Thanks. A 40M increase in population in c. 35 years at minimum means conditions were not all that bad for most.
The actual numbers will probably never be determined, if only because it appears the commies either didn’t keep books as thoroughly as the nazzies or because they destroyed their records.
What’s really interesting is to look back at the supposedly horrific oppression under the tsars. If I remember correctly only a couple thousand executions took place over the entire century from 1815 to 1914. The commies beat that total daily even during their first few months in power.
AS far as birth control goes, I don’t buy that entirely either. Soviet population rose from 180M in 1951 to 293M in 1991. I believe that’s almost the identical percentage increase as in the US over the same period, 63% to 64%. And it’s not like USSR had many illegal (or legal) immigrants!
To be sure, a LOT of this population growth was probably among Muslim and other minority groups. Not Russians, Balts, Ukrainians, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
In fact records are kept pretty carefully and indicating well under ‘tens of millions’ victims.
This policy culminated since 1937 following infamous Operational Order # 00447, which declared Party’s estimates for ‘enemies of the people’ per region of USSR and called local authorities to identify and punish people based on these estimates.
This order was practically a road map to the so-called Great Purge.
‘Enemies of the people’ were divided into two groups: extremely dangerous (Cat I) condemned for execution and less hostile (Cat II) to be punished with up to 10 years of hard labor.
To bring things into perspective Republic of Belarus was ordered to identify and prosecute 2500 people under Cat I and 10000 under Cat II between July and December 1937 (there were Supreme Soviet election on December, 12 and it is believed that the major idea behind the Purge was to scare Stalin’s opponents).
For Udmurtia and Ossetia quotes for Cat I were 63 and 169 individuals respectively.
A few regions have actually met these quotas.
South East Ukraine was demanded to prosecute some 6600 people under Cat I but only managed under 5000, and it was quite a result comparing to the rest.
Quite a vast Yakutia in Central Siberia refused to cooperate at all stating that they don’t have anti-communists and foreign spies at all, and Yakutian Party bosses got away with such a bold statement.
On the other hand ‘anti-Stalinist’ Khruschev identified and prosecuted over 40,000 ‘enemies’ in Moscow region, way over his quota.
Based on the archives of the operation it is probably close to 300,000 executed and 2,000,000 imprisoned as a result. Of course, many of the imprisoned might have finished dead too. On the other hand it was a socialist government operation and you can’t 100% exclude that local authorities have lied to Moscow and didn’t manage to kill as many.