1
Dystopia
The Red Holocaust was a tsunami that swept across the planet, killing tens of millions in two primary waves. The first wave began in 1929 with Soviet collectivization, intensified during the Great Terror, changed character during and immediately after World War II, weakened, surging anew before Stalin died. Geographically, it inundated the Soviet Union, and was spread westward and eastward by military conquest, occupation and insurrectionary incitement in eastern Europe and North Korea.
The second wave was driven by communist state seizures elsewhere in Asia and beyond, starting with Maoâs victory in 1949, and then sweeping south into Indochina, where it was intensified by anti-colonialism and national liberation. Although Stalin was complicitous in these killings, the primary responsibility lay with his devotees: Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot. The common denominators throughout were despotic resolve and terror command economy in the public, household and civic spheres. As long as they and Kim Il Sung reigned, the killings persisted, and still continue under Kim Jong Il.
This wasnât the utopia Marx envisioned in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the Communist Manifesto or his more mature writings. Communism as he conceived it was an harmonious society free of human exploitation, where everyone fully actualized his or her human potential, achieved by abolishing private property, profit-seeking business and money. Although exploiters would resist, Marx predicted that the class struggle would ineluctably culminate in communismâs peaceful dialectical victory. A Red Holocaust was superfluous. Utopia couldnât be denied.
However, Lenin and Stalin claimed that communismâs birth pangs could be shortened by a vanguard of the working class using insurrection and repression to seize the state, and expedite the attainment of universal prosperity. This heresy didnât alter the principles of communist humanitarianism, but opened the door to despotism.
It makes little difference whether Lenin and Stalin were true believers, wolves in sheepâs clothing or schizophrenics. Whatever their intent, the humanist values they espoused would be mocked by their actions; everything would be topsy-turvy.
In Marxâs paradise, individuals would not only strive to maximize their personal welfare by searching utility-enhancing opportunities; they would harmoniously cooperate to chose the best communitarian provision of public goods and voluntary social activities. The peopleâs will would democratically govern the supply of public goods.1 Consumer sovereignty would determine the characteristics, quantities and assortments of household goods (even under conditions of full abundance),2 and community sovereignty would fix civic activities. Stalinâs directives in the best case would be redundant; otherwise, they would be discordant.
Marxists didnât contest that Leninâs suppression of democracy and command economic domination over household and civic activities violated communist self-regulatory principles. State control was only intended as a temporary expedient that would gradually wither with the vestiges of capitalism, to be ultimately replaced by a mature popular reign foreswearing private property, business and entrepreneurship. The classless society of the future would be self-regulating just as Marx predicted, but in the interim, command economy and the Communist Partyâs vigilance were indispensable.
This wouldnât matter if proletarian will initially, and the classless peopleâs will later, corresponded perfectly with Communist Party directives, but what if Marx were mistaken? Suppose that people in the classless future, discovering that communism didnât generate the harmony and prosperity expected, decided to decriminalize private property, business, entrepreneurship and the money economy. If the Communist Party refused to accept this judgment, it would assume the role of peopleâs oppressor, not liberator as claimed. Instead of each individual compatibly actualizing his or her potential, everyone would be stifled by Marxâs misjudgment and the partyâs intransigence. Lenin and Stalin could counterclaim that the Bolsheviks, not the people in the classless society, knew best, but why should anyone believe them?
Worse still, suppose that Stalinâs humanist rhetoric was perfunctory, or a ploy compelling the people to do his despotic bidding, rather than a sincere strategy for creating utopia from above. Communism then wouldnât merely thwart the classless peopleâs will; it would enslave society while paying lipservice to humanism. Stalinâs world would be the antithesis of paradise sought. It would be an infernal dystopia, as John Stuart Mill mused the year after the publication of Das Kapital, where every vice triumphed over virtue.3
Insofar as the historical record provides a basis for judgment, Marxâs predictions about the ineluctability of self-regulating communism have been falsified. Neither the class struggle nor totalitarian command forged communist utopia. Moreover, despotism typically had the upper hand. Life wasnât an incessant hell for everyone, but was materially and spiritually grim for the vast majority. Although, Stalin and his clones could have adopted a liberal attitude toward dissenters, stressing humanism over dogma (or power), they created diverse communist dystopias.
The invisible hand of Marxist harmony was supposed to make everyone supremely free; yet few were at liberty to think, speak, write or publish proscribed ideas unless explicitly authorized. Not only were people prohibited from criticizing Marxist verities about property, business, entrepreneurship, religion, dialectical materialism, class struggle and communist superiority; they couldnât challenge the party line on a host of important subjects. Workers couldnât agitate for multiparty democracy, independent trade unions and syndicalist workers control. They couldnât oppose the abolition of NEP (New Economic Policy) after Stalin defeated Bukharin. They couldnât oppose collectivization, breakneck heavy industrialization, the rule of men, secret police violations of human rights, the forced relocation of punished peoples, terror, structural militarization, insurrectionary incitement abroad, involuntary annexation and the Red Holocaust.
The same principle applied to more mundane aspects of life. Consumers were compelled to buy what the state supplied (forced substitution), and praise their good fortune. They couldnât negotiate prices, characteristics, or bypass the state foreign trade monopoly. They had to take whatever health, education, recreation, vacation, transport and utility services they could get. They could not protest working conditions, hours of employment, compulsory assignments, obligatory overtime, wages, ecocide, destruction of cultural assets, abortion, marriage and divorce regulations, inadequate burial facilitates, poverty, inegalitarianism and pervasive shortages.
Moreover, the proletariat couldnât defame communism by calling the system dystopic. The people lived the terror command nightmare, but were forbidden to condemn it. They were compelled instead to laud communismâs march from victory to victory, and pretend they believed that paradise was at hand, while many in the west conflated Marxist aspirational rhetoric with reality.4
2
20 Million Souls
Stalinâs Red Holocaust and the siege-mobilized terror-command system that drove the killing machine epitomize Soviet dystopia. They mock all claims of utopian intent and accomplishment. The proof long eluded researchers, but the archival revolution which began in Gorbachevâs waning days finally produced the smoking gun. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were millions of indictable Soviet crimes against humanity 1929â38, and additional millions 1939â53. We now know as well beyond a reasonable doubt that there were more than 13 million Red Holocaust victims 1929â53, and that this figure could rise above 20 million.
This is a far cry from the days prior to the archival revolution when it was claimed on demographic grounds that it couldnât be proven that Stalinâs agrarian collectivization, terror-starvation, Great Terror, lethal forced labor or ethnic cleansing wrongfully killed anybody.
The doubts that linger primarily involve the incompleteness of NKVD archival data on executions and excess mortality in Gulag camps, colonies and prisons. No one claims they are complete, but there is wide disagreement about the degree of undercounting. One school relying on the character of archival records argues for a small margin of error, while the other, guided by demographic and testimonial evidence, contends that killings were many times greater than the NKVD archival data indicate.
This treatise rejects the argument that NKVD archives are nearly complete, because demographic excess death statistics, supported by testimonial evidence point to vastly higher killings 1939â53. Demographic excess death predictors 1929â38 proved correct (Chapters 3â5), and it is reasonable to surmise that they are right again.
The issue isnât crucial for Stalinâs indictment, but it could affect sentencing. If the NKVDâs archival statistics are taken literally, most Soviet killings 1929â53 can be ascribed to criminally negligent homicide, with a modest admixture of murders and felonious manslaughter. But if they are seriously incomplete, then the murder-manslaughter component swells, buttressing the case for the charge of aggravated Red Holocaust in the first degree.
Divergent assessments of the completeness of NKVD archival data also color interpretations of terror-command history. NKVD archival literalists believe that Gulag excess deaths from overwork and execution tapered off after 1945 to low levels, and infer in the absence of terror-starvation and collectivization deaths on the scale of the thirties that Stalin matured; that the Soviet Union during his reign began transitioning from a terror-command to a terror-free-command economic system. Those favoring the demographic/testimonial evidence see more systemic continuity than change, until Khrushchevâs emergence in the m...