You’re right, of course—the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war involved atrocities on all sides that easily beat the French revolutionary terror.
For some interesting reason, when I make a query to my brain on what happened in Europe in some period X-Y, the answer usually excludes Russia unless I ponder it more carefully. Even when I wrote about post-WW1 Eastern Europe in my above comment, I was vaguely thinking of the Freikorps fighting it out with Poles and Czechs rather than the Russian Civil War.
It would certainly mean moving the goalposts if I insisted on excluding Russia from Europe, but it still says something that you have to go all the way to the rise of the hardcore 20th century totalitarians to find similar examples.
You’re right, of course—the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war involved atrocities on all sides that easily beat the French revolutionary terror.
On the other hand, it’s standard to the point of cliché to regard the events in France post-1789 as specifically foreshadowing those in Russia post-1917 (with Lenin “correcting” some of Robespierre’s mistakes, for instance making sure all the heirs of the old regime were dead).
You’re right, of course—the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war involved atrocities on all sides that easily beat the French revolutionary terror.
For some interesting reason, when I make a query to my brain on what happened in Europe in some period X-Y, the answer usually excludes Russia unless I ponder it more carefully. Even when I wrote about post-WW1 Eastern Europe in my above comment, I was vaguely thinking of the Freikorps fighting it out with Poles and Czechs rather than the Russian Civil War.
It would certainly mean moving the goalposts if I insisted on excluding Russia from Europe, but it still says something that you have to go all the way to the rise of the hardcore 20th century totalitarians to find similar examples.
On the other hand, it’s standard to the point of cliché to regard the events in France post-1789 as specifically foreshadowing those in Russia post-1917 (with Lenin “correcting” some of Robespierre’s mistakes, for instance making sure all the heirs of the old regime were dead).