In this period Russia experienced
The first world war
The Russian Civil war
The Stalinist purges
The Second world war
Several famines
What is the total death toll for the entirety of that period? I would assume over 100 million.
According to Wikipedia:
Deaths in WWII: 24,000,000
Deaths in WWI and the Civil War: 20,000,000
Estimated count of all deaths due to Purges: 3,000,000
Deaths from Famines of 1921, 1932, and 1947: 13,200,000
So that’s just over sixty million.
Are we talking about deaths because of these events, or all deaths over this period? (And why the extra 4 years before WWI?) Obviously quite a lot of people would have died over this period, even if everything in Russia had been peaceful and peachy.
Perhaps more would have died! (Spoiler: People who don’t die may have children, who may themselves eventually die.)
Over a period of just 43 years that seems unlikely.
Don’t forget the flu of 1918.
From what I could find, Russia was relatively unaffected by the 1918 epidemic. Apparently there had been an epidemic of a similar flu in Russia in 1889 and many Russians still had some immunity to the 1918 flu as a result.
Clearly the 1918 flu never played Risk as a kid. Eddie Izzard paraphrased
Deaths from the events, not deaths from old age. Russia had a population of about 130 million around 1910, so if they lost half their starting population (60 million deaths as was claimed) to war, disease and famine it does say a lot about the resiliency of civilization that half the people can die in 40 years and things still go on.