Criticism of communist party rule | Wikipedia audio article
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Date: 2018-11-28

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Criticism of communist party rule

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SUMMARY
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The actions by governments of communist states have been subject to criticism. According to critics, the rule by Communist parties leads  to totalitarianism, political repression, restrictions of human rights, poor economic performance and cultural and artistic censorship.After the Russian Revolution, communist party rule was consolidated for the first time in Soviet Russia (later the largest constituent republic of the Soviet Union, formed in December 1922) and criticized immediately domestically and internationally. During the first Red Scare in the United States, the takeover of Russia by the communist Bolsheviks was considered by many a threat to free markets, religious freedom and liberal democracy. Meanwhile, under the tutelage of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union the only party permitted by the Soviet Union constitution, state institutions were intimately entwined with those of the party. By the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin consolidated the regime's control over the country's economy and society through a system of economic planning and five-year plans.
Between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War, Soviet-style communist rule only spread to one state that was not later incorporated into the Soviet Union. In 1924, communist rule was established in neighboring Mongolia, a traditional outpost of Russian influence bordering the Siberian region. However, throughout much of Europe and the Americas criticism of the domestic and foreign policies of the Soviet regime among anticommunists continued unabated. After the end of World War II, Soviet Union took control over the territories reached by the Red Army, establishing what later became known as Eastern Bloc.
Following the Chinese Revolution, the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949 under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Between the Chinese Revolution and the last quarter of the 20th century, communist rule spread throughout East Asia and much of the Third World and new communist regimes became the subject of extensive local and international criticism.
Western criticisms of the Soviet Union and Third World communist regimes have been strongly anchored in scholarship on totalitarianism, which asserts that communist parties maintain themselves in power without the consent of the populations and they rule by means of secret police, propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, repression of free discussion and criticism, mass surveillance and state terror. These studies of totalitarianism influenced Western historiography on communism and Soviet history, particularly the work of Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes on Stalinism, the Great Purge, the Gulag and the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. Western criticisms of communist rule have also been grounded in criticisms of socialism by economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who argued that the state ownership and economic planning characteristic of Soviet-style communist rule were responsible for economic stagnation and shortage economies, providing few incentives for individuals to improve productivity and engage in entrepreneurship.
Ruling communist parties have also been challenged by domestic dissent. In Eastern Europe, the works of dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Václav Havel gained international prominence as did the works of disillusioned ex-communists such as Milovan Djilas, who condemned the "new class" or "nomenklatura" system that had emerged under communist rule. Communism: Promise and Practice (1973) detailed what its author termed flagrant gaps between official Soviet policies of equality and economic justice and the reality of the emergence of a new class in the Soviet Union and in other communist countries, which thrived at the expense of the remaining population.