I saw a quote that 80% of people born in Russia in 1923 died before the end of ww2.
Considering the Stalinist purges and WW2, I would assume that is possible. Is it a valid statistic?
I thought the Stalinist purges killed 1/6 of the country, and WW2 killed another 1/6. Considering age and gender (the original quote was only about men I think), 80% who were in their early 20s in the 1940s sounds plausible.
Plus childhood mortality which was probably 30% back then in Russia.
I’m not equipped to address the accuracy of it, but Anatoly Karlin (Russian-American blogger, and moderately anti-communist) here argues that based on Soviet archives the ‘20 million deaths attributable to Stalin’ is closer to 6 million or so (with the famines included). That would put Stalin’s death toll at closer to 1/22 or the population rather than 1/6. Key quote is below:
*But the Black Book was written in 1997, by which time the Soviet archives were fully open, and one could see that a figure of 20 million Soviet deaths due to “communism” are utterly out of sync with reality. (I will focus on the USSR since I am most familiar with it, but I am given to understand that the work on China is even shoddier, while the work on Latin America is even more purely ideological).
You had 1.1mn deaths in the Gulag since its founding in 1930. But first, it was a prison system for conventional criminals, people like murderers and thieves who would be in prison under any functioning regime; not just dissidents! “Politicals” over all years averaged around 30% of the Gulag population. Second, of those deaths, more than half occured during WW2, when the country was under great stress (millions of Soviet citizens died of malnutrition in the rear). Take out the war, and annual Gulag mortality was at 3.2% – and that includes the years of the 1933-1934 famines. Very bad, but not sure all that strange in what was still essentially a Third World country with a vast prison population in inhospitable areas. Mortality fell below 1% by the 1950s. All these factors considered, is it really legitimate to take even the 1.1mn figure at face value? But okay, let’s do so.
Executed? A million give or take. 650,000 during the Great Purge (of which the Anti-Kulak Operation accounted for the majority); around 800,000 during the Stalinist period as a whole. Round up to a million to account for unrecorded executions (though the Soviets were nothing if not meticulous in this regard). That’s not a lot more than 2 million.
Then you of course have the famines to consider. From just a simple demographic extrapolation of Russian and Ukrainian excess mortality in 1932-34, you have around 5mn excess deaths during the Great Famine (split about equally). Add perhaps one million from the rest of the USSR. 6mn.*
This is a good anaylsis: Was the Soviet 1923 Male Birth Cohort Doomed by World War II?, 13/12/14, Mark Harrison's blog