Criticisms of Communist party rule - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

This article only discusses criticisms that are specific to communist states and not necessarily to other forms of socialism. See Criticisms of socialism

Criticisms of socialism

Criticism of socialism refers to a critique of socialist models of economic organization, their efficiency and feasibility; as well as the political and social implications of such a system. Some criticisms are not directed toward socialism as a system, but are directed toward the socialist...

and Criticisms of Marxism

Criticisms of Marxism

Criticisms of Marxism have come from the political left as well as the political right. Democratic socialists and social democrats reject the idea that socialism can be accomplished only through class conflict and a proletarian revolution. Many anarchists reject the need for a transitory state phase...

for discussions of literature and viewpoints objecting to socialism

Socialism

Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

and Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

, respectively, in general. In addition, see Criticisms of Marxism

Criticisms of Marxism

for information on perspectives relating Marxism-Leninism

Marxism-Leninism

Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology, officially based upon the theories of Marxism and Vladimir Lenin, that promotes the development and creation of a international communist society through the leadership of a vanguard party over a revolutionary socialist state that represents a dictatorship...

to totalitarianism

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...

Criticisms of communist party rule have been known since the first days of the first communist government in Soviet Russia

Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic

The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic , commonly referred to as Soviet Russia, Bolshevik Russia, or simply Russia, was the largest, most populous and economically developed republic in the former Soviet Union....

, established after the October Revolution

October Revolution

The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

of 1917.

Background

Differentiated from both liberal democracy

Liberal democracy

Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...

and traditional forms of autocratic rule such as tsarism, communist party

Communist party

A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...

rule, notably in the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

, one of two world superpower

Superpower

A superpower is a state with a dominant position in the international system which has the ability to influence events and its own interests and project power on a worldwide scale to protect those interests...

s for nearly four decades after the end of World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, and the People's Republic of China

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

, the world's most populous state, has represented an important and distinct type of modern political regime. Criticisms of these regimes have related to their effects on the domestic development of various states, and their role in international politics, including the Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

, and the collapse of the Eastern bloc

Eastern bloc

The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...

and later the Soviet Union itself in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

After the Russian Revolution, communist party rule was consolidated for the first time in Soviet Russia

Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic

(later the largest constituent republic of the Soviet Union, formed in December 1922), and criticized immediately domestically and internationally. During the first Red Scare

Red Scare

Durrell Blackwell Durrell Blackwell The term Red Scare denotes two distinct periods of strong Anti-Communism in the United States: the First Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, and the Second Red Scare, from 1947 to 1957. The First Red Scare was about worker revolution and...

in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, the takeover of Russia by the communist Bolshevik

Bolshevik

The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....

s was considered by many a threat to free market

Free market

A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...

s, religious freedom, and liberal democracy

Liberal democracy

. Meanwhile, under the tutelage of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...

, the only party permitted by the USSR constitution

Constitution of the Soviet Union

There were three versions of the constitution of the Soviet Union, modeled after the 1918 Constitution established by the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic , the immediate predecessor of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics....

, state institutions were intimately entwined with those of the party. By the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

consolidated the regime's control over the country's economy and society through a system of economic planning

Economic planning

Economic planning refers to any directing or planning of economic activity outside the mechanisisms of the market, in an attempt to achieve specific economic or social outcomes. Planning is an economic mechanism for resource allocation and decision-making in contrast with the market mechanism...

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 USSR; in 1924, communist rule was established in neighboring Mongolia

Mongolia

Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...

, a traditional outpost of Russian influence bordering the Siberia

Siberia

Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...

n 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 spread of communist rule throughout Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

coincided with the early years of the Cold War. In the West, critics of communist rule pointed out that the Soviets were imposing Stalinist

Stalinism

Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...

regimes on unwilling populations in Eastern Europe. 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

East Asia

East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...

and much of the Third World

Third World

The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...

, and new communist regimes became the subject of extensive local and international criticism.

Western criticisms of the Soviet Union and Third World communist regimes have been strongly anchored in scholarship on totalitarianism

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...

, which points out that communist parties maintain themselves in power without the consent of the populations

Consent of the governed

"Consent of the governed" is a phrase synonymous with a political theory wherein a government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is only justified and legal when derived from the people or society over which that political power is exercised...

they rule by means of secret police

Secret police

Secret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy and beyond the law to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian political regime....

, propaganda

Propaganda

Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....

disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, repression of free discussion and criticism, mass surveillance

Mass surveillance

Mass surveillance is the pervasive surveillance of an entire population, or a substantial fraction thereof.Modern governments today commonly perform mass surveillance of their citizens, explaining that they believe that it is necessary to protect them from dangerous groups such as terrorists,...

, and state terror. These studies of totalitarianism influenced Western historiography on communism and Soviet history, particularly the work of Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest

George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...

and Richard Pipes

Richard Pipes

Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union...

on Stalinism

Stalinism

, the Great Purge

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

, the Gulag

Gulag

The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...

, and the Soviet famine of 1932-1934.

Western criticisms of communist rule have also been grounded in criticisms of socialism

Criticisms of socialism

by economists such as Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich August Hayek CH , born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought...

and Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman was an American economist, statistician, academic, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades...

, who argued that the state ownership and economic planning

Planned economy

A planned economy is an economic system in which decisions regarding production and investment are embodied in a plan formulated by a central authority, usually by a government agency...

characteristic of Soviet-style communist rule were responsible for economic stagnation and shortage economies

Shortage economy

Shortage economy is a term coined by the Hungarian economist, János Kornai. He used this term to criticize the old centrally-planned economies of the communist states of the Eastern Bloc...

, providing few incentives for individuals to improve productivity

Productivity

Productivity is a measure of the efficiency of production. Productivity is a ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it. Usually this ratio is in the form of an average, expressing the total output divided by the total input...

and engage in entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur, which can be defined as "one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods". This may result in new organizations or may be part of revitalizing mature organizations in response...

.

Ruling communist parties have also been challenged by domestic dissent. In Eastern Europe, the works of dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...

and Václav Havel

Václav Havel

Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...

gained international prominence, as did the works of disillusioned ex-communists such as Milovan Đilas, who condemned the "new class

New class

The "New Class" model, as a theory of new social groups in post-industrial societies, gained ascendency during the 1970s as social and political scientists noted how "New Class" groups were shaped by post-material orientations in their pursuit of political and social goals...

" or "nomenklatura

Nomenklatura

The nomenklatura were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in all spheres of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions were granted only with approval by the...

" system that had emerged under communist rule.

Communism: Promise and Practice (1973) detailed what its author termed flagrant gaps between official Soviet policies of equality and economic justice and the reality of the emergence of a new class in the U.S.S.R. and in other communist countries, which thrived at the expense of the remaining population; see Nomenklatura

Nomenklatura

Areas of criticism

Criticisms of communist regimes have centered on many topics, including their effects on the economic development

Economic development

Economic development generally refers to the sustained, concerted actions of policymakers and communities that promote the standard of living and economic health of a specific area...

, human rights

Human rights

Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

, foreign policy

Foreign policy

A country's foreign policy, also called the foreign relations policy, consists of self-interest strategies chosen by the state to safeguard its national interests and to achieve its goals within international relations milieu. The approaches are strategically employed to interact with other countries...

, scientific progress

Science

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

, and environmental degradation

Natural environment

The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth or some region thereof. It is an environment that encompasses the interaction of all living species....

of the countries they rule.

Political repression is a topic in many influential works critical of communist rule, including Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest

's accounts of Stalin's purges

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

Richard Pipes

Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union...

' account of the "Red Terror

Red Terror

The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. In Soviet historiography, the Red Terror is described as having been officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended about October 1918...

" during the Russian Civil War

Russian Civil War

The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...

; R. J. Rummel

R. J. Rummel

Rudolph Joseph Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career assembling data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination...

's work on "democide

Democide

Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the...

"; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

's account of Stalin's forced labor camps in The Gulag Archipelago; and Stéphane Courtois

Stéphane Courtois

Stéphane Courtois is a French historian, an internationally known expert on communist studies, particularly the history of communism and communist genocides, and author of several books...

' account of executions, forced labor camps, and mass starvation in communist regimes as a general category, with particular attention to the USSR under Stalin and China under Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...

.

Soviet-style central planning and state ownership has been another topic of criticism of communist rule. Works by economists such as Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hayek

and Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman was an American economist, statistician, academic, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades...

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.

Criticisms of anticommunist accounts of political repression and economic development under communist rule are diverse. On one hand, supporters of various ruling communist parties have argued that accounts of political repression are exaggerated by anticommunists, that repression was unfortunate but necessary to preserve social stability, and that communist rule provided some human rights not found under liberal democracies. They further claim that countries under communist party rule experienced greater economic development than they would have otherwise, or that communist leaders were forced to take harsh measures to defend their countries against the West during the Cold War

Cold War

. On the other hand, some noncommunist academic historians have argued that various attacks on communist rule should be more strongly contextualized, while not denying their factuality or concerning themselves with justifying the actions of ruling communist parties.

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 Nikolaevich Yakovlev

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev was a Soviet politician and historian who was a Soviet governmental official in the 1980s and a member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...

and Dmitri Volkogonov

Dmitri Volkogonov

Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov was a Russian historian and officer.-Biography:...

. Similarly, Jung Chang

Jung Chang

Jung Chang is a Chinese-born British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in the People's Republic of China....

, one of the authors of Mao: The Unknown Story
Mao: The Unknown Story
Mao: The Unknown Story is a 2005 biography of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong written by the husband and wife team of writer Jung Chang and historian Jon Halliday, and depicts Mao as being responsible for more deaths in peacetime than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.In conducting their research...

, was a Red Guard

Red Guards (China)

Red Guards were a mass movement of civilians, mostly students and other young people in the People's Republic of China , who were mobilized by Mao Zedong in 1966 and 1967, during the Cultural Revolution.-Origins:...

in her youth. Others are disillusioned former Western communists, including several of the authors of The Black Book of Communism
The Black Book of Communism
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a book authored by several European academics and edited by Stéphane Courtois, which describes a history of repressions, both political and civilian, by Communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and...

. Robert Conquest

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

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

in The Great Terror
The Great Terror
The Great Terror is a book by British historian Robert Conquest, published in 1968. It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet history known as the Great Purge. The complete title of the book is The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties...

, 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 (1927–53), China under Mao during the Cultural Revolution

Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...

(1966–76), and the communist regime in North Korea

North Korea

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...

throughout its rule (1948–present). Under Stalin's rule, political repression in the Soviet Union included executions of Great Purge

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

victims and peasants deemed "kulak

Kulak

Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...

s" by state authorities; the Gulag

Gulag

system of forced labor camps; deportations of ethnic minorities; and mass starvations during the Soviet famine of 1932-34, 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

Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social campaign of the Communist Party of China , reflected in planning decisions from 1958 to 1961, which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern...

in China, and the Killing Fields in Cambodia

Cambodia

Cambodia , officially known as the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia...

.

Although political repression in the USSR was far more extensive and severe in its methods under Stalin's rule than in any other period, authors such as Richard Pipes

Richard Pipes

Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union...

, Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes

Orlando Figes is a British historian of Russia, and Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London.-Overview:Figes is the son of the feminist writer Eva Figes. His sister is the author and editor Kate Figes. He attended William Ellis School in north London from 1971-78...

, and works such as the Black Book of Communism argue that a reign of terror began within Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...

immediately after the October Revolution

October Revolution

, and continued by the Red Army

Red Army

The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...

and the Cheka

Cheka

Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...

over the country during the Russian Civil War

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 Nikolaevich Yakovlev

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev

's critiques 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 Gulag

Gulag

s, 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 (suffering from disorders such as sluggishly progressing schizophrenia

Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia

Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia or sluggish schizophrenia was a category of schizophrenia diagnosed by psychiatrists in the Soviet Union...

) and incarcerated in mental hospitals. The fact that workers in the Soviet Union were not allowed to organize independent, non-state trade union

Trade union

A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...

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

Tambov Rebellion

The Tambov Rebellion which occurred between 1920 and 1921 was one of the largest and best-organized peasant rebellions challenging the Bolshevik regime during the Russian Civil War. The uprising took place in the territories of the modern Tambov Oblast and part of the Voronezh Oblast, less than...

and the Kronstadt rebellion

Kronstadt rebellion

The Kronstadt rebellion was one of many major unsuccessful left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War...

during the Russian Civil War, and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989

Tiananmen Square protests of 1989

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese , were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China beginning on 15 April 1989...

in China.

Ex-communist dissident Milovan Djilas, among others, focused on the relationship between political repression and the rise of a powerful "new class

New class

" of party bureaucrats that had emerged under communist rule, and exploited the rest of the population. (see nomenklatura

Nomenklatura

)

Critics claim that communist states provided low standards of living and committed numerous human rights violations, including millions of deaths caused directly or indirectly by the government. Estimates of the number of such deaths, in particular those that occurred in China

People's Republic of China

and the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

, vary greatly depending on the source and methodology, with numbers ranging from under 30 million to 145 million worldwide. Critics argue that the Soviet Union experienced a severe economic downturn in the 1970s and 1980s, which contributed to its collapse, and that China has been reforming since towards a more market-oriented economy.

Alternative accounts

Throughout the Cold War, each side in the ideological struggle between Soviet-style socialism and U.S.-style capitalism cast itself as the champion of 'freedom' while accusing the other side of 'oppression.' Western Cold War critics of communist rule stressed abridgments of freedom of speech

Freedom of speech

Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak freely without censorship. The term freedom of expression is sometimes used synonymously, but includes any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used...

, freedom of religion

Freedom of religion

Freedom of religion is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or community, in public or private, to manifest religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance; the concept is generally recognized also to include the freedom to change religion or not to follow any...

, freedom of the press

Freedom of the press

Freedom of the press or freedom of the media is the freedom of communication and expression through vehicles including various electronic media and published materials...

, and equality before the law in the Soviet Union. Soviet Cold Warriors responded with arguments asserting that civil liberties under capitalism existed only for the ruling classes, and that they were irrelevant to the lower classes that they argued lacked the economic capacity to exercise them in any meaningful way.

Some noncommunist accounts argue that various attacks on political repression under communist rule in anticommunist narratives should be more strongly contextualized. Academic specialists on social revolutions and Soviet development highlight continuities of political culture and social structure between communist regimes and the old regimes they uprooted. From this view, as the Bolsheviks struggled against the White army

White movement

The White movement and its military arm the White Army - known as the White Guard or the Whites - was a loose confederation of Anti-Communist forces.The movement comprised one of the politico-military Russian forces who fought...

and foreign armies during the civil war, they ensured the survival of their own regime by sweeping away the tsarist secret police and replacing it with a new political police, though of considerably greater dimensions. The new regime continued practices of censorship institutionalized under the old regime; indeed, the communists themselves had most often been the targets of this previous censorship.

These continuities were not unnoticed by Bolshevik leaders. In Bolshevik commentaries on war tactics in the civil war, revolutionary leaders asserted that they were fighting the former ruling class using its own weapons, in order to prevent it from staging a counterrevolution. In later years, communist leaders defended restrictions and suppression of dissent as defensive measures against external subversion. During the Cold War, communist leaders at times claimed that their states were assaulted by propaganda campaigns and infiltration by the intelligence agencies of Western 'imperialist' powers. Western scholars of international relations do not discount the role of international influences on domestic political development. However, international relations scholars do not consider international forces the sole, or even necessarily the principal or a major determinant of domestic political development under certain conditions.

Some Western academics argue that anticommunist narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and censorship in states under communist rule. Albert Szymanski, for instance, draws a comparison between the treatment of anticommunist dissidents in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death and the treatment of dissidents in the United States during the period of McCarthyism

McCarthyism

McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...

, claiming that "on the whole, it appears that the level of repression in the Soviet Union in the 1955 to 1980 period was at approximately the same level as in the U.S. during the McCarthy years (1947-56)." Szymanski's arguments have received unfavorable reviews by U.S. historians of the period. Amnesty International

Amnesty International

Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...

estimated the number of political prisoners in the Soviet Union in 1979 at a little over 400.

Personality cults

Both anticommunists and communists have criticized the personality cults of many communist rulers, especially the cults of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh 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

Kim Jong-il

Kim Jong-il, also written as Kim Jong Il, birth name Yuri Irsenovich Kim born 16 February 1941 or 16 February 1942 , is the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea...

in 1994. Cuban communists have also been criticized for planning an inherited leadership, with the succession of Raúl Castro

Raúl Castro

Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz is a Cuban politician and revolutionary who has been President of the Council of State of Cuba and the President of the Council of Ministers of Cuba since 2008; he previously exercised presidential powers in an acting capacity from 2006 to 2008...

following his brother's illness in mid-2006.

Freedom of movement

In the literature on communist rule, many anticommunists have asserted that communist regimes tend to impose harsh restrictions on the freedom of movement

Freedom of movement

Freedom of movement, mobility rights or the right to travel is a human right concept that the constitutions of numerous states respect...

. 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

Korean War

The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...

.

In Cuba

Cuba

The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...

, 50,000 middle-class Cubans left between 1959–1961 after the Cuban Revolution

Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...

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

Mariel boatlift

The Mariel boatlift was a mass emigration of Cubans who departed from Cuba's Mariel Harbor for the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980....

of 1980. In the 1990s, the economic crisis known as the Special Period

Special Period

The Special Period in Time of Peace in Cuba was an extended period of economic crisis that began in 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, by extension, the Comecon. The economic depression of the Special Period was at its most severe in the early-to-mid 1990s before slightly declining...

coupled with the United States' tightening of the embargo

United States embargo against Cuba

The United States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo partially imposed on Cuba in October 1960...

led to desperate attempts to leave the island on balsas (rafts, tires, makeshift vessels). Many Cubans currently continue attempts to emigrate to the U.S. In total, according to some estimates, more than 1 million people have left Cuba, around 10% of the population. Between 1971-98, 547,000 Cubans emigrated to the U.S. alongside 700,000 neighboring Dominicans, 335,000 Haitians and 485,000 Jamaicans. Since 1966, immigration to the U.S. was governed by the 1966 Cuban adjustment act, a U.S. law that applies solely to Cubans. The ruling allows any Cuban national, no matter the means of the entry into the US, 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

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

, over a million people in former South Vietnamese territory left the country (see Boat People

Boat people

Boat people is a term that usually refers to refugees, illegal immigrants or asylum seekers who emigrate in numbers in boats that are sometimes old and crudely made...

) in the 1970s and 1980s. Another large group of refugees left Cambodia

Cambodia

Cambodia , officially known as the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia...

and Laos

Laos

Laos Lao: ສາທາລະນະລັດ ປະຊາທິປະໄຕ ປະຊາຊົນລາວ Sathalanalat Paxathipatai Paxaxon Lao, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south and Thailand to the west...

.

Restrictions on emigration from states ruled by communist parties received extensive publicity. In the West, the Berlin wall

Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin...

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. North Korea currently imposes strict restrictions on emigration.

Albania

Albania

Albania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...

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.

Alternative accounts

During the period of renewed Cold War tensions of the 1980s, American sociologist Albert Szymanski argued that the level of human rights in the USSR in areas such as emigration, civil liberties, civil and economic rights, and treatment of women and national minorities was not as poor as it was painted in Western Cold War accounts. Szymanski challenged accounts stressing a relationship between communist rule and high levels of nation emigration, pointing to other factors explaining patterns of human migration. Szymanski noted that restrictions to emigration were in force in many societies that had been shaped by capitalist development in the late 19th century. France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

and Portugal

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

even limited their citizens' travel to their own colonies. The various German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

principalities allowed only emigration to Slavic lands in the east prior to the 18th century, and many of them banned emigration altogether from the 18th century to the mid-19th. Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n authorities did not allow commoners to move beyond the empire's borders before the 1850s. While most European states relaxed or even completely eliminated their restrictions on emigration by the early 20th century, largely due to their population explosion, there were some exceptions. Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

, Serbia

Serbia

Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...

, and tsarist Russia still required their citizens to obtain official permission for emigration up to World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. During the war, all European countries re-introduced strict restrictions on migration, either temporarily or permanently. However, when looking at the Cold War period, many Americans considered these restrictions on emigration violations of human rights, and the United States did not have such restrictions.

Szymanski reached the conclusion that restrictions imposed by communist regimes on the emigration were no more intense than state restrictions that had been imposed in capitalist societies in the past. In Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

, for example, the communist regime maintained the same emigration laws that had been in force under the old regime since 1936. Nevertheless, East Germany, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea experienced increasing levels of control of emigration under communist rule. Their official explanations claimed that their societies needed as much labor as possible for either postwar reconstruction or economic development. Third World communist leaders did not deny Western countries reached higher standards of living, but they argued that they were in the process of catching up; such claims have been received with skepticism in the West, especially with respect to countries that have not adopted market reforms such as North Korea.

Imperialism

As an ideology, Marxism-Leninism

Marxism-Leninism

stresses militant imperialism

Imperialism

Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...

. Vladimir Lenin considered imperialism

Imperialism

"the highest stage of capitalism" and, in 1917, made empty declarations of the unconditional right of self-determination

Self-determination

Self-determination is the principle in international law that nations have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or external interference...

and secession

Secession

Secession is the act of withdrawing from an organization, union, or especially a political entity. Threats of secession also can be a strategy for achieving more limited goals.-Secession theory:...

for the national minorities of Russia. Later, during the Cold War, communist states exercised 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.

However, 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

Armenia

Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...

, Georgia

Georgia (country)

Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...

and Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan , officially the Republic of Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to...

), have been condemned as examples of Soviet imperialism. Similarly, Stalin's forced reassertion of Moscow's rule of the Baltic states

Baltic states

The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...

in World War II has been condemned as Soviet imperialism. Western critics accused Stalin of creating satellite state

Satellite state

A satellite state is a political term that refers to a country that is formally independent, but under heavy political and economic influence or control by another country...

s in Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

after the end of World War II. Western critics also condemned the intervention of Soviet forces during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution

1956 Hungarian Revolution

The Hungarian Revolution or Uprising of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the government of the People's Republic of Hungary and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956....

, the Prague Spring

Prague Spring

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II...

, and the war in Afghanistan as aggression against popular uprisings. China's reassertion of central control over territories on the frontiers of the Qing dynasty

Qing Dynasty

The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....

, particularly Tibet, has also been condemned as imperialistic by some.

World War II

According to Richard Pipes, the Soviet Union shares some responsibility for World War II

World War II

. Pipes argues that both Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

and Benito Mussolini

Benito Mussolini

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....

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

Proletarian internationalism

Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is a Marxist social class concept based on the view that capitalism is now a global system, and therefore the working class must act as a global class if it is to defeat it...

. 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 forbad 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.

Support of terrorism

Some states under communist rule have been criticized for directly supporting terrorist

Terrorism

Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...

groups, such as the PFLP, the Red Army Faction

Red Army Faction

The radicalized were, like many in the New Left, influenced by:* Sociological developments, pressure within the educational system in and outside Europe and the U.S...

, and the Japanese Red Army

Japanese Red Army

The was a Communist terrorist group founded by Fusako Shigenobu early in 1971 in Lebanon. It sometimes called itself Arab-JRA after the Lod airport massacre...

. North Korea has been implicated in terrorist acts such as Korean Air Flight 858

Korean Air Flight 858

Korean Air Flight 858 was a scheduled international passenger flight between Baghdad, Iraq, and Seoul, South Korea that exploded in mid-air on 29 November 1987 after two North Korean agents planted a bomb in the passenger cabin...

Forced labor and deportations

A number of communist states also held forced labor as a legal form of punishment for certain periods of time, and, again, critics of these policies assert that many of those sentenced to forced labor camps such as the Gulag

Gulag

were sent there for political rather than criminal reasons. Some of the Gulag camps were located in very harsh environments, such as Siberia

Siberia

, which resulted in the death of a significant fraction of inmates before they could complete their prison terms. Officially, the Gulag was shut down in 1960, though they remained de facto in action for some time after.

Many deaths were also caused by involuntary deportations of entire ethnic groups. (see population transfer in the Soviet Union

Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, often classified as "enemies of workers," deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite...

). 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 (see Evacuation of East Prussia

Evacuation of East Prussia

The evacuation of East Prussia refers to the evacuation of the German civilian population and military personnel in East Prussia and the Klaipėda region between 20 January, and March 1945, as part of the evacuation of German civilians towards the end of World War II...

) and due to the policy of ethnic cleansing

Ethnic cleansing

Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....

of Germans from the territories they lost due to the war. (see expulsion of Germans after World War II

Expulsion of Germans after World War II

The later stages of World War II, and the period after the end of that war, saw the forced migration of millions of German nationals and ethnic Germans from various European states and territories, mostly into the areas which would become post-war Germany and post-war Austria...

Loss of life

Scholars such as Stephane Courtois

Stéphane Courtois

Stéphane Courtois is a French historian, an internationally known expert on communist studies, particularly the history of communism and communist genocides, and author of several books...

, Steven Rosefielde

Steven Rosefielde

Steven Rosefielde is a Professor of Comparative Economic Systems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.. He is also a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.-Selected works:...

(in Red Holocaust), Banjamin Valentino and R.J. Rummel have argued that communist regimes were responsible for tens of millions of deaths. These deaths mostly occurred under the rule of Stalin and Mao. Therefore, these particular periods of communist rule in Russia and China receive considerable attention in The Black Book of Communism, though other communist regimes have also caused high number of deaths.

These accounts often divide their death toll estimates into two categories:

Executions of people who had received the death penalty for various charges, or deaths that occurred in prison.
Deaths that were not caused directly by the regime (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. Courtois, among others, argues 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. (The Soviet Union, for example, formally abolished the death penalty between 1947 to 1950, though this did nothing to curb executions and acts of genocide). Critics argue that many of the convicted prisoners executed by authorities under communist rule were not criminals, but political dissidents. Stalin's Great Purge

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

in the late 1930s (from roughly 1936-38) 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

Famine

A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including crop failure, overpopulation, or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality. Every continent in the world has...

and war

War

War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...

as the indirect causes of what they see as deaths for which communist regimes were responsible. The Soviet famine of 1932-34 and the Great Leap Forward

Great Leap Forward

, in this sense, 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

Mengistu Haile Mariam

Mengistu Haile Mariam is a politician who was formerly the most prominent officer of the Derg, the Communist military junta that governed Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987, and the President of the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia from 1987 to 1991...

's regime in Ethiopia

Ethiopia

Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...

for having exacerbated the 1984-1985 famine

1984 - 1985 famine in Ethiopia

A widespread famine affected the inhabitants of today's Eritrea and Ethiopia from 1983 to 1985. In northern Ethiopia, famine led to more than 400,000 deaths; over half this mortality can be attributed to human rights abuses that caused the famine to come earlier, strike harder, and extend further...

by imposing unreasonable political and economic burdens on the population.

Estimates

The authors of the Black Book of Communism, R.J. Rummel, Norman Davies, 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 Joseph Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union by 1939 has been estimated as 3.5-8 million by G. Ponton, 6.6 million by V. V. Tsaplin, and 10-11 million by Alec Nove.
The number of people killed under Joseph Stalin's rule by the time of his death in 1953 has been estimated as 13-20 million by Steven Rosefielde

Steven Rosefielde

, 20 million by The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a book authored by several European academics and edited by Stéphane Courtois, which describes a history of repressions, both political and civilian, by Communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and...

, 20 to 25 million by Alexander Yakovlev

Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev

, 43 million by R. J. Rummel

R. J. Rummel

, and 50 million by Norman Davies

Norman Davies

Professor Ivor Norman Richard Davies FBA, FRHistS is a leading English historian of Welsh descent, noted for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland, and the United Kingdom.- Academic career :...

.

The number of people killed under Mao Zedong'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, 50+ million by Steven Rosefielde, 65 million by The Black Book of Communism, well over 70 million by Mao: The Unknown Story
Mao: The Unknown Story
Mao: The Unknown Story is a 2005 biography of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong written by the husband and wife team of writer Jung Chang and historian Jon Halliday, and depicts Mao as being responsible for more deaths in peacetime than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.In conducting their research...

, and 77 million by R.J. Rummel.

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. R.J. Rummel has estimated that 1.6 million died in North Korea, 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 Russia 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 believes around 144.7 million died under six communist regimes. Benjamin Valentino claims that between 21 and 70 million deaths are attributable to the Communist regimes in the USSR, The People's Republic of China

People's Republic of China

and Democratic Kampuchea

Democratic Kampuchea

The Khmer Rouge period refers to the rule of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Khieu Samphan and the Khmer Rouge Communist party over Cambodia, which the Khmer Rouge renamed as Democratic Kampuchea....

alone.

Jasper Becker

Jasper Becker

Jasper Becker is an author, commentator and journalist who has spent two decades as a foreign correspondent in China. - Journalism :In 1995, he joined the staff of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. He was later promoted to the senior position of Beijing bureau chief, which meant he was...

, author of Hungry Ghosts, claims that if the death tolls from the famines caused by communist regimes in China, the USSR, 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, it should be noted that 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 possible, when including other communist states, to reach higher totals.

In a January 25, 2006, resolution

Council of Europe resolution 1481

In the resolution 1481/2006 of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly issued on January 25, 2006 during its winter session, the Council of Europe "strongly condemns crimes of totalitarian communist regimes"....

condemning the crimes of communist regimes, the Council of Europe

Council of Europe

The Council of Europe is an international organisation promoting co-operation between all countries of Europe in the areas of legal standards, human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural co-operation...

cited the 94 million total reached by the authors of the Black Book of Communism.

Explanations have been offered for the extreme 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 above, 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 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, in Russia many of archives 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- or anti-communist bias at one time or another.

Economic policy

Both critics and supporters of communist rule often make comparisons between the economic development of countries under communist rule and noncommunist 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; East Germany had much of its industry dismantled and moved to the USSR for war reparations.

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 impressive in 1950s and 1960s, in some estimates much higher than during 1930s, but later declined and according to some estimates became negative in the late 1980s. Before collectivization

Collectivisation in the USSR

Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy pursued under Stalin between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms...

, 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 (see socialism with Chinese characteristics) starting in the late 1970s and 1980s; higher growth rates were 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 unification in 1989. All the Eastern European national economies had productivity far below the Western European average.

Nevertheless, 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

Economy of the Soviet Union

The economy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was based on a system of state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, industrial manufacturing and centralized administrative planning...

grew by a factor of 10, and GNP per capita

Per capita

Per capita is a Latin prepositional phrase: per and capita . The phrase thus means "by heads" or "for each head", i.e. per individual or per person...

grew more than fivefold. The Soviet economy started out at roughly 25 percent the size of the economy of the United States

Economy of the United States

The economy of the United States is the world's largest national economy. Its nominal GDP was estimated to be nearly $14.5 trillion in 2010, approximately a quarter of nominal global GDP. The European Union has a larger collective economy, but is not a single nation...

. By 1955, it climbed to 40 percent. In 1965 the Soviet economy reached 50% of the contemporary US 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 U.S. 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

Extensive growth

Extensive Growth, in economics, is based on the expansion of the quantity of inputs in order to increase the quantity of outputs, opposite to that of intensive growth. Thus, extensive growth is likely to be subject to diminishing returns...

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, anticommunists point out that high growth rates under communist rule were associated with particularly intense suffering and even mass starvation of the peasant population.

**Estimates of national income (GNP) growth in the Soviet Union, 1928 - 1985** (source:)
	Khanin	Bergeson/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
1980-85	0.6	2.0	3.2

Unlike the slow market reforms in China and Vietnam, where communist rule continues, the abrupt end to central planning was followed by a depression

Depression (economics)

In economics, a depression is a sustained, long-term downturn in economic activity in one or more economies. It is a more severe downturn than a recession, which is seen by some economists as part of the modern business cycle....

in many of the states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe which chose to adopt the so-called economic shock therapy

Shock therapy (economics)

In economics, shock therapy refers to the sudden release of price and currency controls, withdrawal of state subsidies, and immediate trade liberalization within a country, usually also including large scale privatization of previously public owned assets....

. 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.

Social development

Starting with the first five-year plan

Five-Year Plan (USSR)

The Five-Year Plans for the National Economy of the Soviet Union were a series of nation-wide centralized exercises in rapid economic development in the Soviet Union. The plans were developed by a state planning committee based on the Theory of Productive Forces that was part of the general...

in the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Soviet leaders pursed a strategy of economic development concentrating the country's economic resources on heavy industry

Heavy industry

Heavy industry does not have a single fixed meaning as compared to light industry. It can mean production of products which are either heavy in weight or in the processes leading to their production. In general, it is a popular term used within the name of many Japanese and Korean firms, meaning...

and defense

Defense (military)

Defense has several uses in the sphere of military application.Personal defense implies measures taken by individual soldiers in protecting themselves whether by use of protective materials such as armor, or field construction of trenches or a bunker, or by using weapons that prevent the enemy...

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

Standard of living

Standard of living is generally measured by standards such as real income per person and poverty rate. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, income growth inequality and educational standards are also used. Examples are access to certain goods , or measures of health such as...

.

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. Soviet leaders, for instance, boasted of guaranteed employment

Employment

Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as:- Employee :...

, subsidized food and clothing, free health care

Health care

Health care is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Health care is delivered by practitioners in medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and other care providers...

, free child care, and free education

Education

Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...

. 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

Ostalgie

Ostalgie is a German term referring to nostalgia for aspects of life in East Germany. It is derived from the German words Ost and Nostalgie ....

, 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.

However, 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

Propaganda

Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....

and of low quality. U.S. 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

Life expectancy

Life expectancy is the expected number of years of life remaining at a given age. It is denoted by ex, which means the average number of subsequent years of life for someone now aged x, according to a particular mortality experience...

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

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

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

, before starting to increase.

In The Politics of Bad Faith David Horowitz

David Horowitz

David Joel Horowitz is an American conservative writer and policy advocate. Horowitz was raised by parents who were both members of the American Communist Party. Between 1956 and 1975, Horowitz was an outspoken adherent of the New Left before rejecting Marxism completely...

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

Red meat

Red meat in traditional culinary terminology is meat which is red when raw and not white when cooked. In the nutritional sciences, red meat includes all mammal meat. Red meat includes the meat of most adult mammals and some fowl ....

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

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

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. The only area of consumption in which the Soviets excelled, according to Horowitz, 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
Izvestia
Izvestia is a long-running high-circulation daily newspaper in Russia. The word "izvestiya" in Russian means "delivered messages", derived from the verb izveshchat . In the context of newspapers it is usually translated as "news" or "reports".-Origin:The newspaper began as the News of the...

, 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 U.S.

Artistic, scientific, and technological policies

David King

David or Dave King may refer to:In sports:*David King , Australian rules footballer for the Kangaroos Football Club*Dave King , Scottish businessman, Rangers F.C...

's The Commissar Vanishes documents examples of the falsification of photos in Stalin's Soviet Union. Nikolai Yezhov

Nikolai Yezhov

Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...

, the man to the right of Stalin in the original (top) version of this photograph, was shot in 1940. King reveals that the later version (bottom) was altered by censors, removing all trace of his presence.

Criticisms of communist rule have often centered on the censorship of the arts

ARts

aRts, which stands for analog Real time synthesizer, is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It is best known for previously being used in KDE to simulate an analog synthesizer....

. In the case of the Soviet Union, these criticisms often deal with the preferential treatment afforded to socialist realism

Socialist realism

Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...

. Other criticisms center on the large-scale cultural experiments of certain communist regimes. In Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

, the historical center of Bucharest

Bucharest

Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....

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

Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...

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. Critics argue, however, 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

David King

David or Dave King may refer to:In sports:*David King , Australian rules footballer for the Kangaroos Football Club*Dave King , Scottish businessman, Rangers F.C...

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

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....

in the Russian revolution and Civil War, for example, 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

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

winners from Communist states.

Soviet research in certain sciences was at times guided by political rather than scientific considerations. Lysenkoism

Lysenkoism

Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism, also denotes the biological inheritance principle which Trofim Lysenko subscribed to and which derive from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics, a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism and that Lysenko named...

and Japhetic theory

Japhetic theory (linguistics)

Japhetic theory is a term used to describe a linguistic theory developed by the Soviet linguist Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr . In linguistics it was compared by critics to Lysenkoism in biology: a theory that was promoted and supported for ideological rather than scientific reasons, because it was...

were promoted for brief periods of time in biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

and linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

respectively, despite having no scientific merit. Research into genetics

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

was restricted, because Nazi

Nazism

Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

use of eugenics

Eugenics

Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...

had prompted the Soviet Union to label genetics a "fascist science". Research was also suppressed in cybernetics

Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...

, psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

and psychiatry

Psychiatry

Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

, and even organic chemistry

Organic chemistry

Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation of carbon-based compounds, hydrocarbons, and their derivatives...

. (see suppressed research in the Soviet Union

Suppressed research in the Soviet Union

Suppressed research in the Soviet Union refers to scientific fields which were banned in the Soviet Union, usually for ideological reasons. Science and humanities were placed under a strict ideological scrutiny in the Soviet Union. All research was to be founded on the philosophy of dialectical...

)

Soviet technology in many sectors lagged Western technology. Exceptions include areas like the Soviet space program

Soviet space program

The Soviet space program is the rocketry and space exploration programs conducted by the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the 1930s until its dissolution in 1991...

and military technology where occasionally Communist technology was more advanced due to a massive concentration of research resources. According to the CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...

, 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 COCOM

CoCom

CoCom is an acronym for Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls. CoCom was established by Western bloc powers in the first five years after the end of World War II, during the Cold War, to put an arms embargo on COMECON countries.CoCom ceased to function on March 31, 1994, and the...

and providing defective technology to Communist agents after the discovery of the Farewell Dossier

Farewell Dossier

The Farewell dossier was the collection of documents that Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB defector , gathered and gave to the French DST in 1981–82, during the Cold War....

contributed to the fall of Communism.

Environmental policy

Other criticisms of Communist rule focus on environmental disasters. One example is the gradual disappearance of the Aral Sea

Aral Sea

The Aral Sea was a lake that lay between Kazakhstan in the north and Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region of Uzbekistan, in the south...

and a similar diminishing of the Caspian Sea

Caspian Sea

The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed body of water on Earth by area, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea. The sea has a surface area of and a volume of...

because of the diversion of the rivers that fed them. Another is the pollution of the Black Sea

Black Sea

The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...

, the Baltic Sea

Baltic Sea

The Baltic Sea is a brackish mediterranean sea located in Northern Europe, from 53°N to 66°N latitude and from 20°E to 26°E longitude. It is bounded by the Scandinavian Peninsula, the mainland of Europe, and the Danish islands. It drains into the Kattegat by way of the Øresund, the Great Belt and...

, and the unique freshwater environment of Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal is the world's oldest at 30 million years old and deepest lake with an average depth of 744.4 metres.Located in the south of the Russian region of Siberia, between Irkutsk Oblast to the northwest and the Buryat Republic to the southeast, it is the most voluminous freshwater lake in the...

. Many of the rivers were polluted; several, like the Vistula

Vistula

The Vistula is the longest and the most important river in Poland, at 1,047 km in length. The watershed area of the Vistula is , of which lies within Poland ....

and Oder

Oder

The Oder is a river in Central Europe. It rises in the Czech Republic and flows through western Poland, later forming of the border between Poland and Germany, part of the Oder-Neisse line...

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

Sewage

Sewage is water-carried waste, in solution or suspension, that is intended to be removed from a community. Also known as wastewater, it is more than 99% water and is characterized by volume or rate of flow, physical condition, chemical constituents and the bacteriological organisms that it contains...

in the Soviet Union was treated properly. Established health standards for air pollution

Air pollution

Air pollution is the introduction of chemicals, particulate matter, or biological materials that cause harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms, or cause damage to the natural environment or built environment, into the atmosphere....

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

Lung cancer

Lung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...

, 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

Erosion

Erosion is when materials are removed from the surface and changed into something else. It only works by hydraulic actions and transport of solids in the natural environment, and leads to the deposition of these materials elsewhere...

, acidity, or waterlogging

Waterlogging

Waterlogging or water logging may refer to:* Waterlogging , saturation of the soil by groundwater sufficient to prevent or hinder agriculture...

. Nuclear waste was dumped in the Sea of Japan

Sea of Japan

The Sea of Japan is a marginal sea of the western Pacific Ocean, between the Asian mainland, the Japanese archipelago and Sakhalin. It is bordered by Japan, North Korea, Russia and South Korea. Like the Mediterranean Sea, it has almost no tides due to its nearly complete enclosure from the Pacific...

, the Arctic Ocean

Arctic Ocean

The Arctic Ocean, located in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Arctic north polar region, is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five major oceanic divisions...

, and in locations in the Far East. It was revealed in 1992 that in the city of Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

there were 636 radioactive toxic waste sites and 1,500 in Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

. Besides, according to the US Department of Energy, socialist economies maintained a much higher level of energy intensity

Energy intensity

]Energy intensity is a measure of the energy efficiency of a nation's economy. It is calculated as units of energy per unit of GDP.* High energy intensities indicate a high price or cost of converting energy into GDP....

than either the Western nations or the Third World. This analysis is confirmed by the Institute of Economic Affairs

Institute of Economic Affairs

The Institute of Economic Affairs , founded in 1955, styles itself the UK's pre-eminent free-market think-tank. Its mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social...

: According to Mikhail Bernstam from the IEA, economies of the Eastern Bloc

Eastern bloc

The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...

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

Double standard

A double standard is the unjust application of different sets of principles for similar situations. The concept implies that a single set of principles encompassing all situations is the desirable ideal. The term has been used in print since at least 1895...

. However, other environmental problems have improved in every studied former Communist state. Some researchers have argued that part of improvement was largely due to the severe economic downturns in the 1990s that caused many factories to close down.

Left-wing criticism

Communist countries, states, areas and local communities have been based on the rule of parties proclaiming a basis in Marxism-Leninism

Marxism-Leninism

, an ideology which is not supported by all Marxists and leftists. Many communists disagree with many 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

Eduard Bernstein

Eduard Bernstein was a German social democratic theoretician and politician, a member of the SPD, and the founder of evolutionary socialism and revisionism.- Life :...

, who denied the necessity of a revolution. Anarchists

Anarchism

Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...

(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

Tsar

Tsar is a title used to designate certain European Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, or Tsarism...

, but vigorously opposed the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolshevik

Bolshevik

s.

Criticisms of Communist rule from the left continued after the creation of the Soviet state. The anarchist Nestor Makhno

Nestor Makhno

Nestor Ivanovych Makhno or simply Daddy Makhno was a Ukrainian anarcho-communist guerrilla leader turned army commander who led an independent anarchist army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War....

led an insurrection against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War

Russian Civil War

and the Socialist-Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan tried to assassinate Lenin. Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...

visited Russia in 1920, and regarded the Bolsheviks as intelligent, but clueless and planless. In her book about Soviet Russia after the revolution, My Further Disillusionment in Russia
My Further Disillusionment in Russia
My Further Disillusionment in Russia is a 1924 non-fiction book by Emma Goldman, her continuation of My Disillusionment in Russia, the original publication of which the last twelve chapters were entirely missing, including the Afterword....

, Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century....

condemned the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion

Kronstadt rebellion

The Kronstadt rebellion was one of many major unsuccessful left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War...

as a 'massacre.' Eventually, also the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries

Left Socialist-Revolutionaries

In 1917, Russia the Socialist-Revolutionary Party split between those who supported the Provisional Government, established after the February Revolution, and those who supported the Bolsheviks who favoured a communist insurrection....

broke with the Bolsheviks.

By anti-revisionists

Anti-revisionist

Anti-Revisionist

In the Marxist–Leninist movement, anti-revisionism refers to a doctrine which upholds the line of theory and practice associated with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and usually either Mao Zedong or Enver Hoxha as well...

s (which includes Marxist Leninists, Hoxhaists

Hoxhaism

"Hoxhaism" is an informal term used to refer to a variant of anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism that developed in the late 1970s due to a split in the Maoist movement, appearing after the ideological row between the Communist Party of China and the Party of Labour of Albania in 1978.The Albanians...

and Maoists

Maoism

Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...

) criticise the rule of the communist states by claiming that they were state capitalist

State capitalism

The term State capitalism has various meanings, but is usually described as commercial economic activity undertaken by the state with management of the productive forces in a capitalist manner, even if the state is nominally socialist. State capitalism is usually characterized by the dominance or...

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

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

was socialist during Stalin's time. Maoists believe that the Peoples Republic of China became state capitalist after Mao

Mao Zedong

's death. Hoxhaists believe that the Peoples Republic of China was always state capitalist and uphold Socialist Albania as the only socialist state after the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

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

Leninism

In Marxist philosophy, Leninism is the body of political theory for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party, and the achievement of a direct-democracy dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of socialism...

were the German-Dutch left communists, including Herman Gorter

Herman Gorter

Herman Gorter was a Dutch poet and socialist. He was a leading member of the Tachtigers, a highly influential group of Dutch writers who worked together in Amsterdam in the 1880s, centered around De Nieuwe Gids .Gorter's first book, a 4,000 verse epic poem called "Mei" , sealed his reputation...

, Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick

Paul Mattick

Paul Mattick Sr. was a Marxist political writer and social revolutionary, whose thought can be placed within the council communist and left communist traditions...

. Though most left communists see the October Revolution

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

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen...

was another communist who disagreed with Lenin's organizational methods that eventually led to the creation of the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

By Trotskyists

After the split between Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....

and Stalin, Trotskyists

Trotskyism

Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...

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

Stalinism

. There are various terms used by Trotskyists to define such states, such as "degenerated workers' state

Degenerated workers' state

In Trotskyist political theory the term degenerated workers' state has been used since the 1930s to describe the state of the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power in or about 1924...

" and "deformed workers' state

Deformed workers' state

In Trotskyist political theory, deformed workers' states are states where the bourgeoisie has been overthrown through social revolution, the industrial means of production have been largely nationalized bringing benefits to the working class, but where the working class has never held political power...

", "state capitalist" or "bureaucratic collectivist

Bureaucratic collectivism

Bureaucratic collectivism is a theory of class society. It is used by some Trotskyists to describe the nature of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and other similar states in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere .- Theory :...

". While Trotskyists are Leninists, there are other Marxists who reject Leninism entirely, arguing, for example, that the Leninist principle of democratic centralism

Democratic centralism

Democratic centralism is the name given to the principles of internal organization used by Leninist political parties, and the term is sometimes used as a synonym for any Leninist policy inside a political party...

was the source of the Soviet Union's slide away from communism. Maoists

Maoism

view the Soviet Union and most of its satellites as "state capitalist" as a result of destalinization, some also view modern China in this light.

By Anarchists

Anarchists

Anarchism

have been among the most vocal critics of contemporary and historical Communist party rule. The Irish

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

anarchist organization, Workers Solidarity Movement

Workers Solidarity Movement

The Workers Solidarity Movement is an anarchist organisation in Ireland broadly in the platformist tradition of Nestor Makhno. It was set up in 1984 and publishes the paper Workers Solidarity and the magazine Red and Black Revolution....

, states:

External links

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Global Museum on Communism
Museum of Communism
Foundation for Investigation of Communist Crimes
Crimes of Soviet Communists
The Black Book of Communism: Introduction
Summary of different estimates for total 20th century democide Note that only some of numbers are totals for the Communist states.
How many did the Communist regimes murder? By R. J. Rummel
R. J. Rummel
Rudolph Joseph Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career assembling data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Background

Areas of criticism

Political repression

Alternative accounts

Personality cults

Freedom of movement

Alternative accounts

Imperialism

World War II

Support of terrorism

Forced labor and deportations

Loss of life

Estimates

Economic policy

Social development

Artistic, scientific, and technological policies

Environmental policy

Left-wing criticism

By anti-revisionists

By left communists

By Trotskyists

By Anarchists

See also

Further reading

External links