I think not. I think that Rummel is the only collection we have--and that Bill Emmott was driven to use it for the same reason that I use it. I think that the Soviet numbers are too high (perhaps by a factor of two?), that the Nazi numbers are too low, and that civilian casualties U.S. strategic bombing during World War II and Vietnam belong in the category of "democide." But I haven't looked at even a portion of the stuff, and Rummel has...
Rummel builds up his estimate of Soviet deaths by starting with an estimate of 3.2 million civilians killed by Reds during the Civil War--the suppression of the Don Cossack revolt, the confiscation of all grain in White sympathetic areas and the consequent use of famine as a tool of policy, et cetera.
He continues with an estimate of 2.2 million for the NEP period, which seems to me to be much too high. NEP does see the beginnings of the GULAG system (to which Rummel attributes 230,000 deaths during the NEP period), but the very point of NEP was not to use mass terror. Trumped-up show trials of a few engineers for "sabotage," sure. But mass terror, no.
Then comes the collectivization of agriculture and the Great Terror: 5 million dead in the Ukrainian terror-famine, 3.3 million more deported to the GULAG where they died. 1.7 million shot resisting collectivization. 1 million shot and 3 million more deported to the camps during the Great Terror itself.
The Great Terror was then followed by the absorption of "new territories"--the Baltic Republics, Modova (or Bessarabia if you are Romanian) and the Polish East (or the Belorussian West). The figure of 5 million dead during this absorption seems to me to be too large. But I think of Katyn, think Katyn was the tip of the iceberg, and have to admit that I don't know how big the iceberg was.
Rummel thinks that Stalin's state killed 13 million--the overwhelming number of them in the camps--during World War II. This I can't believe. Wartime discipline was... harsh. But the Soviet Union's human resources were stretched thin during the war: I can't see wartime civilian deaths caused by Stalin at more than one million (wartime civilian deaths caused by the Nazis, however... the sky is the limit...).
After World War II we have the more than one million returning ex-Nazi prisoners of war who then appear to have completely disappeared. We have the reexpansion of the camps under Zhdanov. We have the beginnings of a pogrom not just in the Soviet Union but in the satellites as well. We have the doctors' plot. I can't judge how far-reaching these terrors were, but it seems to me very unlikely that they amounted to the pace of the Great Terror or the terror-famine--yet Rummel thinks that Stalin offed 500,000 people a year between 1946 and 1954. And then there are the seven million post-Stalin deaths...
I'm inclined to think that the Reds during the Civil War inflicted perhaps 2 million civilian deaths (with the Whites at least matching their total), that mass terror during the NEP was negligible, that perhaps 8 million died during the terror-famine, perhaps 5 million during the Great Terror itself, perhaps another 2 million in the absorption of the territories given Stalin by the Nazi-Soviet pact and to enforce discipline during World War II, and then 2 million more in returned prisoners of war liquidated after World War II.
Add on another million for Zhdanov, the doctors' plot, and on general principles, and you have my personal estimate of 20 million.
But I haven't studied it. I haven't worked through the sources. Rummel has. And he has tried to call 'em as he sees 'em--20 million civilians dead at the hands of the Nazis, 10 million civilians dead at the hands of Chiang Kai-Shek (if the guerrillas are fish swimming in the sea of the people, dry up the sea), 5 million civilians dead at the hands of the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 2 million Armenians and others dead at the hands of the Young Turk government, 1.5 million in Bangladesh dead at the hands of Yahya Khan (toward whom Henry Kissinger thought the U.S. should "tilt" because Yahya Khan was a friend of Mao's), and 1 million dead at the hands of Nicholas II Romanov and his regime...
Brad DeLong
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- "Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory of money] is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
--J.M. Keynes -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley; Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives. Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 (510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones (510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes http://econ161.berkeley.edu/ <delong at econ.berkeley.edu>