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. --- Pyotr Velikii killed a lot of people (so did Catherine the Great). Petersburg was built by slave labor (peasants and Swedish prisoners). As much as a hundred thousand people may have died in the building of Petersburg. The Northern Capital is built on bones. They still dig them up.
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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!), --- People have already forgotten about this. ---
the totalitarian bent and the wilful capriciousness, as well as the cruel betrayal of socialist ideals. Peter was just a Czar after all. jks --- Not used a tsar. He was the Uebertsar. He built tsarist Russia.
The jovial middle-aged Georgian guy who works in the office across from mine is a HUGE fan of Stalin and Beria.