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.
Thanks for the numbers. I’m sure Lenin and Stalin managed to kill some millions of people, but not the up to 60M I’ve seen estimated. Which is kind of sad, because I like anything that makes commies look bad.
I suspect the Soviets managed to kill a total somewhere in the vicinity of the 12M the Nazis murdered. Keeping in mind that the Soviets had around 35 years to get their killing done in, with the Nazis on a rush schedule, with the great majority of their killing done in 3 or 4 years.