It has always annoyed me a bit that every few years, Stalin's murder count mysteriously goes up a few million. It's always struck me as a kind of revisionist history shyness -- as though the guys who want to badmouth Stalin are peeking their heads out and saying, "Uh, the KGB is really gone, then, is it?"
Stalin was a mass murdering bastard, who defaced the name of the Soviet Union and all it stood for. Stalin's true heinous crimes are enough to send him to the lowest circle of hell -- to go crashing through the floor of it, in fact. Why do you need to falsify the facts? Why dishonour the millions that did die due to him by claiming every year or every textbook edition a larger number?
The number of people that Stalin killed, as a direct result of his policies, initiatives, or planned inactions, is somewhere from 9-13 million people. An unfathomable amount. A disgusting amount. Don't ramp it up to 15 million, or to 20, or 30, or 40, as there's no point in doing so -- nobody's sitting around saying "Oh! Well, if it was only TEN million sentient beings, and not 20, then I guess he wasn't such a bad guy after all."
Or, perhaps I've jumped down your throat too soon, and the mistake was accidental -- I see a lot of people confusing the number of Soviet dead in World War II with the number of Soviet dead from Stalin's purges. Two entirely different things, though, sadly, two similarly astronomical numbers.