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 -