And not to forget the other victims in smaller purges. Pol Pot in Cambodia, for one.
Plus, the Soviets killed others in smaller numbers.
In the early 1920s, Mongolia asked for aid from the USSR to push out the Chinese occupiers. To this day, the Mongolians still regard the Soviets as heros for this assistance. Yet the Soviets clamped down on practice of religion. As part of the religious purge, they invaded a monastery where approximately 1200 Buddhist monks lived and ran a school for nomadic children. They arrested many of the monks and executed 200 of them. The other monks managed to escape. The communists then destroyed the monastery.
I have stood in the ruins of that monastery and regarded the bullet holes in partial walls. It was a very sobering experience.
The large scale murders have been recorded. But how many small scale mass murders like that of the Mongolian monks did Communists commit that are overlooked by history?
“... But how many small scale mass murders ...”
Or an entire detachment of Russian linguists (recording US military communications) that were machine gunned by Spetsnaz troops for the crime of listening to US music while on duty? A horrific scene, especially on a pitch dark night in the middle of some East German woods on a mountain top.
I have heard that the Mongolian dictator who ruled at the same time as Stalin, Choibalsan, may have killed one tenth of his country’s people.