Assessing the Claim of 27 Million Soviet Deaths in the War Against Nazism

German soldier throws a grenade during Operation BARBAROSSA in 1941

Last week, I wrote about HAMAS’s latest admission of an “error” in its data for Palestinian fatalities in Gaza. I noted that this has happened multiple times since HAMAS started its war with Israel in October 2023, and the purpose is always the same: by eliminating the most flagrant lies in the data, HAMAS hopes, paradoxically, to gain credibility so it can further its political warfare, in this case by claiming the number of Palestinian deaths has exceeded 50,000.

The media malpractice in disseminating the HAMAS numbers cannot be divorced from the ideological motives of many journalists, who are hostile to Israel, if not (all) sympathetic to HAMAS. Yet, as I alluded to in the piece, political bias is not the sole reason why HAMAS has had so much success on this point: the HAMAS casualty figures are the only ones available, and the alternative of admitting we simply do not know the death toll in Gaza makes many people uncomfortable. This is not a good excuse for the press to be circulating terrorist propaganda, but it is understandable. Humans have a strong “desire for a definite answer”, whatever the subject is, and will prefer “any answer as opposed to confusion and ambiguity”. Psychologists call the phenomenon “need for closure” (NFC).

What makes the NFC tendency so easy to exploit for propagandists is that human cognition is also prone to “anchoring”, meaning the mind latches on to the first piece of information received about a subject and interprets subsequent information with reference to the initial data point. This can be more abstract: people primed with negative information about someone or something will find it difficult to move on from this first impression even if their own subsequent direct experience of the person or institution is positive. But anchoring has a particular power when it comes to numbers.¹ The distortions NFC and anchoring impose on the understanding of the lethality of conflicts has long been understood, at least by those with any interest in knowing.²

Over the last century, the nefarious geopolitical actor that most effectively exploited human psychology to further its cause was the Soviet Union and the current Russian government that is its successor. HAMAS benefits directly from this inheritance: it is a component of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution that seized Iran in 1979, which had assistance from the KGB in constructing the security and intelligence services that keep it in power, and draws on the Soviet model of worldwide Revolution.

In this context, it is less surprising that the information operation HAMAS has run with the Gaza casualty figures resembles a classic of Moscow’s anchoring propaganda: the claim twenty-seven million Soviet citizens were killed fighting the Nazis.

CALCULATING DEATH TOLLS IN WAR

A caveat to be added here is that while the Soviets/Russia have been particularly successful in sacralising the figure of twenty-seven million Soviet martyrs in the Anti-Nazi War, the success is a matter of degree not kind. For the reasons mentioned above, interested parties developing false casualty figures that persist is not in itself unusual.

The open secret is that war death tolls generally originate from one of the combatants and their supporters, either to try to sway the course of the war and/or to serve a political purpose in the aftermath, and these numbers are frequently invented wholesale.³ Human psychology being what it is, and the widespread equation of numbers with Science, propagandists can short-circuit policy debates by presenting the right number in the right way.⁴ More importantly, whether the tactic works or not for its narrow purposes, such propaganda-generated numbers “tend to be sticky and to take on lives of their own”.⁵

A major reason for the endurance of politically-derived casualty numbers is that they, and the emotive narratives they undergird, become important, materially and ideologically, to various constituencies,⁶ in the war-torn countries and abroad, from activists, academics, and journalists—fluid categories where a single individual often plays multiple roles—all the way up to governments, and repetition of the numbers by these opinion-forming authorities embeds them as conventional wisdom.⁷ Challengers to the numbers are fiercely resisted, often with vicious reputational attacks, which deter other doubters from going public, explaining the otherwise-baffling paucity of efforts to investigate the origins and veracity of totemic body counts.⁸ Even were there is a public effort at refutation, it often unintentionally reinforces the number by focusing on it.

The overall result is that casualty counts “everyone knows”, even for wars that have been studied for decades, are often mythical.⁹

An obvious corollary is that, when it comes to ongoing wars, honest people should be operating on the assumption that death tolls cannot be known, and that anybody making a claim to the contrary is at best lying to themselves and probably consciously trying to advance an untruth. A moment’s thought about the practicalities of carrying out a body count in a warzone is enough to realise that such a thing cannot be done in any meaningful sense, thus when a number is proffered—whether in Syria, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Yemen—scepticism is in order about exactly where it has come from. The answer in most cases is an extrapolations that is indistinguishable from guesswork given the small sample size it is based on, or it is just outright made up.¹⁰ The strangely precise fatality figures put forward with even stranger levels of confidence for these conflicts should be a red flag, not a guide for policy, let alone people’s moral judgments. Gaza is special in this matrix only because we actually do know where the fatality count comes from.¹¹

THE HISTORY OF SOVIET CLAIMS ABOUT THE WAR DEAD

Joseph Stalin said in May 1945 the Soviets had lost five million people in the war,¹² then set the official tally of Soviet war dead at seven million in March 1946,¹³ a presumable minimisation intended to deter the Main Adversary (the United States) from getting any ideas about Soviet weakness it could take advantage of, and to bury the history of Stalin’s catastrophic miscalculation in allying with Adolf Hitler to jointly start the Second World War and then being beaten to the punch in betraying the Pact.

After Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, consolidated his rule in 1956, a new figure of seventeen million Soviet war dead began to circulate.¹⁴ Khrushchev personally began to speak of twenty million in 1961, which naturally filtered into Soviet publications.¹⁵ Khrushchev’s twenty million figure was made into Soviet State doctrine in the sixth and final volume of the History of the Great Fatherland War: 1941-1945, published in 1965,¹⁶ by which time Khrushchev himself had fallen to a Party coup.

Where Khrushchev’s legitimacy rested on his indictment of Stalin, hence the incentive to inflate the casualty figures,¹⁷ his replacement, Leonid Brezhnev, embarked on a “re-Stalinisation” that reversed Khrushchev’s reforms and looked for legitimacy in the “anti-fascist war”. One might expect that this meant Brezhnev scaled the figure down again. But Brezhnev did something much cleverer: he emphasised the twenty million figure, and turned the meaning Khrushchev had ascribed to it on its head.¹⁸

In Brezhnev’s narrative, the workers in arms had made this enormous sacrifice on behalf of humanity, a testament to the moral superiority of the Soviet system. And where it would have been so easy to revive the cult of the Vozhd as a buttress for the regime alongside this cult of “victory”, Brezhnev omitted Stalin and substituted himself into the story. By calling attention to his rise from modest beginnings in Ukraine to become a Major-General, Brezhnev, one of the few genuinely working-class individuals to ever make it into the Bolshevik elite, was positioned as simultaneously one of the workers and their leader, an embodiment of the claim that the Soviet State represented rather than repressed the Soviet population. In this way, “Victory Day” (9 May) 1965, when the pre-existing day of festivities became a formal public holiday, affected to be a celebration of the masses while in practice inculcating loyalty and obedience to the ruler who ostensibly provided them security and triumph,¹⁹ establishing the template for the event staged annually ever since.

THE TWENTY-SEVEN MILLION CLAIM

As explained in a paper by Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, we can pinpoint precisely when the Soviet Union began to claim that it lost twenty-seven million people in the 1941-45 war—and how.

In March 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev, the “reformist” Soviet ruler, created a special committee at Goskomstat (State Committee for Statistics) to look into the Soviet wartime fatalities. The committee had Ministry of Defence officials attached to it and access to “the archives, some research institutes and Moscow State University”, write Ellman and Maksudov. In early 1990, the committee reported to Gorbachev that the figure was 26.6 million, and in his speech on the forty-fifth anniversary of the war, in May 1990, Gorbachev went public with the new figure, referring to Soviet fatalities of “almost 27 million”.

A few months later, the leading demographers on the committee published an article in the State-run journal Vestnik Statistiki (Statistical Herald), which explained that the figure was more accurately between 26 and 27 million. From that point onwards, the higher figure stuck as the official Soviet (then Russian Federation) estimate.

Simultaneously, a committee of the Soviet General Staff had been set up, which estimated military war deaths at 8.7 million (32% of 27 million).

SOVIET MILITARY FATALITIES

The military figure is based on mobilisation statistics and army records. Ellman and Maksudov note the data is “of good quality” on the whole, though not without problems.

The authors point out the figure is too high: it includes 400,000 natural deaths, and it inflates the number of deaths in captivity because it includes Soviet prisoners-of-war (POWs)—notably Balts, who had only recently been forcibly herded into Stalin’s big prison, and Ukrainians—who either refused to return to the country or who were released and came home but did not try to re-enlist because being known as a POW meant being officially viewed as a traitor and could be a death sentence.

When these deductions are made, the number is 7.8 million: 5.5 million killed at the front, 1.1 million died of injuries in hospitals, and 1.2 million deaths in German captivity.

The authors provide the data, but do not draw attention to the fact that this lower number still includes half-a-million men who died in accidents, of disease, or were killed by the Soviets themselves. This latter category is listed as “shot as punishment”: it is unclear whether this is just executions after court martials or claims to cover all Soviet citizens liquidated by the “barrier troops” (zagraditelnye otriady). Do these count as war deaths? Do the accidents but not those shot? What this flags up is the far broader reality that interpretation is intrinsic to reaching conclusions from statistics no matter their quality: data that is correct per se can be of limited or no utility if applied to an unrelated question.²⁰

Now, in the case of Soviet military deaths, the authors contend the Soviet committee in effect calculated the number of serving members of the Red Army who died during the period 1941 to 1945, when the question at hand was how many soldiers died fighting in the war, and included the living deserters among the fatalities. The divergence on this account is not too extreme. The data is sufficiently relevant and detailed to detect these errors—and make a decision about factoring in the disease, accidents, and executions numbers—so the discrepancy can be calculated, in the authors’ view, at a roughly 10% over-estimate.

The data for Soviet civilian casualties does not resemble this.

SOVIET CIVILIAN FATALITIES

Just taking the civilian data on its own terms, there is an immediate, flagrant issue. The Soviet military figure only includes the regular army, frontier soldiers, and internal NKVD troops, Ellman and Maksudov document. Partisans and other non-conscript resistance forces in Nazi-occupied zones, “railwaymen fighting in their own militarised detachments, local anti-aircraft defence, the militarised fire service, police in frontier areas who fought against the invaders etc.”, plus the “deaths among the 500,000 conscripts called up at the beginning of the war but captured by the Germans before reaching their unit”, are all counted as “civilians”. This might seem like a technicality—these are war deaths, regardless of how they are categorised—but this is just the beginning.

What the Soviet committee actually did in calculating civilian casualties was a demographic comparison between the census data for 1939 and 1959. Thus, as Ellman and Maksudov put it, the figure is “basically an estimate of the excess deaths of the population of the USSR between 22 June 1941 … and 31 December 1945”. Except it is not quite even that. Let us set aside the additional months after the war had ended that are included in the count, and we shall get to the matter of the 1939 census below. On the one hand, this demographic estimate takes no account of those who were injured during the war and succumbed afterwards—which might suggest a higher death toll—and on the other hand it does include Soviet citizens who died from all causes and those who departed the Soviet Union (i.e., people who were still alive) during the timeframe.

The deaths of Soviet citizens from disease and famine in 1941-45 are counted into the civilian tally, and this is fair enough: individual cases might be complicated, but broadly these deaths—especially the bulk of them, in places like Saint Petersburg (“Leningrad”) and Volgograd (“Stalingrad”)—result from the Nazi invasion. Where this breaks down is with the inclusion of Soviet victims of Stalin’s repression and those Soviet citizens who were killed fighting in the Wehrmacht and paramilitary detachments raised by the Germans. While there is no reliable estimate for this latter category of Soviet defectors, who were neither civilians nor martyrs in the anti-Nazi struggle, there is enough clarity to say Stalin’s Soviet victims during the war amount to millions of people.

The most lethal time in the whole history of the GULAG archipelago was 1942-43, according to the Soviets’ own (likely minimised) statistics.²¹ Overworked even by the standards of the 1930s as slave labour, systematically starved, deprived of shelter and warmth, and left to the ravages of disease, not less than a million zeks perished in the four wartime years. The deportation of “suspect nations”, such as the Volga Germans and the Chechens, encompassed the destruction of three million people by Maksudov’s estimate. The chronic, grinding attrition of totalitarian rule on the Soviet population continued all through the war, and hysterical wartime measures were added, like murdering people who spoke foreign languages. One reason the Soviets misinterpreted the set-up at Nuremberg was they had no translators left.

The inclusion of migrants in the civilian death toll is more problematic than the obvious fact they are not dead. It is known that there was some immigration to the Soviet Union during the war—Armenians, “White” Russians from Manchuria, Belarussians and Ukrainians from Poland—and a method could be imagined for isolating and removing these numbers from the count. The bigger problem, though, is with the emigration figures. The Soviet Union’s borders had expanded in 1939-40 under the Pact with Nazi Germany to encompass eastern Poland, the Baltic States, and parts of Romania. The estimates for the populations in these zones are not in the 1939 Soviet census, the figures the Soviets came up with are suspect, and emigration is therefore difficult to calculate because it relies on comparing more reliable later numbers with dodgy starting figures. Tying these contested migration figures to the wartime death toll is dubious in any case, and separating out who was driven out of their own country by the Nazis and the Soviets is even more difficult. Drawing attention to how hopelessly polluted and arbitrary this measure is: a combined two million Finns, Konigsberg Germans, and Japanese fled or were expelled from newly-annexed Soviet territories in the months after December 1945, yet they are not included in the count.

On top of the doubts about the appropriateness of the data and analytical methods used in reaching the 27 million figure, there is the issue of the data itself.

Perhaps the role of Goskomstat in calculating the 27 million figure can be overlooked. This institution was the successor—with much of the same staff and the same mission—to the Central Statistical Administration (TsSU), the notorious producer of false official statistics used in Soviet propaganda. It was easy to sneer at the “glorious progress” the TsSU figures claimed, but it was not always merely ludicrous. TsSU falsified the data to hide the terror-famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan in 1932-33, for example, and—important for our purposes—it was TsSU that oversaw the compilation of the 1939 census, a patently unreliable document put together as Yezhovshchina was tailing off and in the shadow of Stalin having murdered the compilers of the 1937 census for accurately recording the effects of the Holodomor. Still, Goskomstat was created during Gorbachev’s glasnost with the announced purpose of getting around TsSU’s problems, and one of the signs of this was making use of the long-suppressed 1937 census to adjust the 1939 census data it used in calculating the casualties. The generous will grant Goskomstat the benefit of the doubt in its intentions and competence with the adjustments.

Where there is no room for assumptions of good faith is with the Soviet attempt to provide some positive evidence for the civilian casualties during the war beyond the (manifoldly flawed) demographic projection. Yet another committee was set up by the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, led by Yu. A. Polyakov, who in 1990 reported there had been 18.2 million civilian war deaths and in 1991 upped his estimate to 20.8 million. Not only was this preposterous on its face in claiming—as directly as can be done without spelling it out—that there were no “excess deaths” in Soviet-held territory, i.e., that Stalin killed no Soviet citizens in 1941-45, and repeating the elision about Soviet citizens killed in German-occupied zones fighting for the Nazis. The source Polyakov relied upon was the Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), an ostensible criminal investigative body, which inter alia “recorded” the Katyn Massacre, one of the great crimes of the Soviet Union, in its tally of Nazi atrocities. As Ellman and Maksudov phrase it, with immense restraint, “neither [ChGK’s] data nor its conclusions are likely to have been models of statistical accuracy”.

INTERPRETATION ALL THE WAY DOWN

In sum, the estimate that the uniformed Soviet military took 7.8 million battlefield fatalities against the Nazis is reasonable enough to work with, but the Soviet civilian casualties derive from a demographic estimate of population loss during the war that includes:

• Non-civilians from the Partisans and other irregular Soviet forces;

• Non-civilians killed fighting for the Nazis against the Soviet Union;

• Millions of Soviet citizens killed by Stalin; and

• Untold numbers of people who were not dead, but were outside the country, having either fled abroad (many of them from newly-annexed areas who were “Soviet citizens” only in the most nominal sense) or been taken POW and refused to come home because Stalin would murder them.

Factoring in the dubious underlying census data, all that can really be said is that the figure of 27 million Soviets killed in the Anti-Nazi war is false.²² The evidentiary clues point to the real overall total being lower and the military count being higher, though we do not actually know in which direction the error goes, and this framing is part of the problem: it leaves us anchored to a 27 million figure that never should have been.

An effort was made to break out of the Soviet framework altogether and focus on the wartime fatalities directly, in a manner comparable to the way other Second World War combatants have tallied their war dead, by Russian historian Viktor Zemskov in 2012. Zemskov’s conclusion was that the Soviet Union lost sixteen million people in the war with the Nazis: 11.5 million military and 4.5 million civilians.²³ Zemskov’s finding is far from definitive: it involves a series of assumptions, arguments, and calculations that can be contested, and, again, even where his data is unimpeachable, the use it has been put to might be challenged or reinterpreted. But a debate on the terrain of Zemskov’s methodology seems more likely to yield reality-based answers, even if the ultimate truth is we do not know and probably never can.

The overriding reason for pessimism in tallying the Soviet fatalities in the war against Nazism is that embedded within the search is a question that is ultimately unanswerable, namely: How many Soviet wartime deaths is Stalin responsible for?

Stalin had massacred the best men in the Soviet officer corps in Yezhovshchina, leaving a demoralised Red Army with diminished capability to prepare and wage a war of national self-defence. Stalin then disastrously mishandled Hitler. Stalin’s cynical alliance with Hitler erased the buffer States between the U.S.S.R. and Germany, meaning the Vozhd had no room or time to prepare when he realised his former ally meant to make an end of him. Stalin had shaped and reshaped the Devil’s Pact, using his leverage to extract further concessions from Hitler throughout 1940, virtually economically vassalizing the Nazi State, while remaining oblivious to the darkening mood forming in Berlin in response. Infamously, as zero hour approached, Stalin refused to believe it for too long, the last mistake in a long line of mistakes that ensured when the war came it would be won or lost on Soviet territory. Once the war was underway, Stalin micromanaged it—as he had to, having terrorised the initiative out of the Red Army—and repeatedly increased the carnage for the Soviets with his orders, “Not a Step Back” being only the best-known.

A lot of Soviet citizens died in the 1941-45 war because Stalin so grievously weakened the country’s defences and so grossly mismanaged the war. In other words, even if we had perfect data for the number of Soviet citizens physically killed by the Germans, the question would remain how many of those deaths Stalin is responsible for, and there is no statistical technique that can tell us.

FINAL THOUGHT

The question of the extent of Stalin’s responsibility for the Soviet casualties never came up in Soviet times because the cult of the “Great Patriotic War” foreclosed it. Moscow’s official historiography told of the Soviet Union being invaded by the Nazis out of the clear blue sky in June 1941 and heroically defending the homeland against this demonic foe. The narrative required a tight focus in time and space: the pre-1941 period where Stalin collaborated with Hitler in setting the conditions in which Operation BARBAROSSA took place was excised, and the period from the spring of 1944 to May 1945 when the Wehrmacht was off Soviet territory and the Red Army waged a grisly war of conquest in Eastern Europe was elided. The horrific casualties inflicted by the Nazis on the Motherland were a key mechanism in maintaining this focus and sustaining the war cult, hence the interest in increasing the figures. The “Great Patriotic War” cult and its inflated victim tally did not die with the Soviet Union: they linger still in Russia, most importantly in the mind of Vladimir Putin, forming integral elements in the worldview that has led him to domestic repression and external aggression. Those who falsify history do not always have malign motives, but it is a high stakes game that rarely ends well, as the Putin case testifies.

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NOTES

1. It is why skilled negotiators—for a house, say—set down their price early: the figure “anchors” the discussion, becoming the baseline that the other party has to work from, and will usually settle around, even if the figure has no basis in reality. It has been argued anchoring impacts courtrooms. If one of the sides establishes a number—for years of sentencing or amount of compensation—judges seem to orient their verdicts around it.

2. ‘Introduction: The Politics of Numbers’, by Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill, in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (2010), pp. 17-18.

3. ‘Counting the Cost: The Politics of Numbers in Armed Conflict’, by Kelly M. Greenhill, in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, pp. 132-35.

Where war fatality numbers are not fabricated out of whole cloth, where there is some kind of data collection but the numbers are systematically misrepresented, the most common finding is that the numbers are inflated, rather than deflated. See: ‘Conclusion: The Numbers in Politics’, by Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill, in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, p. 266.

4. ‘Conclusion: The Numbers in Politics’, by Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill, in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, p. 264.

5. ‘Introduction: The Politics of Numbers’, by Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill, in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, p. 9.

6. ‘The Politics of Measuring Illicit Flows and Policy Effectiveness’, by Peter Andreas, in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, p. 42.

7. ‘The Politics of Measuring Illicit Flows and Policy Effectiveness’, by Peter Andreas, in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, p. 26; ‘Trafficking in Numbers: The Social Construction of Human Trafficking Data’, by David A. Feingold (pp. 52-53); and, ‘(Mis)Measuring Success in Countering the Financing of Terrorism’, by Sue E. Eckert and Thomas J. Biersteker (pp. 262-63).

8. An obvious example is the behaviour of the Muslim nationalist government of Bosnia and its Western supporters. See also: ‘Research and Repercussions of Death Tolls: The Case of the Bosnian Book of the Dead’, by Lara J. Nettelfield, in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, pp. 159-87.

9. ‘Counting the Cost: The Politics of Numbers in Armed Conflict’, by Kelly M. Greenhill, in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, p. 133.

10. ‘Conclusion: The Numbers in Politics’, by Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill, in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, p. 265.

11. The Gaza War is also special in that it involves Jews, and for a truly alarming number of people this prevents any rational thought.

12. Sean McMeekin (2021), Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, p. 622.

13. Stalin gave the number publicly in an interview with Pravda. See: Juliane Fürst (2006), Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention, p. 39.

14. Aleksandr Nekrich (1991), Forsake Fear: Memoirs of An Historian, p. 103.

15. From a 1992 collected works of the United States Joint Publications Research Service, JPRS Report: Soviet Union. Political Affairs. Issues 58-62, p. 118. Khrushchev’s first use of the twenty million figure was in a letter to Sweden’s Prime Minister Tage Erlanger on 5 November 1961.

16. Nina Tumarkin (1994), The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, p. 135. The title of the official history put out in the U.S.S.R., “История Великой Отечественной войны Советского Союза 1941-1945 гг”, has often been translated as a History of the Great Patriotic War because a convention arose to translate “Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna” into English as “Great Patriotic War”, but the actual meaning is “Great Fatherland War”.

17. Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin from the “Secret Speech” onwards were never publicly broadcast to the Soviet population, but the message did filter down in various ways. One method—as with the Speech—was direct transmission of information and talking points to lower cadres of the Party, ensuring a gradual dissemination to the masses. Other means were more subtle, a matter of signals and allusions. The increased official claims for the war dead was such a case, and the implicit criticism of Stalin on this point was somewhat going with the grain of public sentiment, since even a system as closed as the Soviet Union could not prevent the thought occurring to many that something must have gone wrong in failing to prevent the Nazi invasion and its catastrophic devastation of the country. See: Vladislav Zubok (2007), A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, pp. 1-2, 167-72.

18. Susanne Schattenberg (2021), Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman, p. 261.

19. Schattenberg, Brezhnev, pp. 261-62.

20. The problem is summarised in the acronym GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out”).

21. Anne Applebaum (2003), Gulag: A History, chapter nineteen.

22. As early as 1995, Andrei Konstantinovich Sokolov, a Soviet social historian of some international renown but no radical dissident, whose father had been killed during the Second World War, wrote: “It is worth reminding certain authors, prone to exaggeration, that by global standards—and taking into account its territory—Russia is, in fact, a sparsely populated country … The strange notion of the inexhaustibility of its human resources is a myth, one that most authors contribute to when they carelessly ‘throw around’ tens of millions of victims … The number of those who died during the war is, after all, less than 27 million people.”

23. Zemskov did a lot of work on Soviet repression, axiomatically meaning he focused on the Cheka, and he was the only historian to get access to the GULAG archives when they were briefly opened in the early 1990s. He published a number of scholarly works using these documents on the size, mortality rates, etc., of the Soviet camps. So Zemskov has experience with the difficulties of interpreting Soviet official statistics.