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Excess mortality under Joseph Stalin - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher..none of these were war related deaths.
"Excess Mortality", is the current DSA/Muslim Democratic term for killing dissidents...............that some died in gulags or just disappeared is echoed in Hillarys' "MAGA are just a basket of Deplorables", and
Never trust a democrat as they ALL want you Stalinized.
The original claim by some "historians" was 61 million, that number was downsized to 20 million to be more believable, but even that was disproved long ago by examining Soviet archives. BTW, people were dying from famines and diseases in pre-Soviet Russia as well. It wasn't something that Stalin planned.
The archives have, as you said, made studying Stalinist repression far easier than in previous years. For example many cold war warrior (or people pushing a higher death toll in the tens of millions), like one Rummel, cited around 61 million deaths collectively in the USSR. However in the 1980's a group of historians called the revisionists, (most notably Getty and Wheatcroft), stated lower numbers than the infamous 20 million. Getty claimed about 1-2 million were killed under Stalin. Wheatcroft around 3 million. When the information from the archives came out, the revisionists found their claims to be more accurate. Getty found roughly 800,000 execution and and 1 million gulag deaths. This of course doesn't count undocumented executions such as the Katyn massacre, and the gulag deaths eventually went up to 1.2 million with more achives coming out, with the current consensus on the gulag and labor colonies now being 1.5-1.7 million deaths, averaging at 1.6 million deaths. Wheatcroft cites around a million "purposive shootings" and around two million deaths from deportations and gulags. The best material on this is Micheal Ellman's:"Soviet Repression statistics: some comments." It came to the conclusion of about 3-3.5 million deaths from 1921-1953, the vast majority, if not all, of those deaths under Stalin. He also find 950,000-1.2 million from the 1937-1938 terror.
On deportations I find J Otto Pohl's "Stalin's genocide Against "Repressed People" to be the best source. It found around 1 million deaths from these deportations. 600,000+ from ethnic deportations and 389,000 from dekulakization. Werth cites 1.5 million, but Pohl is likely more accurate.
So if we add all of these together then we find 1.6 million+1 million+1 million and we get 3.6 million. If we add and extra 200,000 that Ellman estimated then we get closer to 4 million. If we use Werth's estimate for deportations then we go over four million, but this number is likely the best we get for things we can absolutely pin on Stalin's regime.
We know from Years of Hunger, by Davies and Wheatcroft one of the best books on the 1932-33 famine, that around 5.5 million died. Snyder adds that to the numbers we already found to get 9 million deaths. But without those famine deaths, Snyder's number drops to 3.5-4 million.
Overall, the archive opening gave us tremendous knowledge on Stalinist repression, and 3.6 million repression deaths and 5.5 famine deaths, totaling 9.1 million is the best we have. Whether or not you want to include famine deaths is a completely different topic and this answer by u/Kockevn81 is worth checking out.
Sources:
Lethal Politics: Soviet mass murder and genocide since 1917( and example of the higher estimates.
Getty's Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre-war years
Wheatcroft's German and Soviet mass murder and repression
Ellman's Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments.
Red Holocaust by Steve Rosefielde (for the 1.2 million gulag number.
Golfo Alexopoulos's analysis shows 1.5-1.7 million deaths in the gulag and other prisons
Werth's analysis shows 1.5 million deaths from deportations
Pohl finds roughly 1 million deaths from deportation
Years of Hunger by Davies and Wheatcroft.
Snyder's "Who killed more, Hitler or Stalin"
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