Museum of Communism

From: bcaplan@gmu.edu (Bryan Caplan) 
 Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory,talk.politics.misc,soc.history,soc.rights.human, soc.politics.soviet,soc.politics.cis,alt.politics.socialism,alt.politics.socialism.trotsky,alt.politics.socialism.mao,alt.politics.vietnamese,alt.society.conservatism,alt.politics.libertarian,talk.politics.libertarian,alt.politics.radical-left,soc.culture.cambodia,soc.culture.china,soc.culture.cis,soc.culture.czecho-slovak,soc.culture.korean,soc.culture.polish,soc.culture.russia,soc.culture.soviet,soc.culture.ukrainian,soc.culture.vietnamese,soc.culture.yugoslavia,alt.answers,talk.answers,news.answers 
 Subject: Museum of Communism FAQ Version 1.2 
 Followup-To: poster 
 Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.EDU 
 Summary: This FAQ answers questions often asked at the Museum of
 Communism, with a strong focus on the atrocities committed under the 
 regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other major Communist dictators.
 
 Archive-name: museums/communism/faq
 Posting-Frequency: monthly
 
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 To view the hypertext version of the FAQ (so the links work), go to 
 http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan. 
 --------------------------------------------------------------------- 
 
 
 Museum of Communism FAQ 
 
 by Bryan Caplan
 
 Version 1.2
 
 1. What is the Museum of Communism?
 2. What is the purpose of the Museum of Communism?
 3. What were the most significant human rights violations committed by
 Communist regimes, and who was responsible for them?
 4. What were the most important human rights violations committed under
 Lenin's rule?
 5. What were the most important human rights violations committed by
 Stalin?
 6. What were the most important human rights violations perpetrated by
 the Soviet Union during the post-Stalin era?
 7. What were Mao's greatest crimes against humanity?
 8. What about the post-Mao years in Communist China?
 9. What were the greatest abuses of Communist regimes outside of the USSR
 and China?
 10. To what extent did Communist totalitarianism derive from Lenin's
 political and philosophical theories? From Marx's political and
 philosophical theories? From the broader socialist tradition?
 11. Were Communism and Nazism "morally equivalent" movements?
 12. Some common objections answered:
 A. Aren't you ignoring or defending American human rights
 violations?
 B. What about the oppressive policies of the 'White' regimes that
 were often the only alternative to Communism?
 C. Weren't repressive policies forced upon Communist regimes by the
 hostility of the West?
 D. Americans have been raised on anti-Communist propaganda. Isn't
 there really a need to balance out this one-sided treatment,
 rather than reinforce it as your Museum does?
 13. What are the main resources currently available at the Museum of
 Communism?
 14. What museum expansions are currently being planned?
 15. How can I contribute exhibits to the Museum of Communism?
 16. Communism is dead or dying all over the world. Given this, does the
 history of Communism retain any practical political implications?
 
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 1. What is the Museum of Communism?
 
 The Museum of Communism is an online, "virtual" museum that provides
 historical, economic, and philosophical analysis of the political
 movement known as Communism; it may be found on the World Wide Web at
 http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan. An overwhelming
 consensus of historians from a wide range of political viewpoints
 concludes that the human rights violations of Communist regimes have
 been enormous - often greater, in fact, than those of the infamous
 Nazi Germany. Yet public awareness of the major crimes of Communist
 regimes remains minimal. The purpose of the Museum of Communism is to
 disseminate this information, combining high scholarly standards with
 an entertaining format.
 
 The founder and curator of the museum is Prof. Bryan Caplan, who
 recently received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University,
 and has just joined the economics department of George Mason
 University. The study of Communism and webpage design have been two of
 his long-time avocations; unless otherwise stated, he is the sole
 author of all material in the Museum of Communism. Outside
 contributions of exhibits to the museum are welcomed; see the museum's
 exhibit guidelines.
 
 2. What is the purpose of the Museum of Communism?
 
 The purpose of the Museum of Communism is to for Communism what the
 Holocaust Memorial Museum does for Nazism: namely, to educate the
 public about mass murder, widespread slave labor, and other human
 rights violations committed by Communist regimes. As the curator of
 the museum, I strive for high standards of objective scholarship; but
 the historical facts - enjoying the widespread agreement of scholars
 whatever their political orientation - ensure that the museum's
 exhibits will almost invariably place Communism in an extremely
 negative light.
 
 The horrors of Nazi Germany prompted many concerned observers to vow
 that "Never again" would such a regime be allowed to exist. This has
 prompted an energetic effort to publicize Nazi atrocities, an effort
 which has been singularly successful. Unfortunately, while equally
 solid and damning historical evidence on the behavior of Communist
 regimes exists, there has been surprisingly little effort to convey
 this information to a broader audience. It would be tragic if
 Communism were to collapse without intellectually immunizing future
 generations against similar movements.
 
 As it currently stands, a fair percentage of the Western population
 knows almost nothing of the human rights record of Communist regimes,
 considering Communism a noble ideal that people weren't virtuous
 enough to practice. Another segment is vaguely aware of the abuses of
 Communist regimes, but drastically underestimates their magnitude. The
 comparatively well-informed know of the aggressive foreign policy of
 Communist regimes - of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
 
 What the public knows least about is the internal policies of
 Communist countries. While many countries in the world have had
 imperialistic foreign policies comparable to e.g. the Soviet Union's,
 the crimes inflicted by Communist governments against their own
 populations find almost no historical parallel. In particular, using
 almost any scholarly tabulations (and even official Communist
 pronouncements), the government of the USSR murdered more
 non-combatants than any other in the 20th-century. Communist China
 comes in second. Out of the top ten most murderous regimes in this
 century, five were Communist, according to the ranking provided by
 R.J. Rummel in his Death By Government (Communist regimes indicated in
 bold):
 
 1. Soviet Union
 2. Communist China
 3. Nazi Germany
 4. Nationalist China
 5. Imperial Japan
 6. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge
 7. Turkey under the Young Turks
 8. Communist Vietnam
 9. Communist Poland
 10. Pakistan under Yahya Khan
 (N.B. Others have taken issue with some of Rummel's calculations, but
 not with his basic conclusions. For a reproduction of Rummel's
 tabulations, go to Freedom's Nest).
 
 One might note that out of this hall of shame, probably only Nazi
 Germany widely enjoys the reputation it deserves. Each of these
 regimes - along with many lesser offenders - deserves to have its
 crimes exposed. But the enduring willingness of many in the West to
 minimize Communist atrocities, combined with the enormous magnitude of
 their crimes, to my mind makes human rights violations by Communist
 regimes especially worthy of attention.
 
 3. What were the most significant human rights violations committed by
 Communist regimes, and who was responsible for them?
 
 All Communist governments have practiced widespread killing of non-
 combatants. The extermination of the bourgeoisie and wealthy "as a
 class" has been most loudly proclaimed, although in actual fact
 peasants have been by far the majority of the victims. In addition,
 Communist governments have ordered the genocide of numerous ethnic
 minorities deemed disloyal or anti- Communist. Finally, Communist
 governments have frequently killed large numbers of rival Communists.
 In most cases, the official reasons given for mass killings have been
 economic or political rather than racial, but punishment has rarely
 been inflicted for individual infractions of the law. Rather,
 Communist governments would judge "enemies of the people" to be common
 in one's class, family, or ethnicity, and respond with blanket
 repression of the entire suspect group. As the democratic socialist
 historian Carl Landauer notes in his discussion of Stalin's
 "dekulakization" campaign:
 
 Whether it is more immoral to persecute people because of
 their opinions than to victimize them because of their
 former position or their descent may be arguable... But
 whether a child is made to perish because his parents were
 Jewish or because his father had a few cows too many and
 therefore was regarded as a kulak, or whether a man is
 excluded from jobs because he is a Negro or because he used
 to be a merchant - in all these cases the victim is
 penalized for something that has nothing to do with moral
 guilt and that originated in the past, so that it cannot now
 be changed. If Communists argued that the incidence of
 counterrevolutionary designs was greater among kulaks or
 former bourgeois than among workers, we may remember
 Hitler's argument that the incidence of some types of crimes
 was higher among Jews than among non- Jews, and similar
 arguments of American racists with regard to Negroes or
 Orientals.(European Socialism: A History of Ideas and
 Movements)
 
 Unnatural deaths ordered by Communist regimes fall into three fairly
 distinct categories: deaths due to extreme hardship conditions in
 slave labor camps; deaths due to man-made famine, usually closely
 connected to forced collectivization of agriculture; and lastly,
 straightforward executions. Later sections of the FAQ discuss the
 composition and quantity of killings in different nations and time
 periods, but since similar patterns repeat themselves, here are some
 general remarks:
 
 o Deaths due to extreme hardship conditions in slave labor camps
 
 Slave labor camps, also known as "concentration camps," "forced
 labor camps," and "re-education camps," have played a vital role
 in Communist systems from the very beginning. Lenin's secret
 police, the Cheka, began to set up concentration camps in 1918;
 the first official admission appears to have been made by Leon
 Trotsky, who threatened rebellious Czech forces with confinement
 in concentration camps if they refused to join the Red Army. The
 number confined during Lenin's reign was by later standards
 modest, apparently no more than 100,000; but from the outset
 concentration camps were set up in the unbearable climates of
 Siberia and northern Russia, and used for extremely demanding
 tasks such as canal digging, timber cutting, and mining. Such
 conditions would have tested the endurance of anyone, but they
 became deadly when combined with the small amounts of food and
 inadequate clothing issued to prisoners: the annual death rate in
 Lenin's slave labor camps generally ranged between 10-30% per
 year. (Thus, the odds of surviving a five- year sentence ranged
 from 20-60%). Moreover, the high death rate required continuous
 large-scale arrests merely to keep the prison population stable.
 
 In the early Stalin years, the camp populations were roughly
 stable, but by 1930 by most estimates the number had skyrocketed
 to 1,000,000 inmates. But the growth era of the camps was only
 beginning: by 1940 the concentration camps contained about
 10,000,000 souls, while camp conditions grew ever worse. The
 prison population declined and living conditions improved
 considerably after Stalin's death, but the slave labor camps
 persisted into the Gorbachev years.
 
 Some would question whether the deaths in slave labor camps can
 reasonably be considered "murder." Clearly, if prisoners had been
 provided with adequate food, clothing, and shelter, the state
 would have been guilty of slave-driving, but not murder. But this
 is simply not the case: a conscious decision was made to severely
 restrict provisions for prisoners while forcing them to perform
 incredibly demanding work. This methodological standard is not
 especially high: researchers of Nazi atrocities have routinely
 and sensibly counted the deaths of slave laborers under inhuman
 conditions as murder. Mass murderers use a diverse bag of tools,
 as the testimony of famed Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann
 reveals:
 
 EICHMANN'S MINUTES FROM THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE
 PRESENTED AS EVIDENCE AT HIS TRIAL:
 
 "Within the framework of the final solution, Jews will
 be conscripted for labour in the eastern territories
 under appropriate leadership. Large labour gangs of
 those fit for work will be formed, with the sexes
 separated. They will be made to build roads as they are
 led into these territories. A large percentage will
 undoubtedly be eliminated by natural diminution."
 
 PROSECUTOR: What is meant by "natural diminution"?
 
 EICHMANN: That's perfectly normal dying. Of a heart
 attack or pneumonia, for instance. If I were to drop
 dead just now, that would be natural diminution.
 
 PROSECUTOR: If man is forced to perform heavy physical
 labour and not given enough to eat, he grows weaker,
 and if he gets so weak he has a heart attack...?
 
 EICHMANN: That undoubtedly would have been reported as
 natural diminution.
 
 o Deaths due to man-made famine
 
 While a wide variety of governments in this century have used
 slave labor camps, mass death due to man-made famine can be
 fairly described as an original Communist invention. For
 ideological reasons, Communist governments almost invariably seek
 to "collectivize" agriculture; i.e., to expropriate peasants'
 farms. But while Marx thought that Communist revolution would
 occur only in highly industrialized societies, in actual fact
 most Communist governments came to power in countries in which
 "peasants", or farmers, were the large majority of the
 population. In combination, ideology and objective conditions
 made Communist states choose between abandoning their theories or
 waging war on the majority of their own citizens.
 
 Collectivization comes about in a variety of ways, but its
 essence is the same: getting as much food as possible out of the
 peasantry while giving them as little as possible in return.
 During the "War Communism" period, Lenin officially assured
 peasants that they owned their land, but forced them to sell
 their entire surplus to the state at a pitifully small price.
 When peasants chose not to sell, government troops began seizing
 grain - first surplus grain, then the grain peasants needed to
 feed their families, and finally the seed grain needed to plant
 the next crop. The final result was a massive famine in which
 about 5 million people perished. Under Stalin's forced
 collectivization program, the peasantry was formally
 expropriated. Millions of disgruntled peasant families were
 sentenced to the Siberian slave labor camps. Stalin's collective
 farmers had to surrender enormous quantities of grain for next to
 nothing, frequently leading to the seizure of the entire crop.
 The result was yet another massive famine, made even worse than
 Lenin's by Stalin's refusal to authorize international relief
 efforts. The deaths by starvation from this famine were around 7
 million; approximately equal numbers of scapegoated peasant
 families perished in the Siberian concentration camps. This
 pattern repeated itself in China when Mao collectivized
 agriculture, and appears at some point in the history of most
 Communist regimes.
 
 Again, some people would deny that imposing foolish agricultural
 policies can be considered murder. (Of course, the regimes denied
 that the policies were foolish, implausibly blaming the famines
 on the poor weather that always seems to hit at the same time the
 Party orders the collectivization). But the evidence indicates
 that the man-made famines were either intentional (under e.g.
 Stalin) or at least the result of malevolent indifference - both
 of which are sufficient for a murder conviction. Even Lenin, who
 pioneered Communist peasant policy and therefore lacked the
 benefit of experience, realized what he was risking. Barely a
 month after he seized power, Lenin noted the risk of famine,
 declaring: "The critical situation of food supply, the threat of
 famine caused by speculation, the sabotage of capitalists and
 bureaucrats, as well as the prevailing chaos, make it necessary
 to take extraordinary revolutionary measures to combat the evil."
 While Lenin typically blamed everyone but himself, he was quite
 aware that speculation and sabotage did not cause famine unless
 combined with anti- peasant policies. When the famine finally
 threatened to destroy his regime, Lenin dropped requisitioning
 and price controls - indicating that he knew that these were the
 cause rather than the cure for hunger. The man-made famines of
 Communist dictators after Lenin, as shall be seen, were not only
 foreseen but often used deliberately as a political weapon
 against recalcitrant peasants.
 
 o Executions
 
 Straightforward execution of innocent people has led to far fewer
 deaths than either slave labor camps or man-made famine. Still,
 the numbers are impressive. During the Russian Civil War, "class
 enemies" were executed en masse in the Red Terror. As Zinoviev, a
 high-ranking Bolshevik put it, "We must carry along with us 90
 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's inhabitants. As
 for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be
 annihilated." The number executed in this period fell far short
 of Zinoviev's threat, probably adding up to a few hundred
 thousand. The executions under Stalin's rule - such as during the
 Great Terror of 1936-1938 - added up to several million by most
 counts. Comparable numbers of executions (adjusting for national
 population) are typical of Communist states.
 
 Needless to say, mass murder was not the only human rights violation
 found in Communist regimes. As indicated, widespread use of slave
 labor has been common. The freedom to migrate - even within national
 borders - has frequently been severely restricted. Freedom of speech,
 conscience, and religion have been ruthlessly suppressed - although
 occasional "thaws" during e.g. part of Khrushchev's reign permitted
 writers such as Solzhenitsyn to expose some of the most egregious of
 their government's prior human rights violations. Communist regimes
 rejected on principle the economic freedom to own property, engage in
 business, or choose one's occupation, although sometimes these have
 been permitted on pragmatic grounds.
 
 It is safe to say that there is scarcely a single human freedom that
 Communist regimes have not suppressed as a matter of official policy.
 While later sections will continue to focus on Communist mass murder
 and slave labor, the magnitude of the worst atrocities is also a
 fairly good indicator of the severity of lesser rights violations.
 
 4. What were the most important human rights violations committed under
 Lenin's rule?
 
 V.I. Lenin was the founding father of the Soviet Union and its [Image]
 dictator during the Russian Civil War that followed. A series
 of strokes after the Civil War, and his early death in 1924, gave him
 a mere five years to reign. The brevity of his tenure led many to
 assume that subsequent human rights abuses in the Soviet Union were
 not Lenin's fault. Oppression did intensify after Stalin replaced
 Lenin as the absolute ruler of the USSR. But Lenin did everything that
 Stalin would later do, except execute fellow Communists. As Richard
 Pipes notes, this "is not as significant as it may appear at first
 sight. Towards outsiders, people not belonging to his order of the
 elect - and that included 99.7 percent of his compatriots - Lenin
 showed no human feelings whatever..." (Russia Under the Bolshevik
 Regime)
 
 Lenin repeatedly indicated that large-scale killing would be necessary
 to bring in his utopia, and did not shrink from this realization. His
 speeches and writings overflow with calls for blood: "Merciless war
 against these kulaks! Death to them." "We'll ask the man, where do you
 stand on the question of the revolution? Are you for it or against it?
 If he's against it, we'll stand him up against a wall." As Pipes sums
 up, "Lenin hated what he perceived to be the 'bourgeoisie' with a
 destructive passion that fully equaled Hitler's hatred of the Jews:
 nothing short of physical annihilation would satisfy him." Moreover,
 "The term 'bourgeoisie' the Bolsheviks applied loosely to two groups:
 those who by virtue of their background or position in the economy
 functioned as 'exploiters,' be they a millionaire industrialist or a
 peasant with an extra acre of land, and those who, regardless of their
 economic or social status, opposed Bolshevik policies." (Russia Under
 the Bolshevik Regime) Lenin used all three of the tools of mass murder
 that his successors and imitators would later perfect.
 
 o Deaths due to extreme hardship conditions in slave labor camps
 
 Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, pioneered the development of
 the modern slave labor (or "concentration") camp. Inmates were
 generally frankly treated as government-owned slaves, and used
 for the most demanding work - such as digging arctic canals -
 while receiving pitifully small rations. As Pipes explains,
 "Soviet concentration camps, as instituted in 1919, were meant to
 be a place of confinement for all kinds of undesirables, whether
 sentenced by courts or by administrative organs. Liable to
 confinement in them were not only individuals but also
 'categories of individuals' - that is, entire classes:
 Dzerzhinskii at one point proposed that special concentration
 camps be erected for the 'bourgeoisie.' Living in forced
 camps be erected for the 'bourgeoisie.' Living in forced
 [Image] isolation, the inmates formed a pool of slave labor on
 which Soviet administrative and economic institutions
 could draw at no cost." (The Russian Revolution) The number of
 people in these camps according to Pipes was about 50,000
 prisoners in 1920 and 70,000 in 1923; many of these did not
 survive the inhuman conditions. The inmates might be bourgeoisie,
 or peasants, or members of other socialist factors such as the
 Mensheviks or the Social Revolutionaries, or members of
 ethnicities thought to be hostile to the Bolsheviks, such as the
 Don Cossacks. The death rates in these camps appear to have been
 in the extreme hardship range of 10-30%. While the number thus
 killed was only a small percentage of the total exterminated
 under Lenin's regime, it laid the foundation for Stalin's slave
 labor empire.
 
 o Deaths due to man-made famine
 
 By far the largest number of unnatural deaths for which Lenin and
 his cohorts were responsible resulted from famine. Lenin and his
 regime tried to depict the famine as simply bad luck, but the
 truth is rather different. To feed his troops and keep the cities
 producing munitions, Lenin needed food. He got it by
 "requisitioning" it from the peasantry - demanding delivery of
 large sums of food for little or nothing in exchange. This led
 peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. In
 retaliation, Lenin often ordered the seizure of the food peasants
 had grown for their own subsistence, sometimes ordering the
 confiscation of their seed grain as a further sanction. The Cheka
 and the army began by shooting hostages, and ended by waging a
 second full-scale civil war against the recalcitrant peasantry.
 
 The ultimate results of this war against the peasantry were
 devastating. Official Soviet reports admitted that fully 30
 million Soviet citizens were in danger of death by starvation.
 The White forces shared little of the blame: as Pipes notes, the
 Civil War was essentially over by the beginning of 1920, but
 Lenin continued his harsh exploitation of the peasantry for yet
 another year. Moreover, the areas under White control had
 actually built up a food surplus. The horrific famine of 1921 was
 thus much less severe in 1920, because after the reconquest of
 the Ukraine and other White territories, the Reds shipped the
 Whites' grain reserves to Petrograd, Moscow, and other cities
 with less hunger but more political clout. Low estimates on the
 deaths from this famine are about 3 million; high estimates go up
 to 10 million - which would probably have been much higher if not
 for foreign relief efforts which Lenin had the good sense to
 permit. For perspective, the last severe famine in Russia hit in
 1891-92, and cost about 400,000 lives.
 [Image]
 
 The famine ended soon after Lenin relaxed his choke-hold on the
 peasantry, but he showed no sign of remorse for what his policies
 had done. Other Bolsheviks were shaken by the events, but Lenin's
 successor, Joseph Stalin, learned only to husband his strength
 until the peasantry could be utterly broken.
 
 o Executions
 
 Under Lenin's rule - unlike that of his successors - executions
 played a far more important role than deaths in forced labor
 camps. The primary function of Lenin's secret police, the Cheka,
 was carrying out summary executions of "class enemies" in what
 came to be known as the Red Terror. The exact number murdered is
 usually estimated at between 100,000 and 500,000, but the chaotic
 wartime conditions make the accounting especially difficult.
 Large-scale executions of hostages began after a failed effort of
 the Social Revolutionaries to seize power in mid-1918. (The
 hundreds of hostages shot in "retaliation," however, not only did
 not participate in the failed coup, but almost invariably had no
 affiliation of any kind with the SRs). From then on the Red
 Terror turned in every conceivable direction: execution of the
 bourgeoisie and Czarist sympathizers; execution of White POWs and
 friendly civilian populations; and finally execution of Lenin's
 socialist opponents.
 
 5. What were the most important human rights violations committed by
 Stalin?
 
 Joseph Stalin won a leading role in the Communist Party during [Image]
 Lenin's failing years, and after a few years of power-sharing
 he obtained dictatorial powers that exceeded even those of Lenin. In
 recent years, historians have gradually recognized that Stalin was
 personally responsible for the murder of more people than any other
 human being in the 20th century - and probably any other century.
 Stalin took Lenin's system of slave labor camps and turned it into a
 vast secret empire in the depths of Siberia. Lenin chose to let
 millions starve to death in order to sustain his war effort, but
 Stalin went further by deliberately engineering famines on an even
 greater scale. Finally, Stalin crossed the one line that Lenin would
 not, by ordering the executions of fellow Communists on a massive
 scale.
 
 o Deaths due to extreme hardship conditions in slave labor camps
 
 Lenin pioneered the slave labor camp, but Stalin expanded it
 literally a hundredfold. Under Lenin, the inmates numbered fewer
 than 100,000. By 1930, they numbered 1,000,000. By 1940, the
 Gulag Archipelago housed fully 10,000,000 pitiful souls. The
 death rate was extraordinary: 10-30% per year, for the prisoners
 performed demanding labor such as mining and timber-cutting with
 minimal food and clothing in freezing temperatures. The slaves
 were ruled by an elite of secret police, now known as the NKVD.
 As Robert Conquest describes:
 
 In the vast empty spaces in the north and the Far East,
 areas as big as fair-sized countries came under
 complete NKVD control. There were many camps scattered
 through the Urals, in the Archangel area, and more
 especially in and around Karaganda and on the new
 railway being built from Turkestan to Siberia. But in
 these, the NKVD administered only comparatively small
 enclaves... The two biggest true colonies of the NKVD
 empire were the great stretch of northwestern Russia
 beyond the Kotlas, comprising roughly what is shown on
 the map as the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist
 Republic, and the even vaster area of the Far East
 centered on the gold fields of Kolyma. These regions
 had, before the NKVD took over, populations of a
 handful of Russians and a few thousand Arctic
 tribesmen. A decade later, they held between them
 something between 1.25 and 2 million prisoners. (The
 Great Terror)
 
 [Image] Who were the prisoners? Before Stalin's collectivization
 of agriculture, the composition was quite mixed. Anyone
 who opposed the Communists, from Czarist reactionary to Social
 Revolutionary, might be consigned to the camps. While almost
 invariably innocent of any definite action against their
 government, they were perceived as potential enemies. After 1930,
 the composition of the camps drastically changed. Suddenly,
 millions upon millions of peasant families were sentenced to
 Siberia. Stalin called them "kulaks," or wealthy farmers, though
 in fact any peasant somehow caught up in resistance to forced
 collectivization was labeled a "kulak." As the democratic
 socialist Carl Landauer observes:
 
 Between the persecution of the Armenians by the Turks
 during the First World War and the extermination of
 "undesirable" races by Hitler, the Bolshevik campaign
 against the kulaks and the former bourgeois was
 probably the only instance in which large masses of
 men, women, and children were by administrative order
 dislodged from their places of habitation and brought
 into camps where many, if not most of them, were sure
 to perish - and were meant to perish. (European
 Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)
 
 After Stalin crushed peasant resistance, the enormous death rate
 in the slave labor camps ensured that the number of inmates could
 not remain steady - unless more and more people were declared
 enemies of the people and sentenced to Siberia. Stalin claimed to
 find conspiracies and enemies everywhere. "Kulaks" were blamed
 for all agricultural failures, while "wreckers" bore
 responsibility for industrial disasters. Intellectuals, ethnic
 leaders, and officers in the military became targets. Anyone with
 contact with foreign countries could be easily declared a spy.
 Then Stalin began to target fellow Communists, purging them for
 left deviations, right deviations, treason, and espionage. As
 Conquest notes, at the 1939 Party Congress, "Of the 1,966
 delegates to the [1934] Congress, 1,108 had been arrested for
 counter-revolutionary crimes." (The Great Terror) Sentences to
 Siberia were their typical fate. Foreign Communists living in the
 USSR, especially foreign Communists from non-democratic
 countries, almost invariably wound up in Siberia. Even the NKVD
 itself was purged, so that the secret policeman of today might be
 the inmate of tomorrow.
 
 After Stalin was satisfied with the composition of the Communist
 Party, new waves of victims arose. Millions of Poles were sent to
 slave labor camps in 1939 when Stalin and Hitler divided Poland.
 In 1940, Stalin annexed the Baltic states and sent 2-4% of their
 populations to the slave camps. During World War II, any
 ethnicity deemed disloyal was likely to be deported en masse:
 ethnic Germans - including the Volga Germans who had lived in
 Russia for centuries - were deported to Siberia, along with
 Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and other nationalities. With the end
 of World War II, the prison population was replenished not only
 with German POWs, and German civilians (including ethnic Germans
 scattered across Europe), but with Soviet POWs. Stalin considered
 captured Soviet soldiers to be traitors, so they had the
 opportunity to perform slave labor for Stalin as well as Hitler.
 
 Stalin's slave empire lasted so long and went through so [Image]
 many waves of victims that one is left speechless. So
 many millions perished within the Gulag Archipelago for so many
 reasons, or for no reason. With a minimum of 5,000,000 slave
 laborers from 1931 to 1950, and a minimum death toll of 10% per
 year - both improbably low figures - one can conclude that
 Stalin's camps claimed a minimum of 10,000,000 victims, and
 easily two or three times as many.
 
 o Deaths due to man-made famine.
 
 Lenin knew that his agricultural policies might cause widespread
 famine, but implemented them anyway. Stalin went further. Not
 only did he know that his policies would cause widespread famine;
 he turned famine into a political weapon by deliberately and
 selectively amplifying its horrors. Lenin nominally gave peasants
 the title to their land, while effectively expropriating them by
 forcing them to sell their crops for a pittance. Stalin went
 further by ordering the forced collectivization of agriculture.
 The peasants lost their land and became employees of the state;
 moreover, they had to obtain government permission to quit their
 jobs, which was often impossible to obtain. State-owned serf
 plantations had returned to Russia after a 70-year lapse.
 
 Naturally, reducing landed free peasants to serfs required
 massive application of government force. Wealthy, prominent, or
 recalcitrant peasants were dubbed "kulaks" and deported to
 Siberia. Still the peasants resisted; food production drastically
 declined, farm animals were slaughtered, and surplus grain
 ferreted away. In 1930, the peasants' reaction to forced
 collectivization was so extreme that even Stalin backed away. But
 this was only a tactical retreat, and by 1934 90% of sown acreage
 in the USSR was owned by collective (i.e., government) farms.
 
 Food production of all kinds drastically declined. Slave labor in
 the fields proved far less efficient than free labor; the harvest
 of grain and other crops shrank. The herds of livestock often
 declined by 50% or more by either slaughter before
 collectivization, or neglect after collectivization. But Stalin
 was not interested in total food production, but in how much food
 he could squeeze out of the peasants without compensation. The
 collective farms were ordered to surrender their quota of food to
 the state, under severe penalty. As Conquest explains, "The basic
 principle was that a certain amount of grain must be delivered to
 the state regardless, and that this demand must be satisfied
 before the needs of the peasantry could be taken into
 consideration. A law of 16 October 1931 forbade reserving grain
 for internal kolkhoz [collective farm] needs until the
 procurement plan was fulfilled." (The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet
 Collectivization and the Terror-Famine) If production declined,
 it could be taken out of the hides of the peasants. This was
 precisely what Stalin had in mind.
 
 From the outset, the quotas set for delivery were far too high,
 especially considering the decline in total production. As the
 peasants began to face severe hunger, in 1932, one might have
 expected the quotas to be reduced - especially since Stalin
 actually had grain to export. But instead, in early 1933 Stalin
 demanded still more food from the desperate peasantry. Yet his
 exactions were uneven: they were particularly inhuman for the
 Ukraine, Don, Kuban, and lower Volga - regions where popular
 sentiment against Communist oppression and Russification was
 strong. As Conquest notes, "Nor is it the case that the famine,
 or the excessive grain targets, were imposed on the most
 productive grain-producing areas as such, as a - mistaken or
 vicious - economic policy merely. There was no famine in the rich
 Russian 'Central Agricultural Region'; and on the other hand the
 grain-poor Ukrainian provinces of Volhynia and Podilia suffered
 along with the rest of the country." (The Harvest of Sorrow:
 Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine)
 
 All of the facts point to a deliberate effort to use starvation
 as a tool of genocide. Seed grain in 1932 in the Ukraine was for
 the first time taken from the peasants and stored in urban
 granaries: officials realized that once starvation set in the
 peasants would try to eat the seed grain. The Ukrainian-Russian
 border was carefully guarded to keep Russian grain out of the
 famine-stricken Ukraine and starving Ukrainians out of Russia.
 Government grain stockpiles were available, but unused.
 
 This mixture of ruthless methods resulted in the starvation
 deaths of about 7 million people: 5 million in the Ukraine, 1
 million in the North Caucasus region, and 1 million elsewhere. On
 top of this, a similar collectivization campaign carried out
 against the nomads of Kazahkstan led to 1 million further deaths.
 
 The famine in 1933 was the worst under Stalin's rule, but not the
 last. Famines swept Eastern Europe and the USSR again after World
 War II, although here the Nazis bore part of the blame. Stalin
 also shares responsibility for the deaths - again mostly through
 hunger - of ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe with the
 Red Army's advance. The Communist-dominated governments of Poland
 and Czechoslovakia shared with Stalin the blame for some 2
 million unnatural deaths of ethnic Germans. (see Alfred-Maurice
 de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East
 European Germans, 1944- 1950)
 
 o Executions
 
 On April 7, 1935, Stalin issued a decree authorizing the death
 penalty for children as young as 12 years old. While far more of
 Stalin's subjects died in slave labor camps and man-made famines
 than from execution, even here the numbers are startling. There
 were approximately one million executions during the Great Terror
 of 1936-1939, and probably over five million for his entire
 reign. The executed were often Stalin's opponents within the
 Party, or his less eager friends, or foreign Communists. Large
 numbers of officers were executed. Polish POWs taken in 1939 were
 executed en masse in Katyn and elsewhere. Almost all of Stalin's
 comrades in the Russian Civil War were executed or assassinated
 at his orders: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, Rykov,
 Tomsky, and (as recent discoveries confirm) Kirov. Many of these
 were tortured, bullied, and threatened into condemning themselves
 in the so-called "show trials," where they absurdly confessed to
 large-scale espionage and subversion. The poetic justice of the
 trials of Stalin's ex-comrades is palpable, since a
 Nuremberg-style trial of the Communist leadership for crimes
 against humanity would have condemned most of them to death. So
 numerous were Stalin's victims that amongst the oceans of
 innocents executed, justice occasionally accidentally descended
 upon the guilty.
 [Image]
 
 6. What were the most important human rights violations perpetrated by
 the Soviet Union during the post-Stalin era?
 
 In comparison with Stalin's hellish regime, the rule of his successors
 seemed benign. But even compared to Czarism, the rule of Khrushchev,
 Brezhnev, and later leaders remained bloodthirsty. There were no
 significant man-made famines in the post-Stalin era. The number
 executed for political offenses from 1953-1991 was perhaps one or two
 hundred thousand, many of them Hungarians and Czechs who opposed
 Soviet rule.
 
 The significant post-Stalin mass killings were in the slave labor
 camps. While living conditions in the camps greatly improved over the
 decades, the death rate remained enormous: while Stalin's camps had
 annual fatality rates in the range of 10-30%, the rates fell to 5-15%
 in the late 50's, 2-6% in the 60's, and still lower in later periods.
 The slave labor population declined, but even in the 1980's was
 numbered in the millions. The unnatural fatality rate and the large
 population in camps add up to a major, albeit drawn-out, crime against
 humanity: at least 3 millions during the later part of the 50's, and 2
 million more during the 60's. Certainly even a fatality rate of 4% is
 high enough to qualify as reckless endangerment of human life and
 therefore murder - consider that with an annual fatality rate of 4%, 1
 in 3 inmates (generally healthy young men) would not survive a decade.
 There is a line-drawing problem for later periods - 
 
category:USSR