How many people died under Stalin?

[Phenix]

different purposes(ideology, money, conquest and such), one result(mass murdering)..

Some say that disproportionate violence and cruelty are a sign of weakness, because in their opinion, brutes could not achieve what they seek by other means, I regard it as efficiency method, after analyzing situation dictators understand that masses won't cooperate with exigences and ideas so they proceed to democide to economize time and resources. Truly terrifying.
The problem with dealing with violence and diktat is the need of another dissuasive power to have a balance, a never ending cycle of atrocities awaits us at every epoch, when the balance cease.

[Aspirin]

This nigga was totally savage, deported plenty of my people in Siberia and Kazakhstan.

[Crimean]

Pol Pot was actually worse than all put together: he killed a quarter of the entire Cambodian pop. Not a bad score (cynically)for a tyrant that was only in power for a couple of years.

The massacre in Phnom Penh was a rehearsal for the rapid decline of the population in urban settings. I do not remember the source, but it seemed like it was a serious book.
Stalin is too whitewashed in the media - he shot 400-500 million people, 50 million of them personally. In truth, most of the "enemies of the people" were not humans enough in my understanding, but I agree, the sorting mechanism was imperfect.
Seriously, capitalism has killed and continues to kill far more people. And how many children will never be born because of him.

[Dragoon]

Most solid historian works point to figures between 10 and 20 millions brutal death outside of combat situations during Stalin's period.

When I first started looking into this stuff many years ago, found the larger estimates (say Rummel or Solzhenitsyn).
Although Rummel seems to have used a lot of very old estimates during the Cold War in his work. Back then people gave massive estimations.
Apparently for Solzhenitsyn his wife said his work wasnt an exact thing, mostly just literature..

Most common in the English world is around 20 million (from various groups).

The archives give numbers for executions, gulag, and kulak, but are probably incomplete and miss the famine.
(see Wheatcroft, and Ellman works, and slightly higher under Timothy Snyder). Those estimates are even lower 3-9 million.

[Dragoon]

Would be interesting to see some death rate statistics before, under and after Stalin’s regime. He certainly killed a lot of his political opponents and at least one person was killed by an ice axe.

Part of the chaos and massacres happened during the 1917-1923 period. The Civil War had 5-15 million killed (this time includes disease and famine).
After the Khrushchev Thaw it seems the mass killing largely dropped.

[Papastratosels26]

Don't know, but I heard many people.

[Mingle]

30-50 million, ironic but Stalin killed much more russian people than Hitler.

He killed his own people and didn't target anyone for their ethnicity/nationality/religion so that's why him killing more people than Hitler is not made into as much big of a deal. Mao killed more people than both Stalin and Hitler, yet most of the people he killed were his own people, so it's not made into as big of a deal.

[Sarmatian]

When I first started looking into this stuff many years ago, found the larger estimates (say Rummel or Solzhenitsyn).
Although Rummel seems to have used a lot of very old estimates during the Cold War in his work. Back then people gave massive estimations.
Apparently for Solzhenitsyn his wife said his work wasnt an exact thing, mostly just literature..

Most common in the English world is around 20 million (from various groups).

The archives give numbers for executions, gulag, and kulak, but are probably incomplete and miss the famine.
(see Wheatcroft, and Ellman works, and slightly higher under Timothy Snyder). Those estimates are even lower 3-9 million.

Wheatcroft's estimates are the most realistic and sitting at roughly 1 million. He excluded famine deaths as statistics on it are virtually non-existent and cannot be proven.

Regarding archives your guess of their unreliability holds no ground. The widespread belief of poor records contradicts the very claim of USSR being totalitarian state. How could one establish control over such massive institution without keeping thorough record of every movement of humans and supplies around it? Main fact is all those camps were labor camps before anything so they were integral part of country's economy. In centralized planning system government must know exactly what resources they have dedicated to the job. All these archives were accounting documents and are extremely precise because of that.

All pre-1990's estimates are highly exaggerated. They all based on works of Solzhenitsyn but it's exactly as you said - just literature, fictional at that. Solzhenitsyn had never had any access to statistics so all his claims are made for dramatic effect. Wheatcroft summarized it perfectly:

...prior to the opening of the archives for historical research, "our understanding of the scale and the nature of Soviet repression has been extremely poor" and some scholars who wish to maintain pre-1991 high estimates are "finding it difficult to adapt to the new circumstances when the archives are open and when there are plenty of irrefutable data" and instead "hang on to their old Sovietological methods with round-about calculations based on odd statements from emigres and other informants who are supposed to have superior knowledge".

At the end all that crying and bitching about Stalin being a monster worse than Hitler is laughable.

[Phenix]

When I first started looking into this stuff many years ago, found the larger estimates (say Rummel or Solzhenitsyn).
Although Rummel seems to have used a lot of very old estimates during the Cold War in his work. Back then people gave massive estimations.
Apparently for Solzhenitsyn his wife said his work wasnt an exact thing, mostly just literature..

Most common in the English world is around 20 million (from various groups).

The archives give numbers for executions, gulag, and kulak, but are probably incomplete and miss the famine.
(see Wheatcroft, and Ellman works, and slightly higher under Timothy Snyder). Those estimates are even lower 3-9 million.

Solzhenitsyn novel "The Gulag Archipelago" is a literature work based on a true experience, nonetheless it should not be regarded as a historical reference. And in the Cold War period, people were more catched by propaganda and exaggeration than factuality.
I counted a median some years ago of the communist massacres and brutal deaths outside of war times (including orchestrated famines and forced labor), if my memory is good, Stalin's USSR was the theater of 15 millions death.

[Satem]

Definitely too many