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 Tom, But, first, our numbers have gone up _a lot_ since then, because we've got much better information now than we did in the 1970s and 1980s. But, second, I never claimed a population deficit of 20 million for the 1930s. We're talking about an almost 30-year period, here, and if you just focused on the 1930s you'd miss: The Ukrainian famine The various genocides in the "istans" that made up the USSR's southern tier, and which have never really been fully documented. The mass executions conducted during the Second World War. The wave of purges that _followed_ the Second World War. The purges that were beginning when he finally died and 20 years of the incidental killing that was an everyday part of Stalinist rule. That's a lot of killing to be added in. I'm not in graduate school right now but I am a professional Russia specialist, so I'm not exactly outside of the Russia-studies community either, and the 20M number is pretty much accepted. It might be high - but I've _never_ heard an estimate of less than 10 million that wasn't accompanied by "Well, you know, the prison camps were all American propaganda anyways" - to quote my high school history teacher who would always tell us how Stalin's USSR was far less oppressive than FDR's USA. I'm not kidding. I've also heard estimates as high as _40_ million, which I consider completely implausible, and probably counting in civilian casualties during WW2. I'm not denying that 5 million would be horrible. It would be. But it would also be different, in that it would suggest a fundamentally different conception of Stalin's regime as one that killed periodically, instead of one that used mass murder routinely and comprehensively in order to create an atmosphere of fear in its subject population - the essence of what totalitarianism is.
