By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 April 2025

Russian historian Viktor Zemskov estimated in 2012 that total Soviet losses in the “Great Fatherland War” were sixteen million (11.5 million military casualties and 4.5 million civilian deaths), a far lower total than the official Soviet claim since 1990, inherited by the Russian Federation, of twenty-seven million.

Zemskov took full advantage of glasnost and the U.S.S.R.’s collapse to study the hard evidence of Soviet repression, focusing on the Cheka—correctly identifying the secret police as the backbone of the whole system—and particularly the GULAG. Zemskov was the only historian to get direct access to the documentary archive for the GULAG after it was opened in 1990 and to publish statistical work using the documents, until the archives were closed in 1992. So Zemskov has form in dealing with the knotty problem of numbers in Soviet official records.

That said, while Zemskov is convincing in his indictment of the methods used to calculate the overall 27 million figure and the 8.7 million military casualties in 1990, and the way these figures have come to be “regarded as dogmas, not subject to doubt or dispute”, his own methods in calculating his alternative figures are open to debate.

Zemskov notes that the official figure Stalin gave in 1946 (seven million) was too low, a politically-derived number to prevent the Soviet Union appearing weak and to deflect criticism from his handling of the war, which would include his jointly starting the war in alliance with Hitler. The Khrushchev figure (twenty million) officially proclaimed in 1961 was likewise political, part of his program of denouncing Stalin, and Leonid Brezhnev retained the figure, though repurposed it to buttress his own legitimacy by creating the cult around the Second World War that lasts in Russia to this day.

Zemskov argues that the twenty-seven million figure arrived at by the committees set up by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989-90 was equally politicised, “part of a broad propaganda campaign … aimed at the ‘exposure of Stalinism’. All the propaganda at that time was constructed in such a way that Stalin appeared as the sole culprit (Hitler was rarely mentioned) for the enormous human losses in the Great Patriotic War”, and therefore a new, much higher number was constructed “with the goal of intensifying the negative image of Stalin and ‘Stalinism’ in public consciousness”.

The military casualties having held roughly constant since 1961 and 1990, Zemskov argues that the seven million civilian fatalities added to the Soviet death toll in the Gorbachev era result in large measure from a “statistical fraud” that counted natural deaths as casualties of the war, and he is not much impressed with the general methods used in calculating even this, namely a demographic estimate of population decrease—including emigration (i.e., people who were still alive)—based on the dubious 1939 census and shaky figures for the populations in the territories annexed by Stalin under his Pact with Hitler in 1939-40.

Zemskov harshly criticises as “utterly absurd” the idea put into circulation by Soviet historians like A.A Shevyakov that the “special nature” of the Nazi war in the Soviet Union could have resulted in the fatalities being so lopsidedly civilian. Zemskov writes: “It is clear and obvious to any reasonable person that such a ratio between military and civilian losses [i.e., roughly 1:3.5] could not have existed by definition, and that fallen military personnel undoubtedly made up the majority of the overall number of direct human losses.”

Zemskov points out that there was mass-displacement from the cities and he argues that the “local commissions” of the Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), the source for all non-demographic claims about the civilian death toll, “in practice” regularly recorded these absent people in lists of the dead. For Zemskov, “it is absolutely clear that the ChGK’s data on the deaths of the civilian population in the occupied territories (6.8 million) are exaggerated by at least a factor of two.” Zemskov thinks the real figure for Soviet civilians killed in extermination operations in Nazi-occupied areas is nearer three million, including 1.5 million Jews.

When it comes to deaths among the “Eastern workers” (Ostarbeiter)—the Soviet citizens taken to Germany to be used as slave labour—Zemskov writes:

If one strictly relies on the statistical data available in historical sources (which is our professional duty), then the scale of mortality among the Ostarbeiter can only be discussed within the following range: from 100,000 to 200,000 people. But this is an area where direct evidence from historical sources is completely ignored and, in their place, absurd and fantastical “assumptions” and “calculations” are presented, with imaginary “millions of victims”.

Zemskov once again criticises Shevyakov by name for generating not one but two “utterly ludicrous” estimates of Ostarbeiter fatalities (2.8 million and 3.4 million). And in reference to the figure of 2,164,313 Ostarbeiter deaths recorded in the All-Russian Book of Remembrance (Всероссийская Книга Памяти), the book published in 1995 that set the Gorbachev-era figures in stone, Zemskov says the “precision” is part of a wilful deception: “This ‘statistic’ does not appear in any documents and is entirely the product of the authors’ imagination.”

The other “direct civilian losses include the fighters from civilian volunteer formations” and innocents killed in artillery shelling and airstrikes by the Germans, writes Zemskov. This category amounts to “many hundreds of thousands”, Zemskov says, with a significant portion being the 700,000 people who perished in the siege of Saint Petersburg (“Leningrad”). Added to the victims of Nazi extermination operations and the dead in the Ostarbeiter, the “direct [Soviet] civilian losses” in the 1941-45 war were, “at a minimum, 4.5 million people”, Zemskov writes.

On the military side, Zemskov calculates that about seven million Red Army soldiers were killed directly by the Germans, “most of them … on the battlefield” itself, and half-a-million soldiers were killed by disease, in accidents, or by their own commanders—shot for desertion. The additional one million in the official count, as has been explained elsewhere, derives from natural deaths in the ranks and non-returned but living prisoners-of-war: Zemskov does not explicitly say he has deducted this million, but implicitly does so by ignoring it. This is a total of 7.5 million Soviet military deaths and Zemskov argues the reality is 11.5 million: the four million “missing” soldiers from the official tally, Zemskov contends, are because of a gross undercount of Soviet soldiers murdered or otherwise killed in captivity during Operation BARBAROSSA.

(The Gorbachev committee, once the adjustment is made between its declared total and what its data shows, estimates 7.8 million Soviet military fatalities, with 5.5 million killed at the front, 1.1 million injured at the front and dying later in hospitals, and 1.2 million Soviet POWs. While Zemskov frames his argument about the undercount around the POWs, what he is actually doing in effect is arguing the 1990 tally undercounted the slain POWs and the battlefield losses, by about three million and one million, respectively. This is slightly unclear in the paper for a reason that, paradoxically, reflects well on Zemskov: he is not constrained or distracted by the official figures. He makes reference to them where necessary, but does not pick through every claimed detail of such a flawed dataset.)

In 1993, a team of historians led by Grigori F. Krivosheev, published, The Secrecy Label Has Been Removed (Гриф секретности снят), which estimated that 1,783,300 Soviet POWs never returned from captivity, either dead or became émigrés. “This figure should be dismissed outright due to its obvious absurdity”, Zemskov argues, saying the “consolidated” German official estimate that 3.3 million Soviet POWs (out of nearly six million taken) were killed by the Nazis is “incomparably closer to the truth”.

Zemskov believes the “consolidated” German number is off by 600,000 to 700,000 for three reasons: (1) it dates from May 1944, a year before the end of the war; (2) due to incomplete record-keeping, it does not include Soviet POWs killed before they ever made it to a camp in 1941; and (3) it covers only deaths in German custody, omitting the numbers of Soviet POWs who died while being held by the Finns and Romanians. (It is known Finland took about 64,000 Soviet POWs and 22,000 of them perished, 3,000 unregistered, mostly from hunger. Romania appears to have taken 90,000 Soviet POWs and 5,000 certainly died, some in massacres, but these numbers are more uncertain.)

Zemskov draws to a close by arguing that his method for arriving at sixteen million Soviet casualties in the Second World War is comparable to the way Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have tallied their war dead. These “other countries calculated only direct human losses”, Zemskov writes, whereas the Soviet figures—Khrushchev’s twenty million and Gorbachev’s twenty-seven million—have been calculated more speculatively, by including “demographic losses in a broader sense”, specifically an alleged “spike in natural mortality” and the suppressed birthrate during the war. This latter, in particular, has enabled the production of “extremely dubious ‘calculations’, guided solely by [the author’s] own ‘intuition’,” since they “have no idea how many children were supposedly ‘not born’.” It is the inflation of the “lost” unborn children that has produced “incredible and obviously false figures” over forty million.

Overestimating the Soviet casualties in the Second World War has often been motivated by a polemical desire to indict Stalin, the Red Army leadership, and the Soviet system as a whole, Zemskov writes, and those who inflate the figures with the reverse motive, intending to bring credit to the Soviet Union, have it exactly wrong: what they are doing is to “diminish the significance and greatness of the feat of the Red Army and the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War”, and “to glorify the successes of the Nazis and their collaborators”. “Sixteen million direct human losses is a tremendous sacrifice” that needs no exaggeration, Zemskov concludes.