Stalin: Death Count?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

A quick,and simple,question concerning Stalin.

How many of his people did he actually kill? The number by western academics is,from what I hear,greatly distorted.So I was simply curious as to what the realistic amount was.

[chegitz guevara]

too many

[TheGodlessUtopian]

too many


*sigh* For the love of that non-existent god,please,post real responses!

[Amphictyonis]

Dead horse meet broom. ;) Do a search on the site. I'm sure this has been discussed 3 trillion times. It seems to be the focus of peoples attention. Stalin Stalin Stalin. He's completely irrelevant to our modern day struggles (unless we're talking about what NOT to do).

[chegitz guevara]

That is a real response. We'll never know, and the actual count is a pointless quibble. Does it matter if it's three million or five million or only 800,000?

[Nolan]

50 billion.

[Bandito]

I'm fairly sure that Stalin didn't kill anyone.

[el_chavista]

You may want to look for the book "lies about the soviet history" from Soares, a member of the KPMLR of Sweden.
According to him, there were more inmates in American prisons than in soviet gulags by the time of Stalin.

[Ocean Seal]

To be fair it was above 9,000
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiMHTK15Pik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J0MF26pkLE


:ohmy::ohmy::ohmy::ohmy::cursing::cursing::cursing ::cursing::ohmy::ohmy::ohmy::ohmy:

I would give a real response, but the truth is nobody knows. People can speculate, but that's about it. inb4 the flame war.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

1,387,145.

[Kléber]

The official figure from the Russian archives is that there were around 700,000 executions by the NKVD from 1936-41. Add more if you believe the millions of deaths from 1928-1953 due to starvation, overwork in labor camps, and ethnic forced migrations, should be blamed on the bureaucracy led by Stalin.

[Sosa]

one too many.

[RadioRaheem84]

Many people obsess over Stalin because they want a clean conscious when adopting socialism. This is something the capitalist media tries to instill in many young socialists; that we should feel apologetic for Stalin's autocratic rule. It's ridiculous.

Why don't cappies obsess over Suharto and lose sleep wondering if their ideology is morally unblemished?

Fuck, if cappies would just accept Fascism, Nazism as theirs there would be no questioning of socialism or fingerpointing at Stalin or Mao.

But instead they leave Hitler in some sort of limbo not wanting to take the guy as someone championed capitalism.

[Gustav HK]

There were 700-something-thousand people sentenced to death under Stalin, although I have read that "only" a half of them were executed.

The number of deaths in the Gulag camps were 1,053,831 from 1934 to 1953, of course that starts just after the collectivization, so the deaths were probably a bit higher.
Many people also died few years after their release, but the number probably doesn´t go over 2,000,000.

http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk/lies.html (scroll down for statistics).

Moreover most of the executions took place under Yezhov, who was later sentenced to death himself, for executing so many innocent.

"Yezhov was a rat; in 1938 he killed many innocent people. We shot him for that" - Stalin

[Roach]

50 billion.
Wrong, it was much higher, but sadly not even great historians like Robert Conquest were able to discover. :rolleyes:
If you are interested in seeing what Stalin wanted the Soviet Goverment to be.Read this: http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html

[Kléber]

If you are interested in seeing what Stalin wanted the Soviet Goverment to be.Read this: http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html
You gotta love Grover Furr, one of the wittiest cynics of our age. Stalin was totally in favor of free speech and democratic reforms... but he could never quite get there, because there was always one more scumbag revisionist to kill!


Moreover most of the executions took place under Yezhov, who was later sentenced to death himself, for executing so many innocent.
Yezhov was executed to serve as a scapegoat for purges which he had conducted in close concert with Stalin and against Stalin's political rivals. Stalin would later be denounced and himself used as a scapegoat for the bureaucracy as a whole, during the Khrushchev administration, when it tried to distance itself from the ghastly memory of 1937.

[Barry Lyndon]

Purges: 800,000 executed
Gulag: Approx. 2 million died
Deportations of Ethnic minorities: 1 million died
Famine:3-7 million deaths
Total: 6.8-10.8 million deaths under Stalin

[Os Cangaceiros]

I have a sneaking suspicion that this topic may have been brought up somewhere in this 19 page long thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalin-thread-all-t100814/index.html).

And here's another active 17 page long thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/gulag-myth-t141202/index.html) about the exact same topic.

[Born in the USSR]

Purges: 700,000 executed
Gulag: Approx. 2 million died
Deportations of Ethnic minorities: 1 million died
Famine:3-7 million deaths
Total: 6.7-10.7 million deaths under Stalin

Plus about 15 millions Nazi killed or captured during the WW2.
Then total is about 25 millions of killed or captured.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Wrong, it was much higher, but sadly not even great historians like Robert Conquest were able to discover. :rolleyes:
If you are interested in seeing what Stalin wanted the Soviet Goverment to be.Read this: http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html

I'm intending to read the entire Furr essay, however i'd just like to post point no.86, which i've just read:

86. At the end of the Plenum Robert Eikhe, First Secretary of the West Siberian Krai (region of the Russian republic) met privately with Stalin. Then several other First Secretaries met with him. They probably demanded the awful powers that they were granted shortly afterward: the authority to form "troikas," or groups of three officials, to combat widespread conspiracies against the Soviet government in their area.18 These troikas were given the power of execution without appeal. Numerical limits for those to be shot and others to be imprisoned on the sole power of these troikas were demanded and given. When those were exhausted, the First Secretaries asked for, and received, higher limits. Zhukov thinks that Eikhe may have been acting on behalf of an informal group of First Secretaries. (Getty, "Excesses" 129; Zhukov, Inoy 435)

(My emphasis).

Therein lies Stalin's guilt. For whatever reason, he seemingly (as Furr admits, and as is corroborated by evidence from Getty and Zhukov) granted first secretaries the powers to form undemocratic centres of power and to execute a completely arbitrary number of people without appeal. I'm sure we've all seen the lists of random numbers drawn of how many people in a particular oblast/city etc. were to be shot. It numbers, in total, in 5, possibly 6 figure sums. So, for me, whether it was 10,000 or 1 million people who were executed in the late 1930s is now irrelevant. This piece of evidence is eye-opening for me, as somebody who tends not to side with either Trotskyists or anti-revisionists in the Stalin debate; this has, once and for all, proved to me that Stalin had a now irrefutable part in the excesses of the late 1930s and, whilst there is still a huge amount of unfair anti-Stalin propaganda being passed around these days, this evidence really is damning and we should accept it as such.

[Black Sheep]

we are reporting that the death toll is over 30 billion people
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:H2BGu0CW1g_OQM:http://newsbusters.org/media/2005-10-19-southpark.jpg&t=1

[scarletghoul]

Any attempt to attribute such a toll to an individual is undialectical nonsense, as well as a parrotting of bourgeois crapp (if same standards applied to capitalist leaders, Queen Victoria may be the biggest murderer in history)

Besides, if we're gonna be like that, we should also consider how many lives Stalin saved. How many would have perished if the kulaks were left untouched ? How many lives were saved by the building of socialist education, healthcare, etc ? How many millions were spared from nazi extermination ?

So the answer to the OP is minus-something0000000

[scarletghoul]

You may want to look for the book "lies about the soviet history" from Soares, a member of the KPMLR of Sweden.
According to him, there were more inmates in American prisons than in soviet gulags by the time of Stalin.
this is true, even in proportion

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Any attempt to attribute such a toll to an individual is undialectical nonsense, as well as a parrotting of bourgeois crapp (if same standards applied to capitalist leaders, Queen Victoria may be the biggest murderer in history)

Besides, if we're gonna be like that, we should also consider how many lives Stalin saved. How many would have perished if the kulaks were left untouched ? How many lives were saved by the building of socialist education, healthcare, etc ? How many millions were spared from nazi extermination ?

So the answer to the OP is minus-something0000000

You are missing the point. No serious historian should really be attributing all sorts of deaths from famine, war, revolution to a single individual. Here we can agree. The point is whether Stalin, along with others, was culpable in a chain of events that led to totally unnecessary deaths, as occurred 1937-38. I implore you to read my previous post, which documents how Stalin, after being persuaded by a group of First Secretaries, effectively gave them the power to draw up arbitrary lists of numbers of people to execute.

Insofar as he is culpable in this process which led to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands (I often refer to Ellman's estimates, which are in the 700,000-1.1million mark, but really the exact numbers are immaterial, it could realistically be 10,000 or 1million for all any of us know), then whichever people he 'saved' from death is not part of the discussion. This isn't a mathematical discussion. If it turns out that, due to his granting of these powers of execution to first secretaries of the party, 100,000 people died, yet he saved 100,001 people in other ways, that does not leave him in credit. The fact is that, due to his granting of powers to first secretaries, huge amounts of people were arbitrarily shot. Whilst Stalin did not kill these people, he is culpable for these deaths.

[Сталин]

Justice under Stalin was brought down like a mallot on an ant. Why bother trying to figure out how many criminals got their justice? The simple fact is he did what needed to be done. The people after him were not nearly as capable as he was.

[durhamleft]

You are missing the point. No serious historian should really be attributing all sorts of deaths from famine, war, revolution to a single individual. Here we can agree. The point is whether Stalin, along with others, was culpable in a chain of events that led to totally unnecessary deaths, as occurred 1937-38. I implore you to read my previous post, which documents how Stalin, after being persuaded by a group of First Secretaries, effectively gave them the power to draw up arbitrary lists of numbers of people to execute.

Insofar as he is culpable in this process which led to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands (I often refer to Ellman's estimates, which are in the 700,000-1.1million mark, but really the exact numbers are immaterial, it could realistically be 10,000 or 1million for all any of us know), then whichever people he 'saved' from death is not part of the discussion. This isn't a mathematical discussion. If it turns out that, due to his granting of these powers of execution to first secretaries of the party, 100,000 people died, yet he saved 100,001 people in other ways, that does not leave him in credit. The fact is that, due to his granting of powers to first secretaries, huge amounts of people were arbitrarily shot. Whilst Stalin did not kill these people, he is culpable for these deaths.

Well said.

While one can question quite the extent of the people killed under Stalin's regime, it is baffling that any true lefties would dismiss it or try and understate it, the facts are there, Stalin deformed socialism and damaged the name.

[Kléber]

Stalin deformed socialism
The deformation (privileged bureaucratic caste) already existed before Stalin came to power, it was a product of the backwardness and isolation of the Russian workers' revolution, and the political/military institutions it had inherited from Tsarism or been forced to adopt during the Civil War (concentration camps, firing squads, forced requisitions, undemocratic official appointments, ban on strikes, high pay for quasi-bourgeois managers/officials, etc). Stalin just led the bureaucracy to push the workers out of political power, massacre their revolutionary leaders, and start rolling back the economic gains of the revolution. As far as theoretical stuff you are correct that he responsibility for calling this system "socialism" after 1934 and defending it as a permanent state of affairs that should be considered the most advanced form of social organization known yet.

[Tavarisch_Mike]

Ive also got the impression that the most accurate numbers are around 10 million.
One fucker once told me that Stalin killed (allways this fixation about one person) somewhere betwen 19,5 and 64 million people, something betwen that. :whoco5:

This shit is used by right-wingers to, not just give leftist bad conciousness, but to label us things we never said we stod for in the begining, its a rethorical trick thats good to be aware of.

[Tavarisch_Mike]

You may want to look for the book "lies about the soviet history" from Soares, a member of the KPMLR of Sweden.
According to him, there were more inmates in American prisons than in soviet gulags by the time of Stalin.

And here it is. Its good, but dont fall for all of it.

http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

[Chimurenga.]

I normally don't participate in these things but because there are so many wrong responses and nothing too factional in here, I'll do this for the hell of it anyways.

The total executions that are documentable from the year before Stalin was in power 1921 to the year that he died in 1953 was 799,455. A graph, found in J Arch Getty's report Victims Of The Soviet Penal System, found here (http://i52.tinypic.com/2cdiqmp.jpg), shows this figure compared to a number of bourgeois estimates that were circulating at that time.

Michael Parenti sheds light on this figure and the circumstances of that time in his book, Blackshirts and Reds.


"Total executions from 1921-1953, a thirty-three year span inclusive, were 799,455. No breakdown of this figure was provided by the researchers. It includes those who were guilty of nonpolitical capital crimes, as well as those who collaborated in the Western capitalist invasion and subsequent White Guard Army atrocities. It also includes some of the considerable numbers who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and probably German SS prisoners. In any case, the killings of political opponents were not in the millions or tens of millions--which is not to say that the actual number was either inconsequential or justifiable."

And as Gustav previously said, the total deaths in the Gulag camps (from 1934-1953, including the height of WWII) were "1,053,831". Not surprisingly, the largest incarceration rates, and in turn, death rates, occurred during World War 2.

Actual statistics can be found here: 1934-1943 (http://i51.tinypic.com/1tlc38.jpg) and 1944-1953 (http://i54.tinypic.com/s5jtqg.jpg)

J. Arch Getty also points out here (http://i56.tinypic.com/sw5r7t.jpg) that the mass numbers of people in the Gulags were not a majority of political opponents or counter-revolutionaries, but actual criminals.

Here's another quote from Parenti:


"Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes ("counterrevolutionary offenses") numbered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society."

Hope this helps, Wanderer.

[Kléber]

J. Arch Getty also points out here (http://i56.tinypic.com/sw5r7t.jpg) that the mass numbers of people in the Gulags were not a majority of political opponents or counter-revolutionaries, but actual criminals.
Yes, actual workers and farmers who responded to harsh conditions as many people might - stealing to feed themselves and their families - not because they wanted to wreck "socialism." Working hundreds of thousands of thieves to death, like punishing dirt poor gleaners with the death penalty and forcibly migrating minorities at gunpoint, was absolutely disgusting. It shows just how detached the bureaucrat traitors were from the hungry masses. That is not socialism, or democracy, that is a disgrace.

[Sentinel]

Seriously, what's up with the non-serious and rude responses? This is the learning forum and people are supposed to have the right to ask questions without being ridiculed. I'm fairly sure there was a sticky in here specifically pointing this out. It's gone now, but it should really be self-explanatory.

I also don't understand people saying 'use the search function, this has been discussed before' responses. Perhaps they want to comment the responses without necroing some thread from October, 2007?

Members should either respond to learners politely and patiently or refrain from posting in this forum.

[Vampire Lobster]

I really don't care what's the exact number, as it doesn't really change anything. What matters is that Stalin's legacy was unnecessarily wasteful in terms of human life, but I've always found the habit of making exact calculations and basing your opinion of Stalin on that a disgustingly callous and mathematical way of forming your views. I don't think a great moral difference exists between a leader who has blood of thousands in his hands and a leader who has blood of millions. You either accept political violence and ethnic cleansing as a completely valid strategy or you don't.