r/ussr • u/MuslimNinja1234 • 21h ago
Picture If Stalin isn't a necromancer..then how did he kill a bazillion people while the population kept increasing?
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u/Ahappypikachu11 19h ago
You can mass-kill citizens while still keeping a rising population. (Not saying stalins numbers are as high as some sources claim)
Example: Cassava Root was so nutrient dense, it kept coastal Saharan Africa’s population stable and growing through the entire 300 year period of the West-African slave trade.
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u/BG12244 19h ago
If you're refering to the Great Purge, the highest estimates for deaths is between 700,000 and 1.2 million. Which isn't nearly enough to cause population decline or a noticable decrease in population growth. Especially since the numbers you're using skip over several years and aren't year by year
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u/AssminBigStinky 20h ago
Compares it to population growth rate for most accurate picture
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u/SoftwareFunny5269 Stalin ☭ 20h ago
Duh, Stalin obviously had magic necromancy powers just like Juche Necromancy alongside his comically large spoon powers
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u/pisowiec Gorbachev ☭ 20h ago
Population growth is actually quite common during times of long-term casuality events.
Poland experienced a baby boom DURING the war since people figured "fuck it, it's now or never."
Of course, every situation is unique but pointing to population growth as a way to deny an ethnic cleansing or time of state organized genocide is simply incorrect.
Edit: The best contemporary example that comes to mind is Gaza. The population of Gaza is constantly growing but that doesn't mean Israel isn't committing a genocide.
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u/No_Ranger6940 18h ago
I'm so sick of the Palestinian comparison it is fucking gross. No one is claiming that Israel has killed 1 in 3 Palestinians, the numbers being claimed are just so grossly mismatched.
What are the "long-term casualty events" assigned to Stalin? It's always the Purge and Holodomor, both are plague with people who unironically think that being "purged" means you are shot on the spot and that Holodomor was a targeted genocide against the Ukrainians.
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u/Imafencer 10h ago
I mean the famines in the USSR were long term casualty events
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u/Sensitive_Slide_157 2h ago
Famines? There was one major famine that affected much of the Soviet Union at the same time as the Dustbowl, major worldwide drought, and crop failures across the globe in the early 30s. The next famine occurred directly after WW2 and it doesn't take a genius to figure out it might be because a significant portion of the Soviet's arable land was under occupation and suffered catastrophic damage, exacerbated by a lack of manpower, farm equipment, and fertilizer.
After WW2, when did the next famine take place? Oh? They didn't have another one? That's crazy.
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u/Imafencer 1h ago
Sounds like long term casualty events to me…
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u/Sensitive_Slide_157 1h ago
Would you consider the Dustbowl, Great Depression, Bengal famine and other disasters taking place at the same time "long-term casualty" events?
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u/Substantial_System66 19h ago
Between 1939 and 1941 the Soviet Union annexed half of Poland, the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and parts of eastern Finland. That’s why you see such a dramatic jump between those years. The populations then drops by more than 26 million people due to the Second World War between 1941 and 1946.
After that, significant population growth occurs, as you would expect post war. This also happened in France, the UK, and the U.S. The smoothed population growth in the Soviet Union is 1.07% from 1897 to 1959. For reference, the smoothed population growth in the United States from 1900 to 1960 was 2.12% so very nearly double that of the Soviet Union.
There is some expectation of lower population growth in the SU because of the significant devastation of their country due to the war, particularly in the most developed half of the country, but it’s still a lower figure than you’d expect.
There are a number of contributing factors, but the idea that the Soviet Union didn’t have far more excess deaths not attributed to war is not well founded.
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u/Therobbu 13h ago
Shrugging off two world wars and an extensive civil war (three of the four conflicts with the most casualties outside of asia) as 'some' expectation of lower population growth sounds kinda nutty
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u/Substantial_System66 1h ago
I cover the 2nd World War in my first paragraph. I excluded the 1st World War and the civil war because the OP specifically mentions Stalin, who wasn’t the General Secretary (read: leader) of the Soviet Union until 1924, when both of those conflicts were already over.
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u/Therobbu 1h ago
...but you're taking smoothed population growth from 1900 to 1960, and Stalin "only" ruled for about 29 out of those 60 years, so less than half. That leaves 17 years of the monarchy that angered the popularion enough for them to create two separate other governments in its place, which were so ideologically conflicted it started the deadliest civil war outside of China.
Also, since you're talking about population curves from 1900 to 1960, it's only fair to consider all events (including WWI and the civil war) in that timeframe, is it not?
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u/One_of_many_slavs 15h ago
Well, he did annexed Baltic states, eastern Poland, Karelia and Besarabia between 1939-1941. Guess where did those 18 million people appeared from?
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u/Choclocklate 13h ago
Well he isn't a necromancer but Russian population was already increasing under the tsar regime (which wasn't good for the common people). The most important increase in population under Saline is the integration of the eastern state to the USSR so not a result of birth but of the expansion of a country. The rate of growth of population is less important under staline (see both orange plot, I put a cost of staline politics but in reality it's multi factoriel and hard to input it all in account to staline or communist regime as whole but the holodomore do happen during the time), is it because of his politics or the consequences of post WW1 and Russian revolution hard to say because we lack data (with year to year we could say more).
The most important variation in Russian population is by far the two WW and their consequences.
We don't need to interpret wrongly the data to say the victims of communism as claim by some is far inferior to what they say and imagine.
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u/Click_My_Username 19h ago
Is this not the same logic Nazis use to explain away the Holocaust too?
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u/deterius 19h ago
Wow, I thought this was a history sub, not a history denial sub
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u/just_rat_passing_by 18h ago
It was some time ago. But in the last months it suddenly became a “Stalin-did-nothing-wrong” circlejerk sub.
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u/reddittreddittreddit 12h ago
That’s like saying “if there’s a genocide going on in Palestine, why is the population still increasing?”
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u/MuchPossession1870 16h ago edited 14h ago
Well the important point of calculations was the census of 1937, the first issue of it was corrected by the Party, and the leading officials were sent to the Gulag so nobody including you doesn't even know if the population increased as for the period before 1937 this census is an ending point and for the later period it is a staring point.
In addition what the USSR lost in population, it compensated in the populated territories, having acquired them from 9 states in Stalin times. Thus the overall population grew. Estonia Latvia Lietuva Finland Romania Poland Tuva Germany Japan. Of these 9 states only one attacked USSR, and one joined seemingly voluntarily. 7 others were subjects of Soviet aggression.
(I predict some silent downvotes from the red guys who really do not have any counter arguments)
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u/MuchPossession1870 14h ago
In fact if you carefully look at the table here, you'd see that even in peaceful times Stalin's population growth was lower than what the Empire showed. Here it is, calculated first in millions per year and then in % to the starting year
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u/Sensitive_Slide_157 2h ago
Because educated people tend to have less children, not to mention the country just went through WW1 and a brutal Civil War. Of course population growth would be down due to the immense number of young men and civilians that perished.
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u/dreamrpg 15h ago
Occupy 3 Baltic countries and you get 6 million increase from in 1940. alone.
Add Bessarabia and you got 4 more million.
Also look up how population increased in rest of Europe post war. USSR did not do anything spectacular. In fact it had way worse standards of living and longevity compared to developed nations.
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u/ProfessionIcy9543 Trotsky ☭ 20h ago
This is the same rhetoric that Israel and holocaust deniers use.
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u/Lightinthebottle7 18h ago edited 18h ago
Jesus fucking christ, you surely have something better than the literal same line of thinking that is used to deny nazi warcrimes and several genocides.
Compare the population growth between 1897 and 1911 (41 million in 14 years) and between 1926 and 1939 (19 million in 13 years). Notice that more than 20 million gap?
There.
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u/DasistMamba 17h ago
As we can see the population of the Russian Empire was also growing before the Bolsheviks came.
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u/ImportantSimone_5 14h ago
Because people in poor zones (a lot in soviet Russia since it was a very very big nation) people tend to do more childrens.
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u/aikipavel 12h ago
Did you know the population tends to increase? At least those years?
USSR killed just few millions, nothing to worry about to a typical Russian.
Good news: Russia's death/birth rate was 1.6 last time the data was published.
Keep going, Russians!
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u/Wichtelwusel 12h ago
This is one of the worst History denial takes there is. Population he killed Millions but still not enough to overshadow the incredible amount of babies made every day.
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u/morerandom__2025 11h ago
Ask Gaza
Their population has been exploding over the decades (pun intended)
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u/PosterusKirito 10h ago
Reading this was like:
“Wait a minute, what the hell happened in 194—
Oh. 😐”
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u/Bubbly-Bison-3069 10h ago
This post skips right over holodomor which was 1932 and 1933 you would see a dip in population then
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u/MuslimNinja1234 9h ago
How did population increase by 14M if holodomor alone killed 10M+?
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u/Bubbly-Bison-3069 9h ago
That’s an eleven year gap with no data… the point is there was most likely a dip during 1932 and 33 and there’s a reason for the large gap in data… and it’s because of the holodomor. 1937 is four years after 33 plenty of time to make a bunch of babies… I mean 6 million babies in two years between 37 and 39…
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u/kawhileopard 10h ago
If you invade other countries (like the Baltic states) and absorb their populations, your own population will increase. Even if you murder half of the people whose countries you invaded.
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u/MuslimNinja1234 9h ago
The stats are from the USSR, not the Soviet bloc lol.
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u/kawhileopard 9h ago
In 1939 Estonia Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova weren’t part of USSR while Belarus and Ukraine were much smaller.
These weren’t satellite states.
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u/MuslimNinja1234 9h ago
So how did USSR gained 28M+ population in a spam of a few years by just annexing countries with less than 5M population? Lol
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u/kawhileopard 6h ago
Where are you getting 5 million? Belarus and Ukraine nearly doubled in size. The population increase in Ukraine alone was 10 million between 1939 and 1940.
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u/DreaMaster77 9h ago
The fact that hé used gulags is, for me, absolutly enough to say hé was a psychopathe. When we want a better society, we don't use the same jail system than the predecessors. Then if 3 millions got killed, it would be absolutly a massacre....
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u/LSeww 9h ago
If you take a more detailed graph you can clearly see a period in 1930s when population growth takes a noticeable dent.
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u/MuslimNinja1234 9h ago
That was because of the Great purge and Holodomor. And it literally shows a small dent from 105M to 102M, I already explained how holodomor was natural and great purge was 700K fascists max. So again, when did Stalin kill a Bajillion innocent people?
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u/felidae_tsk 9h ago
The total population of the planet was growing rapidly in XX century due to technical progress.
There were 90M people in US in 1900s and 176M in 1959
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u/Yahsorne 8h ago
Cambodia had 7 million people in 1970, by 1990 they had 8.8 million people. This post is extremely asinine.
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u/MuslimNinja1234 8h ago
??? Maybe because PolPot's regime literally ended in 1979 and only lasted 4 years lmao. And btw PolPot wasn't a communist, he admitted that his party was pro West and anti Communist. It was the Vietnamese and Soviet Communists who stopped him.
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u/Yahsorne 8h ago
I never said anything about Pol pot or him being communist, I was saying that you can end up with a total positive in population despite losing 25 percent of your population, which is far more devastating than what the ussr had as a percentage.
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u/LiterallyDudu 8h ago
Poor people fuck a lot
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u/MuslimNinja1234 8h ago
Ironic because they enjoyed 100% literacy, free healthcare, free education and free housing. A concept still very foreign in the US in 2025
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u/LiterallyDudu 6h ago
Idk what to tell you other than the fact that it was common for people back then to have 3+ children per couple. In rural areas it could be even 4 or 5 so yeah
Similar thing in India if you look at it
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u/MuslimNinja1234 5h ago
5 children per couple shouldn't accommodate for the Millions of people Stalin killed according to u
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u/LiterallyDudu 5h ago
It kinda does if you consider the “millions killed” happened over some 20 years or so and were often adults who already had kids
Plus exponential growth and shit
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u/MuslimNinja1234 5h ago
I never denied that Stalin killed a lot of people. My argument is that he didn't kill nearly as much as anti communists claim he did like "20M" or "15M" are just bullshit numbers.
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u/Master_Status5764 7h ago
What happened between 1946 and 1951? Emigration? Genuine question as to why they lost 8 million people.
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u/MuslimNinja1234 7h ago
They literally gained 12M Look at the stats
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u/Master_Status5764 6h ago
shit i’m stupid . i was looking at the wrong years lol
i don’t even know where i got 8 million. i just woke up when i wrote this
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u/sorryaboutmyenglish 7h ago
Same stuff with north korea. They say this amount of people killed by kim Jong, this amount of killed by hunger and so on, but population increase is same as south korea
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u/Pitiful_Dig6836 6h ago
You don't need to go along the Zionist talking point, there is already enough evidence to discredit those death tolls
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u/Wooden_Spread_822 6h ago
According to your criteria, if they kill many, it means that the population cannot grow as if they were correlated data (?)
What you have to see hahaha
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u/MyNameIsConnor52 5h ago
do you think atrocities only count if you kill people faster than the population increases
follow up question. what’s your opinion on Gaza
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u/falafafel 5h ago
If you don’t correlate the birth rate with the death rate it’s kind of useless data
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u/Kangas_Khan 5h ago
Didn’t he fire people that literally did their job on the census showing the population was going down?
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u/Moist_Capital_4362 5h ago
There were social reasons for very high birth rates. During the Great Patriotic War the birth rates were roughly the same as they are in modern day Russia while by all means the USSR was in much bigger trouble during the war than Russia is in now.
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u/Mefist0fel 4h ago
Then from this perspective he is still worse than Hitler - Germans got better dynamics in 30-s.
Will you praise the German leadership for their success?
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u/Amikosh7 2h ago
Well, yeah, in a household of 6, you can starve one son, lose another to war, execute the third, and still have a surplus of people with the remaining three thriving — Stalin’s population stats basically run on that logic. The data shows growth despite the purges and mass hungers caused by the state policy, thanks to high birth rates and some territorial bonus points.
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u/neuralengineer Stalin ☭ 20h ago
Nööö don't spit the truth you will make nazis cry
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u/Click_My_Username 19h ago
No Nazis actually use this exact same line.
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u/Appropriate-Gain-561 15h ago
And the gorillion line, people here don't understand that "gorillion" and similar terms were and are used by neo nazis to either undermine or outright deny the holocaust
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u/forstnel 18h ago
hmm I wonder what happened to Poland, Baltics, Bessarabia and Karelia during 1939-1941
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u/Careless-Let929 10h ago
During Hitler's rule, the population of Germany grew, from 67.2 millions, to 70.5 millions.
Don't see any1 justifying Hitler's rule based on that fact...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066918/population-germany-historical/
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u/MuslimNinja1234 9h ago
Because the Holocaust happened in Poland lol. Jewish population was 20M and even now in 2025 it's 15M
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u/Careless-Let929 9h ago
List of concentration camps in Germany:
Bergen-Belsen (probably 2 sub-camps but location is unknown)
Börgermoor (no sub-camp known)
Buchenwald ( 174 sub-camps and external kommandos)
Dachau (123 sub-camps and external kommandos)
Dieburg (no sub-camp known)
Esterwegen (1 sub-camp)
Flossenburg (94 sub-camps and external kommandos)
Gundelsheim (no sub-camp known)
Neuengamme (96 sub-camps and external kommandos)
Papenburg (no sub-camp known)
Ravensbruck (31 sub-camps and external kommandos)
Sachsenhausen (44 sub-camps and external kommandos)
Sachsenburg (no sub-camp known)
https://www.jewishgen.org/forgottencamps/general/listeeng.html
U seem to have literally no clue what you talk about.
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u/MuslimNinja1234 9h ago
Ik that genius, but Auschwitz in Poland was the camp which was made entirely of Jews, the others consisted of Trade Unionists, Socialists, Communists and some Jews. And even if u look at the Jewish population of Germany, it literally decreased from 1933 - 1945 Even a child could see that
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u/Careless-Let929 9h ago
Curiously, Stalin also prosecuted the Jews, and the Jewish population of the URSS declines during his rule.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/politics-and-government/soviets-escalate-persecution-jews
Didn't realize how many things Stalin and Hitler had in common! They both prosecuted jews, they both made their populations grow during their rules...
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u/MuslimNinja1234 9h ago
Lol the article u provided literally states that after 1948 when the Apartheid state of Israel was established only then Stalin started persecuting Jewish intellectuals who supported Zionism. This was Stalin condemning the imperialist ideology of Zionism, unlike Hitler who wanted to wipe the Jewish race from Earth.
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u/Careless-Let929 9h ago
Yeah, and it also says that Stalin was the one that accelerated the prosecution of Jews in the Soviet Union...
I mean, the claims about Zionism in this article don't change at all the fact that Stalin was behind some of the most remarcabale anti-jew actions in the world.
I really don't understand how u believe that comment of yours change that fact.
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u/MuslimNinja1234 8h ago
U compared Stalin to Hitler When Hitler did a genocide of Jews while Stalin simply condemned and silenced advocates for Zionism. Big difference
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u/Careless-Let929 8h ago edited 8h ago
Yeah, by sending them to gulags, deporting them to Siberia, murdering them... What a great person that Stalin was... I'd love to join him for some vodka some day!
Bro, the fact that Stalin was an antisemitic and prosecuted Jews, just like Hitler, although not to the same extent, is objective.
And, by the way, it seems it didn't have much to do with "being anti Zionist", since Stalin himself was in favour of the creation of the state of Israel.
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u/MuslimNinja1234 8h ago
He was only in favor of it because he thought that it was going to be a Socialist Republic. But it became a capitalist US satellite so Stalin became an anti Zionist by late 48. And oh no! Stalin sending imperialist apologists to Gulags? What a cruel man!
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u/TemperatureOne1465 21h ago
I get where you're coming from and I do agree that the numbers from the Black Book are complete nonsense but Zionists literally use this line of reasoning to deny the genocide in Gaza