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Very graceful.

The sum total of the fatalities column on that page is joke compared to even the most optimistic assessment of how the British middle east or French Indochina went, and that's before you add in all the crap in Africa.

Edit: You could probably even include the current Ukraine shindig and my statement would still hold.

Yeah in retrospect I could probably have phrased that a little better!

The toll was far greater than just that of conflicts. If you look at increased mortality during the period you'll see excess death in the millions. Wiki says 3.4 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Un...

In absolute terms it's one of the harshest death tolls in the last decades. It's far from a joke. Though for completeness, AIDS was also going on there and it's hard to tell from the stats the proportion of impact

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