how many people were ultimately killed by stalin?

Answer 1

The truth is, no one knows. Especially because during World War II, it was very easy to shift the blame over onto the Nazis, who, to be sure, were dreadful killers in their own right with long-run policy goals that included exterminating Jews and Gypsies and enslaving Slavs...

Just one example. For decades, the Soviet government maintained that 1941 mass executions of Polish POWs who remained in Soviet camps following the joint annexation of Poland by USSR and Germany in 1939 were carried out by advancing Germans. Only during Gorbachev's tenure in 1980s (and only after persistent diplomaic pressure from Poland) it was aknowledged that the executions were in fact done by the Soviet People's Commission for Domestic Affairs (NKVD), which supervised the POW camps, out of fear that Polish POWs (mainly career officers) would join the Germans.

Now this was something that involved foreigners and diplomatic pressure from abroad. When only Soviet citizens were involved, no one seems to care...

Another problem is, how do you decide between blaming Stalin, Hitler, or circumstance when it comes to wartime deaths of civilians? Wars cause disruptions in food supply; what medical care there used to be gets diverted to the frontline troops; safe drinking water becomes hard to come by as warring armies destroy water mains and treatment facilities. As a result, civilian population suffers from malnutrition (sometimes, outright starvation) and disease.

One thing is certain though; USSR's civilian casualties during World War II were unusually high. During Brezhnev's times (1965-82), the official Soviet estimate of USSR's World War II casualties was 20 million, vast majority of it civilians. Needless to say, the whole thing was summarily attributed to Nazi atrocities. In mid-1980s, several prominent Soviet demographers conducted their own estimates and came up with figures in 15 to 40 million range. As to dividing responsibilities between SS and NKVD, this is anyone's guess... We do know that NKVD has orchestrated two large "cleansing" campaigns (one in 1937 and another in 1948), so demographically, their toll would be indistinguishable from wartime losses.

Also, what about the West's complacency? During Yalta conference in 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Stalin's request that all Soviet (and Yugoslavian) citizens that end up in the territories occupied by the U.S., Britain, or France, would be handed back to the USSR (or Yugoslavia, as the case may be) after the war is over, regardless of their consent. Most of those people went straight to labor camps, where many died. Who killed them?

Answer 2

Author Robert Conquest came up with 10 million, but there has been some suspicion that this was to 'equal' Hitler's body count. This figure was from the book 'Hitler and Stalin: A Study in Tyranny' from the 1980s. There are probably better figures now, but of course 'official' records are only likely to tell part of the truth. Sorry I don't have a recent Stalin biography to check the latest thinking.

You would need to add together those killed by starvation during farm collectivisation in the early 1930s (most of the figure), those killed in labour camps and during the purges of the military in the late 1930s, (many tens of thousands- but the majority of those oppressed were imprisoned rather than killed), German prisoners (perhaps 1 - 3 million), nationalists in the occupied countries after the war, especially Ukraine.

Answer 3

Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 23 million of his own people years before anyone ever heard of Adolf Hitler.

Stalin perpetrated a systematic eradication of the Russian officer corp, he engineered the Ukranian famine, and he routinely ordered his political enemies executed by his state secret police and the elimination of entire ethnic groups.

Only Mao Tse Tung and his 'Cultural Revolution' with 32 million killed has exceeded Stalin's murders.

Answer 4

Exact numbers are impossible to determine, but between 7,000,000 and 10,000,000 people were murdered during the process of colectivization, economic policies caused a further 10,000,000 to starve to death. The purges of 1936/37 killed well over 10,000,000.

A good estimate, which only includes pre WW2 data would put the figure around 20,000,000 on orders, 10,000,000 due to famine.

Answer 5

Soviet Government archives show a total of 3 million victims.