Stalin killed how many people

Toward the end of his life, Stalin may have had another genocide in his crosshairs. No one. In the end, they all got what they deserved. Who remembers? Oriana Skylar Mastro has built two careers simultaneously: one as an academic, the other, as a service member in the U. Air Force. To commemorate Veterans Day, wreaths will be placed in Memorial Court and Memorial Auditorium, along with a letter from President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, to honor members of the university community who have served or are serving in the U.

Armed Forces. Stanford News is a publication of Stanford University Communications. Stanford , California Skip to content. Menu Search form Search term. September 23, Stalin killed millions. A Stanford historian answers the question, was it genocide? Facebook Twitter Email. Senate, in a resolution , affirmed the findings of the commission that Stalin had committed genocide. As in the case of Ukraine it generated so much hatred and resentment that it solidified Ukrainian nationalism.

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Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Joseph Stalin. When Stalin Was Caught Napping. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.

It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive. Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between and , while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. The total figure for the entire Stalinist period is likely between two million and three million.

The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed no more than a million people, probably a bit fewer. The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of —, in which more than five million people died. Of those who starved, the 3. Tens of thousands of people were shot by Soviet state police and hundreds of thousands deported. Those who remained lost their land and often went hungry as the state requisitioned food for export. The first victims of starvation were the nomads of Soviet Kazakhstan, where about 1.

The famine spread to Soviet Russia and peaked in Soviet Ukraine. Stalin requisitioned grain in Soviet Ukraine knowing that such a policy would kill millions. Blaming Ukrainians for the failure of his own policy, he ordered a series of measures—such as sealing the borders of that Soviet republic—that ensured mass death. In , as his vision of modernization faltered, Stalin ordered the Great Terror.

Because we now have the killing orders and the death quotas, inaccessible so long as the Soviet Union existed, we now know that the number of victims was not in the millions. We also know that, as in the early s, the main victims were the peasants, many of them survivors of hunger and of concentration camps.

In all, , people were killed during the Great Terror, to which might be added a few hundred thousand more Soviet citizens shot in smaller actions. The total figure of civilians deliberately killed under Stalinism, around six million, is of course horribly high. But it is far lower than the estimates of twenty million or more made before we had access to Soviet sources.

At the same time, we see that the motives of these killing actions were sometimes far more often national, or even ethnic, than we had assumed.

Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe. Nazi Germany began to kill on the Soviet scale only after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the summer of and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland that September.

About , Polish civilians were killed between and , with each regime responsible for about half of those deaths. It was this policy that brought asphyxiation by carbon monoxide to the fore as a killing technique. Beyond the numbers killed remains the question of intent.

Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically informed vision of modernization. Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism.

Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated.

Such plans, though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest occupation in the history of the world. The Germans placed Soviet prisoners of war in starvation camps, where 2.

A million Soviet citizens also starved during the siege of Leningrad.