To Justin and others, shoulda said, most prominent victims, of the purges.
I'll go with the J. Arch Getty figures, for now (though, his earlier work, from the reviews I read in Soviet Studies by the late Alec Nove, I think, or someone of similiar calibar, struck me as aplogetic. Though, as a ling time reader of The New Republic (horrors!) and Dissent and New Left Review, (see the piece of the early 90's by R.W. Davies in NLR, on just this demographic sifting debate on the numbers) I'm not inclined to be gentle on the Soviets. Also skimming the volumes in the Yale Univ. Press series, The Annals Of Communism, which has a new volume edited by Getty on NKVD docs on the purges, or glancing through the newly translated tome edited by the French ex-Maoist Stephane Coutois, "The Black Book Of Communism, " which absurdly inflates the numbers for all the "premature deaths' in Soviet type societies to a neat 100 million. And from the reviews, most of the other contributors, esp. Nicholas Werth thought rather high.
So, not being a demographer, never took a class on statistics, couldn't do a regression analysis if I had to, or cross-factoral, or is it multi-factoral (???) one either, I'll go with 10 million in the fSU, which a person on another list, was able to provisionally get me to agree to.
Not that this stuff, is kinda ghoulish, and if used to excuse, or deflect attention to the 200,000 deaths in Guatemala from the death squads (made possible with help from Control Data in Minneapolis, a supposedly "progressive" computer corp. see an article by Allen Nairn in The Progressive, circa 1983 or so), the 500,000 in Indonesia, the 2.8 million in Vietnam, and all the rest of the victims of Western imperialism through shoring up sub-fascist miltary regimes and IMF/WB structural readjustment programs. Plenty of blood all around. Too much, and I think all of us, regret that previous generation on the left made excuses for it. (For a literary treatment of Parisian parlour Stalinism see the memoir of the late writer, Paul Zweig, "Dispatches, " just discovered it the other day. Zweig figured in part of a chapter of Christopher Lasch'es "The Culture Of Narcissism, " and I think too, his, "The Minimal Self."
Michael Pugliese