World War II casualties of the Soviet Union

• 1. Introduction

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  World War II casualties of the Soviet Union represent perhaps the most contested and staggering accounting problem in modern history. The Soviet Union lost somewhere around 27 million people in the war, though that figure has been disputed, revised, and politically contested ever since the guns fell silent. Joseph Stalin, speaking in March 1946, told the world the number was 7 million. That figure was, by later accounts, an almost incomprehensible understatement. What happens when a nation's losses are so enormous that no single number can contain them? And who decides what counts as a war death? This documentary traces the decades-long struggle to measure the unmeasurable, from secret Soviet archives to competing Russian scholars, and asks what we can actually know about one of history's darkest chapters.

• 2. The Official Count

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  In 1993, Russia's Ministry of Defense published a landmark study authored by a group headed by G. F. Krivosheev. Its sources included Soviet field reports and archive documents that had been classified during the Soviet era, among them a secret Soviet General Staff report prepared between 1966 and 1968. Krivosheev's central finding was that Soviet military dead and missing totaled 8.7 million. That figure became the most cited number in international scholarship on the subject.

  The study broke down 8,668,400 irreplaceable losses into their component causes: 5,226,800 killed in action, 1,102,800 who died of wounds in field hospitals, 555,500 non-combat deaths, and 1,283,200 who died in or as a result of prisoner-of-war captivity. Krivosheev maintained that his figure was correct because it excluded called-up reservists who were never formally inducted, soldiers counted twice when territories were liberated and they were conscripted again, and deaths from non-combat causes among rear-area personnel.

  The numbers also reveal the scale of the fighting itself. In the third quarter of 1941 alone, the first months of the German invasion, Soviet forces suffered 2,129,677 irrecoverable losses. By contrast, the second quarter of 1943 saw 191,904 such losses, a reflection of improved Soviet defensive capability. Over the entire 1941-1945 period, 22,326,905 Soviet personnel were recorded as wounded or sick, including 15,205,592 wounded, 3,047,675 sick, and 90,881 frostbite cases.

• 3. The Prisoner Problem

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  Roughly 5.7 million members of the Red Army fell into German hands between the 22nd of June 1941 and the end of the war, according to German figures. By January 1945, 930,000 were still alive in German camps. Western scholars estimate that 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in captivity, which would represent 57.5 percent of all those captured.

  Krivosheev disputed this western figure. He maintained that German counts included civilians and military reservists caught in encirclements, not just uniformed soldiers. He put the number of Soviet military POWs actually sent to camps at 4,059,000, and cited German sources acknowledging that 673,000 died in captivity, with Soviet sources indicating that over half of the remaining disputed figure also perished.

  The fate of surviving POWs was itself complicated. After the war, 960,039 Soviet military POWs were turned over to Soviet authorities by the Western powers, and 865,735 were released by Soviet forces in territory they occupied. In a 1999 article, Krivosheev noted that after the war 180,000 liberated POWs did not return to the USSR and most likely settled in other countries. He had not mentioned this in the English-language translation of his study.

  Beyond German-held prisoners, Romania captured 82,090 Soviet POWs, of whom 5,221 died, 3,331 escaped, and 13,682 were released. Finland captured 64,188 Soviet POWs, and at least 18,318 were documented to have died in Finnish prisoner-of-war camps.

• 4. Scholars Push Back

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  S. N. Mikhalev published a competing analysis in 2000, drawing on his work from 1989 to 1996 as an associate of the Institute of Military History of the Ministry of Defence. He put Soviet military dead at more than 10.9 million, and total irreplaceable losses at 13.7 million. His core argument was that Krivosheev could not reconcile official figures with the total number of men drafted. Mikhalev also included in his count the deaths of 994,300 Soviet military personnel convicted of offenses during the war, among them 422,700 sent to penal battalions, 135,000 executed, and 436,600 imprisoned.

  Viktor Zemskov estimated total military dead at 11.5 million, including nearly 4 million POWs. He also argued that the official civilian death figure of 2.1 million forced laborers in Germany was inflated compared to German wartime records, which put the deaths of forced workers at 200,000.

  S. A. Il'Enkov, an official at the Russian Military Archives, pointed to a different kind of evidence entirely. His institution maintained an alphabetical card-index database of individual war dead. A compilation made in March 2008 from those card files put total dead and missing at 14,241,000, including 13,271,269 enlisted men and 970,000 officers. Il'Enkov called this database a "priceless treasure of history". Krivosheev responded that the database was unreliable because some personnel records were duplicated and others omitted.

  Makhmut Gareev, former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR, went further, stating that the published information on Soviet casualties was the work of individual authors and not based on official data, and that the Russian government had never disclosed actual losses.

• 5. Civilian Deaths

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  A 1995 paper by M. V. Filimoshin, an associate of the Russian Defense Ministry, put the civilian death toll in German-occupied regions at 13.7 million. Filimoshin used the terms "genocide" and "premeditated extermination" when describing the 7.4 million civilians killed by direct, intentional violence. A large portion of these deaths were civilians killed in reprisals during the Soviet partisan war.

  Famine was a distinct and massive killer. Germany's Hunger Plan, which called for the confiscation of food stocks, resulted in an estimated 4.1 million famine deaths in occupied regions. Another 2.5 to 3.2 million Soviet civilians died of famine and disease in non-occupied Soviet territory, caused by wartime shortages in rear areas.

  In 2020, historian Mikhail Meltyukhov, working with the Russian federal archival project, stated that 15.9-17.4 million civilians were killed on Soviet territory by Germany and its allies. Russian sources include Jewish Holocaust deaths in that total. Martin Gilbert put Jewish losses within 1939 Soviet borders at one million; an additional 1.5 million deaths occurred in the annexed territories, bringing total Jewish losses to 2.5 million.

  The Siege of Leningrad produced its own dispute within the larger dispute. The 1945 Soviet estimate presented at the Nuremberg Trials was 642,000 civilian deaths. A Soviet-era source from 1965 put the figure at greater than 800,000, a Russian source from 2000 put it at 1,000,000, and other Russian historians have placed the death toll between 1.4 and 2.0 million. Separately, 57,000 people were killed in bombing raids across the country, including 40,000 in Stalingrad and 17,000 in Leningrad.

• 6. The Range of All Estimates

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  In March 1946, Stalin put Soviet war losses at 7 million. That was the official Soviet figure until Nikita Khrushchev raised it to 20 million in November 1961. Leonid Brezhnev described the toll in 1965 as "more than 20 million". During the Glasnost period under Gorbachev, Soviet scholars challenged even that revised figure. In a May 1990 speech, Gorbachev gave the total as "almost 27 million", the result of a committee he had established in March 1989 to investigate the question.

  The range of scholarly estimates extends far beyond any official figure. Boris Sokolov published a study in 1996 estimating total war dead at 43.3 million, including 26.4 million in the military. V. E. Korol estimated overall Soviet war dead at 46 million. At a hearing of the Russian State Duma on the 14th of February 2017, legislator Nikolai Zemtsov presented documents from the defunct Soviet Gosplan indicating war dead of almost 42 million, including 19 million military and 23 million civilians. Scholars broadly regarded those figures as without serious foundation.

  Historian Igor Ivlev also reached 42 million in 2017, using Soviet State Planning Committee documents that put the population at 205 million in June 1941 and 169.8 million in June 1945. Accounting for 17.6 million births and 10.3 million natural deaths during the war period, his calculations yielded roughly 42 million in war-related losses. These figures are endorsed by the Russian civic organization Immortal Regiment.

  Russian demographer Rybakovsky, surveying the full range of estimates he could find, cited figures running from 21.7 to 46 million. He placed his own estimate at 27-28 million, and acknowledged that every component used to compute losses was uncertain and disputed.

• 7. Who Bore the Loss

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  Demographic studies by Andreev, Darski and Kharkova (ADK), published by the Russian Academy of Science in 1993, estimated 26.6 million total Soviet war deaths. Their breakdown by gender is striking. Of the 26.6 million total, roughly 20 million were male and 6.6 million were female. In mid-1941 the USSR had 8.3 million more females than males. By 1946 that gap had grown to 22.8 million, an increase of 13.5 million.

  The age-group breakdown from the same study shows where the killing was concentrated. Men aged 20-34 suffered the highest proportional losses: 9 million dead out of a mid-1941 population of roughly 25 million in that group, a mortality rate of 36.1 percent. Among women of the same age, 2.6 million died, a rate of 10.1 percent. The 2.6 million female deaths in that age group are described in the source as an indication that women were involved in the partisan war and became victims of Nazi reprisals.

  Children were not spared. The deaths of 2.8 million children under 14 were due primarily to famine and disease caused by the war. ADK estimated wartime infant mortality increased by 1.3 million above what would have been expected in peacetime.

  By republic, the losses were unevenly distributed. The Byelorussian SSR, with a prewar population of 9,050,000, lost 2,290,000 people, representing 25.3 percent of its population. The Ukrainian SSR lost 6,850,000 from a population of 41,340,000, or 16.3 percent. Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad estimated that about 200,000 Soviet Jews, or 40 percent of all those drafted, were killed in battles or captivity, which he identified as the highest percentage of any nation in the USSR. Vladimir Putin, in a live broadcast on the 16th of December 2010, claimed that the Russian Federation had suffered 70 percent of the total Soviet losses, a claim disputed by the other former republics, whose own Memory Books in many cases record mortality rates among the conscripted of 50 percent or more.