Solovki, one of the earliest Gulag camps, there was a huge sign that captured the essence of the Communist system: “WITH AN IRON FIST, WE WILL LEAD HUMANITY TO HAPPINESS”. Nobody knows how many people the CPSU murdered between 1917 and 1991. As you will see in the charts and tables, our calculations (originally done in 1970) indicated that the Bolshevik regime killed approximately 130,000,000 people during this period. Our calculations were confirmed by one of the world's leading authorities on the Bolshevik slaughter, Roman Krutsyk, Chairman of Kiev Memorial, who said: “You're absolutely right-- the figure is about 130 000 000.” (E-mail “UCCA”[email protected] dated 4 April 2005) Mr. Krutsyk estimates that “50 million ethnic Ukrainians within the borders of the Soviet Union” were killed by the Bolsheviks in this 1917-1991 period.
To lend perspective to these numbers, consider the fact that the total casualties in World War I World War II were 65,000,000 (WWI: 15,000,000; WW II 50,000,000). Utopia Empowered became Murder Incorporated!
During Collectivization, people were being executed, starved or sent to the Gulag by the millions. When the starving people started eating dogs and cats, the Party killed all the dogs and cats. When the people started eating birds, the party killed all the birds. When the people started eating orphan children, the Party shot or poisoned all orphan children. During the Purges, about 10 percent of the population of the Soviet Union (approximately 15,000,000) were executed outright or shipped off to the Gulag to be worked to death. After World War II, the Gulag population reached approximately 40,000,000 people.
In the Gulag, guards and criminals killed prisoners for diversion. Notorious Magadan commandant Ivan Nikishov, entertained himself by dancing around the prisoner formations, raining obscenities on them and shooting them at random. In 1944, Vice-President Henry Wallace and Professor Owen Lattimore visited Magadan; Nikishov was their host. Wallace found Magadan idyllic, noting approvingly how Nikishov “gamboled about, enjoying the wonderful air.” Lattimore admired Nikishov's “trained and sensitive interest in art and music and a deep sense of civic responsibility.” Nikishov had set up a “Potemkin” camp; all the prisoners and guards were NKVD; his guests were completely duped.
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, pp 353-354.
Some post-World War II history of the CPSU and the KGB are covered; but primary attention is focused on the activities of the CPSU and the NKVD during the 1930s. Though there were bureaucratic reorganizations and name changes, nothing fundamental about the CPSU or the NKVD/KGB changed until their demise. What I've tried to do is come up with some new perspectives on old material, in hopes that better researchers than I will pursue the truth. Most of the basic information has been available since the 1930s and 1940s. The liberal establishment have been unwilling to face the ugly truths about the great Utopian experiment they so admire. At best, they are like Jean-Paul Sartre, who said that even if the stories of the Gulag were true, French workers should not be told—they might become anti-Soviet. At worst, they are like Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht. When Brecht was told that Stalin had sent thousands of innocents to the Gulag, he replied: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.”
Though numerous sources were used in developing the manuscript, most of the fundamental data can be confirmed by reading the following books, cited in the bibliography:
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror.
R. J. Rummell, Lethal Politics.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956; The Gulag Archipeligo Two
Viktor Suvorov, Icebreaker, Who Started the Second World War?
Ernst Topitsch, Stalin's War
Albert L. Weeks, Stalin’s Other War.
“EMINENCE GRIS”
“If there is one place where a start can be made to arouse Europe to revolution, that place is Germany---and victory of the revolution in Germany will guarantee the victory of world revolution.”
Stalin, Sochineniya, Vol.6, p.267.
Stalin brought Hitler to power and maneuvered him into starting World War II. All studies of Communism have shown that the long-range objective of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was world conquest. Lenin made this clear in a speech delivered in 1920:
“[In November 1917] we knew that our victory will be a lasting victory only when our undertaking will conquer the whole world, because we have launched it exclusively counting on world revolution.”
Lenin, Polnoe sobraniesochinenii, vol. 42, 1.
Lenin believed that a World War I devastated Europe was ripe for Communist conquest. Lenin and Stalin always believed Germany was the key to seizing control of Europe. Throughout 1918-1919, Lenin tried to overthrow the tottering German Republic by staging a Bolshevik coup as he had in Russia in 1917. All over Germany there were pitched battles between the troops of the Communist’s Spartakists and the Republic’s Freikorps. The Freikorps was made up largely of veteran “stosstruppen” – specially trained shocktroops who had spearheaded the German 1918 Spring offensive. They trounced the Spartakists; temporarily foiling Lenin’s plans.
However, chaos continued to reign in Germany. Watching the growing Bolshevik strength, Poland feared the rebirth of a strong imperialist Russia that would be a threat to their newly acquired independence. In the Spring of 1920, the Poles allied themselves with the Ukrainian nationalist forces who had revolted against the Bolsheviks and were attempting to break away from Russia and create an independent Ukrainian Republic. Lenin sent the Red Army under the command of Stalin and General Tukhachevsky to put down the Ukrainian revolt and chase out the Poles. The revolt was crushed and the Polish Army retreated toward home with the Red Army in hot pursuit. Lenin saw this as another opportunity to seize control of Germany. Germany was still in political, economic, and social turmoil, and in Lenin’s eyes a prime target for revolutionary takeover. He planned to march the Red Army through Poland, link up with still powerful Bolshevik forces in Germany and seize control directly.
The Poles, however, took umbrage to being used as an access highway to Germany. In a huge battle outside Warsaw, the Polish Army trounced the Red Army, and sent it reeling back to Russia. It was a devastating blow to Stalin’s reputation, and aroused in him an enduring hatred of the Poles, for which they were to later pay a terrible price at places like the Katyn Forest. The Polish debacle convinced Lenin that the most feasible way to seize Germany and Europe would be to bring about another great European war. He figured it would be a rerun of World War I in which the Europeans would eventually bleed each other to death and be helpless to a Bolshevik takeover. This became the Bolshevik master plan, which Stalin relentlessly pursued throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
Due to the still fresh memories of the horrors of World War I, during the 1920s and 1930s democratic socialism, pacifism, disarmament, and peace at almost any price were the prevailing sentiments in Europe. Stalin considered European social democrats and pacifists the greatest obstacle to a new European war. In November 1927 he stated:
“It is impossible to finish with capitalism without first finishing with social democratism in the workers’ movement.” (Pravda, No. 255, 6/7 Nov. 1927.) Again, in 1928, Stalin reiterated: “---first of all, the struggle with social democratization along all lines, including and following from this exposure of bourgeois pacifism.”
Stalin, Sochineniya, Vol.II, p.202.
Marx and Engels had predicted a world war that would last “fifteen, twenty, fifty years,” leading to “general exhaustion and creation of conditions for the final
