What is evil? The worst atrocities committed by communist regimes may be a place to look for some answers. Hanna Arendt’s, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Eviladdresses this same question in order to find the root of what evil is. In the bewildering and contradictory history of communism, communist mass murders and communist genocides play no small part. So, the question is: how can individuals who support an ideology that advances liberty and the rights of the working class commit heinous acts against their fellow human beings? Arendt concludes that, ‘evil’ can be as simple as when a person doesn’t possess the moral courage to stand up against wrongdoing. 

Violence, terror and repression were common in the Soviet Union but not unique to it; the People’s Republic of China, The Khmer Rouge, Cuba, North Korea, The People’s Republic of Mongolia, and other communist nations have all manufactured dark periods against their own people in their histories. How were these crimes possible? Why weren't they stopped? The answers aren’t simple, but what is in plain sight is that these countries killed people in the name of communism.

When The Kronstadt Sailors Asked For Freedom Of Speech, They Were Violently Denied It

During the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the subsequent Russian Civil War, the sailors of the Kronstadt naval fortress near Saint Petersburg were considered to be at the vanguard of all three moments in Soviet history. They were crack troops who had served in the Imperial Russian Navy during the First World War only a few years earlier.

Under the authority of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the sailors of Kronstadt could be relied upon to do the hardest fighting, and they were believed to be completely supportive of the new communist state regardless of its direction. Initially, the sailors were among the first military forces to revolt against the Romanov government, but they quickly became disillusioned with Bolshevik rule. Between 1917 and 1920, the sailors had seen that the Bolsheviks had pushed other political parties out of power, imprisoned anyone who questioned or opposed the revolutions, and executed those who were considered a threat. With a growing network of secret police and government informers, the sailors now realized that a surveillance state was growing where no true freedom would exist. 

While the sailors were certainly communists and socialists, almost all of them were opposed to a one-party police state. In March 1921, 15,000 sailors decided to act, and they drew up a list of 12 demands to present to Lenin’s government. The most significant clauses included: new elections to the soviets (councils), liberation of political prisoners, freedom to organize, the right to free speech and a free press, and the abolition of political party armed wings. Once these and other demands were made, the Bolshevik leadership saw this move as a threat to their power. Leon Trotsky, head of the Red Army, declared that any sailors who laid down their arms would be spared while those who continued to resist would be disarmed by force. The sailors did not back down and readied themselves to engage the Red Army.  

Five days after the sailors made their demands, Leon Trotsky mobilized the local Red Army units and sent them to attack under the command of Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukachevsky. The first attack came quickly and involved about 30,000 Red Army soldiers who crossed the frozen bay ice on foot. The sailors were safely barricaded in the fortress and in their ships and easily slowed the attack. The Red Army met a murderous wall of gunfire; the attack stumbled and began to fall apart. After fierce fighting, the Red Army retreated, and the Kronstadt sailors prepared for more fighting to resume. Soon, the Red Army returned with 60,000 soldiers, and they advanced upon the naval base at night while wearing white winter camouflage. The second attack raged all night and into the following day. The Red Army soon reached Kronstadt and infiltrated the city. The rebelling sailors knew the end had come. 

The leader of the rebellion, Stephan Petrichenko, and other sailors knew that although the Bolsheviks guaranteed clemency to those who surrendered, it was likely a hollow promise with deadly consequences. He and others managed to elude capture and cross the frozen bay to the safety of Finland. Those who surrendered to the Red Army were arrested, imprisoned, and executed in groups for the rest of 1921. In the end, the very idea of freedom of speech and any views that contradicted the Bolshevik view of communism weren’t tolerated. The failure of the Kronstadt Rebellion was the last chance for democracy to grow in Soviet Russia.

In Moscow, following the Stock Market crash and the onset of the Great Depression, Joseph Stalin had quietly become the single ruler of the Soviet Union and begun his first five-year plan to rapidly industrialize the country. Stalin was a pathologically paranoid former street thug who trusted no one. He saw enemies everywhere, and government officials close to him recall seeing him furiously doodling cartoons of vicious wolves all over his work papers. 

This paranoia was infectious and spread throughout Stalin’s administration, ultimately bringing about the appalling Holodomor of 1933. Holodomor is a Ukrainian word that can be translated in several ways, all of which mean "to starve [someone or something] to death." It began in 1928 when Stalin began the process of collectivizing farms across the country. All livestock, surplus food, and equipment would be confiscated by the state. Once in state hands, farms would produce grain for the cities and export it to pay for the industrialization campaign. The farmers in Ukraine resented this because it felt too familiar to the serfdom they had lived under during the age of the Tsars. Many farmers and families passively resisted by killing their livestock, hiding their food, and refusing to join the collective farms. In response, Stalin labeled anyone resisting as ‘kulaks’ and began sending the NKVD secret police into the countryside to confiscate all materials by force and to arrest anyone resisting. 

A series of deadly events soon set the famine in motion. Grain and animals were taken away, and the most skilled farmers were arrested as ‘enemies of the people.' Now, with no one to produce food and no grain seed, the Ukrainian peasants began to starve. Families who did not flee were often rounded up and sent to the Gulag. To prevent people from leaving the farms or escaping, roadblocks were set up by armed soldiers and police. In 1932 and 1933, thousands of people begin starving, and disease became rampant. A new law, straight from Stalin’s desk, decreed that anyone caught stealing food would be shot on sight. It is estimated that by 1934, four million people had died from starvation and hunger-related diseases alone. Many more perished from execution and exile. It was not uncommon for entire villages to be littered with corpses laying in the streets, and witnesses recall seeing dogs gnawing on lifeless limbs. Some people were tortured by hunger and resorted to cannibalism, either by exhuming buried victims or kidnapping children. The perverted rationale behind this manufactured catastrophe is that the Ukrainian peasants had to be liquidated to prevent them from impeding communist progress in the Soviet Union. 

Most modern democratic governments have become secular while, to one degree or another, protecting the rights of religious groups and minorities. The Soviet Union broke from this practice in its earliest years and embarked on several campaigns to actually eradicate religion that ceased only when the Wehrmacht invaded in 1941. Instead of establishing a cultural and societal separation of church and state, Orthodox churches (and those of other denominations) were closed and re-purposed. Some were turned into warehouses while others were demolished. 

Gloriously towering above the Moscow skyline, the Cathedral of Christ The Savior stood until it was dynamited in 1931 to free up the land beneath for a new structure, the Palace of The Soviets. Designed by Konstantin Ton and built in 1839, the Cathedral remained a thorn in the side of the communists who routinely ridiculed all religion, adherents, and clergy. The 1920s and '30s saw the closure and destruction of about 50,000 churches, leaving only a few hundred still standing and open on the eve of World War Two. 

The Great Purge was a frenzied clearing out of the Soviet government’s personnel in all branches and at all ranks with wanton violence. When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, the elite in the Soviet government began sniffing out opportunities to rise to the top. Among those were Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Mikhail Kallinin, Sergei Kirov, Nikolai Bukharin, and Joseph Stalin. Stalin proved himself to be the master politician by playing others against each other while maintaining the facade of not aspiring to the heights of power. 

Through the '20s and '30s, Stalin formed alliances and broke them when it benefited him. With the help of allies in the secret police apparatus, he literally killed of his rivals one-by-one until only he and Sergei Kirovremained. Kirov was the communist party boss of Leningrad and seemed to be a close ally - even a friend - of Stalin. While it may never be known for certain, Stalin likely had Kirov assassinated to complete his consolidation of power. After Kirov’s assassination in 1935, the communist leadership underwent a purge from the top to the bottom. 

Arrests took place everywhere. Red Army generals, administration officials, low-ranking soldiers, factory workers, farmers, and regular individuals were dragged from their homes and workplaces before courts. Most of the arrests were warrantless, and the accused were labeled as wreckers, provocateurs, spies, counter-revolutionaries, and Trotskyists. One by one, individuals were condemned during show trials, which were nothing more than the defendant standing before a tribunal and being attacked and screamed at.

The Great Purge crippled the Red Army and left it without a senior officer command. The purge also eradicated any officials who had been loyal to Lenin before Stalin rose to power. By stunting these two areas of the Soviet government, Stalin cemented his power by killing off politicians and soldiers who knew life before Stalin. In a final act, he filled positions with cowardly yes-men and allies who would never challenge him while also preventing any military officers from staging a coup. The purge was also a psychological weapon that was meant to confuse and terrify others into never thinking of rising against Stalin again. The propaganda of the time claimed that everyone who had been arrested was anti-communist in some way, and, to protect the Soviet State, the purge had to happen. 

Once members of the opposition were killed off with Stalin’s help, Choibalsan became Prime Minister in 1939 and set into motion his own great purge in Mongolia. This purge closely mirrored Stalin’s and involved the arrest and murder of government officials, the original revolutionaries, army commanders, and anyone who opposed Khorloogin Choibalsan’s position of power. Lastly, Choibalsan turned his gaze to eliminating Mongolian Buddhism. 

In 1939, Choibalsan’s security forces descended upon the oldest Buddhist monastery in Mongolia, Eredene Zuu, and set about destroying it. Across the country, other temples and monasteries were destroyed, and over 10,000 Buddhist monks were executed by firing squad. They were then dumped into mass graves and buried. Choibalsan’s purge lasted much longer than the Soviet purge; it continued until 1952 when Khorloogin Choibalsan died. Some may find it puzzling that the strongest proponents of communism could be the greatest destroyers of other people and cultures.

After Prussia was defeated by Napoleon, the region known as Old Poland became the Duchy of Warsaw until it was taken by Russia and made the Kingdom of Poland in 1815. Poland remained part of the Russian Empire until 1917 when the empire was destroyed, and Poland was declared the Second Polish Republic in 1918. By this time, however, many in Russia felt that the Polish territory was rightfully part of Russia. Lenin and other Bolsheviks believed that for the communist world revolution to succeed, Poland would be the route for the Red Army to travel to reach Germany. It was there that they believed the German Communists would establish the Marxist nation that Engels and Marx had predicted. 

In 1919, Lenin was also concerned that Symon Petlura was going to win Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union. In response to maneuvers by the Polish army, the RKKA moved west and pushed all the way to the gates of Warsaw where it was finally stopped and pushed back by Poland in 1920. Though the Treaty of Liga ended the Soviet-Polish War, the defeat was felt deeply by Lenin, Trotsky, and - especially - Stalin. During the conflict, he commanded a small force, and Lenin laid partial blame on his shoulders for the defeat. This snub erupted when the Red Army returned 19 years later when Russia invaded Poland in 1939. 

While the Red Army fought off the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, the two forces clashed in Scandinavia. As part of the Soviet effort, armed partisan militia harassed eastern Finland. While the Army attacked military targets, the Red Air Force carried out indiscriminate bombing raids that killed countless civilians. In the east, control was not tightly maintained, and there were instances of partisans deliberately attacking civilian settlements and killing unarmed people.

The image above was taken in north-eastern Finland and depicts two young boys that had been murdered by Soviet partisans. In 2006, the Finnish government declassified a number of photographs from the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union that give evidence that Soviet partisans continually crossed into Finland to terrorize the local populations. These attacks have gone largely unknown until recently.

Towards the end of the Second World War in Europe, the Red Army began arriving en masse in the suburbs around Berlin, and all knew that it was just a matter of time before the last German forces would surrender, and the occupation could begin. What followed is perhaps the darkest hour in the history of the Soviet Union and the Red Army. 

As early as February in 1945, Red Army soldiers began raping local German women and girls, either individually or in groups. The diary of one soldier who did not commit assault records what he witnessed and heard in the last months of the war. Vladimir Gelfand was a Lieutenant in the Red Army, and he had witnessed World War Two from 1941 until it ended in 1945. One passage from April of 1945 describes how Lt. Gelfand passed by a group of German women and girls with suitcases. When he asked where they were going, the women explained with horror that the previous night no fewer than 20 Red Army soldiers had raped one young woman in front of her mother. After describing this, she burst into tears and begged Lt. Gelfand to stay.

Following the end of World War Two and the iron curtain ‘falling’ across Europe, Hungary became a satellite state of the Soviet Union and part of the Warsaw Pact. Its status as an independent nation was only accurate on paper, and any real decision was made in Moscow. Though Stalin died in 1953, his machine of repression was carried on by those who had been appointed by him. Three years later, the people of Hungary began demonstrating against Soviet control for more democratic freedoms.

In response, the Soviets first tried to appease the revolutionaries by placing the popular Imre Nagy as the new leader of Hungary. The Soviets, at Nagy’s request, then pulled their soldiers out of Hungary in order to quell the tension. Once the soldiers were gone, Nagy, who had been critical of Soviet control, began to encourage the demonstrators and revolutionaries. His first step was to end the one-party rule of Hungary and introduce a multi-party system. The Soviets responded by rolling tanks into Budapest. 

Nagy made a final radio broadcast on November 4th, 1956, stating: "Our troops are fighting. The Government is in place." That same day, he fled and tried to reach the Yugoslavian Embassy in Budapest, but he was arrested and executed. Fighting began throughout Budapest when revolutionaries broke into an armory and seized weapons and ammunition. The first building to be attacked was the headquarters of the secret police. Police officials were captured, tortured, and executed by the revolutionaries. Following the skirmish, the Hungarians declared an official strike and began setting up barricades. Several tanks were successfully destroyed by being drawn into close quarters and attacked with homemade explosives. 

The Soviets could have stopped the violence and reasoned with the revolutionaries in a way that was mutually beneficial without firing a shot, but old habits die hard, and the Kremlin, under Khrushchev, ordered the tanks to begin firing indiscriminately. The revolution was stopped at the cost of 2,500 dead. As many as 200,000 fled Hungary to other countries, including the United States. As a result of the failed revolution and iron fist of communism, Hungary would remain part of the Warsaw Pact until 1989.

Like Hungary, Czechoslovakia was part of the Warsaw Pact that emerged after World War Two. Just three years after the war ended, Czech communists who supported the Soviet Union took control of Czechoslovakia, which had been democratic after the war. After almost 20 years of rule by the Soviets, partially under Stalin, the Czech people began to push for change, more rights, and less censorship. 

Alexander Dubcek replaced Antonin Novoty as First Secretary through a unanimous vote in 1968. This move was pushed because, at the time, it was felt that the government was being run mostly be Czechs, and not enough Slovaks were in power to represent the Slovak population. Afterward, the leadership declared the adoption of the new ‘Action Program,’ which guaranteed movements for more freedoms, autonomy for Slovakia, economic reforms, less censorship, and more individual rights. This alarmed hard-line communists in East Germany, Poland and Leonid Brezhnev, the Stalinist conservative and leader of the Soviet Union. They believed that if Czechoslovakia reformed itself, other communist countries would do the same, and ultimately the Warsaw Pact would fall apart. 

The Khmer Rouge terrorized Cambodia, then known as Democratic Kampuchea, during its short lived but evil history. Pol Pot was the leader of the new Marxist government, and he believed that forcing people to live on communal farms was the best way to bring about his version of Marxism. Over four years, his dictatorship and decisions would ultimately cause the deaths of 1.5 million people. 

Pol Pot and his supporters began taking people from Cambodia’s cities and relocating them onto the communal farms while also liquidating anyone who they thought was capable of resistance. One source states that anyone wearing glasses was thought to be an intellectual and capable of independent thought, thus making them a threat to the Khmer Rouge. Thousands of people, in typical totalitarian form, were rounded up and brought to prisons where they were interrogated, tortured, and killed. Many more were killed by being overworked on the communal farms and by disease in the infamous killing fields. 

One particular massacre took place when Khmer Rouge soldiers crossed the Cambodian border and entered Vietnam. In 1978, in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, Khmer soldiers approached Ba Chuc and killed 3,000 people, though more were likely victims of the violence. One woman, Ha Thi Nga, witnessed the killing of both of her children and her husband. She survived when she hid in the mountains after being left for dead. The Ba Chuc Massacre is believed to have been the worst individual massacre committed by the Khmer Rouge. In a twist of fate, it was this massacre (among others) that pushed the Vietnamese government to respond by invading Kampuchea and capturing the capitol, Phnom Penh. Once under Vietnamese control, the Khmer Rouge government was abolished in 1979. 

Why did this happen? Attorney Lyma Nguyen is confident that the massacre was part of a larger plan by the Khmer Rouge to ethnically cleanse Cambodia of ethnic Vietnamese people. He cites a speech by Pol Pot in which the dictator uses the racial slang term, ‘yuon’ to refer to the ethnic Vietnamese while explaining his plan to exterminate them. This strengthens the argument that many communist nations that carried out violent attacks were hybrid communist-ultra nationalist societies.

Because the Soviet Army was much larger and mechanized, resistance fighters began a guerrilla campaign in the mountains to make up for their lack of weapons. The resistance fighters were practicing Muslims and formed fighting units based on ancient tribal lines. In response to the resistance and the mounting death toll, the Soviet Army began to indiscriminately bomb villages and any targets that helped maintain the resistance and supply the Mujahidin. On the ground, Soviet soldiers and communist-Afghan allies began executing Afghan civilians thought to be helping the resistance. During the war, several million Afghan people left the country to escape the violence. 

The war left Afghanistan in ruins, and the communist coup failed. The number of Afghan civilian deaths alone are believed to be as high as two million, while the Soviet Union counted 15,000 dead and thousands more wounded and missing. It is now considered Russia’s Vietnam-style quagmire, and the Soviet army ended up evacuating in 1988. The conflict contributed to the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the rise of radical terrorism, and indirectly ended communist rule in eastern Europe. 

North Korea was born out of the left-wing and nationalist struggle against occupation by Imperial Japan from 1910 to 1945. In 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded the peninsula from the northern border, while the United States occupied the southern half, and the landmass was divided at the 38th parallel. 

The Soviet Union was an important ally of North Korea and supplied financial as well as material support to prop up the new state. Once the USSR came to an end in 1991, North Korea could only rely on China. Under the 46-year-rule of Kim Il Sung, North Korea weathered the Cold War and witnessed the first transition of power from father to son in a communist nation when Kim Il Sung died and was replaced by his son, Kim Jong Il in 1994. It was at this point that the Great Famine of North Korea began stalking the countryside. 

The peninsula’s northern areas are mountainous and not suitable for large-scale agriculture. This, combined with loss of support from Russia, began to affect industry, which lacked oil and other commodities that fueled machines and equipment. Kim Jong Il had a clear opportunity to relax government restrictions against commercialization, but he knew that any hint of admitting that the political and economic structure of North Korea wasn’t working could germinate into a threat against his personal and family power. Nothing was done other than more pressure being applied to farmers and the agriculture sector. These problems were only exacerbated by devastating floods that destroyed the little arable land that was available. 

Kim Jong Il’s government took no responsibility for the dire situation, and, when asking the United Nations for assistance, the blame was put on the floods. Even when food aid began arriving, the North Korean Army and the city of Pyongyang were fed the most while powerful government officials hoarded food supplies, and the North Korean people received the smallest cut of aid. This criminal mismanagement resulted in the deaths of three million people who could have very easily survived. The famine was so severe that children who survived were mentally and physically stunted from lack of nutrition. To this day, the Kim dynasty and the North Korean government have never taken responsibility for the catastrophe and continue to blame the United States and others for the death toll. Interestingly, the famine forced many people to defect from North Korea through China, and the stories they carried with them may have contributed to a better understanding of what life is like in North Korea.

Following the resumed Chinese Civil War that ended in 1949, Mao set about rebuilding the country and consolidating power. In 1958, the Great Leap Forward was Mao’s own five-year plan, and like Stalin, he forced the Chinese people in the countryside to move onto collective farming communes in order to begin mass producing grain to feed the country. About 26,578 communes existed across China, and propaganda was used to create enthusiasm. The dark side of this was the level of control. In the fields, entire families and communities toiled by hand while special, public-address radios blasted political speeches and work songs. 

It has been agreed upon that Mao Tse-Tung was detached from reality and possibly crazy. For example, in 1958 he dictated that the common sparrow should be killed off because it was eating too much grain. After the birds were pushed close to extinction, crop pests began destroying the wheat that was being grown. The following year saw a bad growing season, and the combination of these factors led to a preventable famine that claimed the lives of as many as 78 million people who starved to death.