Outside of criteria, my main question regarded the significance of the 2010 Kiev Appeals Court report. The 3.9+ estimate is in the range previously thought as Conquest was mentioning 4 million for the Ukraine by 1991. But it seems to be based on the same demographic evidence as all others since there was never much more than an OGPU report known for 60+ years and some local death tolls by %. The death toll seems plausible except for the 6.1 million birth deficits claimed since the 1970 Census shows births only dropping from 12.4 million from 1929-1931 to 8.4 million for 1932-34 and that's for the entire USSR. I thought I'd let you know that the source for the 1.6 million attributed to Kim IL Sung was RJ Rummel before it was found out some of Syngman Rhee's massacres were falsely attributed to Kim IL Sung. Rummel is typically decent, except on the big ones, such as the 52 million he attributes to Stalin and 20 million for Hitler, both too high by a factor of at least 2, maybe 3. As for Brezhnev, this source says 1 million in Afghanistan: https://rickkelo.liberty.me/socialism-mass-murder/ But they didn't return my email asking which page this is on in the book cited by M. Hassan Kakar. I've only skimmed the book, but it did quote another source saying in 1983 that it had been said "half a million civilians had died", I'll let you know when I read my entire 1994 edition of the book since there's much I have to follow up on, but through 1982, 3.2 million had fled to Pakistan and Iran, which suggests that most of the 1,500,100 killed were during this time, though these putting it at 295,000 based on the same source suggest otherwise:
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/afghanfatalities.html http://www.afghandata.org:8080/xmlui/handle/azu/3246 Difficult to say as Gorbachev wound down the war around '87. Regarding Mao for your criteria, outside of the executions for "Land Reform" and "Counterrevolutionary" campaigns, the "Cleansing the Class Ranks" part of the Cultural Revolution had most of the state sanctioned executions, I can maybe get a number. Other than that, the Laogai system is the biggest problem. The 70 million estimate relies on a ridiculous 27 million camp deaths. It's understudied, but the "reasonable" estimates are around 15 million, but this is still too high probably by a factor of at least 2. Gulag deaths were estimated at 12 or even 15-30 million before archives showed "only" 2.75 million documented labor camp and colony deaths, which reduced the consensus to "only" 4.5 million. A similar reduction puts Mao at 40 million including GLF, but GLF was clearly different from the Holodomor. Closer in responsibility to the 1946-47 USSR famine, or how Stalin's Order 270 and refusal of Germany's offer through Sweden played a role in mass Soviet POW deaths in German custody. Although by typical criteria, Russian historian Vadim Erlichman gives a good breakdown of deaths for Stalin at 1.5 million executions, 1.7 million from mass deportations, 5 million forced labor and 1 million from mistreatment of enemy POWS and German civilians. Add 6 million for the entire USSR famine and you got 15 million, which may be how Conquest got his revised minimum from 2007, or of course 4 million if you limit famine to the Ukraine, which may explain some 13 million estimates I've seen. Unfortunately, since the CCP doesn't seem likely to fall anytime soon, we don't have anything that detailed with Mao. There were some nominations that came to mind as well, but I didn't want to flood you with too much right now.
While your 900,000 for Brezhnev seems as likely as anything else and I don't have anything definitive enough to recommend it revised, looking into it, Kim IL Sung doesn't seem to have killed near a million. Pierre Rigoulot estimated 100,000 executions post-war, which could be right, but considering population, that's on a scale similar to Stalin's estimated 1.5 million executions and I've never heard of anything like that. The early purges into the 1960's to consolidate Kim's power were more extensive than anything since in North Korea, but lower level executions are understudied. As of 2002, 400,000 were estimated to have died in camps since 1972: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/world/n-koreans-talk-of-baby-killings.html Even if 75% were Kim Il Sung, that's only 300,000, but that's doubtful since the camp death rate increased in the 80's, by which time Kim had semiretired. As for the Korean War, 13,836 South Korean POWs are reported killed by the North. About 3,000 are reported to have been shot during the North occupation of Seoul, I don't remember the total "enemies of the people" purged during the occupation, but it wasn't more than 26,000. 373,599 South Korean civilians were reported dead, but many were killed as suspected Communists by Sungman Rhee and some by the Chinese. So it looks doubtful to me that it reaches half of 1.6 million. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to find any total number for Kim Jong Il outside of the 1995-1998 famine. It took a long time to even find an estimate from Ken Gause of 320 for the 1992-1994 purge. Apparently, in addition to 7900+ political executions from 1981-1985, Khomeini's 1988 fatwa led to 30,000 political executions as well:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/1321090/Khomeini-fatwa-led-to-killing-of-30000-in-Iran.html I can't find Iraqi civilian death tolls, but since Saddam was claimed to "only" kill between 11 and 16 thousand Iranian civilians, it's probably not significant enough to greatly alter Khomeini's total of roughly 40,000. As for Lenin, in probably the definitive work on the subject, Richard Pipes cited 2 estimate's on p. 838 of "The Russian Revolution", one is 50,000 by William Henry Chamberlain and the other 140,000 by George Leggett. Among the nominations I was thinking of was Deng Xiaoping's mass executions of "Strike Hard Anti-Crime" campaign over 8 months starting August 1983 and Jiang Zemin's forced organ harvesting of Falungong, but first, probably the best estimate I've seen for Hitler overall is 10 million by John Ashley Soames Grenville:
https://books.google.com/books?id=xsmhdpARfGoC&pg=PA181&lpg=PA181&dq=john+ashley+soames+grenville+hitler+killed+10+million&source=bl&ots=sKBvPHZ-_m&sig=VG9R0gVHeMCa0F0IyxtGfp1NEkI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjv2N7igcvSAhWJL8AKHdIIBcIQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=john%20ashley%20soames%20grenville%20hitler%20killed%2010%20million&f=false Makes sense. Roughly 4.2-5.1 Jews killed by camps and Einsatzgruppen, 2.6-3 million Soviet POWs, 670,000 Soviets starved Siege of Leningrad, 250,000 Gypsies and the remainder non-Jewish Poles and Soviet civilians killed by the Luftwaffe.
Part of the confusion you mention is not only did people like Beria, Shelepin and Khrushchev destroy documents over the years, but we only really have 2 censuses for Stalin, the 1926 (said to be 1.2 million low, 800,000 low for the Ukraine) and 1937, which was suppressed until Glasnot after it showed a 15 million deficit. Then the 1939 census was falsified and WW2 and annexed territories make any post-WW2 censuses useless. That makes it impossible to really separate 1929-1931 Dekulakization deaths from the 1932-1933 famine. That might help explain the population deficit of 10 million since roughly half those targeted by Dekulakization shootings and deportations were Ukrainian. One point of confusion is people frequently mix up the USSR totals and the Ukraine, so you have some people erroneously stating 7 million died in the Ukraine in 1932-1933 and others mistakenly believing it was only 4 million for the entire USSR. Even books like the "Black Book" makes these careless errors. Part of my point that the mass killings really occurred throughout the 24 years rather than just the 1930's is how many documented Soviet repression deaths there were during WW2 from 1941-1945: http://russia-insider.com/en/wartime-deaths-due-soviet-repression/5657 Russia Insider compiled 1.5 officially documented although this omits some so a guess in the range of 2-3 million can't be far wrong. Most are covered from 1929-1945. By the way, here's the link to the page with Conquest's final estimate of 15 million. After Conquest studying this half a century, it's probably about as good as you'll find:
https://books.google.com/books?id=ubXQSk2qfXMC&pg=PR16&lpg=PR16&dq=conquest+great+terror+hardly+lower+than+fifteen+million&source=bl&ots=H53WLQqymw&sig=XDBTBJprjSjN0Tq-ZaQXDRbo2vc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihluPV88rSAhUo2IMKHR6mDdYQ6AEIKjAG#v=onepage&q=conquest%20great%20terror%20hardly%20lower%20than%20fifteen%20million&f=false This fits perfectly with Vadim Erlichman's breakdown so while some Soviets with access to secret documents like Alexander Yakovlev and Dmitri Volkogonov made higher estimates, the evidence to support these conclusions has never been made public and there has to be a reason Conquest reduced his estimate.
Yeah, wartime is always more difficult, especially with limited documents, but 10 million seems most plausible. For Deng the figure of 24,000 from 1983-84 is well established and the fact that there were reports of execution quotas early makes it an atrocity, imo. Here's one link. You can find plenty with 24,000: https://books.google.com/books?id=MTDHAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=deng+xiaoping+executed+24,000&source=bl&ots=YQFYp8-wzU&sig=attptPxrCE_7lOJYAlyl9iW5sA4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjnyJrDzMzSAhXl6oMKHSbTDKkQ6AEIHDAB#v=onepage&q=deng%20xiaoping%20executed%2024%2C000&f=false Another example of misquotes is some media outlet strangely added a 13 million to the Stalin estimate given by Conquest, while you can see in the Google edition of the book I linked, as well as the physical copy I have, 15 million was the only number mentioned there. The sloppiness of some professional writers amazes me. While I'm at it, I might as well provide the link to the last of the info I cited, Vadim Erlichman's breakdown:
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/stalin-died-60-years-too-late Btw, I'd see no reason not to include the 25,000 Chechen civilians killed in the second war you mention so in case you want them, here's one fairly recent estimate of civilians killed by Russian airstrikes in Syria:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/09/30/middleeast/un-aleppo-condemnation/index.html There's also a higher 4751 figure out there. Personally, I'm skeptical of many West claims about Putin, especially how politicized this war is, but we've heard the claims of civilians targeted so I figure I'd send the figures in case you want to use them.
It's unfortunate that my hard drive died because at least for now, I had lost my
research on Chiang Kai-shek and Imperial Japan. You put a question mark next the
500,000 Chinese civilians from 1937-1939 and it's always tough trying to find
definitive information when a period is split between 2 or more rulers. I've
settled on 200,000 for the Nanking massacre, perhaps up to 20,000 POWs murdered
at Mufushan, but it's difficult to find specific civilian numbers for the Hankow
massacre, battle of Wuhan and chemical weapons used there and battle of
Shanghai, all of which we'd need to get a good idea. Chiang Kai-shek seems to be
the most exaggerated of all, Rummel estimated 10 million for him! The 30,000 you
have for the "White Terror" in Taiwan is often cited, but as the upper limit.
For instance, the official commission gave a range of between 18 and 28
thousand, but Marvin C.H. Ho, a member of the commission said that he and the
majority of the commission actually didn't even subscribe to a number that high.
NY Times article about the 1992 commission
Some refer to 3 or 4 thousand executed during the 40 year martial law period,
though although that number is also given for executions by the end of March
1947 following the 2/28 incident. It is true that after the initial purge, most
of the violence happened after martial law was instituted in 1949, happened from
1950-1952 when Chiang kai-shek was still in power, but it's difficult to tell if
some estimates refer to just that period or the entire 40 years. By the way,
similar to how Stalin's mass murder continued much longer than just the 9.5
million excess deaths from 1932-39, Francisco Franco actually executed more than
twice as many during the civil war as after. Stanley Payne gave the same figure
of 30,000 post-war executions along with a figure of 70,000 behind Nationalist
lines during the civil war. It was this
article reviewing Paul Preston's Spanish Holocaust. You can find the article
reprinted on other sites for free. There were also thousands of deaths in
concentration camps, but I would still think the 150,000 estimates are closer
than the 400,000. For just executions, I'd go with Payne's 100,000 total. I'd
like to chime in on Saddam Hussein when I have more time, but on the subject of
Vietnam, your figure for Ho Chi Minh's Land Reform is in the range I've seen,
since Robert F. Turner does say it's definitely at least six figures, though
there's also lower estimates like Bernard Fall's 50,000. As with Japan, it's
tough to know how many civilian deaths in the war took under him, but we at
least have some idea with the 1968 Hue Massacre between 3,000 and 6,000
civilians killed and according to this Chicago Tribune article
conveniently from when Ho Chi Minh died, 30,000 civilians had been assassinated
to that point. This seems plausible as it lines up with a later figure of 36,725
South Vietnamese assassinated from 1957-1973. I also thought the executions
after the fall of Saigon under Ton Duc Thang were worth mentioning. The number
is consistently at 65,000 with one source being Karl Jackson, along with a
70,000 given by Nguyen Anh Tuan. Re-education camp deaths vary from 165,000 to
250,000, but the time periods given are pretty vague. On the American side, I'm
pretty confident on the 52,000 given by Spencer Tucker in Encyclopedia of the
Vietnam War for LBJ's Operation Rolling Thunder from 1965-1968. Most of the
heavy bombing in North Vietnam was done by LBJ except for Nixon's Operation
Linebacker II/Christmas bombing, which has a pretty well established figure of
1,624. 50,000 seems right for Nixon's bombing of Cambodia as given by Bruce
Sharp and others, but it's tough to find as much definitive information on Laos.
Civilians killed by ground troops are more problematic, some like Operation
Speedy Express started in LBJ's final 6 weeks and continued early under Nixon,
similar for other numbers given, though we at least have for the 1,000+ killed
by Tiger Force in 1967 and the roughly 420 killed in the My Lai Massacre. Btw, I
don't know how you count the Korean War, but I did at least find an estimate of
280,000 North Koreans killed by US bombing. Civilians weren't distinguished, but
you can get an idea by applying the 2/1 civilian death toll in the war. On the
topic of Syngman Rhee, I actually have 100,000 for the Bodo League/Daejon
massacres given by Professor Kim Dong-Choon, Commissioner of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. I don;t know if it's accurate, but all the estimates
I see tend to be 100,000+. For the 1948 Jeju uprising, I know more than 12,000
were killed, but I don't have any more numbers for pre-1950 deaths under Synman
Rhee. If your source for the 80,000 was from before 1999, then I'd change it, if
not I'd actually say your less round figure is probably more accurate. I'd also
add the El Salvador death squads under Roberto D'Aubisson from 1980-1983, 35,000
seems to be the likely estimate given by Cynthia J. Arnson from Human Rights
Watch since the L.A. Times had 30,000 and this NY Times article
from 1983 says most of the 35,000-40,000 civilian deaths were by government
security forces. One more is Amnesty International reported 6,000 extrajudicial
killings under Hugo Chavez from 2000-2007.
Looking through some of my books, what might explain some of the huge census losses is in Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust, it's mentioned in the introduction by Adam Ulam that most of the Kazakhstan deaths were actually during the first 1929-1931 Dekulakization phase, rather than the 1932-33 famine. This helps explain the deficit because without the additional 1+ million Kazakhstan deaths, the Dekulakization losses seemed way too high, but now I can pretty much tell when all of the deaths took place under Stalin because before, I wasn't seeing where the rest of the pre-1937 loss was. Estimates for Kazakhstan have actually risen since the 1937 census became available since it turns out the population dropped to under 2.2 million from over 3.6 million in 1926, such as the 1.45 million Maksudov estimates. This is a bit understudied, but similar to the Ukraine campaign and it makes sense Kazakhstan was so hard hit in light of Stalin's decision during WW2 to wide 8 smaller nations off the map, primarily smaller Asian and Muslim ones. As for the Holodomor in particular, the Kuban should be included in that as well since it was majority Ukrainian in 1926, but by 1959, mass ethnic cleansing had it just 4% Ukrainian. Conquest gave a figure of an additional 1 million Ukrainians dead in the North Caucasus so that million could be added to the other 4-5 million targeted for Ukrainian nationalism. Incidentally, Conquest gave a total deficit of 10.5 million in the Ukraine, similar to the 10+ million by the Court of Appeal of Kiev, but this is for the entire period 1926-1937, so it includes the additional 500,000 Ukrainian deaths he estimates for the earlier Dekulakization campaign. Conquest attributed a 1.5 million birth deficit, which is much closer to the data, as births dropped in the Ukraine from nearly 3.1 million from 1929-1931 to just over 1.8 million from 1932-1934. Granted births were still lower after, but by 1936, they had recovered to roughly the 1931 number, which was just over 200,000 lower than in 1927, likely due to Dekulakization, but at this point, additional numbers are fairly negligible due to many unregistered births and deaths. Some of the rest of the 10 million deficit could have been Ukrainians who survived the Dekulakization mass deportations, though there was the resettlement of 116,000 peasants from other areas to try to make up the enormous demographic loss. The 1937 census is very important for this, but also has some surprising results. For instance, the NKVD told the census board that there were 2.6 or 2.75 million Gulag prisoners, yet the archives show just under 1.2 million including labor colonies. These type of discrepancies make any hopes of truly precise numbers impossible. BTW, if you're interested in the subject and haven't read it, Execution by Hunger is an excellent short book on the subject without any of the hyperbole you sometimes get in those sorts of books by survivors. Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow is similarly quite good, though more of a history than telling a story, you just have to realize before reading that the Gulag deaths were inflated and he later revised them down.
I can now wrap up most of the key info & details on Stalin in this email. Outside of the 700,000 or so official political executions, I have some info on the other executions. "Ten years without the right of correspondence" was a euphemism for death sentences, but not counted in the execution totals in things like the Shvernik report, which is important because there were actually many of these. For instance, of the 9,432 corpses exhumed in 1943 from the 1938 Vinnitsa massacre, all those identified had received this sentence. This is also true for all of the identified bodies of the 50,000 or so in the Kuropaty mass graves. I also at least have some idea for camp executions with 26,000 for Serpantinka type operations and 40,000 total in the Kolyma complex in 1938. Bamlag was about the same - 50,000 executions for 1937-1938 combined with a similar population. If you extrapolate from these camps you get 600,000-700,000 executions, but this would undoubtedly be very misleading since these two camps were known to be the worst outside of the execution camps of Novaya Zemlya and Taymyr, which there's unfortunately very little written about. I can attribute a lot of the recorded Gulag deaths in 1938 to Kolyma since about 70,000 out of 250,000 prisoners died according to camp administrators, a much higher rate than what was recorded at most other camps, though I don't know if this includes executions. I'll really have to become proficient in Russian to get much more information on the Soviet Union, especially to find the answers to some of my questions regarding the Brezhnev era. But while details are important, it ultimately hasn't changed my view, I still think about 1 million executions is right for those years since 800,000-900,000 seems a bit conservative and 1.75 million seems too high + several hundred thousand camp and exile deaths. The Politburo decision on November 17th 1938 and the order about 10 days later led to the mass operations winding down, although the January 16th 1940 list was really the conclusion with 346 shot over the next 2 weeks including Yezhov, Zhukovski, Frinovsky, Evdokimov and their wives and sons shot on Feb. 3rd and 4th. More importantly, I've at least gathered quite a bit of information about Soviet mass killings during WW2, which is covered less. There's been some focus on the 158,000+ Soviet soldiers shot as "deserters" under Order No. 270 mentioned by Catherine Merridale and Richard Overy and a bit on the 100,000 or so killed in the NKVD prison massacres after Operation Barbarossa, but mass shootings also took place in the camps with the Germans near Moscow in November ,41, June ,42 and with Stalingrad on the verge of falling in September '42. Near Nalchik in the Caucasus, forced laborers were machine gunned on the orders of the Kabardino-Balkar Republic's NKVD Commisar and when threatened with a German advance, the NKVD released all those serving less than five years and on 31 October 1941 shot the remainder out of the 29,000 in the camp at Olginskaya. More WW2 mass killing took place at Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk, Zaporozhe and throughout the Baltic States and a lot of the mass graves were from newly annexed Western Byelorussia in 1939 and 1941. For enemies in the wars, Conquest's 270,000 Poles killed in 1939-1940 seems believeable, estimates don't vary too much for this with another 107,000 minimum, 148,000 dead by summer 1940 and a more vague like "several hundreds of thousands." The 1989 German government study gave 270,000 German civilians dead from Soviet war crimes. The Soviets recorded 450,600 German deaths in custody, but the 1974 West German commission found 1,094,250 died in captivity out of 3,060,000 German military taken prisoner and Rdiger Overmans similar numbers at "1 million max" dead out of 3 million prisoners and said 700,000 Germans listed missing could have died in Soviet custody. This sounds believeable since German numbers put Soviet POW deaths at 280,000 dead at deportation camps and 1,030,157 were executed when trying to escape or died at factories or mines in Germany, but the actual number is twice that at about 2.6 million. Strangely, James Bacque thought it was more likely that Americans were responsible for killing 1 million missing Germans, though outside of him, you don't really hear estimates above 56,000 or 78,000 max in American custody. I certainly recognize some mistreatment of Germans as I view Dresden as a war crime and completely unnecessary, but I can't imagine why he thought that more likely than Overmans' explanation. I'm sending an email now to try to get some more info on Mao. Btw, the number of political executions under Nicholas the II is widely cited at 3,741 from 1906-1910 with the entire figure for 1825-1910 under Tsarist Russia is 3,932, although given your site is 20th century only the former figure is really relevant. Not sure if you want to include it given the circumstances, but worth mentioning at least.
Professor Andrew Walder who is probably the best guy for numbers on the Cultural Revolution. He now told me he has reason to believe the number is very close to 1.6 million after I mentioned his previous estimate of 1.1-1.6 million and that the number probably doesn't include camp deaths, but he told me that the deaths can't be broken down in such detail other than that most occurred from after mid 1968 through late 1969, which he said suggests most deaths were at the hands of the authorities and that executions were involved. When I brought up estimated prison and labor camp deaths under Stalin dropping from 12+ million to 4.5 or 5 million after more information became available and asked whether we could expect a similar drop for the 15+ million camp deaths attributed to Mao, he told me that deaths from political causes under Mao were actually considerably lower than in the Soviet Union under Stalin where he told me the per capita death count was anywhere from 2 to 4 times higher so there's probably a way to get an idea, but I think that suggests it's not 15+ million just like I suspected. Of course, even the 15 million figure Harry Wu gave seemed to include post-Mao years into the 90's and even Deng sentenced at least 667,000 to the Laogai and 836,000 forced labor overall for his '83-'84 anti-crime campaign. Unfortunately there are still limitations to our knowledge of Mao, but this at least gives us an idea of what the death rate was like. I can quote the entire email if you want. On a different subject, I see the note you have for 1904-1907 Herero and Namaqua, but under Kaiser Wilhelm, there was still the targeting of civilians in the 1914 "Rape of Belgium" where 6,000 were said to have been killed directly and 17,700 said to have died from expulsion, deportation, prison and execution. As for Saddam, the 600,000 seemed to come from Rummel who seemed to cite 100,000 civilians dead on both sides of the Iraq-Iran war excluding the Al-Anfal genocide and attribute them all to Saddam. Personally, I don't think this is the best criteria. I haven't seen that figure from anyone else. I've only seen 11,000-16,000 Iranian civilians dead. A common range I see for Saddam would be either 250,000 given by Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch or the 300,000 given by the US government. Of course, if you use the highest estimates for the Al-Anfal campaign and the 1991 then you wind up with 362,000 just between those two, but of course, those are in dispute and some would put the two combined at closer to 150,000, although the higher number for the Anfal genocide is used fairly often. There was an estimate in 2003 based on a lot of extrapolating that estimated 61,000 Baghdad residents executed based on a survey: Estimated Baghdad executions Outside of the 1000 killed during the occupation of Kuwait and 4000 executed in a 1984 Abu Ghraib purge, some have said that many starved to death in refugee camps after being displaced following the 1991 uprising and I know the draining of the marsh displaced many though I've never seen a death toll estimate for it. Here's an article that asks how many Saddam killed. I'm not sure what the 200,000 "disappeared into the hands of the secret police" means. I don't know if it would involve some significant double counting or if it's in addition to others, but the writer seems to link it with Iraqi concentration camps, unfortunately I haven't seen too much written about Iraqi concentration camps, just Abu Ghraib and Radwaniyeh prison camp, where there were thousands of political executions in the mid 90's. That's probably the main problem with estimating Saddam - there hasn't been too much attention given to the many years outside of the Anfal genocide and 1991 Uprising. It wouldn't surprise me if Saddam killed more than 600,000, after all, he displaced millions, but I can't actually account for that much based on what we know now, even using the highest estimates, you don't get much over 500,000, which is also approximately what you get if you subtract Rummel's erroneous 100,000 civilian dead for the Iraq-Iran war from the 600,000 and add 11 or 16 thousand. Of course you could apply responsibility for even more than that, including dual responsibility to both the Clinton administration and Saddam for deaths from sanctions, but that's a different story. To close, I thought I'd mention Khrushchev, at least the crackdowns in Hungary, Tbilisi and Novocherkassk. Depending on whether you go with either the 2,500 or 3,000 figure for Hungary and 229 or 350 for the reprisal executions(add 7 to either figure for the executions after Novocherkassk). and you get a range of 2870 to 3489. I ignored the 800 figure out there for Tbilisi because based on what I know about the event, it's about as plausible as the old 30 or 40 thousand figures you'd see for Hungary. There were also over 300 executions announced in the Soviet press for economic crimes alone between 1961 and 1964. I don't have the numbers, but based on what I've seen, I'd say that it'd be conservative to expect even the official numbers to show something like 4,000+ executions and 40,000 or so labor camp deaths under Khrushchev, but unfortunately nobody I know of has gathered them yet.
I was curious about the studies you refer to with Efrain Rios Montt since I've always doubted the 70,000 number for 1982-83, especially since he was charged in his indictment for genocide with "only" killing 1,771, which is just a small fraction of the murders others claim he's responsible for. For instance, the National Truth and Renconciliation Commission found Pinochet responsible for more than that at 3,197 murdered or disappeared and nobody has claimed Pinochet has killed anywhere near the numbers Montt is said to be responsible for. Funny enough, I did actually find at least one source for the 1 million number, basically during the Brezhnev years in Afghanistan(the estimate was made in 1983) and it was from Jim Dunnigan and Austin Bay. Also, if you want to update the numbers for Assad, as of last month, it was 83,500 civilians killed by Assad and his allies and last I saw, 3,804 of those killed by Russian airstrikes. The numbers are the usual Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, here is one of many articles citing it Speaking of Putin, I forgot to mention that estimates of 25,000 civilians and killed and 5,000 disappeared in the second Chechen war are the higher estimates, Alexander Cherkasov for instance gives a lower range of 14,800 to 24,100. Outside of Franco and Stalin, another time period I'd extend is Ho Chi Minh because outside of the assassinations I've mentioned of civilians in the 60's war, it's been estimated(by Arthur Dommen) the Viet Minh assassinated 100 to 150,000 civilians during the 1st Indochina war from 1946-1955. I'd actually say the opposite about Tito, since according to most sources, the vast majority of the killing under his regime and the Yugoslav partisans seems to have been done pre-1955 despite UDBA continuing to kill in and out of the country for decades, but the partisan purges seem to have reliably been established at a range of 80,000-100,000 and the Bleiburg killings at least 30,000. With the other big well known massacres, it is easy to get up to the 150,000-200,000 range, though I am skeptical that only accounts for a 1/4 to a 1/3 of the deaths under Tito, though I won't rule it out until I do more research, but I know the numbers arrested in the pro-Stalinist purge couldn't account for it. But like I say with Saddam, despite the fact most common estimates for the Anfal genocide and the '91 Shia uprising suppression point to those death tolls more in the 250,000-300,000 range, I'd probably just subtract from the erroneous Iran war figure of 100,000 civilians and just round down to 500,000 since there's atrocities like the 1983 Barzani killings where 8,000 disappear or a survey where 6.6% of Baghdad residents say a member of their household was executed that give the impression there's a lot we don't know about in "normal years." Looking at Mussolini, we at least have a better idea with some of the corrections that have been made for inflated Ethiopian numbers, with almost every historian giving 3,000 for the February 1937 massacre instead of 30,000 and Alberto Sbacchi giving 5,469 for reprisal executions through 1937 as opposed to the Ethiopian figure of 24,000. Adding to this the more believable Ethiopian figures like bombings and concentration camps, you get a bit over 60,000. The number depends on whether you count Ethiopian Patriots in these numbers, or whether you count them the way you do usual combatants. If you include them then subtracting the inflated execution number from the Patriot death toll would give you near 55,000 additional deaths putting the death toll between 110 and 120,000 keeping in mind that with Ethiopian numbers likely hopelessly inflated in this category, we can't accurately account for deaths from privations. For Libya, whether you go with a higher estimate of 80 to 100,000 or 40,000 depends on whether you think 20,000 concentration camp deaths or Christopher Duggan's estimate of 40,000 is more likely, since that, along with the estimated 12,000 executions through 1931 are our best indicators on which the likely death toll. I assume Rummel got his 200,000 for the two countries combined by attributing 120 to Ethiopia and 80 to Libya, which is plausible, but as you can see, you could also make an argument for not even half that. His 15,000 figure for Yugoslavia has some basis as well and is quite easy to believe given the minimum 7,000-8,000 reprisal killings reported in just a few months not to mention the couple thousand or so who died in concentration camps. I have less information of Greece, but 9,000 doesn't alter much either way and it's not an implausible number given the reprisals. But in this case, Rummel's 224,000 for Mussolini overall(excluding the unnecessary 250 domestic kills Rummel added) is a case where he seems more accurate on one of the big names, much like his reasonable estimate of just under 4 million for Tojo. He can be quite helpful for lesser names, but when you have the opportunity, it's always best to go with a historian who specializes on that particular regime, leader or country. Though this isn't possible in many cases. Certainly, it's difficult to find any numbers that break up the death tolls in a conflict under different leaders, which is one more reason why war is more difficult. That's also why I like more specific numbers in war, such as the Commission finding 270,000 German civilians died as a result of Soviet war crimes, as opposed to the larger number of civilians who died during those battles for all sorts of reasons. This is a lot more fair, but also not always possible.
I do have more info on Fumimaro Konoe. While the 500,000 figure for massacres Shanghai, Suzhou, Jiaxing, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Wuxi and Changzhou originally came from hearsay, additional information shows it doesn't seem too high and could even be low. Werner Gruhl's book Imperial Japan's World War Two is very good for figures and details. In the chapter Violent Deaths in China, he gives figures for the Delta campaign from August 1937 to January 1938 at 300,000 civilians as well as 25,000 soldiers killed while surrendering. This could be conservative, imo since he gives 150,000 for Nanking, while I personally settled on 200,000 a while ago. Then for Shantung province in the Hsuchow City region, first half of 1938, he says that between 15 major massacres and the killing of civilians labeled guerillas the civilian death toll was at least 20,000 and more like 40,000 including artillery shelling and bombing heavily populated areas. He also gives a civilian death toll of 130,000 for Hankow, Wuhan and Canton from mid 1938 from the battles and a malaria epidemic, the latter due to a shortage of quinine, which couldn't have been helped by the Canton blockade, plus chemical weapons were used in Wuhan and there were known massacres here as well, such as Hankow in October, marching hundreds of Chinese to be shot in the river. Of course, there's thousands more killed under Konoe I know about, but you get the idea.
It's funny, but while even the 19,000-28,000 given for Chiang kai-shek's 1947 White Terror are questionable, he's been accused of far more at other times, such following the 1927 Shanghai massacre when 300 were estimated killed. It's been said in a Zhou Enlai bio that 300,000 were killed in an anti-Communist campaign over the next year. I have at least made some progress on Kim Jong Il. Obviously, it's likely well over 100,000 died in the camps under him, but as far as the purges, there is at least a number, 2,000 officials executed from 1994-2000 according to the Washington Post But it's worth noting that their source was cited in articles that merely use the word purge, so it's unclear if the Washington Post made the mistake using purges and executions synonymously, or if that's what was meant by the source and the other articles. If you think about it, it would be logical because why would it be significant in context how many people Kim Jong Il simply fired all these years later? Of course this wouldn't be everyone killed anyway, as groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch rarely give estimates for executions of ordinary citizens in North Korea like they do China and Iran. I do have some numbers such as 300 for the 1992-1994 purge from Ken Gause, 50 public executions from the 1997 purge from Bradley K. Martin and I'm trying to confirm numbers for the '95 Purge of the 6th Army Corps as well as the ones in at least 2000 and 2010 and some crackdowns on civilians. The data for each is usually scattered in different sources, but if you check enough different books, papers and articles, you can at least find out when events took place and some estimates for them. This may be superfluous with the 2,000 number, but it can't hurt to try to verify it. Btw, you mention the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in your notes, and the Japanese figures are 30,000 civilians dead and another 30,000 unaccounted for. The official Soviet number of Japanese POWs who died in custody is also just over 62,000. There was some debate about the actual number of Japanese actually in Soviet custody, but in that case, the Soviet numbers actually seem pretty plausible to me, which would mean about a 10% death rate. One thing I noticed looking back, is on Stalin's secret January 21st, 1933 order to prevent peasants from migrating to where there's food, areas outside of the Ukraine such as the Kuban were indeed mentioned so the targeting of ethnic Ukrainians did extend outside of the Ukraine, such as the 1 million ethnic Ukrainians Conquest estimated died in the North Caucasus, which seems more or less right since while the death toll in the Ukraine proper can vary from closer to 4 or 5 million, the 2 million outside the Ukraine proper excluding Kazakhstan since that was mostly earlier seems to be a constant, hence the total 1932-33 death toll usually being given as either 6 or 7 million. On the Baltic nations in the 40s, I know the Estonian commission gave the number of 33,900 killed by Soviets and the death toll was higher in Lithuania. These repressions in annexed territories continued until about 1952, although the only one I believe would be similar to the 200,000 Western Ukrainians I mentioned in one of my earlier emails would be Poland. Though it's not always clear whether Polish figures merely refer to 1939-1941, or also include repression of Polish resistance later around '44-'45. On a different note, it's fortunate there's almost no variation for Jews and Gypsies killed by Pavelic and Ustase, though there is more variation on Serbs, such as the 172,000 estimated by Vladimir Zerjavic as opposed to the higher 290,000-300,000 estimates. Btw, Rummel also attributed a range of 4,000-7,000 to the Sandinista government for 5,500 through 1987. I can't judge how accurate he was on that, but he is listed as one of your sources and I have read accounts of atrocities against dissidents and the devoutly religious. Depending on who you ask, the Contras may qualify as well.
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