It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past by David Satter Yale University Press, 2011, 400 pages, US$23. Buried in an endnote to It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway, David Satter offers the following statistics on state-sponsored terror between 1917 and 1953: The scale of murder in the Soviet Union was so immense that estimating the number of victims with any degree of accuracy is difficult if not impossible. Figures cited in recently available archival materials are often in conflict with demographic data which places death tolls…