Even though archival evidence available post-1991 has significantly reduced the death toll for Soviet Communism from the extremely high estimates of 40-60 million killed suggested during the Cold War era by Solzhenitsyn and others (although some academics such as R. J. Rummel insist the very high estimates were correct:
How Many Did Stalin Really Murder?), the death toll is still horrific, and still in the millions (not “thousands” as some revisionist historians have claimed. For more on these revisionists, see
In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr). And more often than not only deaths from the Stalin era are counted in the Soviet kill tally, while the bloody repressions of Lenin’s era (Red Terror, De-Cossackization, War Communism, etc.) are usually omitted; as well as the repressions after the Stalin era, such as the brutal scorched earth campaigns in Afghanistan during the 1980’s. From the numerous books and articles I've read and many documentaries I’ve seen on the subject, I break down the Soviet death toll like this:
**Nine million repression deaths [Executions: 1.5 million, Gulag: 5 million, Deportations: 1.7 million {out of 7.5 million deported}, and POW's and German civilians: 1 million] (citing Vadim Erlikman’s
Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke : spravochnik. Moscow 2004. ISBN 5931651071) to perhaps 15-20 million deaths attributable to the regime overall (citing
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois et al;
A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia by Alexander Yakovlev;
Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime by Dmitri Volkogonov;
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore; Matthew White’s
Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century;
Stalin: Man of Steel (History Channel program),
Joseph Stalin: Red Terror (A&E Biography))
Mainstream media sources:
The BBC ("Historians believe up to 20 million Soviets died during Stalin's rule")
The Associated Press ("Nobody knows exactly how many people perished during the purges of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, but historians generally estimate the death toll at 14 to 20 million.")
CNN ("The vast Communist secret police apparatus during Stalin's rule is believed to have killed at least 15 million people, mainly Soviet citizens, and deported 40 million, including more than 200,000 people from the Baltics.")
Time Magazine (15-20 million - see the "Historical Atlas" link above)
The numerous mass graves discovered all over the former USSR and various satellite countries from the late 80’s to today are by far the most damning evidence of the sheer criminality of the Soviet regime:
Kurapaty: The Road of Death
Bikivnia
Documenting the Death Toll: Research into the Mass Murder of Foreigners in Moscow, 1937–38 Scroll down to “The Butovo Apple Yard”
Wary of its past, Russia ignores mass grave site
Mass grave found at Ukrainian monastery
Mass grave found containing Stalin victims
Mass grave uncovered in Mongolia
*Some 100,000 (citing
Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War by W. Bruce Lincoln) to 250,000-300,000 (citing
The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police by George Leggett) murdered by Lenin’s Bolsheviks during the "Red Terror" and Russian civil war. But it could be higher. In
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924, Orlando Figes says Cheka victims could number
"several hundred thousand" and that
"it is possible that more people were murdered by the Cheka than died in the battles of the civil war." (pg 649) S. P. Melgunov's
The Red Terror in Russia documents some of the most horrific tortures and mass murders committed by the Bolsheviks during this bloody time. Makes for ghastly reading!
*Between 300,000 and 500,000 Cossacks killed or deported in 1919 and 1920 out of a population of no more than a few million (known as
"De-Cossackization"; not sure how many of these deaths overlap with the aforementioned Cheka murders - if at all). (citing
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois et al) Historian Orlando Figes documents the execution of some 12,000 Cossacks, mostly old men, in the early months of 1919 alone.
*5 million perished in the famine of 1921-22, in which the Bolshevik policy of "war communism" (which included forced requisitioning of food and deportation and even execution of peasants who refused to comply) made the famine much worse than it had to be. Compare this to previous Russian famines under the autocratic Tsars which killed no where near as many. (citing
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes and
Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime by Richard Pipes)
*Between 7.2 to 9.5 million deaths during dekulakization/collectivization and the massive famine caused by these draconian policies (citing
Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed For Him by Donald Rayfield and
Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime by Dmitri Volkogonov)
*Around 700,000 executed during the Great Terror of 1937-38 (citing
Stalin's Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union edited by Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott); this does not include those who were beaten/tortured to death during "interrogation" or deaths in the gulag during this time, which would put the overall murder tally for the Great Terror somewhere between 950,000 and 1.2 million (citing
Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments by Michael Ellman,
Conclusions (2), Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54, No.7, 2002, 1151-1172) Note: I only cite this source because I agree with his totals killed in the Great Terror. Some of his other (clearly revisionist) conclusions on Soviet Repression are total bunk, IMO.
*Over 1 million Polish citizens deported by November 1940; 30% of whom were dead by 1941 (citing
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore) and over 20,000 reserve officers and intellectuals executed outright (i.e. Katyn) by the NKVD during the Nazi-Soviet. Many thousands more were tortured to death by NKVD sadists in the most unspeakable ways, which included scalding in boiling water, the cutting off of fingers, noses, ears and breasts, gouging out eyes and other outrages (citing
Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia by Jan Tomasz Gross)
*A total of 34,250 Latvians and around 60,000 Estonians and 75,000 Lithuanians murdered or deported during Nazi-Soviet pact (citing
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore) Gruesome pictures of Latvian victims of the NKVD can be found
here
*An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 were slaughtered during the "prison massacres," in which the NKVD murdered Ukrainian and Polish political prisoners (this does not include the aforementioned 20,000 killed) wholesale as they retreated from the advancing Wehrmacht in 1941. Most were machine-gunned to death in batches, but sometimes prisons were set on fire and the helpless prisoners burned to death, in other cases grenades were tossed into crowded cells and prisoners were blown to pieces. (citing wikipedia article
NKVD massacres of prisoners)
*The ethnic cleansing of minorities during WW2 within the USSR - such as the Crimean Taters, Chechens, Kalmyks, Volga Germans and others where deported wholesale into exile for "collaborating" with the Germans, with hundreds of thousands dying in transit or of privation while in exile. Those who couldn't be deported were sometimes killed. In one incident at Khainakh, one of Beria's henchmen, Mikeil Gvishiani, locked several hundred villagers in stables and set fire to them, gunning down those who broke out. (citing
Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed For Him by Donald Rayfield)
*An estimated 4.5 million (citing the Pulitzer Prize winning
Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum) deaths in the Gulag. The aforementioned Russian historian Vadim Erlikman comes to a total of 5 million deaths.
*In Mongolia under the Soviet dominated Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP), some 30,000 intellectuals, dissidents, noblemen and monks were murdered by Choibalsan and the Soviet-Mongolian KGB. (citing
Poisoned Arrows: The Stalin-Choibalsan Mongolian Massacres, 1921-1941 by Shagdariin Sandag, Harry H. Kendall, Frederic E. Wakeman)
*Many thousands of POUM members (including Trotsky's former secretary, Erwin Wolff, the Austrian socialist Kurt Landau, the British journalist ‘Bob’ Smilie and a former lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, José Robles and POUM leader Andrés Nin) were executed or tortured to death in NKVD prisons around Madrid during the Spanish civil war. (citing
Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul M. Johnson)
*Numerous assassinations of refugees and defectors abroad (i.e. “special actions” or “wet affairs”), such as Leon Trotsky, Ignace Reiss and Yevhen Konovalets. Other likely (but never 100% proven) victims of Stalin’s “wet affairs” include Walter Krivitsky, Willy Münzenberg and Lev Sedov (Trotsky’s son). One of the more nefarious assassinations on Soviet soil is Solomon Mikhoels “car accident” in Minsk arranged by L. M. Tsanava and S. Ogoltsov at Stalin’s behest (citing historian Gennady Kostyrchenko:
http://www.mk.ru/numbers/1806/article60646.htm). Assassinations, which had been an integral part of Stalin’s foreign policy, were curtailed in the post Stalin era but continued nonetheless, even during the “Khrushchev thaw.” A notorious example is the murder of Ukrainian dissidents Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera by KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky. In 1957, the KGB trained Stashinsky to use a spray gun that fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide ampule. The gas was designed to induce cardiac arrest, making the victim's death look like a heart attack. (citing
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin)
*The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the scorched earth campaigns against the Mujahadeen claimed between 1.5 and 2 million lives, 90% of whom were civilians (citing
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois et al) Methods of terrorizing the Afghan civilian population included the use of incendiary bombs, napalm, poison gas, miniature mines scattered from the air, and booby trapped toys which were designed to maim the children who picked them up and so demoralize their parents. The KGB and their puppets KhAD (Democratic Republic of Afghanistan's secret police) revived on Afghan soil some of the horrors of its Stalinist past. Amnesty International assembled evidence of
‘widespread and systematic torture of men, women and children’. A common theme in its reports was the presence of Soviet advisors directing the interrogations, much as they had done during the Stalinist purges in Eastern Europe a generation earlier. Najibullah sometimes executed prisoners himself. His preferred method, according to survivors of his prisons, was to beat his victims to the ground, then kick them to death. (citing
The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin)
We are talking massive shedding of human blood here; heinous crimes against humanity. From individual assassinations (Leon Trotsky’s murder) to large scale massacres (Katyn) to cold blooded mass murder of its own citizenry on an almost unprecedented scale during peacetime (the Great Terror), the Soviet Empire was one of the most tyrannical regimes of the 20th century that, through murder and misrule, brought about many millions of deaths. The Soviet Union, along with National Socialist Germany, The People’s Republic of China (most likely the deadliest regime in the history of the world, see the 1994 Washington Post article
Uncounted Millions: Mass Death In Mao's China and
Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday) and Democratic Kampuchea, helped make the 20th century the bloodiest in human history. It must be noted, however, that it appears Communism was the greater evil, seeing that of the 4 most vicious regimes of the 20th century, 1 is Fascist (or National Socialist) and 3 are Communist. It is important to make this distinction because while Fascism is considered the epitome of political evil, its totalitarian counterpart is often dismissed as much ado about nothing by various cultural elites and even applauded by some nutcase academics (e.g.
Grover Furr). The rise of neo-Stalinism and the partial rehabilitation of Stalin in the former USSR is also a worrying sign (
Outrage at revision of Stalin's legacy). This is an insult to the millions of victims of this nefarious system. As with the millions of victims of Fascism, the millions killed by Communism must not be forgotten either.
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
