<< Actually, even if you counted the Jews, it's probable that
proportionately
the number of Soviet citizens killed by Stalin was higher than the number
of
Germans killed directly by Hitler (as opposed to casualties during the
war).
Stalin is usually estimated at around 20 million >>
I don't want to get into a numbers game, but the figure quoted for Stalin
cannot be supported by any actual research. Demographers, historians, and
other researchers have been trying for more than 30 years to come up with
estimates for how many Soviets and others died in the collectivization, the
Gulag, etc., and they can't come up with anything even remotely close to 20
million. The figures that can be supported by research are not even a fifth
of that. This is NOT a whitewash of Stalin, by the way! However many people
died is too many. It's just that, for some people, insisting on going with
a
figure that can be documented somehow becomes letting Stalin off the hook
(like the murder victim's relative who complained, when the killer's
sentence
was commuted from capital punishment to life in prison without the chance
for
parole, that the killer got off "scot-free").
Tom Beck
We're going to have to disagree on this one, Tom. The only people I've
seen who put numbers as low as 4 million _are_ leftist historians who are
trying to whitewash Stalin. I'm not saying you are, only that all of the
research that I have seen argues very differently. The Black Book of
Communism is usually considered the authoritative source, and IIRC, 20M was
the number that it came up with. When you think that he had almost 30
years to do that, from Lenin's death to his own too-long delayed journey to
Hell, 20 million doesn't really sound all that high - if he had been around
1M a year, he would have gotten there easily, and there were surely many
years when he went well over that. Plus the Ukrainian famine, which he
created, and so on. Hitler didn't have that long when he was really
killing people - 6 years, starting with the invasion of Poland, but really
even less than that 4-5. Stalin was more...methodical, about it. In terms
of raw numbers, though, both Hitler and Stalin surely take a back seat to
Mao, who shot right past 20 million without breathing hard - the Great Leap
Forward alone probably killed that many, and the Cultural Revolution
probably did it again. And everyone, as a proportion of population, takes
a back seat to Pol Pot, of course. That didn't stop Noam Chomsky from
being Pol Pot's biggest fan, but, well, what can you expect from him,
really?
Gautam
