The Black Book- a Commentary.

[Exorcist]

THanks for the reference, this book is a great source!

It might seem odd to some people, but Communism is already getting a white-wash, especially in Russia. Over there, youth camps are springing up that extol the virtues of Stalin, and the Communist Party tried to ban the recent Indiana Jones movie because it showed Commies in a bad light.
After 50 years of Hollywood and the Press putting one story after another out about the imminent return of the Nazis, not a single one has appeared about the possible resurgence of Communism. Odd, isn’t it?


There happens to be a very interesting book out, first published in France in 1997 called “The Black Book of Communism”. It delves into the little-known fact that from a human standpoint, Communism was the worst disaster to ever befall this world.
Ever.
Not counting the war dead, Communism killed nearly 100 million people. The highest number attributed to the Nazis was less than 25 million. The breakdown is as follows;
USSR- 22 Million
China- 65 million
Vietnam- 1 million
North Korea- 2 million
Eastern Europe- 1 million
Latin America- 150,000
Africa- 1.7 million
The International Communist movement and Communists not in power- 10,000 Deaths

In Russia, a partial breakdown of the main events looks like this;
-the execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners, and the Murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922
-The Famine of 1922, which killed 5 million
-the extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920
-the murder of tens of thousands in Concentration Camps from 1918 to 1930
- the deportation of 2 million “Kulaks” 1930-1932
- the destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means of an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine 1932-33
-the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldovans and Bessarabians from 1939-41, and again in 1944-45.
-The deportation of Volga Germans in 1941
-The deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1943
-The deportation of Chechens in 1944
-The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 1944

And we still have the crimes of Pol Pot, Mao and Kim Il Sung to go over.


One excuse used by Communists is “what they had before was worse” to justify their crimes. This was never true, ever, in any way, shape or form.
Czarist Russia was relatively benighn compared to what followed. True, riots and insurrections were brutally crushed. However, from 1825 to 1917, the number of people sentenced to death in Russia for their politics was 6,360, of whom only 3,932 were executed. This figure was surpassed by the Bolsheviks in March of 1918, after they had only been in power for 4 months.

Another note; while Himmler and Eichmann remain household names, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Ezhov languish in obscurity. Could there be a cover-up, or selective amnesia at work here?

In later installments, I will be going into much greater depth into these and other matters. I will also list sources and other background information.
To begin with, the Black Book of Communism , Compiled by Stephane Courtois, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Cramer. Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-076808-7

[tsar]

I hope you have your fireproof undies on. I see flames, lots of flames, in your future. It wont matter how correct you are there will be some that will scream at you for telling the truth.

[Gorque]

I'll be looking to your updates.

[Legate]

Originally Posted by Gorque

I'll be looking to your updates.

Same here. I have not read that book,but I have heard good things about it.

[Exorcist]

Part 2;

The “Checka” was the Soviet apparatus of Secret Police, later to be known by various abbreviations (GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, KGB and most recently, OMAN)
From 600 in March of 1918, it increased to 2,000 by July. They launched their first major operation on the night of 11 April, arresting 520 anarchists, of whom 25 were summarily executed.
On the night of the 29th of April, Lenin said; “The smallholders, the people who owned only a parcel of land, fought side by side with the proletariat when the time came to overthrow the capitalists and major landholders. But now our paths have diverged. Smallholders have always been afraid of discipline and organization. The time has come for us to have no mercy, and to turn against them.”
Against them, Russians, in order to requisition grain.

The spring of 1919 was marked by numerous strikes which were savagely put down in some of the great working class centers in Russia, such as Tula, Sormovo, Orel, Bryansk, Tver, Ivanovo, Voznesensk, and Ashtrakhan. Reduced to starvation by the miniscule ration of half a pound of bread a day, far less than the Red Army was receiving, the Russian people rebelled. Uprisings also demanded the release of political prisoners, an end of conscription, freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and free elections for factory comities. In Orel, Bryansk Gomel and Ashtrakhan soldiers joined with strikers, shouting “Death to the Jews! Down with the Bolshevik commissars!”
The most common tactic to put down strikes was to withhold ration cards, the first of many instances where Communists used starvation as a weapon. In Tula on March 27 there was a massive “March for freedom and against hunger” which prompted the Checka to arrest 800 “leaders” and throw all the strikers out of work. Starvation forced the workers to agree to sign documents that stated that the next time they strike, they would be executed. On April 10th production resumed, the day after 26 “leaders” had been shot.
In Ashtrakhan, between 12 and 14 March, at least 2,000 strikers were shot or drowned in the Volga.

By 1920, the Checka had become odious even to some Bolshevik leaders. On March 22, Serafina Gopner wrote to Lenin; “This organization is rotten to the core.: the canker of criminality, violence and totally arbitrary decisions abounds, and it is filled with common criminals and the dregs of society, men armed to the teeth who simply execute anyone they don’t like.”
Such was the organization tasked with safeguarding the Revolution.
In Kharkov from Feburary to June of 1919, there were 2-3,000 executions, and another 1-2,000 in December. In Odessa 2,200 from May to August of 1920, then 1500 to 3000 the next year. The lists go on and on. In Ekaterretaken, a town of 30,000, 1,600 were eliminated.

The peasants got it even worse.
Uprisings in the countryside were common, since the farmers were unwilling to part with so much of what they produced that they were reduced to starvation. Order #171, dated June 11 1921 and signed by Antonov-Ovsenko and Tukhachevsky, shows clearly the methods used to “pacify” Tambov province;
shoot on sight any citizens who refuse to identify themselves.
Political Commissars are hereby authorized to pronounce sentence on any village where arms are being hidden, and to arrest hostages and shoot them if the whereabouts of the arms are not revealed. (kinda the ultimate catch-22, eh?)
Wherever arms are found, execute immediately the eldest son in the family.
Any family that harbored a bandit is to be arrested and deported from the Province, their possessions to be seized and the eldest son is to be executed immediately.
Any family sheltering other families who have harbored bandits are to be punished in the same manner.



The day after Order #171 was sent out, Tukhachevsky ordered all rebels to be gassed. “The forests where the bandits are hiding out are to be cleared by use of poison gas. This must be carefully calculated so that the layer of poison gas penetrates the forest and kills everyone hiding there.”
(additional source; Danilov and Shanin, Krestyanskoe vosstanie, pp. 179-180)

5 million Russians starved to death in the famine of 1921-22. The last famine was in 1891, affecting the same area, and killed 400-500,000. Both State and general society fought hard to save lives, but were opposed in this by a young lawyer named Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov… later known simply as Lenin. Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy, would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism…
Thirty years later, his ideas remained unchanged. Famine could and would “strike a mortal blow to the enemy”. The enemy was faith in God, and the peasants resisting collectivization. Thus the disaster was allowed to run its course

The Church was a favorite victim of the Soviets, nowhere more so than in Russia when the State seized much of their property. In 1922, according to Church records, 2,691 Priests, 1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were killed by the State.

So much for Lenin.

[Gorque]

I find it amusing when reading todays news of some people longfully wishing for a return to Communism considering the prior methods employed for repressing dissent.

[Exorcist]

Part III

From 1923 to 1927, there was something of a truce between the Soviets and the peasants. During that time the state contented itself with confiscation or arms, insertion of informers, and a re-organization of the Gulag system, which was showing that it could be a source of profit for the Soviet government.
At the same time, Stalin had taken over, who looked forward to “a peasant war, as in 1918-19,” and wanted to Collectivize all agriculture.
The harvest crisis at the end of 1927 provided Stalin with the pretext he needed. To punish peasants who were unwilling to hand over their produce at prices that were a mere third or a quarter of the going market rate, the Soviets double, tripled or even quintupled the amount to be collected. Taxes on “Kulaks” (the more prosperous peasants) were increased tenfold in two years.
Thus the State was able to squeeze or requisition the same amount of food for the city-dwellers and export as the year before… but this was just the beginning. At the same time, all spetsy, or specialists, that had been educated before the revolution, were persecuted, evicted from their jobs and sometimes killed. Manufactured goods became rare, shoddy and expensive.
Economic desperation led to a tremendous increase in crime. From 578,000 convictions in 1926, the total soared to 1,778,000 in 1929. Short-term prison sentences replaced with long terms in the Gulags for productive labor. The accountants in Moscow must have been delighted.
The harvest of 1928-29 was disastrous. From January of 1928 to December of 1929, before Collectivization, the GPU recorded 1,300 riots and mass demonstrations in the countryside. The stage was set for Stalin to begin his campaign to “eliminate the Kulaks as a class”.

Recent research in newly opened archives has confirmed that the forced collectivization of the countryside was in effect a war by the Soviet State against smallholders of that nation. 1.8 million peasants were deported, hundreds of thousands of whom died as a direct result. 6 million died of hunger.
Firstly, the Kulaks were indeed “liquidated”. The “de-kulakization” Brigades had a difficult time finding peasants who were even reasonably prosperous. They filled their quotas and even exceeded them by arresting people who had sold grain in a market, or were able to hire someone to help with the farm work in 1925 or 26, for possessing two samovars, or killing a pig in 1929 “with the intention of consuming it themselves and thus keeping it from socialist appropriation”.
As was the case with witchcraft or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, an accusation was sometimes all it took.
The Brigades took what they wanted from the victimized families, and auctioned off what they did not for pathetic prices. Wooden houses were bought for sixty Kopeks (cents), cows for fifteen.
Being much like people everywhere else, the Peasants went Berserk. The GPU recorded 402 revolts and mass demonstrations against de-kulakization and collectivization in January of 1930, 1,048 in February, and 6,528 in March.
On March 2nd, every newspaper in the USSR carried Stalin’s “Dizzy with success” article, in which he blamed excesses of collectivization and de-kulakisation on local bosses that had exceeded their authority. This impact of the revelation was immediate; 5 million peasants walked off the Collectives. Many tried, violently, to take their tools and livestock with them. The “Black Earth” regions of greatest productivity of the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Kazakhstan were temporarily beyond the control of the Soviet Government.
These were the exact regions about to be hit by the Great Famine.

[Exorcist]

Part IV

Soviet authorities asked for not outside help, and even denied the Famine of 1932-33. This human tragedy is so immense that it is almost impossible to describe. The reasons for it were not solely bad harvests, but the requisitioning ratios. In 1930, the rates of collection were as follows;
Ukraine; 30%
North Caucasus; 38%
Kazakhstan; 33%

In 1931, when the harvest was considerably smaller-
Ukraine; 41.5 %
North Caucasus; 47 %
Kazakhstan; 39.5 %

Peasants were obliged to steal back confiscated food in order to survive… and many did not survive regardless of what they did.


The following are excerpts from a report to the Central Executive Committee, on conditions in the lower Volga.


“This year, 12% of all Farmers have been tried already, and this does not include the deported Kulaks… the prisons are full to the bursting point. Balachevo prison contains more than 5 times as many people as it was originally designed to hold. Over the last month, Balachevo has sent back 78 prisoners, 48 of them of them were less than ten years old. Twenty-one were immediately released.
One example of how peasants are being victimized; in Morsty, one peasant, who had actually fulfilled his quota, came to see Comrade Fomichev, the President of the District Executive Committee, and ASKED to be deported North, because, he explained, “No one can live under these conditions.”
(sourced to; N. A. Ivnitskii, The Collectivism and dekulakization (Mosco: Izd-vo Magistr, 1996) pp. 192-193)

He was not the only one. At the beginning of March in 1933, a report from the GPU stated that they had intercepted in one month 219,460 starving peasants fleeing to the cities. 186,588 were escorted back to their place of origin, while the rest were arrested and sentenced. No mention was made of the fate of those sent back to the countryside.

The death rate was highest in the summer of 1933. That year, the Soviet Government continued to export grain, shipping out 180 million hundredweight abroad “in the interests of industrialization.”


Of the 14,000 riots recorded by the GPU in 1930, 85% occurred in regions “punished” by the famine of 1932-33. Resistance to collectivization promptly collapsed.



{ I have more, but I have to stop now… sorry. In later posts, I will show how all of this is a pattern repeated in other nations overtaken by Communism }

[Gorque]

Originally Posted by Exorcist

{ I have more, but I have to stop now… sorry. In later posts, I will show how all of this is a pattern repeated in other nations overtaken by Communism }

Looking forward to more. Interesting reading.

[Exorcist]

Originally Posted by Gorque

Looking forward to more. Interesting reading.

Thanks Gorque, it took some dong to put it all together.

Thought I would stir a bit more up with this, but I'll have a few more things to say about all this, probably this weekend. See you then.

[GCoyote]

Keep going Exorcist. You are competing with a great deal of other news over the past weeks but some of us appreciate your efforts.

[Exorcist]

I will skip past Stalin’s purges and the Gulags, it it time to get to the other nations that Communism was inflicted upon.

A constant feature of communist governments was the destruction of existing civil society (especially political parties and religion) and cutting off trade and other contacts with the rest of the world. The Iron Curtain was not just there to arrest the flood of people escaping from crimes, terror and repression… but also to prevent the free exchange of ideas.
All of the old organizations were to be replaced by just one; Communism.

After WW2, Imre Nyeste, a Hungarian resistance fighter in charge of a youth organization, had refused to join the Communist party.
“The difference between the Communist secret police and the Nazis—I am one of the happy few to have experience of both—isn’t a question of their respective levels of brutality and cruelty. The torture chamber in a Nazi jail was the same one as in a Communist jail. The difference is elsewhere. If the Nazis arrested you as a political dissident, in general they wanted to know what your activities were, who your friends were, what your intentions were, etc. The Communists never bothered with all that. They already knew what sort of confession you were going to sign. But you yourself did not. I had no idea I was going to become an ‘American Spy’!”.
(additional source; Jaques Rupnik, The Other Europe, New York: Pantheon, 1989, p. 139)
One is tempted to wonder how many real spies they missed with this kind of nonsense.

China’s long march into darkness would be a study in itself. The most massive Concentration Camp system of all time flourished there, Harry Wu calculates that 50 million men, women and children passed thru that system by the mid-80s. According to estimates by Jean-Luc Domenach, they hosted roughly 10 million people at any one time, about 1-2 percent of the population. Given a mortality rate of around 5%, some 20 million Chinese died during imprisonment, 80% of them political prisoners.
This is minor compared to the damage done by the “Great Leap Forward”.

The worst famine in history;
A bunch of urban intellectuals, among them Trofim Lysenko had advanced theories, that were accepted by Mao in 1958. They forced collectivization, and at the same time intensified agriculture to the point where the young plants never had a chance to thrive. The soil dried out, salt levels rose, extermination of sparrows resulted in a plague of parasites. When the harvest collapsed, experts were trotted out by the press to explain that fat and proteins were unessesary luxuries to the particular physiology of the Chinese.
In 1960, only 8 of 120 Chinese weather monitoring stations noted a drought of any consequence, only a third mentioned drought at all. And yet the harvest was 143 million tons of grain, 26% lower than 1957. The harvest was dwon to its 1950 level, despite an increase of 100 million in the general population. Peasants recived 153 kilos of rice per year… while townspeople were getting 181.
In Anhui province, the death rate soared 68%, while the birth rate fell from 30 to 11 percent. People were so weakened by hunger that they were unable to harvest rice when it finally ripened. Families exchanged children to be eaten.
For the entire countryside, the death rate rose from 11% in 1957 to 15% in both 1959 and 1961… the peak was 18% in 1961. Modern estimates of the dead run as high as 43 million, but the state clings to an official figure of 20 million. Mao probably did not intenend to kill so many of his own people, but he still refused aid from the US form political reasons, and continued his grain exports!
Mao’s grain exports , mainly to the USSR, rose from 2.7 million tons in 1958 to 4.2 million in 1959. In 1960, when things were at the worst, exports fell to just the 1958 level.
I will skip over the well-known disasters of the Cultural Revolution, and Pol-Pot’s Cambodia, except to remind you all that China was the Khmer Rouge’s main supporter, and that they invaded Vietnam for daring to oust that infamously genocidal regime.

[Paul Mann III]

Very cool...

[Exorcist]

Cuba;
Cubans have been voting with their oars since the early 1960s, a mirror image of the ‘Boat people’ fleeing Vietnam. This first came to world attention in 1980, when thousands of Cubans mobbed the Peruvian embassy to gain exit visas away from an intolerable life. Castro was forced to allow 125,000 people, out of a population of less than 10 million, to leave the country from the port of Mariel. Those who left were mainly the poorest of the poor. Less well-known is the fact that violent riots broke out in Havana in 1994, the first time that had happened since 1959. The police had tried to prevent more Boat-people from leaving, and the rioters reacted by sacking the Columbo seafront. 25,000 more people left, but 7,000 lost their lives, partly because the Cuban Police in helicopters bombed the flimsy craft with sandbags.
Of the 11 million Cubans Castro started with, 2 million live in exile, in Maimi, Puerto Rico and Spain.
From 1959 to the late 1990s, more than 100,000 Cubans experienced life in cmaps or prisons. Between 15 and 17 thousand were shot.

Nicaragua;
Another aspect of Communism is militarization on a massive scale. The old Somoza regime had made do with about 10,000 soldiers with a handful of armored cars and a couple of old tanks. One of Ortega’s first imports was 150 new tanks from the Soviets. All men aged 17 to 35 had to report from compulsory military service, and the army was expanded to 75 thousand. Their first target was El Salvador… but they were distracted by internal unrest, and repression of a racial nature.
The Miskito Indians of the Atlantic side of Nicaragua numbered roughly 150,000. Soon after taking power, the Communists launched attacks against the Indians who were determined to hold on to their language and lands. First, the leaders of the Indians were arrested and killed. On December 23, 1981 in Lemus, the Sandinistas massacred 75 miners who demanded back wages. Another 35 met the same fate the next day. Hunger and deportations were also used against them. By 1982, 7-14 thousands Indians had fled to Honduras, and up to 15 thousand were imprisoned in Nicaragua.
That same year, the Junta declared a state of siege, which allowed them to close all opposition parties, radio stations and papers. Civil war became a permanent feature of life there, with all the usual tools of repression in evidence. Without support from the former USSR, the regime collapsed quickly in 1990, and communism was overthrown by the first free elections in 160 years.



Ethiopia;
Assisted by the East German and Soviet secret police, The Communist regime of Ethiopia followed the usual path. It was also common to see the victims of torture on the pavement of the capitol. On May 17, 1977, the Swedish general secretary of the Save the Children Fund lamented that “1,000 children have been killed and their bodies are left in the streets and being eaten by wild Hyeneas… you see the heaped up bodies of murdered children, most of them between eleven and thirteen, lying in the gutter as you drive out of Addiss Ababa.”
The Ethiopian famine of 1982-85 was the result of a genuine drought, but it was used in the usual way, and even made worse by the cessation of trade, persecution of traders and widespread feelings of insecurity and doubt.
The influx of aid brought about by the “We are the World” campaighn helped a little, even tho 80% of it was seized by the Ethiopian Army for their own use.
The brutal Dictator, Mengistu, fled to Zimbabwe, where he was welcomed and sheltered from extradition by Robert Mugabe …

[Legate]

Anymore updates?