Estimating Soviet War Losses on the Basis of Soviet Population Censuses

Abstract

The problem of calculating the Soviet losses in the Second World War has confronted scholars with potentially insoluble difficulties. Especially in the first year of the war, during the catastrophic defeats and disorganized retreats, individual records on Soviet military personnel were either simply not kept or were lost or destroyed. Even during the war, the Soviet government criticized the failure to keep casualty lists up to date and noted that often soldiers were killed or went missing even before they were formally added to the unit rosters. The Red Army had no equivalent to the dog tag. Many soldiers, out of superstition, refused to wear the smertniki—little wooden cases that held identification information on slips of paper—believing that a wearer was ordained to die. Official estimates to this date, however, appear plainly understated. The author proposes a new method for estimating the Soviet personnel losses in the Second World War, based on the 1939 and 1956 censuses of the Soviet population.