Museum of Communism FAQ By Bryan Caplan
- 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.
- 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
- Classifica. Soviet Union Communist China Nazi Germany Nationalist China Imperial Japan Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge Turkey under the Young Turks Communist Vietnam Communist Poland Pakistan under Yahya Khan
- One might note that out of this hall of shame, probably only Nazi Germany widely enjoys the reputation it deserves.
- What were the most significant human rights violations committed by Communist regimes, and who was responsible for them?
- 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.
- genocide of numerous ethnic minorities deemed disloyal or anti- Communist.
- frequently killed large numbers of rival Communists.
- Carl Landauer notes in his discussion of Stalin's "dekulakization" campaign: 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,
- 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.
- Deaths due to extreme hardship conditions in slave labor camps 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.
- 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
- 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%).
- researchers of Nazi atrocities have routinely and sensibly counted the deaths of slave laborers under inhuman conditions as murder.
- "natural diminution"? EICHMANN:
- mass death due to man-made famine can be fairly described as an original Communist invention.
- 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....When peasants chose not to sell, government troops began seizing grain
- Lenin. The final result was a massive famine in which about 5 million people perished.
- 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.
- pattern repeated itself in China when Mao collectivized agriculture, and appears at some point in the history of most Communist regimes.
- evidence indicates that the man-made famines were either intentional (under e.g. Stalin) or at least the result of malevolent indifference
- When the famine finally threatened to destroy his regime, Lenin dropped requisitioning and price
- execution of innocent people has led to far fewer deaths than either slave labor camps or man-made famine.
- 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.
- freedom to migrate - even within national borders - has frequently been severely restricted. Freedom of speech, conscience, and religion have been ruthlessly suppressed
- Communist regimes rejected on principle the economic freedom to own property, engage in business,
- 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.
- What were the most important human rights violations committed under Lenin's rule?
- A series of strokes after the Civil War, and his early death in 1924, gave him a mere five years to reign.
- Lenin did everything that Stalin would later do, except execute fellow Communists.
- Lenin repeatedly indicated that large-scale killing would be necessary to bring in his utopia, and did not shrink from this realization.
- "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."
- Lenin used all three of the tools of mass murder
- Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, pioneered the development of the modern slave labor (or "concentration") camp.
- 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 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%.
- it laid the foundation for Stalin's slave
- 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.
- 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,
- The Cheka and the army began by shooting
- The ultimate results of this war against the peasantry were devastating.
- Low estimates on the deaths from this famine are about 3 million; high estimates go up to 10 million
- Under Lenin's rule - unlike that of his successors - executions played a far more important role than deaths in forced labor camps.
- summary executions of "class enemies" in what came to be known as the Red Terror.
- murdered is usually estimated at between 100,000 and 500,000, but the chaotic wartime conditions make the accounting especially difficult.
- execution of the bourgeoisie and Czarist sympathizers; execution of White POWs and friendly civilian populations; and finally execution of Lenin's socialist opponents.
- What were the most important human rights violations committed by Stalin?
- 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.
- Finally, Stalin crossed the one line that Lenin would not, by ordering the executions of fellow Communists on a massive scale.
- 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)
- 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)
- one can conclude that Stalin's camps claimed a minimum of 10,000,000 victims, and easily two or three times as many.
- 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.
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- There were approximately one million executions during the Great Terror of 1936-1939, and probably over five million for his entire reign.
- 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.
- What were the most important human rights violations perpetrated by the Soviet Union during the post-Stalin era?
- even compared to Czarism, the rule of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and later leaders remained bloodthirsty.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- What were Mao's greatest crimes against humanity?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
- From 1959-1963, around 30 million Chinese perished from this man- made famine.
- "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)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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,"
- What were the greatest abuses of Communist regimes outside of the USSR and China?
- Poland and Czechoslovakia... During World War II, Stalin ordered the deportation of entire nations deemed disloyal: Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Meskhetians, Kalmyks, and ethnic Germans.... (Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950)
- 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).
- Vietnam Ho Chi Minh, the long-lived dictator of North Vietnam, was a loyal Stalinist throughout his life.
- 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)
- 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.
- Cambodia 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 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)
- Yugoslavia Tito was one of the few Yugoslavian Communists living in exile in the USSR who managed to survive Stalin's
- Tito had the blood of 100,000 innocents on his hands - wartime gave him ideal conditions for exterminating domestic opposition.
- Unlike most of the other Communist leaders that came to power after World War II, Tito seized power with his own forces.
- Executions and forced labor camps accelerated, and (as in Poland and Czechoslovakia) a substantial ethnic German minority was expelled.
- Tito's excommunication by Stalin in 1948 sparked a new wave of terror against anyone suspected of continuing loyalty to Moscow.
- Tito's innocent victims exceed 1 million.
- North Korea 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.
- 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.
- Lenin and totalitarianism
- He did not inadvertently create a totalitarian state; he was a totalitarian on principle.
- Like most Marxists in his day, Lenin advocated the "dictatorship of the proletariat,"
- Lenin explicitly stated that a Communist elite was needed to rule and educate the workers for an indefinite interim period,
- "All citizens are here transformed into hired employees of the state, which is made up of the armed workers...
- when the peasants refused to sell food to the state for a pittance, Lenin threatened them with extermination:
- Marx and totalitarianism
- 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.
- The doctrine of the rights of man was faulty, according to Marx, because: None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man...For Marx, freedom of religion or the freedom to own property are hollow freedoms... '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).
- 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)
- 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.
- LIBERTÀ. 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.
- Lenin did not originate the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was Marx's creation. In his Critique of the Gotha Program,
- Carl Landauer notes: Gradually, it became evident that the transition from capitalism to socialism would take not merely months or years but decades,
- Socialism and totalitarianism
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- Mussolini.... he freely admitted that his position was a hybrid of nationalism and socialism: 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)
- 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.
- 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.
- Were Communism and Nazism "morally equivalent" movements?
- 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."
- Probably the most common distinction made between the Communists and the Nazis is that the former were misguided idealists,
- 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.
- Joseph Davies, the pro-Stalin US Ambassador... 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.
- This "argument from intentions" needs to be answered on two levels:
- First, many people are both misguided idealists and brutal thugs. They are the "true believers" who join religious crusades, set up the Inquisition, exterminate Jews, and liquidate kulaks.
- As Solzhenitsyn puts it: To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good...
- 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.
- 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... (quoted in Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks)
- Second, both the Nazis and the Communists dreamed of universal brotherhood - after widescale exterminations of groups potentially disruptive to their respective utopias.
- Just as the Nazis imagined an idyllic Germany free of inferior races, the Communists dreamed of a harmonious world free of reactionary classes.
- Further interesting evidence of the moral equivalence of the two movements comes during the period of 1939-1941, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were in a state of virtual alliance. The Molotov-Rippentrop Pact was officially merely a non-aggression treaty, but its secret provisions divided up all of eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Paul Johnson amusingly recounts the diplomatic festivities in the Kremlin: Ribbentrop reported: "It felt like being among old party comrades."
- The Nazis and Soviets applied almost identical internal policies to their respective halves of defeated Poland.
- A final distinction often made between the Soviets and the Nazis is that the former were "genuine" socialists while the latter were fakers.
- Hitler generally favored and imposed an even greater role for government in the German economy than his leftist Social-Democratic predecessors. Even the Social- Democratic historian Carl Landauer freely admitted this.
- 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,
- 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: He [Hitler] had no intention, like Russia, of "liquidating" the possessing class.
- 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.
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