Quote Originally Posted by Sarmatian View Post
You've linked to exactly one website, in the 5th post of this thread...
Not just in this thread. In previous debates I have linked to you websites in both English and Russian on this issue - those websites also addressed the ones of research on the Russian Archives being flawed (though last I checked, that was also on Wikipedia).

That being said, the following link kind of disproves that demographics were not taken into account and that Russian sources were not used.

THE WORLD ALMANAC AND BOOK OF FACTS 1986. New York: Newspaper Enterprise Association, 1985.
Don't Almanacs generally take into account demographics?

Ambartsumov, Yevgeny. "Remembering the Millions that Stalin Destroyed." MOSCOW NEWS, (July, 1988), p. 12.

Antonov-Ovseyenko, Anton. THE TIME OF STALIN: PORTRAIT OF A TYRANNY. Translated by Stephen F. Cohen. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.
Doesn't sound very Western to me.


I'm not really arguing a case for Stalin here. I'm not saying he killed 1, 5, 25, 50 or 100 millions. I'm just saying I find the number of people he killed exaggerated because all the research on the issue is flawed for the reasons I already stated.
The demographics argument is the one that is flawed. I have already pointed out why. From an earlier post:

I think you and Sarmatian may be making two fatal errors. Firstly, Stalin did not just kill people who were in the USSR. He killed a massive number of Poles, for example. Secondly, nobody is suggesting that everybody was killed all at once - Stalin ruled for thirty years, and even before that he had power to murder - executing Tsarists, burning villages and killing peasants, etc. Also, not all of the dead were during the purges. Nonetheless, the quoted figure for Stalin usually hovers around forty million, not sixty to seventy - the latter number generally applies to the whole Soviet Union.
So yes, if you took the whole Soviet Union (but only the Soviet Union) in any one year during Stalin's reign, and subtracted the people killed, you would have a completely unreasonable number. But how about including surrounding countries and then averaging out the numbers over the years Stalin ruled? The totals you will come up with are perfectly fine, and I am 99% sure that professors/historians doing research will have taken this into account.