Mass killings under communist regimes

Mass killings occurred under several twentieth-century Communist regimes. Death estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions of deaths included. The higher estimates of mass killings account for crimes against civilians by governments, including executions, destruction of population through man-made hunger and deaths during forced deportations, imprisonment and through forced labor. Terms used to define these killings include "mass killing", "democide", "politicide", "classicide" and a broad definition of "genocide". The controversial estimates in Stéphane Courtois's introduction to The Black Book of Communism and by Martin Malia suggested a total death toll of between 85 and 100 million people.

Terminology

Several different terms are used to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants. The following terminology has been used to describe mass killings of unarmed civilians by Communist governments, individually or as a whole:

• Genocide – under the Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide generally applies to mass murder of ethnic rather than political or social groups. Protection of political groups was eliminated from the UN resolution after a second vote, because many states, including Stalin's USSR, anticipated that clause to apply unneeded limitations to their right to suppress internal disturbances. Genocide is also a popular term for mass political killing, which is studied academically as democide and politicide. Killing by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia has been labeled genocide or auto-genocide and, more controversially, the deaths under Leninism and Stalinism in the USSR and Maoism in China have been investigated as possible cases. In particular, the famines in the USSR in the 1930s and during the Great Leap Forward in China have been "depicted as instances of mass killing underpinned by genocidal intent." According to Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, "historians and philosophers close to politically liberal groups" in Europe, especially in Romania, have made the term Communist Genocide a part of the vocabulary.

• Politicide – the term politicide is used to describe the killing of groups that would not otherwise be covered by the Genocide Convention. Barbara Harff studies "genocide and politicide", sometimes shortened as geno-politicide, to include the mass killing of political, economic, ethnic and cultural groups. Manus I. Midlarsky uses the term politicide to describe an arc of mass killings from the western parts of the Soviet Union to China and Cambodia. In his book The killing trap: genocide in the twentieth century Midlarsky raises similarities between the killings of Stalin and Pol Pot.

• Democide – R. J. Rummel defines 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". According to him, this 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, i.e. civil war killings. This definition covers any murder of any number of persons by any government, and it is equally applicable to mass killings perpetrated by communist regimes.

• Crime against humanity – Klas-Göran Karlsson uses the term crimes against humanity, which includes "the direct mass killings of politically undesirable elements, as well as forced deportations and forced labour". He acknowledges that the term may be misleading in the sense that the regimes targeted groups of their own citizens, but considers it useful as a broad legal term which emphasizes attacks on civilian populations and because the offenses demean humanity as a whole. Jacques Semelin and Michael Mann believe that crime against humanity is more appropriate than genocide or politicide when speaking of violence by Communist regimes.

• Classicide – Michael Mann has proposed the term classicide to mean the "intended mass killing of entire social classes". 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.

• Repression – Stephen Wheatcroft notes 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 is sometimes assumed to be synonymous with it, which is not the case in other languages.

• Mass killing – 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." Referencing earlier definitions, 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". The term has been defined by 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. This is the most accepted quantitative minimum threshold for the term. He applies this definition to the cases of Stalin's USSR, the PRC under Mao, 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 Africa. Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago use the term 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."

• Holocaust – the United States Congress has referred to the mass killings collectively as "an unprecedented imperial communist holocaust" while the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation established by the United States Congress refers to this subject as the "Communist holocaust". The term Red Holocaust has been used by German historian Horst Möller. American professor Steven Rosefielde has published a book on this subject titled Red Holocaust. According to Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, "historians and philosophers close to politically liberal groups" in Europe, especially in Romania, have made the term Red Holocaust a part of the vocabulary. The usage of this metaphor is condemned as an attempt to usurp and undermine the history of European Jews.

Estimates

A pile of stones in Germany placed as a memorial to people killed by communist governments

Discussion of the number of victims of Communist regimes has been "extremely extensive and ideologically biased".

Modern historical studies estimate a total number of Stalinism repression deaths during the Great Purge (1937–38) 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. Modern data for the whole of Stalin's rule was summarized by Timothy Snyder, who concluded that Stalinism caused six million direct deaths and nine millions in total, including the deaths from deportation, hunger, and Gulag deaths.

The results of a demographic study of the Cambodian genocide demonstrated that the nationwide death toll in 1975-1979 amounted to 1,843,000-1,871,000, or 21 to 24 percent of the Cambodian population before the Khmer Rouge took power. According to Ben Kiernan, the number of deaths caused by executions us still unknown, because many victims died because of starvation, disease and overwork.

Although any attempt to estimate a total number of victims of communism depends greatly on definitions, several attempts to compile previously published data have been made.

• In his introduction to the Black Book of Communism (1999), Stéphane Courtois gave a "rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates" approaching 100 million killed. In his foreword to the book, Martin Malia noted "a grand total of victims variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million."

• According to Benjamin Valentino in 2005, the estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by Communist regimes in the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, and Cambodia alone ranged from a low of 21 million to a high of 70 million, and the total number of people killed by communist regimes was up to 110 million.

• In 2005, R. J. Rummel revised his estimate of total Communist democide between 1900 and 1999 upward by 38 million to "about 148,000,000", due to recent publications about Mao's role in China's Great Famine.

• According to Steven Rosefielde's book Red Holocaust (2005), "approximately 60 million people and perhaps tens of millions more" were killed.

The criticisms of some of the estimates were mostly focused on three aspects: (i) the estimates were based on sparse and incomplete data, when significant errors are inevitable, (ii) some critics said the figures were skewed to higher possible values, and (iii) some critics argued that victims of Holodomor and other man-made famines created by communist governments should not be counted.

Proposed causes

Political system and ideology

Many scholars, such as R. J. Rummel, Daniel Goldhagen, Richard Pipes, and John N. Gray consider communism as a significant causative factor in mass killings. Klas-Göran Karlsson writes that "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."

According to Rudolph Joseph Rummel, the killings committed by communist regimes can best be explained as the result of the marriage between absolute power and an absolutist ideology – Marxism. "Of all religions, secular and otherwise," Rummel positions Marxism as "by far the bloodiest – bloodier than the Catholic Inquisition, the various Catholic crusades, and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide." He writes that in practice the Marxists saw the construction of their utopia as "a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality – and, as in a real war, noncombatants would unfortunately get caught in the battle. There would be necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, 'wreckers', intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, the rich and landlords. As in a war, millions might die, but these deaths would be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II. To the ruling Marxists, the goal of a communist utopia was enough to justify all the deaths."

In his book Red Holocaust, Steven Rosefielde says that communism's internal contradictions "caused to be killed" approximately 60 million people and perhaps tens of millions more, and that this "Red Holocaust" – the peacetime mass killings and other related crimes against humanity perpetrated by Communist leaders such as Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot—should be the centerpiece of any net assessment of communism. He states that the aforementioned leaders are "collectively guilty of holocaust-scale felonious homicides."

Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky (centre), reading the 1937 indictment against Karl Radek during the 2nd Moscow Trial

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 Vladimir Lenin, who personally ordered the killing of local groups of class enemy hostages. Alexander Yakovlev, architect of perestroika and glasnost and later head of the Presidential Commission for the Victims of Political Repression, elaborates on this point, stating that "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." Historian Robert Gellately concurs, saying: "To put it another way, Stalin initiated very little that Lenin had not already introduced or previewed." Said Lenin to his colleagues in the Bolshevik government: "If we are not ready to shoot a saboteur and White Guardist, what sort of revolution is that?"

Anne Applebaum asserts 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 Lenin and Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky were deployed all over the world. She notes that as late as 1976, Mengistu Haile Mariam unleashed a "Red Terror" in Ethiopia.

Literary historian George G. Watson saw socialism as conservative, a reaction against liberalism. In The Lost Literature of Socialism, he cites an 1849 article written by Friedrich Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" and published in Marx's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung, stating 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." Watson's claims have been criticized by Robert Grant for "dubious evidence", arguing 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." Historian Andrzej Walicki, talking about Engels' 1849 article and citing Watson's book, has said, "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide."

Benjamin Valentino writes that mass killings strategies are chosen by Communists to economically dispossess large numbers of people. "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 coersion."

According to Jacques Semelin, "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."

Failure of the rule of law

Eric D. Weitz says that the mass killing in communist states are 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." They are not inevitable but are political decisions.

Stephen Hicks of Rockford College ascribes the violence characteristic of twentieth-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."

The Black Book of Communism claims an association between communism and criminality—"Communist regimes ... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government"—and says that this criminality lies at the level of ideology rather than state practice.

Other claims

Martin Malia called Russian exceptionalism and the War Experience general reasons for barbarity. The University of Oklahoma political scientist Allen D. Hertzke zooms in on the ideas of British Catholic writer and historian Paul Johnson. According to him, "the attempt to live without God made idols of politics and produced the century's 'gangster statesmen' – Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot – whose 'unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind' unleashed unimaginable horrors. Or as T.S. Eliot puts it, 'If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.'"

The 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." Historian Helen Rappaport describes Nikolay Yezhov, the bureaucrat 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."

States where mass killings have occurred

Soviet Union

See also: Number of deaths in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin

Sign for the Memorial about Repression in USSR at Lubyanka Square. The memorial was erected by the human rights group Memorial in the USSR in 1990 in remembrance of the more than 40,000 innocent people shot in Moscow during the "years of terror".

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 during kulak forced resettlement – for a total of about 3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.

Estimates on the number of deaths brought about by Stalin's rule are hotly debated by scholars in the field of Soviet and communist studies. The published results vary depending on the time when the estimate was made, on the criteria and methods used for the estimates, and sources available for estimates. Some historians attempt to make separate estimates for different periods of the Soviet history, with casualties for the Stalinist period varying from 8 to 61 million. Several scholars, among them Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore, former Politburo member Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev and the director of Yale's "Annals of Communism" series Jonathan Brent, put the death toll at about 20 million. Robert Conquest, in the latest revision (2007) of his book The Great Terror, estimates that while exact numbers will never be certain, the communist leaders of the USSR were responsible for no fewer than 15 million deaths.

According to Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Stalin's regime can be charged with causing the "purposive deaths" of about a million people, although the number of deaths caused by the regime's "criminal neglect" and "ruthlessness" was considerably higher, and perhaps exceed Hitler's. Wheatcroft excludes all famine deaths as "purposive deaths," and claims those that do qualify fit more closely the category of "execution" rather than "murder." However, some of the actions of Stalin's regime, not only those during the Holodomor but also Dekulakization and targeted campaigns against particular ethnic groups, can be considered as genocide, at least in its loose definition.

Genocide scholar Adam Jones claims that "there is very little in the record of human experience to match the violence 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 non-murderous domestic policy." He notes the exceptions being the Khmer Rouge (in relative terms) and Mao's rule in China (in absolute terms).

Red Terror

Main articles: Red Terror, Decossackization, and Lenin's Hanging Order

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 had conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people". Many victims were 'bourgeois hostages' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation. Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tambov Rebellion. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions." A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.

The policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory," according to Nicolas Werth. In the early months of 1919, some 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground. According to historian Michael Kort, "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".

Soviet famine of 1932–1933

Main articles: Soviet famine of 1932–1933, Holodomor, Holodomor genocide question, and Dekulakization

Soviet famine of 1932–33. Areas of most disastrous famine marked with black.

Within the Soviet Union, forced changes in agricultural policies (collectivization), confiscations of grain and droughts caused the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. The famine was most severe in the Ukrainian SSR, where it is often referenced as the Holodomor. A significant portion of the famine victims (3.3 to 7.5 million) were Ukrainians. Another part of the famine was known as Kazakh catastrophe, when more than 1.3 million ethnic Kazakhs (38% of all indigenous population) died. Many scholars say that the Stalinist policies that caused the famine may have been designed as an attack on the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, and thus may fall under the legal definition of genocide (see Holodomor genocide question).

The famine was officially recognized as a genocide by the Ukraine and other governments In a draft resolution, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe declared 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. Regarding the Kazakh catastrophe, Michael Ellman states that it "seems to be an example of ‘negligent genocide’ which falls outside the scope of the UN Convention of genocide."

Great Purge (Yezhovshchina)

Main article: Great Purge

Stalin's attempts to solidify his position as leader of the Soviet Union lead to an escalation in detentions and executions of various people, climaxing in 1937–38 (a period sometimes referred to as the "Yezhovshchina," 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, others perished from beatings and torture while in "investigative custody" and in the Gulag due to starvation, disease, exposure and overwork.

Vynnytsa, Ukraine, June 1943. Mass graves dating from 1937–38 opened up and hundreds of bodies exhumed for identification by family members.

Arrests were typically made citing 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 (GUGB NKVD) October 1936 – November 1938, at least 1,710,000 people were arrested and 724,000 people executed.

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". Citing church documents, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev has estimated that over 100,000 priests, monks and nuns were executed during this time.

Former "kulaks" and their families made up the majority of victims, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed.

National operations of the NKVD

Main article: National operations of the NKVD

In 1930s, the NKVD conducted a series of national operations, which targeted some "national contingents" suspected in counter-revolutionary activity. A total of 350,000 were arrested and 247,157 were executed. Of these, the Polish operation, which targeted the members of already non-existing Polska Organizacja Wojskowa appears to have been the largest, with 140,000 arrests and 111,000 executions. Although these operation might well constitute genocide as defined by the UN convention, or "a mini-genocide" according to Montefiore, there is as yet no authoritative ruling on the legal characterization of these events.

Great purge in Mongolia

Main article: Stalinist repressions in Mongolia

In the summer and autumn of 1937, Joseph Stalin sent NKVD agents to the Mongolian People's Republic and engineered a Mongolian Great Terror in which some 22,000 and 35,000 people were executed. Around 18,000 victims were Buddhist lamas.

Soviet killings during World War II

Main articles: Katyn Massacre, NKVD prisoner massacres, and Soviet war crimes

File:Victims of Soviet NKVD in Lvov ,June 1941.jpg

Victims of Soviet NKVD in Lviv, June 1941.

In September 1939, following the Soviet invasion of Poland, NKVD task forces started removing "Soviet-hostile elements" from the conquered territories. The NKVD systematically practiced torture, which often resulted in death.

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. According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, 150,000 Polish citizens perished due to Soviet repression during the war.

Plaque on the building of Government of Estonia, Toompea, commemorating government members killed by communist terror

Executions were also carried out after the annexation of the Baltic states. 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 forces.

Mass deportations of ethnic minorities

Main article: Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Lavrenti Beria (in foreground). As head of the NKVD, Beria was responsible for mass deportations of ethnic minorities.

The Soviet government during Joseph Stalin's rule conducted a series of deportations on an enormous scale that significantly affected the ethnic map of the USSR. Deportations took place under extremely harsh conditions, often in cattle carriages, with hundreds of thousands of deportees dying en route. Some experts estimate that the number of deaths from the deportations could be as high as one in three in certain cases. 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."

People's Republic of China

Main article: History of the People's Republic of China (1949–1976)

The Chinese Communist Party came to power in China in 1949, when Chinese communist revolution ended a long and bloody civil war between communists and nationalists. There is a general consensus among historians that after Mao Zedong seized power, his policies and political purges caused directly or indirectly the deaths of tens of millions of people. In light of additional evidence, Rummel increased Mao's democide toll to 77 million Based on the Soviets' experience, Mao considered violence necessary to achieve an ideal society derived from Marxism and planned and executed violence on a grand scale.

The first large-scale killings under Mao took place during land reform and the counterrevolutionary campaign. In official study materials published in 1948, Mao envisaged that "one-tenth of the peasants" (or about 50,000,000) "would have to be destroyed" to facilitate agrarian reform. Actual numbers killed in land reform are believed to have been lower, but at least one million. The suppression of counterrevolutionaries targeted mainly former Kuomintang officials and intellectuals suspected of disloyalty. At least 712,000 people were executed, while 1,290,000 were imprisoned in labor camps.

A large portrait of Mao Zedong at Tiananmen

Benjamin Valentino says that the Great Leap Forward was a cause of the Great Chinese Famine, and that the worst effects of the famine were steered towards the regime's enemies. Those labeled as "black elements" (religious leaders, rightists, rich peasants, etc.) in any earlier campaign died in the greatest numbers, as they were given the lowest priority in the allocation of food. 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." His research in local and provincial Chinese archives indicates the death toll was at least 45 million, and that "In most cases the party knew very well that it was starving its own people to death." In a secret meeting at Shanghai in 1959, Mao issued the order to procure one third of all grain from the countryside. He said: “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.” Dikötter estimates that at least 2.5 million people were summarily killed or tortured to death during this period.

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. Mao's Red Guards were given carte blanche to abuse and kill the ones perceived to be enemies of the revolution. For example, in August 1966, over 100 teachers were murdered by their students in western Beijing.

According to Jean-Louis Margolin, writing 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 China proper, and that "one can legitimately speak of genocidal massacres because of the numbers involved." According to the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, "Tibetans were not only shot, but also were beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded." Adam Jones, a scholar specializing in genocide, notes 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 population of about 6 million. These deaths, Jones stresses, may be seen not only as a genocide but also as 'eliticide' – "targeting the better educated and leadership oriented elements among the Tibetan population."

Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea)

See also: Cambodian genocide, Khmer Rouge Killing Fields, and Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia

Skulls of victims of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

Infants were fatally smashed against the Chankiri Tree (Killing Tree) at Choeung Ek, Cambodia.

The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the communist Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Vietnam War. 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 5 years of researching some 20,000 grave sites, he concludes that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,112,829 victims of execution." The number of suspected victims of execution found across 23,745 mass graves is estimated at 1.3 million according to a 2009 academic source; execution is believed to account for roughly 60% of the full death toll during the genocide, with other victims succumbing to starvation or disease. 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; 33.5% of Cambodian men died under the Khmer Rouge compared to 15.7% of Cambodian women.

Helen Fein, a genocide scholar, notes that, although Cambodian leaders declared adherence to an exotic version of agrarian communist doctrine, the xenophobic ideology of the Khmer Rouge regime resembles more a phenomenon of national socialism, or fascism. Henri Locard argues that the "fascist" label was applied to the Khmer Rouge by their enemy, the Vietnamese communists, as a form of "revisionism," but that repression under the Khmer Rouge was "similar (if significantly more lethal) to the repression in all communist regimes." Daniel Goldhagen explains that the Khmer Rouge were xenophobic because they believed the Khmer were "the one authentic people capable of building true communism." Sociologist Martin Shaw described the Cambodian genocide as "the purest genocide of the Cold War era". Steven Rosefielde claims that Democratic Kampuchea was the deadliest of all communist regimes on a per capita basis, primarily because it "lacked a viable productive core" and "failed to set boundaries on mass murder."

In 1997 the Cambodian Government asked the United Nations assistance in setting up a genocide tribunal. The investigating judges were presented with the names of five possible suspects by the prosecution on July 18, 2007. On September 19, 2007 Nuon Chea, second in command of the Khmer Rouge and its most senior surviving member, was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not charged with genocide. On August 7, 2014 he was convicted of crimes against humanity by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and received a life sentence.

Others

Mass killings have also occurred in Vietnam and North Korea. It has been suggested that there may also have been other mass killings (on a smaller scale) in communist states such as Bulgaria, Romania and East Germany, although lack of documentation prevents definitive judgement about the scale of these events and the motives of the perpetrators.

According to Benjamin Valentino, most regimes that described themselves as Communist did not commit mass killings. However, some mass killings may have occurred in some Eastern European countries, although insufficient documentary evidence makes it impossible to make a definitive judgement about the scale, intentionality and the causes of those events.

Yugoslavia

Main articles: List of mass executions and massacres in Yugoslavia during World War II; Communist purges in Serbia in 1944-45; Foibe massacres; and Danube Swabians § World War II, expulsion, and post-war

Bulgaria

According to Benjamin Valentino, available evidence suggests that between 50,000 and 100,000 people may have been killed in Bulgaria beginning in 1944 as part of agricultural collectivization and political repression, although there is insufficient documentation to make a definitive judgement. Dinyu Sharlanov, in his book History of Communism in Bulgaria, accounts for about 31,000 people killed under the regime between 1944 and 1989.

East Germany

Further information: NKVD special camps in Germany 1945–49

Immediately after World War II was won, a denazification commenced in occupied Germany specifically, including the regions the Nazis had annexed. In the Soviet occupation zone, NKVD established prison camps, usually in abandoned concentration camps, and interned alleged Nazis and Nazi German officials, but also some landlords and Prussian Junkers. According to files and data released by the Soviet Ministry for the Interior in 1990, all in all, 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 died of various causes. Most of the deaths were not direct killings, but caused by outbreaks of dysentry and tuberculosis. Death to starvation did also occur on a notable scale, in particular from late 1946 to early 1947, but these deaths does not appear to be deliberate killings, as food shortages were widespread in the Soviet occupation zone. The prisoners of the "silence camps", as the NKVD special camps were called, did not have access to the black market and was unable to get food other than what they were handed by authorities. Some prisoners also died because of execution and perhaps torture. In this context, it is unclear if the prisoner deaths in the silence camps can be categorized as mass killings. It is also unclear how many of the dead were Germans, or East Germans, or of other nationalities.

According to Valentino, between 80,000 and 100,000 people may have been killed in East Germany beginning in 1945 as part of denazification by the Soviet Union, but many other scholars agrees that these figures are inflated.

In 1961, the East German GDR erected the Berlin Wall, following the Berlin crisis. Even though crossing and visits to both East Germany and West Germany was possible for motivated and approved travellers, thousands of East Germans tried to defect by crossing the wall illegally. Until the wall's demolition in 1990, and the reunification of Germany, as much as 5,000 East Germans succeeded in that attempt, while an estimated 239 people died, most of which were shot by East German guards.

Romania

Further information: Danube-Black Sea Canal § Construction of the canal in 1949-1953

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.

Democratic People's Republic of Korea

Further information: Human Rights in North Korea, Prisons in North Korea, Kwalliso, and North Korean famine

According to R.J. Rummel, forced labor, executions, and concentration camps were responsible for over one million deaths in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from 1948 to 1987; others have estimated 400,000 deaths in concentration camps alone. Pierre Rigoulot estimates 100,000 executions, 1.5 million deaths through concentration camps and slave labor, 500,000 deaths from famine, and 1.3 million killed in the Korean War. Estimates based on the most recent North Korean census suggest that 240,000 to 420,000 people died as a result of the 1990s famine and there were 600,000 to 850,000 excess deaths in North Korea from 1993 to 2008. The famine, which claimed as many as one million lives, has been described as the result of the economic policies of the North Korean government, and deliberate "terror-starvation". In 2009, Steven Rosefielde stated that the "Red Holocaust" "still persists in North Korea" as Kim Jong Il "refuses to abandon mass killing."

Democratic Republic of Vietnam

Main articles: Land reform in North Vietnam and Land reform in Vietnam

See also: Boat People; Persecution of Degar Peoples in Vietnam; Reeducation camp; and Viet Cong and PAVN strategy, organization and structure § VC/NVA use of terror

According to recent scholarship based on Vietnamese and Hungarian archival evidence, approximately 15,000 suspected landlords were executed during North Vietnam's land reform from 1953 to 1956. 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; dramatic errors were committed in the course of the land reform campaign. 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.

Valentino attributes 80,000–200,000 deaths to "communist mass killings" in North and South Vietnam, compared to 110,000–310,000 "counterguerrilla mass killings" committed by the U.S. and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Laos

The communist Pathet Lao overthrew the royalist government of Laos in December 1975, establishing the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The conflict between Hmong rebels and the Pathet Lao continued in isolated pockets. The government of Laos has been accused of committing genocide against the Hmong, with up to 100,000 killed out of a population of 400,000.

Democratic Republic of Afghanistan

Main article: Democratic Republic of Afghanistan

Although it is frequently considered as an example of communist genocide, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan represents a borderline case, according to Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago. Prior to the Soviet invasion, the PDPA executed between 10,000 and 27,000 people, mostly at Pul-e-Charkhi prison. After the invasion in 1979, the Soviets installed the puppet government of Babrak Karmal, but it was never clearly stabilized as a communist regime and was in a constant state of war. 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 of entire villages suspected of harbouring or supporting the resistance, the Soviets tried to force the local population to move to the Soviet controlled territory, thereby depriving the armed opposition of their support. Benjamin 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 counterguerrilla mass killing. By the early 1990s, approximately one-third of Afghanistan's population had fled the country. M. Hassan Kakar says that "the Afghans are among the latest victims of genocide by a superpower." Mass graves of executed prisoners have been exhumed dating back to the Soviet era.

People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia

Main articles: Qey Shibir and 1983-1985 famine in Ethiopia

Mengistu Haile Mariam, the former communist leader of Ethiopia

Amnesty International estimates that a total of half a million people were killed during the Red Terror of 1977 and 1978. During the terror groups of people were herded into churches that were then burned down, and women were subjected to systematic rape by soldiers. The Save the Children Fund reported that the 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. Mengistu Haile Mariam himself is alleged to have killed political opponents with his bare hands.

Legal prosecution for genocide and genocide denial

Katyn 1943 exhumation. Photo by International Red Cross delegation.

Ethiopia's former ruler Mengistu Haile Mariam has been convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by an Ethiopian court for his role in the Red Terror, and the highest ranking surviving member of the Khmer Rouge has been charged with those crimes. However, no communist country or governing body has ever been convicted of genocide. Ethiopian law is distinct from the UN 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 distinction of politicide.

According to the laws of the Czech Republic, the 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 by prison of 6 months to 3 years. On November 26, 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."

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. The trial was halted when Meri died March 27, 2009, at the age of 89. Meri denied the accusation, characterizing them as politically motivated defamation: "I do not consider myself guilty of genocide," he said.

On July 26, 2010, Kang Kek Iew (aka Comrade Duch), director of the S-21 prison camp in Democratic 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.

Debate on famines

Authors including Seumas Milne and Jon Wiener have criticized the emphasis on communism and the exclusion of colonialism when assigning blame for famines. Milne argues that if the Soviets are considered responsible for deaths caused by famine in the 1920s and 30s, then Britain would be responsible for as many as 30 million deaths in India from famine during the 19th century, and he laments that "There is a much-lauded Black Book of Communism, but no such comprehensive indictment of the colonial record". Weiner makes a similar assertion while comparing the Ukrainian famine and the Bengal famine of 1943, stating that "Churchill's role in the Bengal famine seems similar to Stalin's role in the Ukrainian famine." The scholars Stephen G. Wheatcroft, R. W. Davies and Mark Tauger reject the idea that the Ukrainian famine was an act of genocide or intentionally inflicted by the Soviet government.

Benjamin Valentino writes that, "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." Daniel Goldhagen says that in some cases, deaths from famine should not be distinguished from mass murder: "Whenever governments have not alleviated famine conditions, political leaders decided not to say no to mass death – in other words, they said yes." He claims that famine was either used or deliberately tolerated by the Soviets, the Germans, the communist Chinese, the British in Kenya, the Hausa against the Ibo in Nigeria, Khmer Rouge, communist North Koreans, Ethiopeans in Eritrea, Zimbabwe against regions of political opposition, and Political Islamists in southern Sudan and Darfur.

Pankaj Mishra questions Mao's direct responsibility for famine noting that "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 that “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame.”

See also

• Anti-communist mass killings
• Communist terrorism
• Crimes against humanity under Communist regimes
• Criticisms of Communist party rule
• Dekulakization
• Gulag
• Great Leap Forward
• Great Chinese Famine
• Land reform in North Vietnam
• Laogai
• Mass graves in the Soviet Union
• Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union
• Revolutionary terror
• Soviet war crimes
• Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
• Victims of Communism Memorial

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Further reading

• Barron, John; Paul, Anthony (1977), Murder of A Gentle Land, The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia, Reader's Digest Press, p. 240, ISBN 0-88349-129-X
• Deker, Nikolai; Institute for the study of the U.S.S.R. Munich (1958), Genocide in the USSR: studies in group destruction, Scarecrow Press
• Lanning, Michael Lee, Cragg, Dan. Inside the VC and the NVA: the real story of North Vietnam's armed forces. 1st edition. Texas A & M University Press August 15, 2008. ISBN 978-1-60344-059-2.
• Sarup, Kamala (September 5, 2005), Communist Genocide In Cambodia (PDF), Genocide Watch, retrieved September 30, 2009
• Totten, Samuel; Paul Robert Bartrop; Steven L. Jacobs (2008), "Communism", Dictionary of genocide, Volume 1, Greenwood Publishing Group, p. 106, ISBN 978-0-313-34642-2, ISBN 0-313-34642-9
• Watson, George (1998), The Lost Literature of Socialism, Lutterworth Press, p. 77, ISBN 978-0-7188-2986-5
• Weiss-Wendt, Anton (December 2005), "Hostage of Politics Raphael Lemkin on "Soviet Genocide"" (PDF), Journal of Genocide Research, 7 (4): 551–559, doi:10.1080/14623520500350017, archived from the original (PDF) on June 10, 2007 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)

External links

• The Global Museum on Communism