"[3] Protection of political groups was eliminated from the United Nations resolution after a second vote because many states, including Stalin's Soviet Union,[5] anticipated that clause to apply unneeded limitations to their right to suppress internal disturbances.
[9] Killings by the Khmer Rouge in Democratic Kampuchea have been labeled genocide or autogenocide, and the deaths under Leninism and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and Maoism in Communist China have been controversially investigated as possible cases; the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward have been controversially "depicted as instances of mass killing underpinned by genocidal intent.
"[10] Politicide is the deliberate physical destruction or elimination of a group whose members oppose a regime or share the main characteristic of belonging to a political movement.
"[12] Harff studies genocide and politicide, sometimes shortened as geno-politicide, in order to include the killing of political, economic, ethnic and cultural groups.
[13] Manus Midlarsky uses politicide to describe an arc of large-scale killing from the western parts of the Soviet Union to China and Cambodia.