The Bleeding Edge. Bob Hughes

This seems to be an overstatement, but only a fractional one. Nicholas Eberstadt calculates that around 23.8 million lives were lost in the Russian Republic in the 16 years that followed the breakup of the USSR: 13.7 million fewer births, and 10.1 million more deaths than in the preceding 16-year period. Nicholas Eberstadt, ‘Drunken Nation – Russia’s Depopulation Bomb’, World Affairs, 138, no 4, 2009, p 51. RW Davies has calculated that 38 to 39 million lives were lost during the Second World War: Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p 2.

      11 Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902.

      12 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, Oxford University Press, 1989.

      13 Ibid, p 232.

      14 The Romanian communist and writer Panaït Istrati was told this when he visited Petrograd in 1917, and was arrested after he replied: ‘OK. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s the omelet?’ Cited in Sébastien Lapaque, ‘Panaït Istrati, roi des vagabonds’, Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2015.

      15 Stites, op cit, p 233.

      16 Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats, Doubleday Canada, 2013, p 90.

      17 Ibid, p 135

      18 Stafford Beer, Decision and Control, Wiley, 1966, p 478, citing UK government report ‘The long term demand for scientific manpower’, 1961.