The Soviet Union Killed More People Than the Nazis

The Soviet death toll under Stalin was indeed massive. Estimates by professional historians range from approximately 9 to 20 million deaths attributable to Stalinist policy between 1922 and 1953, with the larger figure including the famine deaths of the early 1930s, the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, the gulag system, the wartime deportations of national minorities, and the post-war repressions. The figures are real and the scholarship is settled enough to say so. The denier argument is not about the Soviet figures themselves but about the rhetorical use of them to diminish the Holocaust. The argument fails because the two operations were structurally different, because the figures are not in fact straightforwardly comparable, and because comparative scale was never what made the Holocaust the prototypical case of the genocide concept in international law.

The Soviet figures, briefly

The principal scholarly accountings of the Soviet death toll are the work of historians who have had access to the Soviet archives since their partial opening in 1991. The figures by category, with the standard mid-range estimates: the famine of 1932 to 1933 (the Holodomor in Ukraine and the parallel Kazakh famine) killed approximately 5 to 7 million people, the great majority through deliberate Soviet grain-procurement policy that the historian Robert Conquest, the Russian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky and the American historian Anne Applebaum have all characterised as a deliberate policy with genocidal effect on the Ukrainian peasantry; the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938 killed approximately 700,000 people through executions, with several million more sent to the gulag where mortality rates were high; the gulag system as a whole, across its full operating life, processed approximately 18 million people, of whom approximately 1.5 to 2 million died in custody; the wartime deportations of national minorities (Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Balkars, Kalmyks and Meskhetian Turks) killed approximately 500,000 to 1 million through transport, exposure and starvation; the post-war repressions in the Soviet zone of occupation and in the early Cold War period killed perhaps another few hundred thousand. The total varies by methodology and inclusion criteria, but the order of magnitude is in the millions to low tens of millions.

The case is well established. The standard Anglophone scholarly accounts are Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968, revised 1990) and The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), Applebaum’s Gulag (2003) and Red Famine (2017), and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (2010), the last of which is structured precisely around comparing and contrasting the Nazi and Soviet killing operations within the same Eastern European geographical space. None of these scholars argues that the Soviet figures are inflated or that the Holocaust figure is overstated. The proper scholarship recognises both as massive, both as documented, and both as different in structure.

The structural differences

The Soviet killing was not, in the main, a racial or biological extermination programme. It was an instrumental killing programme, in which categories of people were eliminated for what they were thought to do or to threaten politically: kulaks (rich peasants), Trotskyists, “wreckers”, suspected German collaborators, suspected nationalists in the borderland republics. The categories were political, social and economic. Membership of a category was, in principle, alterable; in practice it was often arbitrary, but the regime did not, generally, hold that members of the category were biologically defined and could not change their nature. The Holodomor in Ukraine is a partial exception, in that the deliberate famine policy was directed against an ethnic group as a group; this is why historians have argued for its classification as genocide and why the Ukrainian and a number of other governments have so classified it.

The Holocaust was a racial-biological extermination programme. Jews were defined by ancestry; the racial-biological definition was unalterable; conversion, assimilation, change of political conviction, change of citizenship, change of geography did not exempt a person from the killing. The deliberate aim was the elimination of every Jew within the regime’s reach. The structure was different from the Soviet operation in this central respect, and this difference was the basis on which Raphael Lemkin developed the legal concept of genocide in 1944, with the Holocaust as the case to which the new concept first applied. The Genocide Convention of 1948 codified the concept; the Soviet record across most of its categories does not fit the convention’s racial-religious-ethnic-national clauses (with the Holodomor and the wartime deportations being the partial exceptions).

The category-equivalence move

The deniers’ use of the Soviet figures is the same comparative-equivalence move as the “other groups suffered” argument on its neighbouring leaf. The figures are real; the move is the use of the figures. The implicit suggestion is that if Stalin killed more people than Hitler, then the moral discredit of the Holocaust is partly cancelled, or that the Holocaust’s status as the defining genocide of the modern period is misplaced. Both implications are false. The Soviet record does not cancel the German record; the two are independent. The Holocaust’s status as the defining case of genocide rests on the structural features of the operation, not on the comparative numerical scale; even if (which is not in fact the case for any standard comparison) the Soviet toll were demonstrated to be larger, this would not affect the Holocaust’s status. Genocide is a structural concept, not a numerical one.

The deniers’ deeper move is to use the Soviet comparison to insinuate that the Jewish memorialisation of the Holocaust is itself a Cold War rhetorical construct, advanced for political reasons against an undeserving target. The implicit accusation is that the Jewish institutions promoting Holocaust memory have done so to single out Germany while sparing the Soviet Union. This is contradicted by the actual record of Holocaust memorialisation, which has consistently included recognition of Soviet crimes and which has produced, in figures like Snyder, the most influential current scholarly framework for understanding the two operations together.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it uses the real and substantial Soviet death toll to relativise the Holocaust. The Soviet toll deserves its own historical treatment, its own memorialisation and its own inclusion in any serious account of the twentieth century’s crimes. None of this requires diminishing the Holocaust. The deniers’ move is to set the operations against each other, as if the recognition of one displaced the recognition of the other; the proper scholarship sets them alongside each other, recognises the structural differences, and does not require either to be discounted. The argument’s purpose is the discrediting of Holocaust memory, not the elevation of Soviet memory.

What were the Soviet death tolls, by category? What was the structural difference from the Holocaust? On what comparison are the operations supposed to be equivalent?

See also

• Raphael Lemkin Who Coined the Word Genocide
• Raphael Lemkin
• Other Groups Suffered as Much as Jews
• The Genocide Convention 1948

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Sources

• Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, 1990 (revised edition)
• Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford University Press, 1986
• Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Doubleday, 2003
• Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, Doubleday, 2017
• Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, 2010, the principal comparative study
• Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929 to 1941, Penguin Press, 2017
• Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, Yale University Press, 2004
• Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, Princeton University Press, 2010
• Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944, with the original definition of genocide
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, 9 December 1948
• Stanislav Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932 to 1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2018
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Antecedents: Background to Genocide” and “What is Genocide?”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org