<< 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? >>
I used to be in graduate school in Russian studies in the 1970s and 1980s, and although I was not studying the Soviet period, I had many friends who were, and who were simply trying to compile the facts. It was a big controversy back then, with people coming out with the lower numbers being screamed at as "Stalinists". The fact is, the demographic data compiled by independent, non-partisan researchers do not show a population deficit of 20 million for the 1930s. This is not a political statement, it's a scientific one. The only people using the larger figure are doing so because for them the bigger the number, the worse the crime, and the worse Stalin is. But look, even if it's "only" 5 million, that's still unimaginably horrible! Tom Beck "I always knew I'd see the first man on the Moon. I didn't realize I'd also see the last." - Jerry Pournelle
