An old ghost haunts the 21st century. It is the ghost of an idea so powerful it claimed the lives of nearly 100 million people, yet so appealing it refuses to die. In an age defined by never-before-seen technological progress and interconnectedness, a startling number of people, particularly the young, are turning back to the political ideology that produced the greatest man-made disasters in human history: communism.

The evidence for this resurgence is as widespread as it is puzzling. Polling in Western nations repeatedly shows a generation that has not only forgotten the lessons of the Cold War but is actively using the language of its defeated enemy. In the United States, a 2019 YouGov poll found that more than a third of millennials approve of communism.¹ Another survey by the Fraser Institute discovered that nearly a third of young people in Britain believe “communism is the ideal economic system”.² This trend toward radical ideas is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a common feeling among a generation that has grown up in a world of perceived crisis.²

The reasons for this are understandable, if not forgivable. This generation grew up in the long shadow of the 2008 financial crisis, a moment that shattered faith in the stability of free-market capitalism. They face a future of unstable jobs, wages that don’t increase, and the threatening possibility of climate change.¹ They see a system that appears rigged, generating vast inequality and corporate greed, and they are told—by academics, by activists, and by social media influencers—that the problem is capitalism itself.¹ Into this environment of disappointment, communism offers a simple, powerful narrative. It speaks of justice, equality, and a world free from oppression and exploitation. As one communist youth organization puts it, “A new generation of communists is being forged by capitalism’s crises and catastrophes”.² They are told that the system is broken and that only a revolutionary alternative can fix it.²

The Historical Amnesia

This attraction is enabled by a deep and dangerous lack of historical memory. The public education system and mainstream culture have largely failed to convey the brutal reality of 20th-century communist regimes.¹ The history of communism, when taught at all, is often cleaned up or presented as a series of separate tragedies, with their causes hidden. The direct link between the ideology on the page and the corpses in the field is cut. A report from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation highlights a shocking lack of basic knowledge among young Americans about the horrible acts committed in the name of this ideology.¹

In place of historical truth, a romanticized myth has taken hold. Revolutionary figures like Che Guevara are reduced to fashionable icons on t-shirts, their roles as planners of firing squads and concentration camps conveniently forgotten.¹ After Castro’s victory, Guevara was appointed commander of the La Cabaña prison, where he personally oversaw and ordered the execution of hundreds of individuals deemed “enemies of the revolution”.⁴ Estimates of those killed under his direct authority range from over 150 to 500 people.⁵ His victims were not just soldiers from the previous regime, but political prisoners, dissidents, and even children, with some accounts detailing the execution of boys as young as 14.⁷ Guevara openly disdained due process, famously stating, “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail”.¹⁰ This lack of true understanding allows the ideology’s utopian promises to be heard without the deafening echo of the screams from the Gulag, the killing fields of Cambodia, or the starved villages of Ukraine.

Thesis Statement

This report is an effort to reclaim historical truth. It is a brutally honest accounting of an idea and its consequences. Its purpose is to arm a new generation with the one thing that can protect them from this dangerous attraction: the truth. The central, firm argument of this report is that the promises of communism are not merely difficult to achieve; they are completely impossible. They are built on a deeply mistaken understanding of human nature and a disastrous lack of knowledge of economic reality.

Furthermore, this report will demonstrate, with undeniable proof, that the horrific outcomes witnessed in every communist experiment—totalitarianism, political repression, forced labor, famine, and mass death—are not accidental mistakes, “bad implementations,” or the fault of uniquely evil leaders like Stalin or Mao. They are the direct, predictable, and unavoidable consequences of attempting to force an ideology that cannot work onto the world. The road to a classless, stateless utopia has never once led to its destination. It has only ever been paved with corpses, and the final destination has always been a totalitarian hell. This is the warning from history that must be heard.

I. The Siren Song: The Utopian Promise of Pure Communism

To understand the danger of communism, one must first understand its appeal. It is not an ideology of pure malice; it is a tempting promise of a perfect world that has tricked generations of idealists into disaster. Its power lies in its comprehensive criticism of the world as it is and its amazing vision of the world as it could be.

The Vision of a Perfect World

At the heart of Marxist theory lies a vision of a final, perfect end: the achievement of “true communism.” This is the promised land at the end of history. In this ultimate stage of social organization, the state itself would “wither away”.¹¹ There would be no government, no police, no army, because the root of all social conflict—class division—would have been eliminated. Society would become both classless and stateless.¹¹

In this utopia, the concept of private property, at least concerning the “means of production” (factories, land, mines), would be abolished entirely.¹¹ All productive assets would be owned collectively by the people. There would be no currency, no wages, and no profit motive.¹¹ Wealth and goods would be produced in abundance and distributed according to the famous principle articulated by Karl Marx: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.¹¹ This is the core of the promise: a world without poverty, without inequality, without force, where humanity is finally free to reach its full potential in a peaceful community. It is a vision of heaven on earth, a non-religious belief system for a world that had lost its faith.

The Critique of Capitalism

This utopian destination is made all the more appealing by Marxism’s powerful and strong criticism of the starting point: capitalism. Marx framed all of human history as a non-stop story of conflict between social classes.¹² In each era, a dominant “oppressor” class owns the means of production and exploits a subordinate “oppressed” class. Under capitalism, this struggle is between the bourgeoisie (the owners of capital) and the proletariat (the industrial working class).¹²

According to the theory, capitalism is a system that is naturally unfair and takes advantage of people. The value of any product, Marx argued, comes from the labor invested in it. However, the capitalist pays the worker only a fraction of this value as a wage. The rest, the “surplus value,” is extracted by the capitalist as profit.¹² This process is not seen as a voluntary exchange but as a form of theft that guarantees endless inequality and social injustice.

This framework is essential for understanding the modern appeal of communism. When activists speak of “social justice,” they are often, consciously or not, echoing this Marxist critique. The goal is not merely equal rights or equal opportunity within the existing system, but equity—the achievement of equal outcomes.¹² This can only be accomplished, the theory holds, by taking apart the entire system of capitalism that produces unequal outcomes in the first place.

The Path of Revolution

Crucially, Marx and his followers did not believe this transformation could happen peacefully or slowly over time. The state, in Marxist theory, is not a neutral judge but simply “the repressive institution” of the ruling class.¹¹ It exists to protect the property and interests of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, it cannot be reformed through democratic means; it must be smashed.

Marxism advocates for a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.¹² As the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, a devout Marxist, famously declared, “Political power grows out of a barrel of a gun”.¹² The revolution is envisioned as a violent, necessary act in which the proletariat seizes control, takes the property of the bourgeoisie, and establishes its own rule. This revolutionary path is not an unfortunate but necessary step; it is a key part of the ideology’s thinking. It is the fire in which the old world is burned away to make room for the new. It is this combination—a strong criticism of the present, a glorious vision of the future, and a clear, violent path to get there—that has given communism its enduring and deadly power.

II. The Blueprint’s Fatal Flaws: Human Nature and Economic Reality

The communist blueprint for utopia is elegant in its simplicity and amazing in its ambition. Yet, it is built upon a foundation of sand. It fails not because its ideals are dishonorable, but because it goes against two basic and unchangeable truths of reality: the nature of the human person and the nature of economic knowledge. These are not minor technical problems to be ironed out; they are disastrous flaws in the system itself that guarantee not only the ideology’s failure but its transformation into a horrible dictatorship.

A. The Human Nature Obstacle: The Individual Lost in the Group

Marx’s Malleable Man

The first fatal flaw lies in the ideology’s understanding of humanity itself. To create the communist “new man”—an unselfish, cooperative person content to work for the collective good without personal motivation or reward—the theory had to argue that human nature as we know it is not real. Karl Marx proposed that what we perceive as human nature is not a permanent and universal condition. Instead, he argued that “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations”.¹³

In this view, traits like selfishness, ambition, and the desire for private property are not natural. They are products of culture, mental burdens instilled by the capitalist system, which rewards greed and accumulation.¹³ The theory holds that human nature is endlessly changeable, “modified in each historical epoch”.¹³ Therefore, if you change the economic system from one based on private ownership and competition to one based on collective ownership and cooperation, you will literally change human nature itself. Greed will be replaced by altruism, competition by collaboration.¹⁴ This belief is the fundamental psychological premise of communism: that a new society can create a new kind of person.

The Philosophical and Psychological Rebuttal

This premise is not only something philosophers can argue about; it is psychologically ridiculous. While society and culture are powerful forces in shaping individual behavior, they do not operate on a blank slate. Modern psychology, particularly the strong and widely accepted self-determination theory (SDT), has identified natural and universal psychological needs that are essential for people to thrive and be well across all cultures.¹⁶ These are not capitalist constructs; they are fundamental components of our evolved nature.

According to SDT, all humans require the satisfaction of three basic needs to be motivated, productive, and mentally healthy:

1. Autonomy: The need to feel that one is the author of one’s own life, to have choice and will over one’s actions.¹⁶
2. Competence: The need to feel effective and capable in one’s activities, to master challenges and express one’s abilities.¹⁶
3. Relatedness: The need to feel connected to and cared for by others.¹⁶

Communism, in its practical application, launches a direct and organized attack on these core needs. It is a system that is, by its very design, mentally harmful. The pursuit of self-interest, the desire to “better their condition,” is a powerful and positive human motivation.¹⁶ While it can be channeled destructively, in a free-market environment it becomes the engine of innovation and prosperity through voluntary exchange. Communism does not seek to channel this drive; it seeks to destroy it, and in doing so, it destroys the human spirit.

The Tyranny of Coerced Labor

The entire economic structure of communism is built on the principle of “controlled motivation,” the use of force and duty to make people act, rather than “autonomous motivation,” which flows from free will.¹⁶ The state, in its supposed wisdom, decides what work must be done, who must do it, and what, if anything, they will receive for it. Entrepreneurial activity, the ultimate expression of economic autonomy, is forbidden.¹⁶

This creates a condition of deep mental damage. As one analysis bluntly states, under communism, “Personal autonomy is non-existent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia; they have no value of their own”.¹⁶ The system strips individuals of the very psychological nutrients necessary for a healthy life. It denies them autonomy by eliminating choice. It denies them competence by removing the link between effort and reward, making their work feel meaningless. It even damages relatedness by forcing individuals into a state of dependence on an impersonal, bureaucratic machine.

The result is not the creation of a “new man” but the breaking down of the person who already exists. When a system is at war with fundamental human drives for autonomy, ambition, and self-interest, it cannot win by persuasion. It must win by force. The ideology’s flawed psychology creates the first and most crucial justification for the totalitarian state: the need to crush the natural, unbending resistance of the human spirit.

B. The Economic Calculation Catastrophe: Planning in the Dark

If the psychological flaw of communism guarantees it will become oppressive, its economic flaw guarantees it will be poor. The second fatal error, identified with shocking clarity by economists of the Austrian School, is known as the “economic calculation problem”.¹⁷ It is an argument of such profound power that it demonstrates not just that centrally planned economies are inefficient, but that they are, in a very real sense, impossible to operate logically.

The Problem Defined

The argument, first articulated by Ludwig von Mises in 1920, is as follows: in a complex economy, the central challenge is to decide how to use limited resources for the things people want most. How do we decide whether to use steel to build a bridge, a tractor, or a hospital? In a market economy, this problem is solved by the price system.¹⁷

Prices are not arbitrary numbers set by capitalists. They are changing signals that carry a huge amount of information.¹⁷ The price of steel reflects its relative scarcity, the intensity of consumer demand for all the products made from it, and the cost of all the labor and other resources required to produce it. This allows entrepreneurs to perform economic calculation—to compare the costs of production with the potential revenues and determine whether a project is a worthwhile use of society’s resources.¹⁸

Now, consider the socialist society. The state has abolished private ownership of the means of production.¹¹ Factories, land, and machinery are all owned by the government. Because these “capital goods” (goods used to make other goods) are never bought or sold, there is no market for them. And without a market, there can be no genuine prices.¹⁷ The central planner is flying blind.

The Blindness of the Central Planner

Mises argued that even if the central planning board were staffed by angels and equipped with supercomputers, it could not solve this problem.¹⁸ Without prices for the factors of production, there is no way to logically calculate the most efficient way to produce anything. The planners might know how much steel they have, but they have no objective way to compare its value in one use versus another. They are forced to rely on “calculation in kind”—trying to make decisions based on raw physical quantities (tons, meters, etc.)—which is an impossible task in an economy with millions of different goods and resources.¹⁷ As Mises concluded, “rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth”.¹⁷

Friedrich Hayek later expanded on this, framing it as the “knowledge problem”.¹⁸ Hayek pointed out that the economic data needed to run an economy is not, and cannot be, held in any single mind or by any single committee. It is spread out among millions of individuals, each possessing unique “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place”.²⁰ A farmer knows his land; a factory manager knows his machines; a consumer knows their own preferences. The price system is the only mechanism ever discovered that can automatically coordinate all of this decentralized knowledge and communicate it throughout the economy, allowing millions of people to align their individual plans with one another without any central direction.¹⁷

Guaranteed Inefficiency and Shortage

Central planning, by its very nature, ignores this vast reserve of local knowledge. It attempts to substitute the wisdom of the crowd with the decrees of a few bureaucrats. The inevitable result is a disastrous misuse of resources. The Soviet Union became famous for its stories of tractors sitting idle for want of a single spare part, of mountains of shoes produced with no laces, and of food rotting in fields for lack of transport to the cities.¹⁸ These were not accidents; they were the direct and predictable consequences of an economic system deprived of the ability to calculate.

This fundamental economic flaw explains the constant poverty and lack of goods that have troubled every communist state in history. The system is incapable of efficiently coordinating production to meet the needs of the population. This failure creates the second great justification for the totalitarian state. When the economy inevitably falls into chaos, the state must use its power to impose order, to ration scarce goods, and to punish those who are blamed for the system’s built-in failures. The economic blueprint itself contains the seeds of famine and repression.

The ideology’s war on human psychology and economic logic creates a deadly cycle. The attempt to erase self-interest makes a police state necessary to enforce compliance. The abolition of private property and prices makes a command economy necessary that cannot function, leading to shortages and chaos. This chaos, in turn, requires an even more powerful and brutal state to control the problems it created. The failure is built in from the very beginning.

III. The Road to Tyranny: The State That Never Withers

Marxist theory contains a great and tempting lie: that the state, after seizing power in the name of the people, will simply “wither away”.¹¹ History has proven this to be the most dishonest of its promises. The communist state has never withered. Instead, in every instance, it has grown into a giant, monstrous government, an all-powerful totalitarian machine dedicated to the permanent control of its people. This is not a tragic accident or a betrayal of the original vision. It is the ideology’s only possible political outcome. When a system declares war on human nature and economic reality, it requires unlimited power to keep itself going.

A. The “Transitional” State That Becomes Permanent

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

The theoretical bridge from capitalist revolution to communist utopia is a concept Marx called the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.²¹ This is meant to be a temporary stage. After the revolution, the working class, organized as the ruling power, would use the full force of the state to destroy the remaining opposition from the property-owning class, seize all private property, and centralize all instruments of production under state control.¹¹ Once this task was complete and a classless society was achieved, the state—being merely an instrument of class oppression—would no longer have a function. It would become outdated and fade into history.¹¹

The Inevitable Escalation

This is the point where the theory collides with reality and shatters. As established in the previous chapter, the core policies of communism—the abolition of private property and the imposition of central planning—are fundamentally unworkable. They generate natural, constant resistance from the population, whose psychological needs are being violated, and they create widespread economic chaos.

In such an environment, the state cannot possibly wither. It must do the opposite. It must become ever more powerful, more interfering, and more brutal to control the problems of its own making. To suppress the farmers who resist collectivization, the workers who demand autonomy, and the intellectuals who dare to criticize, the state needs a secret police. To manage the constant shortages, it needs a vast bureaucracy of rationers and enforcers. To eliminate “class enemies” blamed for the system’s failures, it needs concentration camps. The “temporary” dictatorship of the proletariat does not solve the problem of class conflict; it replaces it with a new, more brutal conflict: the all-powerful state versus the entire population. The temporary method of transition becomes the permanent result.

B. Forging the Iron Fist: The Bolshevik Blueprint for Terror

The classic example for this inevitable process is the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. The methods used by Vladimir Lenin and his party from 1917 onwards were not a distortion of Marxism but its most direct practical use. They created the blueprint for totalitarianism that would be copied by every subsequent communist regime.

A Coup, Not a Revolution

First, it is crucial to get rid of the myth that the Bolsheviks were swept to power by a popular mass uprising. As the famous historian Richard Pipes argued in his huge and important work, The Russian Revolution, the event of October 1917 was not a revolution at all but a brilliant and ruthless coup d’état—”the capture of governmental power by a small minority”.²² Having returned from exile, Lenin pushed his party without stopping toward an armed uprising, convinced that only a final blow could secure power.²³ While other socialist parties debated forming a coalition government, the Bolsheviks, through their Military Revolutionary Committee, systematically occupied key points in Petrograd, culminating in the storming of the Winter Palace.²³ They seized power not with the support of the people, but through conspiracy and force.

The Tools of Consolidation (1917-1921)

Having seized power, the Bolsheviks immediately set about constructing the machinery of a one-party state, demonstrating from the very beginning that their goal was absolute control, not freeing the people through democracy.²⁴

• The Death of Democracy: The Bolsheviks’ true attitude toward democracy was revealed in January 1918. In the first and only free election in revolutionary Russia, the vote for the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks were badly beaten, winning less than a quarter of the vote. Their response was simple: they shut down the assembly by force after a single day.²⁵ With this act, the dream of a democratic Russia was put out, and the principle of one-party rule was established.
• The Sword of the Revolution: Just weeks after the coup, in December 1917, Lenin founded the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, better known as the Cheka.²⁷ Led by the extreme Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka was the original secret police, the direct forerunner of the more infamous NKVD and KGB.²⁷ Its mission was to defend the revolution through any means necessary, including press censorship, arrests for no clear reason, torture, and mass executions.²⁷ With a staff that grew to over 250,000, the Cheka was responsible for executing at least 140,000 people in its first few years, establishing an unbroken 74-year tradition of secret police terror at the heart of the Soviet state.²⁸
• The Red Terror: The Bolsheviks did not hide their methods. They openly proclaimed the “Red Terror” as official state policy, a necessary tool to eliminate their opponents.²⁵ This was not an unlucky mistake but the core of their strategy for consolidating power. As Pipes argued, terror was not an afterthought; it was “steeped in” the movement from its very inception.²²
• Monopoly on Truth: To ensure their grip was absolute, the Bolsheviks banned all other political parties and seized control of all printing presses, establishing a complete state monopoly on information.²⁵

This rapid construction of a totalitarian system was not a betrayal of Marxist ideals. It was their logical result. As historian Robert Conquest argued in The Great Terror, Stalinism was not an unusual occurrence but a “natural consequence of the system established by Vladimir Lenin”.³⁰ Lenin forged the iron fist that Stalin would later use to crush millions.

C. The Archipelago of Fear: Life Under the Mature Totalitarian State

The political system forged by Lenin and perfected by Stalin was unlike any tyranny that had come before. Its ultimate expression was the vast network of concentration camps that spread like cancer across the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn’s Testimony

For decades, the true scale of this horror was hidden from the world. It was exposed with shocking force by the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago.³¹ A former Red Army officer and loyal communist, Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 for a slightly critical remark about Stalin in a private letter and sentenced to eight years in the camps.³² His experience, combined with the secret stories of over 200 other survivors, formed the basis of his book, a work that David Remnick of The New Yorker said had a “greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century” than any other.³²

The Gulag System

Solzhenitsyn described the Gulag not as a simple prison system but as a “vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police” that formed a parallel nation within the USSR, an archipelago of islands of terror in a sea of fear.³¹ The Gulag served multiple purposes for the state. It was a dumping ground for political dissidents, religious believers, ethnic minorities, and anyone deemed a “counter-revolutionary” or “enemy of the people”.³³ It was a tool of mass intimidation, ensuring the fearful obedience of the general population. And it was a vital economic force, providing a massive pool of slave labor for Stalin’s large-scale projects to build up industry, from logging in the Siberian taiga to digging canals with bare hands.³⁴

The Gulag Archipelago is more than a history; it is a “ferocious testimony of a man of genius”.³² It tells the story of the journey into this underworld: the midnight arrest, the interrogations and torture in the cellars of the NKVD, the packed cattle cars of the transit centers, and the final destination in a camp where survival, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, “lay not in hope but in despair”.³¹ The state that was supposed to wither away had instead created the most complete system of human slavery the world had ever seen. This was the reality of applied communism.

IV. The Harvest of Sorrow: A Century of Man-Made Disaster

The theoretical flaws of communism are not merely academic. They have real-world consequences, written in the blood and suffering of countless millions. When a state declares war on human nature and economic law, the result is a scale of death and destruction unequaled in human history. The 20th century stands as a dark proof of this fact. Judging the revolution by its fruit, as the saying goes, reveals a harvest of sorrow, famine, and death.³⁵

To comprehend the sheer scale of this tragedy, the following table gathers cautious estimates of the death tolls under major communist regimes, drawing from the work of internationally recognized scholars and important and influential books like The Black Book of Communism.

Table 1: The Human Cost of 20th Century Communism

Country/Region	Leader(s) / Period	Estimated Deaths	Primary Sources
Soviet Union	Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin (1917-1953)	20,000,000 – 25,000,000	30
People’s Republic of China	Mao Zedong (1949-1976)	45,000,000 – 65,000,000	35
Cambodia (Khmer Rouge)	Pol Pot (1975-1979)	1,700,000 – 2,000,000	35
North Korea	Kim Dynasty (1948-Present)	2,000,000+ (famine, purges, camps)	35
Vietnam	Ho Chi Minh / Party (1945-Present)	1,000,000+ (camps, executions)	35
Eastern Europe	Various Regimes (1945-1989)	1,000,000 (purges, repression)	35
Africa	Various Regimes (e.g., Ethiopia, Angola)	1,700,000+	35
Afghanistan	Soviet-backed Regime (1978-1992)	1,500,000	35
Latin America	Various Regimes (e.g., Cuba)	150,000+	35
Total (Approximate)		~85,000,000 – 100,000,000+

This shocking number—approaching 100 million people—is not just a number. Each digit represents a human life put out by a political experiment. These deaths were not primarily deaths in war; they were the victims of executions, famines created on purpose, and the brutal conditions of forced labor camps. The following case studies illustrate how these disasters were not accidental but were the direct result of core communist policies.

A. Case Study: The Soviet War on the Peasantry

Nowhere is the deadly logic of communism clearer than in the Soviet Union’s war against its own rural population. The campaign to build a socialist society required the total control of the peasantry, who made up 80% of the population and controlled the nation’s food supply.

Forced Collectivization

Beginning in 1928, Joseph Stalin initiated a policy of forced collectivization. The goal was to get rid of private land ownership and combine 25 million individual peasant farms into large, state-controlled collective farms, or “kolkhozes”.³⁷ This was presented as a move toward a more modern and efficient form of agriculture, but its true purpose was political: to break the independence of the farmers and give the state absolute control over the country’s grain.³⁸ The process was anything but voluntary. It was a violent, forceful campaign. Peasants who resisted were subjected to the taking of their property, imprisonment, or execution.³⁴ In protest, many slaughtered their own livestock rather than turn them over to the state. Between 1929 and 1933, the Soviet Union’s population of horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs was destroyed, in some cases by more than half.³⁷

Liquidation of the Kulaks

To break the resistance, the regime created a class enemy: the “kulak.” Supposedly representing a class of wealthy, exploitative peasants, the term was applied without careful thought to anyone who opposed collectivization, or simply to the most competent and successful farmers.³⁷ In 1929, Stalin declared his intention to “liquidate the kulaks as a class”.³⁷ What followed was a state-organized terror campaign. Kulaks were divided into three categories. The first, “counter-revolutionary activists,” were arrested and either shot or sent to the Gulag. The second and third categories, along with their families, were stripped of all possessions—land, homes, tools, everything—and forcibly moved by the millions to the most distant and harsh regions of Siberia and Central Asia to perform forced labor.³⁴ At least 1.2 million people were affected in the first year alone.³⁷

The Holodomor: Death by Starvation

The culmination of this war on the peasantry was the terror-famine of 1932-1933, an event known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, or “death by starvation”.⁴⁰ Having destroyed the agricultural productivity of the nation’s most fertile regions, the state then imposed impossibly high grain procurement quotas on the new collective farms.³⁹ Activist brigades swept through villages, seizing all the food they could find, including the seed set aside for the next year’s planting.

The result was a man-made famine of disastrous levels, particularly in Ukraine, a region with a strong sense of national pride that Stalin wanted to destroy.³⁹ As millions began to starve, the Soviet state closed the borders of Ukraine to prevent anyone from fleeing.³⁹ An extremely harsh law, the “Law of Spikelets,” made taking even a handful of grain from a collective field punishable by death. While its people resorted to eating grass, bark, and in some cases, each other, the Soviet government was exporting millions of tons of grain to the West to fund its industrialization drive.⁴⁰ This was not a policy failure; it was, as many historians now conclude, a purposeful act of killing a whole group of people.³⁹ The most reliable estimates place the death toll from the Holodomor at 3.9 million people, with some estimates ranging as high as 7 million.⁴⁰

B. Case Study: China’s Great Leaps into Famine and Chaos

The Chinese Communist Party, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, followed the Soviet blueprint with even more disastrous results. Mao’s attempts to accelerate China’s transition to communism unleashed two decades of unimaginable suffering.

The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962)

In 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, a radical campaign to launch China past its industrial competitors and into a fully communist society in a matter of years.⁴² The policy combined forced collectivization on an even larger scale than in the USSR with strange and destructive industrial plans, most famously the call for every village to produce steel in “backyard furnaces”.⁴² Peasants were forced to melt down their own farming tools, pots, and pans, producing millions of tons of useless, low-quality pig iron while neglecting the crops in the fields.⁴²

Driven by extreme belief in the ideology and a climate of fear where local officials dared not report bad news, the central government set wildly unrealistic grain quotas. Believing the fake reports of bumper harvests, the state proceeded to take nearly all the grain produced, leaving the rural population with nothing.⁴² The result was the single largest famine in recorded human history.³⁶ Conservative estimates place the death toll at 30 million people; some scholars argue it could be as high as 55 million.³⁶ It was a disaster of such huge size that it was almost unnoticed by the outside world, a silent holocaust created by pure ideology.⁴⁴

The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)

Having been pushed to the side within the party after the disastrous Great Leap Forward, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 to get rid of his rivals and re-establish his total control.⁴⁵ It was a call for the nation’s youth to rise up and destroy the “Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.⁴⁵ Mao mobilized millions of students into extreme unofficial military groups known as the Red Guards and let them loose on the country.⁴⁵

What followed was a decade of violent, destructive chaos. China was plunged into a virtual civil war as competing Red Guard groups battled each other in the streets.⁴⁶ Schools and universities were closed for years, creating a “lost generation” deprived of education.⁴⁷ Intellectuals, teachers, scientists, and even high-ranking party officials were publicly humiliated in brutal “struggle sessions,” beaten, imprisoned, murdered, or driven to suicide.⁴⁶ Valuable cultural history—ancient temples, libraries, books, and artworks—was systematically destroyed in an attack on China’s own history.⁴⁵ By the time Mao’s death in 1976 brought the madness to an end, an estimated 500,000 to 2 million people had been killed, and the nation’s society and economy were left in ruins.⁴⁵

C. Case Study: Venezuela’s 21st Century Collapse

For those who might argue that these horrors are things from a past time, the recent collapse of Venezuela serves as a clear, modern-day reminder that the laws of economics are timeless and unforgiving.

The Modern-Day Example

Under the socialist governments of Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela embarked on a “Bolivarian Revolution” that implemented the core policies of the communist playbook.⁴⁸ Praised by many Western idealists, these policies have led to a predictable and complete societal collapse, demonstrating that the ideology’s failures are not dependent on time or place.⁴⁸

The Familiar Pattern

The Venezuelan government took government control of huge parts of the economy, from agriculture to the vital oil industry.⁴⁸ As in every other case, state control led to terrible mismanagement, corruption, and a collapse in production. The country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves became unable to pump its own oil.⁴⁸

Simultaneously, the government imposed strict price controls on all basic foods and goods.⁴⁹ The intent was to make these items affordable, but the result was to make it unprofitable for anyone to produce, import, or sell them. This created disastrous shortages. Venezuelans began spending their days in massive lines, hoping to buy rationed food.⁴⁸ The currency was destroyed by hyperinflation. A 2016 survey found that nearly 75% of the population had lost an average of 19 pounds in body weight due to malnutrition; a year later, that number had risen to 24 pounds.⁴⁸

The outcome is a humanitarian crisis in a nation that should be wealthy. Widespread starvation, a collapsed healthcare system, and one of the largest refugee crises in the world are the direct results of applying the same socialist principles that failed so catastrophically in the 20th century.⁴⁸ Venezuela proves that the harvest of sorrow is not an unusual event in history; it is the inevitable crop yielded by the seeds of communism.

Conclusion: A Warning from History

The history of the 20th century is stained with the blood of nearly 100 million people who were killed for a beautiful and impossible idea. The ghost of communism continues to haunt our world, its tempting promise of a perfect world still finding acceptance in the hearts of the young and the idealistic. But this report has demonstrated that the promise is an illusion, and the path to it leads only to disaster.

Synthesize the Argument

The argument made clear in this report is that communism is not a good idea that was simply implemented badly. It is a fundamentally flawed ideology whose catastrophic failures are built into its very core.

It begins with a war on human nature. By denying the natural human drives for autonomy, competence, and improving one’s own life, it creates a system that can only be imposed by force. It seeks to create a “new man” but succeeds only in creating a slave, just a small part in a huge, uncaring system.¹⁶

It continues with a war on economic reality. By abolishing private property and market prices, it destroys the only known mechanism for logical economic planning. It blinds itself to the information needed to organize a complex society, guaranteeing inefficiency, constant shortages, and poverty.¹⁷

The Inevitable Result

The political result of this two-front war on reality is unavoidable and complete. The “transitional” state that is supposed to wither away must instead become a permanent, all-powerful totalitarian system. It needs a secret police to crush dissent, concentration camps to house its “enemies,” and a monopoly on truth to hide its failures. The Gulag, the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution are not unusual mistakes in the communist project; they are its most genuine and logical results.³⁰ They are the necessary tools for a state attempting the impossible task of bending reality to the will of an ideology. The terror is not a bug; it is the central feature of the operating system.

A Direct Appeal to the Reader

To the young person who sees the injustices of the world and feels the pull of this utopian promise, the evidence of history offers a serious and urgent warning. Do not be tricked by the simplicity of the theory. Look, instead, at the brutal difficulty of putting it into practice. The promise of equality has delivered only the equality of the breadline and the mass grave. The promise of liberation has delivered only the most complete forms of slavery. The promise of a workers’ paradise has delivered only a hell on earth.

The lesson of the 20th century, a lesson paid for with a mountain of skulls, is this: trying to create an impossible heaven always creates a very real hell. To ignore this lesson is not just to be a “historical fool,” as W.L. Webb wrote of those who had not read Solzhenitsyn; it is to risk making it possible for it to happen again.³² The attraction of communism is the attraction of a shortcut to justice, but it is a path that leads over a cliff. The most caring, just, and truly forward-thinking act is to learn from the past, to honor the victims by remembering how they died, and to reject the deadly ideology that killed them.

References and Further Reading

For those who wish to explore this subject in greater depth and verify the claims made in this report, the following works are essential. They represent some of the most important and expert research on the theory and practice of communism.

• Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. New York: Anchor Books, 2017. ⁴¹
• Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ³⁰
• Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. ⁴¹
• Courtois, Stéphane, et al. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ³⁵
• Hayek, Friedrich. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. ³³
• Mises, Ludwig von. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981. ¹⁷
• Pipes, Richard. Communism: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2001. ²⁹
• Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. ²²
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. ³¹

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