Governments exist either because they have come to power through force and violence or they have been elected and given power by the people. The force and violence crowd usually have their roots in the military and we like to call them Dictators. There have been a ton of them throughout history; Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong iL and now his son, Saddam, Gaddafi, the list goes on and on. Dictators don’t care about the people and usually kill anyone who gets in their way. It is a fact that government has killed more people than any other cause, disease or reason.
Is it true that communism has killed 100 million people?
It’s a phrase that has been repeated time and time again. The number can vary from 20 to 50 to 100 to even 200 million, usually depending on how adherent to the orthodox school of Cold War historiography.
A poster from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
The generally most cited source is the Black Book of Communism, which estimates 94+ million deaths. It is a collection of essays published in France in 1997, whose main author was Stéphane Courtois, along with Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczkowski, and Jean-Louis Margolin among other academics. Courtois was the editor, therefore he was in charge of the majority of the book’s conclusions.
However, there is some pretty questionable methodology as to how the Black Book got up to such a high death count. In fact, many of the other authors, specifically Margolin and Werth, noted Courtois was “obsessed with reaching a death count of 100 million”. So sometimes when he fell short of 100 million, he added more numbers out of nowhere.
Now let’s look at the three countries on this list with the highest death tolls (not all of them since this answer will be too long!). I do not necessarily support all of the policies implemented around those time periods.
Soviet Union
Lenin and Stalin are the most discussed leaders in this book, so let’s focus on their time periods.
Starting with Lenin: The number of victims of the Red Terror is estimated to be 100,000.
The Russian famine of 1921 is often cited as a direct result of Soviet policies. But what should be remembered is that it occurred at around the same time as the Russian Civil War, which with a death toll of 7–12 million people, is known as one of the costliest civil wars in history.
During the civil war, all factions — the Red, White, Black armies, etc. — fed their armies and supporters by seizing food from many of the farmers in their territory as many of those soldiers were underfed and war was their main priority. The Red Army, however, usually confiscated some of the food if the peasants around that area already had a decent supply of food. Some farmers deliberately destroyed part of their food storage and grew fewer crops so the armies couldn’t take them.
The kulaks, the wealthier peasants, employed landless peasants to work the large swathes of farmland they owned which was more than they could work. They withheld their surplus grain to either hide it from the Red Army taking it, or sold it on the black market.
However, the kulaks did not necessarily need the grain for survival because the occupying armies didn’t take a large fraction out of their supply, it was mostly to gain a profit. What accelerated the famine even more was a drought.
Lenin, upon decreeing the NEP, witnessing various peasant rebellions, and permitting post-WWI humanitarian aid from the West, later tried to level out the famine. Another thing that should be noticed was that the confiscation of food wasn’t a specifically Soviet tactic — the other factions in the war carried this out, as well.
As for Stalin: let’s start with the Soviet famine of 1932, often nicknamed the Holodomor. The Black Book of Communism repeats the premise that it was a deliberately orchestrated “famine-genocide” implemented by Stalin to destroy Ukrainian opposition to Soviet power.
That wasn’t not exactly the case. The concept behind the 1932 famine being intentional actually originated from a Nazi propaganda campaign facilitated by Goebbels and William Randolph Hearst, an American newspaper proprietor (known as the father of the “yellow press”) who was reportedly a friend of Hitler’s and aided him in his campaign against the Soviet Union.
First of all, the famine did not only take place in Ukraine. Kazakhstan actually had a higher mortality rate than said republic, and some cities in Southern Russia such as Rostov-on-Don and Tambov had a comparable mortality rate to Ukraine.
Part of the reason why was that there was a grain shortage in 1931–32 because of the inefficiencies of the new large-scale mechanized farming among peasants unaccustomed to machines, as well as some regions that were even more prone to famine because modern agricultural methods were not fully adapted yet. Other factors were harsh weather, a major drought in five basic regions, and the burning of crops/slaughtering of livestock from the kulaks who later tried to avoid collectivization (which in fact, was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture — i.e. some of the collectives were torched, the number of sheep and goats reduced from 147 million to about 50 million, etc.).
The government later sent millions of pounds worth of aid to regions affected by the famine.
In addition, the Black Book of Communism came up with a death count of 6 million from the famine because the editors added a nonexistent 2 million deaths to the 4 million actually reported deaths.
The toll of the Great Purges was about 800,000.
More recent evidence from the archives opened up by the post-Soviet Yeltsin government indicate that the total number of death sentences over the 1921-1953 interval, which covered more than a few years of Stalin’s time in power, was between 775,866 and 786,098. Also, although Stalin definitely played a role in the Purges, local officials played a great role in instigating the Terror — sometimes even more than Stalin himself. Roughly 90% of all executions (700,000 out of 800,000) took place during the 2 years when Yezhov was leader of the NKVD. He was later executed for misuse of public office in 1940.
As for the GULAG system: First of all, that penal labor system was around before the Soviet Union — but it was called the Katorga.
Secondly, the number of people in Soviet prisons and labor camps from the 1930s to the 1950s averaged about 2 million of whom 20-40% were released each year.
Approximately 18 million people in total were imprisoned in the labor camp system, while a total of 1,053,829 died around the time period from 1934–1953.
What should also be noted was that the annual death rate for the interned Soviet population was approximately 4%, which incorporates the effect of prisoner executions. Most of the arrests under Stalin were arrested for crimes such as theft, banditry, misuse of public office for personal gain, and smuggling, with less than 10% being for political reasons.
