Communist crimes - Link to a Web Site

[antti]

I hope this is not too much out of the topic.

http://www.communistcrimes.org/

[Zvezda]

The credibility of this propaganda web site is dubious, at best. Let's observe some of the leaders of this organanization and its financial sponsors that help to disseminate such venomous hatred:

Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation: Closely linked to Swedish 'Moderate Party', elements of which openly supported the Nazis in the 1930s.
Mart Laar: A former Estonian statesman, the founder of the website, and a businessman.

[antti]

Oh well Swedish Moderate Party happends to be in power at the moment. Are saying that Sweden has a governement that supports Nazies? And what is wrong with Mart Laar? I thing estonians and people from other Baltic countries might have some first hand knowledge of communist crimes.

[Belobog]

The crimes of the devilish communists is beyond comparison. Communists infiltrated Western Countries. They are responsible for the decline of Western Civilization. Communists are the ones responsible for the ideas of Social Justice and multiculturalism. In essence they are the reason for the ethnic cleansing of the Sons of Europe from their homeland.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ2fMeer5Mw <--Video about this

[Felicia]

Communist crimes? Year 1937 - with a lots of innocent victims.
The intelligent part of society had been cut off, and what's left?

[RomanovsFan4Ever]

I hope this is not too much out of the topic.

http://www.communistcrimes.org/

Thank you for the link of this very interesting web site!

something is wrong with a link. When you are in the page press refress and it will open.

Fortunately I have no problems with it.

[LisaDavidson]

The credibility of this propaganda web site is dubious, at best. Let's observe some of the leaders of this organanization and its financial sponsors that help to disseminate such venomous hatred:

Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation: Closely linked to Swedish 'Moderate Party', elements of which openly supported the Nazis in the 1930s.
Mart Laar: A former Estonian statesman, the founder of the website, and a businessman.

Have you considered that Russia's failure to own up to the crimes against its own people is the reason for this organization and website? I don't see dissemination of any hatred, venomous or otherwise.

[Zecharia]

The credibility of this propaganda web site is dubious, at best. Let's observe some of the leaders of this organanization and its financial sponsors that help to disseminate such venomous hatred:

Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation: Closely linked to Swedish 'Moderate Party', elements of which openly supported the Nazis in the 1930s.
Mart Laar: A former Estonian statesman, the founder of the website, and a businessman.

Is this also propaganda?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8119320.stm

[RomanovsFan4Ever]

Is this also propaganda?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8119320.stm

Thank you for the link Zecharia.

The credibility of this propaganda web site is dubious, at best. Let's observe some of the leaders of this organanization and its financial sponsors that help to disseminate such venomous hatred:

Zvezda, I'm sorry but I have to disagree with you, that organization don't exist for dissiminate such venomous hatred, but on the contrary, the most important objective of this organization is to try to make the world know about crimes and violations of human rights...I don't see anything of negative in this.
If you take a look in the link that Zecharia posted, you can read about the horrible story of Bykivnia, Ukraine...

Under Stalin, about 200,000 people were executed there...200,000...

[Phil_tomaselli]

Perhaps one day we'll see a website devoted to the crimes committed by the Romanovs against the Russian people - the idiotic wars they led them into, the failure to abolish serfdom until the 1860's, the exiling in Siberia, the crushing of attempts to build genuine democracy, the hoarding of wealth and building of huge palaces while the people starved - that kind of thing.  Not that I am or ever would be a Communist - but if I'd been born in Russia circa 1890, had been in the army as it fought and lost against Germany and had relatives working 15 hour days in the factories I might have thought differently.

[RomanovsFan4Ever]

Phil tomaselli, what you said it's true, and your opinion is very welcome and respected, but it's very well know that the Romanovs were not perfect, we all already know about pogroms, wars, murders (and so on...) during the entire Romanov Dynasty...all this was (and it's still) discussed around the forum...this particular topic is dedicated to communist crimes, and they aren't less than those committed during the Romanov dynasty.
So I wonder why not discussing about communist crimes, when it's already discussed about Romanov's crimes around the forum?

[Zecharia]

Is this also propaganda?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8119320.stm

Thank you for the link Zecharia.

The credibility of this propaganda web site is dubious, at best. Let's observe some of the leaders of this organanization and its financial sponsors that help to disseminate such venomous hatred:

Zvezda, I'm sorry but I have to disagree with you, that organization don't exist for dissiminate such venomous hatred, but on the contrary, the most important objective of this organization is to try to make the world know about crimes and violations of human rights...I don't see anything of negative in this.
If you take a look in the link that Zecharia posted, you can read about the horrible story of Bykivnia, Ukraine...

Under Stalin, about 200,000 people were executed there...200,000...

You welkome

Here is more about communist era:

Around 20 million (citing The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois et al) to 35 million (citing A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia by Alexander Yakovlev) killed in all, from 1917 to 1991

250,000 executed by the Cheka during the "Red Terror" and Russian civil war. (citing The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police by George Leggett) But it could be much higher (see my sig)

Between 300,000 and 500,000 Cossacks killed or deported in 1919 and 1920 (known as "de-Cossackization"; not sure how many of these deaths overlap with the aforementioned Cheka executions - if at all). (citing The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois et al)

Between 7.2 to 10.8 million deaths during dekulakization and collectivization - which caused a famine the regime used as a weapon against supposed "class enemies" (citing Stalin and His Hangmen: the Tyrant and Those Who Killed For Him by Donald Rayfield)

Around 700,000 executed during the Great Terror of 1937-38 (citing Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore); this does not include those who were beaten/tortured to death during "interrogation" or deaths in the gulag during this time, which would put it over a million.

Over 1 million Polish citizens deported by November 1940; 30% of whom were dead by 1941 (citing Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore) and 21,857 executed outright (i.e. Katyn) by the NKVD during the Nazi-Soviet pact (citing Autopsy for an Empire by Dimitri Volkogonov)

A total of 34,250 Latvians and around 60,000 Estonians and 75,000 Lithuanians murdered or deported during Nazi-Soviet pact (citing Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore)

An estimated 4.5 million (citing Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum) to 12 million (citing How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the Concerned Citizen by John G. Heidenrich) deaths in the Gulag from 1918 to 1956. 

(I'm leaving out Stalin's ethnic cleansing of minorities in the USSR during WWII - Chechens, Crimean Taters, Kalmyks, Volga Germans, etc. - accused of "collaboration" with the Germans. I can't think of a source for that one off the top of my head. I'm sure hundreds of thousands perished though)

Haven't read as much on Mao Tse-tung, but the new biography of him by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Mao: The Unknown Story) estimates "well over 70 million" perished as a result of Mao's policies which, if true, makes him the biggest mass killer in history.

Broken down looks like this:
3 million deaths during land reform and the "campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries"
38 million deaths during "Great Leap Forward"
3 million deaths during the Cultural Revolution

[Alixz]

Numbers on such a large scale are hard to digest.  Not one of those purges or deportations and then murders can be said to have benefited the new Soviet Union.  The simply are IMHO crimes against humanity.  I have read that Stalin was a more vicious "Tsar" than any Romanov before him.

By the way - Hi to Phil - it is good to hear from you.

[Sergei Witte]

Numbers say nothing. Even with 1 man/woman murdered there is a mother, husband/wife, chlidren etc. who is left alone in misery. One can better imagine the grief of 1 dead than talk about so or so many millions having perished. When we look at numbers we forget the individuals who died.

Having said that, my general impression is that the numbers of victims during the last 70 years of the Tsars were multiplied by 100 during 70 years of Communist regime. (rough estimation)
There is another difference imo: the difference between the phenomena opression and terror. The tsars used a great deal of opression which killed many and condemned many but the Communists used state terror. The difference being the former being a reaction to revolutionary activity, coming to a halt when the upheaval stops, and the latter continuing by killing innocent people 'as an example'. This difference in approach accounts for the numbers of victims multipying by 100.

The cause for this 'different approach' lies in the different 'political goals' of the two regimes. The Tsars wanted everything to remain the same and the Communists wanted to change the whole society. Both used violence as a means to obtain their goal.

[RomanovsFan4Ever]

I'm curious to know if anyone have read this book: Cannibal Island, death in a Siberian Gulag by Nicholas Werth... http://www.amazon.com/Cannibal-Island-Siberian-against-Humanity/dp/0691130833

During the spring of 1933, Stalin's police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime's "cleansing" of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to Siberia. Many of the victims were sent to labor camps, but ten thousand of them were dumped in a remote wasteland and left to fend for themselves. Cannibal Island reveals the shocking, grisly truth about their fate.

These people were abandoned on the island of Nazino without food or shelter. Left there to starve and to die, they eventually began to eat each other. Nicolas Werth, a French historian of the Soviet era, reconstructs their gruesome final days using rare archival material from deep inside the Stalinist vaults. Werth skillfully weaves this episode into a broader story about the Soviet frenzy in the 1930s to purge society of all those deemed to be unfit. For Stalin, these undesirables included criminals, opponents of forced collectivization, vagabonds, gypsies, even entire groups in Soviet society such as the "kulaks" and their families. Werth sets his story within the broader social and political context of the period, giving us for the first time a full picture of how Stalin's system of "special villages" worked, how hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were moved about the country in wholesale mass transportations, and how this savage bureaucratic machinery functioned on the local, regional, and state levels.

Cannibal Island challenges us to confront unpleasant facts not only about Stalin's punitive social controls and his failed Soviet utopia, but about every generation's capacity for brutality--including our own.

Courtesy Princeton University Press.