carried out by shooting; usually the condemned was shot in the
back of the head. However, during World War II, German war
criminals and Soviet collaborators were often publicly hanged. Our
information on executions during the Soviet period is incomplete.
During the first four years of the regime, approximately 143,000
people were executed by the Cheka. Figures for the late 1920s and
1930s are incomplete because the security service did not include
peasants shot resisting collectivizationor killings in forced labor
camps. Information submitted by the security service to the Com-
munist PartyCentral Committee after the death of Joseph Stalin
indicates that there were 747,772 executions between 1922 and- This figure is rejected by most Soviet experts, including for-
mer party leader Nikita Khrushchevand Politburo member Alek-
sandr Yakovlev, who put the figure three to 10 times greater. For
scholars of Russian history, major lacunae remain in the records of
the security services, which prevent any accounting of the blood-
letting during the Leninand Stalin years.
During the Great Patriotic War, more than 157,000 Soviet forces
were sentenced to be shot, the equivalent of 15 infantry divisions.
The NKVD and Red Army executed approximately 13,500 during
the Battle of Stalingrad. The records show that another 25,000 offi-
cers were sentenced to penal battalions, where the overwhelming ma-
jority were killed in action. Those punished officers would have been
sufficient to command the troops of 25 additional infantry divisions.
Following Stalin’s death, execution by shooting was used to
combat a number of criminal acts, including large-scale theft of
state property and embezzlement. According to recently opened So-
viet archives, there were 25,000 death sentences and 21,000 execu-
tions between 1962 and 1990, most for civil criminal activities. In
1962–1963, approximately 3,000 executions took place as Khru-
shchev demanded the security service and police crack down on the
illegal economy.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, capital punishment
continued in most of former Soviet republics. Russia legally abol-
ished capital punishment in 1998; the last execution took place in - Popular opinion supports restoring capital punishment, and
even former Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsynhas publicly
spoken in favor of renewing capital punishment for murder.
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