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The actions by governments of communist states have been subject to criticism across the political spectrum. Communist party rule has been especially criticized by anti-communists and right-wing critics, but also by other socialists such as anarchists, communists, democratic socialists, libertarian socialists and Marxists. Ruling communist parties have also been challenged by domestic dissent. According to the critics, rule by communist parties has often led to totalitarianism, political repression, restrictions of human rights, poor economic performance, and cultural and artistic censorship.
Several authors noted gaps between official policies of equality
and economic justice and the reality of the emergence of a new class in
communist countries which thrived at the expense of the remaining
population. In Central and Eastern Europe, the works of dissidents Václav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gained international prominence, as did the works of disillusioned ex-communists such as Milovan Đilas, who condemned the new class or nomenklatura system that had emerged under communist party rule. Major criticism also comes from the anti-Stalinist left and other socialists. Its socio-economic nature has been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production.
Communist party rule has been criticized as authoritarian or totalitarian for suppressing and killing political dissidents and social classes (so-called "enemies of the people"), religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, forced collectivization, and use of forced labor in concentration camps. Communist party rule has also been accused of genocidal acts in Cambodia, China, Poland and Ukraine, although there is scholarly dispute regarding the Holodomor's classification as genocide. Western criticism of communist rule has also been grounded in criticism of socialism by economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who argued that the state ownership and planned economy characteristic of Soviet-style communist rule were responsible for economic stagnation and shortage economies, providing few incentives for individuals to improve productivity and engage in entrepreneurship. Anti-Stalinist left and other left-wing critics see it as an example of state capitalism and have referred to it as a "red fascism" contrary to left-wing politics. Other leftists, including Marxist–Leninists, criticize it for its repressive state actions while recognizing certain advancements such as egalitarian achievements and modernization under such states.
Counter-criticism is diverse, including the view it presents a biased
or exaggerated anti-communist narrative. Some academics propose a more
nuanced analysis of communist party rule.
Excess deaths under communist party rule have been discussed as part of a critical analysis of communist party rule. According to Klas-Göran Karlsson, discussion of the number of victims of communist party rule has been "extremely extensive and ideologically biased." Any attempt to estimate a total number of killings under communist party rule depends greatly on definitions, ranging from a low of 10–20 million to as high as 148 million. The criticism of some of the estimates are mostly focused on three
aspects, namely that (i) the estimates are based on sparse and
incomplete data when significant errors are inevitable; (ii) the figures
are skewed to higher possible values; and (iii) those dying at war and
victims of civil wars, Holodomor and other famines under communist party rule should not be counted.
Others have argued that, while certain estimates may not be accurate,
"quibbling about numbers is unseemly. What matters is that many, many
people were killed by communist regimes." Right-wing commentators argue that these excess deaths and killings are an indictment of communism,
while opponents of this view, including members of the political left,
argue that these killings were aberrations caused by specific
authoritarian regimes instead of communism, and point to mass deaths
that they claim were caused by capitalism and anti-communism as a counterpoint to communist killings.
Background and overview
After the Russian Revolution, communist party rule was consolidated for the first time in Soviet Russia
(later the largest constituent republic of the Soviet Union, formed in
December 1922) and criticized immediately domestically and
internationally. During the first Red Scare in the United States, the takeover of Russia by the communist Bolsheviks was considered by many a threat to free markets, religious freedom and liberal democracy. Meanwhile, under the tutelage of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the only party permitted by the Soviet Union constitution, state institutions were intimately entwined with those of the party. By the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin consolidated the regime's control over the country's economy and society through a system of economic planning and five-year plans.
Between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War,
Soviet-style communist rule only spread to one state that was not later
incorporated into the Soviet Union. In 1924, communist rule was
established in neighboring Mongolia, a traditional outpost of Russian
influence bordering the Siberian region. However, throughout much of
Europe and the Americas criticism of the domestic and foreign policies
of the Soviet regime among anticommunists continued unabated. After the end of World War II, the Soviet Union took control over the territories reached by the Red Army, establishing what later became known as the Eastern Bloc. Following the Chinese Revolution, the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949 under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
Between the Chinese Revolution and the last quarter of the 20th
century, communist rule spread throughout East Asia and much of the Third World and new communist regimes
became the subject of extensive local and international criticism.
Criticism of the Soviet Union and Third World communist regimes have
been strongly anchored in scholarship on totalitarianism which asserts that communist parties maintain themselves in power without the consent of the governed and rule by means of political repression, secret police, propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, repression of free discussion and criticism, mass surveillance and state terror. These studies of totalitarianism influenced Western historiography on communism and Soviet history, particularly the work of Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes on Stalinism, the Great Purge, the Gulag and the Soviet famine of 1932–1933.
Areas of criticism
Criticism of communist regimes has centered on many topics, including their effects on the economic development, human rights, foreign policy, scientific progress and environmental degradation of the countries they rule.
Political repression is a topic in many influential works critical of communist rule, including Robert Conquest's accounts of Stalin's Great Purge in The Great Terror and the Soviet famine of 1932–33 in The Harvest of Sorrow; Richard Pipes' account of the "Red Terror" during the Russian Civil War; Rudolph Rummel's work on "democide"; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account of Stalin's forced labor camps in The Gulag Archipelago; and Stéphane Courtois'
account of executions, forced labor camps and mass starvation in
communist regimes as a general category, with particular attention to
the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and China under Mao Zedong.
Soviet-style central planning and state ownership has been
another topic of criticism of communist rule. Works by economists such
as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman
argue that the economic structures associated with communist rule
resulted in economic stagnation. Other topics of criticism of communist
rule include foreign policies of expansionism, environmental degradation
and the suppression of free cultural expression.
Artistic, scientific and technological policies
Criticism
of communist rule has also centered on the censorship of the arts. In
the case of the Soviet Union, these criticisms often deal with the
preferential treatment afforded to socialist realism.
Other criticisms center on the large-scale cultural experiments of
certain communist regimes. In Romania, the historical center of
Bucharest was demolished and the whole city was redesigned between 1977
and 1989. In the Soviet Union, hundreds of churches were demolished or
converted to secular purposes during the 1920s and 1930s. In China, the Cultural Revolution sought to give all artistic expression a 'proletarian' content and destroyed much older material lacking this.
Advocates of these policies promised to create a new culture that would
be superior to the old while critics argue that such policies
represented an unjustifiable destruction of the cultural heritage of
humanity.
There is a well-known literature focusing on the role of the falsification of images in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs in Stalin's Russia, David King
writes: "So much falsification took place during the Stalin years that
it is possible to tell the story of the Soviet era through retouched
photographs".
Under Stalin, historical documents were often the subject of
revisionism and forgery, intended to change public perception of certain
important people and events. The pivotal role played by Leon Trotsky
in the Russian Revolution and Civil War was almost entirely erased from
official historical records after Trotsky became the leader of a
Communist faction that opposed Stalin's rule.
The emphasis on the "hard sciences" of the Soviet Union has been criticized. There were very few Nobel Prize winners from Communist states. Soviet research in certain sciences was at times guided by political rather than scientific considerations. Lysenkoism and Japhetic theory were promoted for brief periods of time in biology and linguistics respectively, despite having no scientific merit. Research into genetics was restricted because Nazi use of eugenics had prompted the Soviet Union to label genetics a "fascist science". Suppressed research in the Soviet Union also included cybernetics, psychology, psychiatry and organic chemistry.
Soviet technology in many sectors lagged Western technology. Exceptions include areas like the Soviet space program
and military technology where occasionally Communist technology was
more advanced due to a massive concentration of research resources.
According to the Central Intelligence Agency,
much of the technology in the Communist states consisted simply of
copies of Western products that had been legally purchased or gained
through a massive espionage program. Some even say that stricter Western
control of the export of technology through the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls and providing defective technology to Communist agents after the discovery of the Farewell Dossier contributed to the fall of Communism.
Economic policy
Estimates of national income (GNP) growth per year in the Soviet Union, 1928–1985
|
Khanin |
Bergson/CIA |
TsSu
|
| 1928–1980 |
3.3 |
4.3 |
8.8
|
| 1928–1941 |
2.9 |
5.8 |
13.9
|
| 1950s |
6.9 |
6.0 |
10.1
|
| 1960s |
4.2 |
5.2 |
7.1
|
| 1970s |
2.0 |
3.7 |
5.3
|
| 1980–1985 |
0.6 |
2.0 |
3.2
|
Both critics and supporters of communist rule often make comparisons
between the economic development of countries under communist rule and
non-communist countries, with the intention of certain economic
structures are superior to the other. All such comparisons are open to
challenge, both on the comparability of the states involved and the
statistics being used for comparison. No two countries are identical,
which makes comparisons regarding later economic development difficult;
Western Europe was more developed and industrialized than Eastern Europe
long before the Cold War; World War II damaged the economies of some
countries more than others; and East Germany had much of its industry
dismantled and moved to the Soviet Union for war reparations. For example, virtually every electrified and/or double tracked railroad in East Germany was reduced to a single track non-electrified railroad by Soviet demontage after World War II.
Advocates of Soviet-style economic planning have claimed the
system has in certain instances produced dramatic advances, including
rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union, especially during the
1930s. Critics of Soviet economic planning, in response, assert that new
research shows that the Soviet figures were partly fabricated,
especially those showing extremely high growth in the Stalin era. Growth
was high in the 1950s and 1960s, in some estimates much higher than
during the 1930s, but later declined and according to some estimates
became negative in the late 1980s. Before collectivization,
Russia had been the "breadbasket of Europe". Afterwards, the Soviet
Union became a net importer of grain, unable to produce enough food to
feed its own population.
China and Vietnam achieved much higher rates of growth after introducing market reforms such as socialism with Chinese characteristics starting in the late 1970s and 1980s, with higher growth rates being accompanied by declining poverty.
The communist states do not compare favorably when looking at nations
divided by the Cold War. North Korea versus South Korea; and East
Germany versus West Germany. East German productivity
relative to West German productivity was around 90 percent in 1936 and
around 60–65 percent in 1954. When compared to Western Europe, East
German productivity declined from 67 percent in 1950 to 50 percent
before the reunification in 1990. All the Eastern European national
economies had productivity far below the Western European average.
Some countries under communist rule with socialist economies
maintained consistently higher rates of economic growth than
industrialized Western countries with capitalist economies. From 1928 to
1985, the economy of the Soviet Union grew by a factor of 10 and GNP per capita grew more than fivefold. The Soviet economy started out at roughly 25 percent the size of the economy of the United States.
By 1955, it climbed to 40 percent. In 1965, the Soviet economy reached
50% of the contemporary United States economy and in 1977 it passed the
60 percent threshold. For the first half of the Cold War, most
economists were asking when, not if, the Soviet economy would overtake
the United States economy. Starting in the 1970s and continuing through
the 1980s, growth rates slowed down in the Soviet Union and throughout
the socialist bloc.
The reasons for this downturn are still a matter of debate among
economists, but one hypothesis is that the socialist planned economies
had reached the limits of the extensive growth model they were pursuing and the downturn was at least in part caused by their refusal or inability to switch to intensive growth.
Further, it could be argued that since the economies of countries such
as Russia were pre-industrial before the socialist revolutions, the high
economic growth rate could be attributed to industrialization.
Also while forms of economic growth associated with any economic
structure produce some winners and losers, some point out that high
growth rates under communist rule were associated with particularly
intense suffering and even mass starvation of the peasant population.
Unlike the slow market reforms in China and Vietnam where
communist rule continues, the abrupt end to central planning was
followed by a depression in many of the states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe which chose to adopt the so-called economic shock therapy.
For example, in the Russian Federation GDP per capita decreased by
one-third between 1989 and 1996. As of 2003, all of them have positive
economic growth and almost all have a higher GDP/capita than before the
transition.
In general, critics of communist rule argue that socialist economies
remained behind the industrialized West in terms of economic development
for most of their existence while others assert that socialist
economies had growth rates that were sometimes higher than many
non-socialist economies, so they would have eventually caught up to the
West if those growth rates had been maintained. Some reject all
comparisons altogether, noting that the communist states started out
with economies that were generally much less developed to begin with.
Environmental policy
According to the
United States Department of Energy, the Communist states maintained a much higher level of
energy intensity
than either the Western nations or the Third World, at least after
1970, therefore energy-intensive development may have been reasonable as
the Soviet Union was an exporter of oil and China has vast supplies of
coal.
Criticism of communist rule include a focus on environmental disasters. One example is the gradual disappearance of the Aral Sea and a similar diminishing of the Caspian Sea
because of the diversion of the rivers that fed them. Another is the
pollution of the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea and the unique freshwater
environment of Lake Baikal. Many of the rivers were polluted and several, like the Vistula and Oder
rivers in Poland, were virtually ecologically dead. Over 70 percent of
the surface water in the Soviet Union was polluted. In 1988, only 30
percent of the sewage in the Soviet Union was treated properly.
Established health standards for air pollution
was exceeded by ten times or more in 103 cities in the Soviet Union in
1988. The air pollution problem was even more severe in Eastern Europe.
It caused a rapid growth in lung cancer,
forest die-back and damage to buildings and cultural heritages.
According to official sources, 58 percent of total agricultural land of
the former Soviet Union was affected by salinization, erosion, acidity, or waterlogging. Nuclear waste was dumped in the Sea of Japan,
the Arctic Ocean and in locations in the Far East. It was revealed in
1992 that in the city of Moscow there were 636 radioactive toxic waste
sites and 1,500 in Saint Petersburg.
According to the United States Department of Energy, socialist economies also maintained a much higher level of energy intensity than either the Western nations or the Third World. This analysis is confirmed by the Institute of Economic Affairs, with Mikhail Bernstam stating that economies of the Eastern Bloc had an energy intensity between twice and three times higher as economies of the West.
Some see the aforementioned examples of environmental degradation are
similar to what had occurred in Western capitalist countries during the
height of their drive to industrialize in the 19th century.
Others claim that Communist regimes did more damage than average,
primarily due to the lack of any popular or political pressure to
research environmentally friendly technologies.
Some ecological problems continue unabated after the fall of the
Soviet Union and are still major issues today, which has prompted
supporters of former ruling Communist parties to accuse their opponents
of holding a double standard. Nonetheless, other environmental problems have improved in every studied former Communist state.
However, some researchers argued that part of improvement was largely
due to the severe economic downturns in the 1990s that caused many
factories to close down.
Forced labour and deportations
A number of communist states also used forced labour
as a legal form of punishment for certain periods of time and again,
critics of these policies assert that many prisoners who were sentenced
to serve terms of imprisonment in forced labor camps such as the Gulag
were sent there for political rather than criminal reasons. Some of the
Gulag camps were located in very harsh environments, such as Siberia,
which resulted in the death of a significant fraction of inmates before
they could complete their prison sentences. Officially, the Gulag was
shut down in 1960, but it remained de facto in action for some time afterward. North Korea continues to maintain a network of prison and labor camps
that an estimated 200,000 people are imprisoned in. While the country
does not regularly deport its citizens, it maintains a system of
internal exile and banishment.
Many deaths were also caused by involuntary deportations of entire ethnic groups as part of the population transfer in the Soviet Union. Many Prisoners of War
taken during World War II were not released as the war ended and died
in the Gulags. Many German civilians died as a result of atrocities
committed by the Soviet army during the evacuation of East Prussia) and due to the policy of ethnic cleansing of Germans from the territories they lost due to the war during the expulsion of Germans after World War II.
Freedom of movement
The
Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961 to stop emigration from
East Berlin to
West Berlin
and in the last phase of the wall's development the "death strip"
between fence and concrete wall gave guards a clear shot at would-be
escapees from the East.
In the literature on communist rule, many anticommunists have
asserted that communist regimes tend to impose harsh restrictions on the
freedom of movement.
These restrictions, they argue, are meant to stem the possibility of
mass emigration, which threatens to offer evidence pointing to
widespread popular dissatisfaction with their rule.
Between 1950 and 1961, 2.75 million East Germans moved to West
Germany. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 around 200,000 people
moved to Austria as the Hungarian-Austrian border temporarily opened.
From 1948 to 1953 hundreds of thousands of North Koreans moved to the
South, stopped only when emigration was clamped down after the Korean War.
In Cuba, 50,000 middle-class Cubans left between 1959 and 1961 after the Cuban Revolution
and the breakdown of Cuban-American relations. Following a period of
repressive measures by the Cuban government in the late 1960s and 1970s,
Cuba allowed for mass emigration of dissatisfied citizens, a policy
that resulted in the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, which led to a drop in emigration rates during the later months. In the 1990s, the economic crisis known as the Special Period coupled with the United States' tightening of the embargo led to desperate attempts to leave the island on balsas (rafts, tires and makeshift vessels).
Many Cubans currently continue attempts to emigrate to the United
States In total, according to some estimates, more than 1 million people
have left Cuba, around 10% of the population.
Between 1971 and 1998, 547,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States
alongside 700,000 neighboring Dominicans, 335,000 Haitians and 485,000
Jamaicans.
Since 1966, immigration to the United States was governed by the 1966
Cuban adjustment act, a United States law that applies solely to Cubans.
The ruling allows any Cuban national, no matter the means of the entry
into the United States, to receive a green card after being in the
country a year.
Havana has long argued that the policy has encouraged the illegal
exodus, deliberately ignoring and undervaluing the life-threatening
hardships endured by refugees.
After the victory of the communist North in the Vietnam War, over 2 million people in former South Vietnamese territory left the country (see Vietnamese boat people)
in the 1970s and 1980s. Another large group of refugees left Cambodia
and Laos. Restrictions on emigration from states ruled by communist
parties received extensive publicity. In the West, the Berlin wall
emerged as a symbol of such restrictions. During the Berlin Wall's
existence, sixty thousand people unsuccessfully attempted to emigrate
illegally from East Germany and received jail terms for such actions;
there were around five thousand successful escapes into West Berlin; and
239 people were killed trying to cross. Albania and North Korea
perhaps imposed the most extreme restrictions on emigration. From most
other communist regimes, legal emigration was always possible, though
often so difficult that attempted emigrants would risk their lives in
order to emigrate. Some of these states relaxed emigration laws
significantly from the 1960s onwards. Tens of thousands of Soviet
citizens emigrated legally every year during the 1970s.
Ideology
According to Klas-Göran Karlsson,
"[i]deologies 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." Authors such as Daniel Goldhagen, John Gray, Richard Pipes and Rudolph Rummel consider the ideology of communism to be a significant, or at least partial, causative factor in the events under communist party rule. The Black Book of Communism claims an association between communism and criminality, arguing that "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. On the other hand, Benjamin Valentino does not see a link between communism and mass killing,
arguing that killings occur when power is in the hands of one person or
a small number of people, when "powerful groups come to believe it is
the best available means to accomplish certain radical goals, counter
specific types of threats, or solve difficult military problem", or
there is a "revolutionary desire to bring about the rapid and radical
transformation of society."
Christopher J. Finlay argues 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." According to Rustam Singh, Karl Marx
alluded to the possibility of peaceful revolution, but he emphasized
the need for violent revolution and "revolutionary terror" after the
failed Revolutions of 1848. 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."
According to 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." Rummels writes that Marxist communists 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 the following "apparently high levels of political support for
murderous regimes and leaders should not automatically be equated with
support for mass killing itself. Individuals are capable of supporting
violent regimes or leaders while remaining indifferent or even opposed
to specific policies that these regimes and carried out." Valentino
quotes Vladimir Brovkin as saying that "a vote for the Bolsheviks in
1917 was not a vote for Red Terror or even a vote for a dictatorship of
the proletariat."
According to Valentino, such strategies were so violent because they
economically dispossess large numbers of people, commenting: "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."
International politics and relations
Imperialism
As an ideology, Marxism–Leninism stresses militant opposition to imperialism. Lenin considered imperialism "the highest stage of capitalism" and in 1917 made declarations of the unconditional right of self-determination and secession
for the national minorities of Russia. During the Cold War, communist
states have been accused of, or criticized for, exercising imperialism
by giving military assistance and in some cases intervening directly on
behalf of Communist movements that were fighting for control,
particularly in Asia and Africa.
Western critics accused the Soviet Union and the People's
Republic of China of practicing imperialism themselves, and communist
condemnations of Western imperialism hypocritical. The attack on and
restoration of Moscow's control of countries that had been under the
rule of the tsarist empire, but briefly formed newly independent states
in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War (including Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan), have been condemned as examples of Soviet imperialism. Similarly, Stalin's forced reassertion of Moscow's rule of the Baltic states in World War II has been condemned as Soviet imperialism. Western critics accused Stalin of creating satellite states in Eastern Europe after the end of World War II. Western critics also condemned the intervention of Soviet forces during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring and the war in Afghanistan
as aggression against popular uprisings. Maoists argued that the Soviet
Union had itself become an imperialist power while maintaining a
socialist façade (social imperialism). China's reassertion of central control over territories on the frontiers of the Qing dynasty, particularly Tibet, has also been condemned as imperialistic by some critics.
Support of terrorism
Some states under communist rule have been criticized for directly supporting terrorist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Red Army Faction and the Japanese Red Army. North Korea has been implicated in terrorist acts such as Korean Air Flight 858.
World War II
According to Richard Pipes, the Soviet Union shares some responsibility for World War II. Pipes argues that both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini
used the Soviet Union as a model for their own regimes and that Hitler
privately considered Stalin a "genius". According to Pipes, Stalin
privately hoped that another world war would weaken his foreign enemies
and allow him to assert Soviet power internationally. Before Hitler took
power, Stalin allowed the testing and production of German weapons that
were forbidden by the Versailles Treaty
to occur on Soviet territory. Stalin is also accused of weakening
German opposition to the Nazis before Hitler's rule began in 1933.
During the 1932 German elections, for instance, he forbade the German
Communists from collaborating with the Social Democrats. These parties
together gained more votes than Hitler and some have later surmised
could have prevented him from becoming Chancellor.
Leadership
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.
Professor Nam Kyu Kim writes that exclusionary ideologies are critical
to explaining mass killing, but the organizational capabilities and
individual characteristics of revolutionary leaders, including their
attitudes towards risk and violence, are also important. 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." Martin Malia called the "brutal conditioning" of the two World Wars important to understanding communist violence, although not its source.
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, [he] compensated for his lack of physical stature
with a pathological cruelty and the use of brute terror." Russian and world history
scholar John M. Thompson places personal responsibility directly on
Stalin. According to Thompson, "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."
Professors Pablo Montagnes and Stephane Wolton argue that the purges in
the Soviet Union 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 allegedly viewing human life as disposable to Mao's "cosmic perspective" on humanity.
Mass killings
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", a broad definition of "genocide", "crimes against humanity", "holocaust", and "repression".
Scholars such as Stéphane Courtois, Steven Rosefielde, Rudolph Rummel and Benjamin Valentino
have argued that communist regimes were responsible for tens or even
hundreds of millions of deaths. These deaths mostly occurred under the
rule of Stalin and Mao, therefore these particular periods of communist
rule in Soviet Russia and China receive considerable attention in The Black Book of Communism, although other communist regimes have also caused high number of deaths, not least the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which is often acclaimed to have killed more of its citizens than any other in history.
These accounts often divide their death toll estimates into two
categories, namely executions of people who had received the death
penalty for various charges, or deaths that occurred in prison; and
deaths that were not caused directly by the regime, as the people in
question were not executed and did not die in prison, but are considered
to have died as an indirect result of state or communist party
policies. Those scholars argue that most victims of communist rule fell
in this category, which is often the subject of considerable
controversy.
In most communist states, the death penalty was a legal form of
punishment for most of their existence, with a few exceptions. While the
Soviet Union formally abolished the death penalty between 1947 and
1950, critics argue that this did nothing to curb executions and acts of
genocide.
Critics also argue that many of the convicted prisoners executed by
authorities under communist rule were not criminals but political
dissidents. Stalin's Great Purge in the late 1930s (from roughly 1936–1938) is given as the most prominent example of the hypothesis. With regard to deaths not caused directly by state or party authorities, The Black Book of Communism
points to famine and war as the indirect causes of what they see as
deaths for which communist regimes were responsible. In this sense, the Soviet famine of 1932–33 and the Great Leap Forward
are often described as man-made famines. These two events alone killed a
majority of the people seen as victims of communist states by estimates
such as Courtois'. Courtois also blames Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime for having exacerbated the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia by imposing unreasonable political and economic burdens on the population.
Estimates
The authors of The Black Book of Communism, Norman Davies,
Rummel and others have attempted to give estimates of the total number
of deaths for which communist rule of a particular state in a particular
period was responsible, or the total for all states under communist
rule. The question is complicated by the lack of hard data and by biases
inherent in any estimation. The number of people killed under Stalin's
rule in the Soviet Union by 1939 has been estimated as 3.5–8 million by
Geoffrey Ponton, 6.6 million by V. V. Tsaplin and 10–11 million by Alexander Nove. The number of people killed under Stalin's rule by the time of his death in 1953 has been estimated as 1–3 million by Stephen G. Wheatcroft, 6–9 million by Timothy D. Snyder, 13–20 million by Rosefielde, 20 million by Courtois and Martin Malia, 20 to 25 million by Alexander Yakovlev, 43 million by Rummel and 50 million by Davies.
The number of people killed under Mao's rule in the People's Republic
of China has been estimated at 19.5 million by Wang Weizhi, 27 million by John Heidenrich, between 38 and 67 million by Kurt Glaser and Stephan Possony, between 32 and 59 million by Robert L. Walker, over 50 million by Rosefielde, 65 million by Cortois and Malia, well over 70 million by Jon Halliday and Jung Chang in Mao: The Unknown Story and 77 million by Rummel.
Aerial night view of the Korean Peninsula showing
South Korea illuminated and few lights in Communist North Korea
The authors of The Black Book of Communism have also estimated
that 9.3 million people were killed under communist rule in other
states: 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1.7 million in
Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Vietnam, 1 million in
Eastern Europe and 150,000 in Latin America. Rummel has estimated that
1.7 million were killed by the government of Vietnam, 1.6 million in
North Korea (not counting the 1990s famine), 2 million in Cambodia and
2.5 million in Poland and Yugoslavia.
Valentino estimates that 1 to 2 million were killed in Cambodia, 50,000
to 100,000 in Bulgaria, 80,000 to 100,000 in East Germany, 60,000 to
300,000 in Romania, 400,000 to 1,500,000 in North Korea, and 80,000 to
200,000 in North and South Vietnam.
Between the authors Wiezhi, Heidenrich, Glaser, Possony, Ponton,
Tsaplin and Nove, Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China have an
estimated total death rate ranging from 23 million to 109 million. The Black Book of Communism
asserts that roughly 94 million died under all communist regimes while
Rummel believed around 144.7 million died under six communist regimes.
Valentino claims that between 21 and 70 million deaths are attributable
to the Communist regimes in the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of
China and Democratic Kampuchea alone. Jasper Becker, author of Hungry Ghosts,
claims that if the death tolls from the famines caused by communist
regimes in China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia and
Mozambique are added together, the figure could be close to 90 million.
These estimates are the three highest numbers of victims blamed on
communism by any notable study. However, the totals that include
research by Wiezhi, Heidenrich, Glasser, Possony, Ponton, Tsaplin and
Nove do not include other periods of time beyond Stalin or Mao's rule,
thus it may be possible when including other communist states to reach
higher totals. In a 25 January 2006 resolution condemning the crimes of communist regimes, the Council of Europe cited the 94 million total reached by the authors of the Black Book of Communism.
Explanations have been offered for the discrepancies in the number of estimated victims of communist regimes:
- First, all these numbers are estimates derived from incomplete
data. Researchers often have to extrapolate and interpret available
information in order to arrive at their final numbers.
- Second, different researchers work with different definitions of
what it means to be killed by a regime. As noted by several scholars,
the vast majority of victims of communist regimes did not die as a
result of direct government orders but as an indirect result of state
policy. There is no agreement on the question of whether communist
regimes should be held responsible for their deaths and if so, to what
degree. The low estimates may count only executions and labor camp
deaths as instances of killings by communist regimes while the high
estimates may be based on the argument that communist regimes were
responsible for all deaths resulting from famine or war.
- Some of the writers make special distinction for Stalin and Mao, who
all agree are responsible for the most extensive pattern of severe
crimes against humanity, but they include little to no statistics on
losses of life after their rule.
- Another reason is sources available at the time of writing. More
recent researchers have access to many of the official archives of
communist regimes in East Europe and Soviet Union. However, many of
archives in Russia for the period after Stalin's death are still closed.
- Finally, this is a highly politically charged field, with nearly all
researchers having been accused of a pro-communist or anti-communist
bias at one time or another.
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
posits 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. Courtois 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." Wheatcroft argued that the Soviet government's
policies during the famine were criminal acts of fraud and manslaughter,
though not outright murder or genocide. In contrast according to Simon Payaslian, the scholarly consensus classifies the Holodomor as a genocide. 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 the Great Chinese Famine,
noting that "[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, commenting: "Whenever governments have not alleviated
famine conditions, political leaders decided not to say no to mass death
– in other words, they said yes." Goldhagen says that instances of this
occurred in the Mau Mau Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Nigerian Civil War, the Eritrean War of Independence, and the War in Darfur. Martin Shaw
posits that if a leader knew the ultimate result of their policies
would be mass death by famine, and they continue to enact them anyway,
these deaths can be understood as intentional.
Historians and journalists, such as Seumas Milne and Jon Wiener, have criticized the emphasis on communism when assigning blame for famines. In a 2002 article for The Guardian, Milne mentions "the moral blindness displayed towards the record of colonialism",
and he writes: "If Lenin and Stalin are regarded as having killed those
who died of hunger in the famines of the 1920s and 1930s, then
Churchill is certainly responsible for the 4 million deaths in the
avoidable Bengal famine of 1943." Milne laments that while "there is a much-lauded Black Book of Communism, [there exists] no such comprehensive indictment of the colonial record." Weiner makes a similar assertion while comparing the Holodomor 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,
arguing that in both instances the governments which oversaw the
response to the famines deliberately chose not to alleviate conditions
and as such bear responsibility for the scale of deaths in said famines.
Historian Michael Ellman
is critical of the fixation on a "uniquely Stalinist evil" when it
comes to excess deaths from famines. Ellman posits that mass deaths from
famines are not a "uniquely Stalinist evil", commenting that throughout
Russian history, famines, and droughts have been a common occurrence, including the Russian famine of 1921–1922,
which occurred before Stalin came to power. He also states that famines
were widespread throughout the world in the 19th and 20th centuries in
countries such as India, Ireland, Russia and China. According to Ellman,
the G8 "are
guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence
because of their not taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and
Stalin's "behaviour was no worse than that of many rulers in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Personality cults
Both anti-communists and communists have criticized the personality cults of many communist rulers, especially the cults of Stalin, Mao, Fidel Castro and Kim Il-sung. In the case of North Korea, the personality cult of Kim Il-sung was associated with inherited leadership, with the succession of Kim's son Kim Jong-il in 1994 and grandson Kim Jong-un in 2011. Cuban communists have also been criticized for planning an inherited leadership, with the succession of Raúl Castro following his brother's illness in mid-2006.
Political repression
Large-scale
political repression under communist rule has been the subject of
extensive historical research by scholars and activists from a diverse
range of perspectives. A number of researchers on this subject are
former Eastern bloc communists who become disillusioned with their
ruling parties, such as Alexander Yakovlev and Dmitri Volkogonov. Similarly, Jung Chang, one of the authors of Mao: The Unknown Story, was a Red Guard in her youth. Others are disillusioned former Western communists, including several of the authors of The Black Book of Communism. Robert Conquest,
another former communist, became one of the best-known writers on the
Soviet Union following the publication of his influential account of the
Great Purge in The Great Terror,
which at first was not well received in some left-leaning circles of
Western intellectuals. Following the end of the Cold War, much of the
research on this topic has focused on state archives previously
classified under communist rule.
The level of political repression experienced in states under
communist rule varied widely between different countries and historical
periods. The most rigid censorship was practiced by the Soviet Union
under Stalin (1922–1953), China under Mao during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the communist regime in North Korea throughout its rule (1948–present). Under Stalin's rule, political repression in the Soviet Union included executions of Great Purge victims and peasants deemed "kulaks" by state authorities; the Gulag
system of forced labor camps; deportations of ethnic minorities; and
mass starvations during the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, caused by either
government mismanagement, or by some accounts, caused deliberately. The Black Book of Communism also details the mass starvations resulting from Great Leap Forward in China and the Killing Fields in Cambodia.
Although political repression in the Soviet Union was far more
extensive and severe in its methods under Stalin's rule than in any
other period, authors such as Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes and works such as the Black Book of Communism argue that a reign of terror began within Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin immediately after the October Revolution, and continued by the Red Army and the Cheka over the country during the Russian Civil War. It included summary executions
of hundreds of thousands of "class enemies" by Cheka; the development
of the system of labor camps, which would later lay the foundation for
the Gulags; and a policy of food requisitioning during the civil war,
which was partially responsible for a famine causing three to ten
million deaths.
Alexander Yakovlev's
critique of political repression under communist rule focus on the
treatment of children, which he numbers in the millions, of alleged
political opponents. His accounts stress cases in which children of
former imperial officers and peasants were held as hostages and
sometimes shot during the civil war. His account of the Second World War
highlights cases in which the children of soldiers who had surrendered
were the victims of state reprisal. Some children, Yakovlev notes,
followed their parents to the Gulags, suffering an especially high
mortality rate. According to Yakovlev, in 1954 there were 884,057
"specially resettled" children under the age of sixteen. Others were
placed in special orphanages run by the secret police in order to be
reeducated, often losing even their names, and were considered socially
dangerous as adults. Other accounts focus on extensive networks of civilian informants,
consisting of either volunteers, or those forcibly recruited. These
networks were used to collect intelligence for the government and report
cases of dissent.
Many accounts of political repression in the Soviet Union highlight
cases in which internal critics were classified as mentally ill
(diagnosed with disorders such as sluggishly progressing schizophrenia) and incarcerated in mental hospitals). The fact that workers in the Soviet Union were not allowed to organize independent, non-state trade union has also been presented as a case of political repression in the Soviet Union.
Various accounts stressing a relationship between political repression
and communist rule focus on the suppression of internal uprisings by
military force such as the Tambov rebellion and the Kronstadt rebellion during the Russian Civil War as well as the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in China. Ex-communist dissident Milovan Đilas, among others, focused on the relationship between political repression and the rise of a powerful new class of party bureaucrats, called the nomenklatura, that had emerged under communist rule and exploited the rest of the population.
Political system
Historian Anne Applebaum 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. Applebaum notes that as late as 1976 Mengistu Haile Mariam unleashed a Red Terror in Ethiopia. Lenin is quoted as saying 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?"
Historian Robert Conquest
stressed that events such as 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, arguing that "[t]o put it another way, Stalin initiated very
little that Lenin had not already introduced or previewed."
Philosopher Stephen Hicks of Rockford College
ascribes the violence characteristic of 20th-century communist party
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 communist party rule "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."
Author Eric D. Weitz
says that events such as mass killing in communist states are 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."
According to this view, mass killings are not inevitable but are
political decisions. Soviet and Communist studies scholar Steven Rosefielde
writes that communist rulers had to choose between changing course and
"terror-command" and more often than not chose the latter. Sociologist Michael Mann
argues that a lack of institutionalized authority structures meant that
a chaotic mix of both centralized control and party factionalism were
factors to the events.
Social development
Starting with the first five-year plan
in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Soviet leaders
pursued a strategy of economic development concentrating the country's
economic resources on heavy industry and defense rather than on consumer goods.
This strategy was later adopted in varying degrees by communist leaders
in Eastern Europe and the Third World. For many Western critics of
communist strategies of economic development, the unavailability of
consumer goods common in the West in the Soviet Union was a case in
point of how communist rule resulted in lower standards of living.
The allegation that communist rule resulted in lower standards of
living sharply contrasted with communist arguments boasting of the
achievements of the social and cultural programs of the Soviet Union and
other communist states. For instance, Soviet leaders boasted of
guaranteed employment, subsidized food and clothing, free health care,
free child care and free education. Soviet leaders also touted early
advances in women's equality, particularly in Islamic areas of Soviet Central Asia.
Eastern European communists often touted high levels of literacy in
comparison with many parts of the developing world. A phenomenon called Ostalgie,
nostalgia for life under Soviet rule, has been noted amongst former
members of Communist countries, now living in Western capitalist states,
particularly those who lived in the former East Germany.
The effects of communist rule on living standards have been
harshly criticized. Jung Chang stresses that millions died in famines in
communist China and North Korea.
Some studies conclude that East Germans were shorter than West Germans
probably due to differences in factors such as nutrition and medical
services. According to some researchers, life satisfaction increased in East Germany after the reunification. Critics of Soviet rule charge that the Soviet education system was full of propaganda
and of low quality. United States government researchers pointed out
the fact that the Soviet Union spent far less on health care than
Western nations and noted that the quality of Soviet health care was
deteriorating in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, the failure of Soviet
pension and welfare programs to provide adequate protection was noted
in the West.
After 1965, life expectancy
began to plateau or even decrease, especially for males, in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe while it continued to increase in Western
Europe.
This divergence between two parts of Europe continued over the course
of three decades, leading to a profound gap in the mid-1990s. Life
expectancy sharply declined after the change to market economy in most
of the states of the former Soviet Union, but may now have started to
increase in the Baltic states. In several Eastern European nations, life expectancy started to increase immediately after the fall of communism.
The previous decline for males continued for a time in some Eastern
European nations, like Romania, before starting to increase.
In The Politics of Bad Faith, conservative writer David Horowitz
painted a picture of horrendous living standards in the Soviet Union.
Horowitz claimed that in the 1980s rationing of meat and sugar was
common in the Soviet Union. Horowitz cited studies suggesting the
average intake of red meat for a Soviet citizen was half of what it had been for a subject of the tsar in 1913, that blacks under apartheid
in South Africa owned more cars per capita and that the average welfare
mother in the United States received more income in a month than the
average Soviet worker could earn in a year. According to Horowitz, the
only area of consumption in which the Soviets excelled was the ingestion
of hard liquor.
Horowitz also noted that two-thirds of the households had no hot water
and a third had no running water at all. Horowitz cited the government
newspaper Izvestia,
noting a typical working-class family of four was forced to live for
eight years in a single eight by eight foot room before marginally
better accommodation became available. In his discussion of the Soviet
housing shortage, Horowitz stated that the shortage was so acute that at
all times 17 percent of Soviet families had to be physically separated
for want of adequate space. A third of the hospitals had no running
water and the bribery of doctors and nurses to get decent medical
attention and even amenities like blankets in Soviet hospitals was not
only common, but routine. In his discussion of Soviet education,
Horowitz stated that only 15 percent of Soviet youth were able to attend
institutions of higher learning compared to 34 percent in the United
States.
However, large segments of citizens of many former communist today
states say that the standard of living has fallen since the end of the
Cold War, with majorities of citizens in the former East Germany and Romania were polled as saying that life was better under Communism.
In terms of living standards, economist Michael Ellman
asserts that in international comparisons state socialist nations
compared favorably with capitalist nations in health indicators such as
infant mortality and life expectancy. Amartya Sen's
own analysis of international comparisons of life expectancy found that
several communist countries made significant gains and commented "one
thought that is bound to occur is that communism is good for poverty
removal".
Poverty exploded following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
tripling to more than one-third of Russia's population in just three
years. By 1999, around 191 million people in former Eastern Bloc countries and Soviet republics were living on less than $5.50 a day.
Left-wing criticism
Communist countries, states, areas and local communities have been based on the rule of parties proclaiming a basis in Marxism–Leninism,
an ideology which is not supported by all Marxists, communists and
leftists. Many communists disagree with many of the actions undertaken
by ruling Communist parties during the 20th century.
Elements of the left opposed to Bolshevik plans before they were put into practice included the revisionist Marxists, such as Eduard Bernstein, who denied the necessity of a revolution. Anarchists (who had differed from Marx and his followers since the split in the First International), many of the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Marxist Mensheviks supported the overthrow of the tsar, but vigorously opposed the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Criticisms of Communist rule from the left continued after the creation of the Soviet state. The anarchist Nestor Makhno led the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War and the Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan tried to assassinate Lenin. Bertrand Russell
visited Russia in 1920 and regarded the Bolsheviks as intelligent, but
clueless and planless. In her books about Soviet Russia after the
revolution, My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia, Emma Goldman condemned the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion as a "massacre". Eventually, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries broke with the Bolsheviks.
By anti-revisionists
Anti-revisionists (which includes radical Marxist–Leninist factions, Hoxhaists and Maoists) criticize the rule of the communist states by claiming that they were state capitalist states ruled by revisionists.
Though the periods and countries defined as state capitalist or
revisionist varies among different ideologies and parties, all of them
accept that the Soviet Union was socialist during Stalin's time. Maoists view the Soviet Union and most of its satellites as "state capitalist" as a result of de-Stalinization;
some of them also view modern China in this light, believing that the
People's Republic of China became state capitalist after Mao's death.
Hoxhaists believe that the People's Republic of China was always state
capitalist and uphold Socialist Albania as the only socialist state after the Soviet Union under Stalin.
By left communists
Left communists
claim that the "communist" or "socialist" states or "people's states"
were actually state capitalist and thus cannot be called "socialist". Some of the earliest critics of Leninism were the German-Dutch left communists, including Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick. Though most left communists see the October Revolution positively, their analysis concludes that by the time of the Kronstadt revolt the revolution had degenerated due to various historical factors. Rosa Luxemburg
was another communist who disagreed with Lenin's organizational methods
which eventually led to the creation of the Soviet Union.
Amadeo Bordiga
wrote about his view of the Soviet Union as a capitalist society. In
contrast to those produced by the Trotskyists, Bordiga's writings on the
capitalist nature of the Soviet economy also focused on the agrarian
sector. Bordiga displayed a kind of theoretical rigidity which was both
exasperating and effective in allowing him to see things differently. He
wanted to show how capitalist social relations existed in the kolkhoz and in the sovkhoz,
one a cooperative farm and the other the straight wage-labor state
farm. He emphasized how much of agrarian production depended on the
small privately owned plots (he was writing in 1950) and predicted quite
accurately the rates at which the Soviet Union would start importing
wheat after Russia had been such a large exporter from the 1880s to
1914. In Bordiga's conception, Stalin and later Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Che
Guevara were "great romantic revolutionaries" in the 19th century
sense, i.e. bourgeois revolutionaries. He felt that the Stalinist
regimes that came into existence after 1945 were just extending the
bourgeois revolution, i.e. the expropriation of the Prussian Junker class by the Red Army through their agrarian policies and through the development of the productive forces.
By Trotskyists
After the split between Leon Trotsky and Stalin, Trotskyists
have argued that Stalin transformed the Soviet Union into a
bureaucratic and repressive one-party state and that all subsequent
Communist states ultimately followed a similar path because they copied Stalinism. There are various terms used by Trotskyists to define such states, such as "degenerated workers' state" and "deformed workers' state", "state capitalist" or "bureaucratic collectivist".
While Trotskyists are Leninists, there are other Marxists who reject
Leninism entirely, arguing that the Leninist principle of democratic centralism was the source of the Soviet Union's slide away from communism.
By other socialists
In October 2017, Nathan J. Robinson
wrote an article titled "How to Be a Socialist without Being an
Apologist for the Atrocities of Communist Regimes", arguing that it is
"incredibly easy to be both in favor of socialism and against the crimes
committed by 20th century communist regimes. All it takes is a
consistent, principled opposition to authoritarianism".
Counter-criticism
Some academics and writers argue that anti-communist
narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and
censorship in states under communist party rule and drawn comparisons
with what they see as atrocities that were perpetrated by capitalist
countries, particularly during the Cold War. They include Mark Aarons, Vincent Bevins, Noam Chomsky, Jodi Dean, Kristen Ghodsee, Seumas Milne and Michael Parenti.
Parenti argues that communist states experienced greater economic development than they would have otherwise, or that their leaders were forced to take harsh measures to defend their countries against the Western Bloc during the Cold War. In addition, Parenti states that communist party rule provided some human rights such as economic, social and cultural rights not found under capitalist states
such as that everyone is treated equal regardless of education or
financial stability; that any citizen can keep a job; or that there is a
more efficient and equal distribution of resources.
Professors Paul Greedy and Olivia Ball report that communist parties
pressed Western governments to include economic rights in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
Professor David L. Hoffmann
argues that many actions of communist party rule were rooted in the
response Western governments gave during World War I and that communist
party rule institutionalized them.
While noting "its brutalities and failures", Milne argues that "rapid
industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in
social and gender equality" are not accounted and the dominant account
of communist party rule "gives no sense of how communist regimes renewed
themselves after 1956 or why western leaders feared they might overtake
the capitalist world well into the 1960s."
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