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By Samuel Gregg*

Marxists, Marxist ideas and Marxist regimes have brought death and destruction to millions. Yet according to Pope Francis, if anything, the communists think like Christians. Whats going on here?

Within the first year of his pontificate, Franciss strong criticisms of economic globalization and capitalism resulted in him being accused of having Marxist sympathies. Such charges, however, are demonstrably false.

For one thing, Francis has specified that Communism is a mistaken idea. Back in a 2013 interview with the Italian newspaperLa Stampa, the popestatedthat Marxist ideology is wrong. Likewise, the Argentine home-grown theology of the people which hasinfluencedFranciss thought explicitly rejects Marxist philosophy and analysis. Nor has Francis hesitated to canonize Catholics martyred by Communist regimes. Hes even conferred a cardinals hat upon an Albanian priest, Father Ernest Troshani Simoni, who was twice sentenced to death by Enver Hoxhas dictatorship one of the very worst Communist regimes. These arent the words or actions of a Communist fellow-traveler or apologist.

Nevertheless, in the same interview in which Francis described Communism as wrong, he immediately added, But I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people. One wonders if the pope would say something similar, for example, about Nazis: But I have met many Nazis in my life who are good people.

Theres little in Marxist ideology (let alone practice) to suggest that communists think like Christians about very much at all.

Somehow, I doubt it even though political movements and regimes lead by Marxists and guided by Communist ideologies invariably embrace methods indistinguishable from those of National Socialist Germany. Indeed, if one goes simply by the numbers, Communistshaveslaughtered millions more people than the Nazis. In Pope Franciss Argentina, Marxist movements such as theEjrcito Revolucionario del Pueblohad no qualms about engaging in kidnappings and assassinations in the late-1960s and early-1970s as part of their effort to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.

One possible interpretation of the popes words about Communism is that they reflect his belief that some people are drawn to Marxism because they regard Communism as being on the side of the worlds underdogs. During a 2015 interview, the popesuggestedthat Communists were, in a way, closet Christians. They had stolen, he said, the flag of the poor from Christians.

These themes resurfaced in a more recentinterviewof Francis this time conducted by the self-described atheist, the 92 year-old Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari.

Caution is advised when reading any of Scalfaris interviews. Scalfaris renditions of his conversations with prominent figures are based on memory rather than notes or recordings. Thats bound to raise questions about the veracity of whats written (not to mention the prudence of talking to Scalfari, but thats a different matter). Scalfaris questions are also designed to encourage the pope to make controversial remarks. In most cases, Francis politely deflects them.

At the same time, some of Franciss comments in his latest Scalfari interview mirrors odd statements hes made on other occasions. Consider what Francis says about Communists in response to Scalfaris comments about equality:

Eugenio Scalfari:So you yearn for a society where equality dominates. This, as you know, is the program of Marxist socialism and then of communism. Are you therefore thinking of a Marxist type of society?

Francis:It has been said many times and my response has always been that, if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians. Christ spoke of a society where the poor, the weak and the marginalized have the right to decide. Not demagogues, not Barabbas, but the people, the poor, whether they have faith in a transcendent God or not. It is they who must help to achieve equality and freedom.

The problem with these words is that the most cursory reading of standard Marxist texts soon indicates that theres little in Marxist ideology (let alone practice) to suggest that communists think like Christians about very much at all.

In the first place, Marxism is rooted in atheism and philosophical materialism. Christianity is not. Thats a rather fundamental andirreconcilabledifference. Second, virtually all Marxist thinkers and practitioners Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Pol Pot, etc. hold that the ends justifies the means. Small o orthodox Christianity, with its insistence upon moral absolutes which admit of no exception, specifically refutes that claim. Third, Marxism, Marxists and Marxist movements dont see the poor as Christianity does: i.e., as human beings who need to be loved and assisted.

Communism views the poor like all human beings as simply moving-parts of the dialectics of history.

Instead Communism views the poor like all human beings as simply moving-parts of the dialectics of history. The economically less-well off, from a Marxist standpoint, have no intrinsic worth by virtue of their poverty or status as human beings. Such a materialist and instrumentalist perspective is light-years away from Christianitys view of those in poverty and human beings more generally.

So whatdoesFrancis mean when he says that the communists think like Christians? A clue to the popes thinking may be found with his references to equality in his most recent Scalfari interview. The pope argues, for instance, that

What we want is a battle against inequality, this is the greatest evil that exists in the world. It is money that creates it and that goes against those measures that try to make wealth more widespread and thus promote equality.

From his pontificates beginning, Francis has focused, laser-like, on this inequality theme. As the words above indicate, the specific inequality which the pope has in mind iseconomicinequality.

But is economic inequality really the greatest evil in the world today? Is economic inequality at the root of Islamic terrorism, dictatorial regimes like North Korea, the termination of millions of unborn-children in the West, resurgent anti-Semitism, or the relentless efforts to legalize euthanasia? Theres noevidence, for instance, that economic inequality causes terrorism.

Moreover, economic inequality isnt always wrong. Theresnothingin Catholic teaching to suggest that wealth and income inequalities are intrinsically evil. Theyre often quite justified. The person willing to take on more responsibility, for instance, in creating and managing an enterprise is usually entitled to a greater share of profits than the employee who assumes less responsibility and who didnt take the risk of starting the business in the first place.

Another thing that Christians should keep in mind but sometimes dont is that inequality and poverty arent the same thing. Its theoretically possible for everyone to be economically equal because they are equally poor. Its also conceivable for a society to have vast wealth and income disparities, and for the very same society to have very few people who are materially poor.

Of course, some forms of economic inequalityareunjust. One contemporary example iscrony capitalism. In these economic arrangements, collusion between businesses, politicians and regulators replaces free competition under the rule of law. If theres a major culprit (the money) for unjust forms of economic inequality today, its crony capitalists and their political and bureaucratic enablers.

Crony capitalism should be but isnt the target of Christian critique. Catholic social teaching says exactly nothing about the subject. Part of the difficulty with the popes commentary on these issues is that he, like many other good people, doesnt seem to recognize that market economies are premised on the rejection of governments granting privileges toanyparticular group. Thats the core argument made inBook Fourof Adam SmithsWealth of Nations(1776).

One of Pope Franciss many paradoxes is that, while he consistently and rightly denounces any idolatry of wealth and the type of materialist mindset which reduces everything to economics, the pope often articulates curiously economistic explanations for the worlds ills. Material poverty is something all Christians must be committed to working to reduce. Lets not pretend, however, that Christians and Marxists think the same way about poverty or equality for that matter. The simple truth is that they dont.

This article first appeared atThe Stream.

About the author: *Dr. Samuel Gregg is director of research at the Acton Institute. He has written and spoken extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, ethics in finance, and natural law theory. He has an MA in political philosophy from the University of Melbourne, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in moral philosophy and political economy from the University of Oxford, where he worked under the supervision of Professor John Finnis.

Source: This article was published by The Acton Institute

The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is named after the great English historian, Lord John Acton (1834-1902). He is best known for his famous remark: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Inspired by his work on the relation between liberty and morality, the Acton Institute seeks to articulate a vision of society that is both free and virtuous, the end of which is human flourishing. To clarify this relationship, the Institute holds seminars and publishes various books, monographs, periodicals, and articles.

Originally posted here:
Does Pope Francis Really Believe 'Communists Think Like Christians'? OpEd - Eurasia Review

By Vincent Bevins By Vincent Bevins January 26

JAKARTA, Indonesia Religious radicals in Indonesia are clashing with the government after a cleric claimed he could see communist imagery hidden on the country's new currency.

Habib Rizieq, the leader of the militant Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) recorded comments last month in which he claimed new Indonesian rupiah notes carry the hammer-and-sickle, an iconic symbol of communism. On the notes, the letters B and I (for Bank Indonesia) overlap in a way that vaguely recalls the communist logo if you squint hard enough.

This may seem like a trivial dispute, but it's a provocative attack in the world's most populous Muslim nation, where hundreds of thousands of people (or more) were killed in the 1960s for being communists or suspected communists.

In 1965 and 1966, members of the military, along with civilians, systematically executed members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as well as many of its alleged supporters. The PKI had been accused of backing a military coup. In the decades of authoritarian rule that followed, communists continued to be portrayed as an evil, dangerous threat. When current President Joko Jokowi Widodo was elected in 2014, activists hoped he would apologize for the massacres or launch an official investigation. But Islamists, who still see secular leftism as a major problem, strongly opposed the idea, and Widodo took no major action.

Communist parties are still illegal in Indonesia, and Rizieq was questioned Monday by the police, who were investigating whether he slandered the bank by even making the claim.

Some members of the FPI assembled outside the police station to support Rizieq. The Islamist organization is notorious for carrying out violent raids against people it deems are committing un-Islamic acts.

There is a deep strain of anti-communism, particularly in the Muslim community, and it was made even more intense by the executions in the 1960s, said Gregory Fealy, a professor at Australian National University who has worked on politics and Islam in Indonesia. There continues to be conspiracies theorizing about the reemergence of communists, a lot of which are very fanciful, but they can really get people's imaginations going.

Fealy said accusations of crypto-communism are fairly common for Rizieq's group. This is de rigeur for the FPI, he said. Whether they believe there was really communist imagery there or not, they know this always will get a reaction.

But Rizieq's claim puzzled many Indonesians, who couldn't see the hammer-and-sickle no matter how hard they tried.

Gandrasta Bangko, a 35-year old marketing director in Jakarta, took to social media to mock the allegation. Just saw a cloud formation that looks like Palu-Arit, he tweeted, using the Indonesian term for hammer-and-sickle. Preparing lawyer team to sue anyone responsible for this s---.

An unsigned editorial published Tuesday in Indonesia's Tempo magazine said that we can rightly accuse Rizieq of suffering from acute communism-phobia. It is more laughable than criminal. The editorial argued that rather than focusing on absurd debates over phantom imagery, the group should be restrained by being held responsible for their actual crimes.

After speaking with police, Rizieq denied that he had improperly accused the government of communism but still didn't back down on his claim that the bills have threatening imagery.

Read the original here:
An Islamist militant group says Indonesia's new bills have secret communist symbols - Washington Post

Airport chaos including the detention of travelers with legitimate papers is a worthwhile sacrifice for national security, said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, on Fox News Sunday while speaking with Chris Wallace. "325,000 people from overseas came into this country just yesterday through our airports," she said, and fewer than 400 have been affected by President Trump's Friday executive order that temporarily bans U.S. entry of people from seven majority-Muslim nations.

"That's 1 percent," Conway continued. "And I think in terms of the upside being greater protection of our borders, of our people, it's a small price to pay," she added, arguing that temporary detention pales in comparison to the grief of the children whose parents were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

Her comments come in response to the case of two Iraqi men, one a former U.S. Army employee, who were detained at the airport in New York City because Trump signed the order while they were in transit. Multiple judges ruled Saturday night that they and those in comparable situations must be released.

Wallace pressed Conway to address President Trump's incorrect claim that it has been substantially more difficult for Christian refugees to enter the United States than Muslim refugees, and to answer why countries like Saudi Arabia, the home country of the majority of 9/11 hijackers, are not on the seven-country list. Conway repeatedly deflected on both issues. Watch her remarks in context below. Bonnie Kristian

Here is the original post:
China sees Trump's election as an opportunity to spread the values and stability of communism - The Week Magazine

Editors Note: This article was originally published in the January 16, 1962, issue of National Review. L. Brent Bozell, also a senior editor, responded to Meyer in the September 11, 1962, issue of National Review.

In the spectrum of American conservatism there are and have been many different groupings, holding varying positions within the same broad outlook. Some have emphasized the menace of international Communism; others have emphasized the danger of the creeping rot at the heart of our own institutions. Some stress the corrosion of tradition, and with it of the natural law of justice, as the source of our afflictions; others, an intellectual failure to grasp the prime importance of freedom in the body politic. Nevertheless, whatever the differences in emphasis, there has been general agreement in the practical political sphere on the necessity both to resist the collectivism and statism that emanates from indigenous Liberalism and simultaneously to repel and overcome the Communist attack upon Western civilization, which though it has its subversive detachments operating domestically is primarily based upon the armed power of a foreign enemy.

There have been, of course, tendencies to overstress one aspect or another to such a degree that those who do so tend to move right out of the spectrum. There have been some who concentrate so wholeheartedly on the menace of domestic Communism that its international character is lost sight of and the true role of Liberalism is only cloudily understood. There have been some with such concern for the deterioration of the philosophical foundations of virtue and justice that they neglect almost totally the corollary that in the political realm freedom is the precondition of a good society. But whatever strains these one-sided emphases have created in the growth towards a mature political and philosophical American conservative position, there has not been until lately any grouping which directly and explicitly opposes itself to the defense of freedom from either its domestic or foreign enemies.

Recently, however, there has arisen for the first time a considered position, developed out of the pure libertarian sector of right-wing opinion, which sharply repudiates the struggle against the major and most immediate contemporary enemy of freedom, Soviet Communism and does so on grounds, purportedly, of a love for freedom. These pure libertarian pacifists applaud Khrushchev, support the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, join the Sane Nuclear Policy Committee, and toy with the tactic of a united front with Communists against war. They project themselves as the true representatives of the Right, attacking the militantly anti-Communist position of the leadership of American conservatism as moving towards the destruction of individual liberty because it is prepared to use the power of the American state in one of its legitimate functions, to defend freedom against Communist totalitarianism.

Tempting Fleshpots

It might seem that there is no point to discussing a view of reality so patently distorted that it can consider appeasement of Communism, disarming ourselves before the Communist armed drive and alliance with those who ease the road to Communist victory, as essential to the defense of the freedom of the individual. But although those who profess these absurd opinions are small in number, they do influence a section of the right wing, particularly in the universities, and they may, if not combatted, influence more, for they offer tempting fleshpots: the opportunity at one and the same time bravely to proclaim devotion to individual freedom, championship of the free-market economy, and opposition to prevailing Liberal welfare-statism, while comfortably basking in the sunshine of the Liberal atmosphere, which is today primarily the atmosphere of appeasement and piecemeal surrender.

Shocking though they are, the practical results of this pacifist strain in the right wing are minimal; more important is the light that the development of such a monstrous misapprehension of reality casts upon the dangers inherent in the pure libertarian approach to the problems of freedom in society. It is a tendency which, followed unchecked, can be as harmful to the development of a mature American conservative position as the counter-tendency in the conservative penumbra concerning which I have written previously in these pages to look upon the state as unlimitedly instituted to enforce virtue, thus abnegating the freedom of the individual.

Of course, in any healthy growing movement there are bound to be clashes of opinion, differences of emphasis, within over-all agreement on basic principle. This is particularly to be expected in the burgeoning American conservative movement of today and for two reasons. In the first place, the tone of the conservative mind, with its aversion to the narrowly ideological and its respect for the human person, is alien to the concept of a party line and so is generous to individual differences of stress on this or that aspect of a general outlook. But more specifically, the principles which inspire the contemporary American conservative movement are developing as the fusion of two different streams of thought. The one, which, for want of a better word, one may call the traditionalist, puts its primary emphasis upon the authority of transcendent truth and the necessity of a political and social order in accord with the constitution of being. the other, which, again for want of a better word, one may call the libertarian, takes as its first principle in political affairs the freedom of the individual person and emphasizes the restriction of the power of the state and the maintenance of the free-market economy as guarantee of that freedom.

The Meaning of Virtue

Before the challenge of modern collectivism, hostile alike to transcendent truth and to individual freedom, traditionalist and libertarian have found common cause and tend more and more to work together on the practical political level. But further, the common source in the ethos of Western civilization from which flow both the traditionalist and the libertarian currents, has made possible a continuing discussion which is creating the fusion that is contemporary American conservatism. That fused position recognizes at one and the same time the transcendent goal of human existence and the primacy of the freedom of the person in the political order. Indeed, it maintains that the only possible ultimate vindication of the freedom of the individual person rests upon a belief in his overriding value as a person, a value based upon transcendent considerations. And it maintains that the duty of men is to seek virtue; but it insists that men cannot in actuality do so unless they are free from the constraint of the physical coercion of an unlimited state. For the simulacrum of virtuous acts brought about by the coercion of superior power, is not virtue, the meaning of which resides in the free choice of good over evil.

Therefore, the conservative who understands also that power in this world will always exist and cannot be wished out of existence stands for division of power, in order that those who hold it may balance each other and the concentration of overweening power be foreclosed. He stands for the limitation of the power of the state, division of power within the state, a free economy, and prescriptive protection of the rights of individual persons and groups of individual persons against the state. But he does not see the state as an absolute evil; he regards it as a necessary institution, so long as it is restricted to its natural functions: the preservation of domestic peace and order, the administration of justice, and defense against foreign enemies.

In the political sphere the conservative consensus presently emerging in the United States regards freedom as an end; but, although it is an end at the political level, it is a means as is the whole political structure to the higher ends of the human person. Without reference to those ends, it is meaningless. While that conservative consensus regards the untrammeled state as the greatest of political evils, it does not regard the state itself as evil so long as it is limited to its proper functions, so long as the force it wields is effectively limited by a constitutional understanding of the bounds beyond which that force may not intrude upon the sacred sphere of the individual person, and so long as that understanding is enforced by division and balance of powers.

The American conservative today, therefore, although he owes much to the libertarian stream in Western thought its deep concern with freedom, its analysis of the political structure in terms of freedom, its understanding of the vital importance of the free-market economy for a free modern society cannot accept the fundamental philosophical position, sometimes rationalist, sometimes utilitarian, which is the historical foundation of pure libertarianism. He cannot posit freedom as an absolute end nor can he, considering the condition of man, deny the role of the state as an institution necessary to protect the freedoms of individual persons from molestation, whether through domestic or foreign force. He is not, in a word, a utopian. He knows that power exists in the world and that it must be controlled, not ignored with wishful utopian thinking.

The contemporary American conservative not only rejects the authoritarian extremes of nineteenth-century conservatism and the extremes of nineteenth-century rationalist and utilitarian liberalism, but, in a sense, he goes behind the so often sterile nineteenth-century conservative-liberal controversy, to found his outlook upon that earlier synthesis of belief in transcendent value and in human freedom which the Founders of the Republic embodied in their lives and actions, discursively expressed in their writings and their debates, and bequeathed to us in the body politic they constituted.

Their political concern was the establishment of freedom and its preservation, but they understood that freedom is meaningless unless founded upon the laws of Nature and of Natures God. The protection of the free energies of free individuals, so that they might in liberty strive to live according to those laws, was their most intimate concern. But they knew that in the defense of liberty a properly constituted state is necessary, not only to establish Justice [and] insure domestic Tranquility but also to provide for the common Defense. They did not content themselves with abstract analyses of liberty; they proclaimed in unambiguous tones, Give me liberty or give me death. To that wager of fate, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, they pledged our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Providence, honor, valor, are concepts that the dry utilitarianism of the pure libertarian cannot compass. The pity is that when the soul cannot respond to those words, all the brave intellectual structure turns to cobwebs; and the champion of a freedom unfounded on the deep nature of man and the constitution of being pipes out: Give me liberty if it doesnt mean risking war; give me liberty, but not at the risk of nuclear death.

Frank S. Meyer (19091972)was a senior editor of National Review.

Excerpt from:
The Twisted Tree of Liberty - National Review

Stalinism is the means of governing and related policies implemented by Joseph Stalin. Stalinist policies in the Soviet Union included state terror, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, a centralized state, collectivization of agriculture, cult of personality in leadership, and subordination of interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Uniondeemed by Stalinism to be the most forefront vanguard party of communist revolution at the time.[1]

Stalinism promoted the escalation of class conflict, utilizing state violence to forcibly purge society of claimed supporters of the bourgeoisie, regarding them as threats to the pursuit of the communist revolution that resulted in substantial political violence and persecution of such people.[2] These included not only bourgeois people but also working-class people accused of counter-revolutionary sympathies.[3]

Stalinist industrialization was officially designed to accelerate the development towards communism, stressing that such rapid industrialization was needed because the country was previously economically backward in comparison with other countries; and that it was needed in order to face the challenges posed by internal and external enemies of communism.[4] Rapid industrialization was accompanied with mass collectivization of agriculture and rapid urbanization.[5] Rapid urbanization converted many small villages into industrial cities.[5] To accelerate the development of industrialization, Stalin pragmatically created joint venture contracts with major American private enterprises, such as Ford Motor Company, that under state supervision assisted in developing the basis of industry of the Soviet economy from the late 1920s to 1930s.[6] After the American private enterprises completed their tasks, Soviet state enterprises took over.[6]

The term came into prominence during the mid-1930s, when Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician and associate of Stalin, reportedly declared, "Let's replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism!" Stalin initially met this usage with hesitancy, dismissing it as excessively praiseful and contributing to a cult of personality.

Stalinism is used to describe the period Stalin was acting leader of the Soviet Union while serving as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1922 to his death in 1953.

Stalinism usually denotes a style of a government, and an ideology. While Stalin claimed to be an adherent to the ideas of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx, and hence purported that his policies were merely a style of government, some critics say that many of his policies and beliefs diverged from those of Lenin and Marx.[citation needed]

From 1917 to 1924, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin often appeared united, but had had discernible ideological differences. In his dispute with Leon Trotsky, Stalin de-emphasized the role of workers in advanced capitalist countries (for example, he considered the U.S. working class as "bourgeoisified" labour aristocracy). Also, Stalin polemicized against Trotsky on the role of peasants, as in China, whereas Trotsky's position was in favor of urban insurrection over peasant-based guerrilla warfare.

While traditional Communist thought holds that the state will gradually "wither away" as the implementation of socialism reduces class distinction, Stalin argued that the state must become stronger before it can wither away. In Stalin's view, counterrevolutionary elements will try to derail the transition to full Communism, and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them. For this reason, Communist regimes influenced by Stalin have been widely described as totalitarian.

Soviet puppet Sheng Shicai extended Stalinist rule in Xinjiang province in the 1930s. Sheng conducted a purge similar to Stalin's Great Purge in 1937.[10]

Stalin blamed the Kulaks as the inciters of reactionary violence against the people during the implementation of agricultural collectivisation.[11] In response, the state under Stalin's leadership initiated a violent campaign against the Kulaks, which has been labeled as "classicide".[12]

Stalin, as head of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party that claimed to expel "opportunists" and "counter-revolutionary infiltrators".[13][incomplete short citation] Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.[13][15][16]

In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received at least over a hundred negative votes.[incomplete short citation][18] After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev.[incomplete short citation] The investigations and trials expanded.[incomplete short citation] Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts" that were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys or appeals, followed by a sentence to be executed "quickly".[incomplete short citation]

Thereafter, several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the legal code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as counterrevolutionary crime, was applied in the broadest manner.[incomplete short citation] The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "enemy of the people", starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death. The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD -NKVD troika- with sentencing carried out within 24 hours.[incomplete short citation] Stalin's hand-picked executioner, Vasili Blokhin, was entrusted with carrying out some of the high-profile executions in this period.[23]

Many military leaders were convicted of treason and a large-scale purge of Red Army officers followed.[25] The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin.[26] In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937; this eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership.[incomplete short citation]

With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin (who died in prison in 1937) and Joseph Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenin's original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed.

Mass operations of the NKVD also targeted "national contingents" (foreign ethnicities) such as Poles, ethnic Germans, Koreans, etc. A total of 350,000 (144,000 of them Poles) were arrested and 247,157 (110,000 Poles) were executed.[pageneeded] Many Americans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union during the worst of the Great Depression were executed; others were sent to prison camps or gulags.[29][30] Concurrent with the purges, efforts were made to rewrite the history in Soviet textbooks and other propaganda materials. Notable people executed by NKVD were removed from the texts and photographs as though they never existed. Gradually, the history of revolution was transformed to a story about just two key characters: Lenin and Stalin.

In light of revelations from Soviet archives, historians now estimate that nearly 700,000 people (353,074 in 1937 and 328,612 in 1938) were executed in the course of the terror,[31] with the great mass of victims merely "ordinary" Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, homemakers, teachers, priests, musicians, soldiers, pensioners, ballerinas, beggars.[32][33] Many of the executed were interred in mass graves, with some of the major killing and burial sites being Bykivnia, Kurapaty and Butovo.[34]

Some Western experts believe the evidence released from the Soviet archives is understated, incomplete or unreliable.[35][36][37][incomplete short citation][39]

Stalin personally signed 357 proscription lists in 1937 and 1938 that condemned to execution some 40,000 people, and about 90% of these are confirmed to have been shot.[40] At the time, while reviewing one such list, Stalin reportedly muttered to no one in particular: "Who's going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one."[41] In addition, Stalin dispatched a contingent of NKVD operatives to Mongolia, established a Mongolian version of the NKVD troika, and unleashed a bloody purge in which tens of thousands were executed as "Japanese Spies." Mongolian ruler Khorloogiin Choibalsan closely followed Stalin's lead.[42]

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviet leadership sent NKVD squads into other countries to murder defectors and other opponents of the Soviet regime. Victims of such plots included Yevhen Konovalets, Ignace Poretsky, Rudolf Klement, Alexander Kutepov, Evgeny Miller, Leon Trotsky and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) leadership in Catalonia (e.g., Andreu Nin).[43]

Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale that profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3million[incomplete short citation][45] were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. By some estimates up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.[46]

Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the official reasons for the deportations. Individual circumstances of those spending time in German-occupied territories were not examined. After the brief Nazi occupation of the Caucasus, the entire population of five of the small highland peoples and the Crimean Tatars more than a million people in total were deported without notice or any opportunity to take their possessions.[incomplete short citation]

As a result of Stalin's lack of trust in the loyalty of particular ethnicities, ethnic groups such as the Soviet Koreans, the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens, and many Poles were forcibly moved out of strategic areas and relocated to places in the central Soviet Union, especially Kazakhstan in Soviet Central Asia. By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of deportees may have died en route.[incomplete short citation]

According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, with a further 7 to 8 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union (including the entire nationalities in several cases).[48]

In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninism, and reversed most of them, although it was not until 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhetians and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations has played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic States, Tatarstan and Chechnya, even today.

At the start of the 1930s, Stalin launched a wave of radical economic policies that completely overhauled the industrial and agricultural face of the Soviet Union. This came to be known as the 'Great Turn' as Russia turned away from the near-capitalist New Economic Policy. The NEP had been implemented by Lenin in order to ensure the survival of the Socialist state following seven years of war (19141921, World War I from 1914 to 1917, and the subsequent Civil War) and had rebuilt Soviet production to its 1913 levels. However, Russia still lagged far behind the West, and the NEP was felt by Stalin and the majority of the Communist party, not only to be compromising Communist ideals, but also not delivering sufficient economic performance, as well as not creating the envisaged Socialist society. It was therefore felt necessary to increase the pace of industrialisation in order to catch up with the West.

Fredric Jameson has said that "Stalinism was [...] a success and fulfilled its historic mission, socially as well as economically" given that it "modernised the Soviet Union, transforming a peasant society into an industrial state with a literate population and a remarkable scientific superstructure."[49]Robert Conquest disputed such a conclusion and noted that "Russia had already been fourth to fifth among industrial economies before World War I" and that Russian industrial advances could have been achieved without collectivisation, famine or terror. The industrial successes were, according to Conquest, far less than claimed, and the Soviet-style industrialisation was "an anti-innovative dead-end."[50]

According to several Western historians,[citation needed] Stalinist agricultural policies were a key factor in causing the Soviet famine of 19321933, which the Ukrainian government now calls the Holodomor, recognizing it as an act of genocide.

After Stalin's death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev repudiated his policies, condemned Stalin's cult of personality in his Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, and instituted destalinisation and relative liberalisation (within the same political framework). Consequently, some of the world's Communist parties, who previously adhered to Stalinism, abandoned it and, to a greater or lesser degree, adopted the positions of Khrushchev. Others, such as the Communist Party of China, instead chose to split from the Soviet Union.

The Socialist People's Republic of Albania took the Chinese party's side in the Sino-Soviet Split and remained committed, at least theoretically, to Hoxhaism, its brand of Stalinism, for decades thereafter, under the leadership of Enver Hoxha. Despite their initial cooperation against "revisionism," Hoxha denounced Mao as a revisionist, along with almost every other self-identified Communist organization in the world. This had the effect of isolating Albania from the rest of the world, as Hoxha was hostile to both the pro-USA and pro-Soviet spheres of influence, as well as the Non-Aligned Movement under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, whom Hoxha had also denounced.

The ousting of Khrushchev in 1964 by his former party-state allies has been described as a Stalinist restoration by some, epitomised by the Brezhnev Doctrine and the apparatchik/nomenklatura "stability of cadres," lasting until the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Some historians and writers (like German Dietrich Schwanitz[51]) draw parallels between Stalinism and the economic policy of Tsar Peter the Great, although Schwanitz in particular views Stalin as "a monstrous reincarnation" of him. Both men wanted Russia to leave the western European states far behind in terms of development. Both largely succeeded, turning Russia into Europe's leading power.[citation needed] Others[who?] compare Stalin with Ivan the Terrible because of his policies of oprichnina and restriction of the liberties of common people.

Stalinism has been considered by some reviewers as a "Red fascism".[52] Though fascist regimes were ideologically opposed to the Soviet Union, some of them positively regarded Stalinism as evolving Bolshevism into a form of fascism. Benito Mussolini positively reviewed Stalinism as having transformed Soviet Bolshevism into a Slavic fascism.[53]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in writing The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America, argues that the use of the term "Stalinism" is an excuse to hide the inevitable effects of communism as a whole on human liberties. He writes that the concept of Stalinism was developed after 1956 by western intellectuals so as to be able to keep alive the communist ideal. The term "Stalinism" however was in use as early as 1937 when Leon Trotsky wrote his pamphlet "Stalinism and Bolshevism".[54]

In modern Russia, public opinion of Stalin has increased in recent years; 34 percent of respondents in a 2015 Levada Center poll (up from 28 percent in 2007) say that leading the Soviet people to victory in the Second World War was such a great achievement that it outweighed his mistakes.[55]

Trotskyists argue that the "Stalinist USSR" was not socialist (and not communist), but a bureaucratised degenerated workers' statethat is, a non-capitalist state in which exploitation is controlled by a ruling caste which, although not owning the means of production and not constituting a social class in its own right, accrued benefits and privileges at the expense of the working class. Trotsky believed that the Bolshevik revolution needed to be spread all over the globe's working class, the proletarians for world revolution; but after the failure of the revolution in Germany Stalin reasoned that industrializing and consolidating Bolshevism in Russia would best serve the proletariat in the long run. The dispute did not end until Trotsky's assassination in his Mexican villa by the Stalinist assassin, Ramon Mercader in 1940.[56]

In the United States, Max Shachtman, at the time one of the principal Trotskyist theorists in the United States, argued that the Soviet Union had evolved from a degenerated worker's state to a new mode of production he called "bureaucratic collectivism": where orthodox Trotskyists considered the Soviet Union an ally gone astray, Shachtman and his followers argued for the formation of a Third Camp opposed equally to both the Soviet and capitalist blocs. By the mid-20th century, Shachtman and many of his associates identified as social democrats rather than Trotskyists, and some ultimately abandoned socialism altogether. In the United Kingdom, Tony Cliff independently developed a critique of state capitalism that resembled Shachtman's in some respects but retained a commitment to revolutionary communism.

Mao Zedong famously declared Stalin to be 70% good, 30% bad. Maoists criticised Stalin chiefly regarding his views that bourgeois influence within the Soviet Union was primarily a result of external forces (to the almost complete exclusion of internal forces) and that class contradictions ended after the basic construction of socialism. They however praise Stalin for leading the USSR and the international proletariat, defeating fascism in Germany, and his anti-revisionism.[57]

Anarchists like Emma Goldman were initially enthusiastic about the Bolsheviks, particularly after dissemination of Lenin's pamphlet State and Revolution, which painted Bolshevism in a very libertarian light. However, the relations between the anarchists and the Bolsheviks soured in Soviet Russia (e.g., in the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion and the Makhnovist movement). Anarchists and Stalinist Communists were also in armed conflict during the Spanish civil war. Anarchists are critical of the statist, totalitarian nature of Stalinism, as well as its cult of personality around Stalin (and subsequent leaders seen by anarchists as Stalinists, such as Mao).

Social anarchism sees "individual freedom as conceptually connected with social equality and emphasize community and mutual aid.".[58] Social anarchists argue that this goal can be achieved through the decentralization of political and economic power, distributing power equally among all individuals, and finally abolishing authoritarian institutions which control certain means of production.[59] Social anarchism rejects private property, seeing it as a source of social inequality.[60] Social Anarchism political philosophies almost always share strong characteristics of anti-authoritarianism, anti-capitalism and anti-statism. As the Soviet Union under Stalin manifested itself as a strong centralized authoritarian state, Stalinism and libertarian socialism are almost directly opposed.

Stalin considered the political and economic system under his rule to be MarxismLeninism, which he considered the only legitimate successor of Marxism and Leninism. The historiography of Stalin is diverse, with many different aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the regimes of Stalin and Lenin proposed. Totalitarian historians such as Richard Pipes tend to see Stalinism as the natural consequence of Leninism, that Stalin "faithfully implemented Lenin's domestic and foreign policy programmes".[61] More nuanced versions of this general view are to be found in the works of other Western historians, such as Robert Service, who notes that "institutionally and ideologically, Lenin laid the foundations for a Stalin ... but the passage from Leninism to the worse terrors of Stalinism was not smooth and inevitable."[62] Likewise, historian and Stalin biographer Edvard Radzinsky believes that Stalin was a real follower of Lenin, exactly as he claimed himself.[63] Another Stalin biographer, Stephen Kotkin, wrote that "his violence was not the product of his subconscious but of the Bolshevik engagement with MarxistLeninist ideology."[64] A third biographer, Dmitri Volkogonov, who wrote biographies of both Lenin and Stalin, explained that during the 1960s through 1980s, a conventional patriotic Soviet de-Stalinized view of the LeninStalin relationship (a Khrushchev Thaw and Gorbachev-sympathetic type of view) was that the overly autocratic Stalin had distorted the Leninism of the wise Dedushka Lenin, but Volkogonov also lamented that this view eventually dissolved for those, like him, who had the scales fall from their eyes in the years immediately before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After researching the biographies in the Soviet Archives, he came to the same conclusion that Radzinsky and Kotkin had: that Lenin had built a culture of violent autocratic totalitarianism of which Stalinism was a logical extension. He lamented that, whereas Stalin had long since fallen in the estimation of many Soviet minds (the many who agreed with de-Stalinization), "Lenin was the last bastion" in his mind to fall, and the fall was the most painful, given the secular apotheosis of Lenin that all Soviet children grew up with.

Proponents of continuity cite a variety of contributory factors: it is argued that it was Lenin, rather than Stalin, whose civil war measures introduced the Red Terror with its hostage taking and internment camps, that it was Lenin who developed the infamous Article 58, and who established the autocratic system within the Communist Party.[65] They also note that Lenin put a ban on factions within the Russian Communist Party and introduced the one-party state in 1921a move that enabled Stalin to get rid of his rivals easily after Lenin's death, and cite Felix Dzerzhinsky, who, during the Bolshevik struggle against opponents in the Russian Civil War, exclaimed "We stand for organised terrorthis should be frankly stated".[66]

Opponents of this view include revisionist historians and a number of postCold War and otherwise dissident Soviet historians including Roy Medvedev, who argues that although "one could list the various measures carried out by Stalin that were actually a continuation of anti-democratic trends and measures implemented under Lenin ... in so many ways, Stalin acted, not in line with Lenin's clear instructions, but in defiance of them".[citation needed] In doing so, some historians have tried to distance Stalinism from Leninism in order to undermine the Totalitarian view that the negative facets of Stalin (terror, etc.) were inherent in Communism from the start.[citation needed] Critics of this kind include anti-Stalinist communists such as Leon Trotsky, who pointed out that Lenin attempted to persuade the CPSU to remove Stalin from his post as its General Secretary. Lenin's Testament, the document which contained this order, was suppressed after Lenin's death. British historian Isaac Deutscher, in his biography of Trotsky, says that on being faced with the evidence "only the blind and the deaf could be unaware of the contrast between Stalinism and Leninism".[67] A similar analysis is present in more recent works, such as those of Graeme Gill, who argues that "[Stalinism was] not a natural flow-on of earlier developments; [it formed a] sharp break resulting from conscious decisions by leading political actors."[68]

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