Communism’s Bloody Century
In the 100 years since
Lenin’s coup in Russia, the ideology devoted to abolishing markets and
private property has left a long, murderous trail of destruction
A statue of Vladimir Lenin in Grutas Park, Lithuania.
Photo:
ZUMA PRESS
the Russian empire, the world’s largest state at the time. Leftist
movements of various sorts had been common in European politics long
before the revolution of Oct. 25, 1917 (which became Nov. 7 in the
reformed Russian calendar), but Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks were
different. They were not merely fanatical in their convictions but
flexible in their tactics—and fortunate in their opponents.
Communism entered history as a ferocious yet idealistic
condemnation of capitalism, promising a better world. Its adherents,
like others on the left, blamed capitalism for the miserable conditions
that afflicted peasants and workers alike and for the prevalence of
indentured and child labor. Communists saw the slaughter of World War I
as a direct result of the rapacious competition among the great powers
for overseas markets.
But a century of communism in power—with
holdouts even now in Cuba, North Korea and China—has made clear the
human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing capitalism. Again
and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has
brought about the deaths of an astounding number of people. Since
1917—in the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, Indochina,
Africa, Afghanistan and parts of Latin America—communism has claimed at
least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of
demographers.
Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass
deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror—a model
established by Lenin and especially by his successor Joseph Stalin. It
has been widely imitated. Though communism has killed huge numbers of
people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation
as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering.
A communal Chinese farm in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward.
Photo:
UIG/Getty Images
Photo:
UIG/Getty Images
responsibility, as do Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Kim
dynasty in North Korea and any number of lesser communist tyrants. But
we must not lose sight of the ideas that prompted these vicious men to
kill on such a vast scale, or of the nationalist context in which they
embraced these ideas. Anticapitalism was attractive to them in its own
right, but it also served as an instrument, in their minds, for backward
countries to leapfrog into the ranks of great powers.
The
communist revolution may now be spent, but its centenary, as the great
anticapitalist cause, still demands a proper reckoning.
In
February 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated under pressure from his
generals, who worried that bread marches and strikes in the capital of
St. Petersburg were undermining the war effort against Germany and its
allies. The February Revolution, as these events became known, produced
an unelected provisional government, which chose to rule without the
elected parliament. Peasants began to seize the land, and soviets (or
political councils) started to form among soldiers at the front, as had
already happened among political groups in the cities.
That fall,
as the war raged on, Lenin’s Bolsheviks undertook an armed insurrection
involving probably no more than 10,000 people. They directed their coup
not against the provisional government, which had long since become
moribund, but against the main soviet in the capital, which was
dominated by other, more moderate socialists. The October Revolution
began as a putsch by the radical left against the rest of the left,
whose members denounced the Bolsheviks for violating all norms and then
walked out of the soviet.
The Bolsheviks, like many of their
rivals, were devotees of
Karl Marx,
who saw class struggle as the great engine of history. What he
called feudalism would give way to capitalism, which would be replaced
in turn by socialism and, finally, the distant utopia of communism. Marx
envisioned a new era of freedom and plenty, and its precondition was
destroying the “wage slavery” and exploitation of capitalism. As he and
his collaborator Friedrich Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto of
1848, our theory “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of
private property.”
Once in power in early 1918, the Bolsheviks
renamed themselves the Communist Party as they sought to force-march
Russia to socialism and, eventually, to history’s final stage. Millions
set about trying to live in new ways. No one, however, knew precisely
what the new society was supposed to look like. “We cannot give a
characterization of socialism,” Lenin conceded in March 1918. “What
socialism will be like when it reaches its completed form we do not
know, we cannot say.”
But one thing was clear to them: Socialism
could not resemble capitalism. The regime would replace private property
with collective property, markets with planning, and “bourgeois”
parliaments with “people’s power.” In practice, however, scientific
planning was unattainable, as even some communists conceded at the time.
As for collectivizing property, it empowered not the people but the
state.
The process set in motion by the communists entailed the
vast expansion of a secret-police apparatus to handle the arrest,
internal deportation and execution of “class enemies.” The dispossession
of capitalists also enriched a new class of state functionaries, who
gained control over the country’s wealth. All parties and points of view
outside the official doctrine were repressed, eliminating politics as a
corrective mechanism.
The declared goals of the revolution of
1917 were abundance and social justice, but the commitment to destroy
capitalism gave rise to structures that made it impossible to attain
those goals.
In urban areas, the Soviet regime was able to draw
upon armed factory workers, eager recruits to the party and secret
police, and on young people impatient to build a new world. In the
countryside, however, the peasantry—some 120 million souls—had carried
out their own revolution, deposing the gentry and establishing de facto
peasant land ownership.
Russian Communist Party supporters participated in a march in Moscow on Defender of the Fatherland Day, Feb. 23.
Photo:
Serebryakov Dmitry/TASS/ZUMA PRESS
Photo:
Serebryakov Dmitry/TASS/ZUMA PRESS
forced reluctant party cadres to accept the separate peasant revolution
for the time being. In the countryside, over the objections of communist
purists, a quasi-market economy was allowed to operate.
With
Lenin’s death in 1924, this concession became Stalin’s problem. No more
than 1% of the country’s arable land had been collectivized voluntarily
by 1928. By then, key factories were largely owned by the state, and the
regime had committed to a five-year plan for industrialization.
Revolutionaries fretted that the Soviet Union now had two incompatible
systems—socialism in the city and capitalism in the village.
Stalin
didn’t temporize. He imposed coercive collectivization from the Baltic
Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even in the face of mass peasant rebellion. He
threatened party officials, telling them that if they were not serious
about eradicating capitalism, they should be prepared to cede power to
the rising rural bourgeoisie. He incited class warfare against “kulaks”
(better-off peasants) and anyone who defended them, imposing quotas for
mass arrests and internal deportations.
Stalin was clear about
his ideological rationale. “Could we develop agriculture in kulak
fashion, as individual farms, along the path of large-scale farms” as in
“America and so on?” he asked. “No, we could not. We’re a Soviet
country. We want to implant a collective economy, not solely in
industry, but in agriculture.”
And he never backtracked, even
when, as a result of his policies, the country descended into yet
another famine from 1931 to 1933. Forced collectivization during those
few years would claim 5 to 7 million lives.
The Soviet Union’s
awful precedent did nothing to deter other communist revolutionaries.
Mao Zedong, a hard man like Stalin, had risen to the top of the Chinese
movement and, in 1949, he and his comrades emerged as the victors in the
Chinese civil war. Mao saw the colossal loss of life in the Soviet
experiment as intrinsic to its success.
Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing, 1952.
Photo:
Lyu Houmin/Visual China Group/Getty Images
Photo:
Lyu Houmin/Visual China Group/Getty Images
was an attempt to collectivize some 700 million Chinese peasants and to
spread industry throughout the countryside. “Three years of hard work
and suffering, and a thousand years of prosperity,” went one prominent
slogan of the time.
Falsified reports of triumphal harvests and
joyful peasants inundated the communist ruling elite’s well-provisioned
compound in Beijing. In reality, Mao’s program resulted in one of
history’s deadliest famines, claiming between 16 and 32 million victims.
After the catastrophe, referred to by survivors as the “communist
wind,” Mao blocked calls for a retreat from collectivization. As he
declared, “the peasants want ‘freedom,’ but we want socialism.”
Nor
did this exhaust the repertoire of communist brutality in the name of
overthrowing capitalism. With their conquest of Cambodia in 1975, Pol
Pot and his Khmer Rouge drove millions from the country’s cities into
the countryside to work on collectives and forced-labor projects. They
sought to remake Cambodia as a classless, solely agrarian society.
The
Khmer Rouge abolished money, banned commercial fishing and persecuted
Buddhists, Muslims and the country’s ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese
minorities as “infiltrators.” Pol Pot’s regime also seized children to
pre-empt ideological infection from “capitalist” parents.
All
told, perhaps as many as 2 million Cambodians, a quarter of the
population, perished as a result of starvation, disease and mass
executions during the four nightmarish years of Pol Pot’s rule. In some
regions, skulls could be found in every pond.
Marx’s class
analysis denied legitimacy to any political opposition, not just from
“bourgeois” elements but from within communist movements
themselves—because dissenters “objectively” served the interests of the
international capitalist order. The relentless logic of anticapitalist
revolution pointed to a single leader atop a single-party system.
A Cambodian man prayed
during a ceremony in front of a map of skulls of Khmer Rouge victims at
the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, March 10, 2002.
Photo:
Andy Eames/Associated Press
during a ceremony in front of a map of skulls of Khmer Rouge victims at
the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, March 10, 2002.
Photo:
Andy Eames/Associated Press
communist dictators have shared key traits. All have conformed, more or
less, to the Leninist type: a fusion of militant ideologue and
unprincipled intriguer. And all have possessed an extreme willpower—the
prerequisite for attaining what only unspeakable bloodshed could bring.
Communism
was hardly alone over the past century in committing grand carnage.
Nazism’s repression and wars of racial extermination killed at least 40
million people, and during the Cold War, anticommunism spurred paroxysms
of grotesque violence in Indonesia, Latin America and elsewhere.
But
as evidence of communism’s horrors emerged over the decades, it rightly
shocked liberals and leftists in the West, who shared many of the
egalitarian aims of the revolutionaries. Some repudiated the Soviet
Union as a deformation of socialism, attributing the regime’s crimes to
the backwardness of Russia or the peculiarities of Lenin and Stalin.
After all, Marx had never advocated mass murder or Gulag labor camps.
Nowhere did he argue that the secret police, deportation by cattle car
and mass death from starvation should be used to establish collective
farms.
But if we’ve learned one lesson from the communist
century, it is this: That to implement Marxist ideals is to betray them.
Marx’s demand to “abolish private property” was a clarion call to
action—and an inexorable path to the creation of an oppressive,
unchecked state.
A few socialists began to recognize that there
could be no freedom without markets and private property. When they made
their peace with the existence of capitalism, hoping to regulate rather
than to abolish it, they initially elicited denunciations as apostates.
Over time, more socialists embraced the welfare state, or the market
economy with redistribution. But the siren call to transcend capitalism
persists among some on the left.
It also remains alive, though
hardly in orthodox Marxist fashion, in Russia and China, the great
redoubts of the communist century. Both countries continue to distrust
what is perhaps most important about free markets and private property:
Their capacity to give independence of action and thought to ordinary
people, pursuing their own interests as they see fit, in private life,
civil society and the political sphere.
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world order, one in which long-suppressed nationalist aims might be
realized. For Stalin and Mao, heirs to proud ancient civilizations,
Europe and the U.S. represented the allure and threat of a superior
West. The communists set themselves the task of matching and overtaking
their capitalist rivals and winning a central place for their own
countries on the international stage. This revolutionary struggle
allowed Russia to satisfy its centuries-old sense of a special mission
in the world, while it gave China a claim to be, once again, the Middle
Kingdom.
Vladimir Putin’s
resistance to the West, with his peculiar mix of Soviet nostalgia
and Russian Orthodox revival, builds on Stalin’s precedent. For its
part, of course, China remains the last communist giant, even as Beijing
promotes and tries to control a mostly market economy. Under
Xi Jinping,
the country now embraces both communist ideology and traditional
Chinese culture in a drive to raise its standing as an alternative to
the West.
Communism’s bloody century has come to an end, and we
can only celebrate its passing. But troubling aspects of its legacy
endure.
