You haven't kept up on this Frank. R.W. Davies and Robert Conquest debated the ghoulish #'ers several yrs. ago in New Left Review. J. Arch Getty in his volume of docs in the Yale U. Press series, "Annals of Communism, " using the official Russian figures comes up with a figure of a bit more than 2 million, "excess deaths/premature deaths, " the height being in '36 and '37
Do a google search with these keywords. John Lacny J. Arch Getty marxist at yahoogroups.com He posted the J. Arch Getty numbers on his marxist list. Aw hell, here it is, http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo- talk/0012/0436.html
Read any Robert Conquest? Do more than sneer at, "The Black Book of Communism.? Sure the ex-Maoist editor S. Courtois is rather ridiculous but the chapter by Alexander Werth and others on the PRC, Cambodia are good.
Fascist and US imperialist slaughter in Vietnam, 200,000 in Guatemala, the Contras, 500,000 in Indonesia, the Chilean coup and much else are on the ledgers as crimes of Kapitalizm. When are folks like you gonna own up to what the level of atrocity was by Stalinists against communists, socialists, workers and peasants in the fSU, the Great Leap Forward and the GPCR, the repression of anarchists and Trotskyists and dissident Communists in Spain during the Civil War? How long, how long you gonna be stuck in that tired illusion that not all criticism of the experience of, "Communism, " in the last century is wholly illegit and the product of Langley, Va.? http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue23/jjacob23.htm ("The Russian Question And American Socialism.") Michael Pugliese P.S. And can you make your subject lines reflect the subject line of the individual post you are replying to? What if there are two posts in the same digest on entirely different topics you want to reply on? And the archive will have lots of Re: lbo-talk-digest #666 that are just numbers without a referent.