section_path: Analysis/Excess mortality in Communist states
section_name: Excess mortality in Communist states
paragraph_text: Excess mortality in Communist states
  
  Many authors have written about excess deaths under Communist states and mortality rates, such as excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Some authors posit that there is a Communist death toll, whose death estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions of the deaths that are included in them, ranging from lows of 10–20 million to highs over 100 million. The higher estimates have been criticized by several scholars as ideologically motivated and inflated; they are also criticized for being inaccurate due to incomplete data, inflated by counting any excess death, making an unwarranted link to communism, and the grouping and body-counting itself. Higher estimates account for actions that Communist governments committed against civilians, including executions, human-made famines, and deaths that occurred during, or resulted from, imprisonment, and forced deportations and labor. Higher estimates are criticized for being based on sparse and incomplete data when significant errors are inevitable, and for being skewed to higher possible values. Others have argued that, while certain estimates may not be accurate, "quibbling about numbers is unseemly. What matters is that many, many people were killed by communist regimes." Historian Mark Bradley wrote that while the exact numbers have been in dispute, the order of magnitude is not.
  
  There is no consensus among genocide scholars and scholars of Communism about whether some or all the events constituted a genocide or mass killing. Among genocide scholars, there is no consensus on a common terminology, and the events have been variously referred to as excess mortality or mass deaths; other terms used to define some of such killings include classicide, crimes against humanity, democide, genocide, politicide, holocaust, mass killing, and repression. These scholars state that most Communist states did not engage in mass killings; Benjamin Valentino proposes the category of Communist mass killing, alongside colonial, counter-guerrilla, and ethnic mass killing, as a subtype of dispossessive mass killing to distinguish it from coercive mass killing. Genocide scholars do not consider ideology, or regime-type, as an important factor that explains mass killings. Some authors, such as John Gray, Daniel Goldhagen, and Richard Pipes, consider the ideology of communism to be a significant causative factor in mass killings. Some connect killings in Joseph Stalin 's Soviet Union, Mao Zedong 's China, and Pol Pot 's Cambodia on the basis that Stalin influenced Mao, who influenced Pol Pot; in all cases, scholars say killings were carried out as part of a policy of an unbalanced modernization process of rapid industrialization. Daniel Goldhagen argues that 20th century communist regimes "have killed more people than any other regime type."
  
  Some authors and politicians, such as George G. Watson, allege that genocide was dictated in otherwise forgotten works of Karl Marx. Many commentators on the political right point to the mass deaths under Communist states, claiming them as an indictment of communism. Opponents of this view argue that these killings were aberrations caused by specific authoritarian regimes, and not caused by communism itself, and point to mass deaths in wars and famines that they argue were caused by colonialism, capitalism, and anti-communism as a counterpoint to those killings. According to Dovid Katz and other historians, a historical revisionist view of the double genocide theory, equating mass deaths under Communist states with the Holocaust, is popular in Eastern European countries and the Baltic states, and their approaches of history have been incorporated in the European Union agenda, among them the Prague Declaration in June 2008 and the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, which was proclaimed by the European Parliament in August 2008 and endorsed by the OSCE in Europe in July 2009. Some scholars in Western Europe have rejected the comparison of the two regimes and the equation of their crimes.