The multi-faceted Russian Civil War lasted from 1917 until 1922. In addition to former Czar Nicholas II and his entire family, who were executed by the Communists in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg as royalist forces were advancing (it fell three days after the royal family was killed), it's been estimated that about 1.5 million combatants were killed as a direct result of the hostilities, and another 9 million civilian non-combatants perished from famine and disease during that period. That renders the Russian Civil War the costliest internecine conflict in history, in terms of the number of death directly attributable to combat and war-related events.

Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin died in January 1924, and Josef Stalin seized power later that same year. A research paper published in February 1989 by Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev conservatively estimated the death toll directly attributable to Stalin's rule at some 20 million lives. If one further includes the estimated 27 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War, that's 47 million dead during his rule.

Medvedev's research further provides these rather grim statistics for our contemplation:

• 1 million imprisoned or exiled between 1927 to 1929;
  
•  9 to 11 million peasants forced off their lands, with another 2  to 3 million peasants arrested or exiled in the mass collectivization program;
  
• 6 to 7 million killed by an artificial famine induced by Soviet policies from 1932-1934;
  
• 1 million forcibly exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935;
  
• 1 million executed during the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938, aka the Stalinist purges;
  
• 4 to 6 million dispatched to forced labor camps;
  
• 10 to 12 million people forcibly relocated to the east during the Second World War; and
  
• 2 million arrested for various "political crimes" between the end of the Second World War and Stalin's death in 1953.

If we accept the higher number, that would mean the number of people killed during Stalin's era averaged over 2 million per year! To put that into a perspective we can grasp, that's in excess of 40,000 per week for his entire 29-year reign of terror. Such frightful statistics, when considered in conjunction with some rather remarkable quotes attributed to Stalin -- e.g., "Death is the solution to all problems; no man, no problem" -- are a clear reflection of the man's absolutely callous disregard for human life.

Personally, given the sort of numbers bandied about by those who are experts in their field, I believe that for all its many shortcomings and substantial faults, Imperial Russia under the Romanovs prior to the First World War was likely a far larger and more prosperous country than the one which was bequeathed by Stalin to his successors upon his own death in 1953.

While I believe a defense attorney has only one obligation, to win the case for his/her client (by showing that the prosecution failed to prove its case,) the same is not true for a prosecutor. A prosecutor's goal, as stated in many prosecutor's guide books, should be, "attempting to administer justice." Obviously, it should NOT be to "win a conviction at all costs."

The weather is too weird. An insanely warm winter. Not a single snow day for the school kids. Did not get even 10 inches of snow cumulative all winter. Yesterday the temp hit 85. In April.