Mass killings under communist regimes

Mass killings of non-combatants have occurred under many types of governments. This article discusses mass killings under regimes that are commonly labeled Communist. It includes both intentional killings and those for which regime intent is disputed. Scholars place various level of blame for the deaths on the governments. Tolling methods are non-uniform and often disputed.

Terminology

"Communist regimes" refers to those countries who declared themselves to be socialist states under the Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, or Maoist definition (in other words, "communist states") at some point in their history.

Scholars use several different terms to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants. Under the Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide does not apply to the mass killing of political and 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.

The term "politicide" is used to describe the killing of political or economic groups that would otherwise be covered by the Genocide Convention. 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.

R. J. Rummel coined the term "democide", which includes genocide, politicide, and mass murder. Jacques Semelin prefers "crime against humanity". Helen Fein has termed the mass state killings in the Soviet Union and Cambodia as "genocide and democide."

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

Stephen Wheatcroft notes that, in the case of the Soviet Union, terms such as "the terror", "the purges", and "repression" (the latter mostly in common Russian) colloquially refer to the same events and he believes the most neutral of these terms are "repression" and "mass killings". The latter term has been defined by 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. 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.

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 entered usage in public discourse in the 1990s and is used by several scholars; for instance, Horst Möller and Steven Rosefielde have published books on this subject titled Red Holocaust.

Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago have shown the significance of terminology in that, depending on the use of democide (generalised state-sponsored killing) or politicide (eliminating groups who are politically opposed) as the criterion for inclusion in a data-set, statistical analyses seeking to establish a connection between mass killings can produce very different results, including the significance or otherwise of regime type.

Origin of debate

In the view of Anton Weiss-Wendt, academic debate regarding the common features of mass killing and other legal measures in communist countries originates in the political advocacy of Raphael Lemkin in advocating the genocide convention. According to Weiss-Wendt, Lemkin's goal was the international ratification of a Genocide Convention, and he consistently bent his advocacy towards whichever venue would advance his objective. Associating with the US government and Central and Eastern European emigre communities, Lemkin bent the term genocide to meet the political interests of those he associated with, and in the case of communities of emigres in the US, funded his living.

In this way, contends Weiss-Wendt, Lemkin was enmeshed in an anti-Soviet political community, and regularly used the term "Communist genocide" to refer to a broad range of human rights violations—not simply to mass-killings of ethnic groups—in all the post-1945 communist nations, and claimed that future "genocides" would occur in all nations adopting communism. Lemkin's broad application of his term in political lobbying degraded its usefulness. "Like King Midas, whatever Lemkin touched turned into 'genocide.' But when everything is genocide nothing is genocide!" states Weiss-Wendt.^(p555-6) Additionally, Lemkin displayed both a racialism against Russians, who he believed "were incapable of 'digesting a great number of people belonging to a higher civilization,'" and made broad use of his term in the political service of the US's anti-communist position in the 1950s, concludes Weiss-Wendt. Lemkin has been praised for being the first to use the comparative method into the study of mass violence.

Proposed causes

List of claims linking communism and mass killings

Theories, such as those of R. J. Rummel, that propose communism as a significant causative factor in mass killings have attracted scholarly dispute; this article does not discuss academic acceptance of such theories.

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 done by communist regimes can be explained with 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 argues 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 Tse-tung, 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."

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 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.

In The Lost Literature of Socialism, literary historian George Watson saw socialism as conservative, a reaction against liberalism and an attempt to return to antiquity and hierarchy. He states that the writings of Friedrich 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 criticised 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."

Daniel Goldhagen, Richard Pipes, and John N. Gray have written about theories regarding the role of communism in books for a popular audience.

List of claims relating to a failure in the rule of law or economic conditions as cause

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, a set of academic essays on mass killings under Communist regimes, details "'crimes, terror, and repression' from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989".^{(p x)(p727)} Courtois claims an association between communism and criminality—"Communist regimes ... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government"^(p4)—and says that this criminality lies at the level of ideology rather than state practice.^(p2)

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."

Michael Mann writes: "The greatest Communist death rates were not intended but resulted from gigantic policy mistakes worsened by factionalism, and also somewhat by callous or revengeful views of the victims."

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."

Other claims

Influence of national cultures

Martin Malia called Russian exceptionalism and the War Experience general reasons for barbarity.^{(xvii–xviii)}

Secular values

Some proponents of traditional ethical standards and religious faith argue that the killings were at least partly the result of a weakening of faith and the unleashing of the radical values of the European Enlightenment upon the modern world. Observing this kind of trend in critical scholarship, the University of Oklahoma political scientist Allen D. Hertzke zooms in on the ideas of British Catholic writer and historian Paul Johnson and writes that

[A] shift in intellectual mood has come from the critique of the perceived failures and blinders of the secular project. To be sure, this critique is not universally shared, but a vast scholarship, along with a proliferating array of opinion journals and think tank symposia, catalog the fallout from the abandonment of transcendent societal anchors. Epitomizing this thought is Paul Johnson's magisterial book Modern Times, which attacks the common Enlightenment assumption that less religious faith necessarily equals more human freedom or democracy. The collapse of the religious impulse among the educated classes in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, he argues, left a vacuum that was filled by politicians wielding power under the banner of totalitarian ideologies–whether 'blood and soil' Fascism or atheistic Communism. Thus 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.'

Personal responsibility

The Russian and world history scholar John M. Thompson describes the system of terror developed during Stalin's time as "puzzling"; surveying Russian history, he posits the height of the socialist bloodletting in the Soviet Union in the 1930s as a function of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's personality–specifically contending that

Attempts to explain this nightmarish period as Stalin's consolidation and reshaping of power, or the cleansing of the party as an evolving component of the Stalinist system somehow run amok, or as Stalin's coldly calculated effort to ready the country for war and ensure that he would have a free hand in foreign policy are, singly or even taken together, simply not convincing. Since Stalin destroyed both the records and most of the high officials involved, we will probably never know precisely what led to the purges and terror. Rational and policy considerations undoubtedly there were, but any persuasive explanation of this era must take account of Stalin's personality and outlook. 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.

American 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."

Comparison to other mass killings

Daniel Goldhagen argues that 20th century Communist regimes "have killed more people than any other regime type." Other scholars in the fields of Communist studies and genocide studies, such as Steven Rosefielde, Benjamin Valentino, and R.J. Rummel, have come to similar conclusions. Rosefielde states that it is possible the "Red Holocaust" killed more non-combatants than "Ha Shoah" and "Japan's Asian holocaust" combined, and "was at least as heinous, given the singularity of Hitler's genocide." Rosefielde also notes that "while it is fashionable to mitigate the Red Holocaust by observing that capitalism killed millions of colonials in the twentieth century, primarily through man-made famines, no inventory of such felonious negligent homicides comes close to the Red Holocaust total."

Paul Hollander claims that while there are some similarities between Nazi and Communist mass killings, such as both having a "cleansing, purifying intention and aspect," there are important distinctions as well:

Unlike Nazi Germany, Communist states did not attempt to eradicate, in a premeditated, systematic, and mechanized fashion, any particular ethnic group or class of people. This policy was nonetheless compatible with the systematic mistreatment of particular ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty. Major examples include the Soviet treatment of Baltic and Caucasian ethnic groups and the so-called Volga Germans and the Chinese treatment of Tibetans. There is a second important difference: Communist regimes, unlike the Nazis, did not seek to murder children.

Claimed exemplars

The following is a list of claimed exemplars of the phenomena, in the academic literature claiming mass killings as a result of Communist states or ideologies.

• Soviet Union
  • Gulag
  • forced resettlement
  • Steven Rosefielde's claims of a Red Holocaust.
  • Red Terror
  • Decossackization
  • Lenin's Hanging Order
  • Great purge
  • National operations of the NKVD
  • Stalinist repressions in Mongolia
  • Katyn Massacre
  • NKVD prisoner massacres
  • Soviet war crimes
  • Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946)
  • Soviet famine of 1932–1933
  • Holodomor
  • Holodomor genocide question
  • Dekulakization
  • [Population transfer in the Soviet Union]]
• People's Republic of China
  • Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries
  • Great Leap Forward
  • Cultural Revolution
  • 1959 Tibetan uprising
• Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea)
  • The Killing Fields
• Democratic Republic of Vietnam
  • Land reform in Vietnam
• People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
  • Red Terror (Ethiopia)

Legal prosecution for genocide and genocide denial

Katyn 1943 exhumation. Photo by International Red Cross delegation.

While 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, 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 in 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. In March 2005, the Polish Sejm unanimously requested Russia to classify the Katyn massacre, the execution of over 21,000 Polish POW's and intellectual leaders by Stalin's NKVD, as a crime of genocide. Alexander Savenkov of the Prosecutor's General Office of the Russian Federation responded: "The version of genocide was examined, and it is my firm conviction that there is absolutely no basis to talk about this in judicial terms." In March 2010, Memorial called upon Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to denounce the massacre as a crime against humanity.

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 in part because he's been behind bars for 11 years.

See also

• Criticisms of Communist party rule
• Dekulakization
• Gulag
• Land reform in Vietnam
• Laogai
• Mass graves in the Soviet Union
• Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union
• Soviet war crimes
• Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
• Victims of Communism Memorial
• Anti-communist mass killings
• Revolutionary terror

Notes and references

Footnotes

References

References and further reading

• Applebaum, Anne (foreword) and Hollander, Paul (introduction and editor) (2006) From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States. Intercollegiate Studies Institute. ISBN 1932236783
• Barron, John (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. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Courtois, Stephane (1999). [[The Black Book of Communism]]: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. p. 858. ISBN 0-674-07608-7. {{cite book}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Deker, Nikolai (1958). Genocide in the USSR: studies in group destruction. Scarecrow Press. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Fein, Helen (1993). "Soviet and Communist genocides and 'Democide'". Genocide: a sociological perspective; Contextual and Comparative Studies I: Ideological Genocides;. Sage Publications. ISBN 9780803988293. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
• Goldhagen, Daniel (2009). Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity. PublicAffairs. p. 608. ISBN 1586487698, 9781586487690. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Jones, Adam (2010). Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2 edition. Routledge. ISBN 041548619X.
• Karlsson, Klas-Göran (2008). Crimes against humanity under communist regimes – Research review (PDF). Forum for Living History. p. 111. ISBN 978-91-977487-2-8. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Naimark, Norman M. (2010). Stalin's Genocides (Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity). Princeton University Press. p. 168. ISBN 0691147841. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Pipes, Richard (2003). Communism: A History. Modern Library Chronicles. p. 175. ISBN 9780812968644. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Rosefielde, Steven (2009). Red Holocaust. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-77757-5. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Rummel, Rudolph (1997). Death by government. Transaction Publishers. p. 496. ISBN 1-56000-927-6. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) at WWW.Hawaii.edu
• Sarup, Kamala (September 5, 2005). "Communist Genocide In Cambodia" (PDF). Genocide Watch. Retrieved September 30, 2009. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Totten, Samuel (2008). Dictionary of genocide, Volume 1. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 534. ISBN 0313346429, 9780313346422. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Valentino, Benjamin A (2005). "Communist Mass Killings: The Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia". Final solutions: mass killing and genocide in the twentieth century. Cornell University Press. pp. 91–151. ISBN 0801472733. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
• Watson, George (1998). The Lost Literature of Socialism. Lutterworth press. ISBN 9780718829865.
• Weiss-Wendt, Anton (2005). "Hostage of Politics Raphael Lemkin on "Soviet Genocide"" (PDF). Journal of Genocide Research (7(4)): 551–559. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Weitz, Eric D. (2003). A century of genocide: utopias of race and nation. Princeton University Press. p. 360. ISBN 0691009139, 9780691009131. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)