A History of Communism

When a communist revolution finally succeeded in 1917, it was led by intellectuals in an agrarian culture that had little history with either democracy or capitalism. As Harvard historian Richard Pipes puts it: "Communism. . . did not come to Russia as the result of a popular uprising: it was imposed on her from above by a small minority hiding behind democratic slogans."

Contrary to Marx's predictions, this was the pattern of communist revolutions throughout the twentieth century.

The 1917 Russian Revolution was led by an angry and fanatical intellectual named Vladimir Lenin. He led his Bolshevik ("majority") Party to victory after a three-year civil war. Before the revolution, Russia had been ruled by a czar. Russian society was divided between a small elite aristocracy and a large population of rural peasants, with few capitalists to speak of.

Lenin quickly abolished all legal hindrances to rule and set up a one party system in which the Bolshevik Party (soon renamed the Communist Party) filled every nook and cranny of Russian society. He began to centralize large chunks of the Russian economy, from industry and trade to education and transportation. This required secret police, a massive bureaucracy, and the widespread use of terror.

Lenin's attempts to centralize the economy were utter disasters. The dictatorship of the proletariat quickly became the dictatorship of recalcitrant bureaucrats. To his chagrin, Lenin found that bureaucrats in Moscow were neither motivated nor competent to manage distant factories and farms. Restrictions on trade created a black market that was larger than the official economy. To add insult to injury, the regime dumped banknotes into the market, which predictably led to runaway inflation. By 1923, prices were 1 million times greater than prices before the revolution began.

Across the economy, productivity plummeted: "Overall largescale industrial production in 1920 was 18 percent of what it had been in 1913...The number of employed industrial workers in 1921 was less than one-half of what it had been in 1918; their living standard fell to one-third of its prewar level." Agriculture was even worse. Lenin tried to force peasants to sell their grain below market price even as he ordered a largescale massacre of the wealthier peasants, the kulaks. This led to food shortages and massive strikes, which Lenin punished with poison gas. The situation became so dire that in 1921 Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed the peasants to sell their grain for market prices after paying a tax. He also eased some of the restrictions on trade while continuing to assert control of other parts of the economy. These modest reforms allowed grain production to rebound. But it was too late to prevent a famine, brought on by drought, that killed 5.2 million people.

Lenin did not live to see his policies through. That was left to his successor, Joseph Stalin. Under Stalin, Communist Russia quickly absorbed the countries on its border such as Ukraine, and in 1924 Russia formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Stalin implemented a series of "Five Year Plans" to take control of large sectors of the economy. The livelihoods of industrial workers were decimated, while millions of peasants died from a forced famine in 1932 and 1933. Combined with various purges of Communist Party officials, Stalin orchestrated the largest scale massacre of a domestic population in human history. At its height in 1937 and 1938, there were on average one thousand political executions per day, not including the countless millions sent to labor camps.

Such tragedy was not the exception but the rule for other communist experiments in the twentieth century. Whatever Marx expected, revolutions never sprang up in advanced industrial societies where there was a strong rule of law, but rather in poor agrarian cultures with career tracks for despots.

The Chinese Revolution led by Mao Tse-tung in 1948 differs from the Russian Revolution in details, but the basic plot line is the same: labor and reeducation camps, mass killings, and economic ruin following attempts to collectivize industry and agriculture. Where Stalin had his Five Year Plans, Mao had the "Great Leap Forward":"We shall teach the sun and moon to change places," read one piece of promotional literature. "We shall create a new heaven and earth for man." Perhaps it sounds nice in Mandarin, but more than 20 million Chinese died in the famine that resulted from the heaven-on-earth construction project. Another 20 million died in laogai, the Chinese labor camps.
China and Russia take first and second place when it comes to total deaths. But for the prize of applying the brutal logic of equality, no one beats the French-educated Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. No other regime ever worked so hard to create an egalitarian society.

Source: Money, Greed, and God. Why Capitalism is the Solution and not the Problem (2009) by Jay W. Richards.

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