1929–2019
○ Natural causes
The statistician who made Soviet war losses countable
In a 2002 Vojenno-istoricheskii zhurnal article he wrote that "a historian must rejoice and grieve together with his people."
Grigori Krivosheyev was a Soviet military officer and military historian who rose to deputy chief of the General Staff. From 1988 he led a team that quantified Soviet and Russian military losses from declassified records, producing the 1993 study that made his name widely known. Its estimate of 126,875 irretrievable Soviet losses in the Winter War became a standard reference, although later researchers identified gaps and possible duplication and proposed higher totals.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1949Entered the Soviet Army and served in an artillery regiment
- 1953Graduated from the Tyumen Military Infantry School; platoon commander
- 1964Graduated from the Frunze Military Academy
- 1973Commander of the 161st Motor Rifle Division
- 1979Chief of staff and first deputy commander, Turkestan Military District
- 1984Chief of staff and first deputy commander, Group of Soviet Forces in Germany; Colonel General
- 1987Head of the Main Organizational-Mobilization Directorate and deputy chief of the General Staff
- 1988–1993Head of the statistical research team on military losses
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionHistorian of Civil War lossesHis 1993 study covered losses in the 1917–1923 Civil War.
- 1939.11–1940.03The Winter Warleader of the war-loss statistical studyHe led the 1988-1993 study that produced the standard figure of 126,875 irretrievable losses for the Winter War.
The war-loss statistics programme and its controversy
From 1988 Krivosheyev led a team of military historians that set out to quantify the human and combat-equipment losses of the Soviet and Russian armed forces statistically. The team was granted access to archival materials of the General Staff and the main staffs of the service branches, the interior ministry, state security, the border troops and other institutions, all declassified in the late 1980s. It also drew on earlier loss assessments by the General Staff commission under Shtemenko and the defence ministry commission under Gareyev.
The 1993 monograph "Grif sekretnosti snyat" ("The classification has been lifted") covered the period from the Civil War of 1917-1923 to the war in Afghanistan of 1979-1989 and presented 111 detailed tables. It was also where casualty figures for Lake Khasan (1938), Khalkhin Gol (1939) and the Soviet-Finnish war (1939-1940) were first made public. An English translation with a foreword by John Erickson appeared in 1997, and the 2001 "Russia and the USSR in the Wars of the Twentieth Century" extended the study to the Russo-Japanese and First World Wars and tsarist-era losses as well as local conflicts in the post-Soviet space, revising earlier calculations across 229 tables.
The figures drew wide citation and also challenges. The demographers Ellman and Maksudov judged the overall estimate of 26-27 million Soviet irrecoverable losses broadly reliable while noting possible overstatement from including victims of Soviet repression, Soviet citizens who fought on the German side and emigrants, and understatement from incomplete coverage of territories annexed before and after the war. Glantz called the work on the whole "straightforward and accurate" but listed the absence of analysis for several large operations as a glaring omission; Krivosheyev replied in writing that those operations were parts of larger ones, so the overall totals were not materially affected, and promised to cover them in a second edition. Mikhalev rejected the figure of 8.7 million military dead on the ground that it could not be reconciled with total conscription, putting the dead at more than 10.9 million and total irreplaceable losses at 13.7 million, while Zemskov criticised the prisoner-of-war statistics as calculated rather than counted and argued the Red Army's 8,668,400 irrecoverable losses could not be accepted as reliable. The competing estimates persist.