@Spiderman
"Some scholars" is an interesting weasle word. Which scholars? Reputable ones, whose findings have been reviewed favorably by their peers?
The 200,000 number is the official number claimed by the War Crime trials in Tokyo, and the 300,000 is the official number claimed by PRC historians.
Obviously, the exact numbers will always remain variable by necessity, as contrary to what many non-historians seem to think, it's not actually all that simple to track down dead people if they're not wealthy and come up with really ironclad numbers. The Holocaust Archive for example still has tens of thousands of Nazi documents to go through in order to arrive at an accurate count of solely the Auschwitz victims, over 70 years after the fact - the actual numbers can only be estimates naturally.
The Soviets were the most evil mass murderers in World War 2 who invaded Poland when the Germans did, and took over Eastern Europe without a slap on the wrist. The Soviet Union earned the nickname "army of rapists" when they caused the biggest single mass rape epidemic in history.
Contrary to anti-Soviet propaganda during the Cold War, while the Soviet Union certainly did commit atrocities against minority populations at a smaller scale, it likely did not engage in directed genocide against a large number of its own civilian population. It is my understanding that the
Black Book of Communism's numbers, which are often cited by anti-Soviet scholars, are not based on proper historical fact finding - although I wouldn't go so far as some scholars did and call them fabrication, as some portions of it do ring somewhat true to me personally.
Certainly, somebody with no connection to European history and only a vague understanding of the human misery involved in the World War started by Nazi Germany, and the enormous atrocities and crimes against humanity the Nazis committed, could to jump to quick moral condemnation based on whatever revisionist literature they could find. "The Soviet Union was worse than the Nazis" is certainly a popular talking point among American conservatives with a limited understanding of history, for example, and such talk also frequently brings out people of a certain political dispensation who have waited their whole lives to not be the "bad guys" of history any more.