[legatus]

No, no historian thinks he will find the definitive truth. My point is that there are valid historians (I only know about a few fields, but you can see which historians are valid by how much their peers respect their work) that at least try to get as close to the the probable number of, in this case, deaths. One example: taking a look at Rummel's data on the Soviet Union, he reports 60 million deaths 1917-1987, which is laughable (he even claimed that was a low estimate!). That's the number reported by Solzhenitsyn, which is not considered a reliable source in contemporary Sovietology (probably not a source at all). Here is a relevant thread on r/AskHistorians if you're interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3v5u2t/are_r...

[giggles_giggles]

Is the irony of saying Solzhenitsyn is unreliable while linking a Reddit thread as a better source lost on you?

[legatus]

I'm really sorry an AskHistorians thread is not good enough for you. Let me paste Jonathan Smele's remark about Rummel's work (Smele is known for his compiled bibliography on the Russian Revolution):

>A poorly researched, obsessively anti-Soviet polemical general survey. [1]

Unsurprisingly, you would have read that exact quote in the reddit thread I linked. Guess that was too much to ask for.

[1] Jonathan Smele, Russian Revolution and Civil War Annotated Bibliography

[Fins]

What's wrong with being anti-Soviet?

[legatus]

The point is that in this case Rummel doesn't even attempt to be objective. You can be biased, everyone is. A real historian, someone who is respected by his peers, actively tries to remove his bias from his work. It isn't really profitable (you earn much more by writing extremely biased pop-history) but some individuals, such as me, value it.

[Fins]

It's pretty hard to get objective and accurate count here; unlike Nazis, Soviets (and I imagine Chinese et al) did not keep meticulous accounting even of people specifically executed, let alone of those keeling over in prison camps despite technically being only sentenced to imprisonment). Solzhenitsyn himself said, at least initially, that his numbers are extremely approximate, based on what personal research he could do and that he hopes future historians will do better.

Having said that, 60 million killed in USSR alone would seem highly suspicious. 60 million repressed sounds quite feasible. And as Stalin would acknowledge (death of one is a tragedy, death of millions is statistics), in a way it doesn't really matter -- communists killed as many, if not significantly more, people as Nazis, but because they usually did it to their own population, and weren't defeated by an invading army, they escaped anything resembling Nuremberg Tribunal, and to this day Nazi defenders keep quiet in decent society, but Soviet apologia is pretty rampant.

[legatus]

Well, in fact, they did. It's why pretty much every Sovietology book pre-1991 is now rarely recommended. The Soviet archives were opened with the fall of the USSR, allowing historians to have a much more accurate view of what was happening. Sure, there are caveats (e.g. people freed from the gulag in a dying state) yet, contemporary historians have been able to provide estimates, based on the best data available. The thing with Solzhenitsyn is that he had no access to any kind of data, and as a refugee in the US it's clear he was extremely biased. Note that I'm not saying I don't understand why he did that, I'm just saying that, if you want a good estimate of the numbers related to the Gulag system Solzhenitsyn is not a good source.

Regarding your last points: 60 million repressed is entirely dependent on how you define "repressed". Some people may argue that not having access to health care and education means being repressed. Just noting that it's not really a useful value, it's already difficult estimating number of deaths, estimating such a vague term as "repressed" people will be next to impossible. Regarding your claim that communists killed as many if not more people than Nazis, I really dislike this kind of comparisons. It is an extremely politicized topic, removes the human part of the statistics and historical context. Even then, I would still disagree with your claim, unless you count Mao's Great Leap Forward as part of it, which is really a comparison between apples and oranges. I personally believe state-pursued, systematic genocides should be differentiated from famines (such as the Holodomor and the famines related to the Great Leap Forward) which were more of a consequence of the regime's terrible management (plus already low harvest in the case of the Holodomor). If you want to take a look, the Wikipedia page for the excess mortality under Stalin is not too bad, especially the source they used (Wheatcroft's Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police).

I don't see Nazi defenders keeping quiet, I think it's enough to think of the growing "Identity Politics" movement. Soviet apologia is rarely referring to the Stalinist period, especially considering Khrushchev's 56' "De-Stalinization" speech. And if you only consider the USSR of Khrushchev and beyond, while definitely worth criticizing, I'm not sure it's even comparable to the Nazi regime.