Did Stalin really kill more people?

If you look at the actual statistics, the reason why Hitler is seen as worse becomes quite clear. Usually, numbers are thrown around without any context, and with no indication of what is actually being counted.

I'm going to use wikipedia for this, because it seems to be pretty close to the commonly known figures. These articles are also very well sourced.

Stalin's victims:

"799,455 executions around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement – with a total of about 2.9 million officially recorded victims in these categories."

"Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million – a total of about 9 million victims of repression."

"Some have also included the deaths of 6 to 8 million people in the 1932–1933 famine among the victims of Stalin's repression. This categorization is controversial however, as historians differ as to whether the famine was a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others, or simply an unintended consequence of the struggle over forced collectivization."

"Accordingly, if famine victims are included, a minimum of around 10 million deaths—6 million from famine and 4 million from other causes—are attributable to the regime, with a number of recent historians suggesting a likely total of around 20 million, citing much higher victim totals from executions, Gulag camps, deportations and other causes. Adding 6–8 million famine victims to Erlikman's estimates above, for example, would yield a total of between 15 and 17 million victims. Researcher Robert Conquest, meanwhile, has revised his original estimate of up to 30 million victims down to 20 million."

So, that's quite a few more deaths than the 6 000 000 who died in the Shoah. Isn't Stalin worse than Hitler, then? Well, no, at least not because of this number alone, since the numbers shown here are for a wide variety of causes, unlike the figure for the Shoah. If you're going to make a comparison, you need to compare the same thing.

Let's make a tally for Hitler that is similar to the one for Stalin, including famine, executions, genocide, mortality in captivity, etc. I'm not including soldiers dying in combat or unspecified civilians deaths.

From Consequences of Nazism:

In the Soviet Union: 2.6 million POW dead, 7.1 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals; 1.8 million deported to Germany for forced labor; and 5.5 million famine and disease deaths.

So already we have 17 000 000, which is comparable to some of the higher estimates of deaths under Stalin. But that's just the Soviet Union.

From WWII Castualties:

Up to 4 700 000 deaths in the Shoah, excluding the already counted Soviet Union.

Up to 250 000 deaths in the Porajmos, excluding the Soviet Union.

200,000 to 250,000 handicapped persons

1.8 to 1.9 million ethnic Polish civilians were victims during the German occupation

10,000–15,000 gay men perished in Nazi concentration camps

And over 345 000 executed.

These numbers are far from exact, but trying to be exact would be way too much work for this comment. So, these are a selection of deaths caused by Nazism, which like I said above doesn't include deaths in combat or civilian deaths not included under genocide or starvation. These are also selected from many different counts. Some estimates for deaths in the Porajmos are as high as 1.5 million, and the number of Jewish deaths could be more than 1 million above what I wrote here. Soviet POW deaths could be almost twice as high.

Adding together these 7 460 000 with the 17 000 000 counted above, you get 24.4 million deaths, compared to the 15-20 million estimated deaths under Stalin. Add to that the fact that the Soviet numbers are over a much longer period of time than the numbers for the Nazis, since Stalin was in power for nearly 30 years, whereas a large majority of the deaths under the Nazis took place during the years between 1939-1945.

The 9 to 4 million difference might not seem like much, but the major difference is in intent. Whether or not Stalin intended the deaths from famine is far from a settled issue. Unsurprisingly, those who think he did tend to have a much bleaker view of him. If you take away the famine deaths from the numbers above, you end up with 4 to 9 million, where the two numbers are separated in the article. Unlike the Soviet famines, there's no controversy whether the starvation under the Hunger Plan was intentional, so there's no reason to count those deaths out.