Method
How to read this ledger
The Cheka’s own instructions, the closed Ukrainian border in 1933, and the execution quotas of 1937 are the papers. This page is how the grades and the numbers are used.
Why the textbook page is short
A year of world history has to cross centuries. Teachers inherit surveys that pair “Russian Revolution” with industrialization and the world wars, then move on. During the alliance of 1941–45, American public culture had a reason to talk about Stalin as a partner. During the Cold War, it had a reason to talk about him as a tyrant and very little time for peasants in Poltava. After the 1960s, parts of the academy treated a focus on Bolshevik crimes as itself a political act, and preferred social history to decrees. The archives that settle arguments mostly opened after 1991. A high-school book revised on a slow cycle does not absorb a telegram overnight.
None of that makes the omission harmless. A student can finish a course able to define “soviet” and unable to say that an elected Constituent Assembly was dispersed, that famine was enforced with a travel ban, or that the political police published a class rule for execution. This ledger is for that gap. It is not a claim that American schools teach nothing true.
Five grades of evidence
Every charged claim in the record carries one of these. They are not a moral ranking. A testimony can be true. A decree can be evil and still be the easiest document to prove.
Opened archive
A document from a state archive, published in a documentary edition.
Decree or order
An official order, law, or public instruction of the regime.
Contemporary testimony
A witness, memoir, journalist, or commission report from the time. Real, but not a census.
Historical synthesis
A finding historians argue from documents. Ranges and caveats still apply.
Origin
The 1897 imperial census counted Jews at a little over 4 percent of the population. The 1922 Bolshevik party census counted Jewish members at about 5.2 percent. Russians were the largest group in the membership. In the leadership cohort counted by Liliana Riga, minorities together — Jews, Latvians, Georgians, Poles, Ukrainians, Armenians, and others — were a majority of that cohort. The leader index states birth, family, and religion on each profile.
Numbers
About 22,000 at Katyn, from a Politburo decision. About 680,000 to 700,000 shot in 1937–38, from the NKVD’s statistical report. About 3.9 million excess deaths in Ukraine in 1932–34, from the demographic reconstruction. About 1.5 to 1.7 million registered deaths in the camp ledgers, and about 18 million people passing through. Courtois’s introduction gives about 20 million for the USSR. Rummel’s democide total is about 62 million for 1917–1987.
The civil war
White armies executed prisoners and took part in pogroms. Peasant bands killed as local power shifted. Those deaths are not entries in the Cheka decrees, the famine orders, or the 1937 quotas.
What this site will not do
It will not invent a quotation. It will not print a torture method as a set of instructions. It will not call a famous epigram a document when the file is empty. A wrong name, date, or translation is corrected from the book cited next to the claim.