A-yep. People who are horrified by Stalin's deeds need to recall that the Russian czars would have loved to have done what he did -- they just didn't have the tools. Czarist Russian military units were expected to retain unit cohesion with 90% of their members dead and gone. The Potemkin mutiny, as eminently justifiable to us as it was (and it was!), profoundly shocked the Russian aristocracy of the time: Russian peasants had put up with far worse without complaint.