The report has been compiled by Robert Conquest who is the leading British authority on the communist world.  His academic qualifications are impeccable.  He has held fellowships in Soviet politics at the London School of Economics and Columbia University.  Recently he wrote the book “The Great Terror” which is a definitive account of the purge trials and mass executions carried out by Joseph Stalin.  Concerning this book, Bernard Levin in the Daily Mail writes:

            “. . .A passionate objectivity, a deadly sense of justice. . .an ability to marshall and present facts. . .I know of no modern history with which it can be compared. . . .Robert Conquest deserves the thanks of humanity.”

            He concludes that at least 21.5 million persons have been executed or otherwise killed by Soviet Communism since the revolution.  He classifies the deaths under Soviet rule as follows:

            “Executed or died in prison camps during the post-revolution period (1919-23)—500,000

            “Executed during the Stalin terror—2,000,000

            “Died in camps during the pre-Yexhov period of Stalin’s rule (1930-36)—3,500,000

            Died in forced labor camps during the Stalin-Yexhov terror (1936-38)—12,000,000

            Died in the politically organized famine during the forced collectivization of the thirties—3,500,000

            Total: 21,500,000

            Mr. Conquest points out that this is a conservative estimate which is almost certainly too low and that the real figure might very well be 50 per cent greater than this.

            He does not include in this tabulation the deaths caused by the civil war, 1919-1921.  During this war 9 million lives were lost from military action, executions, typhus, and famine while the great famine of 1921, which followed the civil war, cost another 5 million lives.

            If these figures were added, a minimum estimate of human lives lost is 35 million while 45 million is more probable.

            The principal source of information used by Mr. Conquest are reports published by the Russian authorities and eye-witness accounts written by survivors of prison camps.

            The net result of this incredible slaughter is the Soviet Union today.  Instead of being the promised paradise, it is a totalitarian state where a ruthless political elite seeks to perpetuate itself in power and to order every aspect of the people’s lives.

            The original communist conquerors of Russia promised abundance.  The reality they have created is a state-owned system of agriculture which, by destroying human motivation, had saddled the Soviet Union with the most backward and unproductive agriculture in any major nation.

            The communist conquerors promised that they would produce a new superior man.  This new man would produce artistic and cultural works of transcendent value.  The reality is an artistic wasteland where literature and art are reduced to instruments of communist propaganda and where those brave individuals who seek to express their true artistic identity are sentenced to prison or forced labor or the insane asylum.

            Mr. Conquest points out that the great majority of the murders were not forced on the communists by the opposition of their opponents or committed in the heat of battle.  They are the direct consequences of communist philosophy and doctrine.  Long before the communists seized Russia, they had convinced themselves that a large segment of the bourgeoisie was intrinsically and incurably evil and should be eliminated.  They had extolled mass terror and praised those who had used it.  Consequently the record of merciless brutality is not a perversion of communism but its fulfillment.

The Secret Police

            One of the first official acts of the communists when they had seized control in Russia was to organize the secret police.  The history of this secret police is the history of infamy.  It has been known by many names and directed by many leaders, but the program has always brought catastrophe and terror to the Russian people.  First known as the Cheka, it later became the GPU, then the NKVD, the MVD, the MGB, and the KGB.  Each change in name usually signified a reorganization of personnel.  The customary procedure was to accuse the old leadership of illegality or treason and to arrest and exterminate them.

            The Cheka was founded on December 20, 1917.  The original police chief was Felix Dzerzhinsky who had been known as the conscience of Bolshevism.  He began as an idealist but his “idealism” compelled him to perpetrate great atrocities.  He once remarked: “Only saints or scoundrels can serve in the GPU but now the saints are running away from me and I am left with the scoundrels.”

            Lenin himself placed great reliance on the secret police.  He used the slogan, “Every comrade a Chekist.”

            “On January 27, 1918, Lenin publicly announced—though at this stage about speculators only—that they should be shot on the spot and that ‘we can achieve nothing unless we use terror.’  On February 23, 1918, Pravda published an announcement that the Cheka could ‘see no other method of fighting counter-revolutionaries, spies, speculators, looters, hooligans, saboteurs, and other parasites than their merciless destruction on the spot.’  It was the following day that the first known case of shooting without trial by the Cheka took place.”  Pages 7 and 8.

The First Victims—Anarchists

            The anarchists were the first victims of the communist terror.  Four hundred anarchists were reported sentenced by the Cheka’s 300-man courts in April, 1918, in Moscow alone.

            The anarchists are super-revolutionaries.  They are addicted to violence and terror.  They lack, however, any organization to impose authority once they have achieved their goal of revolutionary destruction.  Consequently they are the allies of the communists during the revolution and the victims of the communists after the revolution.  This lesson was well taught by the Bolsheviks during the first days of their power in Russia, but it is doubtful if it has been learned by the anarchists of today.

            In the early days of Bolshevik power, terror was selective but it escalated and soon became widely practiced.

Execution of the Czar and His Family

            “One particularly well investigated case is, of course, the execution of the czar and his family on July 16, 1918.  It could be argued that the czar and czaritsa had—by Bolshevik standards at least—committed political offenses in their capacity as ruler and adviser.  This was scarcely applicable to the young haemophiliac czarevich not yet 14.  In his case, the argument was that on the death of his father, he would become the true czar for the monarchists.  But even this argument could not apply to the young Grand Duchesses—ages 23, 21, 19, and 17; for under the Romanov law of succession they and their descendants had no right to the throne.  Still less can a case be made for the execution of the czar’s family doctor and the three servants shot at the same time.  Even less, it might be thought, could the royal spaniel be held responsible.

            “This execution was carried out, after careful preparation, by the established Bolshevik authorities using an official Cheka squad, and as such, is instructive about what may be regarded as a comparatively mild example of the methods and attitudes of the time.  It was not accompanied by the sometimes literally obscene brutalities reported elsewhere.  Most of the victims died quickly, though the maid had to be chased round the cellar and bayoneted, and the Czarevich and one of the Grand Duchesses had to be finished off with boots, rifle butts, and bayonets.  All other members of the family on whom the Bolsheviks could lay their hands were similarly executed—sometimes in worse circumstances.  The Grand Duchess Elizabeth, a nun since her husband’s death in 1905, with five other members of the family, including three young boys, were thrown down an abandoned mine shaft and heavy timbers and hand grenades hurled after them.  This all took place at a time when the civil war had barely started, and when the main anti-Bolshevik force on the front concerned was the Czechoslovak Legion, against whom serious allegations of terrorism were never made.  And, as Trotsky later admitted, the killings took place on the express instructions of the Soviet leadership.”  Pages 8 and 9.

Sequel to the Attempted Assassination of Lenin

            “The attempt on Lenin’s life in late August, followed by the assassination of Uritsky, were the occasion for increasing the terror and for extending the power of the Cheka.  First, 500 hostages were executed.  On September 5, 1918, came the famous decree “On the Red Terror.”  Under it the Cheka was to be strengthened by sending a large number of Party members into it; concentration camps were to be set up; anyone in contact with counter-revolutionary organizations was to be shot; and the names and reasons for executions were to be published.  At the same time Latsis explained that under it the prisoner was to be asked ‘to what class he belongs, what is his origin, his education and profession.  It is those questions that should decide the fate of the defendant—therein lies the meaning of red terror.’”  Page 9.

            When some of the more idealistic Bolsheviks protested, the unrestrained power of the Cheka to arrest and execute, Lenin supported the Chekists.

            “He attacked ‘a narrowminded intelligentsia’ in the Party who ‘sob and fuss’ over mistakes made by the Cheka; adding ‘when we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism.’  But he admitted that ‘it is quite understandable that alien elements should attach themselves to the Cheka.’  This early hint that unpleasant characters were getting into the secret police is supported by its own officials, who conceded, moreover, that the work corrupted even the better elements.  One wrote, ‘Work in the Cheka, conducted in an atmosphere of physical coercion, attracts corrupt and outright criminal elements.’”  Pages 9 and 10.

The Civil War—1918-1920

            “The war casualties proper cannot, in the strictest sense, be put into our account of the deaths consciously inflicted by the Bolsheviks—though it may be felt that the seizure of power by a minority group, and its determination to extirpate all opposition, should be considered the main cause of that war.  Even leading Bolsheviks noted, as did 10 peoples commissars, resigning from the government as early as 1917, that the rejection of a coalition government meant ‘government by means of political terror’ while another (Emilian Yaroslavsky) denounced statements by ‘responsible leaders’ that ‘for one of ours we shall kill five opponents,’ as part and parcel of Lenin’s ‘regime of the bayonet and the sabre.’

            “It is also true that battle casualties were light, and the main killings were of prisoners and enemy civilian sympathizers.  In August, 1918, Latsis announced that in the civil war then starting, enemy wounded would be shot.  A Soviet source estimates the total excess mortality in those provinces where statistics were kept as about 7 million between January 1918 and July 1920.  An estimate for the remaining areas should bring this up to about 9 million.  These deaths were largely from typhus and famine—though the great famine of 1921 with its 5 million odd deaths, had not yet come.

            “These casualties might be labeled as resulting from the revolution in a general sense.  But the figures for actual execution (and death in camps and prisons) of the period up till 1924 is of course far lower.  Though official figures are both self-contradictory and admittedly incomplete, it can be deduced that a minimum of 200,000 official executions must have taken place in the period of 1917-23.  This omits two main sources of death.  First, those shot out of hand after the putting down of various ‘rebellions’—245 such risings are officially given for 1918 alone, while 99 are listed in only 20 provinces (constituting about a third of Bolshevik-controlled territory) in 7 months of 1919.  And second, those dying as a result of prison and camp treatment.  Together, these are conservative estimated to have accounted for at least twice as many lives as the executions proper.  If we put forward a total of 500,000 victims for the period, we shall certainly be erring of the side of underestimation.”  Pages 10 and 11.

The Kronstadt Revolt

            “In March 1921 came the crushing by the Communists of the rebellion of their own sailors at Kronstadt.  Among the rebel’s complaints was that the regime had ‘brought the workers, instead of freedom, an ever present fear of being dragged into the torture chambers of the Cheka, which exceeds by many times in its horrors the gendarmerie administration of the Tsarist regime.” Page 11.

Collectivization by Extermination

            “In 1929 the decision was taken to eliminate the richer peasants (kulaks) and to force the remainder into collective farms, where they would be economically and physically under the control of the State.

            “The first attempt, in the early months of 1930, led to hundreds of peasants rising.  Casualties in this phase are not know, but certainly ran into tens of thousands.  But the peasants responded not only ‘with the shotgun,’ but also by slaughtering half Russia’s livestock, and by March, the policy was in ruins, and the attempt was called off.

            “By a far better prepared combination of ruthlessness and economic measures, the almost complete collectivization of the bulk of the country was again attained by the end of 1932.  Resistance was now met by a simple method.  If the peasant had produced only enough for his own subsistence, leaving none for the State, local enforcement officials reversed that procedure.  The last sacks of grain were taken from the barns for export while famine raged.  Butter was sent abroad while the Ukranian infants were dying for lack of milk.

            “The famine can be blamed quite flatly on Stalin.  The crop in 1932 was about 12 percent below the average.  This was far from being famine level.  But procurements of food from the peasantry was up by 44 percent.  The result was, and could not have been other than, largescale starvation.  It is perhaps the only case in history of a purely man-made famine—man-made, not in the sense that it was due to faulty policies, but quite literally, in that the food was there and men took it away.

            “It is also the only major famine whose very existence was ignored or denied by the governmental authorities, and even to a large degree successfully concealed from world opinion.  The process by which this happened is a very unfortunate one, involving political reactions which are still with us to this day.  It was not, of course, possible to make the concealment absolute.  It was widely known in Moscow, and even the low-level government official occasionally spoke of it to a foreigner.  Some foreigners—including Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, Lloyd George’s secretary—even penetrated the amine area and saw for themselves.  But (and this of course applies to the whole of the period’s oppressions) the information was naturally taken up and given widest publicity in the West by those most hostile to the Soviet Union in principle.  By a common—though thoughtless and unfortunate—reaction, leftwing and even moderate circles were able to persuade themselves that the story was untrue or (a much easier view) greatly exaggerated.  The Soviet Government had not admitted it.  Occasionally specially shepherded travelers (for example, Sir John Maynard) had been taken to prepared spots in the area and had generalized from that.  Certain journalists (e.g. Walter Duranty) who were fully aware of the facts and recounted them in private conversation, played them down in order not to offend the Soviet Government and lose their visas and their positions.

            “The Ukranian President Petrovsky told a Western correspondent that millions were dying.  Thirty years later, there was a brief lifting of the curtain in the Soviet press—in the novel ‘People Are Not Angels,’ by Ivan Stadnyuk, who summed up: ‘The men died first, then the children, and finally the women.’

            “A careful examination of all the estimates and all the accounts, seems to show that about 5 million deaths from hunger and from the diseases of hunger is the best estimate.

            “The Mensheviks had already in 1930 quoted a ‘prominent Communist’ as saying that to bring socialism to the villages ‘we must destroy 5 million people.’  The estimate seems to have been correct.  This is on the scale of the losses in the 1921 famine.  Then, however, the authorities concealed nothing, and welcomed the large-scale Western aid program under Herbert Hoover.

            “Of the 5 million odd who perished, more than 3 million were in the Ukraine; Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus and the Middle Volga also suffered particularly heavily.  Even on official figures, the Ukraine’s population had sunk from 31 million to 28 million between 1926 and 1939.  The OGPU figures sent to Stalin seem to have given deaths from starvation alone as 3,300,000 to 3,500,000.

            “Starvation was compounded by terror.

            “Execution also played its part.  Stalin later told Churchill that 10 million ‘kulaks’ had to be dealt with, and that ‘the great bulk’ were ‘wiped out,’ others being transferred to Siberia.  Some 3 million seem to have ended up in the newly expanding labor camp system.  All in all, we can scarcely put the deathroll to famine and deportation at less than 7 million, and it may well have been higher.

Moral Deterioration of Communists

            “Bukharin said, he had seen ‘things that I would not want even my enemies to see.  Yet, 1919, cannot even be compared with what happened between 1930 and 1932.  In 1919, we were fighting for our lives.  We executed people, but we also risked our lives in the process.  In the later period, however, we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenseless men, together with their wives and children.’  But he was even more concerned at the ‘deep changes in the psychological outlook of those Communists who participated in this campaign and, instead of going mad, became professional bureaucrats for whom terror was henceforth a normal method of administration, and obedience to any order from above a high virtue.’”  Pages 12, 13, and 14.  (To be continued.)

COMMUNISM IN CHILE

            The candidate of the communists, Salvador Allende, has now been installed as president of Chile.  He obtained power because of the allegiance of the Chilean people to traditional democratic norms and not because the people of Chile desired Marxist economics and communist dictatorship.  He received a smaller percentage of the popular vote in 1970 than he did in 1964, but because of a split in the anticommunist vote, he received the most votes of any candidate, and the members of the Chilean Congress followed the tradition of electing the candidate with most votes as president.

            Prior to the congressional vote, Allende gave an assurance that he would not change the Chilean system of presidential elections.  Fidel Castro also promised free elections in Cuba.

            The situation in Chile is bleak but not hopeless.  One does not need prophetic gifts to predict that under Allende economic conditions will deteriorate and that the promises he has made to the Chilean people will remain unfulfilled.  Nationalization of industry will not bring abundance to the Chilean people.  If future elections are held, the prospects of his defeat and the repudiation of the Marxist program are overwhelming.

            Whether there will be further democratic elections is the important question.  If Allende is to consolidate revolutionary Marxist power, he must destroy the institutions of the democratic state.  This is taught very clearly by Lenin in his book “The State and the Revolution” which is the world’s most translated book.  It provided the blueprint Fidel Castro followed to establish communist power in Cuba.  We may assume that Allende is giving serious attention to the message of this book.

            To consolidate dictatorial power, Allende must destroy established military power.  This must be followed by the destruction of the courts, the public service, and the election processes.  Once this process is complete, totalitarian power will be established and the people will be enslaved and helpless.  The big question now is whether Allende will be permitted to consummate this process.

“SAINT” ANGELA

            A propaganda hurricane is developing around Communist Angela Davis who is in prison and awaiting trial for murder.  The communists and their allies are cooperating to present her as a saintly, selfless individual who is being victimized by the “fascist” American Government.  Effort will be made to divert attention from the actual charge that she purchased the guns which were used in the holdup and kidnapping of the judge and prosecuting attorney in a California court of law which resulted in the deaths of four people.  By constant repetition, they hope to establish the claim that she is a political prisoner.

            Angela Davis is an ideal subject for such a propaganda campaign.  She is black, young, personable, and intelligent.  She openly acknowledges her membership in the American Communist Party.  The communists have already exploited her and will continue to do so.

KILLING THE POLICE

            The Black Panther Party policy of persuading people to kill policemen is proceeding at full blast.  The October 31, 1970 issue of the Black Panther contains a double-page centerpiece which tells the story of the murder of one black policeman and the wounding of another in Detroit, Michigan on October 24, 1970.  The Black Panther report states:

            “However, two nigger pigs riding in unmarked cars and dressed in street nigger clothes remained in the area.  When they were spotted, again the people began throwing bricks and bottles at them.  One pig was driving across a vacant lot to escape the people, when he was shot in the hand by an unknown person.  At this point the other pig got out of his car with his gun drawn.  Again the unseen assailant fired and the second pig fell dead with a bullet in his head.”

            That killing a policeman is a Black Panther policy is clearly indicated by the following advertisement which appears in the Black Panther, October 31, 1970, page 4:

            “We will not hesitate to either kill of die for our freedom.

            “We have begun to draw pictures that will make people go out and kill pigs.

            “Our Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas has a new book in printing to be released in the near future.  The title is ‘We will not hesitate to either kill or die for our freedom.’  Emory illustrates the essence of revolutionary art, ‘the people’, in pictures as well as gives the Black Panther Party’s position on revolutionary art.”