‘In the US During the Red Scare, More People Were Repressed Than Under Stalin.’ False Claim by Petrovsky and Azarenok Fact-Checked

US Communists marched through the streets of Philadelphia on July 28th, waving red flags adorned with hammers and sickles. Elon Musk commented on a video of the march with an exclamation mark. The media's reaction was mixed, as it remains unclear what garnered more attention—the march itself or Musk's response.

During a discussion on the TV program “Azaryonok. Napryamuyu” on August 1st, 2024, Piotr Petrovsky and Grigory Azarenok drew parallels between the Stalinist repressions and the McCarthy Era in the United States — from the late 1940s to the late 1950s — a time when many Americans were placed on blacklists, dismissed from their jobs, and tried for alleged sympathies towards communism.

“There were no “ships” in the US, only firing squads and concentration camps, which unfortunately few people know about. And when the grantees of the US start telling me about Stalin’s repressions, I tell these gentlemen: look at your sponsors, because they killed even more people,” Petrovsky declared.

Two people were sentenced to death during the McCarthy Era's witch hunts — the Rosenberg husband and wife, accused of spying for the Soviet Union and leaking nuclear secrets.

Historians debate the exact number of people repressed during the Stalinist era. However, a single document is enough to disprove Petrovsky's claims: a 1954 letter to Khrushchev from the Soviet Union's Procurator General and Ministers of Justice and Internal Affairs. The letter states that over the previous 33 years, nearly four million people had been repressed, with 640,000 sentenced to death.