I was never a strong believer. There was never a moment where my “faith shattered”, because I never had “faith” in the first place. It’s just, given the filtered information, how the regime described the situation, that seemed to me like a plausible description of reality. I haven’t heard any alternative description, and I didn’t have a reason to invent one.
Also, I was a small kid, so my ability to think about politics was quite limited. For example, I heard the broadcast of Voice of America / Radio Free Europe (I am not sure which one, maybe both) a few times, and I was warned that this is something controversial that I am never supposed to mention to anyone outside my family, lest I want to get my family into big trouble… but frankly, I didn’t understand what the broadcast was about. It was just some boring adult talk; I had no idea what was supposed to be exciting.
From my perspective, living in the regime was just an ordinary everyday experience. Like, you are told to go to school, so you go to school, because everyone does, duh. (Imagine a society that never invented the concept of homeschooling.) Then you are told to join the Pioneer movement, so you do, because everyone does, duh. (There are a few exceptions; you are told not to ask. They are problematic people. You don’t want to be problematic, do you? So just do your thing and ignore them.) The Pioneer movement is boring, almost the same way the school is boring. You don’t know why adults organize your life in such a boring way, but that’s how it is, so you sit and listen when you are told to sit and listen, then you go home and play. This was the depth of my political sophistication back then.
When I was 13, the regime fell.
Afterwards, I was exposed to different kinds of information; different people saying contradictory opinions. I guess I don’t have a strong psychological need for closure. I accepted that when they tell me about their near-mode experience, they are probably telling the truth; and when they tell me their far-mode opinions, well, everyone says something different, and there is no way to reconcile it. (Today I would say: everyone focuses on some aspects of reality, and ignores whatever doesn’t fit in their story.)
So my model updated gradually. I gradually collected more and more data points about what was wrong about the regime, starting with “the Pioneer movement meetings are so boring”, through “seems like some people were treated unfairly by the regime, for reasons that seem stupid to me”, through “holy shit, they were actually Hitler’s allies during the first part of WW2, and they murdered millions of people”, to “what the fuck, it’s even worse than I imagined when I already believed it was quite evil”. There was no clear moment when I switched from “pro” to “anti”; it was a gradual shift.
One hundred million? That is an extraordinary figure. So one hundred million were executed by Marxist-Leninist regimes? Or does this include excess deaths in Gulags, due to wars, famines etc. I can’t believe that 100 million were executed.
A historian could provide an exact methodology, or maybe Wikipedia. My guess is that people who died in death camps or during genocides were included, people who died in a regular war were not. But that’s just a guess.
Anyway, suppose it was only half of the number; I don’t think it changes the point substantially. The optimistic estimates would still be in order of tens of millions… for the sake of debate, let’s assume that’s how it was.
It’s striking that these numbers are always stated alone, and never compared to the number killed by capitalist governments using a similar methodology. (Which is clearly not zero, just two examples off the top of my head put it well into the millions [1][2])
The dichotomy betwen “socialist” and “capitalist” countries makes about as much sense as a dichotomy between e.g. “Mormons” and “non-Mormons”. That is, it probably sounds very important and profound to a Mormon, but it puts many different kinds of stuff in one basket.
Unless your point was that British colonialism was evil, in which case I agree. There is enough place for more than one evil regime in history.
But “capitalism” in the sense of “a country not governed by a Communist party” is a non-apple.
If the goal is to figure out how murderous the Mormons are, comparing their murder rate to the murder rate of non-Mormons, or some other reasonable base rate, is exactly what you would do. Surely this would be obvious in any other context.
For the sake of thought experiment, suppose that there are three highly murderous religions, e.g. Mormons, Moonists, Mohists; and everyone else is relatively peaceful.
If you say, in such situation, that Mormons are highly murderous, it doesn’t mean you want to take credit from the remaining two, unless you use words like “most murderous” or “the only murderous”.
There are two things I have an issue with:
One-sided “whataboutism”. Like, in every discussion about Mormons, someone inevitably mentions Moonists and Mohists… but in discussions about Moonists or Mohists, Mormons are typically not mentioned. That makes me suspect that the real reason of the objection is simply to move the discussion away from the Mormons.
(For example, if you wrote an article about the Great Famine in Ireland, it would be pretty inappropriate for me to try derailing it into a debate about communism.)
Creating an almost-all-encompassing basket of “non-Mormons” which includes the murderous Moonists and Mohists, along with the rest of humanity, me and you and Gandhi included; pointing out a few examples of Moonist and Mohist atrocities, and concluding “as you can see, the non-Mormons are just as evil”.
(The basket is “capitalist country” which is pretty much a synonym of “a country not ruled by a communist party”. Yes, a few of them are pretty evil. Are they representative of non-communists to the same degree Stalin + Mao + Pol Pot are representatives of communist regimes?)
I agree, such whataboutism is not necessary. But my point remains. The 100 million killed by communism is an incorrect figure created by anticommunists with an agenda.
Well, I am not qualified to judge historical research. As a personal heuristic, I assume things were more likely towards the worse end of the scale. Not only because of Soviet official propaganda, but also because many “experts” in the West publishing about Soviet Union were shamelessly bribed. Thus I believe that the consensus of experts will be biased towards denying atrocities.
To explain why I consider the Western “experts” unreliable, remember that Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, and only people approved by the regime were allowed to enter the country. So, as a first step of selection, only those Western journalists and historians who already demonstrated pro-communist sympathies were allowed to enter the country. As a second step, those who afterwards wrote anything negative, were not allowed to return. (So if you wanted to build a career as an “expert on Soviet Union”, you had a strong incentive to only write what they wanted you to write. If you didn’t, you lost access, and then your colleagues attacked you as “he writes as if he has reliable and up-to-date information about Soviet Union, but he didn’t visit the country for the last X years, and all his research is only based on guesses and rumors and outdated information—but we all know the bad things only happened in the past, and it is completely different now”.) Lastly, foreigners visiting Soviet Union were only allow to visit specified places, and the important ones were often accompanied by police all the time. So they only saw the Potemkin villages the regime wanted to show them, and they only heard good news from local people, because the local people knew that if they something improper, they will be shot along with their families afterwards. This makes me view Western left-wing intellectuals writing positively about life in Soviet Union with deep suspicion.
There is a story in The Gulag Archipelago when Solzhenitsyn was in a death camp where inmates survived 6 months on average… and one day the guards told them that an important American journalist will visit them, so they have to behave nicely. The prisoners were taken to a place outside the camp, where the journalist interviewed them. That is, the journalist spent 99% of time talking to the guards who explained him the enlightened principles of Soviet government that wants to give the second chance even to the hardest criminals (note: many inmates got their sentences for made-up crimes, because the police had to fill the quota of criminals sent to death camps), and then he just asked the prisoners: “so, is it true that you are treated nicely here?”… and the prisoners, with the guards standing right behind them, said “yeah”, not being suicidal. Returning to the camp, Solzhenitsyn thought that the journalist of course cannot be stupid enough to take this all at face value. But a few years later, he had an opportunity to read the article, and… yes, the journalist accepted the story hook, line, and sinker, and wrote a passionate article about how the Russian penal system is so much better and more humane than American.
So, of course there is a chance the survivors would exaggerate, but I still trust their estimates more. To discuss the expert opinion, I would need to know more about the background of these experts (as a rule of thumb, anyone who personally visited Soviet Union before the fall of communism is absolutely untrustworthy in my eyes—they wouldn’t be allowed in otherwise).
I agree. Some intellectuals in the West could not even condemn the execution of Lenin’s comrades by Stalin on trumped up charges. I will trust no Sovietologist who tries to show that Stalin was a good person.
A comparison with USA will be enlightening. I shall note that the methodology includes systematically choosing high estimates. Some of these high estimates like the prison population of USSR, the death toll of the famine stand discredited.
USA itself is responsible for mass murder, by bombing, in Japan, Germany, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. US-backed regimes are implicated in mass murder in Indonesia, East Pakistan, Somalia, and Guatemala. USA also backed Pol Pot, the Cambodian genocidal dictator, during and after his ouster by the Vietnamese army.
And we must not forget that USA backed military juntas in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay. These governments also killed thousands of opponents.
While not defending Communist regimes, it is true that propaganda has greatly inflated the number. For example, Solzhenitsyn said ’110 million Russians fell, victims of Socialism’. No one can seriously believe that. Meanwhile the methodology of including famine deaths is questionable, to say the least. Most scholars of the field regard the Holodomor famine as unintentional on the part of the Soviet government. There is evidence that members of the Soviet administration tried to reduce the impact of the famine. We are manipulating the definition of ‘killed’ if we include the dead of an unintentional famine. Purposeful deaths of Marxist regimes might be around 10 million.
Most scholars of the field regard the Holodomor famine as unintentional on the part of the Soviet government.
When the government takes away food from the entire country, by searching the farms and confiscating every grain… it takes some chutzpah to call the resulting famine “unintentional”.
There is evidence that members of the Soviet administration tried to reduce the impact of the famine.
Some people working in Soviet administration were not monsters. Of course. There were good people among the Nazis, too. Doesn’t make the regimes less evil.
Purposeful deaths of Marxist regimes might be around 10 million.
If you agree to reframe this as “even the greatest apologists of Marxist regimes, after excluding all deniable deaths, couldn’t reduce the number of victims below 10 millions”, okay.
(But to me it feels like having a debate that Nazis only killed 3 million Jews, because according to some historians, people who died of X, Y, and Z don’t really count. Yeah, maybe. So what?)
I was just pointing out that 100 million killed by Communism is a dubious conclusion, arrived by large overestimates made in ignorance. Such estimates, are now rejected in the academic, but the 100 million figure is still used.
‘So what?’ needs no answer. I am not justifying anyone, or defending Marxist regimes.
The Soviet administration reduced the amount of grain to be exported in the first half of 1933 from Ukraine by 50% from the amount exported in the first half of 1932. Moreover, 300000 tonnes of grains were allocated to Ukraine to combat the famine. As the situation got worse grain acquisitions were decreased.
When did you start to doubt?
I was never a strong believer. There was never a moment where my “faith shattered”, because I never had “faith” in the first place. It’s just, given the filtered information, how the regime described the situation, that seemed to me like a plausible description of reality. I haven’t heard any alternative description, and I didn’t have a reason to invent one.
Also, I was a small kid, so my ability to think about politics was quite limited. For example, I heard the broadcast of Voice of America / Radio Free Europe (I am not sure which one, maybe both) a few times, and I was warned that this is something controversial that I am never supposed to mention to anyone outside my family, lest I want to get my family into big trouble… but frankly, I didn’t understand what the broadcast was about. It was just some boring adult talk; I had no idea what was supposed to be exciting.
From my perspective, living in the regime was just an ordinary everyday experience. Like, you are told to go to school, so you go to school, because everyone does, duh. (Imagine a society that never invented the concept of homeschooling.) Then you are told to join the Pioneer movement, so you do, because everyone does, duh. (There are a few exceptions; you are told not to ask. They are problematic people. You don’t want to be problematic, do you? So just do your thing and ignore them.) The Pioneer movement is boring, almost the same way the school is boring. You don’t know why adults organize your life in such a boring way, but that’s how it is, so you sit and listen when you are told to sit and listen, then you go home and play. This was the depth of my political sophistication back then.
When I was 13, the regime fell.
Afterwards, I was exposed to different kinds of information; different people saying contradictory opinions. I guess I don’t have a strong psychological need for closure. I accepted that when they tell me about their near-mode experience, they are probably telling the truth; and when they tell me their far-mode opinions, well, everyone says something different, and there is no way to reconcile it. (Today I would say: everyone focuses on some aspects of reality, and ignores whatever doesn’t fit in their story.)
So my model updated gradually. I gradually collected more and more data points about what was wrong about the regime, starting with “the Pioneer movement meetings are so boring”, through “seems like some people were treated unfairly by the regime, for reasons that seem stupid to me”, through “holy shit, they were actually Hitler’s allies during the first part of WW2, and they murdered millions of people”, to “what the fuck, it’s even worse than I imagined when I already believed it was quite evil”. There was no clear moment when I switched from “pro” to “anti”; it was a gradual shift.
Ominous, under the circumstances.
Who killed millions of people? Czech Communists? Or Communists in general?
In general. About one hundred million victims.
One hundred million? That is an extraordinary figure. So one hundred million were executed by Marxist-Leninist regimes? Or does this include excess deaths in Gulags, due to wars, famines etc. I can’t believe that 100 million were executed.
I didn’t say 100 million were executed.
A historian could provide an exact methodology, or maybe Wikipedia. My guess is that people who died in death camps or during genocides were included, people who died in a regular war were not. But that’s just a guess.
Anyway, suppose it was only half of the number; I don’t think it changes the point substantially. The optimistic estimates would still be in order of tens of millions… for the sake of debate, let’s assume that’s how it was.
It’s striking that these numbers are always stated alone, and never compared to the number killed by capitalist governments using a similar methodology. (Which is clearly not zero, just two examples off the top of my head put it well into the millions [1] [2])
Of course.
The dichotomy betwen “socialist” and “capitalist” countries makes about as much sense as a dichotomy between e.g. “Mormons” and “non-Mormons”. That is, it probably sounds very important and profound to a Mormon, but it puts many different kinds of stuff in one basket.
Unless your point was that British colonialism was evil, in which case I agree. There is enough place for more than one evil regime in history.
But “capitalism” in the sense of “a country not governed by a Communist party” is a non-apple.
If the goal is to figure out how murderous the Mormons are, comparing their murder rate to the murder rate of non-Mormons, or some other reasonable base rate, is exactly what you would do. Surely this would be obvious in any other context.
For the sake of thought experiment, suppose that there are three highly murderous religions, e.g. Mormons, Moonists, Mohists; and everyone else is relatively peaceful.
If you say, in such situation, that Mormons are highly murderous, it doesn’t mean you want to take credit from the remaining two, unless you use words like “most murderous” or “the only murderous”.
There are two things I have an issue with:
One-sided “whataboutism”. Like, in every discussion about Mormons, someone inevitably mentions Moonists and Mohists… but in discussions about Moonists or Mohists, Mormons are typically not mentioned. That makes me suspect that the real reason of the objection is simply to move the discussion away from the Mormons.
(For example, if you wrote an article about the Great Famine in Ireland, it would be pretty inappropriate for me to try derailing it into a debate about communism.)
Creating an almost-all-encompassing basket of “non-Mormons” which includes the murderous Moonists and Mohists, along with the rest of humanity, me and you and Gandhi included; pointing out a few examples of Moonist and Mohist atrocities, and concluding “as you can see, the non-Mormons are just as evil”.
(The basket is “capitalist country” which is pretty much a synonym of “a country not ruled by a communist party”. Yes, a few of them are pretty evil. Are they representative of non-communists to the same degree Stalin + Mao + Pol Pot are representatives of communist regimes?)
I agree, such whataboutism is not necessary. But my point remains. The 100 million killed by communism is an incorrect figure created by anticommunists with an agenda.
Well, I am not qualified to judge historical research. As a personal heuristic, I assume things were more likely towards the worse end of the scale. Not only because of Soviet official propaganda, but also because many “experts” in the West publishing about Soviet Union were shamelessly bribed. Thus I believe that the consensus of experts will be biased towards denying atrocities.
To explain why I consider the Western “experts” unreliable, remember that Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, and only people approved by the regime were allowed to enter the country. So, as a first step of selection, only those Western journalists and historians who already demonstrated pro-communist sympathies were allowed to enter the country. As a second step, those who afterwards wrote anything negative, were not allowed to return. (So if you wanted to build a career as an “expert on Soviet Union”, you had a strong incentive to only write what they wanted you to write. If you didn’t, you lost access, and then your colleagues attacked you as “he writes as if he has reliable and up-to-date information about Soviet Union, but he didn’t visit the country for the last X years, and all his research is only based on guesses and rumors and outdated information—but we all know the bad things only happened in the past, and it is completely different now”.) Lastly, foreigners visiting Soviet Union were only allow to visit specified places, and the important ones were often accompanied by police all the time. So they only saw the Potemkin villages the regime wanted to show them, and they only heard good news from local people, because the local people knew that if they something improper, they will be shot along with their families afterwards. This makes me view Western left-wing intellectuals writing positively about life in Soviet Union with deep suspicion.
There is a story in The Gulag Archipelago when Solzhenitsyn was in a death camp where inmates survived 6 months on average… and one day the guards told them that an important American journalist will visit them, so they have to behave nicely. The prisoners were taken to a place outside the camp, where the journalist interviewed them. That is, the journalist spent 99% of time talking to the guards who explained him the enlightened principles of Soviet government that wants to give the second chance even to the hardest criminals (note: many inmates got their sentences for made-up crimes, because the police had to fill the quota of criminals sent to death camps), and then he just asked the prisoners: “so, is it true that you are treated nicely here?”… and the prisoners, with the guards standing right behind them, said “yeah”, not being suicidal. Returning to the camp, Solzhenitsyn thought that the journalist of course cannot be stupid enough to take this all at face value. But a few years later, he had an opportunity to read the article, and… yes, the journalist accepted the story hook, line, and sinker, and wrote a passionate article about how the Russian penal system is so much better and more humane than American.
So, of course there is a chance the survivors would exaggerate, but I still trust their estimates more. To discuss the expert opinion, I would need to know more about the background of these experts (as a rule of thumb, anyone who personally visited Soviet Union before the fall of communism is absolutely untrustworthy in my eyes—they wouldn’t be allowed in otherwise).
I agree. Some intellectuals in the West could not even condemn the execution of Lenin’s comrades by Stalin on trumped up charges. I will trust no Sovietologist who tries to show that Stalin was a good person.
A comparison with USA will be enlightening. I shall note that the methodology includes systematically choosing high estimates. Some of these high estimates like the prison population of USSR, the death toll of the famine stand discredited.
USA itself is responsible for mass murder, by bombing, in Japan, Germany, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. US-backed regimes are implicated in mass murder in Indonesia, East Pakistan, Somalia, and Guatemala. USA also backed Pol Pot, the Cambodian genocidal dictator, during and after his ouster by the Vietnamese army. And we must not forget that USA backed military juntas in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay. These governments also killed thousands of opponents.
While not defending Communist regimes, it is true that propaganda has greatly inflated the number. For example, Solzhenitsyn said ’110 million Russians fell, victims of Socialism’. No one can seriously believe that. Meanwhile the methodology of including famine deaths is questionable, to say the least. Most scholars of the field regard the Holodomor famine as unintentional on the part of the Soviet government. There is evidence that members of the Soviet administration tried to reduce the impact of the famine. We are manipulating the definition of ‘killed’ if we include the dead of an unintentional famine. Purposeful deaths of Marxist regimes might be around 10 million.
When the government takes away food from the entire country, by searching the farms and confiscating every grain… it takes some chutzpah to call the resulting famine “unintentional”.
Some people working in Soviet administration were not monsters. Of course. There were good people among the Nazis, too. Doesn’t make the regimes less evil.
If you agree to reframe this as “even the greatest apologists of Marxist regimes, after excluding all deniable deaths, couldn’t reduce the number of victims below 10 millions”, okay.
(But to me it feels like having a debate that Nazis only killed 3 million Jews, because according to some historians, people who died of X, Y, and Z don’t really count. Yeah, maybe. So what?)
I was just pointing out that 100 million killed by Communism is a dubious conclusion, arrived by large overestimates made in ignorance. Such estimates, are now rejected in the academic, but the 100 million figure is still used.
‘So what?’ needs no answer. I am not justifying anyone, or defending Marxist regimes.
The Soviet administration reduced the amount of grain to be exported in the first half of 1933 from Ukraine by 50% from the amount exported in the first half of 1932. Moreover, 300000 tonnes of grains were allocated to Ukraine to combat the famine. As the situation got worse grain acquisitions were decreased.