A century has passed since the Communist Party seized power in the Soviet Union. According to records compiled by the U.S. Congress, communist regimes have been responsible for the deaths of at least one hundred million people. The Black Book of Communism details this history of murder, drawing on documents declassified by the governments of nations in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as records on the victims of communist political campaigns in China, North Korea, and other communist countries.
Communist regimes carry out intense political purges among their own ranks and select the cruelest of leaders. It is difficult for many to understand the rationale behind the barbarity inflicted by communist parties upon their own cadres, particularly when it comes to those who are purged simply for deviating on specific issues while otherwise being wholly loyal to the party and its leadership. One reason is that the communist specter, in its rebellion against the divine and humankind, possesses an instinctual fear that its doom is always around the corner. To reinforce itself, the specter needs individuals who have no regard for moral right and wrong. These individuals are identified by their brutality during mass killings, and their elevation to positions of party leadership enables the specter to ensure the perpetuation of its earthly tyranny.
Another of its motives for killing is to recruit participants from general society, as was done during the Cultural Revolution in China. By committing murder and other crimes amid the chaos, these people acted as accomplices to the Chinese Communist Party’s savagery, and the most brutal perpetrators became the staunchest followers of the Party. Even today, many former Red Guards who committed assault and murder during the Cultural Revolution express no remorse for the events of their youth.
Furthermore, by killing its victims openly and deliberately, the Communist Party terrorizes the general population into obedience.
2. The Slaughter of the Working Class
From Marx's theories to the rhetoric of the totalitarian communist regimes,
all were filled with the principle of reliance on the proletarian workers and peasants
and promises to represent their interests. But in practice, it was the working class
that suffered the greatest abuses under the communist system.
A. Suppressing the Soviet Workers and Peasants
In 1918, after Lenin illegally disbanded the Constituent Assembly, it was the workers who
were the first to resist the communist dictatorship. Protesting the dissolution
of the assembly, tens of thousands of workers from Petrograd and Moscow held parades and
demonstrations. Bolshevik soldiers cracked down on the unrest with lethal force,
gunning down demonstrators and filling the streets of Petrograd and Moscow with the workers' blood.
The country's largest labor union, the All-Russian Union of Railwaymen,
announced a strike to protest the Bolshevik coup and gained the broad support of many
other labor organizations. As it did with the workers of Petrograd and Moscow,
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union put down the strikers with its armed forces,
and the All-Russian Union and other independent unions were banned.
Remaining labor organizations were gradually forced under the control
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In the spring of 1919, starving workers in cities across Russia went on strike several
times to demand the same rations as Red Army soldiers, the rights to free speech and democratic
elections, and the abolition of political privileges afforded to the communists.
All these movements were handled by the Cheka secret police, who jailed or shot the strikers.
In the summer of 1918, Russia faced a massive food shortage due to the ongoing civil war.
In June, with the country on the verge of famine, Lenin dispatched Joseph Stalin to Tsaritsyn to
seize grain from the Volga Basin, traditionally a breadbasket of Russian agriculture. The tyranny
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union invited resistance from the peasants. In August 1918,
peasants in the Penza region rose up in an armed revolt, and the uprising quickly spread to the
surrounding areas. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union sent troops to suppress the uprisings,
and Lenin sent a telegram to the Penza Bolsheviks. Here is British historian Robert Service's
translation of the original Russian telegram.
In order to seize its grain, the Soviet Union organized many, quote,
grain requisitioning teams and sent them to the region. Over 50,000 Tambov farmers formed
local militias to fight the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's requisitioning teams.
In June 1921, faced with the task of suppressing the Tambov rebellion,
the Soviet regime suggested that military commander Mikhail Tukhachevsky fight the
hooligans with poison gas. Tukhachevsky's use of chemical weapons combined with fires
that burned across the region rendered much of Tambov completely desolate.
An estimated 100,000 Tambov peasants who took part in the resistance and their relatives
were imprisoned or exiled. Around 15,000 people died in the insurgency.
The widespread slaughter in the Soviet Union served as a comprehensive model for the Chinese
Communist Party's coming persecution of the Chinese workers and peasants.
b. Following the Soviet Model
China has a broad and profound culture with a history of 5,000 years. Its people are steeped
in a tradition of worshiping gods and revering the divine, the specter of communism, incapable
of conquering 5,000 years of tradition using conspiracy alone, dealt with traditional Chinese
culture using systematic violence. The Chinese Communist Party targeted the elites of society
who served as the bearers of traditional culture, destroyed the physical artifacts
of Chinese civilization, and severed the connections between the Chinese people and
their gods. China's traditional heritage was replaced with a party culture to be spread among
the survivors of the CCP's mass killings, turning the young into treacherous wolf cubs who serve as
the specter's pawns in the continued destruction of humanity. Immediately after taking power,
the CCP began to invent enemies, beginning with the murder of elites. In the countryside,
it slaughtered landlords and gentry. In the cities, it killed businessmen,
creating an atmosphere of terror and looting the wealth of civil society.
To rouse the peasants to kill landlords and rich farmers and support the new communist regime,
the CCP implemented a so-called land reform that promised the peasantry their own land.
But after murdering the landowners, the CCP claimed the land was to be turned over to the
peasants in the form of cooperatives. In practice, this meant the land still did not belong to the
also known as the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, which focused on
killing the landlords and rich peasants in the countryside. The CCP announced that by the end of
1952, more than 2.4 million counterrevolutionaries had been eliminated. In fact, more than 5 million
people, accounting for nearly 1% of the total Chinese population, had been murdered.
After killing the landlords and rich peasants in the countryside, the CCP launched the Three
Anti and Five Anti campaigns to slaughter wealthy city dwellers. In Shanghai alone,
876 people committed suicide during the movement from January to April 1951, according to incomplete
statistics. Among them, many capitalists committed suicide with all of their family members.
The CCP did not stop with the extermination of landlords and capitalists. It also robbed
the wealth of peasants, small merchants, and craftsmen. After the mass slaughter,
the vast majority of the working class remained impoverished.
3. The Absolute Brutality of the Communist Party
A. Atrocities of Soviet Communism. The Gulags. Inspiration for Hitler's Death Camps.
On September 5, 1918, Lenin ordered the establishment of the first Soviet
concentration camp on the Solovetsky Islands for the incarceration, torture,
and slaughter of political prisoners and dissidents who opposed the October Revolution.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union followed this up with a constellation of
concentration camps across the Soviet Union, the notorious Gulag labor camps of the Stalinist era.
The Gulag system, the term Gulag being an abbreviation in Russian for the main
administration of corrective labor camps and settlements, grew to a monstrous scale
under the leadership of Stalin as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union intensified its
political terror and carried out even greater purges. By the time of Stalin's death in 1953,
there were 170 Gulag administrations containing over 30,000 individual camps
scattered across the Soviet Union in what Alexander Solzhenitsyn
would famously describe as the Gulag Archipelago in his book by the same name.
In his documentary work, Solzhenitsyn listed 31 different methods that the Soviet secret
police used to exhaust their prisoners' strength and force them to confess to any crime.
Those sent to the Gulag suffered from a constant shortage of food and clothing while being forced
to perform heavy labor 12 to 16 hours a day in the freezing cold of Russian winters. The death
toll was enormous. Many people were imprisoned along with their entire families, with husbands
incarcerated and wives exiled. Not even the elderly, some already in their 80s, were spared.
The condemned ranged from high-ranking party elites, state leaders, and military commanders,
down to completely ordinary citizens from every walk of life, including religious believers,
engineers, technicians, doctors, students, professors, factory workers, and peasants.
It is common for people to believe that concentration camps were a Nazi creation,
but in reality, the Soviet Gulag system was the precursor to similar forms of repression around
the world in both communist and non-communist regimes. According to former Soviet military
intelligence officer and popular historian Viktor Suvorov, before World War II, Hitler sent Gestapo
officers to Russia to tour and study the experiences accumulated by the Soviets in
building the Gulag. According to conservative estimates, over half a million prisoners
perished in the Gulag system between 1930 and 1940, during the years of Stalin's pre-war terror.
The system was disbanded in 1960. In 2013, a website of the Russian state media reported
that more than 15 million people had been sentenced and imprisoned in the Gulag labor
camps and more than 1.5 million had died. Killing by Famine
Communist regimes often killed people through famine. Between 1932 and 1933,
the Ukrainian region suffered from a genocidal mass starvation, known as the Holodomor,
caused by the Soviet regime. After the Civil War, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's
forced collective farming met with widespread resistance from the Ukrainian peasantry.
To deal with this, the Soviet regime classified a majority of skilled farmers as kulaks and exiled
them to Western Siberia and the republics of Central Asia. The removal of the kulaks was a
huge loss to Ukrainian agriculture, and in 1932, production plummeted. In the winter of 1932 to
1933, the Soviet government cut off food supplies to Ukraine and set up security fences along the
borders of the republic. At first, Ukrainians survived on the stored vegetables and potatoes
in their homes, but these were soon requisitioned by party authorities. A large number of farmers
starved to death. In desperation, people turned to eating the dug-up carcasses of cats, dogs,
and livestock, and even cannibalism. The authorities prevented villagers from traveling
to the cities in search of food. Many people starved to death as they walked along the railways.
The Holodomor famine turned more than one million Ukrainian children into orphans.
Many of them became homeless and had no choice but to beg for food in the cities.
To eliminate this embarrassment, Stalin signed orders authorizing police to shoot children as
young as 12. Estimates of the death toll during the Holodomor range from about 2.5 million to 4.8
million. During the famine, bodies of the victims could be seen all over the streets of Kharkov,
the Ukrainian capital. The Great Terror turns on the Soviet elite. The purpose of the communist
specter is to destroy all of mankind, including, eventually, its own followers. This played out
during the Stalinist era, as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union carried out bloody purges
across its own ranks. Beginning in 1928, Stalin targeted the upper echelons of the communist
leadership. Out of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union in 1934, 1,108 were arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activity. Of the 139
members of the Central Committee elected at the 17th Congress, four out of every five were shot.
The Soviet Politburo had elected 31 members between 1919 and 1935, of whom 20 were killed
in Stalin's purges. Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's secret police chief, once said,
Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime. Except for Stalin, all of the Politburo members
remaining at the time of Lenin's death in 1924, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Alexei Rykov,
Mikhail Tomsky, and Leon Trotsky, were executed or assassinated by 1940.
No section of society was spared in the Great Terror. Repression in the religious, scientific,
educational, academic, and artistic fields preceded the purges that gutted the military
and political elite. The main victims of Stalin's terror were ordinary Soviet citizens.
How many were arrested, killed, imprisoned, or exiled by Stalin in the Great Terror?
Even today, there are no complete records or answers. On the eve of the dissolution of the
Soviet Union in June 1991, KGB chief Vladimir Kriuchkov said that between 1920 and 1953,
about 4.2 million people were, quote, suppressed, including two million during the Great Terror
alone. Alexander Yakovlev, a reformist politician in the Soviet and Yeltsin eras,
said in a 2000 interview that the victims of the Stalinist repression numbered at least 20 million.
b. Atrocities of the Chinese Communist Party
From 1949, the year the Chinese Communist Party or CCP regime was established, to 1966,
tens of millions of Chinese lost their lives in the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries,
the Three Anti and Five Anti campaigns, the Anti-Rightist campaign, and the Great
Famine caused by the Great Leap Forward. This period was followed by bloody struggles within
the CCP. As a new generation of Chinese, raised to be atheist wolf cubs indoctrinated in the
education and party culture of communism, came of age, the Communist specter launched a campaign of
even more rampant killing and destruction to wipe out 5,000 years worth of traditional Chinese
culture. The Great Chinese Famine
Between 1959 and 1962, China experienced the world's deadliest famine. To deceive the world,
the CCP still claims it was, quote, three years of natural disasters. In fact, in 1958,
the CCP had rashly begun the People's Commune Movement and the Great Leap Forward campaign.
These wild schemes, which depleted grain stocks and decimated Chinese agricultural production,
were supported by a deluge of false reports written by officials across all levels of
leadership, from rural regions to the cities. The CCP used these reports as justification
for collecting grain from the peasants, who were forced to turn in their food,
seeds, and animal feed to the regime. The CCP's administrative organs at all
levels sent teams to the countryside. They used torture and interrogations to squeeze the last
morsels of food from the doomed peasants. Following the example set by the Soviet Communists,
the CCP prevented villagers from entering cities in search of food, causing the mass death of
families and even whole villages. Cannibalism was widespread, and the corpses of famine victims
littered the countryside. When peasants were caught stealing to survive, they were killed.
The grain seized by the government was traded for large amounts of Soviet weaponry,
or for gold, that the CCP used to pay off debts as it turned a blind eye to the loss of Chinese
lives. In just three years, the Great Chinese Famine had wiped out tens of millions of people.
The Cultural Revolutions, Fanatical Slaughter, and Cultural Genocide
On May 16, 1996, the CCP published the Notice of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist
Party, which marked the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In August, with the children of
high-ranking CCP cadres leading the way, students from secondary schools in Beijing formed a band
of Red Guards. The mob went on a rampage across Beijing in a frenzy of ransacking, assault,
and killing. By the end of the month, known as Red August, thousands of people in Beijing had
been murdered. In the Beijing district of Daxing, 325 people were killed in six days between August
27 and September 1 across 48 production brigades of 13 people's communes. The dead varied in age
from just 38 days to 80 years, and 22 families were wiped out completely. The Red Guards beat
their victims with clubs as well as stabbed or strangled them. They killed infants and toddlers
by stepping on one leg and tearing the child in two. As the specter of communism directed people
to beat and kill, it erased their human compassion, brainwashing them with the slogan of,
quote, treating the enemy with the numb cruelty of the harsh winter.
With every crime against humanity, the CCP displaced the traditional culture and moral
virtue of the Chinese. Poisoned by party culture, many people became tools of murder.
When most people see or learn about the bloodthirsty deeds of the totalitarian communist
state, they are at a complete loss as to how anyone could descend into such inhuman barbarism.
The truth behind this is that they were possessed by rotten demons and degenerate spirits controlled
by the communist specter. Estimating the ravages of the Cultural Revolution is a daunting task.
Most studies suggest a minimum death toll of two million. R.J. Rummel, an American professor who
has researched mass killing, wrote in his book, China's Bloody Century, that the Cultural
Revolution claimed the lives of 7.73 million people. Dong Baoshun, an associate professor
of China's Shandong University, and Ding Longjia, deputy director of the Shandong
Party History Research Office, co-authored a 1997 book titled Exonerate the Innocent,
Rehabilitate the Wrongly Accused and Sentenced. It quoted Ye Jianying, the vice president of the
CCP Central Committee, as making the following statements during the closing ceremony of the
Central Working Conference on December 13, 1978, quote, Two years and seven months of comprehensive
investigation by the Central Committee have determined that 20 million people died in the
Cultural Revolution. Over 100 million suffered political persecution, and 800 billion yuan
were wasted. According to the selected works of Deng Xiaoping, from August 21 to 23, 1980,
CCP leader Deng Xiaoping gave two interviews with Italian journalist Oriana Falacci in the
Falacci asked, quote, How many people died in the Cultural Revolution? Deng replied,
quote, How many people really died in the Cultural Revolution? The figure is astronomical
and can never be estimated. Deng described a typical case. Kang Sheng, the head of the
CCP's secret police, accused the party secretary of Yunnan province, Zhao Jianmin, of treason and
being an agent of the Kuomintang. Not only was Zhao imprisoned, but his downfall also impacted
1.38 million people throughout the province, of whom 17,000 were persecuted to death and 60,000
were beaten to the point of disability. Unprecedented Evil, the Persecution of
Falun Gong. Decades of murderous violence and atheist indoctrination by the Chinese Communist
Party have taken a massive toll on the moral fabric of society, bringing it far below the
standards gods require of humanity. Even many of those who still believe in gods are ignorant of
genuine faith since they are trapped in the sham religious organizations controlled by the CCP.
Should the situation continue to degenerate, humanity will face certain extinction,
as prophesied in the holy texts of every ancient civilization.
During the spring of 1992, to restore human morality and provide a path to salvation,
Mr. Li Hongzhi taught Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, a spiritual practice based on belief
in the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Uncomplicated to learn, Falun Gong
spread across China in a few short years. As practitioners, along with their relatives and
peers, experienced miracles of improved health and character, tens of millions of people took
up the practice in China and around the world. With so many people practicing cultivation in
Falun Gong and holding themselves to higher standards, society began to rediscover its
moral bearings. But the specter of communism is bent on preventing man from being saved by
the Creator. For this reason, it destroyed traditional cultures and corrupted human moral
values. Naturally, it sees Falun Gong as its greatest adversary. In July 1999, then-CCP
leader Jiang Zemin unilaterally ordered the systematic persecution of Falun Gong and its
practitioners. In a brutal campaign that covered every corner of China, the CCP applied every
method imaginable in its efforts to fulfill Jiang's directive, quote, kill them physically,
bankrupt them financially, and ruin their reputations. Party mouthpieces subjected the
Chinese people to constant propaganda filled with hatred and slander of Falun Gong, rejecting
its principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance in favor of falsehood, wickedness,
The evil specter brought society to new lows in moral degeneration. In an atmosphere of hatred
and repression reactivated from dormancy, the Chinese people turned a blind eye to the
persecution happening around them, betraying Buddhas and gods. Some sacrificed their conscience
and participated in the campaign against Falun Gong, ignorant of the fact that they had damned
themselves in the process. The communist specter did not limit the persecution to China.
It silenced the nations of the free world while the Chinese regime engaged in the frenzied jailing,
murder, and torture of Falun Gong practitioners. Essentially bribed with economic incentives,
the free world took in the party's lies, giving the persecutors free reign to commit the worst
crimes. In the persecution of Falun Gong, the CCP introduced an evil never before seen,
live organ harvesting. As the largest group of people imprisoned for their faith in China,
Falun Gong practitioners are killed on demand, cut open on the operating tables of state and
military hospitals, and their organs are sold for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
On July 7, 2006, Canadian lawyers David Matus and David Kilgore,
former Canadian Secretary of State, Asia Pacific, published a report titled
Bloody Harvest, The Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs. Examining 18 types of evidence,
they shed light on the CCP's monstrosity, calling it, quote,
a disgusting form of evil new to this planet. Matus and Kilgore, working with international
investigators, published the report An Update to the Slaughter and Bloody Harvest in June 2016.
Running over 680 pages and containing more than 2,400 references, it proved beyond any doubt
the reality and scale of the live organ harvesting carried out by the Chinese Communist regime.
On June 13, 2016, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed Resolution
343, demanding the CCP bring an immediate end to the forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong
practitioners and other prisoners of conscience. The lucrative organ transplant business sustained
support for the persecution of Falun Gong and attracted clients from China and around the world,
making them part of the CCP's mass murder. 4. Red Terror in Export
The introduction to the Black Book of Communism provides a rough estimate of the death tolls of
Communist regimes around the world. It verified a figure of 94 million, including the following.
20 million in the Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million
in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America,
mainly Cuba, 1.7 million in Ethiopia, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 10,000 due to, quote,
the international communist movement and communist parties not in power.
Apart from Russia and China, lesser communist regimes have shown themselves no less willing
to engage in absolute evil. The Cambodian Genocide is the most extreme mass murder
carried out by a communist government. According to various estimates, the number of Cambodians
killed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime ranges from 1.4 million to 2.2 million,
up to one-third of Cambodia's population at the time. Between 1948 and 1987, the North Korean
communists killed more than one million of their own people through forced labor, executions,
and internment in concentration camps. In the 1990s, famine killed between 240,000 and 420,000
people. In total, 600,000 to 800,000 North Koreans are thought to have died unnatural deaths
between 1993 and 2008. After Kim Jong-un came to power, he committed more overt murders with the
In just one century since the rise of the first communist regime in Russia,
the evil specter of communism has murdered more people in the nations under its rule
than the combined death toll of both world wars. The history of communism is a history of murder,
and every page is written in the blood of its victims.