perm filename KGB.NS[W90,JMC] blob
sn#882130 filedate 1990-02-13 generic text, type T, neo UTF8
a050 0405 13 Feb 90
PM-Soviet-KGB,0361
MOSCOW (AP) - The KGB secret police said in a report today that
three-quarters of a million citizens were shot to death as enemies of
the Soviet state from 1930 to 1953, the years of Stalinist terror.
The figure does not include the millions who died in labor camps and
prisons or in the famines instigated by Stalin during his
collectivization of agriculture, but it represented the first time
the KGB has given any figure for the number Stalin's victims.
Many Western sources say more than 10 million people were killed in
Stalin's reign of terror.
Under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reforms, government
commissions and the KGB have been ordered to find the truth about
Stalin's terror and rehabilitate those who were sentenced.
Gorbachev's KGB director, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, has vowed to never
again permit the KGB to be involved in the terror its precedessors
unleashed on the Soviet public.
The official Tass news agency quoted a KGB committee as saying a
review of its archives determined that 3,778,234 people had been
sentenced for counter-revolutionary or crimes against the state from
1930 to 1953, the year Stalin died.
It said 786,098 of them, including many top state and party leaders,
scientists, military leaders and cultural figures, had been shot to
death.
Most such leading figures such as Bolshevik leader Nikolai I.
Bukharin, who was shot at the height of the terror in 1938, have
since been cleared of any crimes.
The Tass report said the cases of more than 850,000 people had been
reconsidered by the KGB and the Soviet prosecutor's office in the
past two years and that all but about 12,000 of them had been
cleared.
The KGB said it was continuing to look for the mass graves where
Stalin's victims were buried in order to place memorials there. Such
graves have been uncovered in many regions of the country in recent
years.
But it charged that many local KGB offices were not helping uncover
the truth about the innocent victims of the terror in their areas.
AP-NY-02-13-90 0658EST
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