The Great Blackout

The great blackout, the great conspiracy against the Soviet people by the Soviet government, became total and all-embracing. The Soviet government, too, published penal statistics after the bolsheviks took power. There were 6000 political prisoners in Soviet prisons in 1926; 30,000 in 1928; and 662,257 on May 1, 1930. The figures for political prisoners shot up into the millions, and the Soviet government no longer dared to publish penal statistics. In the first years of the Soviet regime, more statistical information was published than in tsarist Russia. Soviet statistical agencies ranked with those of the advanced countries. Concealment of the facts of the "political economy" of the country has gone so far that it begins to handicap even the bureaucracy itself. The Paths of Agricultural Economy was discontinued in October, 1929 with the beginning of the Great War on the peasants.