Comments by "ScorpioBornIn69" (@ScorpioBornIn69) on "Why Isn't Communism as Hated as Nazism? | 5 Minute Video" video.
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@illuminate4622 Red Terror
Main articles: Decossackization, Execution of the Romanov family, Lenin's Hanging Order, Red Terror, and Tambov Rebellion
The Red Terror was a period of political repression and executions carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. During this period, the political police (the Cheka) conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people."[78][79][80][81][82] Many victims were "bourgeois hostages" rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[83] Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion of Baltic Fleet sailors and the Tambov Rebellion of Russian peasants. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions."[84] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[85][86]
According to Nicolas Werth, the policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory."[87] In the early months of 1919, perhaps 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[88][89] and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[90] According to historian Michael Kort: "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000."[91]
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@illuminate4622 Joseph Stalin
See also: Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin
Estimates of the number of deaths which were brought about by Stalin's rule are hotly debated by scholars in the fields of Soviet and Communist studies.[92][93] Prior to the collapse of the USSR and the archival revelations which followed it, some historians estimated that the number of people who were killed by Stalin's regime was 20 million or higher.[75][94][95] Michael Parenti writes that estimates on the Stalinist death toll vary widely in part because such estimates are based on "anecdotes" in absence of reliable evidence and "speculations by writers who never reveal how they arrive at such figures".[96]
After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives became available, containing official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths which occurred during kulak forced resettlement—for a total of about 3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[bh] However, official Soviet documentation of Gulag deaths is widely considered inadequate. Golfo Alexopoulos, Anne Applebaum, Oleg Khlevniuk and Michael Ellman write that the government frequently released prisoners on the edge of death in order to avoid officially counting them.[97][98] A 1993 study of archival data by J. Arch Getty et al. showed that a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.[99] Subsequently, Steven Rosefielde asserted that this number has to be augmented by 19.4 percent in light of more complete archival evidence to 1,258,537, with the best estimate of Gulag deaths being 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953 when excess mortality is taken into account.[100] Alexopolous estimates a much higher total of at least 6 million dying in the Gulag or shortly after release.[101] Jeffrey Hardy has criticized Alexopoulos for basing her assertions primarily on indirect and misinterpreted evidence[102] and Dan Healey has called her work a "challenge to the emergent scholarly consensus".[bi]
According to historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Stalin's regime can be charged with causing the "purposive deaths" of about a million people.[103] Wheatcroft excludes all famine deaths as "purposive deaths" and claims those that do qualify fit more closely the category of "execution" rather than "murder".[103] Others posit that some of the actions of Stalin's regime, not only those during the Holodomor, but also dekulakization and targeted campaigns against particular ethnic groups, can be considered as genocide[104][105] at least in its loose definition.[106] Modern data for the whole of Stalin's rule was summarized by Timothy Snyder, who concluded that Stalinism caused six million direct deaths and nine million in total, including the deaths from deportation, hunger and Gulag deaths.[bj] Michael Ellman attributes roughly 3 million deaths to the Stalinist regime, excluding excess mortality from famine, disease and war.[107] Several present scholars, among them Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore, Soviet/Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, and the director of Yale's "Annals of Communism" series Jonathan Brent, still put the death toll from Stalin at about 20 million.[bk][bl][bm][bn][bo]
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@illuminate4622 Great Purge
Main article: Great Purge
See also: Mass graves from Soviet mass executions, Mass operations of the NKVD, and Stalinist repressions in Mongolia
Mass graves dating from 1937–1938 opened up and hundreds of bodies exhumed for identification by family members[135]
Stalin's attempts to solidify his position as leader of the Soviet Union led to an escalation of detentions and executions, climaxing in 1937–1938 (a period sometimes referred to as the Yezhovshchina, or Yezhov era) and continuing until Stalin's death in 1953. Around 700,000 of these were executed by a gunshot to the back of the head.[136] Others perished from beatings and torture while in "investigative custody"[137] and in the Gulag due to starvation, disease, exposure and overwork.[br]
Arrests were typically made citing counter-revolutionary laws, which included failure to report treasonous actions and in an amendment added in 1937 failing to fulfill one's appointed duties. In the cases investigated by the State Security Department of the NKVD from October 1936 to November 1938, at least 1,710,000 people were arrested and 724,000 people executed.[138] Modern historical studies estimate a total number of repression deaths during 1937–1938 as 950,000–1,200,000. These figures take into account the incompleteness of official archival data and include both execution deaths and Gulag deaths during that period.[br] Former "kulaks" and their families made up the majority of victims, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed.[139]
The NKVD conducted a series of "national operations" which targeted some ethnic groups.[140] A total of 350,000 were arrested and 247,157 were executed.[141] Of these, the Polish operation which targeted the members of Polska Organizacja Wojskowa appears to have been the largest, with 140,000 arrests and 111,000 executions.[140] Although these operations might well constitute genocide as defined by the UN convention,[140] or "a mini-genocide" according to Simon Sebag Montefiore,[141] there is as yet no authoritative ruling on the legal characterization of these events.[106]
Citing church documents, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev has estimated that over 100,000 priests, monks and nuns were executed during this time.[142][143] Regarding the persecution of clergy, Michael Ellman has stated that "the 1937–38 terror against the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and of other religions (Binner & Junge 2004) might also qualify as genocide."[144]
In the summer and autumn of 1937, Stalin sent NKVD agents to the Mongolian People's Republic and engineered a Mongolian Great Terror[145] in which some 22,000[146] or 35,000[147] people were executed. Around 18,000 victims were Buddhist lamas.[146]
In Belarus, mass graves for several thousand civilians killed by the NKVD between 1937 and 1941 were discovered in 1988 at Kurapaty.[148]
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@illuminate4622 Tibet
Main article: History of Tibet (1950–present)
According to Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism, the Chinese communists carried out a cultural genocide against the Tibetans. Margolin states that the killings were proportionally larger in Tibet than they were in China proper and "one can legitimately speak of genocidal massacres because of the numbers that were involved."[173] According to the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, "Tibetans were not only shot, but they were also beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded."[173] Adam Jones, a scholar who specializes in genocide, notes that after the 1959 Tibetan uprising the Chinese authorized struggle sessions against reactionaries, during which "communist cadres denounced, tortured, and frequently executed enemies of the people." These sessions resulted in 92,000 deaths out of a total population of about 6 million. These deaths, Jones stressed, may not only be seen as a genocide, but they may also be seen as an "eliticide", meaning "targeting the better educated and leadership oriented elements among the Tibetan population."[174] Patrick French, the former director of the Free Tibet Campaign in London, writes that the Free Tibet Campaign and other groups have claimed that a total of 1.2 million Tibetans were killed by the Chinese since 1950 but after examining archives in Dharamsala, he found "no evidence to support that figure."[175] French states that a reliable alternative number is unlikely to be known, but he estimates that as many as half a million Tibetans died "as a 'direct result' of the policies of the People's Republic of China" by using historian Warren Smith's estimate of 200,000 people who are missing from population statistics in the Tibet Autonomous Region and extending that rate to the borderland regions.[176]
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Tibet
Main article: History of Tibet (1950–present)
According to Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism, the Chinese communists carried out a cultural genocide against the Tibetans. Margolin states that the killings were proportionally larger in Tibet than they were in China proper and "one can legitimately speak of genocidal massacres because of the numbers that were involved."[173] According to the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, "Tibetans were not only shot, but they were also beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded."[173] Adam Jones, a scholar who specializes in genocide, notes that after the 1959 Tibetan uprising the Chinese authorized struggle sessions against reactionaries, during which "communist cadres denounced, tortured, and frequently executed enemies of the people." These sessions resulted in 92,000 deaths out of a total population of about 6 million. These deaths, Jones stressed, may not only be seen as a genocide, but they may also be seen as an "eliticide", meaning "targeting the better educated and leadership oriented elements among the Tibetan population."[174] Patrick French, the former director of the Free Tibet Campaign in London, writes that the Free Tibet Campaign and other groups have claimed that a total of 1.2 million Tibetans were killed by the Chinese since 1950 but after examining archives in Dharamsala, he found "no evidence to support that figure."[175] French states that a reliable alternative number is unlikely to be known, but he estimates that as many as half a million Tibetans died "as a 'direct result' of the policies of the People's Republic of China" by using historian Warren Smith's estimate of 200,000 people who are missing from population statistics in the Tibet Autonomous Region and extending that rate to the borderland regions.[176]
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Proposed causes
Ideology
Klas-Göran Karlsson writes: "Ideologies are systems of ideas, which cannot commit crimes independently. However, individuals, collectives and states that have defined themselves as communist have committed crimes in the name of communist ideology, or without naming communism as the direct source of motivation for their crimes."[47] Scholars such as Rudolph Rummel, Daniel Goldhagen,[48] Richard Pipes[49] and John Gray[50] consider the ideology of communism to be a significant causative factor in mass killings.[41][51] The Black Book of Communism claims an association between communism and criminality, stating: "Communist regimes [...] turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government"[52] while adding that this criminality lies at the level of ideology rather than state practice.[53]
The last issue of Karl Marx's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung from May 19, 1849, printed in red ink
Professor Mark Bradley writes that communist theory and practice has often been in tension with human rights and most communist states followed the lead of Karl Marx in rejecting "Enlightenment-era inalienable individual political and civil rights" in favor of "collective economic and social rights."[z] Christopher J. Finlay has argued that Marxism legitimates violence without any clear limiting principle because it rejects moral and ethical norms as constructs of the dominant class and "states that it would be conceivable for revolutionaries to commit atrocious crimes in bringing about a socialist system, with the belief that their crimes will be retroactively absolved by the new system of ethics put in place by the proletariat."[ao] Rustam Singh notes that Karl Marx had alluded to the possibility of peaceful revolution, but after the failed Revolutions of 1848 emphasized the need for violent revolution and "revolutionary terror".[ap]
Literary historian George Watson cited an 1849 article written by Friedrich Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" and published in Marx's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung, stating that the writings of Engels and others show that "the Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history."[54][aq] Watson's claims have been criticized by Robert Grant for "dubious" evidence, arguing that "what Marx and Engels are calling for is [...] at the very least a kind of cultural genocide; but it is not obvious, at least from Watson's citations, that actual mass killing, rather than (to use their phraseology) mere 'absorption' or 'assimilation', is in question."[55] Talking about Engels' 1849 article, historian Andrzej Walicki states: "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide."[56] Jean-François Revel writes that Joseph Stalin recommended study of the 1849 Engels article in his 1924 book On Lenin and Leninism.[ar]
According to Rummel, the killings committed by communist regimes can best be explained as the result of the marriage between absolute power and the absolutist ideology of Marxism.[57] Rummel states that "communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and its chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusades against nonbelievers. 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."[58] He writes that the Marxists saw the construction of their utopia as "though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And, thus, this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths."[57]
Benjamin Valentino writes that mass killing strategies are chosen by communists to economically dispossess large numbers of people,[59][as][k] arguing as such: "Social transformations of this speed and magnitude have been associated with mass killing for two primary reasons. First, the massive social dislocations produced by such changes have often led to economic collapse, epidemics, and, most important, widespread famines. [...] 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. Few people have proved willing to accept such far-reaching sacrifices without intense levels of coercion."[60] 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."[at]
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. Furthermore, if events did not work out as they were supposed to, then that was because class enemies, foreign spies and saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no circumstances could it be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that meant capitulation to the forces of reaction."[au] Michael Mann writes that communist party members were "ideologically driven, believing that in order to create a new socialist society, they must lead in socialist zeal. Killings were often popular, the rank-and-file as keen to exceed killing quotas as production quotas."[av] According to Vladimir Tismăneanu, "the Communist project, in such countries as the USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered."[aw]
Alex Bellamy writes that "communism's ideology of selective extermination" of target groups was first developed and applied by Joseph Stalin but that "each of the communist regimes that massacred large numbers of civilians during the Cold War developed their own distinctive account".[ax] Steven T. Katz states that distinctions based on class and nationality, stigmatized and stereotyped in various ways, created an "otherness" for victims of communist rule that was important for legitimating oppression and death.[ay] Martin Shaw writes that "nationalist ideas were at the heart of many mass killings by Communist states", beginning with Stalin's "new nationalist doctrine of 'socialism in one country'", and killing by revolutionary movements in the Third World was done in the name of national liberation.[az]
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Political system
Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky (centre) reading the 1937 indictment against Karl Radek during the second Moscow Trial
Anne Applebaum asserts that "without exception, the Leninist belief in the one-party state was and is characteristic of every communist regime" and "the Bolshevik use of violence was repeated in every communist revolution." Phrases said by Vladimir Lenin and Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky were deployed all over the world. She notes that as late as 1976 Mengistu Haile Mariam unleashed a Red Terror in Ethiopia.[61] Said Lenin to his colleagues in the Bolshevik government: "If we are not ready to shoot a saboteur and White Guardist, what sort of revolution is that?"[62]
Robert Conquest stressed that Stalin's purges were not contrary to the principles of Leninism, but rather a natural consequence of the system established by Lenin, who personally ordered the killing of local groups of class enemy hostages.[63] 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."[64] Historian Robert Gellately concurs, stating: "To put it another way, Stalin initiated very little that Lenin had not already introduced or previewed."[65]
Stephen Hicks of Rockford College ascribes the violence characteristic of 20th-century socialist rule to these collectivist regimes' abandonment of protections of civil rights and rejection of the values of civil society. Hicks writes that whereas "in practice every liberal capitalist country has a solid record for being humane, for by and large respecting rights and freedoms, and for making it possible for people to put together fruitful and meaningful lives", in socialism "practice has time and again proved itself more brutal than the worst dictatorships prior to the twentieth century. Each socialist regime has collapsed into dictatorship and begun killing people on a huge scale."[66]
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Red Terror
Main articles: Decossackization, Execution of the Romanov family, Lenin's Hanging Order, Red Terror, and Tambov Rebellion
The Red Terror was a period of political repression and executions carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. During this period, the political police (the Cheka) conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people."[78][79][80][81][82] Many victims were "bourgeois hostages" rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[83] Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion of Baltic Fleet sailors and the Tambov Rebellion of Russian peasants. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions."[84] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[85][86]
According to Nicolas Werth, the policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory."[87] In the early months of 1919, perhaps 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[88][89] and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[90] According to historian Michael Kort: "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000."[91]
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Joseph Stalin
See also: Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin
Estimates of the number of deaths which were brought about by Stalin's rule are hotly debated by scholars in the fields of Soviet and Communist studies.[92][93] Prior to the collapse of the USSR and the archival revelations which followed it, some historians estimated that the number of people who were killed by Stalin's regime was 20 million or higher.[75][94][95] Michael Parenti writes that estimates on the Stalinist death toll vary widely in part because such estimates are based on "anecdotes" in absence of reliable evidence and "speculations by writers who never reveal how they arrive at such figures".[96]
After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives became available, containing official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths which occurred during kulak forced resettlement—for a total of about 3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[bh] However, official Soviet documentation of Gulag deaths is widely considered inadequate. Golfo Alexopoulos, Anne Applebaum, Oleg Khlevniuk and Michael Ellman write that the government frequently released prisoners on the edge of death in order to avoid officially counting them.[97][98] A 1993 study of archival data by J. Arch Getty et al. showed that a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.[99] Subsequently, Steven Rosefielde asserted that this number has to be augmented by 19.4 percent in light of more complete archival evidence to 1,258,537, with the best estimate of Gulag deaths being 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953 when excess mortality is taken into account.[100] Alexopolous estimates a much higher total of at least 6 million dying in the Gulag or shortly after release.[101] Jeffrey Hardy has criticized Alexopoulos for basing her assertions primarily on indirect and misinterpreted evidence[102] and Dan Healey has called her work a "challenge to the emergent scholarly consensus".[bi]
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Soviet famine of 1932–1933
Main articles: Dekulakization, Holodomor, Holodomor genocide question, and Soviet famine of 1932–33
Within the Soviet Union, forced changes in agricultural policies (collectivization), confiscations of grain and droughts caused the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region, and Kazakhstan.[120][121][122] The famine was most severe in the Ukrainian SSR, where it is often referenced as the Holodomor. A significant portion of the famine victims (3.3 to 7.5 million) were Ukrainians.[123][124][125] Another part of the famine was known as Kazakh catastrophe, when more than 1.3 million ethnic Kazakhs (about 38% of the population) died.[126][127] Many scholars say that the Stalinist policies that caused the famine may have been designed as an attack on the rise of Ukrainian nationalism[128] and thus may fall under the legal definition of genocide.[120][129][130][131]
The famine was officially recognized as genocide by the Ukraine and other governments.[132][bq] In a draft resolution, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe declared the famine was caused by the "cruel and deliberate actions and policies of the Soviet regime" and was responsible for the deaths of "millions of innocent people" in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Russia. Relative to its population, Kazakhstan is believed to have been the most adversely affected.[133] Regarding the Kazakh catastrophe, Michael Ellman states that it "seems to be an example of ‘negligent genocide’ which falls outside the scope of the UN Convention of genocide."[134]
Great Purge
Main article: Great Purge
See also: Mass graves from Soviet mass executions, Mass operations of the NKVD, and Stalinist repressions in Mongolia
Mass graves dating from 1937–1938 opened up and hundreds of bodies exhumed for identification by family members[135]
Stalin's attempts to solidify his position as leader of the Soviet Union led to an escalation of detentions and executions, climaxing in 1937–1938 (a period sometimes referred to as the Yezhovshchina, or Yezhov era) and continuing until Stalin's death in 1953. Around 700,000 of these were executed by a gunshot to the back of the head.[136] Others perished from beatings and torture while in "investigative custody"[137] and in the Gulag due to starvation, disease, exposure and overwork.[br]
Arrests were typically made citing counter-revolutionary laws, which included failure to report treasonous actions and in an amendment added in 1937 failing to fulfill one's appointed duties. In the cases investigated by the State Security Department of the NKVD from October 1936 to November 1938, at least 1,710,000 people were arrested and 724,000 people executed.[138] Modern historical studies estimate a total number of repression deaths during 1937–1938 as 950,000–1,200,000. These figures take into account the incompleteness of official archival data and include both execution deaths and Gulag deaths during that period.[br] Former "kulaks" and their families made up the majority of victims, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed.[139]
The NKVD conducted a series of "national operations" which targeted some ethnic groups.[140] A total of 350,000 were arrested and 247,157 were executed.[141] Of these, the Polish operation which targeted the members of Polska Organizacja Wojskowa appears to have been the largest, with 140,000 arrests and 111,000 executions.[140] Although these operations might well constitute genocide as defined by the UN convention,[140] or "a mini-genocide" according to Simon Sebag Montefiore,[141] there is as yet no authoritative ruling on the legal characterization of these events.[106]
Citing church documents, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev has estimated that over 100,000 priests, monks and nuns were executed during this time.[142][143] Regarding the persecution of clergy, Michael Ellman has stated that "the 1937–38 terror against the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and of other religions (Binner & Junge 2004) might also qualify as genocide."[144]
In the summer and autumn of 1937, Stalin sent NKVD agents to the Mongolian People's Republic and engineered a Mongolian Great Terror[145] in which some 22,000[146] or 35,000[147] people were executed. Around 18,000 victims were Buddhist lamas.[146]
In Belarus, mass graves for several thousand civilians killed by the NKVD between 1937 and 1941 were discovered in 1988 at Kurapaty.[148]
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Tibet
Main article: History of Tibet (1950–present)
According to Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism, the Chinese communists carried out a cultural genocide against the Tibetans. Margolin states that the killings were proportionally larger in Tibet than they were in China proper and "one can legitimately speak of genocidal massacres because of the numbers that were involved."[173] According to the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, "Tibetans were not only shot, but they were also beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded."[173] Adam Jones, a scholar who specializes in genocide, notes that after the 1959 Tibetan uprising the Chinese authorized struggle sessions against reactionaries, during which "communist cadres denounced, tortured, and frequently executed enemies of the people." These sessions resulted in 92,000 deaths out of a total population of about 6 million. These deaths, Jones stressed, may not only be seen as a genocide, but they may also be seen as an "eliticide", meaning "targeting the better educated and leadership oriented elements among the Tibetan population."[174] Patrick French, the former director of the Free Tibet Campaign in London, writes that the Free Tibet Campaign and other groups have claimed that a total of 1.2 million Tibetans were killed by the Chinese since 1950 but after examining archives in Dharamsala, he found "no evidence to support that figure."[175] French states that a reliable alternative number is unlikely to be known, but he estimates that as many as half a million Tibetans died "as a 'direct result' of the policies of the People's Republic of China" by using historian Warren Smith's estimate of 200,000 people who are missing from population statistics in the Tibet Autonomous Region and extending that rate to the borderland regions.[176]
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