CONQUEST & AMIS

 
There was a great Marxist called Lenin,
Who did two or three million men in;
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
The grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

        Robert Conquest

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Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest’s The
Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivism and the Terror-Famine:

    “We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present
    case by saying that in the actions here recorded about
    twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but
    every letter, in this book.”

That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 411
pages long.

        Koba the Dread, by Martin Amis
        New York: Vintage, 2002, 3