In 2003, British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore suggested that Stalin was ultimately responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million people.
After taking power in the 1920s, Joseph Stalin killed at least 9 million people through mass murder, forced labor, and famine, but the true figure may be as high as 60 million. From the 1920s through his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union through fear and violence.
Barnes described the Gulag as an institution of forced labor, where workers had real prospects of being released. According to the author 18 million people passed through the work camps. While approximately 1.6 million died, a large number were released and reintegrated into Soviet society.
In sum, probably somewhere between 28,326,000 and 126,891,000 people were killed by the Communist Party of the soviet Union from 1917 to 1987; and a most prudent estimate of this number is 61,911,000. The democide rates over the three generations of Soviet history are shown in the table (line 94).
Mao Zedong (49-78M deaths)
In 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor, a man-made famine engineered by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin.
Mao's policies were responsible for vast numbers of deaths, with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 million victims due to starvation, persecution, prison labour, and mass executions, and his government was characterized as totalitarian.
The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who died in labor colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521. Former kulaks and their families made up the majority of the victims of the Great Purge of the late 1930s, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 people executed.
Lenin, like Stalin, considered the kulaks as a danger to the socialist collectivization of agriculture. Lenin believed that in order to create a more equal and equitable society, the kulaks' riches and influence needed to be diminished because they were abusing the less wealthy peasants.
Stalin believed any future insurrection would be led by the Kulaks, thus he proclaimed a policy aimed at "liquidating the Kulaks as a class." Declared "enemies of the people," the Kulaks were left homeless and without a single possession as everything was taken from them, even their pots and pans.
During the Famine of 1932–33 it's estimated that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died from starvation. The implication is that the total death toll (both direct and indirect) for Stalin's collectivization program was on the order of 12 million people.
China is estimated to have endured the second-highest number of total casualties in WWII. As many as 20 million people died in China, including up to 3.75 million military deaths and 18.19 million civilian deaths.
The People's Republic of China puts its war dead at 20 million, while the Japanese government puts its casualties due to the war at 3.1 million. An estimated 7-10 million people died in the Dutch, British, French and US colonies in South and Southeast Asia, mostly from war-related famine.
Widely considered the largest famine in human history, the Great Chinese Famine led to an estimated 30 million deaths from starvation, and an estimated 33 million births were lost or postponed.
Estimates conclude that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died of famine across the Soviet Union.
On 19 February 1954, the oblast was transferred from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR jurisdiction, on the basis of "the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic and cultural ties between the Crimea Province and the Ukrainian SSR" and to commemorate the 300th anniversary ...
In the Soviet Union the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32), implemented by Joseph Stalin, concentrated on developing heavy industry and collectivizing agriculture, at the cost of a drastic fall in consumer goods. The second Five-Year Plan (1933–37) continued the objectives of the first.
The German Red Cross reported in 2005 that the records of the military search service WAS list total Wehrmacht losses at 4.3 million men (3.1 million dead and 1.2 million missing) in World War II.
About 4,200,000 Germans died, and about 1,972,000 Japanese died. In all, the scale of human losses during World War II was vast.
World War II
The war pitted the Allies and the Axis power in the deadliest war in history, and was responsible for the deaths of over 70 million people.
The Japanese murdered 30 million civilians while "liberating" what it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere from colonial rule. About 23 million of these were ethnic Chinese. It is a crime that in sheer numbers is far greater than the Nazi Holocaust.
The official death toll for Japanese soldiers killed in China between 1937 and 1945 is 480,000.
In the years following the agricultural collectivization, the reforms would disrupt the Soviet food supply. In turn, this disruption would eventually lead to famines for the many years following the first five-year plan, with 6–7 million dying from starvation in 1933.
The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilians. This represents the most military deaths of any nation by a large margin. Germany sustained 5.3 million military losses, mostly on the Eastern Front and during the final battles in Germany.