Source for Stalin's Death Toll

Here.

For a more academic source that Sousa's essay is based on, see Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years:A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence by J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Ritterspoon and Viktor N. Zemskov.

I am really getting tired of endlessly answering these questions to people who are not familiar with the literature. Note: I am not insulting those of you who have not heard of the revisionist studies, as the revisionist tolls on Stalin have never been disseminated by the "free press" (LOL!) in the West, so of course no one has heard of any of this stuff.

Peacetime figures for political deaths in the USSR 1921-1953 are:

Executions:             900,000
Deaths in the gulag:    300,000
Dekulakization Ukraine: 390,000

Totals:                 1.59 million

Granted this does not include their fake deliberate famine (1.5 million) or the deaths during WW2. It's open to debate whether to include such things or not.

The source is J. Arch Getty and various Russian scholars. The KGB archives were opened up by Gorbachev in 1990 and the millions of pages were pored over by scholars from the world over. The killers wrote down everything. Google J. Arch Getty for more.

The debate has continued to be conducted in academic journals since then, and the Conquest liars have stuck to their guns. The debate gets complicated, and I am not privy to all the details. Bottom line is that Conquest is saying that Commies lie all the time, so why should we believe the KGB archives, since obviously the KGB lied in their own archives.

Feel free to dip into it if you wish. I gave up after a bit and am just siding with Getty and rest. It may be some time before this is all sorted out. There are clearly some overheated emotions, at least on one side anyway.

The figures do not include:

Famine deaths "Holodomor": 1.5 million
WW2 minority transfers:    300,000+
Executions during WW2:     ~100,000+
Gulag criminal deaths:     900,000

Totals:                    2.8 million 

Even if you include those deaths, the figure only goes to 4.4 million. That's a far cry from 20-110 million.

So many people have been fed the Conquest fertilizer for so many years that they can't help but believe it, and they refuse to believe that the US government and the World Press lied to them for so many decades. People don't like to hear that they got lied to.

References

Getty, J. Arch, Ritterspoon, Gabor T. and Zemskov, Viktor N. 1993. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence American Historical Review 98:4, 1048-49.

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