Estimated number of victims
In the introduction, editor Stéphane Courtois states that “...Communist regimes... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government”[3].
He claims that a death toll totals 94 million[4]. The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:
65 million in the People’s Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America (mainly Cuba)
10,000 deaths “resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power.”[4]
2 million in North Korea
More than that starved to death in the mid-90’s when the Soviet Union fell and stopped sending food
Solzhenitsyn claimed that over a hundred million, probably closer to two hundred million were killed in the Soviet Union. He said they had horrible record keeping, unlike the WW II Germans and that’s why the figure shows so much lower than it actually was.