Recently I've been trying to learn about the USSR and things like the death toll atributted to Stalin.
From what I've heard, the 20 million dead figure that is often thrown around used to be the estimate before the USSR fell and its archives were open to the public.
Could anyone link me to those archives and specifically to the archives detailing the deaths under Gulags, famines, etc? I can't seem to find them anywhere so I thought maybe I could ask here for a link.
Thanks.
The Soviet archives are literally archives. Thousands and thousands of physical pages. They have yet to be digitized, because the Russian Government - like most Governments - have more important things to do. In other words, there's no "link" to them.
But researchers have taken a look and summarized. See for example this by Timothy Snyder. Russian and other researchers mostly agree.
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/01/27/hitler-vs-stalin-who-was-worse/