This astonishing and sobering account of government- and war-induced civilian deaths in the Soviet Union calculates that Soviet loss of life between 1928 and 1954 was far higher than Western experts have ever believed. Applying mathematical techniques to Soviet demographic statistics, Dyadkin shows that Stalinist repression and World War II must have taken the lives of between 43 and 52 million Soviet citizens.
In the first period, 1929-36, one of collectivization, Stalin controlled and eliminated classes; during the Great Purge of 1937-38, millions of Communist party members and bureaucrats were executed, and then the purge extended into the Red Army. Dyadkin shows that World War II took close to 30 million lives and that during 1950-53 another 450,000 died in prison camps.