Communism's Barbaric Cruelty By the Numbers
Communism's death toll overshadows other contemporary human cruelty.
Writing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, A. Barton Hinkle remembers "A century of ghastly communist sadism,"
which started when a relatively small number of Bolshevik anarchists
led by Vladimir Lenin managed to overthrow the Russian government of
Alexander Kerensky in November 1917. As Hinkle writes, "while the Soviet
Union is no more and communism has been discredited in most eyes for
many years, it is hard even now to grasp the sheer scale of agony
imposed by the brutal ideology of collectivism."
The Black Book of Communism,
which came out in 1997, estimated that some 95 million people were
either killed or made to starve to death in the communist attempt to
create an egalitarian paradise on earth. Current research
puts the number of victims of communism anywhere between 43 million and
162 million. As such, the original 100 million figure remains a
remarkably accurate midway point. It is, also, a figure so large that
people may have difficulty comprehending it without additional context.
Leaving the (rightly) well-known example of the Holocaust aside, let us
look at some other bywords for human cruelty.
For example, the Russian Empire was always seen as backward and tyrannical. As Orlando Figes noted in A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924,
"from the perspective of the individual, it could be said that the
single greatest difference between Russia and the West... was that in
Western Europe citizens were generally free to do as they pleased so
long as their activities had not been specifically prohibited by the
state, while the people of Russia were not free to do anything unless
the state had given them specific permission to do it. No subject of the
Tsar, regardless of his rank or class, could sleep securely in his bed
in the knowledge that his house would not be subject to a search, or he
himself to arrest."
So, how bad was the backward and tyrannical Tsarist regime that was
so reviled by its more sophisticated Western neighbors? Between 1825
and 1917, Stéphane Courtois notes in his introduction to The Black Book of Communism,
"tsarism carried out 6,321 political executions (most of them during
the revolution of 1905-1907), whereas in two months of official 'Red
Terror' in the fall of 1918 Bolshevism achieved some 15,000." That's one
way to put communism in perspective.
Or take another byword for savagery—the Inquisition. According to
Professor Agostino Borromeo, a historian of Catholicism at the Sapienza
University in Rome who authored a 783-page study
of the Inquisition that was based on the Church's own records, "there
were some 125,000 trials of suspected heretics in Spain... [between 1478
and 1834, but only] about 1 percent of the defendants (i.e., 1,250)
were executed." The rate of killing varied across Europe. Of the 13,000
people tried by the inquisition in Portugal (1536-1821), 5.7 percent
(i.e., 741) were executed.
Queen Mary, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, who has come to be
known as Bloody Mary for her attempt to restore Catholicism to England
between 1553 and 1558, sent 280 dissenters to the stake. If we consider
the communist era as the period between the birth of the Soviet Union in
November 1917 and its dissolution in December 1991, the ideology
killed, on average, 154 people every hour.
Lastly, consider apartheid, which the United Nations declared
a "crime against humanity" in 1966. The Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, which was tasked by Nelson Mandela's government to provide a
definitive account of apartheid abuses between 1960 and 1994, found (Volume 5, p. 232)
that the "IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party—a black nationalist movement)
remains the major perpetrator of killings on a national scale, being
allegedly responsible for over 4,500 killings compared to 2,700
attributed to the SAP (white-dominated South African Police) and 1,300
to the ANC (African National Congress—another black nationalist
movement)."
Personally, I find the above figures astonishingly low, but was
unable to come up with other numbers from an equally authoritative
source. (Also, keep in mind that the data does not include killings
committed by the South African Defense Force). In any case, the
inclusion of the SAP killings allows me to make one final comparison
between communism and other murderous regimes of the last century.
As one of the pre-eminent historians of South African history, Hermann Giliomee writes in his 2012 book The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power,
in 1984, which was one of the most violent years during the struggle
against apartheid, South Africa only had 1.4 policemen per 1,000 of
population. A comparable figure in the United Kingdom was 2.4, 4.4 in
Ulster and 5.7 in Algeria. In the USSR the number was 16 per 1,000.
Put in proper perspective, in other words, communism really does take
the cake when it comes to the scale and intensity of human rights
abuses.
which started when a relatively small number of Bolshevik anarchists
led by Vladimir Lenin managed to overthrow the Russian government of
Alexander Kerensky in November 1917. As Hinkle writes, "while the Soviet
Union is no more and communism has been discredited in most eyes for
many years, it is hard even now to grasp the sheer scale of agony
imposed by the brutal ideology of collectivism."
The Black Book of Communism,
which came out in 1997, estimated that some 95 million people were
either killed or made to starve to death in the communist attempt to
create an egalitarian paradise on earth. Current research
puts the number of victims of communism anywhere between 43 million and
162 million. As such, the original 100 million figure remains a
remarkably accurate midway point. It is, also, a figure so large that
people may have difficulty comprehending it without additional context.
Leaving the (rightly) well-known example of the Holocaust aside, let us
look at some other bywords for human cruelty.
For example, the Russian Empire was always seen as backward and tyrannical. As Orlando Figes noted in A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924,
"from the perspective of the individual, it could be said that the
single greatest difference between Russia and the West... was that in
Western Europe citizens were generally free to do as they pleased so
long as their activities had not been specifically prohibited by the
state, while the people of Russia were not free to do anything unless
the state had given them specific permission to do it. No subject of the
Tsar, regardless of his rank or class, could sleep securely in his bed
in the knowledge that his house would not be subject to a search, or he
himself to arrest."
So, how bad was the backward and tyrannical Tsarist regime that was
so reviled by its more sophisticated Western neighbors? Between 1825
and 1917, Stéphane Courtois notes in his introduction to The Black Book of Communism,
"tsarism carried out 6,321 political executions (most of them during
the revolution of 1905-1907), whereas in two months of official 'Red
Terror' in the fall of 1918 Bolshevism achieved some 15,000." That's one
way to put communism in perspective.
Or take another byword for savagery—the Inquisition. According to
Professor Agostino Borromeo, a historian of Catholicism at the Sapienza
University in Rome who authored a 783-page study
of the Inquisition that was based on the Church's own records, "there
were some 125,000 trials of suspected heretics in Spain... [between 1478
and 1834, but only] about 1 percent of the defendants (i.e., 1,250)
were executed." The rate of killing varied across Europe. Of the 13,000
people tried by the inquisition in Portugal (1536-1821), 5.7 percent
(i.e., 741) were executed.
Queen Mary, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, who has come to be
known as Bloody Mary for her attempt to restore Catholicism to England
between 1553 and 1558, sent 280 dissenters to the stake. If we consider
the communist era as the period between the birth of the Soviet Union in
November 1917 and its dissolution in December 1991, the ideology
killed, on average, 154 people every hour.
Lastly, consider apartheid, which the United Nations declared
a "crime against humanity" in 1966. The Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, which was tasked by Nelson Mandela's government to provide a
definitive account of apartheid abuses between 1960 and 1994, found (Volume 5, p. 232)
that the "IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party—a black nationalist movement)
remains the major perpetrator of killings on a national scale, being
allegedly responsible for over 4,500 killings compared to 2,700
attributed to the SAP (white-dominated South African Police) and 1,300
to the ANC (African National Congress—another black nationalist
movement)."
Personally, I find the above figures astonishingly low, but was
unable to come up with other numbers from an equally authoritative
source. (Also, keep in mind that the data does not include killings
committed by the South African Defense Force). In any case, the
inclusion of the SAP killings allows me to make one final comparison
between communism and other murderous regimes of the last century.
As one of the pre-eminent historians of South African history, Hermann Giliomee writes in his 2012 book The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power,
in 1984, which was one of the most violent years during the struggle
against apartheid, South Africa only had 1.4 policemen per 1,000 of
population. A comparable figure in the United Kingdom was 2.4, 4.4 in
Ulster and 5.7 in Algeria. In the USSR the number was 16 per 1,000.
Put in proper perspective, in other words, communism really does take
the cake when it comes to the scale and intensity of human rights
abuses.
