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There are fortunately not many examples of leaders who didn't care if their people starved to death in history. The ones who starved their people also tended to active mass murder. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Caligula, and several other Europeans fit this profile. Montezuma was especially inventive in this regard, and the lyrics to the Neil Young song Cortez the Killer are hilarious if you understand the chasm between reality and Neil Young's perception of it.

Rand plays with the idea of a state that is willing to slaughter its people to maintain power, but she drops it almost immediately. There are two kinds of people who run such states. One kind understands that if he starves the masses, he'll get food riots, so he makes sure they can at least eat. The other is willing to kill the rioters. Joseph Zdugashvili and Mao Tse Tung were two of the latter group.

Rand avoided the obvious implications of the state she imagined. She wrote extensively about the deaths of the passengers on the Comet when it crashed with the arms train in the Taggart Tunnel. The incident filled twenty pages and introduced several characters, all of whom were portrayed as worthy of their fate. There are also hints of violence prior to this point. Dagny Taggart mentions raiders on the frozen train, but nothing about their actual methods.

Rand portrayed the ideological battle between self love and self hate, not a contest of arms between factions of different stripes. Her method argues that the reader should appreciate himself and not view himself as worthless when compared to society. Another interesting view of a society gone mad “for the common good” is offered in Harlan Ellison's A boy and His Dog.

In the film adaptation of that story, the Topeka Council is the absolute authority in a post apocalypse city. Anyone who defies the council is immediately killed and the death attributed to a farm accident or some other benign circumstance, with the council blithely adding, “Oh, and may the Lord have mercy on his soul,” after they order the murder. In Soviet Russia, the order might be a profane tirade from Papa Joe, followed by the disappearance of the victim, and the state's effort to remove that person from the historical record. Why bother to lie about his death when refusing to admit that he ever lived eliminates the need to answer difficult questions?

Rand's collectivist state sabotaged a wheat harvest so that politically connected traders could ship grapefruits. Such a state has to use force. People find out why they're starving, why their friends and relatives are starving, and they're not nice when they find out who did it. But Rand never mentions the state taking action against the violators of Directive 10-289. The penalty for violation is death, but no one gets executed. This is perhaps a reflection of The Fountainhead, which portrayed the conflict between socialism and liberty as an ideological battle. Perhaps enough people did not understand what The Fountainhead was truly about and Rand changed her theme to make it more clear.

Rand does mention at one point - forgive me if this is a spoiler, I don't remember in which chapter - that the jailers allow people to escape because they can't keep them. In her native Russia at that time the Gulag Archipelago simply starved them harder. Your point is well taken - I used the phrase "remarkably bloodless" above with a bit of tongue in cheek - it's actually unrealistically nice. Or she simply isn't telling us everything. (I do recall a single instance of an actual death, a poor fellow starving to death and his mother caressing his hair, but that's it).

But Project X is clearly designed to keep internal order by killing a lot of people at once, and so I think your observation about regimes willing to do that is precisely accurate. One of the nomenklatura - Mouch? - blandly recommended murder in that conversation about Directive 10-289 and Kinnan put his foot down. The union thugs won't stand for it at the moment but later they will. Maybe it's just that they won't stand for people other than themselves doing it.

Rand's written violence has a fairyland-like quality to it that may have been a product both of her times (although Raymond Chandler was putting out some pretty graphic stuff) and her antecedents - as we'll see later, she writes about a gunfight like a philosopher, not a gunfighter.

I'd love to know how much she really knew about the starvation campaign in the Ukraine - at the time the novel was published Krushchev had only just made his secret speech, so a lot of Stalin's abuses were still pretty much papered over, but Rand did have relatives in the old country at the time who occasionally wrote to her. I have to wonder, though, if she had stuck that stuff into AS - would anyone have believed it?

Late to the party, I’ve been out of town.

Consider, though, that Rand found it necessary to have the State create a weapon that is designed, primarily, to keep internal order.

Again, remarkably prescient. Ruby Ridge and the botched military style raid against Randy Weaver. Elian Gonzalez and the government sanctioned thugs that seized him, unnecessarily, at the point of a gun.

And, the most grotesque violation by the government against citizens, in recent memory, Waco.

Rand implies the US has become a country willing to use deadly force against its own citizens.

I suggest recent history shows our government has no problem with the idea of violence against its own citizens.

And, the people who are involved in these raids always use the “I was just doing my job” excuse to justify their actions.