Fair enough. It sounds like this book is controversial and even the author walked back most of it in favor of 15 million, which still other historians protest. From everything else I've read or heard, most people say 7 million. Not being a historian myself I don't really know how I can evaluate either claim in any way more than "he said, she said." Either way, it's easily enough to be an atrocity, and I mean no defence of Stalin. However, the author clearly has an ideological axe to grind, and tries to make it all about communism when it started and ended with Stalin. I stick by my original claim that post-Stalin USSR was the best period of Russian history, and that the horrors of the 30s and 40s were due more to Stalin and war than anything to do with communism. After all, those were hardly the first famines and prison camps in East Europe, anyway.