How many millions of people did Stalin save?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Over the past 25 years, the country has loved to talk about the "villain" Stalin, about how many people he killed, writes burckina-faso. Repressed, seduced, etc. If you listen to all this, you get the feeling of an unreal villain of all times and peoples. Now I will show you in numbers: how many millions of people in the USSR survived thanks to Stalin.

Or thanks to Stalinism. To do this, I will operate with such a demographic concept as the general mortality rate of the population. This is an indicator that includes everything in a complex: both victims and non-victims, repression and not repression, and most importantly, the dynamics of improvement or deterioration of the state of affairs in the country due to progress or some kind of cataclysms.

It is known that in pre-revolutionary Russia this figure is very high relative to other developed European countries. For example, in pre-war Germany, the mortality rate dropped to 15 ppm, while in the European part of the Republic of Ingushetia it was equal to 27 ppm. With all this, more or less accurate information about the level and dynamics of mortality is known only from data from 50 European provinces. The rest of the territory of the Russian Empire is a blank spot - terra incognito. Nevertheless, mortality in tsarist Russia was declining. Progress and culture took their toll, and although Russia lagged far behind, the trend was generally positive.

And if everything went in an evolutionary way, then Russia would catch up with Germany in terms of mortality by about the middle of the twentieth century.

But evolution did not happen, as there was a revolution. We will not argue about the reasons for it here. Let's talk about mortality in ppm. So, after the revolution, the mortality rate in the USSR fell and fell quite strongly. For clarity, I made a graph where this is clearly visible:

For the pre-revolutionary period, I used Rashin's data from the book "The population of Russia for 100 years (1813-1913)". There are figures for only 50 European provinces. The attentive reader will see that the data on the graph is slightly higher than that of Rashin. This is due to the fact that I used the data on the USSR within the borders until September 1939. For comparability, I corrected the pre-revolutionary data upward, since in the European part the mortality rate was the smallest relative to the rest of the RI.

From 1900-13, I made a linear trend and continued until 1955. Regarding this trend, we will see the real effect of Stalinism for all the peoples of the USSR. As can be seen from it, the real mortality rates under Stalin were significantly below this line. In the pre-war period, it is lower by about 5 ppm, and in the post-war period, when antibiotics were introduced, by as much as 8 ppm. The only exception is 1933, when in the USSR, against the background of hunger, mortality rose sharply from 20 to 40 ppm. That in real life gave the number of victims of about 2, 5-3 million people.

And so, the entire green field on the graph shows the gain of the most valuable resource - human lives. My calculation by translating ppm into real numbers showed the gain * of the peoples of the USSR from Stalinism in 23.2 million human lives. This includes the 2, 6 million victims of the 1933 famine, as well as the repressions about which so many horrors have been told to us in the last 25 years from the stories of Shalamov and the novels of Solzhenitsyn.

* - this is without taking into account the losses of 1941-45.

Thus, in the bottom line, we have 23 million saved lives of people who would have died before their deadline had it not been for Stalin's reforms in the country, which include the construction of hospitals, schools, industry and everything else. But no one talks about it - everyone talks only about repressions, the Gulag and hunger and the millions of mythical victims of Stalinism, forgetting about the real achievements that are visible on this graph.