Documented Homicides and Excess Deaths: New Insights into the Scale Killing in the USSR During the 1930S

1997/09/01 by Steven Rosefielde · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Health Professions · #Soviet and Russian History #Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences #Health and Conflict Studies #Famine #Scale (ratio) #History #Demography #Political science #Economic history #Development economics #Criminology #Geography #Sociology #Law #Economics #Cartography

paper · doi:10.1016/s0967-067x(97)00011-1

openalex publication_date 1997/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23

Abstract

"Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov recently claimed that no more than 2 million people could have perished from collectivization, famine, execution, terror, and forced labor in the USSR during the 1930s. Prior demographic confirmation of this estimate was provided by Anderson and Silver who contended that killings were unlikely to exceed a few million and could not be more than 4.8 million victims. This essay disproves both these contentions by introducing new demographic evidence proving that Stalin killed at least 5.2 million Soviet citizens 1927-1938, with a best estimate in the vicinity of 10 million."

Citations

• More light on the scale of repression and excess mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s
• Excess mortality in the Soviet Union: A reconsideration of the demographic consequences of forced industrialization 1929–1949
• The scale and nature of German and Soviet repression and mass killings, 1930–451
• Stalinism in post‐communist perspective: New evidence on killings, forced labour and economic growth in the 1930s
• Excess deaths and camp numbers: Some comments
• Stalinist Terror
• Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence

Cited by

• Deportation of the Crimean Tatars [wikipedia]