Communist party mass killings have been criticized by members of the political right, who state that the mass killings are an indictment of communism as an ideology, and has also been criticized by other socialists such as
anarchists,
communists,
democratic socialists,
libertarian socialists, and
Marxists. Opponents of this hypothesis, including those on the
political left and
communist party members, state that these killings were aberrations caused by specific
authoritarian regimes, and not caused by communism itself, and point to mass deaths that they say were caused by anti-communism and
capitalism as a counterpoint to those killings.
Ideology Historian
Klas-Göran Karlsson writes: "
Ideologies are systems of ideas, which cannot commit crimes independently. However, individuals, collectives and states that have defined themselves as communist have committed crimes in the name of communist ideology, naming communism as the direct source of motivation for their crimes."
John Gray,
Daniel Goldhagen, and
Richard Pipes consider the ideology of communism to be a significant causative factor in mass killings. In the introduction to
The Black Book of Communism,
Stéphane Courtois claims an association between communism and
criminality, stating that "Communist regimes ... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government", while adding that this criminality lies at the level of ideology rather than state practice. , printed in red ink, of Karl Marx's journal
Neue Rheinische Zeitung from 19 May 1849 Professor Mark Bradley writes that communist theory and practice has often been in tension with
human rights and most communist states followed the lead of
Karl Marx in rejecting "Enlightenment-era inalienable individual political and civil rights" in favor of "collective economic and social rights." Christopher J. Finlay posits that Marxism legitimates violence without any clear limiting principle because it rejects moral and ethical norms as constructs of the dominant class, and states that "it would be conceivable for revolutionaries to commit atrocious crimes in bringing about a socialist system, with the belief that their crimes will be retroactively absolved by the new system of ethics put in place by the
proletariat."
Rustam Singh states that Marx had alluded to the possibility of peaceful revolution; after the failed
Revolutions of 1848, Singh states that Marx emphasized the need for violent revolution and
revolutionary terror. Literary historian
George Watson cited an 1849 article written by
Friedrich Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" and published in Marx's journal
Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and commented that "entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution against the bourgeoisie, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history." One book review criticized this interpretation, maintaining that "what Marx and Engels are calling for is ... at the very least a kind of
cultural genocide; but it is not obvious, at least from Watson's citations, that actual mass killing, rather than (to use their phraseology) mere 'absorption' or 'assimilation', is in question." Talking about Engels's 1849 article, historian
Andrzej Walicki states: "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide."
Jean-François Revel writes that Joseph Stalin recommended study of the 1849 Engels article in his 1924 book
On Lenin and Leninism. According to Rummel, the killings committed by communist regimes can best be explained as the result of the marriage between absolute power and the absolutist ideology of Marxism. Rummel states that "communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and its chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusades against nonbelievers. What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's instruments of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and the family." Rummels writes that Marxist communists saw the construction of their
utopia as "though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And, thus, this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths."
Benjamin Valentino writes that "apparently high levels of political support for murderous regimes and leaders should not automatically be equated with support for mass killing itself. Individuals are capable of supporting violent regimes or leaders while remaining indifferent or even opposed to specific policies that these regimes and carried out." Valentino quotes Vladimir Brovkin as saying that "a vote for the Bolsheviks in 1917 was not a vote for Red Terror or even a vote for a dictatorship of the proletariat." According to Valentino, such strategies were so violent because they economically dispossess large numbers of people, commenting: "Social transformations of this speed and magnitude have been associated with mass killing for two primary reasons. First, the massive social dislocations produced by such changes have often led to
economic collapse,
epidemics, and, most important, widespread famines. ... The second reason that communist regimes bent on the radical transformation of society have been linked to mass killing is that the revolutionary changes they have pursued have clashed inexorably with the fundamental interests of large segments of their populations. Few people have proved willing to accept such far-reaching sacrifices without intense levels of coercion." According to
Jacques Sémelin, "communist systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new
Promethean political
imaginaire."
Daniel Chirot and
Clark McCauley write that, especially in
Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union,
Mao Zedong's China, and
Pol Pot's Cambodia, a fanatical certainty that socialism could be made to work motivated communist leaders in "the ruthless
dehumanization of their enemies, who could be suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong. Furthermore, if events did not work out as they were supposed to, then that was because
class enemies, foreign spies and
saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no circumstances could it be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that meant capitulation to the forces of reaction." Michael Mann writes that
communist party members were "ideologically driven, believing that in order to create a new socialist society, they must lead in socialist zeal. Killings were often popular, the rank-and-file as keen to exceed killing quotas as production quotas." According to
Vladimir Tismăneanu, "the Communist project, in such countries as the USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered." Alex Bellamy writes that "communism's ideology of selective extermination" of target groups was first developed and applied by Joseph Stalin but that "each of the communist regimes that massacred large numbers of civilians during the Cold War developed their own distinctive account", while
Steven T. Katz states that distinctions based on class and nationality, stigmatized and stereotyped in various ways, created an "otherness" for victims of communist rule that was important for legitimating oppression and death.
Martin Shaw writes that "nationalist ideas were at the heart of many mass killings by Communist states", beginning with Stalin's "new nationalist doctrine of 'socialism in one country'", and killing by revolutionary movements in the Third World was done in the name of national liberation.
Political system (centre) reading the 1937 indictment against
Karl Radek during the second
Moscow Trial Anne Applebaum writes that "without exception, the
Leninist belief in the
one-party state was and is characteristic of every communist regime" and "the
Bolshevik use of violence was repeated in every communist revolution." Phrases which were first uttered by
Vladimir Lenin and
Cheka founder
Felix Dzerzhinsky were uttered all over the world. Applebaum states that as late as 1976,
Mengistu Haile Mariam unleashed a
Red Terror in Ethiopia. To his colleagues in the Bolshevik government, Lenin was quoted as saying: "If we are not ready to shoot a saboteur and
White Guardist, what sort of revolution is that?".
Robert Conquest stated that Stalin's purges were not contrary to the principles of
Leninism, rather, they were a natural consequence of the system which was established by Lenin, who personally ordered the killing of local groups of class enemy hostages.
Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, architect of
perestroika and
glasnost and later head of the Presidential Commission for the Victims of Political Repression, elaborates on this point, stating: "The truth is that in punitive operations Stalin did not think up anything that was not there under Lenin: executions, hostage taking, concentration camps, and all the rest." Historian
Robert Gellately concurs, commenting: "To put it another way, Stalin initiated very little that Lenin had not already introduced or previewed."
Stephen Hicks of
Rockford College ascribes the violence characteristic of 20th-century socialist rule to these collectivist regimes' abandonment of protections of
civil rights and rejection of the values of
civil society. Hicks writes that whereas "in practice every liberal capitalist country has a solid record for being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives", in socialism "practice has time and again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships prior to the twentieth century. Each socialist regime has collapsed into dictatorship and begun killing people on a huge scale."
Eric D. Weitz states that the mass killing in communist states is a natural consequence of the failure of the rule of law, commonly seen during periods of social upheaval in the 20th century. For both communist and non-communist mass killings, "genocides occurred at moments of extreme social crisis, often generated by the very policies of the regimes", and are not inevitable but are political decisions.
Steven Rosefielde writes that communist rulers had to choose between changing course and "terror-command" and more often than not, they chose the latter. Michael Mann posits that a lack of institutionalized authority structures meant that a chaotic mix of both centralized control and party factionalism were factors which contributed to the killings.
Leaders Professor Matthew Krain states that many scholars have pointed to
revolutions and
civil wars as providing the opportunity for radical leaders and ideologies to gain power and the preconditions for mass killing by the state. Professor Nam Kyu Kim writes that exclusionary ideologies are critical to explaining mass killing, but the organizational capabilities and individual characteristics of revolutionary leaders, including their attitudes towards risk and violence, are also important. Besides opening up political opportunities for new leaders to eliminate their political opponents, revolutions bring to power leaders who are more apt to commit large-scale acts of violence against civilians in order to legitimize and strengthen their own power. Genocide scholar
Adam Jones states that the
Russian Civil War was very influential on the emergence of leaders like Stalin and it also accustomed people to "harshness, cruelty, terror."
Martin Malia called the "brutal conditioning" of the two World Wars important to understanding communist violence, although not its source. Historian
Helen Rappaport describes
Nikolay Yezhov, the bureaucrat who was in charge of the NKVD during the
Great Purge, as a physically diminutive figure of "limited intelligence" and "narrow political understanding. ... Like other instigators of mass murder throughout history, [he] compensated for his lack of physical stature with a pathological cruelty and the use of brute terror."
Russian and
world history scholar John M. Thompson places personal responsibility directly on
Joseph Stalin. According to him, "much of what occurred only makes sense if it stemmed in part from the disturbed mentality, pathological cruelty, and extreme paranoia of Stalin himself. Insecure, despite having established a dictatorship over the party and country, hostile and defensive when confronted with criticism of the excesses of collectivization and the sacrifices required by high-tempo industrialization, and deeply suspicious that past, present, and even yet unknown future opponents were plotting against him, Stalin began to act as a person beleaguered. He soon struck back at enemies, real or imaginary." Professors Pablo Montagnes and Stephane Wolton posit that the purges in the Soviet Union and China can be attributed to the
personalist leadership of Stalin and Mao, who were incentivized by having both control of the security apparatus used to carry out the purges and control of the appointment of replacements for those purged. Slovenian philosopher
Slavoj Žižek attributes Mao allegedly viewing human life as disposable to his "cosmic perspective" on humanity. American historian and author
William Rubinstein wrote that "Most of the millions who perished at the hands of Stalin,
Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot and the other communist dictators died because the party's leaders believed they belonged to a dangerous or subversive social class or political grouping." == Debate over famines ==