<< 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. . . . I'll go with 10 million in the fSU, which a
person on another list, was able to provisionally get me to agree to. >>
Getty' s intentions may have originally been apologetic--I think he used to be in PL--but his scholarship is extremely careful. What some people didn't like about his work was less his perhaps lowball figures than his idea that Stalin didn't plan, direct, and control the whole thing, taht there was a large anarchic Cultural-Revolution-like frenzy-from-below aspect to the Terror. Of course taht is perfectly credible and I think now established beyond a reasonable doubt.
The 10m figure for "surplus" deaths in the FSU--do you mean in the whole history of the USSR? In which case the figure is too low, everyone will agree to that. Getty is talking about the Stalin Terror in particular, that is the period from 1934-49, mainly. In addition you have to factor in the Red Terror of the Civil War, the dekulakization campaign (that might be as many as 10m right there), surplus deaths during the war (hard to calculate), and in the Cold War era. After Stalin, things pretty much quiet down.
Insofar as one goes about making comparisons of this dreadful sort, I think it sort of odd that defenders of imperialsim insist on counting against communism the famine deaths of the dekulakization campaign in the USSR or the Greal Leap Forward in China, but think it perverse ti count against capitalisim any famines that happen in capitalist countries. Unless they're Irish, inw hich case theyw ill blame it on the English, but not on Political Economy.
--jks