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A historian teaching in Nagasaki University has recently written in a daily news paper in India that about 35000 people were killed in the USSR during the Stalin era. They were members of the Old Bolshevik party, officers of the Red army and intellectuals who supported Trotsky and Lenin. No ordinary people were involved. Is this correct?

2007-03-24 18:45:32 · 5 answers · asked by rabi k 2 in Arts & Humanities History

5 answers

I'm afraid that it's not possible to find a single, authoritative estimate on which there is general agreement (much less an official definite statistic that is generally accepted). But I have found a list, with brief commentary, on the range of estimates given by major sources. For the entire period of Stalin's rule, from the mid-1920s to 1953, the MEDIAN of these estimates is 30,000,000 — almost a thousand times more than the 35,000 people for which you cite the professor from Nagasaki.

The list I refer to folllows (I am copying and pasting from the source which is given in the source note below):

Soviet Union, Stalin's regime (1924-53): 20 000 000 [make link]
There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to the number who died at Stalin's hands. There's the "Why doesn't anyone realize that communism is the absolutely worst thing ever to hit the human race, without exception, even worse than both world wars, the slave trade and bubonic plague all put together?" school, and there's the "Come on, stop exaggerating. The truth is horrifying enough without you pulling numbers out of thin air" school. The two schools are generally associated with the right and left wings of the political spectrum, and they often accuse each other of being blinded by prejudice, stubbornly refusing to admit the truth, and maybe even having a hidden agenda. Also, both sides claim that recent access to former Soviet archives has proven that their side is right.
Here are a few illustrative estimates from the Big Numbers school:
Adler, N., Victims of Soviet Terror, 1993 cites these:
Chistyakovoy, V. (Neva, no.10): 20 million killed during the 1930s.
Dyadkin, I.G. (Demograficheskaya statistika neyestestvennoy smertnosti v SSSR 1918-1956 ): 56 to 62 million "unnatural deaths" for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin.
Gold, John.: 50-60 million.
Davies, Norman (Europe A History, 1998): c. 50 million killed 1924-53, excluding WW2 war losses. This would divide (more or less) into 33M pre-war and 17M after 1939.
Rummel, 1990: 61,911,000 democides in the USSR 1917-87, of which 51,755,000 occurred during the Stalin years. This divides up into:
1923-29: 2,200,000 (plus 1M non-democidal famine deaths)
1929-39: 15,785,000 (plus 2M non-democidal famine)
1939-45: 18,157,000
1946-54: 15,613,000 (plus 333,000 non-democidal famine)
TOTAL: 51,755,000 democides and 3,333,000 non-demo. famine
William Cockerham, Health and Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe: 50M+
Wallechinsky: 13M (1930-32) + 7M (1934-38)
Cited by Wallechinsky:
Medvedev, Roy (Let History Judge): 40 million.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: 60 million.
MEDIAN: 51 million for the entire Stalin Era; 20M during the 1930s.
And from the Lower Numbers school:
Nove, Alec ("Victims of Stalinism: How Many?" in J. Arch Getty (ed.) Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, 1993): 9,500,000 "surplus deaths" during the 1930s.
Cited in Nove:
Maksudov, S. (Poteri naseleniya SSSR, 1989): 9.8 million abnormal deaths between 1926 and 1937.
Tsaplin, V.V. ("Statistika zherty naseleniya v 30e gody" 1989): 6,600,000 deaths (hunger, camps and prisons) between the 1926 and 1937 censuses.
Dugin, A. ("Stalinizm: legendy i fakty" 1989): 642,980 counterrevolutionaries shot 1921-53.
Muskovsky Novosti (4 March 1990): 786,098 state prisoners shot, 1931-53.
Gordon, A. (What Happened in That Time?, 1989, cited in Adler, N., Victims of Soviet Terror, 1993): 8-9 million during the 1930s.
Ponton, G. (The Soviet Era, 1994): cites an 1990 article by Milne, et al., that excess deaths 1926-39 were likely 3.5 million and at most 8 million.
MEDIAN: 8.5 Million during the 1930s.
As you can see, there's no easy compromise between the two schools. The Big Numbers are so high that picking the midpoint between the two schools would still give us a Big Number. It may appear to be a rather pointless argument -- whether it's fifteen or fifty million, it's still a huge number of killings -- but keep in mind that the population of the Soviet Union was 164 million in 1937, so the upper estimates accuse Stalin of killing nearly 1 out of every 3 of his people, an extremely Polpotian level of savagery. The lower numbers, on the other hand, leave Stalin with plenty of people still alive to fight off the German invasion.
[Letter]
Although it's too early to be taking sides with absolute certainty, a consensus seems to be forming around a death toll of 20 million. This would adequately account for all documented nastiness without straining credulity:
In The Great Terror (1969), Robert Conquest suggested that the overall death toll was 20 million at minimum -- and very likely 50% higher, or 30 million. This would divide roughly as follows: 7M in 1930-36; 3M in 1937-38; 10M in 1939-53. By the time he wrote The Great Terror: A Re-assessment (1992), Conquest was much more confident that 20 million was the likeliest death toll.
Britannica, "Stalinism": 20M died in camps, of famine, executions, etc., citing Medvedev
Brzezinski: 20-25 million, dividing roughly as follows: 7M destroying the peasantry; 12M in labor camps; 1M excuted during and after WW2.
Daniel Chirot:
"Lowest credible" estimate: 20M
"Highest": 40M
Citing:
Conquest: 20M
Antonov-Ovseyenko: 30M
Medvedev: 40M
Courtois, Stephane, Black Book of Communism (Le Livre Noir du Communism): 20M for the whole history of Soviet Union, 1917-91.
Essay by Nicolas Werth: 15M
[Ironic observation: The Black Book of Communism seems to vote for Hitler as the answer to the question of who's worse, Hitler (25M) or Stalin (20M).]
John Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the Concerned Citizen (2001): 20M, incl.
Kulaks: 7M
Gulag: 12M
Purge: 1.2M (minus 50,000 survivors)
Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin: directly responsible for 20 million deaths.
Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europes Ghosts After Communism (1995): upwards of 25M
Time Magazine (13 April 1998): 15-20 million.
AVERAGE: Of the 17 estimates of the total number of victims of Stalin, the median is 30 million.

Individual Gulags etc.
Kolyma
Kuropaty
Vorkuta
Bykivnia
Famine, 1926-38
Richard Overy, Russia's War (1997): 4.2M in Ukraine + 1.7M in Kazakhstan
Green, Barbara ("Stalinist Terror and the Question of Genocide: the Great Famine" in Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust Unique?) cites these sources for the number who died in the famine:
Nove: 3.1-3.2M in Ukraine, 1933
Maksudov: 4.4M in Ukraine, 1927-38
Mace: 5-7M in Ukraine
Osokin: 3.35M in USSR, 1933
Wheatcraft: 4-5M in USSR, 1932-33
Conquest:
Total, USSR, 1926-37: 11M
1932-33: 7M
Ukraine: 5M

2007-03-24 19:08:50 · answer #1 · answered by silvcslt 4 · 5 0

No, not even close. The great purge alone had a death toll of around a million. Add in starvation deaths caused by agricultural policy and the number of people who went into the Gulags and never came out, and at a minimum, the 35,000 figure is about 1% of the total death toll. The lowest estimate I've seen prior to this was about 2.5 million, and range from there up to 60 million. The frightening thing is that there is really no way to know the exact number because people weren't considered important enough to warrant accurate record keeping.

2007-03-24 19:17:10 · answer #2 · answered by Captain Hammer 6 · 2 0

Staling killed anyone who felt was a threat to him or anyone that opposed him. He even killed some of his most trustworthy friends. Under his rule nearly 6-8 million people were killed, most were ordinary people. Anyone opposing him had a death sentence.


Grandfather Lenin.

2007-03-24 18:50:26 · answer #3 · answered by Nebel6 2 · 1 1

At least 3 million according to Wikipedia.

2007-03-24 18:51:23 · answer #4 · answered by puppylove 6 · 0 2

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2016-10-20 09:56:21 · answer #5 · answered by valda 4 · 0 0

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