I always found arguments that makes the point that "X is responsible for more deaths than Y" weak and invalid when they fail to mention the time frame.
mortality/(time x population)
For example, the Nazis killed 11M over 12 years and the German population was about 70M in 1939. Thus, their deadliness is 11/(70x12) ~ 1/70
The USSR killed 40M (a middling estimate) over about 70 years and the Soviet population was 170M in 1939, so their deadliness is 40/(170x80) ~ 1/340 or about 1/5 as deadly as the Nazis.
This intuitively makes sense to me since the Nazis actively sought to exterminate people, whereas most (not ALL) deaths in the USSR were accidental because communism is useless.
They may have killed less people per year compared to Nazis but that doesn't make them less deadly. In terms of sheer human loss for society, they were 4 times worse than the Nazis (according to your estimate). If you consider how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious.
I've always considered Nazis and communists to be in the same bucket: authoritarian killers.
Communists often get a moral pass somehow, unlike Nazi and I wonder if it's because most schools and history teachers are biased; they teach about Nazi concentration camps but don't teach about gulags. I had to read books and books in school about Nazis and I didn't even know Solzhenitsyn existed.
How many exactly? West operate lies of notorious propagandists like Solzhenitsyn (which never had access to any statistics).
E.g. in the books published on the west you can find absurd numbers like "Stalin sent two millions to the camp X", and later historians prove that you can't place more than 1200 persons in camp X, and there weren't enough houses even for the guards for such absurd amount of people and there weren't roads or waterways to transport that many people, and there're no even you know payment sheets for the number of guards required to guard two millions prisoners.
But the West continue to regurgitate the same old lies over and over because who would want to know the truth? The best truth is that USSR was evil, so every tiny piece of evidence saying otherwise should be well hidden from public.
It's not like in the contemporary Russia there are powers willing to open that truth either.
So, who's more evil?
"This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[7] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[8][9] some 390,000[10] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[11] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[12] The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million[13] persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes, though not always, included with the victims of the Stalin era.[2][14]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...
One can dispute this belief, and no doubt they were both brutal, but there is a difference between a genocidal policy with the aim of extermination, and the state exerting its power to punish those it thinks are working against its interests.
Put another way, you could, in theory, avoid punishment in the Soviet Union by avoiding certain actions (although I know this is stretching things quite a bit), whereas those who were targeted by the nazis had no hope of escape.
sure, as long as we admit that in practice you really couldn't because punishment, although supposedly for crimes, was irrational enough to be essentially random.
> the state exerting its power to punish those it thinks are working against its interests
is as bad and wrong as saying the same thing about the Holocaust.
> Put another way, you could, in theory, avoid punishment in the Soviet Union by avoiding certain actions
No, you couldn't. You're implying that the millions of people murdered, tortured, dispossessed, and imprisoned in gulags under Stalin somehow had it coming and could have avoided their "punishment" by just behaving better. Stop spreading lies, and stop trivializing the crimes against humanity committed by the early Soviet Union.
This does not explain why the Nazis were also targeting the disabled and blacks, for example, does it? What crimes had the disabled and blacks committed against the state? Also, how could people not living in Germany, the Poles and Slavs, have committed crimes against the German state?
See, the Nazis were not motivated by any good faith belief that the groups they targeted had committed any specific crimes against the state. They believed that these groups should not exist at all, and they were prepared to, ultimately, hunt them down for extermination anywhere in the world.
I think equating the Communists and the Nazi is rather repugnant. Yes, both were brutal, but to downplay the unparalleled evil of the Nazi regime betrays a lack of critical analysis of what actually happened.
The whole system was set up to routinely fabricate absurd evidence against innocent people and send them to Gulags (or straight against the wall). It was needed, because the rulers needed their population to be terrorized (less chance of a rebellion) and also because it provided huge amounts of free labor for the Gulags.
I don't think anybody up high believed for a second that any significant fraction of people they condemned to death, torture or lives destroyed in Gulags were guilty of anything.
I see echoes of this kind of thinking everywhere in the present.
I think there is a simpler explanation (assuming you went to school in a Western country). The USSR under Stalin was allied with the western powers during WWII. Presenting Stalin as "just as bad" as Hitler would cast doubt on the whole moral justification of the war and would undermine the image of the western powers as the good guys who fought the evil Nazis to save the world from tyranny.
I don't have real numbers, but I'd guess at least 95% of the people the Nazis killed were foreigners. So that math makes little sense.
Ignoring Jews, Germans were more ruthless and murderous toward Polish or Russian people then toward western ones. And they much more ruthless and murderous toward western then toward Germans themself. (And yes they were ruthless and murderous toward German population too.)
You included the most liberalized (less hard core communist) years of the Soviet Union.
> This intuitively makes sense to me since the Nazis actively sought to exterminate people, whereas most (not ALL) deaths in the USSR were accidental because communism is useless.
The Holodomor was caused by explicit policies. The purges were intentional. People who pointed out problems were considered anti-revolutionaries. Skilled laborers were purged or fled.