Here, the term refers to those who are traditionally defined as "political dissidents," but also,

in a more general sense, to anyone whose behavior breaks with (or is suspected to break with)

authority's demand for unity among the proletariat. Here we find the artist, the intellectual,

even the teller of political jokes or the glib parent s turned in by t heir own c hildren , or the

scapegoat of the scapegoat who is trying to shine the spotlight away from him or her self

in order to escape communism's horrors. The term also refers to those unfortunate victims of

communism who were arrested in order to fill arrest quotas ( 60 ) . Often, the above dissidents were

referred to as enemies of the people although many such "enemies of the people" fall into one of

the earlier categories and thus, for our purposes, may not be included with the dissidents. Perhaps

the most difficult victims to classify are those urban residents who w ere killed during the Great

Leap Forward, ( 64 ) a lthough for our purposes they too are considered dissidents.



And then there are questions outside the scope of the above chart that are still relevant to the

the overall totals-- q uestions that must be dealt with , such as h ow many people did Stalin kill .

At the low end of the spectrum we find Yale professor Timothy Snyder's estimate of 6 to 9 million

unnatural deaths under Stalin ( 61 ) , and at the upper end of the spectrum , we find British historian

Norman Davies' claim of 50 million deaths ( 62 ) . Somewhere in the middle is historian and American

Medal of Freedom winner Robert Conquest's oft-cited estimate of at least 20 million deaths ( 63 ) .



Perhaps the best we can do is err on the conservative side and in so doing, arrive at figures

that are almost impossible for a pologists to r ebu t . For example, i n a n effort to limit communist

genocide figures to peacetime deaths, I have n ot included m ass killings from th e first Soviet f amine

since it wa s t hinly connected to previous war and intermittent climate dis ruption . This choice

lowers t he death toll for all communis t c ountries from 90 million to around 85 million . Such logic

governs many of the choices made over the course of compiling these facts and statistics , as do

other attempts to err on the low side when calculating the number of deaths under communism .

Concerning the number of deaths due to Stalin alone , I've chosen to veer toward professor

Snyder's estimate, which is also con sistent with Ste p hane Courtois' count of 20 million

Soviet peacetime c asualties in all regimes. And certainly neither Snyder nor Courtois are

communist apologists, especially considering that the latter was one of the c hiefs behind

The Black Book of Communism, the bible f or anti- communists. This choice

is consistent with t he overall means for determining numbers . When choosing from a range

of numbers , I've typically chosen t he lowest number (in addition to Snyder's Stalin count,

s ee " Cambodian c lergy killed" ) or a median number ( s ee " Chinese landowners killed" ) .



But u ltimately , the purpose of this website i s educational : to c hart communis m 's human-rights

violations in a format in which i ts horrors can quickly and accessibly be comprehended .

After more than a century of bloodshed, it should be clear that t he differences between capital ism

a nd communism are as grounded in morality as in economics . I t's unfortunate that when

studying the morality of capitalism vs. the morality of communism, so many students are

first introduced to an abstract notion of "capitalist greed," rather than a concrete measurement

of communist genocide, slavery, torture, mass homicide , false imprisonment, and deliberate starvation.



I f forced to answer the question how many people d id communism kill , I would

have to approximat e -- after totalling the deaths from all demographic s -- that peacetime communism

killed 85 million people . While this figure is a conservative estimate , the n umber is high enough

that it puts communist a pologists in the u nenviable position o f having t o pretzel themselves

into embarra s singly bad logic and outright falsehoods over the course of 3 4 point-by-p oint

calculations, all for the privilege of arguing that it was only 3 0 or 4 0 million innocents who were

slaughtered by their mentors.





