Sources A and B give different figures for the amount of Russian soldiers killed in the First World War. How can this be explained?

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Question 1.  Sources A and B give different figures for the amount of Russian soldiers killed in the First World War.  How can this be explained?

        Leon Trotsky wrote source A for his book ‘The history of the Russian Revolution’ in 1932.  It is a short paragraph from the book explaining how the Russian army lost more men than any other country in the war.

        Source B was written by John Traynor for his book ‘Europe 1890-1990’ in 1991.  The source is a simple table displaying Russian casualties and total mobilised units in the First World War.  When comparing the two sources you notice there is a difference of 800,000 casualties.

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Possible reasons for this is during the war the Russian army was badly organised. They may not have kept accurate figures of casualties rates, so Leon Trotsky’s book’s figures may have been completely wrong in the first place, but to be fair he did use the word ‘approximately’ and so admitting uncertainty over the number of casualties.  Other reasons include another form of mis-recording which was the number of deserters and men taken prisoner were recorded as deaths and so obviously these men could not really be counted as casualties.  Unknown to some, Trotsky was a Bolsheviks and may have ...

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