Question on Soviet War Dead

[Kretschmer]

Yet another question has come to my mind recently for the Forum, after having spoken with a friend about Allied atrocities against German civilians and the unrealized Operation Vegetarian, as he made the oft-cited claim that 26.6 million Soviets died during the war. Knowing how consistently unreliable and dishonest Soviet war records tend to be when surrounding even the most minute combat actions and their associated details, I greatly doubt that the number of Soviet dead was this severe.

While the number of military dead (8.7 to 10.7 million) seems believable enough in consideration of the USSR's disastrous failures in 1941 and the German military's consistent ability to inflict significantly greater casualties in absolute numbers on the Red Army, the alleged number of civilian dead is 15.9 million according to Vadim Erlikman, including those who died of famine as directed by Stalin's Order No. 270. His figures as cited in Poteri Narodonaseleniia v XX Veke: Spravochnik for the individual Soviet Socialist Republics of Russia (14 million), Belarus (2.3 million), and Ukraine (6.9 million) are especially suspicious, as I have never seen any actual evidence of such high death tolls. These very same death tolls also include the alleged 34,000 dead Jews at Babi Yar, even though the whole story of the "Babi Yar Massacre" has been completely demolished.

In short, being aware that the claim of "26 / 27 million" is certainly nonsense, are there any revisionist estimates of Soviet war dead? The closest I have come to finding the answer to this question is through looking at the German records on Soviet POW deaths, which give a significantly lower figure of deaths (1.3 million in total) than the claimed 2.5 million.

[Otium]

I have some information on this. Mainly sources to check, unfortunately this is probably one of the most difficult questions of the Second World War to answer. Because it's generally a question not only of numbers, but of culpability.

I think Norman Davies put it best:

It lies in the nature of the problem that the victims of Soviet wartime repressions cannot be easily quantified. The records of the victorious Soviets, unlike those of the defeated Nazis have never been opened for scrutiny. Whether the fraction of Soviet civilians who perished at the hands of their own régime was one quarter, one third or even one half of the whole will never be firmly established until the Soviet government itself comes clean.

Continuing western reticence on this issue is less understandable. Forty years after the war, it should surely be possible to recognise the full extent of Stalinist crimes, whilst still giving credit to the heroic sacrifices of the Red Army which saved our skins from Hitler. There may be those with a vested interest in preserving the Nazis’ reputation as the most murderous régime in history, and others who cannot bear to see a former ally in the same dock as the hated enemy. There are many who still see the Grand Alliance of 1941-45 as “the cause of all good men”, rather than a desperate partnership for survival. Nowadays there should be other priorities. So long as western discussions of Soviet history do not assume a vindictive tone, they can only hasten that act of internal expiation which alone can free the Soviet peoples from the fears and burdens of their terrible past.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160307093421/http://libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/histn/histn004.pdf

Davies even somewhat addresses the massive effects of the Soviet scorched earth policy:

When the German attack came, the Soviets’ scorched earth policy condemned whole towns and factories to forcible evacuation beyond the Urals - 4 million people from the Ukraine alone. Entire nationalities, among them the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tartars, were driven from their homelands. Amidst these vast tides of uprooted humanity, the least hint of dissent earned the fatal label of “spy” or “saboteur”. In 1943-45, when the Red Army’s counter-offensives brought the NKVD back into the “liberated areas”, the process was restarted, and extended into Eastern Europe. Anyone who had dealt with the Germans, willingly or unwillingly, stood to be eliminated as a “collaborator”. The non-communist resistance movements, such as the Polish Home Army, were rounded up en masse for “illegal activities”. Men and women returning from Nazi concentration camps, or from slave labour in the Reich, were faced with the ominous question, “Why are you alive?”

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160307093421/http://libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/histn/histn004.pdf

At some point I might make a post about this, I'm not sure. But at the end of the day we will never know the true numbers, and we can be sure that the Soviets are not receiving the blame that primarily lies with them. This is due to the fact that historians, like Davies, although perhaps much less scrupulous, but are nonetheless ideologically primed to arbitrarily view the Soviets favourably, even though they're not better than the Nazis by their own historical criteria of what made the Nazis so "bad". Except for "racism" perhaps; which very well might be the deciding factor in why Davies would not dare utter a phrase such as that the German Wehrmacht, and SS was defending Europe in a heroic battle, imbued with sacrifice, to save their skins from Stalin.

[Mortimer]

The following is an interview with Sergei Khruschev son of former Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev . In it he claims that the Soviet communists killed 18 million of their own citizens during World War 2.
https://nationalvanguard.org/2021/01/an ... hrushchev/
It is possible that many of these victims were written off as wartime losses attributable to the enemy.