If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be [routinely] practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (“the secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible of circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to an insane asylum.
—Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

At this point, it is safe to say that the twentieth century is the bloodiest on record. By the most conservative estimates, at least one hundred million people were killed by Communist regimes. The largest number of deaths were, of course, Chinese and Soviet—to the point where the million or so executed by the Khmer Rouge are well within the margin of error for the total. And of course these figures do not include the Nazi murders and other tragedies of stupefying