In the way way back when RevLeft was still active, I got into a debate with a somewhat notorious Marxist-Leninist about his claim that Leon Trotsky had been collaborating with the Third Reich. To my sheer horror, as evidence to support this, he cited court documents from none other than the Trial of Twenty One, the infamous trail of Grigory Zinoviev, the last of the "Moscow Show Trials". We, then, got into a debate about the death toll of the regime of Josef Stalin.

At that point, I decided to barter with him. I began with oft-cited twenty million and was eventually widdled down to eight million. He started with one and conceded to three. I felt that it'd be unethical to give an estimate below seven, and, so, let our sleeping dogs lie there.

I, later, became deeply troubled by this experience. I felt that, by bartering with death toll statistics, I had given credibility to the claim, "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.", oft attributed to Stalin.

I, personally, happen to think the death toll for Stalin's regime is a bit higher than seven million, at probably around eighteen million. It, however, seems to me to be logistically improbable for him to have been able to kill too many more.

I generally feel so inclined to err on the side of caution when giving an estimate for any given humanitarian catastrophe. There, however, seems to be a problem with this line of reasoning, as, once the death toll for so-called "Communism" begins to reach the upper register of one-hundred million, the Holocaust seems fairly trivial by comparison, as, to my best recollection, the total number of people that the Nazis systematically eliminated is estimated as being between eleven and fifteen and three-fifths million, with the obvious figure of six million Jews, of which we are thankfully not so lacking in serious historical scholarship in regards to for it to be a matter of debate. If you consider the Third Reich as more or less totally responsible for the war casualties, at between seventy and seventy-eight million, all of which, of course, is according to Wikipedia, whom, due to the consistency that I suspect for such pages to be defaced and the care that the people who write them have to present accurate information, I would contend is actually a better source of information than most academic journals in these regards, you'll end up with between eighty-one and ninety-three and three-fifths of a million people, a number that happens to be curiously close to the Black Book of Communism estimate of beyond ninety-four million.

Within historiography, there seems to be a relative consensus of the figures for Stalin at between around ten and twenty million. Though there are still Marxist-Leninists apologists in the world, I would contend that, regardless as to what figure most will cite, in part, due to that he was officially denounced by Nikita Khrushchev, there is only so much of a predicament that apologists for Stalin any longer present, though that may, to some degree, be challenged within the Russian Federation today, as many are so inclined to think of the scope of Stalin's atrocities to be overblown and characteristic of "Western propaganda". For all intensive purposes, however, I have faith in that the correct interpretation of Stalin's political legacy, that of an abject dictator, will come to be commonly understood and accepted.

What about Mao Zedong?

Something that you often hear people say in defense of Mao is that the Great Chinese Famine was unintentional, which is true an extent. Mao did not intentional starve the Chinese people in the same manner that Josef Stalin did during the Holodomor, but he did willfully attempt to industrialize the People's Republic at the same catastrophic rate that he had witnessed the Soviet Union fail in doing and was, at best, criminally negligent.

A trouble with discounting the famine statistics is that they do happen to be where the bulk of Mao's death toll comes from. At least, as per the Chinese records, fifteen million people died because and upwards of fifty-five million people did. It is my entirely speculative opinion that between twenty and forty million people died, which I generally cite as around thirty.

A rather spurious defense of either Stalin or Mao is that they only killed more people due to having larger populations. If you, however, adjust the respective estimates to the population size of the various countries, the numbers are fairly comparable to the number of people systematically eliminated by the Nazis. It also stands to common reason that a government who is in control over a larger population bears a greater responsibility to their subjects. Another defense is that they were in control for longer than Adolf Hitler, which, again, adjusting presents a slightly lower rate of murder, but is still fairly comparable. It, again, ought to be argued that the duration of time that what I have no qualms with categorizing as a totalitarian regime is irrelevant. That some form of political repression or another lasts longer only really makes it that much worse. What is a fair comparative analysis is to suggest that the Nazis were more virulent, which I don't think that anyone could reasonably deny. In so far that anyone finds it useful to compare the regimes, which I would caution against to a certain extent, as each one of them is fairly particular, that is something that should be taken into consideration.

The second great point of contention in an analysis of Mao's legacy is the number of people killed during the Cultural Revolution. The statistics range from one to twenty million. It'd seem, to me, to be irresponsible to give a figure below three, despite that the only mandated minimum is four-hundred thousand, which, again, I believe to be an official Chinese figure of some sort. I would even suggest that you shouldn't go below seven million. I, again, personally think it to be a bit higher at around between ten and twenty million, if not even trending towards the latter.

I have thusly given eighteen million to Stalin, which is higher than most, and around between thirty and sixty million to Mao, which, if we are to consider other campaigns of his, I think that we can add another five to ten to arrive at between thirty-five and seventy million, which is slightly, but significantly lower than the estimates that Wikipedia lists. Personally, I suspect for Mao to be responsible for around fifty million deaths.

The total Allied war casualties for the Second World War, of whom we do only have the Nazis to blame for, is around fifty-five million, added to the number of people whom they systematically eliminated leaves us with sixty-six to seventy-one million, a set of numbers within the ballpark of my estimates for Stalin and Mao at sixty-eight million, which is how you should never let someone convince you that the astronomical figures for authoritarian Communist regimes leaves Fascism as a drop in the bucket by comparison.

From this, we can deduce that totalitarianism is catastrophic and terrible. I, of course, want to say a lot of things with the figures that I present and, due to both the both the obvious difficulties in calculating the Communist statistics, namely that they didn't necessarily keep good records and are notorious for having fabricated or destroyed them, and what, to me, as respective estimates for the Soviet Union throughout its history and Mao's regime range from six to sixty-one million or forty to eighty million, is an obvious lack of serious historical scholarship.

Having presented you with all of this information, I should also like to open the floor to a more general discussion on death toll arguments themselves. A cursory search of this sort of thing online will disinter some of the worst forms of apologetics and lesser evilism. There's also the question of such comparative analysis more broadly, as the concept of totalitarianism was used during the Cold War to transform anti-Fascist sentiment into anti-Communist sentiment, something was even materially supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. To me, the catastrophe of Twentieth Century history ought to elicit an understanding of the need for human rights in the prevention of genocide and other crimes against humanity. When statistics are generated to suit historical opinion or pulled out of hat in various forms of apologia, everything, it seems, becomes permissible via an appeal to the lowest common denominator of what we consider to be politically acceptable. Arguments about death tolls, it seems, are where the dreams of good society go to die.