On the crimes of Lenin and Stalin

This from Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties:

But the most important consideration remains the mere extent of the Terror. In the First World War the killing was on a scale wholly disproportionate to any military or political objective attainable by either side — to the degree, indeed, that our whole civilization was badly shaken, and almost ruined. This has long been widely understood. The Great Purge in Russia (and the previous killings of the collectivization period) are a similar case, but one which has perhaps not yet been grasped so clearly. Even leaving aside the question of whether the ends involved were good ones, the casualties were too great for any attainable political or social objective.

Put another way, this time in Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:

We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter in this book.

The book, as Martin Amis points out in Koba the Dread, is 411 pages long.