, either in the past or in the present. (p.113)
V.N. Zemskov "Polit. repressions in the USSR - Holodomor, Ukraine"
V.N. Zemskov "Victims of the Great Patriotic War"
Voice of Russia. Theory of delusions (2011) with the participation of V.N. Zemskova
Soviet prisoners of war
July 21, 2015. Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academic Secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia, died suddenly at the age of 70 Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov. Farewell to V.N. Zemskov will be held on July 25, Saturday at 10.30. in the morgue of Hospital No. 81 (Lobnenskaya St., 10).
The following obituary has been published on the website of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Viktor Nikolayevich's entire life was inextricably linked with the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked for more than 50 years.
After graduating from Moscow State University in 1974, in the same year he joined the Institute, having passed all the steps in his scientific career. Viktor Nikolayevich became especially famous for his archival research; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was the discoverer of archival funds previously closed to scientists on the history of political repressions in the USSR.
VN Zemskov made a significant contribution to the development of historical science. He studied the history of the Soviet working class, political repressions in the USSR, the statistics of the Gulag prisoners, the history of special settlers, the fate of repatriates of the Second World War, etc. His monographs “Special Settlers in the USSR. 1930-1960" (M., 2003), "People and War: Pages of the History of the Soviet People on the Eve and During the Great Patriotic War, 1938-1945" (M., 2014) and others.
For many years, Viktor Nikolayevich was a member of the Academic and Dissertation Councils of the IRI RAS, was a member of the Association of Historians of the Second World War, was a member of the Scientific Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences on problems of military history under the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, scientific secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia of the IRI RAS.
Viktor Nikolaevich was not only an excellent scientist, but also a wonderful person - an optimist by nature, kind and sympathetic to colleagues, and a great worker. He also earned respect for the fact that he did not compromise his principles and was not afraid to defend his point of view. This is a huge loss for the staff of the Institute of Russian History.
We express our most sincere condolences to the family and friends of the deceased.
The editors of the site "Western Rus'" expresses condolences to the family and friends of Viktor Nikolaevich.
In addition to being a sensitive and cordial person, an attentive and easy-to-communicate interlocutor, he was, first of all, one of those Russian historians who never followed conjecture and relied only on facts in their works. And this very often irritated the falsifiers of history, both from the right-liberal and the left-Bolshevik camps.
Great is the merit of Viktor Nikolayevich in the study of Stalinist repressions, in which, on the basis of archival research, he showed the true numbers of its victims. In general, condemning Stalinism and pointing out that its modern followers in vain whitewash their "leader", at the same time V.N. Zemskoy exposed all the falsehood of pro-Western Russian publicists who, in order to denigrate Russia, at times overestimated the number of victims of Stalin's repressions and the number of dead Soviet citizens during the Great Patriotic War. The untimely death of Viktor Nikolayevich was a great loss for our society, which today is in need of honest and objective scientists.
In memory of V.N. Zemskov, we prepared and posted on our Youtube channel an audio recording of his conversation on the radio "Radonezh" on the topic "Stalin and the people", which took place on February 15, 2015.
Researcher of demographic aspects of political repressions in the USSR in 1917-1954.
| Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov | |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | January 30(1946-01-30 ) |
| Place of Birth |
|
| Date of death | 21 July(2015-07-21 ) (69 years old) |
| Place of death | Moscow Russian Federation |
| A country | USSR USSR→Russia Russia |
| Scientific sphere | history |
| Place of work | |
| Alma mater | Moscow State University |
| Academic degree | Doctor of Historical Sciences |
| Known as | researcher of repressions in the USSR |
Biography
In 2005 he defended his doctoral dissertation “ Special settlers in the USSR. 1930-1960» .
Member of the Academic Council of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Member of the Dissertation Council at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Member of the Association of World War II Historians.
Scientific Secretary of the Center for Military History of Russia.
Significance of scientific works
He was the discoverer of archival funds previously closed to scientists on the history of political repressions in the USSR. Thanks to the works of V. N. Zemskov, the public, which had previously drawn information about repressions in the USSR from journalism, had the opportunity to get acquainted with the scientific point of view on the nature and extent of repressions. Sociologist and political scientist S. Kara-Murza characterizes the work of V. N. Zemskov as follows:
... Historian V.N. Zemskov has been busy with painstaking but very important work for almost ten years: he systematizes archival data reflecting the activities of the Gulag, and publishes detailed reports on all categories of the repressed. Publishes without emotion, in special journals on history and sociology. He himself is by no means a Stalinist, and this is reliably stated in publications. Not a Stalinist, but respects the facts. Democrats try not to notice him and not enter into polemics with him. But at first they staged an attack in the form of a damning article by A.V. Antonov-Ovseenko. V.N. Zemskov answered this in his dispassionate manner ...
Viktor Zemskov's response to A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko's criticism:
…AND. V. Antonov-Ovseenko on the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta in the article “Confrontation” expressed an opinion about the false origin of the documents used by me and, therefore, the unreliable nature of the published figures (2). On this occasion it is necessary to say the following. The question of forgery could be considered if we relied on one or several disparate documents. However, it is impossible to forge a whole archival fund with thousands of storage units, which is in public storage, which also includes a huge array of primary materials (it is possible to assume that primary materials are fake only if we assume the absurd idea that each camp had two offices: one that conducted genuine office work , and the second - inauthentic). Nevertheless, all these documents have been subjected to a thorough source analysis, and their authenticity has been established with a 100% guarantee. The data from the primary materials ultimately coincide with the summary statistical reporting of the GULAG and with the information contained in the memos of the Gulag leadership addressed to N. I. Yezhov, L. P. Beria, S. N. Kruglov, as well as in the memos of the latter addressed to V. Stalin. Therefore, the documentation of all levels that we used is genuine. The assumption that this documentation could contain underestimated information is untenable for the reason that it was unprofitable and even dangerous for the NKVD bodies to underestimate the scale of their activities, because otherwise they were in danger of falling out of favor with those in power for "insufficient activity."
The statistics of the GULAG prisoners, cited by A.V. Antonov-Ovseenko, is based on evidence that, as a rule, is far from the truth. So, in particular, he writes in the mentioned article: “According to the data of the Gulag General Supply Directorate, almost 16 million were on allowances in places of detention - according to the number of rations in the first post-war years.” The list of persons who used this document does not contain the name Antonova-Ovseenko. Consequently, he did not see this document and quotes it from someone else's words, and with the grossest distortion of meaning. If A.V. Antonov-Ovseenko had seen this document, he would probably have paid attention to the comma between the numbers 1 and 6, since in reality in the fall of 1945, not 16 million, but 1.6 million prisoners were kept in the camps and colonies of the Gulag .
The fact that the alleged statistics of A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko, as well as the information of O. G. Shatunovskaya, are refuted by the data of primary Gulag materials, makes further polemics on this topic completely meaningless ...
Scientific works
Monographs
- Why there was no uprising - M .: "Algorithm", 2014. - 239 p. - ISBN 978-5-4438-0677-8
- Special settlers in the USSR, 1930-1960. - M.: "Science", 2005. - 306 p.
Articles
- Prisoners, special settlers, exiled settlers, exiles and deportees (Statistical and geographical aspect) //
