Stalin’s terror killed around 26 million Soviet people

Evidence

The total number of Russian dead in four years of war is estimated at between 12 and 21 million. Stalin exterminated in a single year in the Ukraine alone about 8 million people (estimate). … Unlike the Nazi regime which kept rather accurate accounts on the number of its victims, there are no reliable figures for the millions of people who were killed in the Russian system. Nevertheless the following estimate, quoted by Souvarine, op. cit., p. 669, carries some weight insofar as it stems from Walter Krivitsky, who had direct access to the information contained in the GPU files. According to these figures the census of 1937 in the Soviet Union, which Soviet statisticians had expected to reach 171 million persons, showed that there were actually only 145 millions. This would point to a loss in population of 26 millions, a figure which does not include the losses quoted above. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2776

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the necropolitics/biopolitics toolkit — mass death administered bureaucratically, and how the counting regime itself (NKVD files vs. Nazi records) is part of how terror operates.
• QUESTION: The contrast between Nazi and Soviet accounting speaks to how bureaucratic rationality both enables and conceals mass killing — worth chasing into the later biopolitics readings.