> Behalf Of Alberto Monteiro
> Gautam Mukunda wrote:
> >Nope. Most modern sources I've seen put Stalin's death count at
> >somewhere between 20 and 40 million. I lean towards the low end of
> >that scale, which is why I used 20. Hitler's death count for the #
of
> >Russians that died in the Second World War is probably somewhere
over
> >_40_ million, actually. I believe I've seen the number 37 million
> >civilians killed, but that's just a vague memory. The smallest
> >estimte I've seen in the last 10 years for Stalin's death count is
10
> >million. I tend to think that once you're talking about a body
count
> >that runs into 8 _digits_, it doesn't really matter all that much.
> >
> It depends on the _size_ of the population; a body count of 10
million
> for the Communism in China [1 billion people, 50 years] is a
> similar atrocity to, for example, the 30 thousand people
> in the most recent dictatorship in Argentina [20 - 50 million
people,
> 10 years] - of the order of 0.1% chance of being murdered in each 10
years.
>
> How many people did Stalin kill before WW2, when he took things
> away from the farmers to build up his military industry?
>
> Alberto Monteiro
Most of the victims of Stalin's purges were from before WW2. He
didn't get a chance to launch the new set of purges that he was
planning in the early 1950s - by the (belated) grace of God, he died.
Rather ironically, he died of a very minor stroke. He had just had
all of his old doctors shot, however, and the new ones were
(understandably) afraid to treat him. The Ukrainian famine is usually
believed to have cost 3-5 million lives, if I recall correctly. The
_purges_ however, were something else again entirely, where millions
of people were shipped off to Siberia to either be worked to death or
simply shot out of hand. The scale of the purges is hard for us to
imagine. I seem to recall reading, for example, that a numerical
majority of the high-ranking officers in the Soviet army were executed
in the years preceding the Second World War. Initial German successes
in invading the Soviet Union probably have a lot to do with that fact.
********************Gautam "Ulysses" Mukunda**********************
* Harvard College Class of '01 *He either fears his fate too much*
* www.fas.harvard.edu/~mukunda * Or his deserts are small, *
* [EMAIL PROTECTED] *Who dares not put it to the touch*
* "Freedom is not Free" * To win or lose it all. *
******************************************************************
