Simon Spivack wrote:I was hoping to avoid getting bogged down in this sort of thread. It is far easier just to post erroneously, than look things up.
Matt Mackenzie wrote wrote:... even though Stalin killed even more people that Hitler
Simon Spivack wrote:
When this accusation is made, the accusers are normally careful to add the victims of Mao to the total. I invite Matt to substantiate what he has written, or withdraw it. ...
At least, if anyone wishes to post, they should make some effort to quote sources, preferably not bogus ones.
Matt Mackenzie wrote wrote:Simon, I will just say that Stalin killing more than Hitler is a fairly widely accepted thesis these days.
In plain words, Matt cannot substantiate what he has written.
This is often presented through a Cold War prism. Thus the sort of article Matt might have seen states something along the lines that Communism has killed more people than Nazism. That is, mass killings, such as those resulting from the
Great Leap Forward due to Mao, are included. Also added are those from the time of the Bolshevik coup; the bestial Russian Civil War, particularly from what happened in the prison camps; deaths such as those resulting from the Hungarian Uprising; and so on.
Another approach to buttress what Matt has written is to provide estimates that are way higher than those conventionally accepted, for instance giving a figure three times greater than that accepted by academic historians for the Ukrainian Famine. One can then use similar methods for the famine in Kazakhstan and so on. I don't propose to waste any time on this approach. Anyone interested could look at the estimates for the Soviet population, which I provide below.
The other device used to attempt to support Matt's view is to ignore the war losses. I consider this ludicrous, however, if that is the position, there is no point arguing. A short cut is to just look at the number of Soviet killed, this alone is greater than the number of deaths due to Stalin. Note, though, that countries such as Poland suffered ghastly losses, too.
The subject of war casualties has been intensely politicised. It is extremely hard. For instance the Soviets overstated German tank losses at Kursk. Initial Soviet estimates were that 700 Tigers were destroyed, which was more than the entire
Ostheer had.
Consider just human losses. One can't just add up those killed in battles, there was the partisan war. One can't even just look at estimates of the drop in population. For those killed in the Gulag and transports have to be excluded from the calculations.
The first estimate I am aware of was given by Stalin in February 1946, he gave a global figure of seven millions for the Soviets. A self-evidently preposterous number, designed to enhance the reputation of 'the Boss' as a great war leader.
Khrushchev indicated that more than twenty millions had died. This was for both civilian and military losses. This was widely quoted in the sixties by both the Soviets and non-Soviets. How he arrived at this number has never been revealed. It was probably arbitrary.
The publication of the Soviet census figures provided scope for another approach. The Soviet population in the period immediately proceeding the Great Patriotic War was estimated at 197.1 millions. In 1946 it was 168.5 millions. In 1950 178.5 millions. This lends itself to interpolation, with allowances made for natural growth, and so on. It also introduces concepts such as a counting as casualties children who would have been born, were it not for the war (a not insignificant figure of ten million 'not born' babies has been estimated). Deductions must be made for political prisoners and the like. Much work on these was done by I. Kurganov, A. Ya. Kvasha and V. I. Kozlov. Other complications are due to whether one should include soldiers who died of their wounds after the conclusion of the war. Colonel Pronko devoted much time to the examination of this.
Yet another approach, this time restricted to battlefield losses, was to assume that the Soviets always lost more men in combat than the
Ostheer. Highly unfavourable ratios such as 3.5:1 to 7:1 were assumed. Although how these factors were determined was not revealed. It soon became apparent that hardly any attention had been given as to how the
Ostheer determined its own casualties. So the concept of extrapolating from them was fundamentally flawed. Note, too, that there was not enough account taken of whether the Axis losses incurred were German, or from one of her allies. There was a risk of double-counting, too, because of the presence of many from the USSR in the Nazi line-up.
In the spring of 1990 the Chief of the Soviet General Staff, Army General Moiseyev, disclosed the conclusions of an official report into combat dead. This therefore excludes civilian figures. It also adds in those lost fighting the Japanese in 1945.
The commission gave:
Army and Navy 8,509,300;
internal troops 97,700;
frontier troops 61,400.
Similar figures were arrived at independently by B.V. Sokolov.
As an aside, if one assumes a classical ratio of three wounded to every man killed, one sees that a horrifically high proportion of the male population was a casualty.
Later General Krivosheyev examined these figures more closely. Account was taken of those listed as missing in action, returned prisoners of war and so on. He made some allowance for double counting, such as the missing re-enlisting as the Red Army pushed west.
Later on further more detailed compilations were made available. I have a table of estimates of military losses broken down by operation. I won't reproduce it here.
To the above battlefield losses must be added those taken prisoner who died in captivity. This is almost certainly over three millions. Then there are those killed in
bandenkrieg: the German name for partisan warfare. Although many of the victims were women, children and babies. This number is enormous, Major Shomody devoted a lot of time to 'walking the ground'; however, it may well be a fruitless task. It is in the millions, though. Then there are missing civilians to be added, did they die in transit or as slaves of the Reich? Another, difficult to assess number, also in the millions. Further losses were those of civilians killed, for instance, in Stalingrad and Leningrad.
In the early nineties the figure of nearly fifty millions attracted press attention. This included estimates such as the 'what if' children. This is almost certainly too high. More conventional figures of the dead are below thirty millions. The range of 26-27 millions is often given.
What I have written has been sourced from the book
Barbarossa, the Axis and the Allies, which I mentioned in a previous post. An online article, available
here does not differ drastically.
I could now turn to estimates of the losses due in the Gulag etc. However, the estimates I have seen due to Stalinist repression are below these figures for war losses. And, I reiterate, I have not even looked at the losses of other states.
There seems little point my posting further in this thread, no one else bothers with sources, instead coming up with highly questionable assertions.
They can't even be troubled to read what was under discussion. Attacking, instead, assertions that were not made.
