But if the average hides a huge range of datapoints, it becomes less useful.

Well, he had to be, programming his own AI basically by himself.

I just want to know if those excess deaths are part of the Marxist ideology or not. You say the USSR was a country following Marxist theory. At least 7 million people died either because they were killed by the state or died through negligence. Are all those deaths explained away by “The war caused their deaths” and “They deserved it anyways”? Were a significant number of them killed despite the USSR being marxist or because of it?

The very next paragraph read as follows:

Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin’s regime were 20 million or higher.[5][6][7] After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[8][9][10][11][12] around 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[13][14][15] some 390,000[16] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[17] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[18] According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were “purposive” while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility.

You can’t blame all the deaths on Nazis.

I just opened Wikipedia. There is a whole article about the excess mortality under Stalin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin

In reality, states like the USSR absolutely followed Marxist analysis when deciding what to do and when.

How do millions of deaths under Stalin factor into that?

The former decides on an outcome and looks at what needs to happen to achieve that outcome. If you define the latter as realism, then it looks at what is reality now and what that will lead to if nothing changes or what is realistically possible with the hurdles that you will likely encounter.

In my mind, this is ironically why every time communism “has been tried”, those countries have slipped into authotarianism that had little to no similarity with the ideal of communism. Because the reality is, that if you focus too much power on one position that decides how resources are distributed fairly, those positions attract those that care for achieving and holding power above all.