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No one knows, probably not even the Russian government, exactly how many people perished as a result of the many purges, labor camps, and other punishments that occurred during the life of the Soviet Union, which existed from 1917 - 1991. Reliable estimates have put the number over ten million, and perhaps as high as twenty million or more. Most, but certainly not all of those deaths occurred during the reign of Josef Stalin, a genius in the exercise of raw power, but otherwise, a paranoid megalomaniac with few equals in history. In today's video, we are going to tell you about some of the other terrible events that occurred during the life of the Soviet Union, or USSR. In the mid-1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev, a communist reformer, became Premier of the Soviet Union. When he came to power, he understood two things almost immediately: that the Soviet economy needed to be restructured and people allowed more economic freedom, and that many people were dissatisfied with life in the USSR, but did not dare
