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Yep, so I want to be clear, my interest in this matter is not to try to defend Soviet communism. It was a very brutal system, at least in its first few decades. I am just interested in historical accuracy.
I think that you should try to clearly define what you mean by Soviet communism having killed somebody.
For me, it makes sense to count #1 and #2, but not #3. Partly this is because it is extremely hard to accurately count #3.
And do you count military deaths in wars, or just civilian deaths as a result of political persecution?
When you say that mainstream scholarly estimates are about 25 million, how does that break down between the three categories above? 25 million doesn't make much sense to me just because: Russian civil war deaths were about 10 million and I think at most you could probably only ascribe about third of those to direct or indirect killing of civilians by communists. Estimates of the Holodomor death range from about 3-7 million. The Great Purge killed fewer than a million, and if you add all the other purges on top it probably adds another few hundred thousand as far as I know. Various ethnic resettlements killed maybe another million.
If you count every civilian killed as a result of Soviet military actions, that would add another 5 million or so, but that would not help a critique of communism much because the US and its allies also killed millions of civilians during WW2 and the Cold War, so killing large numbers of civilians in war time seems to be more a feature of large scale war, rather than of a country's political system.
I think Russians will probably be more fine with that than ex-Soviet non-Russians would be. Only a minority of Lithuanians or Ukrainians would be ok with being called Russians, on the other hand there are probably plenty of Russians who, while not considering Lithuanians or Ukrainians to be ethnically Russian, would still be more or less ok with them being called Russian in a certain sense of the word Russian if they were re-incorporated into the Moscow-based empire.
But I didn't bring it up in order to nit-pick, it's actually important because I wasn't sure if you actually meant ethnic Russians, or you meant Soviets in general. I understand now that you meant Soviets in general, but I had no way of knowing that when I first read your post.
The Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic empire and even modern Russia is also still a multi-ethnic empire despite not having as much territory as the Soviet Union had.
A lot of the bad blood from the Soviet times comes down to people arguing about whether:
Theory A: The Soviet Union was pro-Russian and oppressed other ethnicities. Ethnic non-Russian nationalists tend to agree with this, and there is good reason to believe it given for example the Holodomor. On the other hand, many of the Holodomor's architects were not ethnic Russians.
Theory B: The Soviet Union was anti-Russian and actually helped non-Russian ethnicities to form their own nationalist movements. Ethnic Russian nationalists tend to agree with this. The idea that the Soviet Union was anti-Russian might seem strange, but the Russian ethnonationalists who argue for this point of view point out that the Soviet Union's leadership in its important years was not particularly ethnically Russian (Lenin was probably part Kalmyk, part Jewish... Trotsky was Jewish... Stalin was Georgian...) and that the Soviets had a policy of (Korenizatsiia)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia]. On the other hand, given that the Soviet Union was about 50% ethnic Russian (in practice, you could probably say even more because back then, many people who in modern terms are non-ethnic Russians were maybe more likely to view themselves and be viewed as ethnic Russian than they are now), it's also clear that Russians were the dominant ethnicity by population size at least - no other single ethnicity had nearly such a fraction of the population.
I think it's quite reasonable to ascribe all civil war deaths to the Bolsheviks because they did consciously started it.
1.5 million of Russians and similar amount of Kazakhs, not counting many other smaller ethnicities also died in the collectivization caused famine. Turning this international communist caused tragedy in the "genocide" against specifically Ukrainians in the eyes of the public is the great achievement of Ukrainian nationalists.
Maybe, but that isn't a good argument in the context of trying to write a critique of communism because by that standard, all American Revolution deaths are the fault of the revolutionaries, and so on. Which might be a valid argument, but my point is that it sheds no light on communism versus other political beliefs. All political movements that start revolutions can be blamed for all of the resulting deaths, by this standard, so it is not something that distinguishes communism from other ideologies.
I take your point, but on the other hand, think of it this way: the American Revolution, the French Revolution(s) and the Russian Revolution were all radical overhauls of society that required tens of thousands of people to die for the movement to succeed. That seems like valuable information that shouldn't necessarily be discarded in a general analysis unless you are performing a specific comparison of one armed revolutionary movement* against another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
https://www.history.com/news/revolutionary-war-deaths
*The question of how far you can hold an ideology responsible for the movements that it produces is vexed, obviously, but if there's a strongish link between a given ideology and violent rebellion I think you have to take that into account to some degree.
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Here historian Stephens Kotkin attributes 18 to 20 million deliberate killings of civilians to Lenin and Stalin combined, not including war deaths or deaths by mismanagement. I do not know what events he totals to get that number.
My original numbers came from combining the low and high numbers for Stalin and Lenin from the table found here, but the numbers have changed since I last looked at them. The range from the current table would 10 million to 52 million (30 million plus or minus 20 million) depending on how you count. However, now that I read more closely, the high number can't be justified as a total murdered because it includes all excess deaths.
So, fair enough, I removed the word "Russian" and replaced the numbers with "some 20 million", citing Kotkin as the source.
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