Stalin-era execution estimates omit graves undiscovered until the war

Evidence

To an estimated nine to twelve million victims of the First Five Year Plan (1928–1933) must be added the victims of the Great Purge—an estimated three million executed while five to nine million were arrested and deported. (See Robert C. Tucker’s important introduction, “Stalin, Bukharin, and History as Conspiracy,” to the new edition of the verbatim report of the 1938 Moscow Trial, The Great Purge Trial, New York, 1965.) But all these estimates seem to fall short of the actual number. They do not take into account mass executions of which nothing was known until “German occupation forces discovered a mass grave in the city of Vinnitsa containing thousands of bodies of persons executed in 1937 and 1938.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1947