Many (not all) Czars also committed unspeakable acts of cruelty and brutality. Ivan the Terrible is most notorious for this. Absolute monarchy may be a “traditional political system”, but it is also a dictatorship that stops at nothing to protect its own power. People who questioned the authority and abuses of communist dicators faced torture and murder. People who questioned the authority and abuses of czarist dictators weren’t treated any better. The Bolsheviks made the people slaves on farms and factories run by Bolshevik cronies. The Aristocracy made the people serfs on farms run by Aristocrats. The Bolsheviks justified themselves by appealing to “enlightment” and “progress”. The Romanovs justified themselves by appealing to the Gospel of Christ (even more galling).
It is for good reason that by the end of “Animal Farm”, the animals could no longer distinguish between Napoleon the Pig and Farmer Jones.
Ivan the Terrible reigned in the 1500s and most of his ‘terrible’ acts were committed AGAINST the aristocracy to bring them under his control. The peasants simply weren’t considered worth bothering with, so the magnitude of the crimes was rather small.
While acknowleging the authoritarian regimes of the Tsars several hundred years ago, the systematic brutalization of the entire populace of the Euro-Asian land mass, including gulags, planned starvation of masses of people (ethnic genocide) and killing off of small landowners is an invention of the 20th century.
While claiming Communism was the modern-day enlightened and compassionate political system for the benefit of the masses, Lenin, Stalin and their cronies killed, abused, tortured, and psychically crushed more people than all the ancient Tsars put together.
Wasn’t it one of the Bosheviks who said that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is just a statistic?