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Mass killings under communist regimes
Mass killings under communist regimes occurred throughout the 20th century. Death
estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions of the deaths that are included in them.
Estimates account for executions, deaths from man-made and intentional famines, as well as
deaths that occurred during forced labor, deportations, or imprisonment.
In addition to mass killings, terms that are used to define such killings include democide,
politicide, classicide, and genocide.
Contents
Terminology and usage
Estimates
Proposed causes
Ideology
Political system
Leaders
Soviet Union
Red Terror
Joseph Stalin
Mass deportations of ethnic minorities
Soviet famine of 1932–1933
Great Purge
Soviet killings during World War II
People's Republic of China
Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries
Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine
Tibet
Cultural Revolution
Tiananmen Square
Cambodia
Other states
People's Republic of Bulgaria
East Germany
Socialist Republic of Romania
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
North Korea
Democratic Republic of Vietnam
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Cuba
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan
People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Debate over famines
Legal status and prosecutions
Memorials and museums
See also
References
Excerpts and notes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Terminology and usage
Several different terms are used to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of
noncombatants.[1][a][b][c][d][e] According to Anton Weiss-Wendt, the field of comparative genocide
studies has very "little consensus on defining principles such as definition of genocide, typology,
application of a comparative method, and timeframe."[2][f] According to Professor of Economics
Attiat Ott, mass killing has emerged as a "more straightforward" term.[g]
The following terminology has been used by individual authors to describe mass killings of
unarmed civilians by communist governments, individually or as a whole:
▪ Classicide – Professor Michael Mann has proposed classicide to mean the "intended mass
killing of entire social classes."[3][h] Classicide is considered "premeditated mass killing"
narrower than genocide in that it targets a part of a population defined by its social status, but
broader than politicide in that the group is targeted without regard to their political activity.[4]
▪ Crime against humanity – Professor Klas-Göran Karlsson uses crimes against humanity, which
includes "the direct mass killings of politically undesirable elements, as well as forced
deportations and forced labour." Karlsson acknowledges that the term may be misleading in
the sense that the regimes targeted groups of their own citizens, but he considers it useful as a
broad legal term which emphasizes attacks on civilian populations and because the offenses
demean humanity as a whole.[5] Historian Jacques Sémelin and Professor Michael Mann[6]
believe that crime against humanity is more appropriate than genocide or politicide when
speaking of violence by communist regimes.[7]
▪ Democide – Professor Rudolph Rummel defined democide as "the intentional killing of an
unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and
pursuant to government policy or high command."[8] His definition covers a wide range of
deaths, including forced labor and concentration camp victims; killings by "unofficial" private
groups; extrajudicial summary killings; and mass deaths due to the governmental acts of
criminal omission and neglect, such as in deliberate famines as well as killings by de facto
governments, such as warlords or rebels in a civil war.[9][i] This definition covers any murder of
any number of persons by any government,[10] and it has been applied to killings that were
perpetrated by communist regimes.[11][12]
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▪ Genocide – Under the Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide generally applies to the
mass murder of ethnic rather than political or social groups. The clause which granted
protection to political groups was eliminated from the United Nations resolution after a second
vote because many states, including the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin,[13][j] feared that it
could be used to impose unneeded limitations on their right to suppress internal disturbances.
[14][15] Scholarly studies of genocide usually acknowledge the UN's omission of economic and
political groups and use mass political killing datasets of democide and genocide and politicide
or geno-politicide.[16] The killings that were committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia has
been labeled a genocide or an auto-genocide; and the deaths that occurred under Leninism
and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, as well as those that occurred under Maoism in China, have
been controversially investigated as possible cases. In particular, the Soviet famine of
1932–1933 and the Great Chinese Famine, which occurred during the Great Leap Forward,
have both been "depicted as instances of mass killing underpinned by genocidal intent."[k]
▪ Holocaust – communist holocaust has been used by some state officials and nongovernmental organizations.[17][18][19] The similar term red Holocaust—coined by the Munich
Institut für Zeitgeschichte[l][20]—has been used by Professor Steven Rosefielde for communist
"peacetime state killings," while stating that it "could be defined to include all murders (judicially
sanctioned terror-executions), criminal manslaughter (lethal forced labor and ethnic cleansing),
and felonious negligent homicide (terror-starvation) incurred from insurrectionary actions and
civil wars prior to state seizure, and all subsequent felonious state killings."[m] According to
Jörg Hackmann, this term is not popular among scholars in Germany or internationally.[l]
Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine writes that usage of this term "allows the reality it describes to
immediately attain, in the Western mind, a status equal to that of the extermination of the Jews
by the Nazi regime."[n][21] Michael Shafir writes that the use of the term supports the
"competitive martyrdom component of Double Genocide", a theory whose worst version is
Holocaust obfuscation.[22] George Voicu states that Leon Volovici has "rightfully condemned
the abusive use of this concept as an attempt to 'usurp' and undermine a symbol specific to the
history of European Jews."[o]
▪ Mass killing – Professor Ervin Staub defined mass killing as "killing members of a group
without the intention to eliminate the whole group or killing large numbers of people without a
precise definition of group membership. In a mass killing the number of people killed is usually
smaller than in genocide."[23][p] Referencing earlier definitions,[q] Professors Joan Esteban,
Massimo Morelli, and Dominic Rohner have defined mass killings as "the killings of substantial
numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces
of an avowed enemy, under the conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness
of the victims."[24] The term has been defined by Professor Benjamin Valentino as "the
intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants", where a "massive number" is
defined as at least 50,000 intentional deaths over the course of five years or less.[25] This is the
most accepted quantitative minimum threshold for the term.[24] He applied this definition to the
cases of Stalin's Soviet Union, China under Mao Zedong and Cambodia under the Khmer
Rouge while admitting that "mass killings on a smaller scale" also appear to have been carried
out by regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and various nations in Africa.[26]
Alongside Valentino, Jay Ulfelder has used a threshold of 1,000 killed.[r] Alex Bellamy states
that 14 of the 38 instances of "mass killing since 1945 perpetrated by non-democratic states
outside the context of war" were by communist governments.[s] Professors Frank Wayman and
Atsushi Tago used mass killing from Valentino and concluded that even with a lower threshold
(10,000 killed per year, 1,000 killed per year, or even 1 killed per year) "autocratic regimes,
especially communist, are prone to mass killing generically, but not so strongly inclined (i.e. not
statistically significantly inclined) toward geno-politicide."[t] According to Attiat F. Ott and Sang
Hoo Bae, there is a general consensus that mass killing constitutes the act of intentionally
killing a number of non-combatants, but that number can range from as few as four to more
than 50,000 people.[27] Yang Su used a definition of mass killing from Valentino but allows as a
"significant number" more than 10 killed in one day in one town.[u] He used collective killing for
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analysis of mass killing in areas smaller than a whole country that may not meet Valentino's
threshold.[v]
▪ Politicide – the term is used to describe the killing of groups that would not otherwise be
covered by the Genocide Convention.[28][j] Professor Barbara Harff studies genocide and
politicide—sometimes shortened as geno-politicide—in order to include the killing of political,
economic, ethnic and cultural groups.[w] Professor Manus I. Midlarsky uses politicide to
describe an arc of large-scale killing from the western parts of the Soviet Union to China and
Cambodia.[x] In his book The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Midlarsky raises
similarities between the killings of Stalin and Pol Pot.[29]
▪ Repression – Professor Stephen Wheatcroft comments that in the case of the Soviet Union
terms such as the terror, the purges, and repression are used to refer to the same events. He
believes the most neutral terms are repression and mass killings, although in Russian the
broad concept of repression is commonly held to include mass killings and it is sometimes
assumed to be synonymous with it, which is not the case in other languages.[30]
Estimates
According to professor of history Klas-Göran Karlsson, discussion of the number of victims of
communist regimes has been "extremely extensive and ideologically biased."[31] Political scientist
Rudolph Rummel and historian Mark Bradley have written that, while the exact numbers have
been in dispute, the order of magnitude is not.[y][z] Rummel and other genocide scholars are
focused primarily on establishing patterns and testing various theoretical explanations of
genocides and mass killings. In their work, as they are dealing with large data sets that describe
mass mortality events globally, they have to rely on selective data provided by country experts, so
precise estimates are neither a required nor expected result of their work.[32]
Any attempt to estimate a total number of killings under communist regimes depends greatly on
definitions, and the idea to group together different countries such as Afghanistan and Hungary
has no adequate explanation.[33] During the Cold War era, some authors (Todd Culberston),
dissidents (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), and anti-communists in general have attempted to make both
country-specific and global estimates, although they were mostly unreliable and inflated, as shown
by the 1990s and beyond. Scholars of communism have mainly focused on individual countries,
and genocide scholars have attempted to provide a more global perspective, while maintaining that
their goal is not reliability but establishing patterns.[32] Scholars of communism have debated on
estimates for the Soviet Union, not for all communist regimes, an attempt which was popularized
by the introduction to The Black Book of Communism and was controversial.[33] Among them,
Soviet specialists Michael Ellman and J. Arch Getty have criticized the estimates for relying on
émigre sources, hearsay, and rumor as evidence,[34] and cautioned that historians should instead
utilize archive material.[35] Such scholars distinguish between historians who base their research
on archive materials, and those whose estimates are based on witnesses evidence and other data
that is unreliable.[36] Soviet specialist Stephen G. Wheatcroft says that historians relied on
Solzhenitsyn to support their higher estimates but research in the state archives vindicated the
lower estimates, while adding that the popular press has continued to include serious errors that
should not be cited, or relied on, in academia.[37] Rummel was also another widely used and cited
source[aa] but not reliable about estimates.[32]
Notable estimate attempts include the following:[aa]
▪ In 1978, journalist Todd Culbertson wrote an article in The Richmond News Leader,
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▪
▪
▪
▪
republished in Human Events, in which he stated that "[a]vailable evidence indicates that
perhaps 100 million persons have been destroyed by the Communists; the imperviousness of
the Iron and Bamboo curtains prevents a more definitive figure."[ab][aa]
In 1985, John Lenczowski, director of European and Soviet Affairs at the United States
National Security Council, wrote an article in The Christian Science Monitor in which he stated
that the "number of people murdered by communist regimes is estimated at between 60 million
and 150 million, with the higher figure probably more accurate in light of recent scholarship."[ac]
In 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, wrote that "the
failed effort to build communism in the twentieth century consumed the lives of almost
60,000,000."[38][aa][ad]
In 1994, Rummel's book Death by Government included about 110 million people, foreign and
domestic, killed by communist democide from 1900 to 1987.[39] This total did not include
deaths from the Great Chinese Famine of 1958–1961 due to Rummel's then belief that
"although Mao's policies were responsible for the famine, he was mislead about it, and finally
when he found out, he stopped it and changed his policies."[40][41] In 2004, historian Tomislav
Dulić criticized Rummel's estimate of the number killed in Tito's Yugoslavia as an
overestimation based on the inclusion of low-quality sources, and stated that Rummel's other
estimates may suffer from the same problem if he used similar sources for them.[42] Rummel
responded with a critique of Dulić's analysis[43] but was not convincing.[44] In 2005, a retired
Rummel revised upward his total for communist democide between 1900 and 1999 from 110
million to about 148 million due to additional information about Mao's culpability in the Great
Chinese Famine from Mao: The Unknown Story, including Jon Halliday and Jung Chang's
estimated 38 million famine deaths.[40][41] Karlsson describes Rummel's estimates as being on
the fringe, stating that "they are hardly an example of a serious and empirically-based writing of
history", and mainly discusses them "on the basis of the interest in him in the blogosphere."[45]
In 1997, historian Stéphane Courtois's introduction to The Black Book of Communism, an
impactful yet controversial[33] work written about the history of communism in the 20th
century,[46] gave a "rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates" approaching 100
million killed. The subtotals listed by Courtois added up to 94.36 million killed.[ae] Nicolas Werth
and Jean-Louis Margolin, contributing authors to the book, criticized Courtois as obsessed with
reaching a 100 million overall total.[47] In his foreword to the 1999 English edition, Martin Malia
wrote that "a grand total of victims variously estimated by contributors to the volume at
between 85 million and 100 million."[af] Courtois' attempt to equate Nazism and communist
regimes was controversial, and remains on the fringes, on both scientific and moral grounds.
[48][ag]
▪ In 2005, associate professor Benjamin Valentino stated that the number of non-combatants
killed by communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia alone ranged from a
low of 21 million to a high of 70 million.[ah][ai] Citing Rummel and others,[aa] Valentino wrote that
the "highest end of the plausible range of deaths attributed to communist regimes" was up to
110 million."[ah]
▪ In 2010, professor of economics Steven Rosefielde wrote in Red Holocaust that the internal
contradictions of communist regimes caused the killing of approximately 60 million people and
perhaps tens of millions more.[49]
▪ In 2011, self-described atrocitiologist Matthew White published his rough total of 70 million
"people who died under communist regimes from execution, labor camps, famine, ethnic
cleansing, and desperate flight in leaky boats", not counting those killed in wars.[aj]
▪ In 2012, academic Alex J. Bellamy wrote that a "conservative estimate puts the total number of
civilians deliberately killed by communists after the Second World War between 6.7 million and
15.5 million people, with the true figure probably much higher."[ak]
▪ In 2014, professor of Chinese politics Julia Strauss wrote that while there was the beginning of
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a scholarly consensus on figures of around 20 million killed in the Soviet Union and 2–3 million
in Cambodia, there was no such consensus on numbers for China.[al]
▪ In 2016, the Dissident blog of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation made an effort
to compile ranges of estimates using sources from 1976 to 2010, and wrote that the overall
range "spans from 42,870,000 to 161,990,000" killed, with 100 million the most commonly cited
figure.[am]
▪ In 2017, historian Stephen Kotkin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that communist regimes
killed at least 65 million people between 1917 and 2017, commenting: "Though communism
has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from
starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering."[50][an]
Criticism is mostly focused on three aspects, namely that the estimates are based on sparse and
incomplete data when significant errors are inevitable,[51][52][53] the figures are skewed to higher
possible values,[51][54][ao] and victims of civil wars, Holodomor, and other famines, and wars
involving communist governments should not be counted.[51][55][56] Criticism of the high-end
estimates such as Rummel's have focused on two aspects, namely his choice of data sources and his
statistical approach. Historical sources Rummel based his estimates upon can rarely serve as
sources of reliable figures.[57] The statistical approach Rummel used to analyze big sets of diverse
estimates may lead to dilution of useful data with noisy ones.[57][58]
Another common criticism, as articulated by anthropologist and former European communist
regimes specialist Kristen Ghodsee and other scholars, is that the body-counting reflects an anticommunist point of view and is mainly approached by anti-communist scholars, and is part of the
popular "victims of communism" narrative,[59][60] with 100 million being the most common,
popularly used estimate,[61][ap] which is used not only to discredit the communist movement but
the whole political left.[62][aq] Anti-communist organizations seek to institutionalize the "victims of
communism" narrative as a double genocide theory, or the moral equivalence between the Nazi
Holocaust (race murder) and those killed by communist regimes (class murder).[59][63] Alongside
philosopher Scott Sehon, Ghodsee wrote that "quibbling about numbers is unseemly. What matters
is that many, many people were killed by communist regimes."[63] The same body-counting can be
easily applied to other ideologies or systems, such as capitalism.[61][ar][63][as]
Proposed causes
Ideology
Klas-Göran Karlsson writes: "Ideologies are systems of ideas, which cannot commit crimes
independently. However, individuals, collectives and states that have defined themselves as
communist have committed crimes in the name of communist ideology, or without naming
communism as the direct source of motivation for their crimes."[64] Academics such as Daniel
Goldhagen,[65] Richard Pipes,[66] and John Gray[67] have written books about communist regimes
for a popular audience, and scholars such as Rudolph Rummel consider the ideology of
communism to be a significant causative factor in mass killings.[51][68] In the introduction to The
Black Book of Communism, Stéphane Courtois claims an association between communism and
criminality, stating that "Communist regimes ... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of
government",[69] while adding that this criminality lies at the level of ideology rather than state
practice.[70]
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Professor Mark Bradley writes that communist theory and
practice has often been in tension with human rights and most
communist states followed the lead of Karl Marx in rejecting
"Enlightenment-era inalienable individual political and civil
rights" in favor of "collective economic and social rights."[z]
Christopher J. Finlay posits that Marxism legitimates violence
without any clear limiting principle because it rejects moral
and ethical norms as constructs of the dominant class, and
states that "it would be conceivable for revolutionaries to
commit atrocious crimes in bringing about a socialist system,
with the belief that their crimes will be retroactively absolved
by the new system of ethics put in place by the proletariat."[at]
Rustam Singh states that Marx had alluded to the possibility of
peaceful revolution; after the failed Revolutions of 1848, Singh
states that Marx emphasized the need for violent revolution
and revolutionary terror.[au]
Literary historian George Watson cited an 1849 article written
The last issue, printed in red ink, of
by Friedrich Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" and
Karl Marx's journal Neue Rheinische
published in Marx's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung, stating
Zeitung from 19 May 1849
that the writings of Engels and others show that "the Marxist
theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons
implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to
capitalism, must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire nations would be left behind after a
workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps
at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only
for the dung-heap of history."[71][av] Watson's claims have been criticized for dubious evidence by
Robert Grant, who commented that "what Marx and Engels are calling for is ... at the very least a
kind of cultural genocide; but it is not obvious, at least from Watson's citations, that actual mass
killing, rather than (to use their phraseology) mere 'absorption' or 'assimilation', is in question."[72]
Talking about Engels' 1849 article, historian Andrzej Walicki states: "It is difficult to deny that this
was an outright call for genocide."[73] Jean-François Revel writes that Joseph Stalin recommended
study of the 1849 Engels article in his 1924 book On Lenin and Leninism.[aw]
According to Rummel, the killings committed by communist regimes can best be explained as the
result of the marriage between absolute power and the absolutist ideology of Marxism.[74] Rummel
states that "communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and its chief
interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and
the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusades against
nonbelievers. What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's
instruments of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent
sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and the
family."[75] Rummels writes that Marxist communists saw the construction of their utopia as
"though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality. And for the greater good, as in
a real war, people are killed. And, thus, this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy
casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants,
rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions
may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism.
And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the
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deaths."[74]
Benjamin Valentino writes that "apparently high levels of political support for murderous regimes
and leaders should not automatically be equated with support for mass killing itself. Individuals
are capable of supporting violent regimes or leaders while remaining indifferent or even opposed to
specific policies that these regimes and carried out." Valentino quotes Vladimir Brovkin as saying
that "a vote for the Bolsheviks in 1917 was not a vote for Red Terror or even a vote for a
dictatorship of the proletariat."[76] According to Valentino, such strategies were so violent because
they economically dispossess large numbers of people,[ax][s] commenting: "Social transformations
of this speed and magnitude have been associated with mass killing for two primary reasons. First,
the massive social dislocations produced by such changes have often led to economic collapse,
epidemics, and, most important, widespread famines. ... The second reason that communist
regimes bent on the radical transformation of society have been linked to mass killing is that the
revolutionary changes they have pursued have clashed inexorably with the fundamental interests
of large segments of their populations. Few people have proved willing to accept such far-reaching
sacrifices without intense levels of coercion."[77] According to Jacques Sémelin, "communist
systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because
they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body'
from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean
political imaginaire."[ay]
Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley write that, especially in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao
Zedong's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, a fanatical certainty that socialism could be made to work
motivated communist leaders in "the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies, who could be
suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong. Furthermore, if events did not
work out as they were supposed to, then that was because class enemies, foreign spies and
saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no circumstances could it
be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that meant capitulation to the
forces of reaction."[az] Michael Mann writes that communist party members were "ideologically
driven, believing that in order to create a new socialist society, they must lead in socialist zeal.
Killings were often popular, the rank-and-file as keen to exceed killing quotas as production
quotas."[ba] According to Vladimir Tismăneanu, "the Communist project, in such countries as the
USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain social
groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered."[bb] Alex Bellamy writes that
"communism's ideology of selective extermination" of target groups was first developed and
applied by Joseph Stalin but that "each of the communist regimes that massacred large numbers of
civilians during the Cold War developed their own distinctive account",[bc] while Steven T. Katz
states that distinctions based on class and nationality, stigmatized and stereotyped in various ways,
created an "otherness" for victims of communist rule that was important for legitimating
oppression and death.[bd] Martin Shaw writes that "nationalist ideas were at the heart of many
mass killings by Communist states", beginning with Stalin's "new nationalist doctrine of 'socialism
in one country'", and killing by revolutionary movements in the Third World was done in the name
of national liberation.[be]
Political system
Anne Applebaum writes that "without exception, the Leninist belief in the one-party state was and
is characteristic of every communist regime" and "the Bolshevik use of violence was repeated in
every communist revolution." Phrases said by Vladimir Lenin and Cheka founder Felix
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Dzerzhinsky were deployed all over the world. Applebaum
states that as late as 1976, Mengistu Haile Mariam unleashed a
Red Terror in Ethiopia.[78] To his colleagues in the Bolshevik
government, Lenin was quoted as saying: "If we are not ready
to shoot a saboteur and White Guardist, what sort of
revolution is that?"[79]
Robert Conquest stressed that Stalin's purges were not
contrary to the principles of Leninism but rather a natural
consequence of the system established by Lenin, who
personally ordered the killing of local groups of class enemy
Prosecutor General Andrey
hostages.[80] Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, architect of
Vyshinsky (centre) reading the 1937
perestroika and glasnost and later head of the Presidential
indictment against Karl Radek
Commission for the Victims of Political Repression, elaborates
during the second Moscow Trial
on this point, stating: "The truth is that in punitive operations
Stalin did not think up anything that was not there under
Lenin: executions, hostage taking, concentration camps, and
all the rest."[81] Historian Robert Gellately concurs, commenting: "To put it another way, Stalin
initiated very little that Lenin had not already introduced or previewed."[82]
Stephen Hicks of Rockford College ascribes the violence characteristic of 20th-century socialist
rule to these collectivist regimes' abandonment of protections of civil rights and rejection of the
values of civil society. Hicks writes that whereas "in practice every liberal capitalist country has a
solid record for being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it
possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives", in socialism "practice has time
and again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships prior to the twentieth century.
Each socialist regime has collapsed into dictatorship and begun killing people on a huge scale."[83]
Eric D. Weitz says that the mass killing in communist states is a natural consequence of the failure
of the rule of law, seen commonly during periods of social upheaval in the 20th century. For both
communist and non-communist mass killings, "genocides occurred at moments of extreme social
crisis, often generated by the very policies of the regimes",[84] and are not inevitable but are
political decisions.[84] Steven Rosefielde writes that communist rulers had to choose between
changing course and "terror-command" and more often than not chose the latter.[bf] Michael Mann
posits that a lack of institutionalized authority structures meant that a chaotic mix of both
centralized control and party factionalism were factors in the killing.[ba]
Leaders
Professor Matthew Krain states that many scholars have pointed to revolutions and civil wars as
providing the opportunity for radical leaders and ideologies to gain power and the preconditions
for mass killing by the state.[bg] Professor Nam Kyu Kim writes that exclusionary ideologies are
critical to explaining mass killing, but the organizational capabilities and individual characteristics
of revolutionary leaders, including their attitudes towards risk and violence, are also important.
Besides opening up political opportunities for new leaders to eliminate their political opponents,
revolutions bring to power leaders who are more apt to commit large-scale acts of violence against
civilians in order to legitimize and strengthen their own power.[85] Genocide scholar Adam Jones
states that the Russian Civil War was very influential on the emergence of leaders like Stalin and it
also accustomed people to "harshness, cruelty, terror."[bh] Martin Malia called the "brutal
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conditioning" of the two World Wars important to understanding communist violence, although
not its source.[86]
Historian Helen Rappaport describes Nikolay Yezhov, the bureaucrat who was in charge of the
NKVD during the Great Purge, as a physically diminutive figure of "limited intelligence" and
"narrow political understanding. ... Like other instigators of mass murder throughout history, [he]
compensated for his lack of physical stature with a pathological cruelty and the use of brute
terror."[87] Russian and world history scholar John M. Thompson places personal responsibility
directly on Joseph Stalin. According to him, "much of what occurred only makes sense if it
stemmed in part from the disturbed mentality, pathological cruelty, and extreme paranoia of Stalin
himself. Insecure, despite having established a dictatorship over the party and country, hostile and
defensive when confronted with criticism of the excesses of collectivization and the sacrifices
required by high-tempo industrialization, and deeply suspicious that past, present, and even yet
unknown future opponents were plotting against him, Stalin began to act as a person beleaguered.
He soon struck back at enemies, real or imaginary."[88] Professors Pablo Montagnes and Stephane
Wolton posit that the purges in the Soviet Union and China can be attributed to the personalist
leadership of Stalin and Mao, who were incentivized by having both control of the security
apparatus used to carry out the purges and control of the appointment of replacements for those
purged.[bi] Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek attributes Mao allegedly viewing human life as
disposable to his "cosmic perspective" on humanity.[bj]
Soviet Union
Adam Jones writes that "there is very little in the record of
human experience to match the violence which was
unleashed between 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power,
and 1953, when Joseph Stalin died and the Soviet Union
moved to adopt a more restrained and largely nonmurderous domestic policy." Jones states that the
exceptions to this were the Khmer Rouge (in relative terms)
and Mao's rule in China (in absolute terms).[89]
Stephen G. Wheatcroft says that prior to the opening of the
Soviet archives for historical research, "our understanding
of the scale and the nature of Soviet repression has been
extremely poor" and that some scholars who wish to
maintain pre-1991 high estimates are "finding it difficult to
adapt to the new circumstances when the archives are open
and when there are plenty of irrefutable data", and instead
"hang on to their old Sovietological methods with roundabout calculations based on odd statements from emigres
and other informants who are supposed to have superior
knowledge", although he acknowledged that even the
figures estimated from the additional documents are not
"final or definitive."[90][91] In the 2007 revision of his book
The Great Terror, Robert Conquest estimates that while
exact numbers will never be certain, the communist leaders
of the Soviet Union were responsible for no fewer than 15
million deaths.[bk]
Sign for the Solovetsky Stone, a
memorial about repression in the Soviet
Union at Lubyanka Square which was
erected in 1990 by the human rights
group Memorial in remembrance of the
more than 40,000 innocent people shot
in Moscow during the Great Terror
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Some historians attempt to make separate estimates for different periods of Soviet history, with
casualty estimates varying widely. Timothy D. Snyder estimates 6 million for the Stalinist
period.[92] Alec Nove estimates 8.1 million for the period ending in 1937.[93] Stéphane Courtois
estimates 20 million[69] and Alexander Yakovlev estimates 20-25 million for the entire period of
Soviet rule.[bl] Rudolph Rummel estimates 61 million for the 1917–1987 period.[94]
Red Terror
The Red Terror was a period of political repression and executions carried out by Bolsheviks after
the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. During this period, the political police (the Cheka)
conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people."[95][96][97][98][99]
Many victims were "bourgeois hostages" rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution
in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[100] Many were put to death during
and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion of Baltic Fleet sailors and the
Tambov Rebellion of Russian peasants. Professor Donald Rayfield writes that "the repression that
followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of
executions."[101] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[102][103]
According to Nicolas Werth, the policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet
leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory."[104] In the early
months of 1919, perhaps 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[105][106] and many more
deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[107] Historian Michael Kort wrote: "During
1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik
regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000."[108]
Joseph Stalin
Estimates of the number of deaths which were brought about by Stalin's rule are hotly debated by
scholars in the fields of Soviet and Communist studies.[109][110] Prior to the dissolution of the
Soviet Union and the archival revelations which followed it, some historians estimated that the
number of people who were killed by Stalin's regime was 20 million or higher.[92][111][112] Michael
Parenti writes that estimates on the Stalinist death toll vary widely in part because such estimates
are based on anecdotes in absence of reliable evidence and "speculations by writers who never
reveal how they arrive at such figures."[113]
After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives became available, containing
official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either
political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths
which occurred during kulak forced settlements in the Soviet Union, for a total of about 3 million
officially recorded victims in these categories.[bm] According to Golfo Alexopoulos, Anne
Applebaum, Oleg Khlevniuk, and Michael Ellman, official Soviet documentation of Gulag deaths is
widely considered inadequate, as they write that the government frequently released prisoners on
the edge of death in order to avoid officially counting them.[114][115] A 1993 study of archival data
by J. Arch Getty et al. showed that a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to
1953.[116] In 2010, Steven Rosefielde posited that this number has to be augmented by 19.4 percent
in light of more complete archival evidence to 1,258,537, with the best estimate of Gulag deaths
being 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953 when excess mortality is taken into account.[117] Alexopolous
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estimates a much higher total of at least 6 million dying in the Gulag or shortly after release.[118]
Dan Healey has called her work a "challenge to the emergent scholarly consensus",[bn] while
Jeffrey Hardy has criticized Alexopoulos for basing her assertions primarily on indirect and
misinterpreted evidence.[119]
According to historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Stalin's regime can be charged with causing the
purposive deaths of about a million people.[120] Wheatcroft excludes all famine deaths as purposive
deaths and posits that those which qualify fit more closely the category of execution rather than
murder.[120] Others posit that some of the actions of Stalin's regime, not only those during the
Holodomor but also dekulakization and targeted campaigns against particular ethnic groups, such
as the Polish operation of the NKVD, can be considered as genocide[121][122] at least in its loose
definition.[123] Modern data for the whole of Stalin's rule was summarized by Timothy Snyder, who
stated that under the Stalinist regime there were six million direct deaths and nine million in total,
including the deaths from deportation, hunger, and Gulag deaths.[bo] Ellman attributes roughly 3
million deaths to the Stalinist regime, excluding excess mortality from famine, disease, and
war.[124] Several popular press authors, among them Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore,
Soviet/Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, and the director of Yale's "Annals of Communism"
series Jonathan Brent, still put the death toll from Stalin at about 20 million.[bp][bq][br][bs][bt]
Mass deportations of ethnic minorities
The Soviet government during Stalin's rule conducted a series
of deportations on an enormous scale that significantly
affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. Deportations took
place under extremely harsh conditions, often in cattle
carriages, with hundreds of thousands of deportees dying en
route.[125] Some experts estimate that the proportion of deaths
from the deportations could be as high as one in three in
certain cases.[bu][126] Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of PolishJewish descent who initiated the Genocide Convention in 1948
and coined genocide, assumed that genocide was perpetrated
in the context of the mass deportation of the Chechens, Ingush
people, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, and
Karachays.[127]
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and
Lavrenti Beria (in the foreground),
who was responsible for mass
deportations of ethnic minorities as
head of the NKVD
Regarding the fate of the Crimean Tatars, Amir Weiner of
Stanford University writes that the policy could be classified as ethnic cleansing. In the book
Century of Genocide, Lyman H. Legters writes: "We cannot properly speak of a completed
genocide, only of a process that was genocidal in its potentiality."[128] In contrast to this view, Jon
K. Chang posits that the deportations had been in fact based on genocides based on ethnicity and
that "social historians" in the West have failed to champion the rights of marginalized ethnicities in
the Soviet Union.[129] This view is supported by several countries. On 12 December 2015, the
Ukrainian Parliament issued a resolution recognizing the 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars (the
Sürgünlik) as genocide and established the 18th of May as the Day of Remembrance for the victims
of the Crimean Tatar Genocide.[130] The Parliament of Latvia recognized the event as an act of
genocide on 9 May 2019.[131][132] The Parliament of Lithuania did the same on 6 June 2019.[133]
The Parliament of Canada passed a motion on 10 June 2019, recognizing the Crimean Tatar
deportation as a genocide perpetrated by Soviet dictator Stalin, designating the 18th of May to be a
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day of remembrance.[134] The deportation of Chechens and Ingush was acknowledged by the
European Parliament as an act of genocide in 2004, stating:[135] "Believes that the deportation of
the entire Chechen people to Central Asia on 23 February 1944 on the orders of Stalin constitutes
an act of genocide within the meaning of the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907 and the Convention
for the Prevention and Repression of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the UN General Assembly
on 9 December 1948."[136]
Soviet famine of 1932–1933
Within the Soviet Union, forced changes in agricultural policies (collectivization), confiscations of
grain and droughts caused the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 in the Ukrainian SSR (Holodomor),
North Caucasus Krai, Volga region, and Kazakh SSR.[137][138][139] The famine was most severe in
Ukrainian, where it is often referenced as the Holodomor. A significant portion of the famine
victims (3.3 to 7.5 million) were Ukrainians.[140][141][142] Another part of the famine was that in
Kazakhstan, also known as the Kazakh catastrophe, when more than 1.3 million ethnic Kazakhs
(about 38% of the population) died.[143][144]
While there is still a debate among scholars on whether the Holodomor was a genocide, some
scholars say the Stalinist policies that caused the famine may have been designed as an attack on
the rise of Ukrainian nationalism[145] and may fall under the legal definition of genocide by the
United Nations's Genocide Convention.[137][146][147][148] The famine was officially recognized as
genocide by the Ukraine and other governments.[149][bv] In a draft resolution, the Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe declared that the famine was caused by the "cruel and
deliberate actions and policies of the Soviet regime" and was responsible for the deaths of "millions
of innocent people" in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Russia. Relative to its
population, Kazakhstan is believed to have been the most adversely affected.[150] Regarding the
Kazakh famine, Michael Ellman states that it "seems to be an example of 'negligent genocide' which
falls outside the scope of the UN Convention of genocide."[151]
Great Purge
Stalin's attempts to solidify his position as leader of the
Soviet Union led to an escalation of detentions and
executions, climaxing in 1937–1938, a period
sometimes referred to as the Yezhovshchina ' after
Cheka official Nikolay Yezhov, or Yezhov era, and
continuing until Stalin's death in 1953. Around 700,000
of these were executed by a gunshot to the back of the
head.[153] Others perished from beatings and torture
while in "investigative custody"[154] and in the Gulag
due to starvation, disease, exposure, and overwork.[bw]
Mass graves dating from 1937–1938 opened
up and hundreds of bodies exhumed for
identification by family members[152]
Arrests were typically made citing Article 58 (RSFSR
Penal Code) about counter-revolutionary laws, which
included failure to report treasonous actions and in an
amendment added in 1937 failing to fulfill one's appointed duties. In the cases investigated by the
State Security Department of the NKVD from October 1936 to November 1938, at least 1,710,000
people were arrested and 724,000 people executed.[155] Modern historical studies estimate a total
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number of repression deaths during 1937–1938 as 950,000–1,200,000. These figures take into
account the incompleteness of official archival data and include both execution deaths and Gulag
deaths during that period.[bw] Former kulaks and their families made up the majority of victims,
with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed.[156]
The NKVD conducted a series of national operations which targeted some ethnic groups.[157] A
total of 350,000 were arrested and 247,157 were executed.[158] Of these, the Polish operation of the
NKVD, which targeted the members of Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, appears to have been the
largest, with 140,000 arrests and 111,000 executions.[157] Although these operations might well
constitute genocide as defined by the United Nations convention,[157] or "a mini-genocide"
according to Simon Sebag Montefiore,[158] there is as yet no authoritative ruling on the legal
characterization of these events.[123] Citing church documents, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev
has estimated that over 100,000 priests, monks, and nuns were executed during this time.[159][160]
Regarding the persecution of clergy, Michael Ellman has stated that "the 1937–38 terror against
the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and of other religions (Binner & Junge 2004) might
also qualify as genocide."[161] In the summer and autumn of 1937, Stalin sent NKVD agents to the
Mongolian People's Republic and engineered a Mongolian Great Terror[162] in which some
22,000[163] or 35,000[164] people were executed. Around 18,000 victims were Buddhist lamas.[163]
In Belarus, mass graves for several thousand civilians killed by the NKVD between 1937 and 1941
were discovered in 1988 at Kurapaty.[165]
Soviet killings during World War II
Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, NKVD task forces started removing
"Soviet-hostile elements" from the conquered territories.[166] The NKVD systematically practiced
torture which often resulted in death.[167][168] According to the Polish Institute of National
Remembrance, 150,000 Polish citizens perished due to Soviet repression during the war.[169][170]
The most notorious killings occurred in the spring of 1940, when the NKVD executed some 21,857
Polish POWs and intellectual leaders in what has become known as the Katyn massacre.
[171][172][173] Executions were also carried out after the annexation of the Baltic states.[174] During
the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa, the NKVD and attached units of the Red Army
massacred prisoners and political opponents by the tens of thousands before fleeing from the
advancing Axis powers forces.[175] Memorial complexes have been built at NKVD execution sites at
Katyn and Mednoye in Russia, as well as a "third killing field" at Piatykhatky, Ukraine.[176]
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Victims of the Soviet NKVD in Lviv, Katyn 1943 exhumation (photo by
June 1941
International
Red
Cross
delegation)
Plaque on Toompea, the building
of the Government of Estonia,
commemorating
government
members killed by communist
terror
People's Republic of China
The Chinese Communist Party came to power in China in 1949 after a long and bloody civil war
between communists and the nationalist Kuomintang. There is a general consensus among
historians that after Mao Zedong seized power, his policies and political purges directly or
indirectly caused the deaths of tens of millions of people.[177][178][179] Based on the Soviets'
experience, Mao considered violence to be necessary in order to achieve an ideal society that would
be derived from Marxism and as a result he planned and executed violence on a grand scale.
[180][181]
Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries
The first large-scale killings under Mao took place during his land reform and the campaign to
suppress counter-revolutionaries. According to Daniel Goldhagen, official study materials
published in 1948 show that Mao envisaged that "one-tenth of the peasants", or about 50,000,000,
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"would have to be destroyed" to facilitate agrarian reform.[182]
The exact number of people who were killed during Mao's land
reform is believed to have been lower; according to Rudolph
Rummel and Philip Short, at least one million people were
killed.[180][183] The suppression of counter-revolutionaries
targeted mainly former Kuomintang officials and intellectuals
who were suspected of disloyalty.[184] According to Yang
Kuisong, at least 712,000 people were executed and 1,290,000
were imprisoned in labor camps known as Laogai.[185]
Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese
Famine
A large portrait of Mao Zedong at
Benjamin Valentino posits that the Great Leap Forward was a
Tiananmen
cause of the Great Chinese Famine and the worst effects of the
[186]
famine were steered towards the regime's enemies.
Those
who were labeled "black elements" (religious leaders, rightists,
and rich peasants) in earlier campaigns died in the greatest numbers because they were given the
lowest priority in the allocation of food.[186] In Mao's Great Famine, historian Frank Dikötter
writes that "coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the very foundation of the Great Leap
Forward" and it "motivated one of the most deadly mass killings of human history."[187] Dikötter
estimates that at least 2.5 million people were summarily killed or tortured to death during this
period.[188] His research in local and provincial Chinese archives indicates the death toll was at
least 45 million: "In most cases the party knew very well that it was starving its own people to
death."[189] In a secret meeting at Shanghai in 1959, Mao issued the order to procure one third of
all grain from the countryside, saying: "When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is
better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill."[189] In light of additional
evidence of Mao's culpability, Rummel added those killed by the Great Famine to his total for
Mao's democide for a total of 77 million killed.[41][bx]
Tibet
According to Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism, the Chinese communists
carried out a cultural genocide against the Tibetans. Margolin states that the killings were
proportionally larger in Tibet than they were in China proper and "one can legitimately speak of
genocidal massacres because of the numbers that were involved."[190] According to the Dalai Lama
and the Central Tibetan Administration, "Tibetans were not only shot, but they were also beaten to
death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried
alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded."[190] Adam Jones, a scholar who specializes in
genocide, states that after the 1959 Tibetan uprising, the Chinese authorized struggle sessions
against reactionaries, during which "communist cadres denounced, tortured, and frequently
executed enemies of the people." These sessions resulted in 92,000 deaths out of a total population
of about 6 million. These deaths, Jones stressed, may not only be seen as a genocide, but they may
also be seen as an eliticide, meaning "targeting the better educated and leadership oriented
elements among the Tibetan population."[191] Patrick French, the former director of the Free Tibet
Campaign in London, writes that the Free Tibet Campaign and other groups have claimed that a
total of 1.2 million Tibetans were killed by the Chinese since 1950 but after examining archives in
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Dharamsala, he found "no evidence to support that figure."[192] French states that a reliable
alternative number is unlikely to be known but estimates that as many as half a million Tibetans
died "as a 'direct result' of the policies of the People's Republic of China", using historian Warren
Smith's estimate of 200,000 people who are missing from population statistics in the Tibet
Autonomous Region and extending that rate to the borderland regions.[193]
Cultural Revolution
Sinologists Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals estimate that between 750,000 and 1.5
million people were killed in the violence of the Cultural Revolution in rural China alone.[194]
Mao's Red Guards were given carte blanche to abuse and kill people who were perceived to be
enemies of the revolution.[195] Sociologist Yang Su has written that these mass killing were an
outcome of "the paradox of state sponsorship and state failure"; according to Yang, mass killings
were concentrated in rural areas in the months after the establishment of county revolutionary
committees, with mass killing being more likely in communities with more local party members.
Repression by the local organizations may have been in response to the rhetoric of violence
promoted by the provincial capitals as a result of mass factionalism in those capitals, and the
"peaks of mass killings coincided with two announcements from the party center in July 1968
banning factional armed battles and disbanding mass organizations";[by] Yang writes that Mao's
government designated class enemies using an artificial and arbitrary standard to accomplish two
political tasks: "mobilizing mass compliance and resolving elite conflict", while the elastic nature of
the category allowed it to "take on a genocidal dimension under extraordinary circumstances."[bz]
Political scientists Evgeny Finkel and Scott Straus write that Su estimates up to three million
people were "murdered by their neighbors in collective killings and struggle rallies. This happened
even though the central government had not issued any mass killing orders or policies."[196]
In August 1966, over 100 teachers were murdered by their students in western Beijing.[197]
Tiananmen Square
Jean-Louis Margolin states that under Deng Xiaoping, at least 1,000 people were killed in Beijing
and hundreds of people were also executed in the countryside after his government crushed
demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989.[198] According to Louisa Lim in 2014, a group of
victims' relatives in China called the "Tiananmen Mothers" has confirmed the identities of more
than 200 of those who were killed.[199] Alex Bellamy writes that this "tragedy marks the last time in
which an episode of mass killing in East Asia was terminated by the perpetrators themselves,
judging that they had succeeded."[200]
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Replica of the Goddess
of A memorial to the 1989 Tiananmen
Democracy statue in Hong Kong's Square events in the Dominican Square in
June 4th Museum
Wrocław, Poland
Statue located in Ávila, Spain
recalling
the
events
of
Tiananmen Square
Cambodia
The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where
large numbers of people were killed and their bodies were
buried by the Khmer Rouge regime during its rule of the
country, which lasted from 1975 to 1979, after the end of the
Cambodian Civil War. Sociologist Martin Shaw described the
Cambodian genocide as "the purest genocide of the Cold War
era."[201] The results of a demographic study of the Cambodian
genocide concluded that the nationwide death toll from 1975 to
1979 amounted to 1,671,000 to 1,871,000, or 21 to 24 percent
Skulls of victims of the Khmer
of the total Cambodian population as it was estimated to
Rouge Killing Fields in Cambodia
number before the Khmer Rouge took power.[202] According to
Ben Kiernan, the number of deaths which were specifically
caused by execution is still unknown because many victims
died from starvation, disease and overwork.[202] Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation
Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely"
figure of 2.2 million. After spending five years researching about 20,000 grave sites, he posited
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that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,112,829 victims of execution."[203] A study by
French demographer Marek Sliwinski calculated slightly fewer than 2 million unnatural deaths
under the Khmer Rouge out of a 1975 Cambodian population of 7.8 million, with 33.5% of
Cambodian men dying under the Khmer Rouge compared to 15.7% of Cambodian women.[204] The
number of suspected victims of execution who were found in 23,745 mass graves is estimated to be
1.3 million according to a 2009 academic source. Execution is believed to account for roughly 60%
of the total death toll during the genocide, with other victims succumbing to starvation or
disease.[205]
Helen Fein, a genocide scholar, states that the xenophobic ideology of the Khmer Rouge regime
bears a stronger resemblance to "an almost forgotten phenomenon of national socialism", or
fascism, rather than communism.[206] Responding to Ben Kiernan's "argument that Pol Pot's
Democratic Kampuchea regime was more racist and generically totalitarian than Marxist or
specifically Communist", Steve Heder states that the example of such racialist thought as it is
applied in relation to the minority Cham people echoed "Marx's definition of a historyless people
doomed to extinction in the name of progress" and it was therefore a part of general concepts of
class and class struggle.[207] Craig Etcheson writes that data on the distribution and origin of the
mass graves as well as internal Khmer Rouge security documents, leads to the conclusion that
"most of the violence was carried out pursuant to orders from the highest political authorities of
the Communist Party of Kampuchea", rather than being the result of the "spontaneous excesses of
a vengeful, undisciplined peasant army",[ca] while French historian Henri Locard writes that the
fascist label was applied to the Khmer Rouge by the Communist Party of Vietnam as a form of
revisionism, but the repression which existed under the rule of the Khmer Rouge was "similar (if
significantly more lethal) to the repression in all communist regimes."[204] Daniel Goldhagen
states that the Khmer Rouge were xenophobic because they believed that the Khmer people were
"the one authentic people capable of building true communism."[208] Steven Rosefielde writes that
Democratic Kampuchea was the deadliest of all communist regimes on a per capita basis, primarily
because it "lacked a viable productive core" and it "failed to set boundaries on mass murder."[209]
Memorial at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Killing Field mass graves at the
Museum in Phnom Penh
Choeung Ek Cambodian Genocide
centre
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Chankiri Tree (Killing Tree) at
Choeung Ek, where infants were
fatally smashed during the genocide
Other states
Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr write: "Most Marxist–Leninist regimes which came to power through
protracted armed struggle in the postwar period perpetrated one or more politicides, though of
vastly different magnitudes."[cb] According to Benjamin Valentino, most regimes that described
themselves as communist did not commit mass killings, but in communist states such as Bulgaria,
Romania, and East Germany, mass killings were committed on a scale which was smaller than his
standard of 50,000 people who were killed within a period of five years, although the lack of
documentation prevents a definitive judgement about the scale of these events and the motives of
their perpetrators.[210] Atsushi Tago and Frank Wayman write that because democide is broader
than mass killing or genocide, most communist regimes can be said to have engaged in it,
including the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, North Vietnam, East Germany, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Albania, and Yugoslavia.[211]
People's Republic of Bulgaria
According to Valentino, between 50,000 and 100,000 people may have been killed in Bulgaria
beginning in 1944 as part of a campaign of agricultural collectivization and political repression,
although there is insufficient documentation to make a definitive judgement.[212] In his book
History of Communism in Bulgaria, Dinyu Sharlanov accounts for about 31,000 people who were
killed by the regime between 1944 and 1989.[213][214]
East Germany
According to Valentino, between 80,000 and 100,000 people may have been killed in East
Germany beginning in 1945 as part of the Soviet denazification campaign; other scholars posit that
these estimates are inflated.[212][215][216]
Immediately after World War II, denazification commenced in Allied-occupied Germany and
regions the Nazis had annexed. In the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, the NKVD established
prison camps, usually in abandoned Nazi concentration camps, and they used them to intern
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alleged Nazis and Nazi German officials, along with some
landlords and Prussian Junkers. According to files and data
released by the Soviet Ministry for the Interior in 1990,
123,000 Germans and 35,000 citizens of other nations were
detained. Of these prisoners, a total of 786 people were shot
and 43,035 people died of various causes. Most of the deaths
were not direct killings but were caused by outbreaks of
dysentery and tuberculosis. Deaths from starvation also
occurred on a large scale, particularly from late 1946 to early
A memorial to dead prisoners at an
1947, but these deaths do not appear to have been deliberate
NKVD special camp in Germany
killings because food shortages were widespread in the Soviet
occupation zone. The prisoners in the "silence camps", as the
NKVD special camps were called, did not have access to the black market and were only able to get
food that was handed to them by the authorities. Some prisoners were executed and others may
have been tortured to death. In this context, it is difficult to determine if the prisoner deaths in the
silence camps can be categorized as mass killings. It is also difficult to determine how many of the
dead were Germans, East Germans, or members of other nationalities.[217][218]
East Germany's government erected the Berlin Wall following the Berlin Crisis of 1961. Even
though crossing between East Germany and West Germany was possible for motivated and
approved travelers, thousands of East Germans tried to defect by illegally crossing the wall. Of
these, between 136 and 227 people were killed by the Berlin Wall's guards during the years of the
wall's existence (1961-1989).[219][220]
Socialist Republic of Romania
Investigations conducted by the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Romania in
Constanţa, based on death records from the villages found along the Canal route, indicate 6,355
"Canal workers" (a euphemism for detainees) died during the 1949–1953 period of forced labor in
the construction of the Danube-Black Sea Canal,[221] while political analyst Vladimir Socor
estimates the number of deaths to be "considerably in excess of 10,000".[222] An additional 1,700
died due to the Bărăgan deportations of the 1950s.[223] Due to radical pro-natalism, many children
were sent to government run orphanages in Romania where 20,000 children may have died.[224]
Higher estimates have been made of the total victims of the regime. According to Valentino,
between 60,000 and 300,000 people may have been killed in Romania beginning in 1945 as part
of agricultural collectivization and political repression.[212]
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
The communist regime of Josip Broz Tito bloodily repressed opponents and committed several
massacres of prisoners of war after the World War II. The European Public Hearing on Crimes
Committed by Totalitarian Regimes reports: "The decision to 'annihilate' opponents must had been
adopted in the closest circles of the Yugoslav state leadership, and the order was certainly issued by
the Supreme Commander of the Yugoslav Army Josip Broz Tito, although it is not known when or
in what form."[225][226][227][228][cc]
Dominic McGoldrick writes that as the head of a "highly centralised and oppressive" dictatorship,
Tito wielded tremendous power in Yugoslavia, with his dictatorial rule administered through an
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elaborate bureaucracy which routinely suppressed human rights.[228] Eliott Behar states that
"Tito's Yugoslavia was a tightly controlled police state",[229] and outside the Soviet Union,
Yugoslavia had more political prisoners than all of the rest of Eastern Europe combined, according
to David Mates.[230] Tito's secret police was modelled on the Soviet KGB. Its members were everpresent and they often acted extrajudicially,[231] with victims including middle-class intellectuals,
liberals, and democrats.[232] Yugoslavia was a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights but scant regard was paid to some of its provisions.[233]
North Korea
According to Rudolph Rummel, forced labor, executions, and concentration camps were
responsible for over one million deaths in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) from
1948 to 1987.[234] Others have estimated that 400,000 people died in North Korea's concentration
camps alone.[235] A wide range of atrocities have been committed in the camps including forced
abortions, infanticide and torture. Former International Criminal Court judge Thomas
Buergenthal, who was one of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea's authors and a child survivor of Auschwitz, told The
Washington Post that "conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even
worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps and in my long
professional career in the human rights field."[236] Pierre Rigoulot estimates 100,000 executions,
1.5 million deaths through concentration camps and slave labor, and 500,000 deaths from
famine.[237] During the Korean War, the DPRK "liquidated" 29,000 civilians during the North
Korean occupation of South Korea, June to September, 1950.[238]
The famine, which claimed as many as one million lives, has been described as the result of the
economic policies pursued by the North Korean government[239] and deliberate "terrorstarvation";[240] in 2010, Steven Rosefielde stated that the Red Holocaust "still persists in North
Korea", as Kim Jong Il "refuses to abandon mass killing."[241] Adam Jones cites journalist Jasper
Becker's claim that the famine was a form of mass killing or genocide due to political
manipulations of food.[242] Estimates based on a North Korean 2008 census suggest 240,000 to
420,000 excess deaths as a result of the 1990s North Korean famine and a demographic impact of
600,000 to 850,000 fewer people in North Korea in 2008 as a result of poor living conditions after
the famine.[243]
Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Valentino attributes 80,000–200,000 deaths to "communist mass killings" in North and South
Vietnam.[244]
According to scholarship based on Vietnamese and Hungarian archival evidence, as many as
15,000 suspected landlords were executed during North Vietnam's land reform from 1953 to
1956.[cd][245][246] The North Vietnamese leadership planned in advance to execute 0.1% of North
Vietnam's population (estimated at 13.5 million in 1955) as "reactionary or evil landlords",
although this ratio could vary in practice.[247][248] Dramatic errors were committed in the course of
the land reform campaign.[249] Vu Tuong states that the number of executions during North
Vietnam's land reform was proportionally comparable to executions during Chinese land reform
from 1949 to 1952.[247]
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Cuba
According to Jay Ulfelder and Benjamin Valentino, the Fidel Castro government of Cuba killed
between 5,000 and 8,335 noncombatants as a part of the campaign of political repression between
1959 and 1970.[250]
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan
According to Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago, although frequently considered an example of
communist genocide, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan represents a borderline case.[211]
Prior to the Soviet–Afghan War, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan executed between
10,000 and 27,000 people, mostly at Pul-e-Charkhi prison.[251][252][253] Mass graves of executed
prisoners have been exhumed dating back to the Soviet era.[254]
After the invasion in 1979, the Soviets installed the puppet government of Babrak Karmal. By 1987,
about 80% of the country's territory was permanently controlled by neither the pro-communist
government and supporting Soviet troops nor by the armed opposition. To tip the balance, the
Soviet Union used a tactic that was a combination of scorched earth policy and migratory
genocide. By systematically burning the crops and destroying villages in rebel provinces as well as
by reprisal bombing entire villages suspected of harboring or supporting the resistance, the Soviets
tried to force the local population to move to Soviet controlled territory, thereby depriving the
armed opposition of support.[255] Valentino attributes between 950,000 and 1,280,000 civilian
deaths to the Soviet invasion and occupation of the country between 1978 and 1989, primarily as
counter-guerrilla mass killing.[256] By the early 1990s, approximately one-third of Afghanistan's
population had fled the country.[ce] M. Hassan Kakar said that "the Afghans are among the latest
victims of genocide by a superpower."[257]
People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Amnesty International estimates that half a million people were killed during the Ethiopian Red
Terror of 1977 and 1978.[258][259][260] During the terror, groups of people were herded into
churches that were then burned down and women were subjected to systematic rape by
soldiers.[261] The Save the Children Fund reported that victims of the Red Terror included not only
adults, but 1,000 or more children, mostly aged between eleven and thirteen, whose corpses were
left in the streets of Addis Ababa.[258] Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam himself is alleged
to have killed political opponents with his bare hands.[262]
Debate over famines
According to historian J. Arch Getty, over half of the 100 million deaths which are attributed to
communism were due to famines.[263] Stéphane Courtois posits that many communist regimes
caused famines in their efforts to forcibly collectivize agriculture and systematically used it as a
weapon by controlling the food supply and distributing food on a political basis. Courtois states
that "in the period after 1918, only Communist countries experienced such famines, which led to
the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. And again in the
1980s, two African countries that claimed to be Marxist–Leninist, Ethiopia and Mozambique, were
the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines."[cf]
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Scholars Stephen G. Wheatcroft, R. W. Davies, and Mark
Tauger reject the idea that the Ukrainian famine was an act of
genocide that was intentionally inflicted by the Soviet
government.[264][265] Getty posits that the "overwhelming
weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives
is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of
Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal
plan."[263] Novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn opined in a 2 April
2008 article in Izvestia that the 1930s famine in the Ukraine
was no different from the Russian famine of 1921–1922, as
both were caused by the ruthless robbery of peasants by
Bolshevik grain procurements.[266]
Pankaj Mishra questions Mao's direct responsibility for
famine, stating: "A great many premature deaths also occurred
in newly independent nations not ruled by erratic tyrants."
Mishra cites Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's research
demonstrating that democratic India suffered more excess
mortality from starvation and disease in the second half of the
20th century than China did. Sen wrote: "India seems to
manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight
years than China put there in its years of shame."[267][268]
The Soviet famine of 1932–1933,
with areas where the effects of
famine were most severe shaded
Benjamin Valentino writes: "Although not all the deaths due to famine in these cases were
intentional, communist leaders directed the worst effects of famine against their suspected
enemies and used hunger as a weapon to force millions of people to conform to the directives of the
state."[77] Daniel Goldhagen says that in some cases deaths from famine should not be
distinguished from mass murder, commenting: "Whenever governments have not alleviated
famine conditions, political leaders decided not to say no to mass death – in other words, they said
yes." Goldhagen says that instances of this occurred in the Mau Mau Rebellion, the Great Leap
Forward, the Nigerian Civil War, the Eritrean War of Independence, and the War in Darfur.[269]
Martin Shaw posits that if a leader knew the ultimate result of their policies would be mass death
by famine, and they continue to enact them anyway these death can be understood as intentional.
[270][cg]
Historian and journalists, such as Seumas Milne and Jon Wiener, have criticized the emphasis on
communism when assigning blame for famines. In a 2002 article for The Guardian, Milne
mentions "the moral blindness displayed towards the record of colonialism", and he writes: "If
Lenin and Stalin are regarded as having killed those who died of hunger in the famines of the 1920s
and 1930s, then Churchill is certainly responsible for the 4 million deaths in the avoidable Bengal
famine of 1943." Milne laments that while "there is a much-lauded Black Book of Communism,
[there exists] no such comprehensive indictment of the colonial record."[271] Weiner makes a
similar assertion while comparing the Holodomor and the Bengal famine of 1943, stating that
Winston Churchill's role in the Bengal famine "seems similar to Stalin's role in the Ukrainian
famine."[272] Historian Mike Davis, author of Late Victorian Holocausts, draws comparisons
between the Great Chinese Famine and the Indian famines of the late 19th century, arguing that in
both instances the governments which oversaw the response to the famines deliberately chose not
to alleviate conditions and as such bear responsibility for the scale of deaths in said famines.[273]
Historian Michael Ellman is critical of the fixation on a "uniquely Stalinist evil" when it comes to
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excess deaths from famines. Ellman posits that mass deaths from famines are not a "uniquely
Stalinist evil", commenting that throughout Russian history, famines, and droughts have been a
common occurrence, including the Russian famine of 1921–1922, which occurred before Stalin
came to power. He also states that famines were widespread throughout the world in the 19th and
20th centuries in countries such as India, Ireland, Russia and China. According to Ellman, the G8
"are guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence because of their not
taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and Stalin's "behaviour was no worse than that of
many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."[124]
Legal status and prosecutions
According to a 1992 constitutional amendment in the Czech Republic, a person who publicly
denies, puts in doubt, approves, or tries to justify Nazi or communist genocide or other crimes of
Nazis or communists will be punished with a prison term of 6 months to 3 years.[274] In 1992,
Barbara Harff wrote that no communist country or governing body has ever been convicted of
genocide.[275] In his 1999 foreword to The Black Book of Communism, Martin Malia wrote:
"Throughout the former Communist world, moreover, virtually none of its responsible officials has
been put on trial or punished. Indeed, everywhere Communist parties, though usually under new
names, compete in politics."[276]
At the conclusion of a trial lasting from 1994 to 2006, Ethiopia's
former ruler Mengistu Haile Mariam was convicted of genocide, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death by an
Ethiopian court for his role in Ethiopia's Red Terror.[277][278][279][280]
Ethiopian law is distinct from the United Nations' Genocide
Convention and other definitions in that it defines genocide as intent
to wipe out political and not just ethnic groups. In this respect, it
closely resembles the definition of politicide.[275]
In 1997, the Cambodian government asked the United Nations for
assistance in setting up the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.[281][282][283] The
prosecution presented the names of five possible suspects to the
Mengistu Haile Mariam, the
investigating judges on 18 July 2007.[281] On 26 July 2010, Kang Kek
former communist leader of
Iew (Comrade Duch), director of the S-21 prison camp in Democratic
Ethiopia
Kampuchea where more than 14,000 people were tortured and then
murdered (mostly at nearby Choeung Ek), was convicted of crimes
against humanity and sentenced to 35 years. His sentence was
reduced to 19 years in part because he had been behind bars for 11 years.[284] Nuon Chea, second
in command of the Khmer Rouge and its most senior surviving member, was charged of war crimes
and crimes against humanity but not of genocide. On 7 August 2014, he was convicted of crimes
against humanity by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and received a life sentence.[285][286] Khieu
Samphan, the Khmer Rouge head of state, was also convicted of crimes against humanity. In 2018,
Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were convicted of genocide for "the attempted extermination of
the Cham and Vietnamese minorities."[287]
In August 2007, Arnold Meri, an Estonian Red Army veteran and cousin of former Estonian
president Lennart Meri, faced charges of genocide by Estonian authorities for participating in the
deportations of Estonians in Hiiumaa in 1949.[288][289] Meri denied the accusation, characterizing
them as politically motivated defamation, saying: "I do not consider myself guilty of genocide." The
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trial was halted when Meri died March 27, 2009 at the age of 89.[290]
On 26 November 2010, the Russian State Duma issued a declaration acknowledging Stalin's
responsibility for the Katyn massacre, the execution of over 21,000 Polish POW's and intellectual
leaders by Stalin's NKVD. The declaration stated that archival material "not only unveils the scale
of his horrific tragedy but also provides evidence that the Katyn crime was committed on direct
orders from Stalin and other Soviet leaders."[291][ch]
Memorials and museums
Monuments to the victims of communism exist in almost all
the capitals of Eastern Europe and there are also several
museums which document the crimes which occurred during
communist rule such as the Museum of Occupations and
Freedom Fights in Lithuania, the Museum of the Occupation of
Latvia in Riga and the House of Terror in Budapest, all three of
these museums also document the crimes which occurred
during Nazi rule.[292][263] Several scholars, among them
Map of Stalin's Gulag camps in the
Kristen Ghodsee and Laure Neumayer, posit that these efforts
Gulag Museum in Moscow, founded
seek to institutionalize the "victims of communism" narrative
in 2001 by the historian Anton
as a double genocide theory, or the moral equivalence between
Antonov-Ovseyenko
the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and those killed by
communist states (class murder),[59] and that works such as
The Black Book of Communism played a major role in the
criminalization of communism in the European political space in the post Cold War-era.[60] Zoltan
Dujisin writes that "the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian 'collective memory' of communism
reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism" and the narrative is proposed by
"anticommunist memory entrepreneurs."[293]
In Washington D.C., a bronze statue modeled after the Goddess of Democracy sculpture, which
was created during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, was dedicated as the Victims of
Communism Memorial in 2007, having been authorized by the Congress in 1993.[17][294] The
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation plans to build an International Museum on
Communism in Washington.[295] In 2002, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism was
unveiled in Prague.[296] In Hungary, the Gloria Victis Memorial to honor "the 100 million victims
of communism" was erected in 2006 on the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution.[297] As
of 2008, Russia contained 627 memorials and memorial plaques which are dedicated to the victims
of the communist terror, most of them were created by private citizens, but it did not have either a
national monument or a national museum.[298] The Wall of Grief in Moscow, inaugurated in
October 2017, is Russia's first monument to the victims of political persecution by Stalin during the
country's Soviet era.[299] In 2017, Canada's National Capital Commission approved the design of
the Memorial to the Victims of Communism – Canada, a Land of Refuge which will be built on the
Garden of the Provinces and Territories in Ottawa.[300] On 23 August 2018, Estonia's Victims of
Communism 1940–1991 Memorial was inaugurated in Tallinn by Estonian president Kersti
Kaljulaid.[301] The memorial's construction was financed by the state and the memorial itself is
being managed by the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory.[302] The date of the opening
ceremony was chosen because it coincided with the official European Day of Remembrance for the
Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.[303]
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See also
Communist movements and violence
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
Communist terrorism
Crimes against humanity under communist regimes
Left-wing terrorism
Red Terror (disambiguation)
Victims of Communism Memorial (disambiguation)
Mass killing of communists
▪ Anti-communist mass killings
▪ Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66
Violence by governments in general and comparative studies
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism
Crimes against humanity § By states
Genocide § By states
Mass murder § By states
Political violence
References
Excerpts and notes
a. Krain 1997, pp. 331–332: "1. The literatures on state-sponsored mass murder and state
terrorism have been plagued by definitional problems. Terms such as state-sponsored mass
murder and state terrorism can be (and often are) easily confused and therefore need
elaboration. The main difference between state-sponsored mass murder and state terrorism,
for instance, is one of intentionality. The purpose behind policies of state-sponsored mass
murder such as genocide or politicide is to eliminate an entire group (Gurr 1986, 67). The
purpose behind policies of state terrorism is to 'induce sharp fear and through that agency to
effect a desired outcome in a conflict situation' (Gurr 1986, 46). The former requires mass
killings to accomplish its goal. The latter's success is dependent on the persuasiveness of the
fear tactics used. Mass killings may not be necessary to accomplish the particular goal. ... 2.
Genocides are mass killings in which the victim group is defined by association with a particular
communal group. Politicides are mass killings in which 'victim groups are defined primarily in
terms of their hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime and dominant groups'
(Harff and Gurr 1988, 360). Interestingly, many of the instances coded by Harff and Gurr as
'politicide' are considered by much of the literature to be instances of state terrorism (e.g.,
Argentina, Chile, El Salvador) (Lopez 1984, 63). Evidently there is some overlap between state
terrorism and some kinds of state-sponsored mass murder."
b. Valentino 2005, p. 9: "Mass killing and Genocide. No generally accepted terminology exists to
describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants."
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c. Karlsson & Schoenhals 2008, p. 6: "'Crimes against humanity' is a linguistically and logically
cumbersome term when the aim is to analyse physical violence perpetrated by individual
groups, institutions and states against specific victim groups in their own country, which is
essentially the case in the context of communist regimes' crimes against humanity. In addition,
it is not in keeping with the terms that have long been used by the academic community.
Naturally, the work of creating an inventory includes examining the terms used in practice by
researchers in their analyses, and it is reasonable to assume that every time, every society and
every paradigm has its own terms to refer to the crimes of communist regimes. Nonetheless, it
is possible to establish at this early stage that researchers have long used the word terror to
describe the crimes of the Soviet communist regime, regardless of the framework of
interpretation to which they adhere. Although the extent to which the mass operations and
forced deportations of specific ethnic groups ordered by Stalin before and during the Second
World War can be defined as genocide is debated, there is agreement among researchers that
the term 'terror' is the best reflection of the development of violence in Bolshevik Russia and in
the communist Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. As a result, terror will be the term most
frequently used here in analysing the Soviet communist criminal history. On the other hand, the
term terror is seldom used to describe the mass killings in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979,
which may be because it is less clear that the actual intention and stated motive of the Khmer
Rouge was to terrorise people into submission. The term genocide, however, is relatively
widely accepted and established in describing the systematic and selective crimes of the
communist regime in Cambodia, although the use of this term is not entirely uncontroversial.
Therefore, in analysing the criminal history of Cambodia, this term will be used in precise
contexts dealing with the killing of a category of people, whereas more neutral terms such as
mass killing and massacre are used to refer to the general use of violence. The terminology
used in the Chinese criminal history is dealt with in detail as part of the section on China. ... In
the Soviet case, as Klas-Göran Karlsson so rightly notes, there is an 'established term' for the
crimes of the regime, namely 'terror' – and this is used almost regardless of the general
frameworks of interpretation employed by individual researchers. In the same way, he notes
that 'the term genocide is established and accepted as a description of the crimes of the Khmer
Rouge'. In the case of the People's Republic of China, however, there are no equivalent terms
that are accepted or generally established in the academic community and that can be made
use of in a research inventory. Bibliographies and search engines all speak their own clear
language: those who carried out research on Maoism in its day made very limited use of words
such as terror and genocide, and neither do these terms appear among the key terms that
carry implicit clear explanations and are therefore regularly used by current foreign and
Chinese historians."
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d. Semelin 2009, p. 318: "'Classicide', in counterpoint to genocide, has a certain appeal, but it
doesn't convey the fact that communist regimes, beyond their intention of destroying 'classes' a difficult notion to grasp in itself (what exactly is a 'kulak'?) - end up making political suspicion
a rule of government: even within the Party (and perhaps even mainly within the Party). The
notion of 'fratricide' is probably more appropriate in this regard. That of 'politicide', which Ted
Gurr and Barbara Harff suggest, remains the most intelligent, although it implies by contrast
that 'genocide' is not 'political', which is debatable. These authors in effect explain that the aim
of politicide is to impose total political domination over a group or a government. Its victims are
defined by their position in the social hierarchy or their political opposition to the regime or this
dominant group. Such an approach applies well to the political violence of communist powers
and more particularly to Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea. The French historian Henri Locard
in fact emphasises this, identifying with Gurr and Harff's approach in his work on Cambodia.
However, the term 'politicide' has little currency among some researchers because it has no
legal validity in international law. That is one reason why Jean-Louis Margolin tends to
recognise what happened in Cambodia as 'genocide' because, as he points out, to speak of
'politicide' amounts to considering Pol Pot's crimes as less grave than those of Hitler. Again,
the weight of justice interferes in the debate about concepts that, once again, argue strongly in
favour of using the word genocide. But those so concerned about the issue of legal sanctions
should also take into account another legal concept that is just as powerful, and better
established: that of crime against humanity. In fact, legal scholars such as Antoine Garapon
and David Boyle believe that the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge is much more
appropriately categorised under the heading of crime against humanity, even if genocidal
tendencies can be identified, particularly against the Muslim minority. This accusation is just as
serious as that of genocide (the latter moreover being sometimes considered as a subcategory
of the former) and should thus be subject to equally severe sentences. I quite agree with these
legal scholars, believing that the notion of 'crime against humanity' is generally better suited to
the violence perpetrated by communist regimes, a viewpoint shared by Michael Mann."
e. Su 2011, pp. 7–8: "Killing civilians in large numbers is an age-old phenomenon. Since World
War II, its conceptualization has been shaped by the enormity of the Holocaust, in which Hitler
and the Nazi regime killed more than six million Jews. In 1948, the United Nations (UN) passed
the 'Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.' Lemkin and other
framers clearly had the Holocaust in mind when they defined genocide as an act of a nationstate to eliminate an ethnic or national group. Other conceptions of genocide are also
preoccupied by central state politics, state-led exterminations, and institutionalized state killers.
Later scholars expanded the concept to include cases in which victims are defined other than
by ethnic, national, or religious characteristics. Valentino uses the term mass killing instead,
and defines it as 'the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants.' Other concepts
such as politicide, democide, and classicide were developed to address killings in communist
countries."
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f. Weiss-Wendt 2008, p. 42: "The field of comparative genocide studies has grown beyond
recognition over the past two decades, though more quantitatively than qualitatively. On the
surface, everything looks good: the number of books on genocide has tripled within less than a
decade; the field of comparative genocide studies has its own professional association and
journals; more and more colleges and universities offer courses on genocide; several research
institutions dedicated to the study of genocide have been established. If we are talking
numbers, comparative genocide studies are indeed a success. Upon closer examination,
however, genocide scholarship is ridden with contradictions. There is barely any other field of
study that enjoys so little consensus on defining principles such as definition of genocide,
typology, application of a comparative method, and timeframe. Considering that scholars have
always put stress on prevention of genocide, comparative genocide studies have been a
failure. Paradoxically, nobody has attempted so far to assess the field of comparative genocide
studies as a whole. This is one of the reasons why those who define themselves as genocide
scholars have not been able to detect the situation of crisis."
g. Ott 2011, p. 53: "As is customary in the literature on mass killing of civilians there is a need to
restate here what mass killing is about. Although many definitions have been used —
'genocide', 'politicide' and 'democide' — there has emerged a sort of consensus that the term
'mass killing' is much more straightforward than either genocide or politicide. Harff (2003)
makes a clear distinction from genocide, often used interchangeably with mass killing, by
emphasizing the intention of the perpetrator. He [sic] posits: 'genocide as an authority group's
sustained purposeful implementation or facilitation of policies designed to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group' (Harff, 2003, p. 58). Although this definition
encompasses the ethnic population, the emphasis here is on the objective function of the
authority, which is the destruction in whole or part of the intended group. The second definition,
politicide, limits the annihilation to a specific group. Politicide pertains when the victimized
group is identified by its political opposition to the dominant party, rather than other communal
characteristics (Harff, 2003, p. 58). Rummel (1995) advanced the democide label. It is defined
as the 'murder of any person or people by a government including genocide, politicide and
mass murder' (p. 3)."
h. Semelin 2009, p. 37: "Mann thus establishes a sort of parallel between racial enemies and
class enemies, thereby contributing to the debates on comparisons between Nazism and
communism. This theory has also been developed by some French historians such as
Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism: they view class
genocide as the equivalent to racial genocide. Mann however refuses to use the term
'genocide' to describe the crimes committed under communism. He prefers the terms 'fratricide'
and 'classicide', a word he coined to refer to intentional mass killings of entire social classes."
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i. Rummel 1993: "First, however, I should clarify the term democide. It means for governments
what murder means for an individual under municipal law. It is the premeditated killing of a
person in cold blood, or causing the death of a person through reckless and wanton disregard
for their life. Thus, a government incarcerating people in a prison under such deadly conditions
that they die in a few years is murder by the state--democide--as would parents letting a child
die from malnutrition and exposure be murder. So would government forced labor that kills a
person within months or a couple of years be murder. So would government created famines
that then are ignored or knowingly aggravated by government action be murder of those who
starve to death. And obviously, extrajudicial executions, death by torture, government
massacres, and all genocidal killing be murder. However, judicial executions for crimes that
internationally would be considered capital offenses, such as for murder or treason (as long as
it is clear that these are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as in
communist show trials), are not democide. Nor is democide the killing of enemy soldiers in
combat or of armed rebels, nor of noncombatants as a result of military action against military
targets."
j. Harff 2003, p. 58: "First, the Convention does not include groups of victims defined by their
political position or actions. Raphael Lemkin (1944) coined the term genocide and later sought
the support of as many states as possible for a legal document that would outlaw mass killings
and prescribe sanctions against potential perpetrators. Because the first draft of the
Convention, which included political groups, was rejected by the USSR and its allies, the final
draft omitted any reference to political mass murder (Le Blanc 1988). The concept of politicide
is used here to encompass cases with politically defined victims, consistent with Fein’s (1993b,
12) line of reasoning that 'mass killings of political groups show similarities in their causes,
organization and motives.'"
k. Williams 2008, p. 190: "A vital element of the evolution of genocide studies is the increased
attention devoted to the mass killing of groups not primarily defined by ethnic or religious
identities. Most vulnerable minorities around the world had been so defined when Lemkin was
crafting his genocide framework, and when UN member states were drafting the Genocide
Convention. Such groups continued to be targeted in the post-Second World War period, as in
East Pakistan/ Bangladesh in 1971, or Guatemala between 1978 and 1984. But it became
increasingly apparent that political groups were on the receiving end of some of the worst
campaigns of mass killing, such as the devastating assault on the Indonesian Communist Party
in 1965—1966 (with half a million to one million killed), and the brutal campaigns by Latin
American and Asian military regimes against perceived dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.
One result of this re-evaluation was that the mass killing by the Khmer Rouge regime in
Cambodia between 1975 and 1978, previously ruled out as genocide or designated an 'autogenocide' because most victims belonged to the same ethnic-Khmer group as their killers,
came to be accepted as a classic instance of twentieth-century genocide. Detailed
investigations were also launched into the hecatombs of casualties inflicted under Leninism
and Stalinism in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, and by Mao Zedong's communists in
China. In both of these cases—and to some degree in Cambodia as well—the majority of
deaths resulted not from direct execution, but from the infliction of 'conditions of life calculated
to bring about [the] physical destruction' of a group, in the language of Article II(c) of the
Genocide Convention. In particular, the devastating famines that struck the Ukraine and other
minority regions of the USSR in the early 1930s, and the even greater death-toll—numbering
tens of millions—caused by famine during Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' (1958—1962), were
increasingly, though not uncontroversially, depicted as instances of mass killing underpinned by
genocidal intent."
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l. Hackmann 2009: "A coining of communism as 'red Holocaust,' as had been suggested by the
Munich Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, did not find much ground, neither in Germany nor elsewhere
in international discussions."
m. Rosefielde 2010, p. 3: "The Red Holocaust could be defined to include all murders (judicially
sanctioned terror-executions), criminal manslaughter (lethal forced labor and ethnic cleansing)
and felonious negligent homicide (terror-starvation) incurred from insurrectionary actions and
civil wars prior to state seizure, and all subsequent felonious state killings. This treatise,
however, limits the Red Holocaust death toll to peacetime state killings, even if communists
were responsible for political assassinations, insurrections and civil wars before achieving
power, in order to highlight the causal significance of communist economic systems. It also
excludes deaths attributable to wartime hostilities after states were founded. As a matter of
accounting, the convention excludes Soviet killings before 1929, during World War II (1940-45)
and in Germany, occupied Europe, North Korea, Manchuria and the Kuril Islands (1946-53).
Killings in China before October 1949 are similarly excluded, as are those in Indochina before
1954. Soviet slaughter of nobles, kulaks, capitalist and the bourgeoisie during War
Communism are part of the excluded wartime group, but killings of similar social categories in
China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia after their civil wars in the process of
Communist consolidation are included. The summary casualty statistics reported in Table 11.1
conform with this definition and in principle only reflect excess deaths, excluding natural
mortality. It provides a comprehensive picture of discretionary communist killings unobscured
by wartime exigencies. Others desiring a broader body count to assess the fullest extent of
communist carnage can easily supplement the estimates provided here from standard
sources."
n. Shafir 2016, p. 64: "Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, who was among the first Western authors to
analyze this postcommunist trend in Romania, was noting back in 1999 that 'The pathos,
indeed the intentionally provocative tone of the militant parallelism [between Nazism and
communism]' makes use of the term 'Red Holocaust' primarily in order to utilize a notion
(Holocaust) that 'allows the reality it describes to immediately attain, in the Western mind, a
status equal to that of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazi regime.' Furthermore, 'the
spirit of the wording is one of a claim of victimization careful to legitimize itself in a sort of
mimetic rivalry with Jewish memory.' That is the competitive martyrdom component of Double
Genocide. But Laignel-Lavastine's intuitive article also alludes to an ideological basis at the
foundations of such efforts. In her opinion, postcommunist Romanian historiography had been
captured by (both inter-war and national-communist) ideology."
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o. Voicu 2018, p. 46: "Beginning in the 1990s the notion of a 'red Holocaust' (or a 'communist
Holocaust') was forged in order to establish--including at the level of terminology--the similarity
of the two tragedies. The concept of Holocaust, specific to the history of European Jews (and
Roma people and other social categories), was thus extracted from its customary register and
used to define a different historical experience with its own specific traits. Leon Volovici
rightfully condemned the abusive use of this concept as an attempt to 'usurp' and undermine a
symbol specific to the history of European Jews. As many of those who use the term 'red
Holocaust' (and other terms along the same lines, such as 'the Holocaust of Romanian culture'
and 'the Holocaust of Romanian people') do so with antisemitic rancor, claiming that the
authors of this 'Holocaust' are none other than the Jews, the reason for the hijacking of the
term becomes clear: to place the blame on Jews and to manufacture an alternate history. It
should be noted that the intelligentsia at the top of Romanian culture does not use the
expression 'red Holocaust' systematically, but rather accidentally. Gabriela Adameșteanu and
Rodica Palade, for instance, once considered this syntagma an innocent 'metaphor' that could
be used legitimately and fruitfully in the debate about the crimes of the communist regime.
However, the two journalists--who at the time they supported this syntagma were at the helm of
Revista 22--did not use the expression in later publications. From time to time, the syntagma
was used by other intellectuals, too, but most of them have recognized its traps and intentions.
Yet, while it is no longer part of their usual vocabulary, something of its spirit is still present in
the positions they adopt."
p. Staub 2011, p. 100: "In contrast to genocide, I see mass killing as 'killing (or in other ways
destroying) members of a group without the intention to eliminate the whole group, or killing
large numbers of people' without a focus on group membership."
q. Charny 1999: In the Encyclopedia of Genocide (1999), Israel Charny defined generic genocide
as "the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military
action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential
defenselessness and helplessness of the victims."; Easterly, Gatti & Kurlat 2006, pp. 129–156:
In the 2006 article "Development, Democracy, and Mass Killings", William Easterly, Roberta
Gatti, and Sergio Kurlat adopted Charny's definition of generic genocide for their use of mass
killing and massacre to avoid the politics of the term genocide altogether.
r. Ulfelder & Valentino 2008, p. 2: "The research described here sprang from an interest in
observing and assessing the risk of extreme human-rights violations in the form of large-scale
violence perpetrated by states against noncombatant civilians. Researchers working in this
area usually use the terms 'genocide' or 'mass killing' to label their subject of interest, but the
definitions of those terms remain a source of heated debate among scholars, international
lawyers, and policy-makers. Cognizant of these debates, we considered numerous strategies
for defining and observing our phenomenon of interest. Unfortunately, none captured the range
of events that we wished to explore as completely and objectively as does a simple numerical
threshold of civilian fatalities. For purposes of this research, then, we defined a mass killing as
any event in which the actions of state agents result in the intentional death of at least 1,000
noncombatants from a discrete group in a period of sustained violence."
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s. Bellamy 2010, p. 102: "If we look at mass killing since 1945 perpetrated by non-democratic
states outside the context of war, we find two basic types of case. The first involved
revolutionary communist governments implementing their plans for radical transformation. Over
one-third of all the relevant cases (14 of the 38 episodes) were perpetrated by communist
governments. According to Benjamin Valentino, communist governments were so exceptionally
violent because the social transformations they attempted to engineer required the material
dispossession of vast numbers of people. The most radical of these regimes, in China,
Cambodia, and North Korea, attempted to completely reorient society, eradicating traditional
patterns of life and forcibly imposing a new and alien way of life. Communist objectives,
Valentino points out, could only be achieved with violence and the scale of the transformation
dictated a massive amount of violence. Of course, communist revolutions also elicited
resistance, prompting the state into massive and bloody crackdowns and generating a culture
of paranoia which led many regimes to periodically purge their own ranks (China's 'cultural
revolution' being a good example). In communist ideology, the good of the party was
associated with the national interest, individuals were divested of rights and subordinated to the
will of the party leadership, and entire groups (e.g. kulaks in the Soviet Union, merchants and
intellectuals in Cambodia) were deemed 'class enemies' that could be eradicated en masse to
protect the revolution."
t. Wayman & Tago 2010, pp. 4, 11, 12–13: "Our term, 'mass killing', is used by Valentino (2004:
10), who aptly defines it as 'the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants'. The
word 'noncombatants' distinguishes mass killing from battle-deaths in war, which occur as
combatants fight against each other. The 'massive number' he selects as the threshold to mass
killing is 'at least fifty thousand intentional deaths over the course of five or fewer years'
(Valentino, 2004: 11-12), which of course averages to at least 10,000 killed per year. ... One
reason for selecting these thresholds of 10,000 and 1,000 deaths per year is that we find that
in the Harff data on geno-politicide, which are one of our key datasets, there are many cases of
over 10,000 killed per year, but also some in which between 1,000 and 10,000 are killed per
year. Therefore, analyzing at a 1,000-death threshold (as well as the 10,000 threshold) insures
the inclusion of all the Harff cases. Valentino chooses 50,000 over five years as 'to some extent
arbitrary', but a 'relatively high threshold' to create high confidence that mass killing did occur
and was deliberate, 'given the generally poor quality of the data available on civilian fatalities'
(Valentino, 2004: 12). We believe that our similar results, when we lower the threshold to 1,000
killed per year, are an indication that the data in Harff and in Rummel remain reliable down
even one power of ten below Valentino's 'relatively high' selected threshold, and we hope that,
in that sense, our results can be seen as a friendly amendment to his work, and that they
basically lend confidence, based on empirical statistical backing, for the conceptual direction
which he elected to take. ... Within that constant research design, we then showed that the
differences were not due to threshold either (over 10,000 killed per year; over 1,000; or over 1).
The only remaining difference is the measure of mass killing itself — democide vs. genopoliticide. We have further shown that (although the onset years vary from Harff to Rummel),
when one looks at which sovereign states were involved (and the approximate onset year), the
geno politicide data is basically a proper subset of the democide data (as one would expect by
the addition of the need to show specific intent in geno-politicide). It would therefore appear
(assuming for the moment that there are not any big measurement biases) that autocratic
regimes, especially communist, are prone to mass killing generically, but not so strongly
inclined (i.e. not statistically significantly inclined) toward geno-politicide."
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u. Su 2003, p. 4: "Following Valentino (1998), I define mass killing in this paper as 'the intentional
killing of a significant number of the members of any group (as group and its membership are
defined by the perpetrator) of non-combatants' (1998:4). A few elements of this definition are
worth further discussion. First, identification of the victim is based on 'membership,' as opposed
to one that is based on immediate threat. In the case of Cultural Revolution, the membership is
based on political standards as opposed to ascriptive traces such as race and ethnicity.4
Second, the intent to kill is imputable in the perpetrator. This separates mass killing from other
causes of deaths in the Cultural Revolution such as death resulting from on-stage beating or
off-stage beating. In on-stage beating the intention was not to kill but to convey a symbolic
message and to humiliate the victims, and the main purpose of off-stage torture for confession
was clearly to force a confession. Mass killing also differs from casualties of armed battles, a
widespread phenomenon occurring in the earlier stage of the Cultural Revolution. Finally, the
criterion of 'a significant number' indicates some concentration in terms of time and space of
the killing. To use a hypothetical example, we should not judge that mass killings occur if 180
villages of a county kill one person in each village, but we should do so if one of the villages
kills more than ten people within one day."
v. Su 2011, p. 13: "In another conceptual departure from standard scholarship, I use the term
collective killing as opposed to genocide or mass killing. This concept shares three basic
premises with genocide or mass killing. First, the criteria for becoming a victim are not about
deeds but rather with membership in a group. Second, the killing must be intentional, which is
distinct from acts of endangerment that carry no goal of killing in the first place. Using torture to
elicit confessions, for example, may cause significant numbers of deaths. Third, the number of
victims must reach a certain level. This aspect is very much related to the first premise
regarding membership: Individuals are rounded up because they are members of a particular
group, which by definition results in a collective of victims. I replace the word mass with
collective for analysis of units smaller than a country as a whole, for example, county.
Collective killings may occur in smaller areas without meeting the criteria suggested by
Valentino of 'at least fifty thousand intentional deaths over the course of five or fewer years.'
With this more fine-grained conceptual approach, it is also possible to compare collective
killings across counties, townships, and villages."
w. Wayman & Tago 2010, p. 4: "The two important scholars who have created datasets related to
this are Rummel (1995) and Harff (2003). Harff (sometimes with Gurr) has studied what she
terms 'genocide and politicide', defined to be genocide by killing as understood by the
Genocide Convention plus the killing of a political or economic group (Harff & Gurr, 1988); the
combined list of genocides is sometimes labeled 'geno-politicide' for short. Rummel (1994,
1995) has a very similar concept, 'democide', which includes such genocide and geno-politicide
done by the government forces, plus other killing by government forces, such as random killing
not targeted at a particular group. As Rummel (1995: 3-4) says, 'Cold-blooded government
killing ... extends beyond genocide'; For example, 'shooting political opponents; or murdering
by quota'. Hence, 'to cover all such murder as well as genocide and politicide, I use the
concept democide. This is the intentional killing of people by government' (Rummel, 1995: 4).
So Rummel has a broader concept than geno-politicide, but one that seems to include genopoliticide as a proper subset."
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x. Midlarsky 2005, pp. 22, 309, 310: "I distinguish between genocide as the systematic mass
murder of people based on ethnoreligious identity, and politicide as the large-scale killing of
designated enemies of the state based on socioeconomic or political criteria. Although
genocide can be understood to be a species of politicide (but not the converse), in practice,
genocidal (i.e., ethnoreligious) killings tap into much deeper historical roots of the human
condition. In this distinction, I follow Harff and Gurr 1988, 360. ... Turning to Cambodia, the
mass killings in that country during Pol Pot's murderous regime are often characterized with
other seemingly identical circumstances. Cambodia and Rwanda, for example, are typically
treated as genocides that differ little from each other in essential characteristics. However, the
victimization rates for the two countries are similar only when treated as proportions of the total
country population systematically murdered. Although the mass murders in Cambodia are
frequently characterized as genocide, I argue that in fact genocidal activity was only a small
proportion of the killing and that the vast majority of Cambodians died in a politicide,
substantially different in origin from the genocides we have been examining. The matter of
etiology lies at the root of my distinction here, not definitional semantics. If we lump the
Cambodian case other instances of systematized mass murder, then the sources of all of them
become hopelessly muddled. ... Essentially, I argue that genocides stem from a primitive
identification of the 'collective enemy' in Carl Schmitt's sense, whereas politicides, at least of
the Cambodian variety, are attributable to more detailed ideological considerations. Further, the
Cambodian case falls under the rubric of state killings, having a particular affinity with earlier
practices in the Soviet Union and China. Indeed, an arc of Communist politicide can be traced
from the western portions of the Soviet Union to China and on to Cambodia. Not all Communist
states participated in extensive politicide, but the particular circumstances of Cambodia in 1975
lent themselves to the commission of systematic mass murder. Because an element of
Cambodian state insecurity existed in this period, especially vis-à-vis Vietnam, a genocidal
element is found in the killing of non-Khmer peoples such as the Vietnamese, who comprised a
small proportion of the total."
y. Rummel 1993: "Even were we to have total access to all communist archives we still would not
be able to calculate precisely how many the communists murdered. Consider that even in spite
of the archival statistics and detailed reports of survivors, the best experts still disagree by over
40 percent on the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis. We cannot expect near this
accuracy for the victims of communism. We can, however, get a probable order of magnitude
and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range."
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z. Bradley 2017, pp. 151–153: "The relationship between human rights and communism in both
theory and practice has often been in tension. In the ideational realm, Karl Marx famously
dismissed the rights of man as a bourgeois fantasy that masked the systemic inequality of the
capitalist system. 'None of the supposed rights of man,' Marx wrote, 'go beyond the egoistic
man, man as he is, as a member of civil society ... withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied
with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice.' Rights and liberties
in bourgeois society, he argued, provided only an illusory unity behind which social conflict and
inequalities deepened. Rhetorically, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and most
of the rest of the communist world followed Marx's lead. As the Chinese argued in 1961, 'the
'human rights' referred to by bourgeois international law and the 'human rights' it intends to
protect are the rights of the bourgeoisie to enslave and to oppress the labouring people ... [and]
provide pretexts for imperialist opposition to socialist and nationalist countries. They are
reactionary from head to toe.' Rejecting Enlightenment-era inalienable individual political and
civil rights, communist states instead championed collective economic and social rights. The
Soviets grew fond of annually celebrating International Human Rights Day, to mark the
anniversary of the 1948 adoption of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by offering
lectures to its citizens that contrasted the promotion of socialist rights in the Soviet Union with
their violations in the capitalist world. And yet state-orchestrated mass killings and what have
come to be called gross violations of human rights were at times almost commonplace in
communist-led states. Between 1933 and 1945, more than a million people died in the Soviet
Gulag system and likely at least 6 million more in politically induced Soviet famines, Stalin's
mass executions in the great terror and in what Timothy Snyder has termed the 'bloodlands' of
Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus and the western edges of Russia. In Mao's China,
as many as 45 million Chinese died of famine during the Great Leap Forward, while some 2.5
million were killed or tortured to death. During the Cultural Revolution, between 750,000 and
1.5 million were killed. In Pol Pot's Cambodia, 200,000 were executed and between 1.4 million
and 2.2 million of the country's 7 million people died of disease and starvation. If the precise
numbers have always been, and continue to be, in dispute, their order of magnitude is not. In
fact the entanglements between human rights and communism in the twentieth century were
more ambiguous than the chasm between ideology and these staggering numbers would
suggest. The meanings of human rights themselves remained unstable over much of the
second half of the century, as did the actors in the communist world who engaged with them.
What promises of global human rights like those contained in the Universal Declaration might
portend and the very claims about what constituted human rights were not fixed. Nor was the
significance of human rights for the making of international politics or local lives as they were
lived on the ground at all clear. The relationship between human rights and international
communism after 1945 became fluid. In the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union played
an active role in the creation of a global human rights order in the drafting of the Universal
Declaration and the Genocide Convention and participating in the Nuremberg Trials. With the
coming of decolonization, the Soviets and the Chinese would also help to open out the
meanings of international human rights toward the rights of postcolonial self-determination and
development. But human rights in the communist world largely became a polemical state
posture within the broader Cold War ideological struggle. Indeed, the international project of
human rights itself became a muted practice by the 1950s."
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aa. Valentino 2005, p. 275: "Rudolph J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. 15. A team of six French historians coordinated by Stéphane
Courtois estimates that communist regimes are responsible for between 85 and 100 million
deaths. See Martin Malia, 'Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity,' in Stéphane Courtois et.al., The
Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1999), p. x. Zbigniew Brzezinski estimates that 'the failed effort to build communism' cost the
lives of almost sixty million people. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on
the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), p. 16. Matthew
White estimates eighty-one million deaths from communist 'genocide and tyranny' and 'manmade famine.' See Matthew White, 'Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century,'
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm [June 2002]. Todd Culbertson estimates that
communist regimes killed 'perhaps 100 million' people. See Todd Culbertson, 'The Human Cost
of World Communism,' Human Events, August 19, 1978, pp. 10-11. These estimates should be
considered at the highest end of the plausible range of deaths attributable to communist
regimes."
ab. Culbertson 1978, pp. 10–11: "Available evidence indicates that perhaps 100 million persons
have been destroyed by the Communists; the imperviousness of the Iron and Bamboo curtains
prevents a more definitive figure. The Communist system of forced starvation, concentration
camps, and slave labor is remarkably similar to that of the Nazis, whose policies claimed
approximately six million Jewish victims. ... This is an incomplete accounting of Communist
genocide. Since the Russian Revolution 61 years ago communism has been responsible for
the death of 100 million innocent persons - not including the terrorism inspired by Communists
in free countries. The total cost of human suffering and grief is beyond comprehension."
ac. Lenczowski 1985: "The human cost of communism exceeds most Americans' expectations.
The number of people murdered by communist regimes is estimated at between 60 million and
150 million, with the higher figure probably more accurate in light of recent scholarship. The
greatest tide of refugees in world history flows from communist states to noncommunist ones:
Today it comes from Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Indochina, East Europe, and Nicaragua. (During
the entire Vietnam war there was nary a refugee fleeing from Indochina. It was not until
communism triumphed that life became so unbearable that people who could withstand
decades of war fled to the seas.) Communism invented the concentration camp. Millions have
been imprisoned and executed, have worked and starved to death, in these camps.
Communist regimes will not permit enterprising Western reporters near these camps, so you
don't hear about them on the news. Communist regimes recognize no restraint on their
absolute power. From this they establish ideological falsehoods as the standards of right and
wrong and the standards by which deviationism is measured; from this stems the systematic
denial of all individual human rights. The quality of life always deteriorates under communism:
the militarization of society; the destruction of the consumer economy; the rationing of food; the
deterioration of housing and insufficient new construction to meet population growth; the
destruction of medical care through lack of medicine and medical supplies; the destruction of
religion; the destruction and political control of education and culture; the rewriting of history
and destruction of monuments to the national heritage; and the assault on family life and
parental jurisdiction over children."
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ad. Brzezinski 2010, pp. 12–16: "Because of Lenin - through mass executions during and after civil
war, through massive deaths in the Gulag initiated under Lenin's direction (and powerfully
documented in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago), and through mass famines induced by
ruthless indifference (with Lenin callously dismissing as unimportant the deaths of 'the halfsavage, stupid, difficult people of the Russian villages') - it can be estimated that between
6-8,000,000 people perished. That number subsequently was more or less tripled by Stalin,
who caused, it has been conservatively estimated, the deaths of no less than 20,000,000
people, and perhaps even upward of 25,000,000. ... Though the precise figures for Stalin's toll
will never be available, it is unlikely that the range of 20-25,000,000 victims is an exaggeration.
Census statistics also indicate that additionally the biological depletion of the Soviet population
during Stalin's reign was even higher. The estimated number of killings cited above, in any
case, accounts for Stalin's direct genocide. Demographic depletion - because of reduced
birthrates, loss of offspring because of higher infant mortality, births that did not take place
because of imprisonment of a would-be parent, etc. - certainly had to be in excess of even the
enormous toll directly attributable to Stalin personally. ... Accounting for the human losses in
China during the most violent phases of the communist experiment is an even more difficult
task. Unlike the exposure of Stalin's crimes in the Soviet Union (and the much delayed and the
still somewhat reticent exposure of Lenin's crimes), the Chinese regime persists in regarding
the Maoist phase as relatively sacrosanct, with its killings justified but with their scale kept
secret. The only exception is the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, from
which the current Chinese rulers suffered directly. For this phase of internal violence some
estimates have surfaced, and they suggest deaths on the scale of 1-2,000,000. For the earlier
phases, notably the 1950s, there have been broad estimates of as many as several million
executed as 'enemies of the people' - mostly landlords and richer bourgeoisie as well as former
Kuomintang officials and officers. In addition, the figure of up to 27,000,000 peasants who
perished as a consequence of the forcible collectivization has often been cited. Given the size
of the Chinese population, and the indifference to human life of the current regime, the
estimate of about 29,000,000 as the human cost of the communist era is in all probability on
the low side, especially as it does not take into account the net loss to China's population
because of the demographic impact of such mass killings. This ghastly ledger would not be
complete without some accounting of the price in human lives paid for the attempts to construct
communist utopias in Eastern Europe, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba. It is a safe
estimate that these consumed at least 3,000,000 victims, with Cambodia under Pol Pot alone
accounting for one-third. Thus the total might actually be higher. In brief, the failed effort to
build communism in the twentieth century consumed the lives of almost 60,000,000 human
beings, making communism the most costly human failure in all of history."
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ae. Courtois 1999, p. 4: "Thus we have delimited crimes against civilians as the essence of the
phenomenon of terror. These crimes tend to fit a recognizable pattern even if the practices vary
to some extent by regime. The pattern includes execution by various means, such as firing
squads, hanging, drowning, battering, and, in certain cases, gassing, poisoning, or 'car
accidents'; destruction of the population by starvation, through man-made famine, the
withholding of food, or both; deportation, through which death can occur in transit (either
through physical exhaustion or through confinement in an enclosed space), at one's place of
residence, or through forced labor (exhaustion, illness, hunger, cold). Periods described as
times of 'civil war' are more complex - it is not always easy to distinguish between events
caused by fighting between rulers and rebels and events that can be properly described only
as a massacre of the civilian population. Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. The
following rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates, gives some sense of the scale
and gravity of these crimes:
USSR: 20 million deaths
China: 65 million deaths
Vietnam: 1 million deaths
North Korea: 2 million deaths
Cambodia: 2 million deaths
Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths
Latin America: 150,000 deaths
Africa: 1.7 million deaths
Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths
the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about
10,000 deaths."
af. Malia 1999, p. x: "The Black Book offers us the first attempt to determine, overall, the actual
magnitude of what occurred, by systematically detailing Leninism's 'crimes, terror, and
repression' from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989. This factual approach puts
Communism in what is, after all, its basic human perspective. For it was in truth a 'tragedy of
planetary dimensions' (in the French publisher's characterization), with a grand total of victims
variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million. Either
way, the Communist record offers the most colossal case of political carnage in history. And
when this fact began to sink in with the French public, an apparently dry academic work
became a publishing sensation, the focus of impassioned political and intellectual debate. The
shocking dimensions of the Communist tragedy, however, are hardly news to any serious
student of twentieth-century history, at least when the different Leninist regimes are taken
individually. The real news is that at this late date the truth should come as such a shock to the
public at large."
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ag. Karlsson & Schoenhals 2008, pp. 53–54: "Bearing in mind the charged nature of the subject, it
is polemically effective to make such comparisons, but it does not seem particularly fruitful,
neither morally nor scientifically, to judge the regimes on the basis of their 'dangerousness' or
to assess the relationship between communism and Nazism on the basis of what the
international academic community calls their 'atrocities toll' or 'body count'. In that case, should
the crimes of all communist regimes, in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and other countries
where communism is or has been the dominant party, be compared to the Nazi regime's
massacre of six million Jews? Should the Nazi death toll also include the tens of millions of
people who the German Nazi armies and their supporting troops killed during the Second
World War? Not even Courtois' analytical qualification, that ranking the two regimes the same
is based on the idea that the 'weapon of hunger' was used systematically by both the Nazi
regime and a number of communist regimes, makes this more reasonable, since this 'weapon'
on the whole played a very limited role in the Nazi genocide in relation to other types of
methods of mass destruction, and in relation to how it was used by communist regimes."
ah. Valentino 2005, p. 91: "Communist regimes have been responsible for this century's most
deadly episodes of mass killing. Estimates of the total number of people killed by communist
regimes range as high as 110 million. In this chapter I focus primarily on mass killings in the
Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia — history's most murderous communist states.
Communist violence in these three states alone may account for between 21 million and 70
million deaths. Mass killings on a smaller scale also appear to have been carried out by
communist regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Africa."
ai. Valentino 2005, p. 75: Table 2: Communist Mass Killings in the Twentieth Century
Soviet Union (1917-23) ... 250,000-2,500,000
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1927-45) ... 10,000,000-20,000,000
China (including Tibet) (1949-72) ... 10,000,000-46,000,000
Cambodia (1975-79) ... 1,000,000-2,000,000
Possible cases:
Bulgaria (1944-?) ... 50,000-100,000
East Germany (1945-?) ... 80,000-100,000
Romania (1945-?) ... 60,000-300,000
North Korea (1945-?) ... 400,000-1,500,000
North and South Vietnam (1953-?) ... 80,000-200,000
"Note: All figures in this and subsequent tables are author's estimates based on numerous
sources. Episodes are listed under the heading 'possible cases' in this and subsequent tables
when the available evidence suggests a mass killing may have occurred, but documentation is
insufficient to make a definitive judgement regarding the number of people killed, the
intentionality of the killing, or the motives of the perpetrators."
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aj. White 2011, pp. 455–456: "For those who prefer totals broken down by country, here are
reasonable estimates for the number of people who died under Communist regimes from
execution, labor camps, famine, ethnic cleansing, and desperate flight in leaky boats:
▪ China: 40,000,000
▪ Soviet Union: 20,000,000
▪ North Korea: 3,000,000
▪ Ethiopia: 2,000,000
▪ Cambodia: 1,700,000
▪ Vietnam: 365,000 (after 1975)
▪ Yugoslavia: 175,000
▪ East Germany: 100,000
▪ Romania: 100,000
▪ North Vietnam: 50,000 (internally, 1954-75)
▪ Cuba: 50,000
▪ Mongolia: 35,000
▪ Poland: 30,000
▪ Bulgaria: 20,000
▪ Czechoslovakia: 11,000
▪ Albania: 5,000
▪ Hungary: 5,000
▪ Rough Total: 70 million
(This rough total doesn't include the 20 million killed in the civil wars that brought Communists
into power, or the 11 million who died in the proxy wars of the Cold War. Both sides probably
share the blame for these to a certain extent. These two categories overlap somewhat, so once
the duplicates are weeded out, it seems that some 26 million people died in Communistinspired wars.)"
ak. Bellamy 2012, p. 949: "Between 1945 and 1989, communist regimes massacred literally
millions of civilians. A conservative estimate puts the total number of civilians deliberately killed
by communists after the Second World War between 6.7 million and 15.5 million people, with
the true figure probably much higher. Communist governments in China and Cambodia
embarked on programs of radical social transformation and killed, tortured or allowed to starve
whole groups that were thought hostile to change or simply unworthy of life. In the Soviet
Union, Albania, North Korea, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Yugoslavia
and China, communist governments used sometimes massive levels of indiscriminate violence
against civilians to deter and defeat actual and imagined opponents and/or exact revenge for
the Second World War. Where communist governments were violently challenged, they
exhibited little concern for civilian immunity, as evidenced by the Soviet assaults on Hungary
and Afghanistan and North Korea’s conduct in the Korean War. Finally, communism spawned
violent non-state actors, such as the Red Brigades and Bader-Meinhoffer gang in Europe,
Shining Path in Peru, and FARC in Colombia, all of which deliberately targeted noncombatants."
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al. Strauss 2014, pp. 360–361: "For some areas, there is now a beginning of scholarly
convergence on raw numbers. Most are now willing to accept a rough number of around 20
million including famine victims for the Soviet Union, and provisionally somewhere between 2
and 3 million for Cambodia, of whom roughly half were executed outright. In other
environments such as China, there is still little consensus on numbers of total victims of Maoist
revolutionary policies; for the Great Leap Forward alone, estimates of excess deaths range
from 15 to 40 million."
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am. Dissident 2016: "A brief survey returns the following high and low estimates for the number of
people who died at the hand of communist regimes:
China: 29,000,000 (Brzezinski) to 78,860,000 (Li)
USSR: 7,000,000 (Tolz) to 69,500,000 (Panin)
North Korea: 1,600,000 (Rummel, Lethal Politics; figure for killings) to 3,500,000 (Hwang
Jang-Yop, cited in AFP; figure for famine)
Cambodia: 740,000 (Vickery) to 3,300,000 (Math Ly, cited in AP)
Africa: 1,700,000 (Black Book) to 2,000,000 (Fitzgerald; Ethiopia only)
Afghanistan: 670,000 (Zucchino) to 2,000,000 (Katz)
Eastern Europe: 1,000,000
Vietnam: 1,000,000 (Black Book) to 1,670,000 (Rummel, Death by Government)
Latin America: 150,000
International Movements not in power: 10,000
The combined range based on the estimates considered, which derive from scholarly works,
works of journalism, memoirs, and government-provided figures, spans from 42,870,000 to
161,990,000. While reasonable people will disagree in good faith on where the true number
happens to lie, any number within this range ought to provoke horror and condemnation. And
as previously mentioned, these figures estimate only the number of people who perished, not
those who were merely tortured, maimed, imprisoned, relocated, expropriated, impoverished,
or bereaved. These many millions are victims of communism too. The commonly cited figure of
the deaths caused by communist regimes, 100 million, falls midway through this range of
estimates. As scholars continue to research the history of the Soviet Union, the People’s
Republic of China, and other communist regimes, and as they gain access to previously
inaccessible records, the scale of communist crimes will gradually come into even sharper
focus.
Works Consulted
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2010.
Courtois, Stéphane, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel
Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Marolin. The Black Book of Communism. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999.
'Cambodians Recall Massacres.' AP, May 22, 1987.
Fitzgerald, Mary Anne. 'Tyrant for the taking.' The Times (London), April 20, 1991.
Katz, Lee Michael. 'Afghanistan’s President is Ousted.' USA Today, April 17, 1992.
Li, Cheng-Chung. 'The Question of Human Rights on China Mainland. Republic of China:
World Anti-Communist League', 1979.
Panin, Dimitri. Translated by John Moore. The Notebooks of Sologdin. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
Rummel, R. J. Death by Government. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers,
1994.
Rummel, R. J. Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990.
Tolz, Vera. 'Ministry of Security Official Gives New Figures for Stalin's Victims.' Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report. May 1, 1992. (The figure of seven million
direct executions under Stalin, given by a member of the security services heading a
commission for rehabilitation, may be taken as an absolute baseline figure to which
should be added the many deaths suffered by labor camp inmates and the deaths
preceding and following the Stalin period.)
'Top defector says famine has killed over three million Koreans.' Agence France Presse,
March 13, 1999.
Vickery, Michael. Cambodia 1975 – 1982. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
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Zucchino, David. 'The Americans ... They Just Drop Their Bombs and Leave.' Los
Angeles Times, June 2, 2002.
Matthew White's website Necrometrics provides a useful compilation of scholarly
estimates of the death toll of major historical events."
an. Kotkin 2017: "But a century of communism in power—with holdouts even now in Cuba, North
Korea and China—has made clear the human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing
capitalism. Again and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has brought
about the deaths of an astounding number of people. Since 1917—in the Soviet Union, China,
Mongolia, Eastern Europe, Indochina, Africa, Afghanistan and parts of Latin America
—communism has claimed at least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of
demographers. Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass deportations, forced
labor camps and police-state terror—a model established by Lenin and especially by his
successor Joseph Stalin. It has been widely imitated. Though communism has killed huge
numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result
of its cruel projects of social engineering."
ao. Aronson 2003, pp. 222‒245: "But most of these problems pale in significance compared with
the book's opening and closing chapters, which caused enormous controversy and even
occasioned a break among The Black Book's authors. ... Courtois's figures for the Soviet
Union, Vietnam, and Latin America go far beyond the estimates of the authors themselves, as
does Courtois's final body count. ... But two other theses created considerable consternation
and have come to be associated with The Black Book: the figure of 100 million deaths and the
parallel with Nazism. They became central in the debate that followed. ... In articles and
interviews Werth and Margolin pointed out how, in the service of this goal, Courtois distorted
and exaggerated: Werth's total, including the Civil War and the famine of 1932–1933 had been
five million less than Courtois's 'mythical number,' while Margolin denied having spoken of the
Vietnamese Communists being responsible for one million deaths. Interviewed in Le Monde,
Margolin likened Courtois's effort to 'militant political activity, indeed, that of a prosecutor
amassing charges in the service of a cause, that of a global condemnation of the Communist
phenomenon as an essentially criminal phenomenon.' Both rejected the comparison between
Communism and Nazism: ... ."
ap. Engel-Di Mauro 2021: "A petulant upsurge in anti-communism is permeating the United States
(US) and Canada, as well as countries in the European Union (EU). Its main truncheon is the
simultaneously fictitious and slanderous claim that communism caused 100 million victims, a
catchy slogan sensationalised through a 1997 propaganda volume titled The Black Book of
Communism (henceforth BBC). It suits a more recent China-bashing campaign, where the
Communist Party of China is purposefully conflated with communism."
aq. Courtois 1999, p. xiv: "On the one side, commentators in the liberal Le Monde argue that it is
illegitimate to speak of a single Communist movement from Phnom Penh to Paris. Rather, the
rampage of the Khmer Rouge is like the ethnic massacres of third-world Rwanda, or the 'rural'
Communism of Asia is radically different from the 'urban' Communism of Europe; or Asian
Communism is really only anticolonial nationalism. ... [C]onflating sociologically diverse
movements is merely a stratgem to obtain a higher body count against Communism, and thus
against all the left."
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ar. Engel-Di Mauro 2021: "In this discussion I want to draw attention to the fact that, since the time
of the Russian Revolution, capitalist institutions as a whole have caused close to 158 million
deaths by waging war alone, with liberal democratic varieties of capitalism contributing at least
56 million of those fatalities. This monstrous impact, unprecedented in the history of humanity,
doubtless reaches hundreds of millions more deaths when the centuries of genocides and
slavery systems are considered and when murders in the home, at work, in prisons, and in the
streets (including by police) are counted as well. Because studies on the level of morbidity
associated with capitalist relations are scarce and limited, war-related deaths provide an
arguably less assailable set of figures to oppose anti-communist libels."
as. Ghodsee & Sehon 2018: "But the problem for the anti-communists is that their general premise
can be used as the basis for an equally good argument against capitalism, an argument that
the so-called losers of economic transition in eastern Europe would be quick to affirm. The US,
a country based on a free-market capitalist ideology, has done many horrible things: the
enslavement of millions of Africans, the genocidal eradication of the Native Americans, the
brutal military actions taken to support pro-Western dictatorships, just to name a few. The
British Empire likewise had a great deal of blood on its hands: we might merely mention the
internment camps during the second Boer War and the Bengal famine. This is not mere
'whataboutism', because the same intermediate premise necessary to make their anticommunist argument now works against capitalism: ... ."
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at. Jahanbegloo 2014, pp. 117–118: "Most interesting, however, is Finlay's argument that Marxist
thought, beyond justifying and excusing the use of violence, also legitimates it. Finlay (ibid. p.
378) argues that this is done by 'undermining existing moral norms and suggesting that new
ones will be created to suit a new proletarian order.' Marx argues that norms and ethics are
determined by the dominating class of the time, as can be illustrated in Lenin's statement that
'Honesty is a bourgeoisie virtue', meaning that honesty is crucial to the existence of
bourgeoisie, as other virtues such as loyalty and obedience were necessary virtues during the
reign of the feudal aristocracy. This impacts the concept of justice in war dramatically. As there
is the assumption that a new social order is to be created, along with a new set of moral and
ethical codes, then the current ones may be discarded. Therefore, Finley (ibid.) states that it
would be conceivable for revolutionaries to commit atrocious crimes in bringing about a
socialist system, with the belief that their crimes will be retroactively absolved by the new
system of ethics put in place by the proletariat. Finley also addresses an alternative opinion,
that of Shlomo Avineri, who believes that this may be a non-issue when one takes into account
the universality of the proletariat. This universality means that it has no active class-based or
sectarian interest, or, rather, that its interests represent those of all society. Its major interest is
simply to 'eliminate all other special interests on the basis of which it suffers oppression' and is
an entirely negative entirely (ibid., p. 379). Therefore, our conception of ethics and morality the product of a capitalist society - is inaccurate. Being based on the interest of the bourgeoisie
rather than a true and authentic reflection of the ethics of a universal class, its contravention is
not something to be lamented. Finley understands Avineri as drawing two conclusions. First,
that:
whatever the bourgeoisie with its individualistic and legalistic conception of political ethics
and legality has to say about the morality of violence is likely to be invalid since it reflects
the particular class interests and therefore the perverted humanism of its proponents.
(Ibid., p. 370)
and, moreover, that only ethical claims of the proletariat are valid, insofar as they are the true
reflections of 'the perspective of the last social class, at its final revolutionary stage of
oppression' (ibid.). It is only then that morals and ethics can be created authentically, and all
other systems ought to be considered as arbitrary. However, this creates a major difficulty for
Finlay and, as Marx has inspired many other theorists (Žižek, Fanon, Sorel, etc.) this is a
difficulty which he identifies in each of their works as well. Understanding that revolutionary
violence is carried out in the hope of future absolution based on a hypothetical social order able
to craft a universal system of ethics, Finlay sees this as carte blanche for revolutionists to carry
out any action, however atrocious, so long as it helps bring about this imminent revolution.
Finlay's 'permissive doctrine' is a 'philosophical framework within which the possibility of using
violence is validated but without setting any clear limits to how much violence can be used and
against whom'. Finlay also argue that there is a tendency for excess, as Fanon, Sorel and
Žižek all see the use of violence as beneficial, since it may act as a spark for the revolution.
Finlay sees the total legitimation of violence in revolution, with no principle of restriction, to be
both dangerous and unethical."
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au. Jahanbegloo 2014, pp. 120–121: "Singh makes a principled argument: that Marx saw the use
of violence, even when it is avoidable, as required insofar as that it has a purging quality,
believing that only by using violence can all elements of the previous regime be eradicated.
Moreover, Singh (ibid., p. 14) considers Marx's references to the use of bourgeoisie democratic
institutions to bring about social change only as 'hinting to the possibility of the working class
coming into power, in England, through universal suffrage'. Furthermore, he quotes Engels in a
letter addressed to the Communist Committee in Brussels in October 1846. In this letter,
Engels states that there cannot be any means of carrying out the communist agenda 'other
than a democratic revolution by force' (ibid. p. 10). Singh, however, does acknowledge the
desire in Marx to avoid a bloody revolution. Singh (ibid. p. 11) notes that most Marxist writing
that alluded to the possibility of this transition being carried out peacefully took place before the
events of 1844-48, which 'showed that a peaceful change was not even remotely possible'.
After 1848, Singh notes a return to advocating a violent revolution due to what Singh identifies
as the 'practical considerations' of being unable to overcome the existing obstacles to a
peaceful transition. Singh (ibid. p. 13) writes that, in 1848, Marx published an article titled The
Victory of Counter-Revolution in Vienna (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/
06.htm), where he states 'there is only one means by which the murderous death agonies of
the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and
concentrated - and that is by revolutionary terror'."
av. The Magyar Struggle (https://web.archive.org/web/20190921053557/https://www.marxistsfr.org/
archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm): "Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only
three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality —
the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large
and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world
storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary. ... There is no country in Europe
which does not have in some corner or other one or several ruined fragments of peoples, the
remnant of a former population that was suppressed and held in bondage by the nation which
later became the main vehicle of historical development. These relics of a nation mercilessly
trampled under foot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual fragments of
peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until
their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in
general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution. Such, in Scotland, are the Gaels,
the supporters of the Stuarts from 1640 to 1745. Such, in France, are the Bretons, the
supporters of the Bourbons from 1792 to 1800. Such, in Spain, are the Basques, the
supporters of Don Carlos. Such, in Austria, are the pan-Slavist Southern Slavs, who are
nothing but the residual fragment of peoples, resulting from an extremely confused thousand
years of development. ... The Magyars are not yet defeated. But if they fall, they will fall
gloriously, as the last heroes of the 1848 revolution, and only for a short time. Then for a time
the Slav counter-revolution will sweep down on the Austrian monarchy with all its barbarity, and
the camarilla will see what sort of allies it has. But at the first victorious uprising of the French
proletariat, which Louis Napoleon is striving with all his might to conjure up, the Austrian
Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians.
The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all
these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the
disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but
also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward."
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aw. Revel 2009, pp. 94–95: "Already among the most authentic sources of socialist thought, among
the earliest doctrinarians, are found justifications for ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with
the totalitarian state, all of which were held up as legitimate and even necessary weapons for
the success and preservation of the revolution. Socialism's canonical principles were not at all
violated by Stalin or Mao when they implemented their murderous policies; on the contrary,
Stalin and Mao were scrupulous in applying these principles with perfect fidelity to the letter
and the spirit of the doctrine - as has been rigorously established by the Cambridge scholar
George Watson in his treatise on The Lost Literature of Socialism. In the modern
historiography of socialism, an essential part of the theory has been quite effectively
suppressed. The true believers, while claiming socialism's founding fathers as their mentors,
very early on dispensed with any thorough study of them, even of Marx himself. And today, the
key texts seem to enjoy the rare privilege of being understood by everyone, without having
been read in their entirety by anyone - not even by socialism's adversaries, who for fear of
reprisal are likely to quell their own curiosity. (History for the most part is a selective
rearrangement of the facts, and the history of ideas does not escape this general law.) Study of
the unexpurgated texts, writes Watson, shows us that "Genocide was an idea unique to
socialism." Friedrich Engels, in an article penned in 1849 for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a
periodical edited by his friend Karl Marx, called for the extermination of the Hungarians, who
had risen up against Austria. He had a low opinion also of Serbs and other Slavic peoples, and
of the Basques, the Bretons and the Scottish Highlanders - all problems that needed to be
eliminated. Three-quarters of a century later, in his On Lenin and Leninism (1924), Stalin would
recommend study of Engels' influential piece. Marx himself, in "Revolution and CounterRevolution in Germany," published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1852, asked how "those
moribund peoples, the Bohemians, the Carinthians, the Dalmatians etc.," might be disposed
of."
ax. Valentino 2005, pp. 91, 93: "Communism has a bloody record, but most regimes that have
described themselves as communist or have been described as such by others have not
engaged in mass killing. In addition to shedding light on why some communist states have
been among the most violent regimes in history, therefore, I also seek to explain why other
communist countries have avoided this level of violence. ... I argue that radical communist
regimes have proven such prodigious killers primarily because the social change they sought
to bring about have resulted in the sudden and nearly complete material and political
dispossession of millions of people. These regimes practiced social engineering of the highest
order. It is the revolutionary desire to bring about the rapid and radical transformation of society
that distinguishes radical communist regimes from all other forms of government, including less
violent communist regimes and noncommunist, authoritarian governments."
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ay. Semelin 2009, p. 331: "Dynamics of destruction/subjugation were also developed
systematically by twentieth-century communist regimes, but against a very different domestic
political background. The destruction of the very foundations of the former society (and
consequently the men and women who embodied it) reveals the determination of the ruling
elites to build a new one at all costs. The ideological conviction of leaders promoting such a
political scheme is thus decisive. Nevertheless, it would be far too simplistic an interpretation to
assume that the sole purpose of inflicting these various forms of violence on civilians could only
aim at instilling a climate of terror in this 'new society'. In fact, they are part of a broader whole,
i.e. the spectrum of social engineering techniques implememted in order to transform a society
completely. There can be no doubt that it is this utopia of a classless society which drives that
kind of revolutionary project. The plan for political and social reshaping will thus logically claim
victims in all strata of society. And through this process, communist systems emerging in the
twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to
annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to
bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean political
imaginaire."
az. Chirot & McCauley 2010, p. 42: "The modern search for a perfect, utopian society, whether
racially or ideologically pure is very similar to the much older striving for a religiously pure
society free of all polluting elements, and these are, in turn, similar to that other modern utopian
notion - class purity. Dread of political and economic pollution by the survival of antagonistic
classes has been for the most extreme communist leaders what fear of racial pollution was for
Hitler. There, also, material explanations fail to address the extent of the killings, gruesome
tortures, fantastic trails, and attempts to wipe out whole categories of people that occurred in
Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The revolutionary thinkers who
formed and led communist regimes were not just ordinary intellectuals. They had to be fanatics
in the true sense of that word. They were so certain of their ideas that no evidence to the
contrary could change their minds. Those who came to doubt the rightness of their ways were
eliminated, or never achieved power. The element of religious certitude found in prophetic
movements was as important as their Marxist science in sustaining the notion that their vision
of socialism could be made to work. This justified the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies,
who could be suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong. Furthermore,
if events did not work out as they were supposed to, then that was because class enemies,
foreign spies and saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no
circumstances could it be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that
meant capitulation to the forces of reaction. The logic of the situation in times of crisis then
demanded that these 'bad elements' (as they were called in Maoist China) be killed, deported,
or relegated to a permanently inferior status. That is very close to saying that the community of
God, or the racially pure volksgemeinschaft could only be guaranteed if the corrupting
elements within it were eliminated (Courtois et al. 1999)."
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ba. Mann 2005, pp. 318, 321: "All accounts of 20th-century mass murder include the Communist
regimes. Some call their deeds genocide, though I shall not. I discuss the three that caused the
most terrible human losses: Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. These saw
themselves as belonging to a single socialist family, and all referred to a Marxist tradition of
development theory. They murderously cleansed in similar ways, though to different degrees.
Later regimes consciously adapted their practices to the perceived successes and failures of
earlier ones. The Khmer Rouge used China and the Soviet Union (and Vietnam and North
Korea) as reference societies, while China used the Soviet Union. All addressed the same
basic problem - how to apply a revolutionary vision of a future industrial society to a present
agrarian one. These two dimensions, of time and agrarian backwardness, help account for
many of the differences. ... Ordinary party members were also ideologically driven, believing
that in order to create a new socialist society, they must lead in socialist zeal. Killings were
often popular, the rank-and-file as keen to exceed killing quotas as production quotas. The
pervasive role of the party inside the state also meant that authority structures were not fully
institutionalized but factionalized, even chaotic, as revisionists studying the Soviet Union have
argued. Both centralized control and mass party factionalism were involved in the killings."
bb. Tismăneanu 2012, p. 14: "However, a nuance emphasized by Snyder offers a caveat to the
comparison between these two extremisms. In fact, Stalinism did not transform mass murder
into political history, as happened in Nazi Germany. For Stalin, 'mass murder could never be
anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress
toward socialism.' But, to take Snyder's point further, Communism, like Fascism, undoubtedly
founded its alternative, illiberal modernity upon extermination. The Communist project, in such
countries as the USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the
conviction that certain social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered."
bc. Bellamy 2012, p. 950: "But it is not simply the number of victims that distinguishes communist
from non-communist mass killing in the Cold War—though that in itself is important to
acknowledge. The most important difference for our purposes lies in the fact that amongst the
perpetrators and their supporters there was very little recognition that the deliberate
extermination of large numbers of civilians might be morally problematic, let alone prohibited.
Where there was criticism of this litany of mass murder, it almost always came from outside the
communist world. The principal reason for the failure of civilian immunity to moderate the
behavior of communist governments during the Cold War was the persistence and spread of
communism’s ideology of selective extermination, and its general acceptance within the
communist world as a legitimator of mass killing. As I argued earlier, this 'anti-civilian ideology'
identifies whole groups as being outside the protection of noncombatant immunity and
therefore liable for legitimate extermination. The basic communist variant of this ideology was
first developed and applied by Stalin and held that certain socioeconomic or national groups or
political attitudes were anti-communist and that group members were 'enemies of the people'
who could be legitimately destroyed. Although each of the communist regimes that massacred
large numbers of civilians during the Cold War developed their own distinctive account of
selective extermination, they all shared the basic idea that their targets—identified as whole
groups—had by their identity, actions, or thoughts, placed themselves outside legal or moral
protection.85 Thus, in contrast to most Western or anti-communist perpetrators of mass
atrocities during the Cold War, communist perpetrators tended to argue that their victims were
'criminals' or 'enemies of the people' and therefore beyond the protection of civilian immunity."
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bd. Katz 2013, p. 267: "Mass Death under Communist Rule and the Limits of 'Otherness' Steven T.
Katz Boston University Mass death is not a new reality. Over the centuries this tragic
phenomenon has manifest itself in many times and places. An integral feature of this history of
large-scale violence is what I call, 'otherness.' That is, the victimizer stigmatizes and
stereotypes the victim in various ways in order to legitimate the violence that is then unleashed.
What is worthy of note is that this distancing process takes many forms. The historical record
reveals cases where the 'Other' is created on the grounds of class, sex, color, race, religion,
ethnicity, and nationality. So, for example, the majority of Stalin's victims were identified as
'class enemies.' The most notorious example of such class war was directed at the Kulaks,
though his entire massive campaign against the peasantry as represented by his forced drive
to collectivize agriculture, was based on the notion of class (and his desire for national
modernization). Likewise, the extraordinary event that was Kampuchea was defined by the
application of a radical communist ideology in which class was everything. Nationalism —
connected usually to other factors such as religion, ethnicity, race, or color — has also played
its part in justifying oppression and death — as a decisive ingredient in Stalin's exile of the
minority nationalities during World War II and in his assault on the Ukraine in the early 1930s."
be. Shaw 2015a, p. 115: "In these contexts, democratic impulses were snuffed out, and
foundations were made for the centralization of power in the hands of Stalin, who in turn
proclaimed the new nationalist doctrine of 'socialism in one country'. Thereafter, nationalist
ideas were at the heart of many mass killings by Communist states, both in genocide and in
war. As Stalinist parties seized power in Asia and the Balkans after 1945, they each proclaimed
their own national ideology. Each 'great leader' claimed to represent his fatherland, and many
were prepared to kill extensively in the leader's name. After this, nationalist militarism became
the model for revolutionary movements across the Third World. Whatever other ideological
elements and alliances the insurgent forces claimed, their killing was invariably in the name of
national liberation. The 'killing fields' of Cambodia (episode VII) represented the nadir of this
kind of nationalist Communism. In the former Soviet and Yugoslav areas after 1989, many
former Communist elites reinvented themselves as ethnic nationalists. In some cases, they
launched genocidal wars in the name of their new creed, to renew the foundations of their
power. Nationalism made democratization a sick joke in war zones - the incentive to
manufacture ethnically homogenous electorates became one of the driving forces of expulsion
and slaughter (episode VIII)."
bf. Rosefielde 2010, p. xvi: "The story that emerges from the exercise is edifying. It reveals that
the conditions for the Red Holocaust were rooted in Stalin's, Kim's, Mao's, Ho's and Pol Pot's
siege-mobilized terror-command economic systems, not in Marx's utopian vision or other
pragmatic communist transition mechanisms. Terror-command was chosen among other
reasons because of legitimate fears about the long-term viability of terror-free command, and
the ideological risks of market communism. The internal contradictions of communism
confronted leaders with a predicament that could only have been efficiently resolved by
acknowledging communism's inferiority and changing course. Denial offered two unhappy
options: one bloody, the other dreary, and history records that more often than not, communist
rulers chose the worst option. Tens of millions were killed in vain; a testament to the triumph of
ruthless hope over dispassionate reason that proved more durable than Hitler's and Hirohito's
racism. These findings are likely to withstand the test of time, but are only a beginning, opening
up a vast new field for scientific inquiry as scholars gradually gain access to archives in North
Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia."
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bg. Krain 1997, p. 334: "In addition, many studies have documented the effects of wars and civil
wars on general preconditions for genocides and politicides. For example, Melson (1992)
argues that revolutions create the conditions that allow genocidal movements and permit their
leaders to come to power in the first place and impose their radical ideology, thereby
legitimizing mass murder in the eyes of the populace by making it state sponsored. Following
the work done by Laswell (1962) on the 'garrison state,' Gurr (1988) documents the
establishment and expansion of the secret police and other institutions of the 'coercive state' as
a direct result of wars and civil wars. Eisenstadt (1978) argues that hostile international
pressures lead to greater isolation of the elites, which in turn leads to an increased probability
that these elites will use repression. Some preliminary quantitative work has verified this
hypothesis."
bh. Jones 2010, p. 126: "This civil war, one of the most destructive of the twentieth century, lasted
until 1921 and claimed an estimated nine million lives on all sides. Its 'influence . . . on the
whole course of subsequent history, and on Stalinism, cannot possibly be overestimated. It was
in the civil war that Stalin and men like Stalin emerged as leaders, while others became
accustomed to harshness, cruelty, terror.' Red forces imposed "War Communism,' an economic
policy that repealed peasants' land seizures, forcibly stripped the countryside of grain to feed
city dwellers, and suppressed private commerce. All who opposed these policies were
'enemies of the people.' 'This is the hour of truth,' Lenin wrote in a letter to a comrade in
mid-1918. 'It is of supreme importance that we encourage and make use of the energy of mass
terror directed against the counterrevolutionaries.' The Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet
secret police (later the NKVD and finally the KGB), responded with gusto. Lenin and other
Bolshevik leaders may have viewed mass terror as a short-term measure but its widespread
use belies claims that it was Stalin's invention."
bi. Montagnes & Wolton 2019, p. 27: "Mass purges further seem to have occurred during,
arguably, the most personalist phase, to borrow Geddes’s (2003) terminology, of the
communist regimes in the USSR and China. We see two possible complementary reasons for
this. According to Geddes (2003), personalist leaders control appointments, potentially raising
the congruence of new agents, and the security apparatus, potentially reducing the cost of
carrying out the purge. Purges may then have almost disappeared in China and the USSR
following the deaths of Stalin and Mao because of the subsequent return to a form of collective
leadership to avoid a repeat of past excesses (Levytsky, 1972; Teiwes, 2017). Obviously, much
more needs to be learned about why autocrats decide to start a mass purge. However, our
framework can be seen as a possible starting point for a more general theory of coercive
instruments in autocracy."
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bj. Žižek 2006: "This 'cosmic perspective' is for Mao not just an irrelevant philosophical caveat; it
has precise ethico-political consequences. When Mao high-handedly dismisses the threat of
the atomic bomb, he is not down-playing the scope of the danger — he is fully aware that
nuclear war may led to the extinction of humanity as such, so, to justify his defiance, he has to
adopt the 'cosmic perspective' from which the end of life on Earth 'would hardly mean anything
to the universe as a whole':
The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom
bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China,
they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly
mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar
system.
This 'cosmic perspective' also grounds Mao's dismissive attitude towards the human costs of
economic and political endeavors. If one is to believe Mao's latest biography, he caused the
greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38
million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was
happening, saying: 'half of China may well have to die.' This is instrumental attitude at its most
radical: killing as part of a ruthless attempt to realize goal, reducing people to disposable
means - and what one should bear in mind is that the Nazi holocaust was NOT the same: the
killing of the Jews not part of a rational strategy, but a self-goal, a meticulously planned
'irrational' excess (recall the deportation of the last Jews from Greek islands in 1944, just
before the German retreat, or the massive use of trains for transporting Jews instead of war
materials in 1944). This is why Heidegger is wrong when he reduces holocaust to the industrial
production of corpses: it was NOT that, Stalinist Communism was that."
bk. Conquest 2007, p. xvi: "Exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but the
total of deaths caused by the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors can hardly be lower than
some fifteen million."
bl. Yakovlev 2002, p. 234: "My own many years and experience in the rehabilitation of victims of
political terror allow me to assert that the number of people in the USSR who were killed for
political motives or who died in prisons and camps during the entire period of Soviet power
totaled 20 to 25 million. And unquestionably one must add those who died of famine—more
than 5.5 million during the civil war and more than 5 million during the 1930s."
bm. Wheatcroft 1999, pp. 315‒345: "During 1921–53, the number of sentences was (political
convictions): sentences, 4,060,306; death penalties, 799,473; camps and prisons, 2,634,397;
exile, 413,512; other, 215,942. In addition, during 1937‒52 there were 14,269,753 non-political
sentences, among them 34,228 death penalties, 2,066,637 sentences for 0–1 year, 4,362,973
for 2–5 years, 1,611,293 for 6–10 years, and 286,795 for more than 10 years. Other sentences
were non-custodial."
bn. Healey 2018, p. 1049: "New studies using declassified Gulag archives have provisionally
established a consensus on mortality and 'inhumanity.' The tentative consensus says that once
secret records of the Gulag administration in Moscow show a lower death toll than expected
from memoir sources, generally between 1.5 and 1.7 million (out of 18 million who passed
through) for the years from 1930 to 1953. Moreover, as Alexopoulos summarizes, we have
found no 'plan of destruction' of prisoners (7), no statement of official intent to kill them in these
records. Instead, historians have found that prisoner releases significantly predominated over
deaths in the Gulag, with Alexopoulos's own earlier work on amnesty a leading statement of
this view. Yet her encounter with the Gulag medical-sanitary service's Moscow archive
'surprised' Alexopoulos (1), and she now attempts to challenge the emergent scholarly
consensus, with uneven success."
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bo. Snyder 2011: "All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a
figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and
sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the
analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million."
bp. Montefiore 2005, p. 649: "Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18
million had slaved in the Gulags."
bq. Volkogonov 1999, p. 139: "Between 1929 and 1953 the state created by Lenin and set in
motion by Stalin deprived 21.5 million Soviet citizens of their lives."
br. Gellately 2007, p. 584: "More recent estimations of the Soviet-on-Soviet killing have been more
'modest' and range between ten and twenty million."
bs. Brent 2008: "Estimations on the number of Stalin's victims over his twenty-five year reign, from
1928 to 1953, vary widely, but 20 million is now considered the minimum."
bt. Rosefielde 2010, p. 17: "We now know as well beyond a reasonable doubt that there were
more than 13 million Red Holocaust victims 1929–53, and this figure could rise above 20
million."
bu. Kleveman 2003: In one estimate, based on a report by Lavrenti Beria to Stalin, 150,000 of
478,479 deported Ingush and Chechen people (or 31.3 percent) died within the first four years
of the resettlement.; Naimark 2001: Another scholar puts the number of deaths at 22.7 percent:
Extrapolating from NKVD records, 113,000 Ingush and Chechens died (3,000 before
deportation, 10,000 during deportation, and 100,000 after resettlement) in the first three years
of the resettlement out of 496,460 total deportees.; Mawdsley 2003: A third source says a
quarter of the 650,000 deported Chechens, Ingush, Karachais and Kalmyks died within four
years of resettlement.; Fischer & Leggett 2006: However, estimates of the number of deportees
sometimes varies widely. Two scholars estimated the number of Chechen and Ingush
deportees at 700,000, which would halve the percentage estimates of deaths.
bv. BBC 2008b: "Латвія стала 19-ю країною світу, яка визнала Голодомор ґеноцидом
українського народу. Литва й Естонія ухвалили такі декларації раніше." (translation:
'Latvia became the 19th country in the world that recognized the Holodomor as the genocide of
the Ukrainian people. Lithuania and Estonia have adopted such declarations earlier.');
Korrespondent 2008a: "Латвия присоеденилась к еще 15 странам, уже признавшим
Голодомор в Украине геноцидом украинского народа. Декларация подготовлена в
ответ на призыв Украины к международному сообществу признать и осудить
Голодомор - голод на Украине 1930-х годов прошлого века. Как сообщалось, в феврале
Мексика и Парагвай признали Голодомор 1932-1933 годов актом геноцида украинского
народа." (translation: 'Latvia has joined 15 more countries that have already recognized the
Holodomor in Ukraine as the genocide of the Ukrainian people. The declaration was prepared
in response to Ukraine's appeal to the international community to recognize and condemn the
Holodomor — the famine in Ukraine of the 1930s of the last century. As reported, in February,
Mexico and Paraguay recognized the Holodomor of 1932–1933 as an act of genocide against
the Ukrainian people.'); Korrespondent 2008b: "Сусідні з Латвією Литва та Естонія визнали
Голодомор в Україні геноцидом проти українського народу ще на початку 1990-х років.
Загалом, Голодомор 1932-33 рр. геноцидом українців визнали понад 10 держав світу.
Серед них США, Канада, Естонія, Аргентина, Австралія, Італія, Угорщина, Литва, Грузія,
Польща, Еквадор і відтепер Латвія." (translation: 'Neighboring Latvia Lithuania and Estonia
recognized the Holodomor in Ukraine as a genocide against the Ukrainian people in the early
1990s. In general, the Holodomor of 1932-33 has been identified by more than 10 states of the
world as a genocide of Ukrainians. Among them are the USA, Canada, Estonia, Argentina,
Australia, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Georgia, Poland, Ecuador and now Latvia.')."
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bw. Ellman 2002, pp. 1151–1172: "The best estimate that can currently be made of the number of
repression deaths in 1937–38 is the range 950,000–1.2 million, i.e., about a million. This
estimate should be used by historians, teachers, and journalists concerned with twentieth
century Russian—and world—history."
bx. Fenby 2008, p. 351: "Mao's responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 to 70 million
lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin, his indifference to the suffering
and the loss of humans breathtaking."
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by. Su 2003, pp. 25–26: "In this study I have documented the patterns of mass killings in three
Chinese provinces in the demobilization period of the Cultural Revolution. I also have also
sought explanations for this historical tragedy by examining the role of the state. I have
presented the findings from a few different angles. Now it is time to take a look at these
findings together to formulate my central argument: The mass killings were rooted in the
paradox of state sponsorship and state failure. ... Mass killings occurred in the three provinces;
in two provinces they were a widespread phenomenon. That this finding is from a published
source sanctioned by the Chinese government unequivocally supports similar claims made by
previous case studies. By examining the mass killings across more than 180 counties, with
information from the previous case studies, I am able to uncover the following patterns. First,
the mass killings varied greatly across three provinces, while within one province, there
appears to be a great degree of uniformity. This pattern indicates that the occurrence of mass
killings was more germane to province-specific political conditions rather than national politics
as a whole. I tentatively attribute the provincial difference to the different patterns of mass
factional alignment vis-à-vis the governmental authorities in the province. In Hubei, the Rebel
Faction, having had prevailed in the previous conflict, was incorporated into the new
government. In contrast, in Guangxi and Guangdong, the Rebel Factions continued to be the
outsider, and the two provinces were more prone to use violence as a weapon against the
Rebel Factions. An alternative explanation for the difference is that Hubei was geographically,
and by inference, politically closer to Beijing, hence the province tended to have more restraint
against violence. Second, the mass killings concentrate in the months after most counties
established revolutionary committees, but in the time when the provincial capitals were still
entangled in mass factionalism. The peaks of mass killings coincided with two announcements
from the party center in July 1968 banning factional armed battles and disbanding mass
organizations. The finding that historical timing was crucial factor helps us understand the
nature and source of mass killings. The fact that most of them occurred after the new
governments were put in place indicates that mass killings were the result of the repression by
the local state rather than the result of conflicts between independent mass groups. The fact
that they coincided with the crackdown of the oppositional mass organizations in the provincial
capital indicates that the provincial authorities promoted the rhetoric of violence, although
extreme violence in local communes and villages may not be what they intended. Third, mass
killings were primarily a rural phenomenon. In other words, they occurred not in provincial
capitals or county seats, but in communes and villages. This is in stark contrast to earlier mass
movements of the Cultural Revolution such as campaigns against intellectuals and government
officials and the factional street battles which mostly occurred in urban settings. The imagery of
top-down diffusion does not apply to the mass killings. This suggests that the class struggle
rhetoric disseminated from urban centers found an expression in extreme violence in rural
townships and villages, possibly due to the failure of the state to hold the action of the lowest
bureaucrats accountable. This explanation is supported by another piece of evidence—the
poorer and remoter counties were more likely to have mass killings. Fourth, the perpetrators
were the local leaders and their mass followers (e.g., militia members). The more party
members in the local community, the more likely there were mass killings, likely because the
local government in these communities enjoyed a stronger organizational base to mobilize the
extreme violence. Fifth, other things being equal (i.e., controlling for distance, county revenue,
and party membership) counties with a significant presence of ethnic minority were not more
likely to have mass killings. Similarly, population density, prior armed battle conflict, and the
compositions of the county leadership have no association to the likelihood of mass killings.
These findings to some extent eliminate alternative explanations to the argument fashioned
here that stresses the role of the state."
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bz. Su 2011, pp. 98–100: "The so-called class enemy as a category of the rural population had
been in place for about two decades after 1949, but not until the Cultural Revolution did it
become a victim group for eliminationist killing. This development cannot be explained by the
communist doctrine of a classless society because the doctrine as previously practiced in
China, for the most part, was not to create this society by physical elimination. Neither can it be
explained by the notion that previously propertied classes posed an objective threat, hence that
their elimination was imperative. This review of the origin of class enemy demonstrates that its
creation, maintenance, and treatment all served the politics of the time. Mass-killing scholars
who draw on political violence in communist societies for comparison, however, often take a
realist view of the concept of class enemy (or 'people's enemy' in the case of the Soviet Union).
That is, they write as though the opposition to the new communist system was real, with class
enemy identifying a broad category of individuals who represent plausible or incipient
opposition or resistance to the state. ... After the Land Reform movement, China was
transformed into a classless society, if defined only in terms of property. From this classless
society, the state created an artificial divide between 'the people' and the 'class enemy.' The
toothless enemy class was never designed to be eliminated, either by murder or other means.
In the first place, the numbers of class enemies were inflated. Quotas were established and
sanctions were applied to local leadership if localities did not have a certain percentage of
landlords and rich peasants; the numbers were always greater than their initial landed status
would warrant. To underscore the artificiality and arbitrariness of this designation, a few years
after Mao's death, class enemies were eliminated as a political class - not by murder but rather
by declaration - once the new leadership decided that the categories and campaigns had
become counterproductive. Therefore, the class divides were imposed and maintained by the
state and perpetuated through state-sponsored mass campaigns. What purpose, then, did the
existence of a constructed enemy class serve? The answer links this artificial class divide to
two main political tasks: mobilizing mass compliance and resolving elite conflict. These
linkages are the key to understanding why the system deepened the politically constructed
divide in times of political crisis. Its elastic nature, then, is the key to understanding why the
class categorization could take on a genocidal dimension under extraordinary circumstances."
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ca. Etcheson 2005, p. 78: "Were the Cambodian people somehow Pol Pot's 'willing executioners,'
with the violence of the Khmer Rouge regime reflecting an underlying trait of the Cambodian
people, historically unique to the time and place it occurred? Or did the violence of the Khmer
Rouge regime emanate from some more broadly distributed ideological origin, therefore
rendering it amenable to comparison? Perhaps the Khmer Rouge mass killing arose from the
same tenets of communism that brought about the mass killing of Stalin's Russia and Mao's
China but that was, by absolute numbers, much less evil. Or perhaps the killing in Cambodia
can be understood as a response to the perceived threat from Vietnam, as the Khmer Rouge
themselves have argued at some length. These same themes and issues lay at the heart of the
Historikerstreit, and they are also part and parcel of genocide studies. In the scholarly literature
on the Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea, there have been two principal schools
of thought regarding the nature of the violence that took so many lives in such a short period of
time. One school of thought holds that the primary locus of the violence was local and that it
was largely the result of the spontaneous excesses of a vengeful, undisciplined peasant army.
A prominent proponent of this school of thought is Michael Vickery. A second school of thought
holds that the locus of the violence was centralized and that it was largely the result of a
carefully planned and centrally controlled security apparatus. Several observers have proposed
this explanation of the violence in the Democratic Kampuchea regime, including, for example,
the recently retired U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, Kenneth Quinn. It can be argued, however,
that until recently there was an inadequate amount of data to make an unambiguous
determination of the question. A wide range of new evidence uncovered by the Documentation
Center of Cambodia over the course of the last ten years has done much to resolve this
controversy. In particular, data on the frequency, distribution, and origin of mass graves,
combined with data gleaned from newly discovered Khmer Rouge internal security documents,
have given us new insight into the question of the economy of violence within Democratic
Kampuchea. The data lead inexorably to the conclusion that most of the violence was carried
out pursuant to orders from the highest political authorities of the Communist Party of
Kampuchea. In this chapter, I briefly review some of the new evidence that so strongly
suggests this new and well-documented conclusion."
cb. Harff & Gurr 1988, p. 369: "Revolutionary mass murder: the most common type of politicide
(following repressive politicide), with ten examples in our data set. In all these instances new
regimes have come to power committed to bringing about fundamental social, economic, and
political change. Their enemies usually are defined by variants of Marxist-Leninist ideology:
initially their victims include the officials and most prominent supporters of the old regime and
landowners and wealthy peasants. Later they may include-as they did in Kampuchea and in
China during the Cultural Revolution-cadres who lack revolutionary zeal. In Laos and Ethiopia
they have included ordinary peasants in regions which actively or passively resisted
revolutionary policies. Most Marxist-Leninist regimes which came to power through protracted
armed struggle in the postwar period perpetrated one or more politicides, though of vastly
different magnitudes. The worst offender was the Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea; the second
worst, the Chinese Communist regime."
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cc. Jambrek 2008, p. 156: "Most of the mass killings were carried out from May to July 1945;
among the victims were mostly the 'returned' (or 'home-captured') Home guards and prisoners
from other Yugoslav provinces. In the following months, up to January 1946 when the
Constitution of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia was passed and OZNA had to
hand the camps over to the organs of the Ministry of the Interior, those killings were followed by
mass killing of Germans, Italians and Slovenes suspected of collaborationism and anticommunism. Individual secret killings were carried out at later dates as well. The decision to
'annihilate' opponents must had been adopted in the closest circles of Yugoslav state
leadership, and the order was certainly issued by the Supreme Commander of the Yugoslav
Army Josip Broz — Tito, although it is not known when or in what form."
cd. Vu 2010a, p. 103: "Clearly Vietnamese socialism followed a moderate path relative to China. ...
Yet the Vietnamese 'land reform' campaign ... testified that Vietnamese communists could be
as radical and murderous as their comrades elsewhere. In May 1953, on the eve of the
campaign, the VWP Politburo chaired by Ho authorized the execution of landlords by a ratio of
one person for every thousand people, or 0.1 percent of the population.5 ... 5. 'Chi thi cua Bo
Chinh Tri' (Politburo's Decree), May 4, 1953 (Dang Cong San Viet Nam, hereafter DCSVN,
2001, 14: 201). Based on other sources, Edwin Moise (2001, 7-9) accepts an estimate close to
15,000 executions. This was about 0.1 percent of the total population of 13.5 million in North
Vietnam in 1955."
ce. Valentino 2005, p. 223: "The pattern of Soviet military operations strongly suggests that
population relocation was a significant part of Soviet counterinsurgency strategy in
Afghanistan. Although direct evidence of Soviet intentions is limited, most analysts and
observers of the war have concluded that the Soviets adopted an intentional policy of attacking
villages in areas of high guerrilla activity in the effort to force the population into flight. Free-fire
zones were established in depopulated areas, permitting Soviet troops to shoot anything that
moved. In addition to killing tens of thousands in attacks on villages, this policy eventually
produced one of the most massive refugee movements in modern history. Approximately 5
million people out of a total prewar population of between 15.5 and 17 million had fled the
country by the early 1990s, the great majority across the border to Pakistan. Two million more
were displaced within Afghanistan. Many refugees died during the difficult journey over
mountain passes to Pakistan."
cf. Courtois 1999, p. 9: "As for the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, which resulted from the
rural population's resistance to forced collectivization, 6 million died in a period of several
months. Here, the genocide of a 'class' may well be tantamount to the genocide of a 'race' —
the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine causes by
Stalin's regime 'is equal to' the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of
the famine caused by the Nazi regime. Such arguments in no way detract from the unique
nature of Auschwitz — the mobilization of leading-edge technological resources and their use
in an 'industrial process' involving the construction of an 'extermination factory,' the use of gas,
and cremation. However, this argument highlights one particular feature of many Communist
regimes — their systematic use of famine as a weapon. The regime aimed to control the total
available food supply and, with immense ingenuity, to distribute food purely on the basis of
'merits' and 'demerits' earned by individuals. This policy was a recipe for creating famine on a
massive scale. Remember that in the period after 1918, only Communist countries experienced
such famines, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of
people. And again in the 1980s, two African countries that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist,
Ethiopia and Mozambique, were the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines."
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cg. Shaw 2015b, Structural contexts and unintended consequences: "Many famines, for example,
are originally the product of natural conditions (e.g. in nineteenth-century colonial India) or of
anti-peasant policies not originally intended to cause mass death (Stalin's 'terror-famine' and
Mao's 'Great Leap Forward'). However, if regimes, whether colonial or Stalinist, fail to take
action to alleviate or end starvation, then that outcome may come to be, in part, intended. The
understanding of this issue in the laws of war is enlightening: 'If the destruction [of civilian
populations] is avoidable ... through better weapon selection, tactics, etc., then the commander
could still be held liable under Article 2 of the 1907 Hague Conventions,' even if he did not
intend to kill civilians. If leaders, in the knowledge of hunger, actively pursue policies that
exacerbate it, as Stalin and Mao did by selling grain overseas and using violence to prevent
peasants from accessing it, then their intention is clear."
ch. The resolution stated: "In the early 1990s, our country took important steps towards
establishing the truth in the Katyn tragedy. It was recognized that the mass extermination of
Polish citizens on the territory of the USSR during World War II was an act of arbitrariness by
the totalitarian state, which also repressed hundreds of thousands of Soviet people for their
political and religious beliefs, on social and other grounds. The published materials, kept in
secret archives for many years, not only reveal the scale of this terrible tragedy, but also testify
that the Katyn crime was committed on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet leaders."
Citations
1. Wheatcroft 1996, pp. 1320–1321.
2. Weiss-Wendt 2008, p. 42.
3. Mann 2005, p. 17.
4. Sangar 2007, p. 1, paragraph 3.
5. Karlsson & Schoenhals 2008, p. 104.
6. Semelin 2009, p. 344.
7. Semelin 2009, p. 318.
8. Harff 2017, p. 112.
9. Harff 2017, pp. 112, 116.
10. Harff 2017, p. 116.
11. Fein 1993a, p. 75.
12. Rummel 1993.
13. Jones 2010, p. 137.
14. van Schaack 1997, p. 2267.
15. Staub 2000, p. 368.
16. Wayman & Tago 2010, pp. 3–4.
17. US Congress 1993, p. 15 at §905a1.
18. Rauch 2003.
19. Victims of Communism Memorial
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20. Möller 1999.
21. Rousso & Goslan 2004, p. 157.
22. Shafir 2016, pp. 64, 74.
23. Staub 1989, p. 8.
24. Esteban, Morelli & Rohner 2010, p. 6.
25. Valentino, Huth & Bach-Lindsay 2004,
p. 387.
26. Valentino 2005, p. 91.
27. Ott 2011, p. 55.
28. Harff & Gurr 1988, p. 360.
29. Midlarsky 2005, p. 321.
30. Wheatcroft 1996, p. 1320.
31. Karlsson & Schoenhals 2008, p. 8.
32. Harff 2017.
33. Dallin 2000.
34. Getty 1985, p. 5.
35. Ellman 2002.
36. Ellman 2002, p. 1151.
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37. Wheatcroft 1999, p. 341: "For decades,
many historians counted Stalin' s victims in
'tens of millions', which was a figure
supported by Solzhenitsyn. Since the
collapse of the USSR, the lower estimates
of the scale of the camps have been
vindicated. The arguments about excess
mortality are far more complex than
normally believed. R. Conquest, The Great
Terror: A Re-assessment (London, 1992)
does not really get to grips with the new
data and continues to present an
exaggerated picture of the repression. The
view of the 'revisionists' has been largely
substantiated (J. Arch Getty & R. T. Manning
(eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives
(Cambridge, 1993)). The popular press,
even TLS and The Independent, have
contained erroneous journalistic articles that
should not be cited in respectable academic
articles."
38. Brzezinski 1993, p. 16.
39. Rummel 1994, p. 15, Table 1.6.
40. Rummel 2005a.
41. Rummel 2005b.
42. Dulić 2004, p. 85.
43. Rummel 2004.
44. Harff 2017, p. 10.
45. Karlsson & Schoenhals 2008, p. 79.
46. Aronson 2003.
47. Rutland 1999, p. 123.
48. Karlsson & Schoenhals 2008, pp. 53–54.
49. Rosefielde 2010, pp. 1, 7.
50. ChicagoTribune 2017.
51. Harff 1996, p. 118.
52. Dulić 2004, p. 98.
53. Harff 2017, pp. 113–114.
54. Weiner 2002, p. 450.
55. Paczkowski 2001, p. 34.
56. Kuromiya 2001, p. 195.
57. Harff 1996.
58. Dulić 2004.
59. Ghodsee 2014.
60. Neumayer 2018.
61. Engel-Di Mauro 2021.
62. Courtois 1999, p. xvii.
63. Ghodsee & Sehon 2018.
64. Karlsson & Schoenhals 2008, p. 5.
65. Goldhagen 2009, p. 206.
66. Pipes 2001, p. 147.
67. Gray 1990, p. 116.
68. Harff & Gurr 1988, pp. 360, 369.
69. Courtois 1999, p. 4.
70. Courtois 1999, p. 2.
71. Watson 1998, p. 77.
72. Grant 1999, p. 558.
73. Walicki 1997, p. 154.
74. Totten & Jacobs 2002, p. 168.
75. Totten & Jacobs 2002, p. 169.
76. Valentino 2005, pp. 33–34.
77. Valentino 2005, pp. 93–94.
78. Hollander 2006, p. xiv.
79. Fitzpatrick 2008, p. 77.
80. Conquest 2007, p. xxiii.
81. Yakovlev 2002, p. 20.
82. Ray 2007.
83. Hicks 2009, pp. 87–88.
84. Weitz 2003, pp. 251–252.
85. Kim 2016, pp. 23–24.
86. Malia 1999, p. xviii.
87. Rappaport 1999, pp. 82–83.
88. Thompson 2008, pp. 254–255.
89. Jones 2010, p. 124.
90. Wheatcroft 1996, p. 1330.
91. Wheatcroft 2000, pp. 1146–1147.
92. Snyder 2011.
93. Nove 1993, p. 265.
94. Rummel 1994, pp. 10, 15, 25.
95. Melgunov 1975.
96. Melgunov 1927, p. 205.
97. Lincoln 1999, pp. 383‒385.
98. Leggett 1987, pp. 197–198.
99. Figes 1997, p. 647.
100. Figes 1997, p. 643.
101. Rayfield 2004, p. 85.
102. Yakovlev 2002, p. 156.
103. Pipes 1994, p. 356.
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104. Courtois 1999, p. 98.
105. Holquist 1997, p. 138.
106. Figes 1997, p. 660.
107. Gellately 2007, pp. 70–71.
108. Kort 2001, p. 133.
109. Keep 1997, p. 94.
110. Haynes & Klehr 2003, p. 23.
111. Keller 1989.
112. Rummel 2017, p. xii.
113. Parenti 1997, pp. 77–78.
114. Ellman 2002, p. 1153.
115. Alexopoulos 2013.
116. Getty, Rittersporn & Zemskov 1993, p. 1024.
117. Rosefielde 2010, pp. 67, 77.
118. Alexopoulos 2017, p. 16.
119. Hardy 2018, pp. 269–270.
120. Wheatcroft 1996, p. 1348.
121. Naimark 2010, pp. 133–135.
122. Applebaum 2010.
123. Ellman 2007, p. 690.
124. Ellman 2002, p. 1172.
125. Boobbyer 2000, p. 130.
126. Conquest 1970.
127. Courtois 2010, pp. 121–122.
128. Totten, Parsons & Charny 1997, p. 120.
129. Chang 2019, p. 270.
130. RFE/RL 2015.
131. RFE/RL 2019.
132. Saeima 2019.
133. BalticTimes 2019.
134. Wrzesnewskyj 2019.
135. UNPO 2004.
136. EuropeanParliament 2004.
137. Kulchytsky 2007.
138. Wheatcroft 2001, p. 885, Приложение № 2.
139. Kremlin 1998.
140. Britannica1 2008.
141. Davies & Wheatcroft 2004, p. 401.
142. Ellman 2005, pp. 833–834.
143. Pianciola 2001, p. 237.
144. Volkava 2012.
145. Amstutz 2005, p. 96.
63 of 87
146. Finn 2008.
147. Bilinsky 1999, p. 147.
148. Snyder 2010, p. vii.
149. Maksymiuk & Dratch 2006.
150. RIAN 2010.
151. Ellman 2007, p. 682.
152. Courtois 1999, p. 202 (photographic insert).
153. McLoughlin 2002, p. 141.
154. Gellately 2007, p. 256.
155. Okhotin & Roginsky 2007.
156. Figes 2007, p. 240.
157. Ellman 2007, p. 686.
158. Montefiore 2005, p. 229.
159. Yakovlev 2002, p. 165.
160. Pipes 2001, p. 66.
161. Ellman 2007, p. 687.
162. Kuromiya 2007, p. 2.
163. Kaplonski 2002, p. 156.
164. White 2010.
165. Alexandra 2008.
166. Strzembosz 2001, p. 2.
167. Gross 2002, pp. 181‒182.
168. Allen 1996, p. 155.
169. AFP 2009.
170. Materski & Szarota 2009.
171. Fischer 1999, p. 69.
172. Parrish 1996, pp. 324, 325.
173. Montefiore 2005, pp. 197‒198, 332, 334.
174. Montefiore 2005, p. 334.
175. Gellately 2007, p. 391.
176. Fischer 1999, pp. 68–69.
177. Short 2001, p. 631.
178. Chang & Halliday 2005, p. 3.
179. Rummel 1991, p. 205.
180. Rummel 2007, p. 223.
181. Goldhagen 2009, p. 344.
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182. Goldhagen 2009, p. 608. It is based on a
quote from the 1958 Wuchang conference,
where Mao was quoted as saying: "In this
kind of situation, I think if we do [all these
things simultaneously] half of China's
population unquestionably will die; and if it's
not a half, it'll be a third or ten percent, a
death toll of 50 million people. ... If with a
death toll of 50 million, you didn't lose your
jobs, I at least should lose mine; [whether I
would lose my] head would be open to
question. Anhui wants to do so many things,
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principle to have no deaths."
183. Short 2001, pp. 436‒437.
184. Mosher 1992, pp. 72‒73.
185. Kuisong 2008, p. 120.
186. Valentino 2005, p. 128.
187. Dikötter 2010, pp. x, xi.
188. Fish 2010.
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209. Rosefielde 2010, pp. 120–121.
210. Valentino 2005, pp. 91, 75 table 2.
211. Wayman & Tago 2010, p. 12.
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216. Morré 1997, p. 9.
217. von Plato 1999.
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ISBN 978-0-7658-0151-7
▪ Ulfelder, Jay; Valentino, Benjamin (1 February 2008), Assessing Risks of State-Sponsored
Mass Killing (https://ssrn.com/abstract=1703426), SSRN, doi:10.2139/ssrn.1703426 (https://do
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▪ US Congress (1993), Friendship Act (HR3000) (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-103hr300
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▪ Valentino, Benjamin; Huth, Paul; Bach-Lindsay, Dylan (2004), "Draining the Sea: mass killing
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▪ Valentino, Benjamin A. (2005), Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth
Century (https://books.google.com/books?id=LQfeXVU_EvgC), Cornell University Press,
ISBN 978-0-801-47273-2
▪ van Schaack, Beth (1997), "The Crime of Political Genocide: Repairing the Genocide
Convention's Blind Spot", The Yale Law Journal, 106 (7)
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▪ Verdeja, Ernesto (June 2012). "The Political Science of Genocide: Outlines of an Emerging
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▪ Vo, Alex-Thai D. (Winter 2015), "Nguyễn Thị Năm and the Land Reform in North Vietnam,
1953" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277659858), Journal of Vietnamese Studies,
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▪ Voicu, George (2018), "Postcommunist Romania's Leading Public Intellectuals and the
Holocaust" (https://books.google.com/books?id=XqlJDwAAQBAJ), in Florian, Alexandru (ed.),
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▪ Volkava, Elena (26 March 2012), The Kazakh Famine of 1930–33 and the Politics of History in
the Post-Soviet Space (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-kazakh-famine-1930-33-an
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▪ Žižek, Slavoj (2006), Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule (https://web.archive.org/web/201
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▪ После продолжительных дебатов Сейм Латвии признал Голодомор геноцидом
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May 2008
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sion=print) on 7 June 2011
▪ Ethiopian Dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, Human Rights Watch, 24 November 1999
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20090402154538/http://www.balticguide.ee/index.php/a641), Baltic Guide, archived from the
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684399), BBC News, 16 November 2018
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ambodia.gov.kh/krt/english/), Royal Government of Cambodia, archived from the original (htt
p://www.cambodia.gov.kh/krt/english/) on 17 March 2009
▪ Латвія визнала Голодомор ґеноцидом (https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/domestic/story/2008/
03/080313_latvia_holodomor_oh.shtml) [Latvia recognized the Holodomor as a genocide] (in
Ukrainian), BBCUkrainian, 13 March 2008
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▪ Латвія визнала Голодомор 1932-33 рр. геноцидом українців (https://ua.korrespondent.net/
ukraine/403780-latviya-viznala-golodomor-1932-33-rr-genocidom-ukrayinciv) [Latvia
recognized the Holodomor of 1932-33 as a genocide of Ukrainians] (in Ukrainian),
Korrespondent.net, 14 March 2008
▪ Latvian Lawmakers Label 1944 Deportation Of Crimean Tatars An Act Of Genocide (https://ww
w.rferl.org/a/latvian-lawmakers-label-1944-deportation-of-crimean-tatars-as-act-of-genocide/29
933467.html), RFE/RL, Inc., 10 May 2019, retrieved 10 May 2019
▪ The legacy of 100 years of communism: 65 million deaths (https://web.archive.org/web/201711
07032519/http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-communism-bolshevik
-anniversary-putin-20171106-story.html), Chicago Tribune, 6 November 2017, archived from
the original (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-communism-bolshev
ik-anniversary-putin-20171106-story.html) on 7 November 2017
▪ Lithuanian parliament recognizes Soviet crimes against Crimean Tatars as genocide (https://w
ww.baltictimes.com/lithuanian_parliament_recognizes_soviet_crimes_against_crimean_tatars_
as_genocide/), The Baltic Times, 6 June 2019, retrieved 6 June 2019
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December 2006, retrieved 2 January 2010
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ru/world/20100428/158792272.html), RIA Novosti, 28 April 2010
▪ Polish experts lower nation's WWII death toll (http://www.expatica.com/de/news/german-news/
Polish-experts-lower-nation_s-WWII-death-toll--_55843.html), AFP/Expatica, 30 July 2009,
retrieved 4 November 2009
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genocīdu (http://www.saeima.lv/lv/aktualitates/saeimas-zinas/27934-saeima-pienem-pazinojum
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2015
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Further reading
General
▪ Courtois, Stéphane, ed. (1999), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (ht
tps://books.google.com/books?id=H1jsgYCoRioC), translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark
Kramer; Mark Kramer (consulting ed.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
ISBN 978-0-674-07608-2
▪ Fein, Helen (1993), Genocide: a sociological perspective; Contextual and Comparative Studies
I: Ideological Genocides (https://books.google.com/books?id=n4TaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Soviet+
and+Communist+Genocides%22), Sage Publications, ISBN 978-0-8039-8829-3
▪ Ghodsee, Kristen (2017), Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism (https://
www.dukeupress.edu/red-hangover), Duke University Press, ISBN 978-0-822-36949-3
▪ Hollander, Paul, ed. (2006), From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political
Violence and Repression in Communist States (https://books.google.com/books?id=zyaDAAAA
MAAJ), Applebaum, Anne (foreword) and Hollander, Paul (introduction (http://www.isi.org/book
s/content/384intro.pdf)), Intercollegiate Studies Institute, ISBN 978-1-932-23678-1
▪ Karlsson, Klas-Göran; Schoenhals, Michael (2008), Crimes against humanity under communist
regimes – Research review (https://www.levandehistoria.se/sites/default/files/material_file/rese
arch-review-crimes-against-humanity.pdf) (PDF), Forum for Living History,
ISBN 978-91-977487-2-8
▪ Mann, Michael (2005), The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (https://book
s.google.com/books?id=cGHGPgj1_tIC), New York: Cambridge University Press,
ISBN 978-0-521-53854-1
▪ Rosefielde, Steven (2010), Red Holocaust (https://books.google.com/books?id=7_eMAgAAQB
AJ), Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-77757-5
▪ Rummel, Rudolph Joseph (November 1993), How Many did Communist Regimes Murder? (htt
ps://web.archive.org/web/20180827103150/https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM),
University of Hawaii Political Science Department, archived from the original (https://www.hawa
ii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM#*) on 27 August 2018, retrieved 15 September 2018
▪ Sangar, Eric (3 November 2007), Classicide (https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-ma
ssacre-resistance/en/document/classicide), Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, retrieved
6 June 2018
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▪ Semelin, Jacques (2009), "Destroying to Subjugate: Communist regimes: Reshaping the social
body" (https://books.google.com/books?id=mwf-pHi_2I0C), in Jaffrelot, Christophe (ed.), Purify
and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, CERI Series in Comparative
Politics and International Studies, translated by Cynthia Schoch, New York: Columbia
University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-14283-0
▪ Totten, Samuel; Paul Robert Bartrop; Steven L. Jacobs (2008), "Communism" (https://books.go
ogle.com/books?id=xWKjSc0ql3cC&q=Lenin+genocide), Dictionary of genocide, Volume 1,
Greenwood Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0-313-34642-2
▪ Valentino, Benjamin (2005), Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth
Century (https://books.google.com/books?id=LQfeXVU_EvgC), Cornell University Press,
ISBN 978-0-801-47273-2
▪ Watson, George (1998), The Lost Literature of Socialism (https://books.google.com/books?id=
F3EmtyNuKfQC&pg=PA77), Lutterworth Press, ISBN 978-0-7188-2986-5
▪ White, Matthew (2011), "The Black Chapter of Communism" (https://books.google.com/books?i
d=0-fQHlaIpR4C&q=The+Black+Chapter+of+Communism), Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest
Episodes in Human History, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 978-0-393-08192-3
Soviet Union
▪ Deker, Nikolai; Institute for the study of the U.S.S.R. Munich (1958), Genocide in the USSR:
studies in group destruction (https://books.google.com/books?id=S9NoAAAAMAAJ),
Scarecrow Press
▪ Weiss-Wendt, Anton (December 2005), "Hostage of Politics Raphael Lemkin on "Soviet
Genocide" " (https://web.archive.org/web/20070610031348/http://www.inogs.com/JGRFullText/
WeissWendt.pdf) (PDF), Journal of Genocide Research, 7 (4): 551–559,
doi:10.1080/14623520500350017 (https://doi.org/10.1080%2F14623520500350017),
S2CID 144612446 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:144612446), archived from the
original (http://www.inogs.com/JGRFullText/WeissWendt.pdf) (PDF) on June 10, 2007
▪ Wheatcroft, Stephen (1996), "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and
Mass Killings, 1930–45" (http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-German_Soviet.pdf) (PDF), EuropeAsia Studies, 48 (8): 1319–1353, doi:10.1080/09668139608412415 (https://doi.org/10.1080%2
F09668139608412415)
China
▪ Lorenz, Andreas (15 May 2007), "The Chinese Cultural Revolution: Remembering Mao's
Victims" (http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,483023,00.html), Der Spiegel Online
▪ Rummel, Rudolph Joseph (2011), China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since
1900 (https://books.google.com/books?id=iIEPoEL4lG0C), Transaction Publishers,
ISBN 978-1-412-81400-3
▪ Song, Yongyi (25 August 2011), "Chronology of Mass Killings during the Chinese Cultural
Revolution (1966-1976)" (http://bo-k2s.sciences-po.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/
en/document/chronology-mass-killings-during-chinese-cultural-revolution-1966-1976), Online
Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, ISSN 1961-9898 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/1961-9898)
Cambodia
▪ Barron, John; Paul, Anthony (1977), Murder of A Gentle Land, The Untold Story of Communist
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Genocide in Cambodia (https://books.google.com/books?id=GYZuAAAAMAAJ), Reader's
Digest Press, ISBN 978-0-88349-129-4
▪ Sarup, Kamala (5 September 2005), Communist Genocide In Cambodia (https://web.archive.or
g/web/20100714055842/http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/Cambodia5Sep05CommunistG
enocideInCambodia.pdf) (PDF), Genocide Watch, archived from the original (http://www.genoci
dewatch.org/images/Cambodia5Sep05CommunistGenocideInCambodia.pdf) (PDF) on 14 July
2010, retrieved 30 September 2009
Others
▪ Rummel, Rudolph Joseph (1997), Statistics Of Yugoslavia's Democide: Estimates,
Calculations, And Sources (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP9.HTM), University of
Hawaii Political Science Department
▪ —— (1997), Statistics of North Korean Democide: Estimates, Calculations, and Sources (http://
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP10.HTM), University of Hawaii Political Science
Department
▪ Sharlanov, Dinyu; Ganev, Venelin I. (2010), "Crimes Committed by the Communist Regime in
Bulgaria" (http://www.hac.ekonet-bg.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=
1%3Abasics&id=18%3Acommunist-crimes-report&Itemid=7&lang=en), "Crimes of the
Communist Regimes" Conference Country Report, February 24–26, 2010, Prague, Hanna
Arendt Center in Sofia
External links
▪
Media related to Communist repression at Wikimedia Commons
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes&
oldid=1057483662"
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