Mass killings under communist regimes


Many mass killings occurred under 20th-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".

Terminology

Several different terms are used to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants and according to Professor Anton Weiss-Wendt there is no consensus in the field of comparative genocide studies on a definition of "genocide". The following terminology has been used by individual authors to describe mass killings of unarmed civilians by communist governments, individually or as a whole:
According to Klas-Göran Karlsson, discussion of the number of victims of communist regimes has been "extremely extensive and ideologically biased". Although any attempt to estimate a total number of killings under communist regimes depends greatly on definitions, several attempts to compile previously published data have been made:
The criticisms of some of the estimates were mostly focused on three aspects: the estimates were based on sparse and incomplete data when significant errors are inevitable; some critics said the figures were skewed to higher possible values; and some critics argued that victims of Holodomor and other man-made famines created by communist governments should not be counted.

Proposed causes

Ideology

writes: "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". Scholars such as R. J. Rummel, Daniel Goldhagen, Richard Pipes and John N. Gray consider the ideology of communism to be a significant causative factor in mass killings. The Black Book of Communism claims an association between communism and criminality, saying: "Communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government" while adding that this criminality lies at the level of ideology rather than state practice.
's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung from May 19, 1849, printed in red ink
Christopher J. Finlay has argued that Marxism legitimates violence without any clear limiting principle because it rejects moral and ethical norms as constructs of the dominant class and "states that it would be conceivable for revolutionaries to commit atrocious crimes in bringing about a socialist system, with the belief that their crimes will be retroactively absolved by the new system of ethics put in place by the proletariat". Rustam Singh notes that Karl Marx had alluded to the possibility of peaceful revolution, but after the failed Revolutions of 1848 emphasized the need for violent revolution and "revolutionary terror".
Literary historian George G. Watson cited 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 mere 'absorption' or 'assimilation', is in question". Talking about Engels' 1849 article and citing Watson's book, historian Andrzej Walicki has said: "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide".
According to R. J. Rummel, the killings committed by communist regimes can best be explained as the result of the marriage between absolute power and the absolutist ideology of Marxism. Rummel states that "communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and its chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusades against nonbelievers. What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's instruments of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and the family." He writes that the Marxists saw the construction of their utopia as "though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And, thus, this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths".
Benjamin Valentino writes that mass killings strategies are chosen by communists to economically dispossess large numbers of people, arguing as such: "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 coercion". According to Jacques Sémelin, "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".
Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley write that, especially in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia, a fanatical certainty that socialism could be made to work motivated communist leaders in "the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies, who could be suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong. Furthermore, if events did not work out as they were supposed to, then that was because class enemies, foreign spies and saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no circumstances could it be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that meant capitulation to the forces of reaction". Michael Mann writes that communist party members were "ideologically driven, believing that in order to create a new socialist society, they must lead in socialist zeal. Killings were often popular, the rank-and-file as keen to exceed killing quotas as production quotas".

Political system

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 Vladimir 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. 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?".
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: "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".
Stephen Hicks of Rockford College ascribes the violence characteristic of 20th-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".
Eric D. Weitz says that the mass killing in communist states is 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. Steven Rosefielde writes that communist rulers had to choose between changing course and "terror-command" and more often than not chose the latter. Michael Mann argues that a lack of institutionalized authority structures meant that a chaotic mix of both centralized control and party factionalism were factors in the killing.

Leaders

Professor Matthew Krain states that many scholars have pointed to revolutions and civil wars as providing the opportunity for radical leaders and ideologies to gain power and the preconditions for mass killing by the state. Martin Malia called the "brutal conditioning" of the two World Wars important to understanding communist violence, although not its source. Professor Nam Kyu Kim writes that exclusionary ideologies are critical to explaining mass killing, but also important are organizational capabilities and revolutionary leaders' individual characteristics, such as their attitudes toward risk and violence. "Besides opening up political opportunities for new leaders to eliminate their political opponents, revolutions bring to power leaders who are more apt to commit large-scale violence against civilians in order to legitimize and strengthen their own power."
Genocide scholar Adam Jones states that the Russian Civil War was very influential on the emergence of leaders like Stalin and accustomed people to "harshness, cruelty, terror." 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, compensated for his lack of physical stature with a pathological cruelty and the use of brute terror".
Professors Pablo Montagnes and Stephane Wolton argue that the purges in the USSR and China can be attributed to the "personalist" leadership of Stalin and Mao, who were incentivized by having both control of the security apparatus used to carry out the purges and control of the appointment of replacements for those purged. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek attributes Mao Zedong allegedly viewing human life as disposable to Mao's "cosmic perspective" on humanity.

States where mass killings have occurred

Soviet Union

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 and Mao's rule in China. Stephen G. Wheatcroft asserts that prior to the opening of the Soviet archives for historical research, "our understanding of the scale and the nature of Soviet repression has been extremely poor" and that some scholars who wish to maintain pre-1991 high estimates are "finding it difficult to adapt to the new circumstances when the archives are open and when there are plenty of irrefutable data" and instead "hang on to their old Sovietological methods with round-about calculations based on odd statements from emigres and other informants who are supposed to have superior knowledge", although he acknowledged that even the figures estimated from the additional documents are not "final or definitive". In the 2007 revision of his book The Great Terror, Robert Conquest estimates that while exact numbers will never be certain, the communist leaders of the Soviet Union were responsible for no fewer than 15 million deaths. Some historians attempt to make separate estimates for different periods of Soviet history, with casualty estimates varying widely from 6 million to 8.1 million to 20 million to 61 million.

Red Terror

The 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 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 of Baltic Fleet sailors and the Tambov Rebellion of Russian peasants. 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.
According to Nicolas Werth, the policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory". In the early months of 1919, perhaps 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".

Joseph Stalin

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. Prior to the collapse of the USSR and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher. Michael Parenti writes that estimates on the Stalinist death toll vary widely in part because such estimates are based on "anecdotes" in absence of reliable evidence and "speculations by writers who never reveal how they arrive at such figures".
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. However, official Soviet documentation of Gulag deaths is widely considered inadequate. Golfo Alexopoulos, Anne Applebaum, Oleg Khlevniuk and Michael Ellman write that the government frequently released prisoners on the edge of death in order to avoid officially counting them. A 1993 study of archival data by J. Arch Getty et al. showed that a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953. Subsequently, Steven Rosefielde asserted that this number has to be augmented by 19.4 percent in light of more complete archival evidence to 1,258,537, with the best estimate of Gulag deaths being 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953 when excess mortality is taken into account. Alexopolous estimates a much higher total of at least 6 million dying in the Gulag or shortly after release. Jeffrey Hardy has criticized Alexopoulos as basing her assertions primarily on indirect and misinterpreted evidence and Dan Healey has called her work a "challenge to the emergent scholarly consensus".
According to historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Stalin's regime can be charged with causing the "purposive deaths" of about a million people. Wheatcroft excludes all famine deaths as "purposive deaths" and claims those that do qualify fit more closely the category of "execution" rather than "murder". Others posit that 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. 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 million in total, including the deaths from deportation, hunger and Gulag deaths. Michael Ellman attributes roughly 3 million deaths to the Stalinist regime, excluding excess mortality from famine, disease and war. Several scholars, among them Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore, Soviet/Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, and the director of Yale's "Annals of Communism" series Jonathan Brent, put the death toll from Stalin at about 20 million..
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 Soviet Union. 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 proportion of deaths from the deportations could be as high as one in three in certain cases. Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who initiated the Genocide Convention and coined the term genocide himself, assumed that genocide was perpetrated in the context of the mass deportation of the Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks and Karachay.
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". In contrast to this view Jon K. Chang contends that the deportations had been in fact based on genocides based on ethnicity; and that "social historians" in the west have failed to champion the rights of marginalized ethnicities in the Soviet Union. This view is supported by several countries. On 12 December 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament issued a resolution recognizing the deportation of Crimean Tatars as genocide and established 18 May as the "Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide." The parliament of Latvia recognized the event as an act of genocide on 9 May 2019. The Parliament of Lithuania did the same on 6 June 2019. Canadian Parliament passed a motion on June 10, 2019, recognizing the Crimean Tatar deportation of 1944 as a genocide perpetrated by Soviet dictator Stalin, designating May 18 to be a day of remembrance. The deportation of Chechens and Ingush was acknowledged by the European Parliament as an act of genocide in 2004:
Soviet famine of 1932–1933
Within the Soviet Union, forced changes in agricultural policies, confiscations of grain and droughts caused the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region and Kazakhstan. The famine was most severe in the Ukrainian SSR, where it is often referenced as the Holodomor. A significant portion of the famine victims were Ukrainians. Another part of the famine was known as Kazakh catastrophe, when more than 1.3 million ethnic Kazakhs 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.
The famine was officially recognized as 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)
Stalin's attempts to solidify his position as leader of the Soviet Union led to an escalation of detentions and executions, climaxing in 1937–1938 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.
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 from October 1936 to November 1938, at least 1,710,000 people were arrested and 724,000 people executed. Modern historical studies estimate a total number of repression deaths during 1937–1938 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. Former "kulaks" and their families made up the majority of victims, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed.
The NKVD conducted a series of "national operations" which targeted some ethnic groups. A total of 350,000 were arrested and 247,157 were executed. Of these, the Polish operation which targeted the members of Polska Organizacja Wojskowa appears to have been the largest, with 140,000 arrests and 111,000 executions. Although these operations might well constitute genocide as defined by the UN convention, or "a mini-genocide" according to Simon Sebag Montefiore, there is as yet no authoritative ruling on the legal characterization of these events.
Citing church documents, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev has estimated that over 100,000 priests, monks and nuns were executed during this time. 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 might also qualify as genocide".
In the summer and autumn of 1937, Stalin sent NKVD agents to the Mongolian People's Republic and engineered a Mongolian Great Terror in which some 22,000 or 35,000 people were executed. Around 18,000 victims were Buddhist lamas.
In Belarus, mass graves for several thousand civilians killed by the NKVD between 1937 and 1941 were discovered in 1988 at Kurapaty.
Soviet killings during World War II
Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, NKVD task forces started removing "Soviet-hostile elements" from the conquered territories. The NKVD systematically practiced torture which often resulted in death. According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, 150,000 Polish citizens perished due to Soviet repression during the war. 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. 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. Memorial complexes have been built at NKVD execution sites at Katyn and Mednoye in Russia, as well as a "third killing field" at Piatykhatky, Ukraine.

China

The Chinese Communist Party came to power in China in 1949 after 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 directly or indirectly caused the deaths of tens of millions of people. Based on the Soviets' experience, Mao considered violence to be necessary in order to achieve an ideal society that would be derived from Marxism and as a result he planned and executed violence on a grand scale.

Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries

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

Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine

Benjamin Valentino claims that the Great Leap Forward was a cause of the Great Chinese Famine and the worst effects of the famine were steered towards the regime's enemies. Those who were labeled "black elements" in earlier campaigns died in the greatest numbers because 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". Dikötter estimates that at least 2.5 million people were summarily killed or tortured to death during this period. His research in local and provincial Chinese archives indicates the death toll was at least 45 million: "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, saying: "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". In light of additional evidence of Mao's culpability, Rummel added those killed by the Great Famine to his total for Mao's democide for a total of 77 million killed.

Cultural Revolution

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 people who were perceived to be enemies of the revolution. For example, in August 1966, over 100 teachers were murdered by their students in western Beijing.

Tibet

According to Jean-Louis Margolin 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 they were in China proper and "one can legitimately speak of genocidal massacres because of the numbers that were involved". According to the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, "Tibetans were not only shot, but they were also beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded". Adam Jones, a scholar who specializes 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 total population of about 6 million. These deaths, Jones stressed, may not only be seen as a genocide, but they may also be seen as an "eliticide", meaning "targeting the better educated and leadership oriented elements among the Tibetan population". Patrick French, the former director of the Free Tibet Campaign in London, writes that the Free Tibet Campaign and other groups have claimed that a total of 1.2 million Tibetans were killed by the Chinese since 1950 but after examining archives in Dharamsala, he found "no evidence to support that figure". French states that a reliable alternative number is unlikely to be known, but he estimates that as many as half a million Tibetans died "as a 'direct result' of the policies of the People's Republic of China" by using historian Warren Smith's estimate of 200,000 people who are missing from population statistics in the Tibet Autonomous Region and extending that rate to the borderland regions.

Tiananmen Square

Jean-Louis Margolin states that, under Deng Xiaoping, at least 1,000 people were killed in Beijing and hundreds more were executed in the countryside after his government crushed demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989. According to Louisa Lim in 2014, a group of victims' relatives in China called the "Tiananmen Mothers" has confirmed the identities of more than 200 of those who were killed. Alex Bellamy writes that this "tragedy marks the last time in which an episode of mass killing in East Asia was terminated by the perpetrators themselves, judging that they had succeeded."

Cambodia

The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, after the end of the Cambodian Civil War.
Sociologist Martin Shaw described the Cambodian genocide as "the purest genocide of the Cold War era". The results of a demographic study of the Cambodian genocide concluded that the nationwide death toll from 1975 to 1979 amounted to 1,671,000 to 1,871,000, or 21 to 24 percent of the total Cambodian population before the Khmer Rouge took power. According to Ben Kiernan, the number of deaths which were specifically caused by execution is still unknown because many victims died from starvation, disease and overwork. 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 spending five years researching about 20,000 grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,112,829 victims of execution". 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, with 33.5% of Cambodian men dying under the Khmer Rouge compared to 15.7% of Cambodian women. The number of suspected victims of execution who were found in 23,745 mass graves is estimated to be 1.3 million according to a 2009 academic source. Execution is believed to account for roughly 60% of the total death toll during the genocide, with other victims succumbing to starvation or disease.
Helen Fein, a genocide scholar, states that the xenophobic ideology of the Khmer Rouge regime bears a stronger resemblance to a phenomenon of national socialism, or fascism. Responding to Ben Kiernan's "argument that Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea regime was more racist and generically totalitarian than Marxist or specifically Communist", Steve Heder states that the example of such racialist thought relative to the minority Cham people echoed "Marx's definition of a historyless people doomed to extinction in the name of progress" and were a part of general concepts of class and class struggle. French historian Henri Locard argues that the "fascist" label was applied to the Khmer Rouge by its enemies, the Vietnamese communists, as a form of "revisionism", but the repression under the Khmer Rouge was "similar to the repression in all communist regimes". Daniel Goldhagen explains that the Khmer Rouge were xenophobic because they believed that the Khmer were "the one authentic people capable of building true communism". 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 it "failed to set boundaries on mass murder".

Other states

According to Benjamin Valentino, most regimes that described themselves as communist did not commit mass killings. He has suggested that there may also have been other mass killings 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.

People's Republic of 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. In his book History of Communism in Bulgaria, Dinyu Sharlanov accounts for about 31,000 people killed under the regime between 1944 and 1989.

East Germany

According to Valentino, between 80,000 and 100,000 people may have been killed in East Germany beginning in 1945 as part of the Soviet Union's denazification campaign, but other scholars argue that these figures are inflated.
Immediately after World War II, denazification commenced in occupied Germany and the regions which the Nazis had annexed. In the Soviet occupation zone, the NKVD established prison camps, usually in abandoned concentration camps, and they used them to intern alleged Nazis and Nazi German officials along with some landlords and Prussian Junkers. According to files and data which was 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 people died of various causes. Most of the deaths were not direct killings, instead, they were caused by outbreaks of dysentery and tuberculosis. Death from starvation also occurred on a large scale, particularly from late 1946 to early 1947, but these deaths do not appear to have been deliberate killings because 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 as a result, they were only able to get food that was handed to them by the authorities. Some prisoners were executed and other prisoners may have been tortured to death. In this context, it is difficult to determine if the prisoner deaths in the silence camps can be categorized as mass killings. It is also difficult to determine how many of the dead were German, East German, or members of other nationalities.
In 1961, East Germany erected the Berlin Wall following the Berlin crisis. Even though crossing between East Germany and West Germany was possible for motivated and approved travelers, thousands of East Germans tried to defect by illegally crossing the wall. Of these, between 136 and 227 people were killed by the Berlin Wall guards during the years of the wall's existence.

Socialist Republic of Romania

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.

Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

made bloody repression and several massacres of POW after second world war; European Public Hearing on "Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes" reports: "The decision to "annihilate" opponents must had been adopted in the closest circles of Yugoslav state leadership, and the order was certainly issued by the Supreme Commander of the Yugoslav Army Josip Broz Tito, although it is not known when or in what form".
Dominic McGoldrick writes that as the head of a "highly centralised and oppressive" dictatorship, Broz Tito wielded tremendous power in Yugoslavia, with his dictatorial rule administered through an elaborate bureaucracy which routinely suppressed human rights. Eliott Behar states that "Tito's Yugoslavia was a tightly controlled police state". According to David Mates, outside the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia had more political prisoners than all of the rest of Eastern Europe combined. Tito's secret police was modelled on the Soviet KGB. Its members were ever-present and often acted extrajudicially, with victims including middle-class intellectuals, liberals and democrats. Yugoslavia was a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but scant regard was paid to some of its provisions.

North Korea

According to 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. A wide range of atrocities have been committed in the camps including forced abortions, infanticide and torture. Former International Criminal Court judge Thomas Buergenthal, who was one of the UN report's authors and a child survivor of Auschwitz, told The Washington Post "that conditions in the Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps and in my long professional career in the human rights field". Pierre Rigoulot estimates 100,000 executions, 1.5 million deaths through concentration camps and slave labor, and 500,000 deaths from famine.
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 2010, Steven Rosefielde stated that the "Red Holocaust" "still persists in North Korea" as Kim Jong Il "refuses to abandon mass killing". Adam Jones cites journalist Jasper Becker that the famine was a form of mass killing or genocide due to political manipulations of the food. Estimates based on a North Korean 2008 census suggest 240,000 to 420,000 excess deaths as a result of the 1990s famine and a demographic impact of 600,000 to 850,000 fewer people in North Korea in 2008 as a result of poor living conditions after the famine.

Vietnam

Valentino attributes 80,000–200,000 deaths to "communist mass killings" in North and South Vietnam.
According to scholarship based on Vietnamese and Hungarian archival evidence, as many as 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 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.

Cuba

According to Jay Ulfelder and Benjamin Valentino, the Castro government of Cuba killed between 5,000 and 8,335 noncombatants as part of political repression between 1959 and 1970. According to Amnesty International, official death sentences under the Castro government from 1959–87 numbered 237 of which all but 21 were actually carried out.

Democratic Republic of Afghanistan

According to Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago, although frequently considered an example of communist genocide, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan represents a borderline case. Prior to the Soviet–Afghan War, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan executed between 10,000 and 27,000 people, mostly at Pul-e-Charkhi prison. Mass graves of executed prisoners have been exhumed dating back to the Soviet era.
After the invasion in 1979, the Soviets installed the puppet government of Babrak Karmal. 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 entire villages suspected of harboring or supporting the resistance, the Soviets tried to force the local population to move to Soviet controlled territory, thereby depriving the armed opposition of support. 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 counter-guerrilla mass killing. By the early 1990s, approximately one-third of Afghanistan's population had fled the country. M. Hassan Kakar said that "the Afghans are among the latest victims of genocide by a superpower".

People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia

estimates that half a million people were killed during the Ethiopian 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 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.

Debate over famines

According to historian J. Arch Getty, over half of the 100 million deaths which are attributed to communism were due to famines. Stéphane Courtois argues that many communist regimes caused famines in their efforts to forcibly collectivize agriculture and systematically used it as a weapon by controlling the food supply and distributing food on a political basis. He states that "in the period after 1918, only Communist countries experienced such famines, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. And again in the 1980s, two African countries that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist, Ethiopia and Mozambique, were the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines."
Scholars Stephen G. Wheatcroft, R. W. Davies, and Mark Tauger reject the idea that the Ukrainian famine was an act of genocide that was intentionally inflicted by the Soviet government. Getty posits that the "overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan". Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn opined on 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that the 1930s famine in the Ukraine was no different from the Russian famine of 1921 as both were caused by the ruthless robbery of peasants by Bolshevik grain procurements.
Pankaj Mishra questions Mao's direct responsibility for famine, noting: "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".
Benjamin Valentino writes: "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.
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 1930s, then Britain would be responsible for as many as 30 million deaths in India from famine during the 19th century, lamenting: "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 Winston Churchill's role in the Bengal famine "seems similar to Stalin's role in the Ukrainian famine". Historian Mike Davis, author of Late Victorian Holocausts, draws comparisons between the Great Chinese Famine and the Indian famines of the late 19th century and argues that both the Maoist regime and the British Empire share the same level of criminal responsibility for these events respectively.
Michael Ellman is critical of the fixation on a "uniquely Stalinist evil" when it comes to excess deaths from famines and asserts that catastrophic famines were widespread in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as "in the British empire, China, Russia and elsewhere". He argues that a possible defense of Stalin and his associates is that "their behaviour was no worse than that of many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries". He also draws comparisons to the actions of the Group of Eight in recent decades, saying "the world-wide death of millions of people in recent decades which could have been prevented by simple public health measures or cured by application of modern medicine, but was not, might be considered by some as mass manslaughter—or mass death by criminal negligence—by the leaders of the G8 ".

Legal status and prosecutions

According to a 1992 constitutional amendment in the Czech Republic, a 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 with a prison term of 6 months to 3 years.
Barbara Harff wrote in 1992 that no communist country or governing body has ever been convicted of genocide. In his 1999 foreword to The Black Book of Communism, Martin Malia wrote: "Throughout the former Communist world, moreover, virtually none of its responsible officials has been put on trial or punished. Indeed, everywhere Communist parties, though usually under new names, compete in politics".
, the former communist leader of Ethiopia
At the conclusion of a trial lasting from 1994 to 2006, Ethiopia's former ruler Mengistu Haile Mariam was convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by an Ethiopian court for his role in Ethiopia's Red Terror. 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 definition of politicide.
In 1997, the Cambodian government asked the United Nations for assistance in setting up a genocide tribunal. The prosecution presented the names of five possible suspects to the investigating judges on July 18, 2007. On July 26, 2010, Kang Kek Iew, director of the S-21 prison camp in Democratic Kampuchea where more than 14,000 people were tortured and then murdered, 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. 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.
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. Meri denied the accusation, characterizing them as politically motivated defamation, saying: "I do not consider myself guilty of genocide". The trial was halted when Meri died March 27, 2009 at the age of 89.
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".

Memorials and museums

Monuments to the victims of communism exist in almost all the capitals of Eastern Europe and there are several museums documenting communist rule, such as the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Lithuania, the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga and the House of Terror in Budapest, all three of which also document Nazi rule.
In Washington D.C., a bronze statue based upon the 1989 Tiananmen Square Goddess of Democracy sculpture was dedicated as the Victims of Communism Memorial in 2007, having been authorized by the Congress in 1993. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation plans to build an International Museum on Communism in Washington.
As of 2008, Russia contained 627 memorials and memorial plaques dedicated to victims of the communist terror, most of which were created by private citizens, and did not have a national monument or a national museum. The Wall of Grief in Moscow, inaugurated in October 2017, is Russia's first monument for victims of political persecution by Joseph Stalin during the country's Soviet era.
In 2017, Canada's National Capital Commission approved the design for a memorial to the victims of communism to be built at the Garden of the Provinces and Territories in Ottawa.
On August 23, 2018, Estonia's Victims of Communism 1940–1991 Memorial was inaugurated in Tallinn by President Kersti Kaljulaid. The memorial construction was financed by the state and is managed by the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory. The opening ceremony was chosen to coincide with the official EU European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.

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