In the short post that follows I will be discussing large numbers of fatalities, and I want to ask readers to keep in mind that these are not ammunition for social media debates but real people who died horrible, untimely deaths.

How many were killed in Red and White Terror? Any estimate you read in any book will be flatly contradicted by the next book you pick up. I have seen claims that the total number killed by both sides was in the millions, but I don’t credit this. It could be argued back and forth whether either side had motive or opportunity for deliberate killing on such a scale. (For the record, I think the Reds had opportunity but not motive, and the Whites had motive but not opportunity.)

But neither side had the murder weapon. The only weapons capable of inflicting death on such a horrific scale are strong and efficient state institutions. Neither side had the institutional capacity for such killing, any more than they had the capacity for major humanitarian operations to tackle hunger and epidemics.

I’ve read a good few primary and secondary sources, and a death toll in the millions just doesn’t seem likely to me. I’ll try to explain why below.

We read that 2,500 Red prisoners were killed after the Whites took Omsk. It is rare that we get such a high death toll from one incident. Did ten massacres with a similar or higher death toll occur during the Civil War? Yes – unfortunately I could think of ten on the spot, split between various factions. Did a hundred incidents with a death toll in the thousands occur? I’m pleased that I can say a flat no. If there were five or six or seven hundred incidents in which thousands were killed, then a death toll in the millions would be plausible. Since there were not, it is not.

This still allows for the possibility that there were hundreds of thousands of individual executions and smaller-scale massacres, but I think that possibility is remote. Life was cheap in this era. But if there were enough small-scale violence going on to add up to the millions, the memoirs and novels that came out of that time would have to have someone being shot or sabred on every page (to be fair, Asian Odyssey by Alioshin comes pretty close to that at times!).

The mass death is terrible enough without exaggeration. My educated guess is that the real number for Red and White combined is greater than 100,000 but less than 500,000. Add in terror campaigns waged by various nationalist forces and interventionists (such as the contribution of Ukrainian Rada forces to the pogroms of 1919, or the massacre of Armenians by Turkish-aligned forces in Baku in 1918) and the total might well be pushed some way north of half a million.

A death toll in the low hundreds of thousands would put the Russian Civil War in the same territory as the Spanish Civil War. Spain had a smaller population, but there terror was pursued in a more determined and systematic way by an efficient military. It seems that in relation to Spain it’s been possible to do some serious homework and settle on a good approximation of the numbers (see Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust). In relation to Russia’s Civil War, I have seen nothing but rough estimates. And, to be brutally honest, this is the case for mortality throughout the revolutionary period: partial data, ambiguity in how it can be interpreted, and politically-motivated spitballing about the total.