Communism is a political system in which the state owns the economy and aims to treat everyone equally. But the last 100 years have proved it to be a nightmare which brought only bloodshed, torture and fear. From Marx or Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, the materialist philosophy of communism transformed these humans into theorists of violence and masters of cruelty. With the emergence of the USSR as the world’s first communist state, the slow poison of communism’s association with the Soviet economic model and Marxism–Leninism started to spread throughout the world. The philosophical aspects of Communism have always been used to defend it.
But the defenders of this ideology have conspicuously failed to highlight the horrors of Marxism-Leninism – the most well-known Marxist school of thought as it was a driving force in international relations during most of the 20th century. The goal of Marxism–Leninism was the revolutionary transformation of a capitalist state into a socialist state by way of a two-stage revolution led by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries drawn from the proletariat. Lenin knew that power is constricted in certain knots, that you take over an important place, and you’ve already got a city. During the 1917 October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin & his followers applied this to take control of St.Petersburg. They captured railway stations, telephone exchanges, post offices, etc. The 1917 October Revolution in Russia set the conditions for the rise to state power of Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks which was the first time any avowedly communist party reached that position.
The aftermath of the Russian Revolution
Tsar Nicholas II destroyed Russia to the best of his abilities. After his abdication, he and his family were imprisoned and later killed on the orders of Vladimir Lenin. The Bolsheviks didn’t even spare the Tsar’s 5 children who were innocent. All the children were brutally murdered. And this was not justice. This was Lenin’s revenge as the Ulyanov against the Romanov family.
The Red Terror was a period of political repression and mass killings carried out by Bolsheviks in 1918. The most reliable estimations for the total number of victims of Bolshevik repression put the number at about 100,000 to 200,000.
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party civil war immediately after the two Russian revolutions of 1917, as many factions vied to determine Russia’s political future. Thanks to Vladimir Lenin, the Russian Civil War alone took 7,000,000 – 12,000,000 lives.
Joseph Stalin assumed leadership over the SovietUnion following Lenin’s death in 1924. Despite initially governing the Soviet Union as part of collective leadership, he eventually consolidated power to become the country’s de facto dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin formalized these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are known as Stalinism. Stalinism has been the bloodiest chapter in the history of Communism. Political repressions were at the peak in the USSR during the Stalin era.
#Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to consolidate individual land & labor into collective farms. As the peasantry resisted this policy, the Soviet government resorted to harsh measures to force the farmers.
The GreatPurge/GreatTerror was a campaign of political repression in the USSR that occurred from 1936-38. It involved large-scale repression of wealthy peasants (kulaks); genocidal acts against ethnic minorities; a purge of the Communist Party, Govt officials, and the Red Army leadership; counter-revolutionaries; imprisonment; and arbitrary executions. Historians estimate the total number of deaths due to Stalinist repression in 1937–38 to be between 680,000 and 1,200,000.
The GULAG was the government agency in charge of the Soviet network of forced-labor camps set up by order of Vladimir Lenin reaching its peak during Joseph Stalin’s rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Roughly 1,600,000 people died due to detention in these camps. After Stalin’s death, the suppression of dissent was dramatically reduced and took new forms.
References:
1) The Black Book of Communism
2) The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin.
3) The Russian Revolution, a documentary.
4) Wikipedia
Chapter 2: People’s Republic of China and Cambodia – coming soon
