From the 1920s until his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with fear and violence. By implementing punitive policies, he caused devastating famines, sent his enemies to prison camps, and executed those who opposed him.

So, how many people did Joseph Stalin really kill?

This number is difficult to determine. There is no clear total that encompasses the terror of the Stalin years, which has led many historians to piece together the facts from available sources. However, various estimates have emerged.

According to historians who examined Soviet archives before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin likely killed between six million and 20 million people. However, considering the widespread and often unrecorded deaths during the Stalin years, this number could be even higher.

The Path to Power of Joseph Stalin

Public DomainBy 1941, when Joseph Stalin's photograph was taken, millions of people had already died due to famine, exile, and executions.

Born on December 18, 1878, in Gori, Georgia, as Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, Joseph Stalin seemed an unlikely candidate to become a Soviet dictator. With a small, pockmarked face and a deformed left arm, Stalin spent his early years in the shadow of his violent, alcoholic father.

However, the future dictator found his way when he began reading Karl Marx while studying at Tiflis Theological School. Inspired by Marx's message, Stalin left school in 1899 and quickly rose as a revolutionary.

The man seized the moment. Adopting the name "Joseph Stalin" or "Man of Steel," he joined the Bolshevik party, established a close relationship with Vladimir Lenin, and helped organize strikes and demonstrations. When Lenin came to power after the Russian Revolution in 1917, Stalin followed in his wake and became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922.

When Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin seized power and made himself dictator by the end of the decade. Looking at the Soviet Union, he became determined to industrialize his country and build a fully developed economy — at any cost.

How Many People Did Stalin Kill?

From 1929 until Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, millions of people died in the Soviet Union as a result of his policies. So, how many people did Stalin kill? Exact numbers are open to debate, but historians generally focus on three areas: famines, executions, and prison camps.

For example, in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin implemented a policy of collectivization aimed at replacing small farms with state-controlled collectives. According to a 1989 report by The New York Times, Soviet historian Roy Medvedev estimated that these policies led to "the expulsion of nine million to 11 million wealthier peasants from their lands and the arrest or exile of two million to three million people," many of whom died in the process.

Medvedev also noted that six to seven million people likely died as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's collectivization policies. However, in 2010, American historian Timothy Snyder argued in The New York Review Of Books that between 1930 and 1933, "only" five million people died as a result of Stalin's famines.

In any case, Stalin's policies led to extremely ruthless famines, particularly in Soviet-controlled Ukraine. Ukrainians refer to the famine of 1932-1933 as "Holodomor" and see it as a deliberate genocide.

Wikimedia CommonsVictims of the famine in Ukraine, which Ukrainians view as a deliberate genocide.

When Stalin announced his collectivization plans, many Ukrainian farmers resisted. The Soviets responded by taking crops as punishment for farmers not meeting quotas and by killing or exiling thousands. As a result, millions of people died of starvation.

Stalin claimed in a conversation with Winston Churchill that he had ordered the deaths of around 10 million kulaks.

"Some of those who died of starvation were in such bad shape that they had begun to smell," testified a survivor in Congress in the 1980s. "You would see them walking, just walking and walking, one would fall down, then another, and it would go on like that."

Stalin was also infamous for executing or imprisoning his enemies. During the Great Purge — also known as the Great Terror — between 1936 and 1938, the Soviet dictator executed up to a million people.

He also sent millions of people to Soviet gulags. Medvedev estimates that four to six million people were sent to such camps; many of them did not return (including Medvedev's father). Snyder believes that about one million people died in the gulags.

Library of CongressMale prisoners in a gulag in Siberia.

Dead prisoners were killed by starvation, overwork, or immediate execution. Therefore, it can be difficult to determine how many people died in the gulags.

Moreover, according to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, several historians related to Stalin's gulags documented that the camps regularly released dying prisoners to artificially reduce official death statistics.

So, how many people did Stalin kill? Medvedev estimated in 1989, without access to official archives, that Stalin killed 20 million people. Snyder, with access to Soviet sources, estimated this number to be around six million in 2010.

Other historians — largely before the collapse of the Soviet Union — have suggested that Stalin may have killed even more people. Some propose that as many as 60 million people may have died under Stalin's rule.

This raises a chilling question. Was Joseph Stalin the deadliest dictator in history?

Was Stalin the Bloodiest Dictator in History?

Unfortunately, Joseph Stalin was not the only bloody dictator of the 20th century. However, he likely killed more people than Germany's Adolf Hitler — who oversaw the deliberate extermination of 11 million people during the Holocaust, six million of whom were Jews in Europe — but Stalin was not the person who killed the most people in the 20th century.

That controversial title belongs to Mao Zedong. According to The Washington Post, the "Great Leap Forward" policies between 1958 and 1962 caused the deaths of at least 45 million people.

Public DomainMao Zedong in 1963. Historians estimate that under his "Great Leap Forward" policies, 45 million people died over four years.

Other dictators from the 20th and 19th centuries have much lower — but still horrific — death tolls. For example, King Leopold of Belgium was responsible for the deaths of eight to 10 million people in the Congo, which was under Belgian control. Pol Pot was determined to transform Cambodia into an agricultural utopia and is estimated to have killed between one and two million people through his enforced policies — which corresponds to nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population.

Therefore, when it comes to the question of how many people Stalin killed, the real answer may never be known. What is certain is that the Soviet dictator killed millions of people — likely more than Adolf Hitler. And in the face of such vast deaths, humanity seemed to understand its limits.

"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic," he said.

As difficult as it may be, it is also important to evaluate the data on how many people Stalin killed with great empathy. Whether he killed six million or 60 million, each life mattered. They were not statistics — they were people killed at the hands of the Soviet dictator.