reliance on Soviet archival sources "when it came to the Soviet diaspora peoples and the 'nationalities deportations' from 1937 to 1950," some revisionist historians "held that these cases of ethnic cleansing were not racial but ideological in nature, in which both elites and ordinary people could be targeted as 'enemies of the people.'" This subgroup of revisionists sought to recapitulate a "relatively pure" communism in the Soviet Union and explain all of its policies, such as the nationality operations of the NKVD and deportations of Koreans, as a reflection of Marxism. Eric D. Weitz wrote that, while revisionists on the topic of Soviet deportations "raise the term race, they step around it gingerly and quickly retreat to the safer language of ethnicity and [Soviet] nationality." He added, "The Soviets explicitly and loudly rejected the ideology of race... Yet at the same time, traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. [...] The particular traits could be the source of praise and power, as with Russians, or could lead to round-ups, forced deportations, and resettlement in horrendous conditions." Victims of Stalinism According to J. Arch Getty, over half of the 100 million deaths which are commonly attributed to Communism were due to famines. Getty writes that the "overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan." As the majority of excess deaths under Joseph Stalin were not direct killings, the exact number of victims of Stalinism is difficult to calculate due to lack of consensus among scholars on which deaths can be attributed to the regime. Stephen G. Wheatcroft posits that "[t]he Stalinist regime was consequently responsible for about a million purposive killings, and through its criminal neglect and irresponsibility it was probably responsible for the premature deaths of about another two million more victims amongst the repressed population, i.e. in the camps, colonies, prisons, exile, in transit and in the POW camps for Germans. These are clearly much lower figures than those for whom Hitler's regime was responsible." Wheatcroft states that Stalin's "purposive killings" fit more closely into the category of "execution" than "murder", given he thought the accused were indeed guilty of crimes against the state and insisted on documentation. Hitler simply wanted to kill Jews and communists because of