The Atheist Obsession with Insulting Christians

[Thumpalumpacus]

Official records from the USSR aren't necessarily very reliable. The advent of extrajudicial punishment meant that many deaths were never recorded.

Granted, there were likely quite a few extrajudicial killings, but nothing on the order of massacres that would change the results by a huge margin. But the Soviets actually tended to keep pretty good records, most of the time, and they weren't exactly ashamed of anything they were doing, such that they'd try to hide it. If there's one thing socialist republics do well, it's bureaucracy! 

However, it's why I was easily willing to concede the higher number of 20 million as the "concensus" estimate, while noting that the number of actual executions in the name of the state (the ones that would have been done publicly, "to make a point for effect"), which is the only category that actually bears on the original topic of "killing in the name of atheism", was far, far lower.

Well yeah, killing in the name of atheism was a pretty paltry number. As others have accurately pointed out, the murders committed by the Soviet regime were driven by power politics or economic policy, not religion, largely. The kulaks weren't killed for their faith; they were killed for the land expropriation and the fact that they represented a power bloc that posed an exaggerated threat to the regime. Another factor not touched-upon is that GULag deaths were often random -- people enslaved not for any action, but solely on the basis of a report that landed them in Vorkuta or Kolyma, where they were worked to death logging or mining.

The Orthodox Church was indeed persecuted, but generally to the extent of expropriation of church property, not the murder of believers, or even clergy in general.

But I disagree with your minimizing extrajudicial murders, based on my reading of Solzhenitsyn -- admittedly controversial, but still relevant. According to him, there were numerous killed with no records kept. Nor were accurate records kept, I think, of the resettlements during the 30s.

The true number will never be known. Solzhenitsyn's estimate of 50-60 million is almost certainly too high, but I don't for a moment doubt that Stalin exceeded Hitler's toll of roughly eleven millions. That being said, your point that the massacres were generally not based on faith or its lack is spot-on.