Communism's Barbaric Cruelty By the Numbers - Reason.com

Communism's Barbaric Cruelty By the Numbers - Reason.com:

"For example, the Russian Empire was always seen as backward and tyrannical. As Orlando Figes noted in A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924, "from the perspective of the individual, it could be said that the single greatest difference between Russia and the West... was that in Western Europe citizens were generally free to do as they pleased so long as their activities had not been specifically prohibited by the state, while the people of Russia were not free to do anything unless the state had given them specific permission to do it. No subject of the Tsar, regardless of his rank or class, could sleep securely in his bed in the knowledge that his house would not be subject to a search, or he himself to arrest."

So, how bad was the backward and tyrannical Tsarist regime that was so reviled by its more sophisticated Western neighbors? Between 1825 and 1917, Stéphane Courtois notes in his introduction to The Black Book of Communism, "tsarism carried out 6,321 political executions (most of them during the revolution of 1905-1907), whereas in two months of official 'Red Terror' in the fall of 1918 Bolshevism achieved some 15,000." That's one way to put communism in perspective."