Boris Johnson wrote in this newspaper yesterday that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn hates the profit motive and that they point their fingers at billionaires “with a relish and vindictiveness not seen since Stalin persecuted the kulaks”.

This remark inspired two reactions among Left-wingers on Twitter. One was that the comparison with Stalin was offensive. The other was scorn that Boris had said something which would fail to resonate with the public because they would never have heard of the kulaks. Jess Brammar, a journalist for the Huffington Post website, put it neutrally: “Genuinely interested – do people know what kulaks are?”

The worrying thing is that she is right. No, they certainly do not know the meaning of “kulaks”. It is worse than that. A few years ago, Survation was commissioned by New Culture Forum to do a poll of 16-24 year-olds. It found that 28 per cent had never heard of Stalin, almost half had never heard of Lenin and an astonishing 70 per cent had never heard of Mao Tse Tung, whose regime was responsible for more deaths through murder and famine than any other in the 20th century. The chances of more than a small minority having heard of the kulaks are remote.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that, in Russian, the word “kulak” originally meant “a miserly, dishonest rural trader who grows rich not by his own labour but through someone else’s”. But the meaning changed under Stalin to mean any peasant or small-scale landowner who hired one or more workers, even if the peasant was temporarily short of working hands from his own family.

Lenin boasted of setting poor peasants against the richer ones, resulting in hangings. Stalin went further in expropriating the property of the kulaks under threat of violence even though it might consist of little more than a cow. This was to pursue a policy of “collectivised” farms which would be managed by groups of workers and much of whose produce was taken by the state.

This policy was a disastrous failure but Stalin could not admit such a thing. So he blamed the kulaks. They became “enemies of the people” and were deported to Siberia and elsewhere. According to Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag, 2.1 million were exiled in the early 1930s. About 100,000 were sent to Gulag camps – effectively forced labour camps with high death rates.

You might think that this part of history should be widely known. But schools these days allow children to give up history at 14. And even if they do continue with it, many will never come across the history of communism. Even then, it is likely to be “greywashed”.

When it comes to the history of the collectivisation of farms as taught at GCSE, it is not denied that people were hanged, executed and sent to Gulags. The resulting famines are not denied either. But the huge numbers who starved to death in the famines are not always mentioned.

It was 3.9 million in Ukraine alone during 1932/33. One of the revision books has a page in which it asks children to consider the “positive” and the “negative” views of collectivisation. One of the “positive” views suggested is that “it got rid of the greedy and troublesome kulaks”. It is astonishing to hear Stalinist hate propaganda treated as an argument that might be used in a GCSE essay. Even more worrying is that knowledge of these things is so rare.

It is the fault of the education system. This manages to spread knowledge of Hitler very successfully. Only 8 per cent of young people have never heard of him. But when it comes the horrors of Communist history, far too many gaps are left. To combat that, I and others are working on a project to create a permanent museum. Museums of a similar nature exist in Budapest, Talinn and other places in Eastern Europe. There is even a Gulag museum in Moscow. One is getting close to being created in Washington.

Our priority in the short term has been to collect video testimonies of people who directly experienced Communist oppression. The latest to be edited and put on our website features one of the last remaining survivors of the Gulag camps – a brave woman of 95. For if the terrible crimes of Stalin are not to be repeated, they must be remembered and understood.

James Bartholomew is director of the Museum of Communist Terror