Seumas Milne has a good piece in The Guardian concerning the question of who exactly did what to whom during the the last 100 odd years of our planet's history; The New York Times should publish it as an editorial. I might add that more people were killed during the retribution that followed the defeat of the Paris Commune than died at the hands of Robespierre et al. But then again, when I read Anna Akhmatova I'm constantly reminded of the number of deaths that occured during the building of her beloved Saint Petersburg, so I guess I'm just a hard-ass. But Milne knows the history better than I do and he tells it well.