Viktor Zemskov
Encyclopedia
Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov is a Russian historian, doctor of historical sciences (2005), scientific worker of the Institute of Russian History. He is a specialist on the Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...

. Zemskov has revealed in detail the secret-police statistics about the Gulag, resolving many disputes among western historians about the number of people affected by political repression in the Soviet Union.

In 1981, he defended his candidate’s thesis “Contribution by working class to strengthening the material-technical base of agriculture in the USSR in the 1960s.”
In 1989, he joined the commission of the History Department of the USSR Academy of Sciences led by its corresponding member Yuri Polyakov to determine population losses and received access to statistical reports made by the OGPU-NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....

-MGB
MGB
The abbreviation MGB may refer to:* Mathematical Gymnasium Belgrade, special school, elementary and high school, for gifted in areas of mathematics, physics, and ICT, under University of Belgrade umbrella...

-MVD and kept in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (CSAOR) renamed the State Archive of the Russian Federation.

Between 1990 and 1992, he published the first precise statistical data on the Gulag which were based on the Gulag archives.

However, his papers were criticized by Sergei Maksudov. In Maksudov's opinion, Lev Razgon
Lev Razgon
Lev Emmanuilovich Razgon was a Soviet and Russian writer, detainee of the Gulag, human rights activist....

 and his followers including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...

 did not envisage the total number of the camps very well and markedly exaggerated their size. At the same time, from their experience, they knew something extraordinarily important about the Archipelago, its diabolical anti-human nature. On the other hand, Viktor Zemskov, who published many documents by the NKVD and KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...

, is very far from understanding of the Gulag essence and the nature of socio-political processes in the country. Without distinguishing the degree of accuracy and reliability of certain figures, without making a critical analysis of sources, without comparing new data with already known information, Zemskov absolutizes the published materials by presenting them as the ultimate truth. As a result, his attempts to make generalized statements with reference to a particular document, as a rule, do not hold water.

In response, Zemskov wrote that the charge that Zemskov allegedly did not compare new data with already known information could not be called fair. In his words, the trouble with most western writers is that they do not benefit from such comparisons. Zemskov added that when he tried not to overuse the juxtaposition of new information with “old” one, it was only because of a sense of delicacy, not to once again psychologically traumatize the researchers whose works used incorrect figures, as it turned out after the publication of the statistics by the OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD.

In 2005, Zemskov defended his doctoral thesis “Special settlers in the USSR. 1930–1960.”

Publications

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