Criticism of communist party rule

[2] According to the critics, rule by communist parties has often led to totalitarianism, political repression, restrictions of human rights, poor economic performance, and cultural and artistic censorship.

[1][3] Several authors noted gaps between official policies of equality and economic justice and the reality of the emergence of a new class in communist countries which thrived at the expense of the remaining population.

[citation needed] Unlike the slow market reforms in China and Vietnam where communist rule continues, the abrupt end to central planning was followed by a depression in many of the states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe which chose to adopt the so-called economic shock therapy.

[66] Some ecological problems continue unabated after the fall of the Soviet Union and are still major issues today, which has prompted supporters of former ruling Communist parties to accuse their opponents of holding a double standard.

In the 1990s, the economic crisis known as the Special Period coupled with the United States' tightening of the embargo led to desperate attempts to leave the island on balsas (rafts, tires and makeshift vessels).

"[80] Authors such as Daniel Goldhagen,[81] John Gray,[82] Richard Pipes[83] and Rudolph Rummel[84][85] consider the ideology of communism to be a significant, or at least partial, causative factor in the events under communist party rule.

[90] According to Jacques Sémelin, "communist systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean political imaginaire.

"[91] Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley write that, especially in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia, a fanatical certainty that socialism could be made to work motivated communist leaders in "the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies, who could be suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong.

What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's instruments of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and the family.

"[96] According to Valentino, such strategies were so violent because they economically dispossess large numbers of people, commenting: "Social transformations of this speed and magnitude have been associated with mass killing for two primary reasons.

The second reason that communist regimes bent on the radical transformation of society have been linked to mass killing is that the revolutionary changes they have pursued have clashed inexorably with the fundamental interests of large segments of their populations.

The attack on and restoration of Moscow's control of countries that had been under the rule of the tsarist empire, but briefly formed newly independent states in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War (including Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan), have been condemned as examples of Soviet imperialism.

[101] Professor Nam Kyu Kim writes that exclusionary ideologies are critical to explaining mass killing, but the organizational capabilities and individual characteristics of revolutionary leaders, including their attitudes towards risk and violence, are also important.

[104] Historian Helen Rappaport describes Nikolay Yezhov, the bureaucrat in charge of the NKVD during the Great Purge, as a physically diminutive figure of "limited intelligence" and "narrow political understanding.

Insecure, despite having established a dictatorship over the party and country, hostile and defensive when confronted with criticism of the excesses of collectivization and the sacrifices required by high-tempo industrialization, and deeply suspicious that past, present, and even yet unknown future opponents were plotting against him, Stalin began to act as a person beleaguered.

[109] Jasper Becker, author of Hungry Ghosts, claims that if the death tolls from the famines caused by communist regimes in China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, North Korea, Ethiopia and Mozambique are added together, the figure could be close to 90 million.

Explanations have been offered for the discrepancies in the number of estimated victims of communist regimes:[34][35][36][37][38][39] According to historian J. Arch Getty, over half of the 100 million deaths which are attributed to communism were due to famines.

Mishra cites Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's research demonstrating that democratic India suffered more excess mortality from starvation and disease in the second half of the 20th century than China did.

Although political repression in the Soviet Union was far more extensive and severe in its methods under Stalin's rule than in any other period, authors such as Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes and works such as the Black Book of Communism argue that a reign of terror began within Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin immediately after the October Revolution, and continued by the Red Army and the Cheka over the country during the Russian Civil War.

It included summary executions of hundreds of thousands of "class enemies" by Cheka; the development of the system of labor camps, which would later lay the foundation for the Gulags; and a policy of food requisitioning during the civil war, which was partially responsible for a famine causing three to ten million deaths.

Ex-communist dissident Milovan Đilas, among others, focused on the relationship between political repression and the rise of a powerful new class of party bureaucrats, called the nomenklatura, that had emerged under communist rule and exploited the rest of the population.

[155] Alexander Yakovlev, architect of perestroika and glasnost and later head of the Presidential Commission for the Victims of Political Repression, elaborates on this point, stating: "The truth is that in punitive operations Stalin did not think up anything that was not there under Lenin: executions, hostage taking, concentration camps, and all the rest.

"[159] Author Eric D. Weitz says that events such as mass killing in communist states are a natural consequence of the failure of the rule of law, seen commonly during periods of social upheaval in the 20th century.

Horowitz cited the government newspaper Izvestia,[failed verification] noting a typical working-class family of four was forced to live for eight years in a single eight by eight foot room before marginally better accommodation became available.

[175] Amartya Sen's own analysis of international comparisons of life expectancy found that several communist countries made significant gains and commented "one thought that is bound to occur is that communism is good for poverty removal".

Anarchists (who had differed from Marx and his followers since the split in the First International), many of the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Marxist Mensheviks supported the overthrow of the tsar, but vigorously opposed the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

He emphasized how much of agrarian production depended on the small privately owned plots (he was writing in 1950) and predicted quite accurately the rates at which the Soviet Union would start importing wheat after Russia had been such a large exporter from the 1880s to 1914.

He felt that the Stalinist regimes that came into existence after 1945 were just extending the bourgeois revolution, i.e. the expropriation of the Prussian Junker class by the Red Army through their agrarian policies and through the development of the productive forces.

"[10] Some academics and writers argue that anti-communist narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and censorship in states under communist party rule and drawn comparisons with what they see as atrocities that were perpetrated by capitalist countries, particularly during the Cold War.

[26] Parenti argues that communist states experienced greater economic development than they would have otherwise, or that their leaders were forced to take harsh measures to defend their countries against the Western Bloc during the Cold War.