June 28, 2006 | By Nathaniel Ward

Understanding Communist brutality

The atrocities perpetrated by Communist governments against their own citizens can best be understood as “violence with a higher purpose,” scholar Paul Hollander told a Heritage Foundation audience today.

“The distinctive feature of communist violence was its idealistic intent,” Hollander reported to an audience in Heritage’s Lehrman Auditorium. Like Nazism, Communism was based on a “belief that [violent] policies paved the way to some future social-political system.” This immoral notion was founded, in turn, on the belief that “they had some kind of scientific basis for their policies.”

These ideas were reinforced by notions that an individual life does not matter. Communists saw mankind, Hollander noted, as more important than the life of individual men. As such, individual men could be dispensed with for the greater good of bringing about the “new socialist man.”

Obsessed with creating this “new socialist man,” Communists devised elaborate schemes to eliminate those who would not conform. “Anybody could be victimized,” Hollander said. “Anybody could be designated as the enemy, including former functionaries or leaders.” Combined with the Communist “emphasis on productive labor of the prisoners,” these political prisons amounted to primitive death camps, where prisoners were either shot or starved to death.

Many Communists genuinely thought that their brutality advanced a good cause—or at least this was the official line of the Communist Party. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin, for example, wrote in The State and Revolution that rough treatment of “reactionaries” and other “enemies of the revolution” would help bring about a Communist utopia. Indeed, Lenin explained, such tactics would in fact lead to “the withering away of the state”:

[T]he suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and it will cost mankind far less. And it is compatible with the extension of democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear.

This idea that the enemies of the Communist system would be few “is obviously so quaint and absurd in retrospect,” Hollander said. “These were extraordinary, groundless beliefs which Lenin abandoned after the seizure of power.” The Communists had built their regime on a faulty premise, he added: having nationalized all industry and created a tremendous bureaucracy to maintain it, the state was far too large to whither away. Communists were forced to turn to repression simply to remain in power.

In a Communist country, there was a “presumption that [citizens] were guilty of something because of their backgrounds,” Hollander explained. Add to that the Communist idea of collective responsibility, and entire families were rounded up because of an individual’s perceived threats to the regime. These threats included being a former businessman, having Western connections or even, in Cambodia, wearing eyeglasses.

Despite the massive scale of these atrocities—tens of millions were killed under Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union alone—there is broad ignorance of this slaughter in the West. Hollander said he suspects that much of this is because Communist countries were “closed societies” which suppressed dissemination of information to the West. He also speculated that some Americans chose to ignore news of Soviet atrocities because of the World War II alliance, while leftists routinely demonized defectors who reported the terrible truth.

But while the Communist crimes were unspeakable, Hollander made a case that the Nazi crimes were still worse. It was possible to escape the Soviet camps in some cases by demonstrating loyalty to the government, while under Nazism anyone meeting certain racial criteria was put to death, regardless of his political beliefs. What’s more, while the Nazis murdered children by the hundreds of thousands, “in Communist states, children as a rule were not killed” though their parents and other parents were murdered.

Hollander, who fled the Communists’ brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian rebellion, is editor of From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, a book of firsthand accounts of Communist brutality.

Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.