1903 – 1953
The regime, in its own paper.
October Ledger is a public file on the Bolshevik state: the coup against an elected assembly, the Cheka, the murder of the Romanovs, the famine, the quotas. The sentences in it are from the documents.
Where to go in
The scale, as ranges
Published counts, with the method named in the note.
Red executions, civil war years
Tens of thousands, and plausibly over 100,000
Cheka and tribunal shootings, 1918–22. Latsis’s own tables are far lower and are not believed. Disease and combat killed more than the executioners did. Leggett, Pipes, Figes.
Volga famine, 1921–22
About 5 million
Drought plus requisition. Foreign aid was eventually allowed. Not the Holodomor.
Dekulakization, 1930–33
About 1.8 million deported
Hundreds of thousands dead in special settlements. Viola, The Unknown Gulag.
Ukraine, 1932–34
About 3.9 million excess deaths
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute reconstruction. Mostly rural, mostly 1933. Plus a large deficit of births.
Kazakhstan, 1930–33
About 1.3–1.5 million
On the order of 38 percent of Kazakhs. Cameron, The Hungry Steppe.
USSR famine, early 1930s
Roughly 5.5 to 8.7 million
Method decides the edge of the range. Davies and Wheatcroft sit lower; the HURI-linked Soviet total sits higher.
Great Terror shootings, 1937–38
About 680,000–700,000
NKVD statistical reports. Camps took many more who were not shot at once.
Camps and colonies, Stalin years
About 18 million passed through; about 1.5–1.7 million registered dead
Applebaum’s synthesis of the camp ledgers. Exiles are additional. Solzhenitsyn’s larger totals predate these ledgers.
Katyn and related sites, 1940
About 22,000
A Politburo decision, not an estimate. Polish officers, police, and civilians.
Orthodox Church, 1918–1939
Tens of thousands of clergy, monks, and nuns killed or sent to camps
Lenin’s letter of 19 March 1922 ordered the seizure of church property while people were being eaten in the famine districts, and ordered shootings of clergy. Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd was shot that year. Of tens of thousands of churches, a few hundred were still open in 1939.
All Soviet victims, high published totals
About 20 million (Courtois). About 62 million (Rummel)
Stéphane Courtois, introduction to The Black Book of Communism, about 20 million for the USSR. R. J. Rummel, Lethal Politics, about 62 million democide for 1917–1987: executions, camps, deportations, and famine.
What the paper shows
The Constituent Assembly was elected. The Bolsheviks lost. They closed it after one day. That fact belongs in the same paragraph as any account of October.
The Cheka was not a wartime improvisation later governments regretted. Its own journal told officers to judge prisoners by class. Lenin’s hanging order to Penza is a telegram with an archive number.
The Holodomor was enforced with blacklists and a ban on leaving Ukraine while grain was still being exported. Journalists who walked the villages printed it in 1933. A Pulitzer correspondent in Moscow spent the same weeks denying it.
Birth, family, and religion are on each leader profile. Lenin’s order of 19 March 1922 to execute clergy is in Documents. The front of this archive prints the published death totals, including the high figures, with the method named on the row.