Viktor Zemskov

Who is Viktor Zemskov?

Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov is a Russian historian, doctor of historical sciences, research associate of the Institute of Russian History. He is a specialist on the Gulag. 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-MGB-MVD and kept in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution renamed the State Archive of the Russian Federation. According to Leonid Lopatnikov, Zemskov was the only historian admitted to the archives for the reports, and later the archives were again "closed."

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