In the 20th century, an unfathomable catastrophe played out in Russia. As first Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin forced through their Bolshevik workers revolution and built the Soviet Union, they destroyed a civilisation and perpetrated unspeakable crimes against their own population. Yet despite knowing what was happening on Europe’s doorstep, the western world was broadly silent, and a combination of historical chance and deliberate cover-up means that to this day, the extent of the tragedy remains largely unknown.
The worst of the crimes happened in the period between the October Revolution in 1917, when the Bolsheviks came into power, and 1956, when Stalin was denounced by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. In just under four decades, around 30 million people were killed in civil war, as a result of political persecution and the famine that arose from the forced collectivisation of agriculture, and in the system of GULAG labour camps.
The civil war. It started with the October Revolution, when Lenin’s Marxist Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government that had been in power since the Tsarist regime was toppled in February 2017. But before the proletariat’s self-appointed leaders could complete their vision of bringing Karl Marx’s theory into practice, Russia was engulfed in a bloody civil war that lasted until 1923. It was engineered by the Bolsheviks to deal with their two enemies, the “white” anti-communist armies and the “green” peasant guerrilla forces, and cost the lives of an estimated 15 million people, of which one million were killed in combat and the rest perished as a result of disease and hunger brought on by the war, including five million who died in the famine of 1921-22.
While the civil war was raging, the Bolsheviks went about the task of changing Russia, most importantly to collectivise the dominant agriculture sector and replace the free market with central command. But the Bolsheviks, who had never had broad popular support, were losing clout due to the war and the economic hardship that followed the revolution, and in 1921, they temporarily gave up on their plans to force change on the Russian agrarian society and instituted the New Economic Policy, which allowed a semi-capitalist economy and for the peasants to continue to live largely as they had before 1917. Political oppression and the war on traditional Russian culture – including the Church – continued, but the economy grew back to pre-war levels and it was a period of relative peace.
The forced collectivization. That ended in 1930. Lenin had died in 1924, and his successor, Joseph Stalin, gradually assumed near-total control of the Communist Party and the Politburo, the central policy making authority. Despite a decade of the communists trying to persuade them, by the end of the 1920s less than 2% of Russian peasants lived in farming collectives, but Stalin now set about to force them to collectivise and to destroy the Kulaks, the property-owning farmers. To achieve it, around 25 million small farms were to be forcefully changed into large state-owned collectives, and the brutality needed to accomplish this in a few years was enormous: at least half a million peasants were killed between 1930 and 1933. The worst fate fell to the Kulaks: those who resisted were executed, some were allocated new land at the periphery of the new collective farms, and the richest – perhaps 400,000 families – were forcefully deported, mostly to isolated regions in the north. The horror of their experience is hard to fathom: stripped of their possessions, separated from their families and transported like cattle, they were often without adequate clothes to protect them from the elements and simply left to die.
The famine of 1932-33. The new collective farms were tasked with feeding the cities and producing grains for export, but hampered by dreadful inefficiency, they often failed to fill their quotas and as a result there was little left over for the peasants themselves. A catastrophic famine ensued. It is without question that the regime used the system to suppress those areas where resistance had been most persistent, such as Ukraine (where the famine became known as the Holodomor, a word that translates as “killing by starvation”) and Northern Caucasus, and as the government further denied the existence of any shortages and prevented foreign aid from entering the USSR, it is clear that this, one of the worst famines in human history, was a man-made disaster. Up to seven million people are estimated to have starved to death in 1932-33.
The GULAG. Since the early days of Bolshevik rule, the communists had operated a system of forced labour camps, knowns as GULAGs, and as Stalin ramped up the terror against his own population, the camps multiplied both in number and size. It is estimated that around 20 million slaves worked in the GULAGs between 1930-53 and that as many as four million died, to which can be added the millions of deported Kulaks, who were not actual prisoners but worked outside the camps under unimaginable hardship. The GULAGs were an instrumental part of the national production machine, serving the Soviet’s need to build infrastructure and a modern army powerful enough to survive “socialism in one country,” as was needed after the Bolsheviks’ original vision of world revolution had failed to materialise. The GULAGS survived Stalin, though the number of political prisoners was much smaller after his death in 1953.
The Great Terror. Throughout the reigns of Lenin and Stalin, political killings were commonplace. The worst period was during the Great Terror of 1936-38, Stalin’s purge of his political enemies, when it is estimated that perhaps more than one million people were murdered, many summarily executed without trial.
All told, up to 30 million people were killed and many millions driven from their homes in the first four decades of communist rule in Russia, victims of a political system where those who didn’t fit in had to be destroyed, discarded like weeds to make way for a new, perfect world. The Soviet Union was behind many other bad deeds, such as the occupation-by-proxy of Eastern Europe, and they inspired and supported other communist experiments across the world where horrifying crimes were committed, from China to Cambodia. But while the other great evil of the 20th century, the Holocaust, is widely infamous and denounced, the crimes of communism are seldom discussed and the ideology, despite the horrors committed in its name, retains an aura of decency. The question is why?
That is the topic of the second part of this series: How the world forgot the crimes of communism – The cover-up.