- What is the Museum of Communism?
The Museum of Communism is an online, "virtual" museum that provides historical, economic, and philosophical analysis of the political movement known as Communism; it may be found on the World Wide Web at http://www3.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan. An overwhelming consensus of historians from a wide range of political viewpoints concludes that the human rights violations of Communist regimes have been enormous - often greater, in fact, than those of the infamous Nazi Germany. Yet public awareness of the major crimes of Communist regimes remains minimal. The purpose of the Museum of Communism is to disseminate this information, combining high scholarly standards with an entertaining format.
The founder and curator of the museum is Prof. Bryan Caplan, who recently received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University, and has just joined the economics department of George Mason University. The study of Communism and webpage design have been two of his long-time avocations; unless otherwise stated, he is the sole author of all material in the Museum of Communism. Outside contributions of exhibits to the museum are welcomed; see the museum's exhibit guidelines.
The purpose of the Museum of Communism is to for Communism what the
Holocaust Memorial
Museum does for Nazism: namely, to educate the public
about mass murder, widespread slave labor, and other human rights violations
committed
by Communist regimes. As the curator of the museum, I strive for high
standards of objective scholarship; but the historical facts - enjoying
the widespread agreement of scholars whatever their political orientation -
ensure that the museum's exhibits will almost invariably place Communism
in an extremely negative light.
The horrors of Nazi Germany prompted many concerned observers to vow that
"Never again" would such a regime be allowed to exist. This has
prompted an energetic effort to publicize Nazi atrocities, an effort which
has been singularly successful. Unfortunately, while equally solid and
damning historical evidence on the behavior of Communist regimes exists,
there has been surprisingly little effort to convey this information to
a broader audience. It would be tragic if Communism were to collapse
without intellectually immunizing future generations against
similar movements.
As it currently stands, a fair percentage of the Western population knows
almost nothing of the human rights record of Communist regimes, considering
Communism a noble ideal that people weren't virtuous enough to practice.
Another segment is vaguely aware of the abuses of Communist regimes, but
drastically underestimates their magnitude. The comparatively well-informed
know of the aggressive foreign policy of Communist regimes - of Hungary in
1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
What the public knows least about is the internal policies of
Communist countries. While many countries in the world have had imperialistic
foreign policies comparable to e.g. the Soviet Union's, the crimes inflicted by
Communist governments against their own populations find almost no historical
parallel. In particular, using almost any
scholarly tabulations (and even official Communist pronouncements), the
government of the USSR murdered more non-combatants than any other in
the 20th-century. Communist China comes in second. Out of the top ten most
murderous regimes in this century, five were Communist, according to the
ranking provided by R.J. Rummel in his Death By Government
(Communist regimes indicated in bold):
One might note that out of this hall of shame, probably only Nazi Germany
widely enjoys the reputation it deserves. Each of these regimes - along with
many lesser offenders - deserves to have its crimes exposed. But the enduring
willingness of many in the West to minimize Communist atrocities, combined
with the enormous magnitude of their crimes, to my mind makes human rights
violations by Communist regimes especially worthy of attention.
All Communist governments have practiced widespread killing of non-
combatants. The extermination of the bourgeoisie and wealthy "as a class" has
been most loudly proclaimed, although in actual fact peasants have been
by far the majority of the victims. In addition, Communist governments have
ordered the genocide of numerous ethnic minorities deemed disloyal or anti-
Communist. Finally, Communist governments have frequently killed large
numbers of rival Communists. In most cases, the official reasons given for mass
killings have been economic or political rather than racial, but punishment has
rarely been inflicted for individual infractions of the law. Rather, Communist
governments would judge "enemies of the people" to be common in one's class,
family, or ethnicity, and respond with blanket repression of the entire suspect
group. As the democratic socialist historian Carl Landauer notes in his
discussion of Stalin's "dekulakization" campaign:
Unnatural deaths ordered by Communist regimes fall into three fairly distinct
categories: deaths due to extreme hardship conditions in slave labor camps;
deaths due to man-made famine, usually closely connected to forced
collectivization of agriculture; and lastly, straightforward executions. Later
sections of the FAQ discuss the composition and quantity of killings in different
nations and time periods, but since similar patterns repeat themselves, here are
some general remarks:
Slave labor camps, also known as "concentration camps," "forced labor camps,"
and "re-education camps," have played a vital role in Communist systems from
the very beginning. Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, began to set up
concentration camps in 1918; the first official admission appears to have been
made by Leon Trotsky, who threatened rebellious Czech forces with confinement
in concentration camps if they refused to join the Red Army. The number
confined during Lenin's reign was by later standards modest, apparently no
more than 100,000; but from the outset concentration camps were set up in the
unbearable climates of Siberia and northern Russia, and used for extremely
demanding tasks such as canal digging, timber cutting, and mining. Such
conditions would have tested the endurance of anyone, but they became deadly
when combined with the small amounts of food and inadequate clothing issued
to prisoners: the annual death rate in Lenin's slave labor camps generally
ranged between 10-30% per year. (Thus, the odds of surviving a five-
year sentence ranged from 20-60%). Moreover, the high death rate required
continuous large-scale arrests merely to keep the prison population stable.
In the early Stalin years, the camp populations were roughly stable, but
by 1930 by most estimates the number had skyrocketed to 1,000,000 inmates.
But the growth era of the camps was only beginning: by 1940 the concentration
camps contained about 10,000,000 souls, while camp conditions grew ever worse.
The prison population declined and living conditions improved considerably after
Stalin's death, but the slave labor camps persisted into the Gorbachev years.
Some would question whether the deaths in slave labor camps can reasonably
be considered "murder." Clearly, if prisoners had been provided with adequate
food, clothing, and shelter, the state would have been guilty of slave-driving, but
not murder. But this is simply not the case: a conscious decision was made to
severely restrict provisions for prisoners while forcing them to perform incredibly
demanding work. This methodological standard is not especially high: researchers of Nazi atrocities
have routinely and sensibly counted the deaths of slave laborers under inhuman
conditions as murder. Mass murderers use a diverse bag of tools, as the
testimony of famed Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann reveals:
"Within the framework of the final solution, Jews will be conscripted for labour
in the eastern territories under appropriate leadership. Large labour gangs of
those fit for work will be formed, with the sexes separated. They will be made to
build roads as they are led into these territories. A large percentage will
undoubtedly be eliminated by natural diminution."
PROSECUTOR: What is meant by "natural diminution"?
EICHMANN: That's perfectly normal dying. Of a heart attack or pneumonia, for
instance. If I were to drop dead just now, that would be natural diminution.
PROSECUTOR: If man is forced to perform heavy physical labour and not given
enough to eat, he grows weaker, and if he gets so weak he has a heart attack...?
EICHMANN: That undoubtedly would have been reported as natural diminution.
While a wide variety of governments in this century have used slave labor
camps, mass death due to man-made famine can be fairly described as an
original Communist invention. For ideological reasons, Communist governments
almost invariably seek to "collectivize" agriculture; i.e., to expropriate peasants'
farms. But while Marx thought that Communist revolution would occur only in
highly industrialized societies, in actual fact most Communist governments came
to power in countries in which "peasants", or farmers, were the large majority of
the population. In combination, ideology and objective conditions made
Communist states choose between abandoning their theories or waging war on
the majority of their own citizens.
Collectivization comes about in a variety of ways, but its essence is the same:
getting as much food as possible out of the peasantry while giving them as little
as possible in return. During the "War Communism" period, Lenin officially
assured peasants that they owned their land, but forced them to sell their entire
surplus to the state at a pitifully small price. When peasants chose not to sell,
government troops began seizing grain - first surplus grain, then the grain
peasants needed to feed their families, and finally the seed grain needed to
plant the next crop. The final result was a massive famine in which about 5
million people perished. Under Stalin's forced collectivization program, the
peasantry was formally expropriated. Millions of disgruntled peasant families
were sentenced to the Siberian slave labor camps. Stalin's collective farmers
had to surrender enormous quantities of grain for next to nothing, frequently
leading to the seizure of the entire crop. The result was yet another massive
famine, made even worse than Lenin's by Stalin's refusal to authorize
international relief efforts. The deaths by starvation from this famine were
around 7 million; approximately equal numbers of scapegoated peasant families
perished in the Siberian concentration camps.
This pattern repeated itself in China when Mao collectivized agriculture, and
appears at some point in the history of most Communist regimes.
Again, some people would deny that imposing foolish agricultural policies can be
considered murder. (Of course, the regimes denied that the policies were
foolish, implausibly blaming the famines on the poor weather that always seems
to hit at the same time the Party orders the collectivization). But the evidence
indicates that the man-made famines were either intentional (under e.g. Stalin)
or at least the result of malevolent indifference - both of which are sufficient for a
murder conviction. Even Lenin, who pioneered Communist peasant policy and
therefore lacked the benefit of experience, realized what he was risking. Barely
a month after he seized power, Lenin noted the risk of famine, declaring: "The
critical situation of food supply, the threat of famine caused by speculation, the
sabotage of capitalists and bureaucrats, as well as the prevailing chaos, make it
necessary to take extraordinary revolutionary measures to combat the evil."
While Lenin typically blamed everyone but himself, he was quite aware that
speculation and sabotage did not cause famine unless combined with anti-
peasant policies. When the famine finally threatened to destroy his regime,
Lenin dropped requisitioning and price controls - indicating that he knew that
these were the cause rather than the cure for hunger. The man-made famines of
Communist dictators after Lenin, as shall be seen, were not only foreseen but
often used deliberately as a political weapon against recalcitrant peasants.
Straightforward execution of innocent people has led to far fewer deaths than
either slave labor camps or man-made famine. Still, the numbers are
impressive. During the Russian Civil War, "class enemies" were executed en
masse in the Red Terror. As Zinoviev, a high-ranking Bolshevik put it, "We must
carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's
inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be
annihilated." The number executed in this period fell far short of Zinoviev's
threat, probably adding up to a few hundred thousand. The executions under
Stalin's rule - such as during the Great Terror of 1936-1938 - added up to
several million by most counts. Comparable numbers of executions (adjusting
for national population) are typical of Communist states.
Needless to say, mass murder was not the only human rights violation found in
Communist regimes. As indicated, widespread use of slave labor has been
common. The freedom to migrate - even within national borders - has frequently
been severely restricted. Freedom of speech, conscience, and religion have
been ruthlessly suppressed - although occasional "thaws" during e.g. part of
Khrushchev's reign permitted writers such as Solzhenitsyn to expose some of
the most egregious of their government's prior human rights violations.
Communist regimes rejected on principle the economic freedom to own property,
engage in business, or choose one's occupation, although sometimes these
have been permitted on pragmatic grounds.
It is safe to say that there is scarcely a single human freedom that Communist
regimes have not suppressed as a matter of official policy. While later sections
will continue to focus on Communist mass murder and slave labor, the
magnitude of the worst atrocities is also a fairly good indicator of the severity of
lesser rights violations.
V.I. Lenin
was the founding father of the Soviet Union and its dictator
during the Russian Civil War that followed. A series of strokes after the
Civil War, and his early death in 1924, gave him a mere five years to
reign. The brevity of his tenure led many to assume that subsequent
human rights abuses in the Soviet Union were not Lenin's fault. Oppression did
intensify after Stalin replaced Lenin as the absolute
ruler of the USSR. But Lenin did everything that Stalin would later do,
except execute fellow Communists. As Richard Pipes notes, this
"is not as significant as it may appear at first sight. Towards outsiders,
people not belonging to his order of the elect - and that included 99.7
percent of his compatriots - Lenin showed no human feelings whatever..."
(Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime)
Lenin repeatedly indicated that
large-scale killing would be necessary to bring in his utopia, and did
not shrink from this realization. His speeches and writings overflow with
calls for blood: "Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them."
"We'll ask the man, where do you stand on the question of the revolution?
Are you for it or against it? If he's against it, we'll stand him up
against a wall." As Pipes sums up, "Lenin hated what he perceived to be
the 'bourgeoisie' with a destructive passion that fully equaled Hitler's
hatred of the Jews: nothing short of physical annihilation would satisfy
him." Moreover, "The term 'bourgeoisie' the Bolsheviks applied loosely
to two groups: those who by virtue of their background or position in the
economy functioned as 'exploiters,' be they a millionaire industrialist or
a peasant with an extra acre of land, and those who, regardless of their
economic or social status, opposed Bolshevik policies." (Russia Under the
Bolshevik Regime) Lenin used all three of the tools of mass murder that his
successors and imitators would later perfect.
Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, pioneered the development of the modern
slave labor (or "concentration") camp. Inmates were generally frankly
treated as government-owned slaves, and used for the most demanding work -
such as digging arctic canals - while receiving pitifully small
rations. As Pipes explains, "Soviet concentration camps, as instituted in
1919, were meant to be a place of confinement for all kinds of undesirables,
whether sentenced by courts or by administrative organs. Liable to
confinement in them were not only individuals but also 'categories of
individuals' - that is, entire classes: Dzerzhinskii at one point proposed
that special concentration camps be erected for the 'bourgeoisie.'
By far the largest number of unnatural deaths for which Lenin and his cohorts
were responsible resulted from famine. Lenin and his regime tried to depict the
famine as simply bad luck, but the truth is rather different.
To feed his troops and keep the cities producing munitions, Lenin needed food.
He got it by "requisitioning" it from the peasantry - demanding delivery of large
sums of food for little or nothing in exchange. This led peasants to drastically
reduce their crop production. In retaliation, Lenin often ordered the seizure of
the food peasants had grown for their own subsistence, sometimes ordering the
confiscation of their seed grain as a further sanction. The Cheka and the army
began by shooting hostages, and ended by waging a second full-scale civil war
against the recalcitrant peasantry.
The ultimate results of this war against the peasantry were devastating. Official
Soviet reports admitted that
fully 30 million Soviet citizens were in danger of death by
starvation. The White forces shared little of the blame: as Pipes notes,
the Civil War was essentially over by the beginning of 1920, but Lenin
continued his harsh exploitation of the peasantry for yet another year.
Moreover, the areas under White control had actually built up a food
surplus. The horrific famine of 1921 was thus much less severe in
1920, because after the reconquest of the Ukraine and other White
territories, the Reds shipped the Whites' grain reserves to
Petrograd, Moscow, and other cities with less hunger but more political
clout. Low estimates on the deaths from this famine are about
3 million; high estimates go up to 10 million - which would probably have
been much higher if not for foreign relief efforts which Lenin had the
good sense to permit. For perspective, the last severe famine in Russia
hit in 1891-92, and cost about 400,000 lives.
The famine ended soon after Lenin relaxed his choke-hold on the peasantry,
but he showed no sign of remorse for what his policies had done. Other
Bolsheviks were shaken by the events, but Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin,
learned only to husband his strength until the peasantry could be utterly broken.
Under Lenin's rule - unlike that of his successors - executions played a far
more important role than deaths in forced labor camps.
The primary function of Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, was carrying out
summary executions of "class enemies" in what came to be known as the Red
Terror. The exact number
murdered is usually estimated at between 100,000 and 500,000, but the
chaotic wartime conditions make the accounting especially difficult.
Large-scale executions of hostages began after a failed effort of the Social
Revolutionaries to seize power in mid-1918. (The hundreds of hostages shot in
"retaliation," however, not only did not participate in the failed coup, but almost
invariably had no affiliation of any kind with the SRs). From then on the Red
Terror turned in every conceivable direction: execution of the bourgeoisie and
Czarist sympathizers; execution of White POWs and friendly civilian
populations; and finally execution of Lenin's socialist opponents.
Lenin pioneered the slave labor camp, but Stalin expanded it literally a
hundredfold. Under Lenin, the inmates numbered fewer than 100,000. By 1930,
they numbered 1,000,000. By 1940, the Gulag Archipelago housed fully
10,000,000 pitiful souls. The death rate was extraordinary: 10-30% per
year, for the prisoners performed demanding labor such as mining and
timber-cutting with minimal food and clothing in freezing temperatures. The
slaves were ruled by an elite of secret police, now
known as the NKVD. As Robert Conquest describes:
After Stalin was satisfied with the composition of the Communist Party, new
waves of victims arose. Millions of Poles were sent to slave labor camps in 1939
when Stalin and Hitler divided Poland. In 1940, Stalin annexed the Baltic states
and sent 2-4% of their populations to the slave camps. During World War II, any
ethnicity deemed disloyal was likely to be deported en masse: ethnic Germans -
including the Volga Germans who had lived in Russia for centuries - were
deported to Siberia, along with Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and other
nationalities. With the end of World War II, the prison population was
replenished not only with German POWs, and German civilians (including ethnic
Germans scattered across Europe), but with Soviet POWs. Stalin considered
captured Soviet soldiers to be traitors, so they had the opportunity to perform
slave labor for Stalin as well as Hitler.
Lenin knew that his agricultural policies might cause widespread famine, but
implemented them anyway. Stalin went further. Not only did he know that his
policies would cause widespread famine; he turned famine into a political
weapon by deliberately and selectively amplifying its horrors. Lenin nominally
gave peasants the title to their land, while effectively expropriating them by
forcing them to sell their crops for a pittance. Stalin went further by ordering the
forced collectivization of agriculture. The peasants lost their land and became
employees of the state; moreover, they had to obtain government permission to
quit their jobs, which was often impossible to obtain. State-owned serf plantations had returned to Russia after a 70-year
lapse.
Naturally, reducing landed free peasants to serfs required massive application of
government force.
Wealthy, prominent, or recalcitrant peasants were dubbed "kulaks" and deported
to Siberia. Still the peasants resisted; food production drastically declined, farm
animals were slaughtered, and surplus grain ferreted away. In 1930, the
peasants' reaction to forced collectivization was so extreme that even Stalin
backed away. But this was only a tactical retreat, and by 1934 90% of sown
acreage in the USSR was owned by collective (i.e., government) farms.
Food production of all kinds drastically declined. Slave labor in the fields proved
far less efficient than free labor; the harvest of grain and other crops shrank.
The herds of livestock often declined by 50% or more by either slaughter before
collectivization, or neglect after collectivization. But Stalin was not interested in
total food production, but in how much food he could squeeze out of the
peasants without compensation. The collective farms were ordered to surrender
their quota of food to the state, under severe penalty. As Conquest explains,
"The basic principle was that a certain amount of grain must be delivered to the
state regardless, and that this demand must be satisfied before the needs of the
peasantry could be taken into consideration. A law of 16 October 1931 forbade
reserving grain for internal kolkhoz [collective farm] needs until the procurement
plan was fulfilled." (The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the
Terror-Famine) If production declined, it could be taken out of the hides of
the peasants. This was precisely what Stalin had in mind.
From the outset, the quotas set for delivery were far too high, especially
considering the decline in total production. As the peasants began to face
severe hunger, in 1932, one might have expected the quotas to be reduced -
especially since Stalin actually had grain to export. But instead, in early 1933
Stalin demanded still more food from the desperate peasantry. Yet his exactions
were uneven: they were particularly inhuman for the Ukraine, Don, Kuban, and
lower Volga - regions where popular sentiment against Communist oppression
and Russification was strong. As Conquest notes, "Nor is it the case that the
famine, or the excessive grain targets, were imposed on the most productive
grain-producing areas as such, as a - mistaken or vicious - economic
policy merely. There was no famine in the rich Russian 'Central Agricultural
Region'; and on the other hand the grain-poor Ukrainian provinces of Volhynia
and Podilia suffered along with the rest of the country." (The Harvest of
Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine)
All of the facts point to a deliberate effort to use starvation as a tool of genocide.
Seed grain in 1932 in the Ukraine was for the first time taken from the peasants
and stored in urban granaries: officials realized that once starvation set in the
peasants would try to eat the seed grain. The Ukrainian-Russian border was
carefully guarded to keep Russian grain out of the famine-stricken Ukraine and
starving Ukrainians out of Russia. Government grain stockpiles were available,
but unused.
This mixture of ruthless methods resulted in the starvation deaths of about 7
million people: 5 million in the Ukraine, 1 million in the North Caucasus region,
and 1 million elsewhere. On top of this, a similar collectivization campaign
carried out against the nomads of Kazahkstan led to 1 million further deaths.
The famine in 1933 was the worst under Stalin's rule, but not the last. Famines
swept Eastern Europe and the USSR again after World War II, although here
the Nazis bore part of the blame. Stalin also shares responsibility for the deaths
- again mostly through hunger - of ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern
Europe with the Red Army's advance. The Communist-dominated governments
of Poland and Czechoslovakia shared with Stalin the blame for some 2 million
unnatural deaths of ethnic Germans. (see Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A
Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-
1950)
On April 7, 1935, Stalin issued a decree authorizing the death penalty for
children as young as 12 years old. While far more of Stalin's subjects died in
slave labor camps and man-made famines than from execution, even here the
numbers are startling.
There were approximately one million executions during the Great Terror of
1936-1939, and probably over five million for his entire reign. The executed
were often Stalin's opponents within the Party, or his less eager friends, or
foreign Communists. Large numbers of officers were executed. Polish POWs
taken in 1939 were executed en masse in Katyn and elsewhere. Almost all of
Stalin's comrades in the Russian Civil War were executed or assassinated at his
orders: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky, and (as recent
discoveries confirm) Kirov. Many of these were tortured, bullied, and threatened
into condemning themselves in the so-called "show trials," where they absurdly
confessed to large-scale espionage and subversion. The poetic justice of the
trials of Stalin's ex-comrades is palpable, since a Nuremberg-style trial of the
Communist leadership for crimes against humanity would have condemned most
of them to death. So numerous were Stalin's victims that amongst the oceans of
innocents executed, justice occasionally accidentally descended upon the guilty.
In comparison with Stalin's hellish regime, the rule of his successors seemed
benign. But even compared to Czarism, the rule of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and
later leaders remained bloodthirsty. There were no significant man-made
famines in the post-Stalin era. The number executed for political offenses from
1953-1991 was perhaps one or two hundred thousand, many of them
Hungarians and Czechs who opposed Soviet rule.
The significant post-Stalin mass killings were in the slave labor camps. While
living conditions in the camps greatly improved over the decades, the death rate
remained enormous: while Stalin's camps had annual fatality rates in the range
of 10-30%, the rates fell to 5-15% in the late 50's, 2-6% in the 60's, and still
lower in later periods. The slave labor population declined, but even in the
1980's was numbered in the millions. The unnatural fatality rate and the large
population in
camps add up to a major, albeit drawn-out, crime against humanity: at least 3
millions during the later part of the 50's, and 2 million more during the 60's.
Certainly even a fatality rate of 4% is high enough to qualify as reckless
endangerment of human life and therefore murder - consider that with an annual
fatality rate of 4%, 1 in 3 inmates (generally healthy young men) would not
survive a decade. There is a line-drawing problem for later periods - a 1%
fatality rate for young men is high, but probably not murder. Ironically, Western
focus on Soviet human rights abuses under the Carter and Reagan
administrations began only after mass murder in the USSR had largely ceased.
This unfortunately left the impression that prison, emigration restrictions, and
censorship were the most heinous crimes ever committed by the Soviet
leadership.
Mao, like Stalin, indisputably murdered more people than Hitler. He tyrannized
the world's most populous nation for more than a quarter century; and while by
most counts his victims were somewhat less numerous than Stalin's, the range
of error makes it quite possible that Mao Zedong was the greatest mass
murderer of the century. Mao was both the Lenin and the Stalin of Chinese
Communism: not only did he found the system, but he raised it to lethal maturity.
While Mao waited a few years to antagonize the peasants with forced
collectivization, the killing began immediately. As Laszlo Ladany observes in his
The Communist Party of China and Marxism: 1921-1985:
After Stalin's death, Khrushchev and his successors eliminated some of the most
horrific aspects of his regime. Mao denounced these reforms as "revisionism,"
studiously repeating each of Stalin's horrors. Unlike Stalin, Mao never fully
succeeded in utterly crushing internal opposition within the Chinese Communist
Party, which is probably why Mao's policies were not even more deadly than
they were.
With the aid of Soviet advisors, Mao set up a Chinese Gulag - an empire of
slave labor camps filled with poorly fed "counter-revolutionaries." As under
Stalin, the prisoners could be anyone:
former landlords, better-off peasants, civil
servants under Chiang's regime,
and eventually out-of-favor members of the
Communist Party itself.
The bulk of the deaths for which Mao was responsible stemmed from the
famines caused by his mad agricultural collectivization program, which
surpassed even Stalin's in its totalitarian aspirations. Like Lenin, Mao initially let
peasants keep their land; he focused on killing or imprisoning landlords, better-
off peasants, and other village leaders who might later resist him. This lasted for
a few years; then Mao began to seize the land that he had promised the
peasants, and force them into collective farms along Stalinist lines. The job was
basically complete by 1956. These collective farms seemed too individualistic to
Mao, so he went one step further in 1958 and forced the peasants into
"communes." The difference was mainly that all property, not merely the land,
became state property:
The communes were just one piece of Mao's overarching plan, the Great Leap
Forward. Mao's stated goal was to make enormous advances in agriculture and
industry simultaneously. Thus, in addition to setting large food quotas for
the communes, villages were also ordered to set up small-scale steel furnaces -
using local scrap metal as raw material. The pressure to surpass Mao's quotas
led to little production but a great deal of falsified economic statistics. The false
numbers were then used in future government plans, exacerbating the disaster
which was to come.
Starvation had already set in during the forced collectivization period, just as it
had under Stalin. Around five million perished from starvation even before the
Great Leap Forward began. The Great Leap Forward turned this river of deaths
into a flood, producing what was probably the single greatest famine in human
history. From 1959-1963, around 30 million Chinese perished from this man-
made famine. While exclusion of foreigners and draconian censorship kept
word of this famine from the West for many years, in recent periods historians,
demographers, and the Chinese government itself have given the world ample
evidence of Mao's most horrible crime. Yet at the time experts were incredulous.
"A BBC commentator - giving the opinion general among China experts -
declared that widespread famine in such a well-organized country was
unthinkable." (Laszlo Ladany, The Communist Party of China and Marxism:
1921-1985) The stories of recent emigres were shocking:
Insofar as official sources admitted existence of the famine following the Great
Leap Forward, it was usually blamed on bad weather - just as the man-made
famines of Lenin and Stalin had been. Natural forces did play a small role:
perhaps 1 million of the 30 million deaths could be attributed to natural disasters.
The deluded zealotry of Mao killed the rest. While even some unsympathetic
scholars argue that Mao's famine, unlike Stalin's, does not qualify as murder, the
case for Mao's personal guilt is strong. Mao's famine does not seem to have
been created for its own sake as Stalin's was. Yet Mao had the experience of
both Lenin and Stalin behind him, and knew full-well that collectivization often
leads to mass death. He implemented his policies at gunpoint with full
knowledge of these risks. Rummel points out that Mao's government tried to
alleviate the famine once it was aware of it, but millions had died even before the
Great Leap Forward began. In response Mao simply accelerated his pace -
revealing the requisite mens rea for murder.
Mao's most famous executions were not his most numerous. In the so-called
Cultural Revolution, Mao ordered massive purges of the Chinese Communist
Party and of educated professionals. After Mao's fall, purge survivors such as
Deng Xioaping seized power and ultimately exposed this crime to the world.
About one million Party members and intellectuals were killed during Mao's
Cultural Revolution - many by execution, others in the camps. Overall, however,
Mao's killing actually declined during the Cultural Revolution. During
earlier periods, millions of landlords, better-off peasants, dissidents, former
Nationalist civil servants, and other "counter-revolutionaries" were executed.
Numerical estimates are difficult to make, but probably add up to about 10-15
million.
Far more Westerners are familiar with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989
than have heard of the millions slaughtered by Mao.
An estimated 2-3,000 - and possibly as many as 12,000 -
protesters may have been killed in 1989 on the orders of Deng Xioaping.
Plainly, Mao's death has not eliminated widespread killing by the Chinese
government. It has, however, allowed the death toll to drastically decline. The
population of the slave labor camps is difficult to ascertain, but there are
probably fewer prisoners living under better conditions than during Mao's reign.
There have been no important famines since Mao's death. Executions of
political prisoners continue, but on a much smaller scale. All told, the Chinese
government has probably killed somewhat less than one million people in the
twenty years since Mao's death. The toll in human terms remains incalculable,
but China's share of the world's state-sponsored killings has drastically declined.
Former prisoners of the Chinese slave labor camps such as Harry Wu have
done much to investigate their secret history and their persistence into the
modern era. In his work Laogai: The Chinese Gulag, Harry Wu estimated
that the Chinese government still commands about 16-20 million forced laborers
of one sort of another, although in the afterward to this work Wu indicates that
his continuing research reveals this estimate too high. Of these, Wu classifies
10% as "political offenders," although it is far from clear how many of the other
90% are "criminals" in the narrow Western sense of the word. According to Wu,
as Mao's ideological fervor has waned, China has focused less on totalitarian
"re-education" of inmates and more on their frank exploitation as state-owned
assets.
Deadly slave labor camps, man-made famine, and mass executions have played
a major role in almost every Communist state. It is not possible to discuss each
country's experience in detail here. Rather, this section limits itself to a brief
examination of other Communist nations guilty of at least 1 million killings
in cold blood.
Racism and Communism can be quite compatible. During World War II, Stalin
ordered the deportation of entire nations deemed disloyal: Crimean Tatars,
Chechens, Meskhetians, Kalmyks, and ethnic Germans. Russia's German-
speaking minority was deported to Siberia early in the war. As Stalin's forces
pushed further westward into non-Soviet territory, Stalin found new reservoirs of
ethnic Germans under his dominion. Some were taken east as slave laborers;
others were expelled west as penniless refugees. After the Red Army had done
its work, provisional governments dominated by native Communists - especially
in Poland and Czechoslovakia - decided that Stalin's treatment of ethnic
Germans had been too lenient.
Even before World War II, Czechoslovakia had a German minority of about 25%
of its population. Poland's pre-war ethnic German population was less
substantial, but by joint Allied decision Poland's western border was pushed
westwards to "compensate" for Soviet annexations on Poland's eastern border.
The Communist-dominated governments of Czechoslovakia and Poland decided
to expel these ethnic Germans en masse, after expropriating them of almost all
their property, with full knowledge that in the harsh post-war conditions large
numbers of the refugees would not survive. Out of about 12 million ethnic
Germans living within the new borders of Poland and Czechoslovakia, about 11
million were expelled. Of these, about 1.5 million perished of hunger, exposure,
and other deadly post-war conditions. Were their deaths merely poetic justice,
as many people then and since have thought? Historian Alfred-Maurice de
Zayas answers no:
It is far easier to blame Communist ideology for man-made famines than for the
terrible revenge post-war governments in Poland and Czechoslovakia exacted
against their German minorities. Yet there is a real connection. On the
theoretical level, Stalin had set the precedent for imputing collective guilt to
"counter-revolutionary" ethnicities as well as "counter-revolutionary" social
classes, when he ordered the deportations of Volga Germans, Chechens,
Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and other nationalities (see Robert Conquest, The
Soviet Deportation of Nationalities). On the practical level, expropriating the
German minority gave the provisional Czech and Polish governments a stockpile
of wealth with which to buy support. Moreover, the chaos of the expulsion
period helped the Communists to crush internal opposition.
Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia also killed along standard Communist
lines. Execution of anti-Communists and dissidents, as well as internal Party
purges were significant, particularly during the remaining years of Stalin's rule.
The deaths of the expelled German minority, however, made up the greater
portion of the blood on the hands of Communist Poland and Communist
Czechoslovakia.
Ho Chi Minh, the long-lived dictator of North Vietnam, was a loyal Stalinist
throughout his life.
After French defeat, Ho followed standard Communist operating procedure.
First, kill off peasant leaders and better-off peasants to decapitate future
peasant resistance; then forced collectivization can proceed unhindered. Slave
labor camps sprang up, as did show trials. By all accounts several hundred
thousand people perished during the 1953-1956 period. The Geneva
Agreements divided Vietnam into the northern region held by Ho, and the
southern region outside of Communist control. The people of Vietnam voted
with their feet. Tallies for 1953-56 speak volumes: about 1 million northerners
chose to flee south, while only one-tenth as many southerners chose to flee
north.
Ho began guerrilla war against South Vietnam almost immediately. The war
escalated quickly; with South Vietnam close to defeat in 1964, the United States
joined in the war to prop up the failing government of South Vietnam. This
delayed the North's victory for about ten years. Throughout the war, both North
and South Vietnam engaged in large-scale killing of civilians. The United States
did so as well, although it appears that more effort was made to avoid civilian
targets than in World War II.
Ho was dead of old age by the time Communist forces triumphed in 1975, but
the post-war atrocities were in his Stalinist tradition. Slave labor plus brain-
washing yielded the infamous "re-education camps" to which anti-Communists,
dissidents, former civil servants of South Vietnam, prostitutes, and others were
condemned. The death rate of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in these
camps was high. Fear of these camps led to the exodus of hundreds of
thousands of Vietnamese on makeshift boats; many of these refugees perished
at sea. Even Vietnamese who escaped the re-education camps were often
deported to the country for milder slave labor in the "new economic zones." The
post-war executions, concentration camps, and deportations probably produced
several hundred thousand additional deaths.
A final major atrocity of the Vietnamese Communists began in 1979. The Khmer
Rouge, a Cambodian Communist faction, had been in power since 1975.
Relations between the Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge were
however hostile. Vietnam invaded and quickly defeated Cambodia in 1979,
revealing to the world the ghastly killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. Now that the
Vietnamese were in charge, however, mass murder was merely curtailed rather
than abolished. The Vietnamese puppet ruler, Heng Samrin, was himself merely
a dissident member of the Khmer Rouge, so what else could be expected?
Supported by Vietnamese troops, the Samrin regime exterminated perhaps an
additional half million Cambodians.
In any other country with a population of only 7 million, Samrin would have been
the greatest butcher in his country's history. Yet Samrin's regime seemed to be
a force for liberation, because it replaced the nightmarish regime of the Khmer
Rouge led by Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge took Mao's totalitarian communes one
step further: in addition to forcing the peasants into collective farms with
communal kitchens and barracks, Pol Pot's troops also forcibly deported the
entire urban population of Cambodia into rural communes. As Paul Johnson
explains:
The usual scapegoats - the bourgeoisie, non-Communist intellectuals, better-off
peasants - shared the fate of numerous other groups demonized by the Khmer
Rouge: the Vietnamese minority, anyone who could speak a foreign language,
teachers, monks, Muslims. Violation of any of the commune's rules could result
in a death sentence, and the rules were harsher than in any other Communist
regime. Sex was often proscribed, even for married couples, and children taken
away from their parents.
The killing rate in Cambodia has no precedent. Executions, slave labor,
and man-made famine all blended together in a nation where every person was
de facto an enslaved prisoner. Middling estimates indicate that in the short span
of 1975-1979, over 25% of Cambodia's population perished at the hands of the
Khmer Rouge. Two millions out of seven. The xenophobia of the Khmer Rouge
have led many to try to re-define them as racists rather than Communists. In
truth, the Khmer Rouge was both racist and Communist.
Tito was one of the few Yugoslavian Communists living in exile in the USSR who
managed to survive Stalin's purges. This made him a natural candidate for
leadership of Yugoslavian Communism, which he attained in the late 1930's.
Unlike most of the other Communist leaders that came to power after World War
II, Tito seized power with his own forces. He had the independent power base to
do as he wished. Executions and forced labor camps accelerated, and (as in
Poland and Czechoslovakia) a substantial ethnic German minority was expelled.
While Stalin imposed a facade of democracy upon Eastern Europe for a brief
period, Tito's police state began at once in full force. Tito's excommunication by
Stalin in 1948 sparked a new wave of terror against anyone suspected of
continuing loyalty to Moscow. Tito executed many accused "Cominformists,"
and sentenced the rest to slave labor camps. Tito sought and obtained Western
support for his heretical Communist regime, and this Western influence seems to
have greatly moderated the level of killing from the early 1950's onward.
Nevertheless, by most counts Tito's innocent victims exceed 1 million.
Lenin did not merely murder large numbers of innocent people; he did it on
principle. He did not inadvertently create a totalitarian state; he was a
totalitarian on principle. Lenin's writings explicitly state his views on the subject.
Like most Marxists in his day, Lenin advocated the "dictatorship of the
proletariat," but unlike many of his comrades, Lenin carefully clarified his
meaning: "The scientific concept, dictatorship, means neither more nor less than
unlimited power resting directly on force, not limited by anything, not restrained
by any laws or any absolute rules. Nothing else but that." Moreover, Lenin
explicitly stated that a Communist elite was needed to rule and educate the
workers for an indefinite interim period, because "The history of all countries
shows that the working class exclusively by its own efforts is able to develop
only trade union consciousness."
Even before Lenin had seized power, his program was totalitarian to the core:
"All citizens are here transformed into hired employees of the state, which is
made up of the armed workers... All that is required is that they should work
equally, should regularly do their share of the work, and should receive equal
pay." What of those who do not wish to be employees of the state? Or of the
more able and skilled who refuse to work for equal pay? Once he was firmly in
control, Lenin's program evolved to answer these difficult questions - and his
replies were deadly. For example, when the peasants refused to sell food to the
state for a pittance, Lenin threatened them with extermination: "These leeches
have drunk the blood of toilers, growing richer the more the workers starved in
the cities and factories. The vampires have gathered and continue to gather in
their hands the lands of landlords, enslaving, time and time again, the poor
peasants. Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them!" Lenin carried
out his threat: suppression of peasant uprisings cost an estimated 250,000
peasant lives. This is but one example among many: anyone who failed to obey
Lenin courted death. Freedom of speech, freedom to choose one's occupation,
freedom of religion, freedom to own property - to Lenin, all were meaningless
because they were "bourgeois."
Lenin's commitment to totalitarianism, in both theory and practice, is essentially
beyond dispute. The view of his precursor Karl Marx is more ambiguous, both
because Marx wrote less clearly than Lenin, and because Marx never held
power. In spite of this, the totalitarian strain in Marx is pronounced. He directs
much of his critique against the classical liberal concern for personal freedom
and private property - the Rights of Man, or what Marx called "bourgeois
freedom." The doctrine of the rights of man was faulty, according
to Marx, because:
For Marx, freedom of religion or the freedom to own property are
hollow freedoms, or at least grossly inadequate stepping stones
to something better: "political emancipation itself
is not human emancipation." "[B]ourgeois 'freedom
of conscience' is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds
of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part
[socialism] endeavors rather to liberate the conscience from the
witchery of religion." (Critique of the Gotha Program).
Rather than advocating freedom for all people, liberals really
value only the freedom of the ruling class of capitalist society,
viz., the bourgeoisie.
Marx accuses the liberal tradition of slighting the social nature
of man. "Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything
which does not harm others... It is a question of the liberty
of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself."
Marx elaborates: "The right of property, is, therefore, the
right to enjoy one's fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without
regard for other men and independently of society... It leads
every man to see in other men, not the realization, but
rather the limitation of his own liberty." (On
the Jewish Question)
Marx's solution, the route to human emancipation, was Communism,
which would give people the freedom that bourgeois society denies
them. Communism is, he explains, "the positive transcendence
of private property, or human self-estrangement,
and therefore the real appropriation of the human essence
by and for man... the complete return of man to himself as a social
being..." (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)
Innumerable
social thinkers disagree with much of Marx's thought, but praise
his reflections upon human freedom, the depth of his insight in
contrast to the shallowness of laissez-faire liberalism. Yet it is difficult
to understand how Marx's concept of freedom is anything more than
a defense of tyranny and oppression. No dissident or non-conformist
can see society as the "realization of his own liberty."
And what can the attack on "the right to do everything which
does not harm others" amount to in practice, except a justification
for coercing people who are not harming others? The problem with
"broad" notions of freedom is that they necessarily
wind up condoning the violation of "narrow" notions
of freedom. Under "bourgeois" notions of religious liberty,
people may practice any religion they wish ("a private whim
or caprice" as Marx calls it); how could this liberty be
broadened, without sanctioning the persecution of some religious
views?
While Marx occasionally says something in favor of democracy, Lenin did not
originate the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was Marx's
creation. In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx explains, "Between
capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary
transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a
political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the
revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." It is not clear how long Marx
thought this transitional dictatorship would last. As democratic socialist historian
Carl Landauer notes:
Marx's thought did not provide the blueprint for Communist totalitarianism, but it
did provide a rough outline for more practical men like Lenin to elaborate upon.
Marx was a leading figure in a broad socialist tradition. Much of this tradition
shared his critique of "bourgeois freedom" and longed for a world in which the
government eliminated both the economic and personal freedom of capitalist
civilization. Such ideas may be found in the works of Rousseau, Saint-Simon,
Auguste Comte, Ferdinand Lassalle, and many other prominent thinkers. Even
socialists critical of authoritarianism such as Bernstein mainly tried to convince
their fellow socialists of the value of democracy, showing little appreciation of the
danger that universal state ownership as such could pose to human freedom, or
the conflict between freedom and enforced equality.
Communists often deviated from Marxism on small points, but almost invariably
remained true to the broader authoritarian socialist tradition if they could get
away with it. Thus, the Khmer Rouge reversed Marx's emphasis on the urban
industrial proletariat, idealizing peasant life so strongly that they forcibly
deported Cambodia's city dwellers into the country. Their inspiration came from
other authoritarian socialists, such as Rousseau. What varies is what the
Communist state forces its subjects to do; what is constant is that the
Communist state recognizes no constraints upon its rule. The variable portion of
the program usually but not always comes from Marx. The constant comes from
the critique of "bourgeois freedom" found in the broader socialist tradition.
Placing Nazism, Italian Fascism, and related movements in proper
historical perspective sheds further light on the socialist-totalitarian connection. Nazism's connection with Communism is somewhat complex, and
is discussed in the next section. The connection with Italian Fascism,
however, is quite direct: until 1914, Benito Mussolini was the leader of
the Socialist Party of Italy. He was a staunch proponent of revolutionary
rather than reformist socialism, and actually received Lenin's
endorsement and support for expelling reformists from the Socialist Party.
Mussolini split with the Socialist Party over participation in World War I,
not over abstract theory, or economic doctrine. As A. James Gregor
explains Mussolini's fall from leadership of the Socialist Party: "On the
day after Mussolini's call for a change in Party policy [on the war], the
directive committee of the Party called a meeting to discuss the issues
involved. The meeting was a heated exchange between Mussolini and the
orthodox majority, almost all of whom favored adherence to the traditional
commitment to absolute neutrality. In the face of almost unanimous
opposition, Mussolini submitted his resignation as editor of Avanti!" (Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism) During World War I, Mussolini publicized his new synthesis
of nationalism and socialism, contrasting his view with orthodox Marxist
internationalism. As violent verbal and physical clashes between
Mussolini's followers and the Socialist Party escalated, Mussolini finally
opted to cast aside the "socialist" label. But he freely admitted that
his position was a hybrid of nationalism and socialism:
At the root of Mussolini's heresy was the realization that a socialism
based on concrete tribal affections would appeal far more to the "man
in the street" than a socialism based on the abstract solidarity of
the international proletariat. Eliminating domestic class conflict would
allow Italy to industrialize and become a great power. The galvanizing Enemy naturally became the foreigner rather than the capitalist. Again
quoting Gregor, "Mussolini insisted that the only socialism that would be
viable in the twentieth century would be a socialism committed to national development, both economic and political. The commitment to national tasks involved fundamental common interests uniting all the special economic and parochial interests of the population."
Mussolini's heresy thrived not because he repudiated socialism, but rather
because he and threw out Marxism's internationalist bathwater but kept the socialist baby. He was therefore able to appeal to socialist sentiment
and Italian jingoism at the same time. "To insist, as did the orthodox
socialists and communists, that so many Italians had died in the benighted
service of capitalism left many Italian families, bereft of their sons and
fathers, without dignity or consolation." (A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism) Instead Mussolini
reached out to veterans and their families as well as other segments of
Italian society sympathetic to his message. One of these segments,
unsurprisingly, were other disaffected socialists; quoting Gregor,
"the rank and file membership of the socialist organizations began to
defect in large numbers, and soon over half a million workers were organized in Fascist syndicates. Socialism gave every evidence of
disintegration." Or rather, orthodox socialism gave every evidence of disintegration. In would not be long before the former leader of the Socialist Party was the dictator of Italy, Italy's official ideology was his heretical socialist doctrine.
Stalinist invective against Trotsky, proclaiming him an arch-enemy of
socialism, has long met with historians' ridicule. The official Comintern
line on fascism, however, met with far less skepticism then and since, but it is hard to see why. Mussolini's struggle with the Italian socialists
was, like the conflict between Stalinists and Trotskyists, an intra-socialist struggle. Both were a mixture of personality clashes
and relatively minor ideological differences within the totalitarian camp.
Both Stalin and Mao's Communist governments indisputably murdered more
people in cold blood than even Hitler's Nazi regime did. This certainly
establishes a powerful prima facie case for the proposition that Communism and
Nazism are "morally equivalent." Once it is granted that a regime deliberately
murdered millions of innocent people, it is difficult to see how any other
achievement - the world's best highway or the world's biggest dam - could
change one's final evaluation.
Probably the most common distinction made between the Communists and the
Nazis is that the former were misguided idealists, while the later were brutal
thugs. Alternately, one might argue that the Communists ultimately wanted a
world where all people would live together in harmony, while the Nazis wanted a
world where the master race reigned supreme over a world purged of inferior
races. In short, the difference between Communist and Nazi is supposed to be
one of intentions. Joseph Davies, the pro-Stalin US Ambassador to the
USSR, gave this point of view its classic expression:
Both Germany and Soviet Russia are totalitarian states. Both are realistic. Both
are strong and ruthless in their methods. There is one distinction, however, and
that is as clear as black and white. It can be simply illustrated. If Marx, Lenin, or
Stalin had been firmly grounded in the Christian faith, either Catholic or
Protestant, and if by reason of that fact this communistic experiment in Russia
had been projected upon this basis, it would probably be declared to be one of
the greatest efforts of Christian altruism in history to translate the ideals of
brotherhood and charity as preached in the gospel of Christ into a government of
men... That is the difference - the communistic Soviet state could function with
the Christian religion in its basic purpose to serve the brotherhood of man. It
would be impossible for the Nazi state to do so. The communistic ideal is that
the state may evaporate and be no longer necessary as man advances into
perfect brotherhood. The Nazi ideal is the exact opposite - that the state is the
supreme end of all. (Journal entry, July 7, 1941)
This "argument from intentions" needs to be answered on two levels:
Admittedly, Hitler
did not carry out massive uncompensated collectivization as Stalin did. Why
not? The reason was strategic rather than principled.
As Hitler explained to Hermann Rauschning:
If the Communists and the Nazis were so similar in their propensity for mass
murder, their fanaticism, and their economic policies, why were their relations so
bitter (save during the 1939-1941 period)? At the outset, it is unclear why an
answer is necessary, for there
are innumerable examples of bloody conflict between people in nearly complete
agreement with each other: Catholics and Protestants, or Stalinists and
Trotskyists, for example. In the case of the Nazi-Communist conflict, what
provoked the Nazis' ire was the internationalism of the Communist
movement. National Socialists mainly objected to Marxism not for its socialism
but for its repudiation of nationalism. And even this difference rapidly
faded away; as A. James Gregor argues, "Since 1918 most revolutionary movements have displayed certain ideological commitments that, were it not for our entrenched preconceptions, could pass as the analogues of the first Fascism. For all the talk of proletarian revolutions in the twentieth
century, no revolution of our time has been proletarian in any intelligible
sense of the word." (Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism) Communists from Russia to China, Cuba to North Korea, were
quick to steal Mussolini's key tactical insights: nationalism appeals to
the "man in the street" far more than internationalism, and a foreign
enemy/scapegoat is often more useful than a domestic one. Thus, notes
Gregor, especially while they are fighting to gain power, Communists'
propaganda has generally argued that "Rather than any specific internal class enemy, the enemy is imperialism, the reactionary and oppressor nations, that thwart the independence and industrial development of
the oppressed nation." Similarly, once comfortably ensconced in power,
nationalism has frequently been the most sincerely held precept of the Communist elite, leaving almost no doctrinal point to distinguish them from
their alleged Nazi anthithesis. One cannot but remember the concluding
sentence of Orwell's Animal Farm:
Absolutely not, and I frankly find it extremely puzzling that anyone would make
such an inference. Does a condemnation of Nazi genocide indicate an
indifference to American atrocities? Surely not. History is not a race with a
single victor, but a courtroom able to try each suspect for his own crime.
Unfair accusations of this kind have dogged the would-be exposers of Communist human
rights violations at least since 1930's. Thus, Eugene Lyons, in his The Red Decade:
The Stalinist Penetration of America, published in 1941, pointedly observed that:
But this gracious leeway is denied to writers hostile to Stalinist Russia and its foreign
conspiratorial empire. When they mention millions of corpses in a Ukrainian famine, they are
told off neatly with a scathing reference to the Okies in California. Should they allude to
the Soviet purges, they are hit over the head with Mooney and Billings. Until the Soviet-Nazi
Pact made the procedure a bit awkward, their indictment of terror in Soviet Russia was instantly
canceled out by reference to Nazi terror in Germany.
There is a grim irony in the mistaken inference that a person concerned with Communist atrocities
somehow excuses U.S. human rights violation.
The truth is that the most egregious crimes
committed by the United States government in this century occurred while the
United States was in alliance with the Soviet Union. Indiscriminate terror
bombing of Germany and Japan during World War II probably cost several
hundred thousand civilian lives. Arguably as a result of this alliance, much of
Asia and eastern Europe came under Communist control. Thus, much of the
history of Communism indirectly condemns the United States as well. A myopic
focus on the Cold War era loses sight of the bulk of harm the American
government has inflicted on the world.
In the midst of civil wars, Red and White forces' level of indiscriminate killing
tends to be roughly proportional to the number of people under their control.
During the Chinese Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists killed more people
than the Communists, mainly because they had control of more of the country for
a longer period. During the Russian Civil War, the Whites were outnumbered,
so the Communists' killings were not surprisingly greater. (It is also worth
pointing out that frequently Communists, including Lenin, began their revolution
not against "rightist" Whites but against moderate democratic socialists).
When the serious killing starts, and where the important differences reveal
themselves, is after one side is victorious. Communist regimes usually escalate
the killing after victory, and typically keep it high for one or two generations.
White forces usually execute and imprison many of their opponents after victory,
but rarely set up massive slave labor empires or impose man-made famines. In
consequence they normally murder far fewer people in total, as a glance at the
list of leading mass murdering regimes confirms.
There are currently three main exhibits running. The first two discuss the origins
of Communism in both the Marxist and the Czarist traditions. In addition, the
Museum has recently opened the first of a fifteen part sequence surveying the
history of Communism. The exhibit currently on display provides an in-depth
look at Lenin, his ideas, and the consequences of his seizure of power.
Parts II-XV of the survey of the history of Communism will appear gradually, in
sequence. Several new interactive features will soon be added, along with some
Special Exhibits.
So far, the Museum has been my personal project. But I would very much
like to receive exhibits relevant to the Museum's mission. Whether you
would like to write about the effect of Communism upon your life, the
history of your mother country, or a broader topic, I would very much like
to hear about it. Write to me at
bcaplan@gmu.edu to tell
me about your ideas.
Communism is in serious decline today, but history has a way of repeating itself.
For this reason alone, it is important for the future of the world that the basic
facts about Communist regimes become common knowledge. While admirers of
Hitler's Germany still exist, the public knows enough about the Holocaust to
make a revival of Nazism far less likely than it otherwise would be. Greater
awareness of the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao could similarly inoculate the
world against any future Communist revival.
I would also suggest a stronger and more controversial set of practical
implications:
In American politics, liberals typically argue for more personal freedom and less
economic freedom, while conservatives argue for less personal freedom and
more economic freedom. The moral controlled experiment which was
Communism suggests that both popular positions are confused. Each only
appreciates half of what was wrong about Communism. A political philosophy
recognizing the supreme value of both personal and economic freedom - in a
word, libertarianism -
provides the clearest insight into why Communism was wrong in principle as well
as practice.
(N.B. Others have taken issue with some of Rummel's calculations, but not
with his basic conclusions. For a reproduction of Rummel's tabulations,
go to Freedom's Nest).
Whether it is more immoral to persecute people because of their opinions than
to victimize them because of their former position or their descent may be
arguable... But whether a child is made to perish because his parents were
Jewish or because his father had a few cows too many and therefore was
regarded as a kulak, or whether a man is excluded from jobs because he is a
Negro or because he used to be a merchant - in all these cases the victim is
penalized for something that has nothing to do with moral guilt and that
originated in the past, so that it cannot now be changed. If Communists argued
that the incidence of counterrevolutionary designs was greater among kulaks or
former bourgeois than among workers, we may remember Hitler's argument that
the incidence of some types of crimes was higher among Jews than among non-
Jews, and similar arguments of American racists with regard to Negroes or
Orientals.(European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)
EICHMANN'S MINUTES FROM THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE
PRESENTED AS EVIDENCE AT HIS TRIAL:
Living in forced isolation,
the inmates formed a pool of slave labor on which
Soviet administrative and economic institutions could draw at no cost."
(The Russian Revolution) The number of people in these camps
according to Pipes was about 50,000 prisoners in 1920 and 70,000 in 1923;
many of these did not survive the inhuman conditions. The inmates might
be bourgeoisie, or peasants, or members of other socialist factors such as the
Mensheviks or the Social Revolutionaries, or members of
ethnicities thought to be hostile to the Bolsheviks, such as the Don Cossacks.
The death rates in these camps appear to have been in the extreme hardship
range of 10-30%. While the number thus killed was only a small percentage of
the total exterminated under Lenin's regime, it laid the foundation for Stalin's
slave labor empire.
Joseph Stalin won a leading role in the Communist Party during Lenin's failing
years, and after a few years of power-sharing he obtained dictatorial powers that
exceeded even those of Lenin. In recent years,
historians have gradually recognized that Stalin was personally responsible for
the murder of more people than any other human being in the 20th century - and
probably any other century. Stalin took Lenin's system of slave labor camps and
turned it into a vast secret empire in the depths of Siberia. Lenin chose to let
millions starve to death in order to sustain his war effort, but Stalin went further
by deliberately engineering famines on an even greater scale. Finally, Stalin
crossed the one line that Lenin would not, by ordering the executions of fellow
Communists on a massive scale.
In the vast empty spaces in the north and the Far East, areas as big as fair-sized
countries came under complete NKVD control. There were many camps
scattered through the Urals, in the Archangel area, and more especially in and
around Karaganda and on the new railway being built from
Turkestan to Siberia. But in these, the NKVD administered only comparatively
small enclaves... The two biggest true colonies of the NKVD empire were the
great stretch of northwestern Russia beyond the Kotlas, comprising roughly what
is shown on the map as the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and the
even vaster area of the Far East centered on the gold fields of Kolyma. These
regions had, before the NKVD took over, populations of a handful of Russians
and a few thousand Arctic tribesmen. A decade later, they held between them
something between 1.25 and 2 million prisoners. (The Great Terror)
Who were the prisoners? Before Stalin's collectivization of agriculture, the
composition was quite mixed. Anyone who opposed the Communists, from
Czarist reactionary to Social Revolutionary, might be consigned to the camps.
While almost invariably innocent of any definite action against their government,
they were perceived as potential enemies. After 1930, the composition of the
camps drastically changed. Suddenly, millions upon millions of peasant families
were sentenced to Siberia. Stalin called them "kulaks," or wealthy farmers,
though in fact any peasant somehow caught up in resistance to forced
collectivization was labeled a "kulak."
As the democratic socialist Carl Landauer observes:
Between the persecution of the Armenians by the Turks during the
First World War and the extermination of "undesirable" races by Hitler, the
Bolshevik campaign against the kulaks and the former bourgeois was probably
the only instance in which large masses of men, women, and children were by
administrative order dislodged from their places of habitation and brought into
camps where many, if not most of them, were sure to perish - and were
meant to perish. (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and
Movements)
After Stalin crushed peasant resistance, the enormous death rate in the slave
labor camps ensured that the number of inmates could not remain steady -
unless more and more people were declared enemies of the people and
sentenced to Siberia. Stalin claimed to find conspiracies and enemies
everywhere. "Kulaks" were blamed for all agricultural failures, while "wreckers"
bore responsibility for industrial disasters. Intellectuals, ethnic leaders, and
officers in the military became targets. Anyone with contact with foreign
countries could be easily declared a spy. Then Stalin began to target fellow
Communists, purging them for left deviations, right deviations, treason, and
espionage. As Conquest notes, at the 1939 Party Congress,
"Of the 1,966 delegates to the [1934] Congress, 1,108 had been arrested for
counter-revolutionary crimes." (The Great Terror) Sentences to Siberia
were their typical fate. Foreign Communists living in the USSR, especially
foreign Communists from non-democratic countries, almost invariably wound up
in Siberia. Even the NKVD itself was purged, so that the secret policeman of
today might be the inmate of tomorrow.
Stalin's slave empire lasted so long and went through so many waves of victims
that one is left speechless. So many millions perished within the Gulag
Archipelago for so many reasons, or for no reason. With a minimum of
5,000,000 slave laborers from 1931 to 1950, and a minimum death toll of 10%
per year - both improbably low figures - one can conclude that Stalin's camps
claimed a minimum of 10,000,000 victims, and easily two or three times as
many.
There are few parallels in history for what the [Chinese] Communists did [when
they first came to power]. The French Revolution had many victims, but it did
not institute a lasting political system. The October Revolution in the Soviet
Union was not a peaceful affair, but the mass killings did not come till years
later, during Stalin's collectivisation... In China, the terror - what else can one
call it? - was widespread and saw the beginning of a lasting system.
By most estimates, the typical slave labor camp population during Mao's reign
was between 10 and 15 million. The conditions were deadly, but markedly safer
than those experienced by Stalin's Siberian slaves. Annual death rates in the
Soviet camps under Stalin ranged from 10-30%, while under Mao the rates were
more along the lines of 5-10%. This is partly due to the more favorable climate,
but also because Mao was more interested than Stalin in getting work out of his
slaves. In any case, these death rates are surely high enough to warrant murder
charges for the inmates' deaths - which must have summed to well over 10
million.
The peasant was now the property of the commune, to labor like factory workers
in teams and brigades at whatever was commanded, to eat in common mess
halls, and often to sleep together in barracks. Family life and traditions,
personal property and privacy, personal initiative and individual freedom, were
destroyed or lost in an instant for around one-seventh of all mankind. (R.J.
Rummel, China's Bloody Century)
Peasants lacked the strength to work, and some collapsed in the fields and died.
City government organisations and schools sent people to the villages by night
to buy food, bartering clothes and furniture for it. In Shenyang the newspaper
reported cannibalism. Desperate mothers strangled children who cried for food.
Many reported that villagers were flocking into the cities in search of food; many
villages were left empty, only the old people who were not strong enough to go
into the cities being left behind. It was also said that peasants were digging
underground pits to hide their food. (Laszlo Ladany, The Communist Party of
China and Marxism: 1921-1985)
All victims of injustice deserve our respect. The crimes committed by the Nazis
and Soviets against the Poles in the years 1939 to 1945 move us to essential
identification with them. The merciless revenge that poured over the entire
German civilian population of Eastern Europe, in particular in those sad years of
the expulsions from 1945 to 1948, should also awaken compassion, for in either
case the common people - farmers and industrial workers, the rich and the poor -
all were the victims of politics and of politicians... Every crime is reprehensible,
regardless of the nationality of its victim - or of the victimizer. (Alfred-Maurice de
Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European
Germans, 1944-1950)
He attended the founding congress of the French Communist Party in 1920,
acquired a revolutionary education in Moscow during the early 20's, and served
as a Comintern advisor in China until 1927. During World War II, he fought the
Japanese in China and in Vietnam, proclaiming himself leader of a provisional
government in 1945. His following at this stage was still small, but over the
course of a nine-year guerrilla war against the French, Ho crushed internal
opposition in order to make himself the Stalin of Vietnam:
As the Viet Minh struggled against the French, they also fought a vicious hidden
war against their noncommunist nationalist competitors. They assassinated,
executed, and massacred whole groups of nationalists, including relatives,
friends, women, and children. Nationalists were not the only victims: "class
enemies" were also "punished," and communist ranks were purified of
Trotskyites and others who deviated from accepted scripture. Thousands
among the most educated and brightest Vietnamese were wiped out in the years
1945 to 1947 that it took the communists to firmly establish their power. (R.J.
Rummel, Death By Government)
The scheme was an attempt to telescope, in one terrifying coup, the
social changes brought about over twenty-five years in Mao's China. There was
to be "total social revolution." Everything about the past was "anathema and
must be destroyed." It was necessary to "psychologically reconstruct individual
members of society." It entailed "stripping away, through terror and other
means, the traditional bases, structures and forces which have shaped and
guided an individual's life" and then "rebuilding him according to party doctrines
by substituting a new series of values." (Modern Times)
Tito was present in Yugoslavia to initiate guerrilla warfare against the Nazis after
Hitler sneak attacked the USSR. During World War II, Tito's forces waged a
two-front war: one against the Nazis and domestic collaborators, the other
against non-Communist opponents of the Germans. Even before assuming
power, Tito had the blood of 100,000 innocents on his hands - wartime gave him
ideal conditions for exterminating domestic opposition. This strategy left Tito in
full control of Yugoslavia after the German surrender.
Under Communist rule, North Korea has been so closed to the outside world that
it is very difficult even to estimate how many people were exterminated under the
rule of Kim Il-sung and his successors. All available information indicates that
Kim imitated the most brutal aspects of Stalinism and Maoism, often taking them
to new heights. The slave labor empire Kim established is reputed to be
extensive and deadly, his executions numerous, and his country often near
starvation. Extrapolating Soviet or Chinese death rates to Kim's regime makes it
extremely likely that he is responsible for one million or more innocent deaths.
None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the
egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that
is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into
himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting
in accordance with his private caprice... Thus man was not liberated
from religion; he received religious liberty. He was not liberated
from property; he received the liberty to own property. He was
not liberated from the egoism of business; he received the liberty
to engage in business.
On the Jewish Question
Gradually, it became evident that the transition from capitalism to socialism
would take not merely months or years but decades, and therefore the extreme
left wing of the social revolutionists was compelled to take one further step. If it
was permissible and even necessary to throw one's country for so long a period
into the horrors of civil war and dictatorship, was it then not illogical to balk at the
use of deceit, torture, provocation - in fact of any means that would speed up the
revolution? Was it not clear that the actions of revolutionaries in the transition
period should be governed only by the law of expediency, and that sincerity,
mercy, justice toward the individual had as little place in the struggle of classes
as in the jungle? (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and
Movements)
Although Mussolini finally decided that the term "socialist" had become
so debased and devoid of specific meaning that he recommended its
abandonment, he was quick to remind his readers that he was prepared to
assimilate everything that remained vital in the tradition. He argued
that his objections to socialism were addressed to the form of socialism
that had rigidified into dogma and was no longer capable of confronting
concrete reality with any intellectual independence... Those socialists
who chose to abandon the nation in pursuit of socialist interests not only
failed in their obligations to the many who had died in a revolutionary
and progressive war, but also violated the letter and the spirit of the
best traditions of socialism. (A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism)
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good...
Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the
evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination... That was how the
agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the
conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the
colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late),
by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to
ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a
scale calculated in the millions. (The Gulag Archipelago)
Hitler noted that Communists made excellent converts to Nazism, because the
same personality type was attracted to both. "[T]here is more that binds us to
Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine,
revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there
are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and
given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once.
The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never
make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will." (quoted in Hermann
Rauschning, Hitler Speaks) Stalin also recognized that ex-Nazis and ex-
fascists were natural recruits for post-war Communist regimes. As Stanley
Payne notes in his A History of Fascism: 1914-1945, "All over Soviet-
occupied eastern Europe, most rank-and-file former fascist party members,
together with many lower-level leaders, were welcomed to fill the ranks of the
initially exiguous local Communist parties. The psychological transition seems
to have been an easy one, for obvious reasons."
Ribbentrop reported: "It felt like being among old party comrades." He was as
much at ease in the Kremlin, he added, "as among my old Nazi friends." Stalin
toasted Hitler and said he "knew how much the German people loved the
Fuhrer." There were brutal jokes about the Anti-Comintern Pact, now dead,
which both sides agreed had been meant simply to impress the City of London
and "English shopkeepers." There was the sudden discovery of a community of
aims, methods, manners, and, above all, of morals. As the tipsy killers lurched
about the room, fumblingly hugging each other, they resembled nothing so much
as a congregation of rival gangsters, who had fought each other before, and
might do so again, but were essentially in the same racket.
The Nazis and Soviets applied almost identical internal policies to their
respective halves of defeated Poland. "While the Gestapo organized the
persecution of 'racial enemies' in German-occupied Poland, the NKVD decrees
of 1940 listed fourteen categories of people to be deported... Like the SS and
the Gestapo, the NKVD was engaged, as General Wladyslaw Anders later put it,
in 'beheading the community' - destroying any potential leadership which might
organized opposition to Soviet rule."
(Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Origins of Its
Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev) Hitler and Stalin even traded
dissident emigres: Stalin handed over the German Communists in exchange for
the Russians and Ukrainians residing within Hitler's domain.
In a history of socialism, fascism deserves a place not only as the opponent
which, for a time, threatened to obliterate the socialist movement. Fascism is
connected with socialism by many crosscurrents, and the two movements have
some roots in common, especially the dissatisfaction with the capitalist economy
of the pre-1918 type. But another relationship is still more significant. Although
fascism was ready to use forms of economic organization first suggested by the
socialists - and very likely that use of socialistic forms would have increased if
fascism had not all but destroyed itself in causing the Second World War - the
Fascists have always repudiated the fundamental humanitarianism on which the
socialist movement was based. Thus fascism permits some conclusions as to
the consequences which will result from socialist economic policies applied
without the ethical motivation of socialism.(European Socialism: A History of
Ideas and Movements)
Hitler's economic policies extensively increased the regulation of foreign trade
and agriculture, imposed widespread price controls, initiated large public works
programs, and copied the Soviets' predilection for N-year Plans. As David
Schoenbaum pointedly remarks in his Hitler's Social Revolution,
"A generation of Marxist and neo-Marxist mythology notwithstanding, probably never
in peacetime has an ostensibly capitalist economy been directed as non- and even
anti-capitalistically as the Germany economy between 1933 and 1939." Summing up
the situation of business under the Nazis, Schoenbaum observes: "Wages, prices,
working conditions, allocation of materials: none of these were left to managerial
decision, let alone to the market... Investment was controlled, occupational freedom
was dead, prices were fixed, every major sector of the economy was, at worst, a victim,
at best, an accomplice of the regime. As a general rule, business, particularly big
business, declined or flourished in direct proportion to its willingness to collaborate."
He [Hitler] had no intention, like Russia, of "liquidating" the possessing class.
On the contrary, he would compel it to contribute by its abilities towards the
building up of the new order. He could not afford to allow Germany to vegetate
for years, as Russia had done, in famine and misery. Besides, the present
owners of property would be grateful that their lives had been spared. They
would be dependent and in a condition of permanent fear of worse things to
come. (Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks)
There is strong evidence that Hitler planned a much more radical economic
program after victory in World War II: forcible deportation of eastern Europe's
peoples, re-colonization of the depopulated territory by Germans, establishment
of a Stalin-style slave labor empire for public works, imposition of slavery for
inferior races, and so on. Stanley Payne explains that Hitler's goals and
situation required him to "invert the Leninist-Stalinist priority of internal
revolution." That is, while Lenin and Stalin planned to first impose socialism on
the Soviet Union, then turn to foreign conquest, Hitler planned to make his
conquests first, then impose the more radical Nazi economic and political
policies. "Hitler could only realize his ultimate goal of complete racial revolution
by foreign conquest, and he believed that he enjoyed only a brief window of
opportunity - scarcely more than a decade - to achieve external ascendancy in
Europe and to conquer the Lebensraum needed for this racial revolution.
Hitler therefore sought to develop rapidly a functional dictatorship that would
enable him to concentrate on military expansion in less than a decade. This
required the thorough subordination of all other elites to such a system, but, for
the time being, not their complete elimination." (A History of Fascism, 1914-
1945)
The creatures outside looked from pig to
man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was
impossible to say which was which.
Certain of my colleagues, having lived in Nazi Germany and learned to recognize Hitler's
methods, have written books exposing the Nazi regime and its intrigues on American soil.
As far as I am aware they have not been reprimanded for not saving the Southern share-croppers
instead. No book reviewer or liberal commentator has sneered at them, "Why must you carry on
about concentration camps and political murder in Germany? What about Sacco and Vanzetti and
Negro lynchings?" It is assumed, sensibly, that they happen to know more about Germany.
