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Note that communism is a branch of socialism. This article only discusses criticisms that are specific to communism and not other forms of socialism. See criticisms of socialism for a discussion of objections to socialism in general. Note also that communism and related words are written with the uppercase "C" when they refer to a political party of that name, a member of that party, or a government led by such a party.

Criticisms of communism can be divided in two broad categories: One is those concerning themselves with the real-world results of the 20th century Communist states. Such critics include both pro and anti communists. Another is those concerning themselves with Marxism, the claimed political ideology of the Communist states. A central question is the implications of the real-world results of the Communist states for Marxist theory.

Criticisms of 20th century Communist states

Human rights violations

Extensive historical research, especially after the fall of Communism opened the achieves of many of the former Communist states, has documented the large scale human rights violations that occurred in these states. Several of the most prominent researchers are former communists who become disillusioned with the Communist system they had powerful positions in, like Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev and Dmitri Volkogonov, or after they started their research, like several of the authors of The Black Book of Communism. Robert Conquest, another former communist, was one of the first to document the Great Purge in his book The Great Terror and was vehemently criticized for this by many Western intellectuals. He was vindicated when the achieves were opened. Jung Chang, one of the authors of Mao: The Unknown Story, was a Red Guard in her youth. See the end of the article for an extensive reference list.

The human rights violations were particularly intensive during the regimes of Stalin and Mao, but started immediately after the Russian revolution during the regime of Lenin. Most prominent are deaths due to executions, forced labor camps, genocides of certain ethnic minorities, and mass starvations caused by either government mismanagement or deliberately. The exact number of deaths caused by these regimes is somewhat disputed, but the historical research shows at least tens of millions and several overviews give a number close to one hundred million deaths. Yakovlev, the researcher with the best access to the Soviet achieves, have recently stated that in the the Soviet Union alone 20-25 millions were killed for political motives or in prisons and camps. More than 10.5 million died from famine. Some particularly brutal episodes were the Holodomor, the Great Purge, the Great Leap Forward, and The Killing Fields.

Yakovlev is especially critical of the treatment of millions of children of claimed political opponents. Children of former Imperial officers and peasants were held as hostages and sometimes shot during the Russian Civil War. The children of soldiers who surrendered during WWII could be punished. Some children followed their parents to the Gulags, where their mortality rate was especially high. In 1954 there were 884,057 "specially resettled" children under the age of sixteen. Others were placed in special orphanages run by the secret police in order to be reeducated, often losing even their names, and were considered socially dangerous also as adults.

Other criticisms concern lack of freedom of speech and religious and ethnic persecutions. The use of an extensive network of civilian informants, sometimes including family members, created a society where no one could trust other citizens. The most prominent example of the strict restrictions on emigration is the Berlin Wall. In some Communist states it was common practice to classify internal critics of the system as having a mental disease, like sluggishly progressing schizophrenia - which was only recognized in Communist states - and incarcerate them in mental hospitals. Workers were not allowed to join free trade unions.

Several internal uprisings were suppressed by military force, like the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Prague Spring, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution can be seen as imperialistic wars where military force crushed popular uprisings against the Communist system. Some Communist states directly supported claimed terrorist groups. Examples include the PFLP, the Red Army Fraction, and the Japanese Red Army.

The leaders of the Communist states themselves frequently announced their support for democracy, held regular elections and sometimes even gave their countries names such as the "German Democratic Republic" or the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". Some supporters of the Communist states have argued that those states were democratic. However, critics point out that, in practice, one political party held an absolute monopoly on power, dissent was banned, and the elections usually featured a single candidate and were ripe with fraud (often producing implausible results of 99% in favor of the candidate). Many of the leaders of Communist states cultivated an extensive personality cult. In some cases the leadership of the state became inherited.

Comparison with human rights violations in other political systems

Some supporters of communism find this approach simplistic, noting that humans rights violations such as executions, forced labor camps, the repression of ethnic minorities, and mass starvation were patterns in both non-democratic Russian and Chinese history before their respective Communist takeovers, and that later the opposing capitalist states also committed some human rights violations, like state terrorism. However, evils in other regimes can hardly be used to justify new ones. Advocates reply that they only seek to put the events into perspective, not justify them. Also this defense can be criticized. Any attempt similarly to similarly relativise Nazi and fascist crimes would be widely seen as obnoxious. Moreover, Alexander Solzhenitsyn argues in his book Gulag Archipelago that the living conditions and death rates of the inmates in the Soviet era Gulags were much worse than those of the Czarist era Katorgas. The worst crop failure of late Czarist Russia, in 1892, caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths, while famines under both Lenin and Stalin caused many millions of deaths. The Czarist regime executed 3,932 persons for political crimes between 1825 and 1910. 681,692 persons were executed between 1937 and 1938 during the Great Purge.

Another comparison may be to the deaths caused by capitalism during several centuries, a number claimed by some (for example, the French book Le Livre Noir du capitalisme - "The Black Book of capitalism") to be far greater. However, this was achieved by counting the crimes of colonialism or imperialism, where defenders of capitalism would argue that the deaths were caused by anti-capitalism, i.e., by reducing the economic freedom of people. But this defense of capitalism may be similar to the defense of communism that the Communist states were not "real" communist societies. A better comparison may be to liberal democracies. According to the research supporting the democratic peace theory, they have very low levels of systematic violence.

According to Richard Pipes, the Communist states share some responsibility for WWII. Both Hitler and Mussolini used the Soviet Union as a model for their own totalitarian states and Hitler privately expressed that Stalin was a "genius". In turn, Stalin expressed desire for another great war that would leave his enemies weakened. He allowed the testing and production of German weapons that were forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to occur on Soviet territory. During the critical 1932 German elections, he forbid the German Communists from collaborating with the Social Democrats. These parties together gained more votes than Hitler and could have prevented him from becoming Chancellor.

Economic and social development

Central economic planning has in certain instances produced dramatic advances, including rapid development of heavy industry during the 1930s in the Soviet Union. Another example is the development of the pharmaceutical industry in Cuba. However, these examples are anecdotal and there are counter-examples: the failure of the Soviet Union to achieve the same kind of development in agriculture (forcing the Soviet Union to become a net importer of cereals after the Second World War), as well as the continued poverty of other Communist states such as Laos, Vietnam or Maoist China. China only achieved high rates of growth after introducing Capitalist economic reforms. Another example is Czechoslovakia, which was among world's most developed industrial countries prior to World War II, but fell far behind the Western nations under the Communist rule. The Communist states do not compare favorable when looking at divided nations with similar culture before the Communist takeovers: North Korea vs. South Korea; China vs. Hong Kong and Taiwan; and East Germany vs. West Germany. East vs. West German productivity was around 90% in 1936 and around 60-65% in 1954. When compared to the EU, the East German productivity declined from 67% in 1950 to 50% before the unification in 1989.

Supporters of the Communist states note the social and cultural programs, sometimes administered by labor organizations. They included in theory guaranteed employment, subsidized food and clothing, free health care, free child care, and free education. Early advances in the status of women were also notable, especially in Islamic areas of the Soviet Union. They point out to the high levels of literacy enjoyed by Eastern Europeans (in comparison, for instance, with Southern Europe), Cubans or Chinese. However, again the Communist parts of the divided nations do not compare favorably. The education was full of propaganda and censored opposing views. There were often great scarcity and rationing even of basic products like food, forcing ordinary workers to spend much of their time waiting in queues, hoping to get one of the rationed products. Some of these benefits can also be found in nations with market economies, like Sweden. Milovan Djilas, once one of the most powerful leaders in Communist Yugoslavia, in his book New Class argued that a new powerful class of party bureaucrats emerged which exploited the rest of the population. In the Soviet Union this group was known as the Nomenklatura. Research shows that a higher score on the Index of Economic Freedom is associated with lower poverty and higher life-expectancy.

In the Soviet Union in 1989 there was rationing of meat and sugar. The average intake of red meat for a Soviet citizen was half of what it had been for a subject of the Czar in 1913. Blacks in apartheid South Africa owned more cars per capita. The only area of consumption in which the Soviets excelled was the ingestion of hard liquor. Two-thirds of the households had no hot water, and a third had no running water at all. According to the government paper, Izvestia, a typical working class family of four was forced to live for 8 years in a single 8x8 foot room, before marginally better accommodation became available. The housing shortage was so acute that at all times 17% of Soviet families had to be physically separated for want of adequate space. A third of the hospitals had no running water and the bribery of doctors and nurses to get decent medical attention and even amenities like blankets in Soviet hospitals was not only common, but routine. The average welfare mother in the United States received more income in a month, than the average Soviet worker could earn in a year.

After 1965, life expectancy began to plateau or even decreased, especially for males, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe while it continued to increase in Western Europe. This divergence between two parts of Europe went on during three decades leading to a profound gap in the mid 90s. The life expectancy sharply declined after the change to market economy in several of the states of the former Soviet Union but may now have started to increase in the Baltic states. In several Eastern European nations life expectancy started to increase immediately after the fall of Communism. The previous decline for males continued for a time in some, like Romania, before starting to increase.

Cuba is often cited as a successful example by communists. However, Cuba was one of most developed nations in Latin America before Castro. Other Latin American nations have seen greater increases in literacy than Cuba. Calories per person have declined in Cuba while it has increased in most other Latin American nations. Cubans eat less cereals and meat than before Castro. On the other hand, there is a United States embargo against Cuba.

Arts, science, technology, and environment

The Communist states censored the arts, usually only allowing socialist realism. Some Communist states have been involved in the destruction of cultural heritage: the historical center of Bucharest, hundreds of churches in the Soviet Union, and the Cultural Revolution are some examples.

There was suppressed research in the Soviet Union and the other Communists states. One example is censorship and revisionism of history. Research was suppressed in biology and genetics (see Lysenkoism), linguistics (see Japhetic theory), cybernetics, psychology and psychiatry, and even organic chemistry. Although the Communist states often emphasized the importance of the "hard sciences", comparatively few advances were made in them. For example, there were very few Nobel prize winners from Communist states.

Soviet technology generally lagged Western technology by many years. Exceptions include areas like the Soviet space program and military technology where occasionally the Communist technology was more advanced due to a massive concentration of research resources. According to the CIA, much of the technology in the Communist states consisted simply of copies of Western products that had been legally purchased or gained through a massive espionage program. Stricter Western control of the export of technology through COCOM contributed to the fall of Communism.

Also pointed out is the environmental disasters. One is the gradual disappearance of the Aral Sea and a similar diminishing of the Caspian Sea because of the diversion of the rivers that fed them. Another the pollution of the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the unique freshwater environment of Lake Baikal. Many of the rivers were polluted; several, like the Vistula and Oder rivers in Poland, were virtually ecologically dead. In 1988 only 30% of the sewage in the Soviet Union was treated properly. Established health standards for air pollution was exceeded by ten times or more in 103 cities in the Soviet Union in 1988. The air pollution problem was even more severe in Eastern Europe. It caused lung cancer, forest die-back, and damage to buildings and cultural heritages. According to official sources, 58 percent of total agricultural land of the former Soviet Union was affected by salinization, erosion, acidity, or waterlogging. Nuclear waste was dumped in the Sea of Japan, the Arctic Ocean, and in locations in the Far East. It was revealed in 1992 that in the city of Moscow there were 636 radioactive toxic waste sites and 1,500 in St. Petersburg. The environmental situation has improved in every studied former Communist state.

Socialist criticisms of the Communist states

There were early Marxist critics of the first Communist states, like Mensheviks and Trotskyites. The revisionist Marxists, such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky denied the necessity of a revolution. However, most foreign communists and Communist parties at first supported the Communist states and accepted the leadership of the Soviet Union (see Comintern). Criticisms gradually increased, especially after Stalin was denounced in the 1956 speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and after the fall of Communism in 1989-91.

There were also early criticisms from non-Marxist socialists, like Bertrand Russell and Emma Goldman. Some, like H G Wells, were initially supportive but gradually became more disillusioned as more details were revealed. Members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and the fraction the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries sometimes fought the Bolsheviks before and in the Russian Civil War. Fanya Kaplan tried to assassinate Lenin. The anarchists have differed from Marx since Bakunin.

Criticisms of Marxist theory

See criticisms of socialism for a discussion of objections to socialism in general. There are also some specific criticisms of Marxist theory.

Relevance of the Communist states for Marxist theory

Marxist critics of the Communist states argue that the problems in the Communist states cannot be used to criticize Marxist theory and the communist society. One argument is that a "Communist state" is an impossibility according to Marxist theory. The communist society itself is stateless in theory and thus cannot be 20th century states. However, Marx and Engel's theory includes a transitory state phase known as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Later, the state will "whither away" and the dictatorship of the proletariat will be replaced by the communist society. The Communist states claimed to be this dictatorship of the proletariat. If they did follow Marxist theory, then the theory failed to work in the real world.

Trotskyites and other Leninists explain this by arguing that the Communist states after Lenin's death did not actually adhere to Marxism-Leninism but rather were perversions heavily influenced by Stalinism. Lenin's War communism and New Economic Policy were in many ways different from Stalinism. On the other hand, in many ways the institutions of the later Communist states differed from those under Stalin. Examples include the profit-sharing in Titoism, the extreme self-reliance in Juche, and the reforms in Perestroika, and Glasnost. Maoism is a broad concept that includes episodes such as the self-sufficient communes during the Great Leap Forward, the anti-intellectualism during the Cultural Revolution, and the almost primitivst Red Khmers. A response is that all later Communist states may have differed in some ways but that all had common problematic institutions created by Stalin and that this explains problems such as systematic human rights violations.

However, Lenin had analyzed the Paris Commune and had concluded that it failed due to "excessive generosity-it should have exterminated its enemies". His regime summary executed hundreds of thousands of "class enemies", created the Cheka, created the system that later become the Gulags, and was responsible for a policy of food requisitioning during the Russian Civil War that was partially responsible for a famine causing 3-10 million deaths.

Some Marxist supporters instead argue that no Communist state was Marxist since no Communist state was democratic. However, Marx and Engels gave few hints regarding how the dictatorship of the proletariat or the later communist society should be implemented. They rejected the concept of liberal democracy, arguing that it could not represent the interest of the proletariat. It is often argued that Marx and Engels supported the claimed direct democracy of the Paris Commune as a model. However, this is disputed and there were human rights violations even during the few months the Commune existed.

Marx: ...When the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by their revolutionary dictatorship ... to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie ... the workers invest the state with a revolutionary and transitional form ...

Engels: ...And the victorious party” (in a revolution) “must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?...

Engels: As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist ....

Lenin later used cited these and other statements by Marx and Engels as support for using the authoritarian principles of vanguard party and democratic centralism during the dictatorship of the proletariat in Communist states. This excluded democracy even in theory outside the ruling Communist party. When the Marxists only gained a minority vote in the democratic Russian Constituent Assembly election, 1917, Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly after its first session and overturned the election. All the later Communist states became and remained totalitarian as long as the Communists remained in power, justifying this by referring to Lenin's interpretation of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism.

On the other hand, some democratic states have been ruled by parties calling themselves Communist without becoming totalitarian. One example is Moldova. Whether these parties and similar parties without power are Marxist is disputed, because, while they aim for a socialist society, they reject Marxist cornerstones like a proletarian revolution and at least for now accept a market economy (see also Definition of a Communist state and Eurocommunism).

Another argument is that true communism can only develop as a response to the contradictions of bourgeois capitalism; therefore, the failure of those experiments in communism to date can be attributed to the fact they did not emerge in this manner. In short, in order for a successful socialist revolution to occur, capitalism must first dominate the globe. The Soviet Union is a case in point - Tsarist Russia was quasi-feudal, not capitalist, and was overthrown by a small cadre rather than by a mass revolution. So it is argued by that the failure of Soviet socialism to sustain itself is actually an affirmation of Marxist theory.

General criticisms

Eric Hoffer has communism as one of the chief examples of the mass movement which offers The True Believer a glorious, if imaginary, future to compensate for the frustrations of his present. Such movements need people to be willing to sacrifice all for that future, including themselves and others. To do that, they need to devalue the past and present. This is not a criticism of Communist tenets specifically; Hoffer's other chief examples are Fascists, Nationalists, and the founding stages of religions.

Arthur Koestler describes Marxism as a closed system, like Catholicism or orthodox Freudianism. This has three peculiarities: It claims to represent a universal truth, which explains everything, and can cure every ill. It can automatically process and reinterpret all potentially damaging data by methods of casuistry, emotionally appealling and beyond common logic. It invalidates criticism by deducing what the subjective motivation of the critic must be, and by arguing about that.

Marxists respond to such allegations by arguing that they are straw men (deliberate misrepresentations of Marxist theory) or ad hominem attacks. For example, they may hold that Marxism does not, in fact, claim to "explain everything and cure every ill"; that it merely recommends certain political and social policies, just as all other ideologies do. On the issue of the True Believer, Marxists may concede the point that some "True Believers" exist in their midst, but argue that not all of them are "True Believers", and that, in any case, the behaviour of individual Marxists says nothing about the validity of Marxism itself.

Historical materialism

Historical materialism is normally considered the intellectual basis of Marxism. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human history in economic, technological, and more broadly, material factors, as well as the clashes of material interests among tribes, social classes and nations. However, it ignores other causes of historical and social change, like biology, genetics, philosophy, art, religion, or other causes that are not "materialist" according to Marxists.

In turn, the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel can be considered the basis of Historical materialism. Max Stirner has argued that this philosophy leads to nihilism and not to historical materialism.

Labor theory of value

Fundamental to Marxist theory is the labor theory of value. It claims that the value (or, to be more exact, use-value) of an item is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. In other words, the greater the amount of work necessary to produce an object, the greater the value of that object. This implies that value is objective, and that it may not be reflected by the price of the object in question (since price is determined by supply and demand, and is not linked to the amount of necessary work that must be expended to produce the object). The labor theory of value was first fully stated by David Ricardo, from suggestions by Adam Smith, and later adopted by Karl Marx.

By contrast, most capitalist economists now use the subjective theory of value, which implies that the only value of an object on which different observers can agree is its price on the market (which is based on the subjective utilities of the participants). Critics of communism hold that the qualifier "socially necessary" in the labor theory of value is not well-defined, and conceals a subjective judgment of necessity. Marxists have replied to these criticisms by refining the theory in various ways.

Tabula Rasa

Marxism views human nature as completely determined by the environment, a Tabula rasa. Richard Pipes describes how this led to a belief in a coming new man without vices, in essence a new superior species (although one caused by the environment, not genetics). Trotsky thought that this new man would be able to control all unconscious processes, including those controlling bodily functions like digestion, and have the intellect of Aristotle. In order to reach this stage it was necessary and right to completely destroy the existing institutions that had formed the current wretched humans. This will make it possible to dispense with the state. This also explains the little value the Communists placed on the lives and rights of the current humans. In reality self-interest could not be destroyed and the new ruling class, the nomenklatura, quickly replaced the old aristocracy. Periodic attempts to destroy it, such as the Cultural Revolution during Mao's regime, failed.

Historical analysis

The Marxist stages of history and the Marxist class analysis have been criticized. Robert Conquest argues that detailed analyses of many historical periods fails to find support for these theories. Marx himself admitted that his theory could not explain the internal development of the "Asiatic" social system, where most of the world's population lived for thousands of years.

Marx's predictions

Marx made numerous predictions. He thought that the workers would become poorer and poorer as the capitalists exploited them more and more; that differences between the members within each class would become smaller and smaller and the classes would thus become more homogeneous; that the skilled workers would be replaced by unskilled workers doing assembly line work; that relations between the working class and the capitalists would get worse and worse; that the capitalists would become fewer and fewer due to an increasing number of monopolies; that the capitalist states would become increasingly authoritarian; and that the proletarian revolution would occur first in the most industrialized nations.

Some of these are debatable, while others have been clearly proven wrong. This is often cited by critics as evidence that historical materialism is a flawed theory. Communists reply with two arguments: The first is that there were a number of major events and trends over the past century and a half which Marx could not have predicted: imperialism, World War I, the rise of social democracy and Keynesian economics in the West (that introduced the concept of redistribution of wealth, thereby narrowing the gap between rich and poor), World War II and finally the Cold War. In response, critics maintain that if so many unpredictable events have happened in the past, then an equal number could happen in the future, and therefore Marxist theory is not a reliable method of making predictions.

Lenin noted that the predicted increasing class polarization and communist revolution had failed to occur in the developed world. He then attempted to explain this by stating that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, and that developed countries had created a labor aristocracy content with capitalism by exploiting the developing world.

After the Western nations voluntarily gave up their colonies, supporters of communism have attempted to explain this with still another stage, sometimes called Neocolonialism, arguing that the Third World is exploited also without formal empires. For criticism of this, see Anti-globalization#Criticisms.

Pseudoscience

Marxism does not claim be to a science. However, historical materialism does. Karl Popper and others have argued that historical materialism is a pseudoscience because it is not falsifiable. Marxists respond that some social sciences are not falsifiable, since it is often difficult or outright impossible to test them via experiments (in the way hard science can be tested). This is especially true when many people and a long time is involved. Popper agreed on this, but instead used it as an argument against central planning and all ideologies that claim to know the future.

See also

• Criticisms of socialism
• The Black Book of Communism
• The Great Terror
• Democide

References and further reading

References

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2. Courtois, 1999. Introduction
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4. Yakovlev, 2004. p. 234
5. Yakovlev, 2004. p. 29-47
6. "A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former). Chapter 9 - Mass Media and the Arts". The Library of Congress. Country Studies. October 03. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
7. Yakovlev, 2004. p. 153-169, 181-213.
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9. "The Soviet Case: Prelude to a Global Consensus on Psychiatry and Human Rights". Human Rights Watch. October 3. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
10. "A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former). Chapter 5. Trade Unions". The Library of Congress. Country Studies. October 4. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
11. Courtois, 1999. Chapter 18
12. Pipes, 1994. p. 412-413, 419
13. Conquest, 1986. p. 306
14. Pipes, 2001. p. 66-67
15. Pipes, 2001. p. 74-76, 96, 103-109
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21. Template:Citepaper publisher version
22. "Zenith and Eclipse: A Comparative Look at Socio-Economic Conditions in Pre-Castro and Present Day Cuba". Released by the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, February 9, 1998. Revised June 2002. October 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
23. Courtois, 1999. Introduction
24. Template:Citepaper publisher
25. Template:Citepaper publisher version
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28. "Environmental Performance Reviews Programme". United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. October 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
29. "UNEP.Net Country Profiles". United Nations Environment Network. October 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
30. "OECD Environmental Performance Reviews: Russia" (PDF). OECD. October 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
31. Template:Citepaper version
32. "Dictatorship of the Proletariat". The Encyclopedia of Marxism. October 3. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
33. Pipes, 1990. p. 789-795.
34. Pipes, 1990. Pipes, 1994. Courtois, 1999. Yakovlev, 2004.
35. "Russian Civil War". Historical Atlas of the 20th Century. October 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
36. Template:Web reference simple
37. "Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, VII". Museum of Communism. October 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
38. "Democracy". The Encyclopedia of Marxism. October 2. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
39. Template:Web reference simple
40. "Martyrs of the Paris Commune". The Catholic Encyclopedia. October 1. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
41. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/equality.htm. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |Author= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |PublishYear= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |Title= ignored (|title= suggested) (help)
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43. Pipes, 1990. p. 550-555
44. Courtois, 1999. Conclusion
45. Pipes, 1990. p. 135-138
46. Pipes, 2001. p. 150-151
47. Conquest, 2000. p. 47-51
48. "Neocolonialism". The Encyclopedia of Marxism. October 3. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)

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• Khlevniuk, Oleg & Kozlov, Vladimir (2004) The History of the Gulag : From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Annals of Communism Series) Yale University Pres. ISBN 0300092849.
• Natsios, Andrew S. (2002) The Great North Korean Famine. Institute of Peace Press. ISBN 1929223331.
• Nghia M. Vo (2004) The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam McFarland & Company. ISBN 0786417145.
• Pipes, Richard (2001) Communism Weidenfled and Nicoloson. ISBN 0297646885
• Pipes, Richard (1994) Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. Vintage. ISBN 0679761845.
• Pipes, Richard (1990) The Russian Revolution 1899-1919. Collins Harvill. ISBN 0679400745.
• Rummel, R.J. (1996). Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. Transaction Publishers ISBN 1560008873.
• Todorov, Tzvetan & Zaretsky, Robert (1999). Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0271019611.
• Van Canh, Nyuyen (1985) Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982. Hoover Institution Press. ISBN 0817978526.
• Yakovlev, Alexander (2004). A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300103220.

External links

Criticisms of the Communist states and Marxism

Directories

• Communism
• Crimes of Soviet Communists
• The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Media Center

Articles

• Museum of Communism
• Chinese and general communism analysis
• Capitalism and Human Nature

Online estimates of Communist democide

• Summary of different estimates for total 20th century democide Note that only some of numbers are totals for the Communist states.
  • 30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century
  • Who was the Bloodiest Tyrant of the 20th Century?
• How many did the Communist regimes murder?
  • Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917
  • Table: Communist democide by nation
  • Graph: Communist democide compared to total for world
  • Graph: Communist democide divied into Genocide, Deportations, Massacres, and Camp/Prisons

Support for Marxism

Support for the Communist states

• Another view of Stalin
• From Marx to Mao

Marxists opposed to the Communist states

• Marxists Internet Archive
  • History Archive
  • Leon Trotsky Internet Archive
  • The Revolution Betrayed An analysis of Stalinism, from a Trotskyist communist point of view.
  • The Russian Revolution A critical analysis by Rosa Luxemburg.
• Capitalism versus socialism: The great debate revisited

• Communism
• Marxism
• Soviet Union
• Soviet repression structures and people
• Criticisms