Red Holocaust

Steven Rosefielde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135195175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Twentieth and twenty-first century communism is a failed experiment in social engineering that needlessly killed approximately 60 million people and perhaps tens of millions more. These high crimes against humanity constitute a Red Holocaust that exceeds the combined carnage of the French Reign of Terror, Ha Shoah, Showa Japan's Asian holocaust, and all combat deaths in World War I and II. This fascinating book investigates high crimes against humanity in the Soviet Union, eastern and central Europe, North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia 1929-2009, and compares the results with Ha Shoah and the Japanese Asian Holocaust.

As in other studies, blame is ascribed to political, ideological and personal causes, but special emphasis is given to internal contradictions in Marx's utopian model as well as Stalinist and post-Stalinist transition systems concocted to realize communist ends. This faulty economic engineering forms a bridge to the larger issue of communism's historical failure.

The book includes:

- a comprehensive study of the transcommunist holocaust

- a judicial assessment of holocaust culpability and special pleadings

- an obituary for Stalinism everywhere except North Korea, and a death watch for contemporary communism in China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba and Nepal

- a comparative assessment of totalitarian high crimes against humanity

- a call for memory as a defense against recurrent economic, racial and ethnic holocausts

The book will be useful to undergraduate and higher level students interested in Russian history, Stalism, communism, North and South Korean economic performance and international affairs.

Steven Rosefielde is a Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.

Part I
Red Holocaust: First Wave

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 Mao’s 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 wasn’t 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 communism’s peaceful dialectical victory. A Red Holocaust was superfluous. Utopia couldn’t be denied.

However, Lenin and Stalin claimed that communism’s 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 didn’t 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 sheep’s clothing or schizophrenics. Whatever their intent, the humanist values they espoused would be mocked by their actions; everything would be topsy-turvy.

In Marx’s 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 people’s 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. Stalin’s directives in the best case would be redundant; otherwise, they would be discordant.

Marxists didn’t contest that Lenin’s 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 Party’s vigilance were indispensable.

This wouldn’t matter if proletarian will initially, and the classless people’s will later, corresponded perfectly with Communist Party directives, but what if Marx were mistaken? Suppose that people in the classless future, discovering that communism didn’t 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 people’s oppressor, not liberator as claimed. Instead of each individual compatibly actualizing his or her potential, everyone would be stifled by Marx’s misjudgment and the party’s 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 Stalin’s 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 wouldn’t merely thwart the classless people’s will; it would enslave society while paying lipservice to humanism. Stalin’s 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, Marx’s 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 wasn’t 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 couldn’t challenge the party line on a host of important subjects. Workers couldn’t agitate for multiparty democracy, independent trade unions and syndicalist workers control. They couldn’t oppose the abolition of NEP (New Economic Policy) after Stalin defeated Bukharin. They couldn’t 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 couldn’t 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 couldn’t 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 communism’s 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

Summary

• Stalin initiated the first wave of the Red Holocaust in 1929. It lasted until he died in 1953, spreading from the Soviet Union to Red Army occupied central and eastern Europe, Mongolia and North Korea.

• Mao started a second wave in 1949 that briefly overlapped the first wave, and then spread independently into Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. North Korea’s Stalinist wave merged with Mao’s as China’s power increased.

• The killings were concentrated in periods where the dominant economic management principle was terror-command.

• There was no place for mass killing in Marx’s concept of communist transition and utopian harmony.

• Lenin and many of his successors heretically sought to ease communism’s birthpangs through insurrection and anti-communist repression.

• The principles Lenin and Stalin extracted from Karl Marx’s communist utopia for their transition model created an anti-utopia, called by John Stuart Mill and others dystopia. The same state that was supposed to protect the people from capitalist exploitation, and empower them, was used to subjugate and repress their freedom.

• The Red Holocaust epitomized twentieth-century communist dystopia.

2
20 Million Souls

Stalin’s 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 Gorbachev’s 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 1929–38, and additional millions 1939–53. We now know as well beyond a reasonable doubt that there were more than 13 million Red Holocaust victims 1929–53, 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 couldn’t be proven that Stalin’s 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 1939–53. Demographic excess death predictors 1929–38 proved correct (Chapters 3–5), and it is reasonable to surmise that they are right again.

The issue isn’t crucial for Stalin’s indictment, but it could affect sentencing. If the NKVD’s archival statistics are taken literally, most Soviet killings 1929–53 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 Khrushchev’s emergence in the m...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Tables, Figures and Boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Red Holocaust: First Wave
• Part II The Second Wave
• Part III Liberalization
• Part IV Terror-Command Economy
• Part V Red Holocaust Denial
• Part VI Hitler’s and Hirohito’s Holocausts
• Part VII After the Second Wave
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index