Victory Day, Russia; 'Great Patriotic War' ends

Inflated figures are regularly given for the number of people who died in the USSR during WWII (eg, “Twenty-seven million soldiers and citizens died during the war, many of them fighting what turned out to be some of the most decisive battles.” – Eleanor Hall, The World Today, ABC Radio National, Australia, May 9, 2005).

However, it has been well documented that the Soviet Union's official figures were a subterfuge to cover up the many millions killed in Josef Stalin's purges and forced collectivization policies, and the figures were less than half that. See Robert Conquest's classic 1968 accounts, The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, University of Alberta Press, 1986 ...

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