legatus

Currently (at least for the-eye) it's about IPFS's barrier of entry. I expect LibGen's case to be similar. Most people don't know about it, and if even those that knew about it had to learn how IPFS works etc, they would probably just try to find the book they're looking for elsewhere.

There are groups behind data curation as well, though it is much harder. LibGen sees an addition rate of about 230 GBs per month, while SciMag's is around 1.10 TBs per month. We should expect those numbers to increase in the future. The man-hours required to curate those database may very well cost much more than the storage and bandwidth required to store duplicates and incorrectly tagged files. In any case, as I said, there are people seriously interested in curating the LibGen database, though most efforts I know of are still in the earliest stages.

Well, in fact, they did. It's why pretty much every Sovietology book pre-1991 is now rarely recommended. The Soviet archives were opened with the fall of the USSR, allowing historians to have a much more accurate view of what was happening. Sure, there are caveats (e.g. people freed from the gulag in a dying state) yet, contemporary historians have been able to provide estimates, based on the best data available. The thing with Solzhenitsyn is that he had no access to any kind of data, and as a refugee in the US it's clear he was extremely biased. Note that I'm not saying I don't understand why he did that, I'm just saying that, if you want a good estimate of the numbers related to the Gulag system Solzhenitsyn is not a good source.

Regarding your last points: 60 million repressed is entirely dependent on how you define "repressed". Some people may argue that not having access to health care and education means being repressed. Just noting that it's not really a useful value, it's already difficult estimating number of deaths, estimating such a vague term as "repressed" people will be next to impossible. Regarding your claim that communists killed as many if not more people than Nazis, I really dislike this kind of comparisons. It is an extremely politicized topic, removes the human part of the statistics and historical context. Even then, I would still disagree with your claim, unless you count Mao's Great Leap Forward as part of it, which is really a comparison between apples and oranges. I personally believe state-pursued, systematic genocides should be differentiated from famines (such as the Holodomor and the famines related to the Great Leap Forward) which were more of a consequence of the regime's terrible management (plus already low harvest in the case of the Holodomor). If you want to take a look, the Wikipedia page for the excess mortality under Stalin is not too bad, especially the source they used (Wheatcroft's Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police).

I don't see Nazi defenders keeping quiet, I think it's enough to think of the growing "Identity Politics" movement. Soviet apologia is rarely referring to the Stalinist period, especially considering Khrushchev's 56' "De-Stalinization" speech. And if you only consider the USSR of Khrushchev and beyond, while definitely worth criticizing, I'm not sure it's even comparable to the Nazi regime.

The point is that in this case Rummel doesn't even attempt to be objective. You can be biased, everyone is. A real historian, someone who is respected by his peers, actively tries to remove his bias from his work. It isn't really profitable (you earn much more by writing extremely biased pop-history) but some individuals, such as me, value it.

Then you can agree with me when saying that it is something worth attempting. It may be a great alternative, or another failure. We won't know unless we try!

(It was nice to have this discussion with you :) )

I'm really sorry an AskHistorians thread is not good enough for you. Let me paste Jonathan Smele's remark about Rummel's work (Smele is known for his compiled bibliography on the Russian Revolution):

>A poorly researched, obsessively anti-Soviet polemical general survey. [1]

Unsurprisingly, you would have read that exact quote in the reddit thread I linked. Guess that was too much to ask for.

[1] Jonathan Smele, Russian Revolution and Civil War Annotated Bibliography