No, Stalin did not kill 60 million people, or 20 million. We know this now. Actually we knew it all along if we looked at population figures for the Soviet Union, which shows constant growth from the 1920s through the mid 1950s when Stalin died, with the exception of 1941 to 1945, when other people were killing millions of people in the USSR. But not Stalin. To say this is not to deny that Stalin was a cruel and vicious dictator or to suggest that Stalinism was just fine. He was and it wasn’t. But we are looking at evidence and facts.

You couldn’t hide 60 million deaths in the population of the Soviet Union over that period. Moreover, Stalin was a butcher and a tyrant but he was not an idiot, and he knew perfectly well that killing tens of millions of people would seriously damage the position of the Soviet Union as an economic power, if nothing else.

And there is no basis for such a claim. Here’s the population of the USSR 1925–59:

1926 148,656,000

1937 162,500,000

1939 168,524,000

1941 196,716,000

1946 170,548,000

1951 182,321,000

1959 209,035,000

The figures are from EM Andreyev, et al., The population of the Soviet Union , Moscow, Nauka, 1992, a standard demographic work.

Where would they hide 60 million deaths? Or even 20 million? People who throw numbers like that around have obviously never looked at these simple population and census results, or are counting on you never having looked at them.

Well, now you have no excuse. You’ve seen them.

The figures for 1937 are the “uncorrected” Census results for 1937, not the inflated numbers that the Stalinists insisted on, expecting 171 to 180 million people, leading to a purge and executions of the statisticians who directed it (as I said, Stalin was a brutal tyrant), and an official invalidation of the 1937 results. These are the original figures reflecting an honest count.

If Stalin had killed 60 million people, a big chunk of those would have been in the collectivization famine of 1930–32 and the year of the Terror, 1937–38. But you don’t see a population drop in those years, much less a drop of, say, 40 million people. That would have reduced the 1939 figure to 20 million below 1925 levels. You can’t, as it were, bury figures of that magnitude. The population increases at a normal rate from 1937 to 1941. The big increase in those years is due to the annexation of Eastern Poland and the Baltic states.

There is a huge population drop between 1941 and 1946, about 27 million people. That corresponds to the havoc somebody wreaked in the Soviet Union, killing 27 million people, but it wasn’t the Soviets who did it.

In any event, we now have post-Soviet archival research into the body count. And it is much less than 60 million or even the 20 million figure that was thrown about under the pre-archival days by people like Robert Conquest. Basically a much lower count is agreed on by all responsible Sovietologists, and I was a Sovietologist when there was a Soviet Union to study–

First, in the great purges, mostly in 1937 and 1938, a little less than a million (in fact, about 680,000) people were executed, mostly Polish and other national minorities, as well as party officials and Red Army officers.

Second, the Gulag: about 15 million people passed through it under Stalin, from 1927 through 1953. About 1.6 million didn’t make it out. That is an intolerably high mortality rate, but mostly, they weren’t murdered; they died of cold, hunger, and exposure. The Gulag was harsh, arbitrary, cruel, but it was not a system of not death camps.

Finally, in the collectivization famine of 1930-33, there were around 3.5 million. Some were due to mismanagement or conflicting priorities, in particular grain exports for hard currency to buy machinery, as opposed to deliberate murder. in 1932–33, the bulk were due to deliberate murder or depraved undifference to human life.

That’s a total of about 5.5 million. That’s not 60 million. It’s not even 20 million. It’s necessary to say that it is terrible beyond reckoning.

Here is an article by the extremely anticommunist Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who wrote a fine book, Bloodlands, on the mass murders under Stalin and Hitler in the Western Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. No one would accuse him of being soft on Stalin or Soviet Communism.

Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse? | Timothy Snyder

In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people—tens of millions, it was often claimed—in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory.

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2011/01/27/hitler-vs-stalin-who-was-worse/

I’m not speaking as an apologist. I’m just reporting what the contemporary studies have shown by way of arriving at what the facts are. Clearly, a death toll of 5.5 million people is terrible beyond comprehension, a world historical crime of great magnitude.But there’s valid no reason to exaggerate it, except for propaganda purposes, to completely incredible levels that have no basis in reality. As you will see from the comments, lots of people think that stating lower figures for Stalin’s body count is denial, but it’s not. Facts are stubborn things, as Reagan meant to say.