Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

estimates of the numbers of dead have in the past ranged widely, from a few tens of thousands to 2 million, 7 million or even 10 million. But in recent years a team of Ukrainian demographers have looked again at the numbers that were tabulated at the district and provincial level, then passed on to Kharkiv and Moscow, and have come up with better answers.2 Arguing that “there was some falsification of cause of death in death certificates, but the number of registered deaths was not tampered with,” they have sought to establish reliable numbers of “excess deaths,” meaning the number of people who died above an expected average. They have also looked at “lost births,” or the numbers of births that did not occur, by comparison to what would have been expected, because of the famine.3 Thanks to their work, agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, or direct losses, and 0.6 million lost births, or indirect losses. That brings the total number of missing Ukrainians to 4.5 million. These figures include all victims, wherever they died—by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages—and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards. The total population of the republic at that time was about 31 million people. The direct losses amounted to about 13 per cent of that number.4 The vast majority of casualties were in the countryside: of the 3.9 million excess deaths, 3.5 million were rural and 400,000 urban. More than 90 per ...