Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin

[1] The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants.

[2][3][4] Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher.

[19] Golfo Alexopoulos, history professor at the University of South Florida, believes that at least six million people died as a result of their detention in the gulags.

[29][30] This categorization is controversial, as historians differ as to whether the famine in Ukraine was created as a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others,[31][32][33][34][35] was an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization,[36][37][38][39][40] or was primarily a result of natural factors.

Ellman claims that the famine resulted in an estimated 1 to 1.5 million lives lost in addition to secondary population losses due to reduced fertility.

Poles, Ukrainians from western regions, Soviet Germans, Balts, and Estonians peoples from the Caucasus and Crimea were the primary victims of this policy.

[56] The massacre was prompted by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps, dated 5 March 1940, approved by the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, including its leader Joseph Stalin.

[57] Writing in Slavic Review, demographers Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver maintained that limited census data make a precise death count impossible.

Instead, they offer a probable range of 3.2 to 5.5 million excess deaths for the entire Soviet Union from 1926 to 1939, a period that covers collectivization, the civil war in the countryside, the purges of the late 1930s and major epidemics of typhus and malaria.

[70] In 2006, political scientist Rudolph Rummel wrote that the earlier higher victim total estimates are correct, although he included those killed by the government of the Soviet Union in other Eastern European countries as well.

They asserted that these Cold Warriors overestimated fertility rates and underrated the impact of assimilation, through which many Ukrainians were redesignated as Russians in the 1939 census, confusing population deficits, which included unborn children, with excess deaths.

[58] Historians such as J. Arch Getty, Stephen G. Wheatcroft, and others, insist that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by the revisionist school.

[76][77] American historian William D. Rubinstein concluded that, even under most conservative estimates, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of at least 7 million people, or about 4.2% of USSRs total population.

[79][80] Conversely, Wheatcroft states that prior to the opening of the archives for historical research, "our understanding of the scale and the nature of Soviet repression has been extremely poor" and that some specialists who wish to maintain earlier high estimates of the Stalinist death toll are "finding it difficult to adapt to the new circumstances when the archives are open and when there are plenty of irrefutable data" and instead "hang on to their old Sovietological methods with round-about calculations based on odd statements from emigres and other informants who are supposed to have superior knowledge.

[15] Ellman compared the behaviour of the Stalinist regime vis-à-vis the Holodomor to that of the British government (towards Ireland and India) and the G8 in contemporary times.

[102][38][40] The idea that this was a targeted attack on the Ukrainians is complicated by the widespread suffering that also affected other Soviet peoples in the famine, including the Russians.

[104] Despite any lack of clear intent on Stalin's part, the historian Norman Naimark noted that although there may not be sufficient "evidence to convict him in an international court of justice as a genocidaire [...] that does not mean that the event itself cannot be judged as genocide.