The existing assumption of facts I have going into this is that from a period between 1918 and 1922 an estimated 50,000 to 200,000 people were executed by the Bolsheviks. What isnt clear to me is was this just mopping up what was left of the Whites and couter-revolutionaries, or was any dissent against the Bolsheviks liable to put you in the line of fire? Was the high death count justified or not? Thoughts?
There was an active civil war, foreign armies invaded, and anarchists and SRs took an active role in the fighting against the fledgling socialist state, not with protests but actually making common cause with the white armies.
I'm not saying that many weren't purged unnecessary. All I'm saying that the USSR lived in war time it's entire existence, and trying to paint it as vicious is a huge oversimplification.