These are the figures commonly used :
Hull loss with fatalities (*) per million departures .
For same generation aircraft :
B727 : 0,72
DC9 0,78
T154M :0,80
aviation-safety.net reports 17 hull losses with fatalities for Tu-154M. Wikipedia reports that 320 of those have been built. The rate of 0.8 per million departures would then translate into an average of 66,000 departures (flight cycles) for each of the 320 aircraft, which seems about 5x high for a long-range aircraft that only entered mass production in 1984.
in the days of Soviet Aeroflot, calculations were easy to verify and in those days the Tu 154M had a quite good safety record.
Tu-154M barely had a chance to fly in the days of Soviet Aeroflot. It was in production for 7 years by the time of the fall of the USSR. The first recorded hull loss of the 154M is dated 1990.
The regular 154 came out earlier (1973) and it had 17 fatal accidents between 1973 and 1991, probably with no more than 300 aircraft in operation at any point (too lazy to look for production stats now), which would also point to a pretty high fatal loss rate per departure.
P.S. Aviation-safety.net gives flight cycle numbers for some of the crashed 154M's and it looks like they pretty consistently average ~700 departures/year.
If we assume that the average Tu-154M is 23 years old (manufactured in 1990) and all remaining aircraft are still in regular service, we get 5 million departures and the hull loss rate of 3.4 per million.