His purges were politically responsible, the murder of more than 2,000 Polish officers and troops (proven to have been done by the Soviets based on pollen in the noses of the dead troops, pollen that was in bloom only when the Soviets occupied Poland, a fact that cannot be distorted or faked).
The large percentage of Russian troops who had seen the west being put in collective farms.
But okay, let's talk percentages. Did you know only slightly more than 2,000 French died in the Terror? That is a very small percentage of the population. Compare that to the 2 million killed in Cambodia, as a percentage.
But, here is an interesting discussion of the topic from both sides.
# 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:
o 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.
o 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.
o 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
o William Cockerham, Health and Social Change in Russia and Eastern Europe: 50M+
o Wallechinsky: 13M (1930-32) + 7M (1934-38)
+ Cited by Wallechinsky:
# Medvedev, Roy (Let History Judge): 40 million.
# Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: 60 million.
o MEDIAN: 51 million for the entire Stalin Era; 20M during the 1930s.
* And from the Lower Numbers school:
o 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.
o 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.
o Gordon, A. (What Happened in That Time?, 1989, cited in Adler, N., Victims of Soviet Terror, 1993): 8-9 million during the 1930s.
o 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.
o 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:
o 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.
o Britannica, "Stalinism": 20M died in camps, of famine, executions, etc., citing Medvedev
o Brzezinski: 20-25 million, dividing roughly as follows: 7M destroying the peasantry; 12M in labor camps; 1M excuted during and after WW2.
o Daniel Chirot:
+ "Lowest credible" estimate: 20M
+ "Highest": 40M
+ Citing:
# Conquest: 20M
# Antonov-Ovseyenko: 30M
# Medvedev: 40M
o 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).]
o 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)
o Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin: directly responsible for 20 million deaths.
o Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europes Ghosts After Communism (1995): upwards of 25M
o 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.
o Kolyma
o Kuropaty
o Vorkuta
o Bykivnia
Okay, now for WWII
# Stalin [make link]:
* Deported nationalities:
o Aleksandr Nekrich, The Punished Peoples (1978): Net population losses, 1939-59, after allowance for wartime losses.
+ Chechens: 590,000
+ Kalmyks: 142,000
+ Ingush: 128,000
+ Karachai: 124,000
+ Balkars: 64,000
+ [TOTAL: 1,048,000]
o Kenneth Christie, Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe: Ghosts at the Table of Democracy (2002)
+ Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonians (1940-41): 85,000 deported, of which 55,000 killed or died
+ Baltics executed during reconquest (1944-45): 30,000
+ Postwar partisan war
# Lithuanians: 40-50,000 k.
# Latvian: 25,000
# Estonians: 15,000
+ [TOTAL: 170,000 ± 5,000]
o Richard Overy, Russia's War (1997)
+ citing Rummel: 530,000 Chechens and other Black Sea/Caucasus minorities d.
+ citing NKVD archives: 231,000 deaths, 1943-49
o Harff and Gurr:
+ Chechens, Ingushi, Karachai, Balkars, Kalmyks: 230,000 d. (1943-57)
+ Meskhierians, Crimean Tatars: 57,000 - 175,000 d. (1944-68)
o Davies: 1,000,000 Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, etc.
o NewsHour: some 200,000 Chechens died during the exile [
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/europe/chechnya/history.html]
* Enemy POWs never returned:
o Brzezinski: 1,000,000 total d. (incl. 357,000 Germans, 140,000 Poles)
o Davies: 1,000,000 d.
o Richard Overy, Russia's War (1997): official figures released under glasnost
+ Germans: 2,388,000 POWs taken, of which 356,000 died
+ Hungarians, Romanians, etc.: 1,097,000 taken, of which 162,000 died
+ Japanese: 600,000 taken, of which 61,855 died
+ [Total: 4,085,000 taken, of which ca. 580,000 died]
o Katyn Massacre (April-May 1940):
+ Dictionary of 20C World History: 14,000 Polish officers systematically killed. 4,500 bodies discovered by Germans.
+ 30 July 2000 Sunday Telegraph [London]: 15,000 k.
+ Paul Johnson: 15,000 -- a third at Katyn, the rest in Sov. conc. camps.
+ Gilbert: 15,000 Polish POWs sent to 3 camps - Starobelsk, Kozelsk, Ostashkov - all killed. 4,400 from Kozelsk killed at Katyn.
* Returning Soviet POWs killed after the war:
o Harff and Gurr: 500,000 - 1,100,000 repatriated Soviet nationals killed (1943-47)
o Harper Collins: 1,000,000 POWs
o Davies: 5-6M deaths, screening of repatriates and inhabitants of ex-occupied territory
* Soviet soldiers executed:
o Richard Overy, Russia's War (1997)
+ "latest Russian estimates put the figure as high as 158,000 sentenced to be shot."
+ "442,000 were forced to serve in penal batallions." [These were assigned suicidally dangerous tasks, and the only way out was death or wounds, so figure maybe half dead, half crippled.]
* Gulag during the war years:
o Richard Overy, Russia's War (1997): 2.4M sent to Gulag; 1.9M freed. "Official figures show 621,000 deaths in the Gulag" during WW2
* Total killed by Stalin during the war years:
o Davies: 16-17,000,000 non-war-dead
o Rummel: 18,157,000 democides
Ash
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