How many people did Stalin kill?

The overall number of people killed during the Stalinist period is most likely between two and three million.

The Great Terror and other mass shootings killed no more than a million people, most likely a little less. The famine of 1930–1933, which killed over five million people, was Stalinism’s worst humanitarian disaster.

From 1922 until he died in 1953, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who ruled the Soviet Union. As General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Soviet Union’s Council of Ministers (1941–1953), he wielded power.

He began leading the country as part of collective leadership, but by the 1930s, he had consolidated power and had become a dictator. He formalized these principles as Marxism–Leninism, while his policies were dubbed Stalinism because he adhered to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism.

In the 1930s, Stalin pushed for rapid industrialization and collectivisation, which coincided with mass famine, millions of people imprisoned in labor camps, and the ‘Great Purge’ of the intellectuals, government, and armed forces.