Abstract

The article is concerned with the features of Stalin’s repressions study by Soviet, emigrant and modern Russian researchers. Accurate data, concerning the number of political prisoners was not published in the Soviet period and special works on this problem were issued only under perestroika. But primarily the wish to say the truth about the real dimension of Stalin’s crimes was not corroborated by historical sources. It resulted in overstated numbers of tens of millions of Soviet citizens being imprisoned and millions being shot. In recent years the researchers have made a great step forward in studying different types of terror and categories of political prisoners, mechanisms of mass repressive acts execution, dynamics of prisoners number in places of confinement, total number of exiles and deportees. The issue of Books of Condolence in the constituent units of the Russian Federation, the establishment of the Common Database of the Victims of Political Terror in the USSR took the problem research to a new level.