Transsylvania - Erdélyi Tájékoztató, 2001 (42. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)

2001 / 1. szám

Vol XLII, No.l. Transsylvania English Language Supplement Published by the American Transyluanian Federation Inc. 319 Bement Ave. Staten Island, NY 10310 Editor in chief: Tibor Cseh Editorial Correspondence: 8 Estes Court, Midland Park, NJ 07432 e-mail: csernaton@aol.com HOW MANY DID COMMUNIST REGIMES MURDER? R.J. Rummel (Note that I completed this study in November 1993 while still engaged in collecting democide data. Not all the democide totals I mention here may be complete, there­fore. For final figures on communist megamurderers, see my summary Table 1. 2 in my Death by Government. For all final estimates, see the summary table in Statistics of Democide.) With the passing of communism into history as an ideological alternative to democracy it is time to do some accounting of its human costs. Few would deny any longer that communism - Marxism-Leninism and its variants - meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made fam­ines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and geno­cide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. Yet there has been virtually no concentrated statistical work on what this might be. For about eight years I have been sifting through thousands of sources trying to determine the extent of democide (genocide and mass murder) in this century. As a result of that effort I am able to give some conservative figures on what is an unrivaled communist hecatomb, and to compare this to overall world totals. First however, I should clarify the term democide. It means for governments what murder means for an indi­vidual under municipal law. It is the premeditated killing of a person in cold blood, or causing the death of a person through reckless and wanton disregard for their life. Thus, a government incarcerating people in a prison under such deadly conditions that they die in a few years is murder by the state - democide - as would parents letting a child die from malnutrition and exposure be murder. So would gov­ernment forced labor that kills a person within months or a couple of years be murder. So would government cre­ated famines that then are ignored or knowingly aggra­vated by government action be murder of those who starve to death. And obviously, extrajudicial executions, death by torture, government massacres, and all genocidal killing be murder. However judicial executions for crimes that internationally would be considered capital offenses, such as for murder or treason (as long as it is clear that these are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as in communist show trials), are not democide. Nor is democide the killing of enemy soldiers in combat or of armed rebels, nor of noncombatants as a result of military action against military targets. With this understanding of democide, Table 1 lists all communist governments that have committed any form of democide and gives their estimated total domestic and foreign democide and its annual rate (the percent of a government's domestic population murdered per year). It also shows the total for communist guerrillas (including quasi-governments as of the White Armies during the Russian civil war in 1917-1922). Figure 1 graphs the com­munist megamurderers and compares this to the commu­nist and world totals. Of course, even though systematically determined and calculated, all these figures and their graph are only rough approximations. Even were we to have total access to all communist archives we still would not be able to cal­culate precisely how many the communists murdered. Consider that even in spite of the archival statistics and detailed reports of survivors, the best experts still disagree by over 40 percent on the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis. We cannot expect near this accuracy for the vic­tims of communism. We can, however, get a probable or­der of magnitude and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range. And that is what the figures in Table 1 are meant to be. Their apparent preci­sion is only due to the total for most communist govern­ments being the summation of dozens of subtotals (as of forced labor deaths each year) and calculations (as in ex­trapolating scholarly estimates of executions or massacres). With this understood, the Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all, apparently killing near 61.000. 000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43.000. 000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39.000. 000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and tran­sit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000.000 murdered, is the second worst mega­ Supplement of Transsylvania Vol. 42 No. 1. 1

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