The Russian Genocide (1917-1989)

The Russian genocide occurred between 1917 and 1989. In total, 61,911,000 died (this is an average estimate), 7,142,000 of them foreigners. That means the Soviets killed 54,769,000 of their own people. In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved.

            The Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels and first published in 1848.  It was forgotten for some time afterwards, between 1850 and 1870, but remembered by a few German revolutionaries. It was then published again in 1872 as the result of the trial of two Social-Democratic leaders. After this, the number of social and social-democratic parties in the world rose rapidly. There were many translations and new editions of it, and by 1914, it had been translated into many languages, notably the major languages of the Russian empire. Marx first published Capital in 1867, and Marx somehow became a revolutionary of ‘scientific’ socialism.

            In the text, the first line states “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism”. A spectre can be defined as “a mental representation of some haunting experience”. Does Marx mean that communism is in fact a negative ideology? Communism struck fear in the hearts of most of Western Europe. Why shouldn’t it? It is a regime built upon control. As much as a communist will say communism is an ideology of freedom, the fact remains that communism is extremely oppressive. Here are the measures of communism as prescribed in The Communist Manifesto.

“1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes”

“2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax”

“3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.”

“4. Confistication of the property of all emigrants and rebels.”

“5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.”      

“6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.”

“7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.”

“8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.”

“9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.”

“10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combintion of education with industrial production, &c., &c.”

           Revolution has come

 In 1917, the Russians had a revolution. They overthrew the Tsar and sent him and his family to die in Siberia. Between 1820 and 1910, the “murderous” Tsars killed about 4,700 people. The Russian Revolution was probably not what the majority of Russians wanted. There were riots and uprising all across Russia from 1917 to 1922. What did Lenin and Trostsky do to these people expressing themselves? He killed them. Men, women, and children, all sent to death camps, executed in large numbers, and starved to death. Is this really “not-so-bad” as Stalin, as some people claim?

            There was more resistance. The anti-communist resistance was not just in one solid form, but many, showing that the majority of the country disliked their new regime. There were anarchists, social-democrats, and even national socialists. The Russian civil war in some areas was a conflict between communism and fascism, but in others, a conflict between communism and democracy. Their enemies did commit crimes, but it does not justify murdering four million people.

Deaths between 1917-1922

            The economy was declining. The ruble had lost 96 percent of its value by 1920. The cities ran out of food, due to the collapse of the economy. And so did the rural areas of Russia, because the ruthless communists robbed it of its food to feed the communists of the cities. The rural people were butchered and starved by Lenin. A people’s government indeed. They started a large program which stole the countryside’s food, and starved them so that they would be submissive. The Bolsheviks deliberately started the immense famine of 1921-1922, killing five million men, women, and children.

Trotsky in 1936

The annual risk of a Soviet citizen being murdered by his own government.

Stalin enters

            In 1924, Lenin died (Trotsky was executed by Stalin in Mexico in 1940). But salvation was not here for the Russian people. Stalin stepped in. Although there was still resistance to collectivization in 1930, and even though some peasants managed to kill many Soviet officials, the State butchered six million of the resisters.

            In 1932-1933, Stalin starved around seven million innocent men, women, and children, mostly in the Ukraine. The food they had was taken by the government, and they were prevented from obtaining food. The Ukraine independence movement had lasted longer than the Lenin and Stalin eras. For about 200 years, the country had been under tsarist rule. With the Russian Revolution, they were given this opportunity and they declared themselves a “People’s Republic” and made Kiev their capital. Unfortunately, this independence would be short-lived. Lenin wanted all of the areas formerly controlled by the Tsars, especially the Ukraine, which was very fertile. For four years, the Ukrainian national army fought against Lenin’s Red Army and Russia’s White Army (troops loyal to the Tsars), and also against other invaders, like the Germans and the Poles.

            By 1921, the battles ended and the Ukraine was divided up, the western part going to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The Soviets began the aforementioned theft of Ukraine’s food supplies. Also, a drought occurred in the Ukraine, battering the starving people even more. After Lenin died, Stalin ruthlessly killed 5000 intellectuals and leaders, in 1929, after falsely accusing them of plotting against the Soviet Union. They were either executed without trail or deported to death camps. Village farmers were basically rural factory workers on collective farms. Anyone who refused to work in the collectivized system were called a Kulak and deported.

 Stalin collectivized the farms and livestock of the Soviet Union. This is basically the first measure of communism.  In Russia, 80% of the people were traditional village farmers. Among them, a class called Kulaks (they were  named that by the communists), who were previously rich farmers. They had owned 24 or more acres of land, or had employed workers. Stalin claimed that any revolt would be led by the Kulaks, so he put forth a policy that aimed at destroying the Kulaks as a class. They were declared “enemies of the people”. All of their possessions were taken, and it was forbidden for others to help them. It is estimated that ten million people were deported to “special settlements” in Siberia, a third of them dying in the freezing living conditions. Everyone but small children, married girls, and women with children became slave workers in mines or large industrial projects.

                                                                             A propaganda campaign started using young communists who attempted to make the people like the Soviets. There was propaganda, coercion, and threats, but the people resisted them via rebellious acts and sabotage. They burnt their homes, took back their belongings from the collectives, harassed and assassinated Soviet authorities, thus putting them in direct conflict with Stalin. Stalin, of course, sent troops and the GPU (the secret  police) to crush the rebellion. They fired warning shots, but also shot the people directly. Resistance still continued, because the people did not want to become another brick in the Soviet wall. Many refused to work, letting the grain rot in the fields. Stalin responded by starving the people.

                                                                              Most of the wheat crop was put on the foreign market to aid Stalin’s Five Year Plan. If the wheat remained in the Ukraine, it would have fed everyone there for up to two years. The Ukrainian communists appealed to Stalin for emergency food aid and a decrease in grain quotas. Stalin denounced them and sent 100,000 loyal Soviet soldiers to purge the Ukrainian Communist Party. They then sealed off the borders of the Ukraine, preventing any food getting in. Thus the country became a large concentration camp. Soviet police went house to house, confiscating stored food, leaving families without anything at all. All food was property of the State, and if it was stolen, even the stubble of wheat, the “enemy of the people” would be shot or imprisoned for ten years or more.

“The well-to-do and middle peasants would not join; they would not sign. Here the agitators saw a problem; they started making lists and started accusations, but without any trial or hearing they started sending these people out to Siberia or Russia. They never came back. The rest of the peasants were scared to death and signed without wavering, because they feared exile to Siberia. This lasted two years.”

- Halyna B., a witness to the Ukrainian famine.

            The first affected of this starvation were children. Their stomachs swelled into large sacs and their limbs became as skinny as twigs. The children smiled no longer. Their faces were pain and hunger. Their mothers threw them onto railways cars into the city so that perhaps someone would take pity on the children and feed them. In Kiev, for instance, there were people just dropping dead on the streets. Their corpses were taken and buried in mass graves, and even people who were lying on the sidewalk who were still alive were taken and buried. While officials remained well fed, some people ate leaves and bushes, killed domestic animals and amphibians such as frogs, and cooked them. Some went mad with hunger and became cannibals, even eating children.

Victims of the Ukrainian famine

“I was born on December 28, 1907, in the village of Hanivka Verkhnodniprovsk region. In 1929 I was sent with my whole family out of Ukraine to Volohodsk in Russia and later by train north to the wilderness to cut wood and build shelters. The family consisted of seven people. We were forcibly taken from our home in the process of completely liquidating that class of kulaks who did not accept collectivization. Everything was taken away from us… In the years 1932-33 it was almost impossible to buy bread. For two kilograms of bread you paid 40 rubles, when a workers earned 150 to 170 rubles a month… in 1933, 37 persons were serving sentences in the Solovky camp for cannibalism.”

- L. Kasian, a witness to the Ukrainian famine

            Meanwhile, the Soviet granaries were practically bursting at the amount of “surplus” grain accumulated. Most of this went to the farm animals which were deemed “more important” than the starving people. In the Ukraine, by the spring of 1933, 25,000 people died every day, and by the end of 1933, 25 percent of the population of the Ukraine was dead. After the kulaks were destroyed, Stalin let food back in. But he still prosecuted people for political crimes.

            Stalin killed an estimated four to eleven million people between 1935 and 1938. The toll of genocidal deaths caused by the Soviets thus far is higher than the amount of people killed during the Holocaust. In 1949, 60,000 Estonians were deported or executed. What about the press? There was one State-run newspaper, Pravda, which means “truth”. It was founded in 1912 and became the official newspaper in 1917 when freedom of the press was abolished. It supported the Soviets blindly, during every single event that happened between 1917 and 1989.

            On March 5, 1953, Stalin died. Khrushchev, who had ruled over the Ukraine, took over under the ruse of a more “collective” government. The leadership seemed weak to the people and in June of 1953 and throughout the Soviet states there were uprisings. There was a labour uprising in East Germany which was crushed by Soviet troops.

            There was also an uprising in Vorkuta, a concentration camp in northeast European Russia. The prisoners had a mass strike and voiced political demands. They were mass executed.

            In February of 1954, Khrushchev ordered seventy million acres of Asiatic Russia planted with corn. In the middle of 1954, compulsory labour minimums were increased substantially, and anyone who fell short was taxed heavily. In April 1955, there was a mass replacement of collective farm chairmen by urban party members. In 1956, Hungary managed to liberate itself from the Soviets.

            Unfortunately, Krushchev’s attempted de-Stalinization did not work. It caused mass confusion and chaos in the countryside. In 1963, Krushchev’s seven-year economical plan was cut short 2 years before its completion. He developed missile forces to have more young men for labour because they would not be needed in the army. This policy finished with the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a disaster in Soviet eyes and it did not do much to warm relations with the west. Meanwhile, political enemies and innocent citizens of Krushchev were being executed as usual in the Soviet Union. In October 1964, Krushchev was voted out of office.

            Now the most powerful men were Brezhnev and Kosygin. By the mid sixties, the Soviet Union was an intricate industrial nation with massive industries connected over massive distances. How was this achieved? Mostly through the labour of the poor men, women, and children in the prison/labour camps; these were the people who were “non-citizens” in the view of the Soviet Union. It doesn’t seem very ideal to have one’s people as slaves now, does it? Thanks to the labour of the poor people imprisoned in the labour camps, the Soviet Union was on the upturn, rapidly increasing in standard of living (doubtful that the prisoners were included in that.) But during the later years of Brezhnev’s era, the economy began to stagnate.

            In 1965, the Kosygin reforms called to give industrial enterprises more control over what they did. Before they were not allowed to deviate from the Soviet plan. But, the new style of leadership did not go over well, especially with the military and planning ministries. They were powerful enough to block most of the reform. Kosygin’s reforms aimed at increasing the productivity of industries by getting rid of surplus labour, so he didn’t have much support from the workers (some of whom probably ended up in a prison camp)

Czechoslovaks watch Soviet tanks from a café

In 1968, the Prague Spring occurred. The Czechs and the Slovaks were showing increasing independence under their leader, Dubček. His reforms were seen by the Soviets as a threat. This came to an end when 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 Soviet tanks invaded the country. Again, we can be sure that many of the people in the Czechoslovakian government at the time or even people who resisted were either executed or sent to concentration camps.  

In the early 70s the party was weakening. Throughout the 70s, the Soviets had been importing grain from the United States, their deadly enemy. In 1980, a reformist movement in Poland was repressed (which means that executions were likely to have occurred.). Martial law was declared for a year. The group, Solidarity, still remained and continued to undermine the Soviets. Brezhnev died, and two days later, Andropov was announced elected as general secretary (leader). During his rather short rule, he replaced 20% of Soviet ministers and regional party first secretaries (leaders). Andropov was heavily bent on restoring discipline in the Soviet Union, which means more people in prison camps. He also did a lot of anticorruption investigations. His health was deteriorating though, and in 1984, he died. Chernenko replaced him, but he was also old and of ill health. He destroyed his predecessor’s corruption investigations. Also in his era, KGB (the Soviet secret police) repression of dissidents increased. That means more people in prison camps. Chernenko died in 1985.

            Chernenko was replaced by Gorbachev. He instituted many reforms, such as relaxing censorship, repression, reducing the power of the KGB, and democratisation. Things were looking up for the battered Russian people. Thanks to Gorbachev’s relaxation of censorship, nationalist feelings were evoked in the Soviet satellite states who demanded freedom. In 1989, all of the communist governments of the satellite states were overthrown with little resistance from Moscow, a far cry from the Prague Spring. Also in 1989, Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan. Also evolving from the relaxation of censorship were media scandals exposing things like social and economic problems for the first time, the second-rate position of women, and also alcoholism. Also exposed were the horrible crimes committed by Stalin, such as the Gulags and the Great Purges.

On February 7, 1990, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party gave up its monopoly of power. The satellite states began to become even more independent, with Lithuania declaring independence on March 11^th of that year. There, unfortunately for the Lithuanians, was a large Soviet prescence in the country, in the form of troops. They blockaded the country, and in January of 1991, there were battles between the Soviet troops and the Lithuanian citizens, resulting in 20 deaths. On March 30^th, 1990, Estonia declared independence. There was an election for the president of Russia in June 1991, and Boris Yeltsin was elected president. He was Gorbachev’s rival.

Yeltsin freed the satellite states, making them independent republics. There was an attempted Soviet coup in 1991, but it did not succeed, and Yeltsin banned the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Russia. On December 8, 1991, the leaders from the satellite states and Yeltsin met and dissolved the Soviet Union.

            Most of the dead of the Russian genocide died in the Stalin era. This genocide, this holocaust cost more innocent lives than World War II and the Nazi Holocaust put together. That is why we must remember the innocent men, women, and children perishing in the Gulags and the labour camps.

References:

http://humphrys.humanists.net/soviet.html

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/stalin.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Soviet_Union_%281953-1985%29

http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1986/518615.shtml

http://mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/russia/lectures/43risekhrush.html

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM

http://www.rense.com/general62/holo.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Soviet_Union_%281985-1991%29

http://www.communist-party.ca/archive/manifesto.html

Some Suggested Reading:

The Black Book of Communism by Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn