They thought they had seen suffering! Tolstoy and Korolenko shed tears of indignation that from 1876 to 1904, the tsars executed 486 people and then, from 1905 to 1908, another 2,200! But from 1917 to 1953, the Soviets on average doubled that total every week. – David Bentley Hart, The Dream-Child’s Progress and Other Essays, 2017