How likely were you to die in the years 1914-1945 as a Russian / Soviet civilian?

I know such a question would be nearly impossible to answer with certaintiy but do you think as a Soviet civilian you were more likely to die in this time frame than not? Certainly a higher chance than being a civilian in the UK or Germany right?

If you are a moscowite or from any other big city, you know your place, praise stalin, and keep your toughts about system to yourself you should be ok. Should, it seems even random good stalinists could easily be sent to gulag, for example, simply because purge quota gotta be met.

I read somewhere that more than half of all males born in 1918 died in WWII

1922*
Russian males that is

>purge quota gotta be met
This is a joke, right?

Nice joke user.
t.newfag

not him, but this isn't a joke. The NKVD were assigned with rough quotas and at times exact numbers, if you are district NKVD in charge and didn't fill it, that means that you are a spy too

Then it must be to just put people on their toes then, on a practical perspective.

Still fucking brutal. Did it end up biting the soviet government in the ass? Or is it just something that any dictatorship can sprinkle onto their dominion to maximize compliance?

Fuck off Kim

???

>Certainly a higher chance than being a civilian in the UK or Germany right?
Definitely.

"How likely were you to die" is an involved question to answer accurately. It's not impossible to come up with an estimate, it'd just be time consuming and it would take a lot more math and research than I feel like doing, you'd have to look up birth rates and death rates and average life expectancies and then do some math and I don't feel like doing any of that shit. But we can come up with a (rough) estimate for "how likely would you have been to die in a famous, big name catastrophe" really easily. And that's what you really want, isn't it? You're not wondering "how much more likely would you have been to die of natural causes in the USSR than in Britain," you're thinking of yourself, as a relatively young guy, unlikely to die of old age or heart disease or whatever, wondering what the odds would have been of starving to death in the Holodomor or getting shot by a death squad. We can come up with a (crude, but reasonable) estimate for that in like 5 minutes.

Casualty numbers from all of these wars and famines are really politicized and controversial, so if you lean right you'll probably tend to go with higher numbers. Feel free to tack on 15 million extra deaths, whatever. I generally went with middling estimates but leaned towards the lower end, not because I'm a Soviet apologist, just because I think it's more interesting to give an ironclad "you were AT LEAST this likely to die, but maybe a lot more" than to give high numbers that a lot of people will call bullshit on.

>I know such a question would be nearly impossible to answer with certaintiy
Look at the projected growth rate before communism, use a simple delta.
Divide that value by the number of those that should be alive/born but aren't and amount of people who are alive.


It works out to about 100%

The Russian Empire had a population of approx. 160 million. The early USSR had a smaller population due to Civil War deaths and lost territories but a lot of those territories were later reacquired by the USSR. In 1940 before the war the USSR had a population of ~195 million. Let's meet in the middle and say the average population in that time period was about 180 million. That's really crude, but whatever, fuck you, this is my day off.

- WWI killed about 2 million Russian civilians. The problem is there's a lot of overlap between that casualty count and the Russian Civli War's. Estimates for deaths from the Civil War vary widely but generally hover between 1-2 million dead from the war itself, 1 million of those being military deaths so we won't count those, and around 3 million dead from epidemics like typhus. Call the civilian death toll from both wars around 5 million, counting disease, not counting the ensuing famines.

- The famines of 21-22 killed approx. 6 million people.

- These numbers are very controversial but let's say that the famines of 32-33 (including but not limited to the Holodomor) killed another 6 million.

- The number of people who were killed as a direct result of Stalin's orders, executions and forced resettlements and deaths in the Gulag and so on, are definitely the most controversial numbers of all. It doesn't help that there's a certain amount of overlap with e.g. WWII deaths there. Let's go with a modest estimate of around 4 million.

- The USSR is generally agreed to have lost about 25 million people in WWII. The majority of those (let's say 15 million) were civilians.

Add all that up and you get 36 million dead, goes into 180 million 5 times. Like I said, I freely admit those numbers are sloppy, but you had ABOUT a 1 in 5 chance of dying in one of the big name atrocities or catastrophes in the Russian Empire / USSR 1914-1945.

Surviving the purges was actually simple
1. Don't be in the party. That shit is political, and politics in the party was a complicated matter.
2. Don't be a layabout. You couldn't be fired in the Soviet Union, but you could be denounced as a wrecker.
3. Don't be rural. Your well-being is secondary to urban-dwellers.

>purge quota
Where can I read more on this?

>As soon as the Kulak Operation was launched (5 August 1937), regional party and NKVD bosses, eager to show their zeal, demanded an increase in the quotas. Accordingly, the quotas were increased. But this was not only the result of demands from below. The largest new allowances were distributed by Stalin and Yezhov on their own initiative: on 15 October 1937, for example, the Politburo passed a secret resolution increasing the number of people "to be repressed" by 120,000 (63,000 "in the first category" and 57,000 "in the second category"); on 31 January 1938, Stalin ordered a further increase of 57,200, 48,000 of whom were to be executed.
>Every NKVD local unit had a "casework minimum" of arrests to perform, and also of confessions to extract to "unmask conspiracies." The NKVD used uninterrupted interrogation for days on end and merciless beatings to force prisoners to confess their alleged "counter-revolutionary" crimes. To speed up the procedure, prisoners were often even forced to sign blank pages of the pre-printed interrogation folios on which the interrogator later typed up the confession.

>The officials were mandated to arrest and execute a specific number of so-called "counter-revolutionaries," compiled by administration using various statistics but also telephone books with names sounding non-Russian.[60] The Polish operation claimed the largest number of the NKVD victims: 143,810 arrests and 111,091 executions according to records. Snyder estimates that at least eighty-five thousand of them were ethnic Poles.[58] The remainder were 'suspected' of being Polish, without further inquiry.

4. Don't be a minority (especially Polish, German, Ukrainian).

It's not a joke, in fact it still exists in modern Russian police.

This. It's called a "stick system" or something. Obviously, it's not a murdering quota, but the police right now mostly don't actually do their job, but try to meet the quota. So they don't give a fuck about complicated, but real crimes, and throw people to jail for fabricated/laughable reasons. It's depressing.

He did murder 200 million of his own people

This still basically exists in western police as well.
It's why at the end of the month the cops will fine people for literally anything.

>Or from any other big city
Like St. Petersburg? Fucking lmao

I am absolutely certain that the worst place to be in all of history would be a civilian or a soldier in the western part of the Soviet Union between the years 1933-1945, especially 1941.

Being a peasant almost made you wish for a nuclear winter.

>That's really crude, but whatever, fuck you, this is my day off.
well then

Being a peasant in China during 1900-1950 would probably suck too

I have type 1 diabetes so very very likely.

The purges contributed to the shitty performance of the red army in the first year of Barbarossa.

>be russian in 1914-1945
>get killed by germans
>get killed by NKVD
>get killed by Germans again
1914-1945 was probably the greatest btfoing of russia in it's entire history.

Or, you know, after 1950 which was objectively the worst time.

Being a peasant ANYWHERE would suck.