(September 22, 2015 at 11:53 am)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote: Before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, researchers who attempted to count the number of people killed under Stalin's regime produced estimates ranging from 3 to 60 million. After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives also became available, containing official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953), around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement – with a total of about 2.9 million officially recorded victims in these categories.
Official records from the USSR aren't necessarily very reliable. The advent of extrajudicial punishment meant that many deaths were never recorded.