Peter the Great killed more people than Stalin did. I have little doubt that monuments to Stalin will be going up in Russia in another century or so, maybe sooner.
-The analogy is excellent, but where are your sources on percentage killed -(not that I agree or disagree with you. I´m just curious)?
Alexandre
I don't know whether there are accurate figures on Peter, but Stalin's have to be revised way downwards after Getty's reserach. See his The Origin of the Great Purge. A summary of the results is available on a U of Chicago (I think) website and has been postedto this list from time to time. Getty's figures are pretty much the only ones based on serious archival research. The short version is this: the body count of the Stalin years -- executions, anyway -- is in the high hundreds of thousands. Deaths in labor camps push it up to the low millions. Figures like 20 million executions or deaths (Conquest) or higher (Solzhenitin says 50 million) have no basis in fact. One can add 8-9 million victims of the collectivization famines of the esaly 1930s as foreseeable if not in the main intended deaths. It would surprise me if Peter's body count were not prioportionately much lower, not because Peter was a nice guy, but because the technologies available for mass oand asseembly line killing did not exist. The comparison of Peter and Stalin misses the peculiar horror of the rule of the Father of Peoples, the terror and the lies to which the Soviet people had to subscribe (Trotskyite-fascist-Zionist spies!), the totalitarian bent and the wilful capriciousness, as well as the cruel betrayal of socialist ideals. Peter was just a Czar after all. jks
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