But the real tragedies were yet to come: first with the Civil War, and then under Stalin’s collectivization and his all-too-frequent purges, which may have killed as many as forty million people. Russian communism was brutal, repressive, and bloody, but not unique. The economic consequences and the human suffering were quite typical of what happened elsewhere—for example, in Cambodia in the 1970s under the Khmer Rouge, in China, and in North Korea. In all cases communism brought vicious dictatorships and widespread human rights abuses.
