During the twentieth century, an estimated 25 million people died under Soviet rule. Under Communist Chinese rule, the death toll was even higher—perhaps 65 million dead. This international bestseller (published in 1999) was the historic first attempt by a group of scholars (many of them former Communists) to compile a history of Communism’s crimes and terrors during the twentieth century, based on freshly released archives from the Soviet bloc. It was also an attempt to dignify the millions whose deaths have, until recently, remained state secrets.

What is Communism? As a philosophy, there are traces of the mentality going back centuries, from Thomas More’s depiction of the ideal society in Utopia to Plato’s Republic, in which he describes a beautifully planned city where justice and reason win over greed and corruption. 

There’s Communism as theory—and then there’s Communism as policy and practice. The latter is what concerns us here: the politics of Communism as brought to life through the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, Ho Chi Min, and Mao. The project began in earnest with the Russian Revolution of 1917 against the tsars. The Russian Democratic Socialists (or Bolsheviks, as they are more commonly known) proceeded to use a particular set of tactics to solidify and then retain control, including:

-executions of individuals (often without trials) by hanging, bludgeoning, firing squad—even poisoning and “car accidents”

-mass killing through deportation, intentionally-crafted famines, starvation

-forced labor camps for the uncooperative

-civil wars ((though the line between a government fighting off insurgents and a regime brutally repressing its unhappy citizens with gratuitous violence is a blurry one)

-burying and denying the truth of their atrocities from the rest of the world, and then minimizing and justifying those acts when the truth came to light

When these tactics are utilized, the terror that grips a people is acute. Mistrust over who was spying on whom paralyzed relations with friends and neighbors. Elaborate intelligence and police networks amplified the paranoia. One of Communism’s lingering hallmarks is the fear of the wrong person overhearing one’s honest thoughts and reporting it. The terror arrested the will of peasants well beyond the end of Stalin’s horrors, as if the possibility of relocation to Siberia never disappeared.

Whether for reasons of basic human nature, something in the DNA of Communism, or because Communism-in-practice began in a country with a long history of ruthless oppression, there is an unnerving consistency to the methods that Communists around the world have relied on. With only a few minor exceptions, the pattern inexorably emerges.

Communism as a theory about revolutions and what actual Communist revolutions ushered in are as disparate as chalk and cheese. But, as writer Ignazio Silone put it, "Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit." To understand the character of Communism, we must take an honest look at the revolutions and regimes Communism has created.

The phrase “crimes against humanity” has its origins in a document that France, Britain, and Russia signed in 1915, in which they denounced Turkey’s slaughter of Armenians. The definition of what constituted crimes against humanity expanded at the Nuremburg Trials to include “murder, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts against any civilian population before or during war.” But these stipulations were created in the light of World War II, and, thus, didn’t speak meaningfully to inhumane acts beyond the scope of war. Moreover, the definition of genocide that the post-WWII tribunals produced was also too narrow (“persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds”).

Adjustments made to the French criminal code in 1992 expanded the definition to include “concerted effort…to destroy totally or partially a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, or a group that has been determined on the basis of any other arbitrary criterion.”

If we judge Communism by this more capacious definition of genocide, most Communist regimes were guilty of not just war crimes, crimes against peace, but crimes against humanity—including genocide.

Communism’s variety of genocide has been social rather than ethnic. Fear went beyond being an individual who could fall from a regime’s grace: There was the fear of one’s group suddenly being deemed an evil (or “antisocial” or “insubordinate”) element impeding the people’s march toward progress.

One of the early leaders of the Cheka (Russian secret police) instructed his minions in the fall of 1918 that they were not targeting individuals. “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class,” he told them. The cronies were not to look for incriminating documents, but an incriminating disposition. “The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots, his education, his training, and his occupation.” 

The Bolsheviks came after intellectuals, religious leaders, nobility, and entire professions such as military officers. They adopted the policy of de-Cossackization, in which people belonging to the Cossack region were butchered or displaced when Bolsheviks destroyed their villages. 

Under Stalin, the kulaks became the group to be hated and eliminated. Kulaks were peasants with enough wealth to employ workers. Official Soviet policy in the early 1930s was “to exterminate the kulaks as a class.” The process of dekulakization and the collectivization of their farms led to the deaths of millions, either through slaughter, deportation, or starvation through the famine Stalinist policies had created.

In Cambodia, Pol Pot’s regime systematically eliminated its intellectual class. It didn’t take much to be considered an intellectual either. Simply wearing glasses put a person at risk for prison, torture, and execution.

The Tibetans have suffered tremendously under Maoist Chinese rule. Though there are plenty of stories of cruelty that cannot be verified, the corroboration of numerous eyewitness accounts can’t be overlooked. The Dalai Lama himself reports that Tibetans were, “shot, beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded.” Official figures from the Tibetan government seem unrealistically high, but the death toll could be about 800,000.

Russia’s history is stained with the blood of not just the guilty but the innocent, not just treacherous politicians but peasants. Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) lived up to his moniker, and even Peter the Great (1672-1725) wasn’t all that great. Peter had a penchant for rapacity. He killed his own son with his bare hands. The tsars were hardly the world’s most beneficent rulers either. Still, Bolsheviks killed as many dissidents (or supposed dissidents, anyway) in four months as the tsars executed in a century. And the tsars gave the dissidents the dignity of a court trial. The Bolsheviks exemplified the callous enjoyment of punitive measures they hated so much in the tsars. 

The emancipation of Russian serfs in 1861 marked a radical departure from centuries of oppressive servitude that the peasants had endured. The Russian tsars were making changes that allowed for a more humane society to emerge, including trade and arts. However, the culture of violence was not so readily expunged from the Russian psyche.

Russia’s entry in the Great War in 1914 reversed the trajectory the nation had been on toward a more humane society. Russia lost 8.5 million men in the war, and the violence of the time reawakened a tradition of violence that came much more naturally to Russians than freedom. They returned to the pattern of oppression and servitude. Lenin himself talked of using the bloodlust that the imperial war had stoked in Russians to fuel the socialist revolution.

Interestingly, the Bolshevik frontrunners, from Lenin to Trotsky and Stalin, were rhetoricians and bureaucrats who never saw battle. Perhaps this lack of exposure to the horrors of war made the bureaucratic levers of massacre and famine easier to pull. The society Bolsheviks were attempting to build was founded on theory—not the carnage of war.

In the space of a few years, decades of movement toward democracy reverted to a millennium-old Russian assumption that progress only came through iron-fisted subjugation of the peasants. This was Ivan’s and Peter’s modus operandi as well.

Russia was undoubtedly the epicenter of Communism- and socialism-in-practice. Russia’s penchant for brutality and repression are indelibly printed in Communism, and the same traits show up in its global exportation. Mao, for example, called Stalin the “great friend of the Chinese people.” Whatever Sino-Soviet conflicts flared up occasionally, there were deep, ideological ties between the two nations. Communism’s results are tragically similar wherever they are tried.

Oceans of ink have been spilled to document and denounce what happened to the Jews and Gypsies at the hands of Nazi oppressors. Thousands of books and scores of movies unblushingly recount Holocaust horrors. Without diminishing the chilling cruelty of the Nazi regime or the terrors of war and genocide it unleashed on the world, we must also remember the bloodbath in which Communism has repeatedly soaked the globe.

In terms of sheer number of deaths, Nazism claimed 25 million lives. The death toll under Communism comes out to around 100 million. By remembering the dead, we honor them. Gaining a clearer picture of what happened and documenting it well is the least we can do toward that end.

With so many millions of lives lost through assassinations, firing squads, indiscriminate massacres, wholesale deportations, gulags, planned starvation, and forced labor, why is there such reticence to denounce these regimes’ crimes and terror—even years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? Why isn’t public outrage on par with the response to Nazism and the Holocaust? Why is it easy to hate Hitler, but maintain an aura of respectful deference around Chairman Mao, “Uncle Ho,” Comrade Lenin—even a butcher like Stalin?

There are at least a few reasons for this:

For one, these regimes took great pains to hide crimes and justify those crimes that could no longer be hidden. No one had access to Communist archives. The Western media further obscured the truth with glowing reports about the Soviet system, which they discovered on carefully-guided government tours. The West was tragically self-deceived, and many bought into the Soviet propaganda machine.

Tyrants were also excellent at thwarting any attempts to discredit the regime. They would imprison, disappear, exile, or besmirch the reputation of any who attempted to out them.

Another reason Communism has not been criticized as roundly as Nazism is that there remains an element of intrigue and allure surrounding the concept of revolution. For several centuries now, there's been something attractive about the defiantly raised fist. Revolution continues to be trendy. There are active revolutionary groups that enjoy the rights to free speech and yet are swift to quash even slight criticisms of their patron saints. Che Guevara still has his admirers—and his shirts still sell. Even butchers like Lenin and Mao are still hailed as heroes who accomplished great things.

A further complicating factor is that the Soviet Union was a critical force in helping bring down Hitler’s Germany. They might have been Communists, but they helped the world. The Soviets leaned into anti-patriotic sentiment that the world was beginning to endorse and led the way with anti-fascist rhetoric. The Soviets denounced the fascists vehemently, even as the Communists made their own land grabs.

By distancing themselves from fascism, Communism regimes found it very helpful to memorialize the Holocaust, and frame the Nazi atrocities as the apex of inhumanity. By constantly redirecting humanity’s ire to Auschwitz and Nazi crimes, Communists were able to avoid the scrutinizing spotlight themselves. It seemed out of the question that those who had brought a hateful, genocidal system to its knees could be running one themselves. It was too jarring and cruel an irony, and most of the world preferred to look the other way.

These factors help explain why assessments of Communism have been far too generous and critiques have been slight and even begrudgingly offered.