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Grandmother, What Big Teeth You Have!
Part 1: Identity Politics and the Russian Revolution
1. Introduction
As of this writing, the Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. The Oxford definition doesn't mention radical progressivism, censorship, collective punishment, or selective enforcement of criminal laws -- or, indeed, anything actually associated with wokeness, as opposed to non-wokeness, in the sense that the word is actually used. I submit this is because the dictionary's authors are woke (or else pretending to be, in order to avoid censorship and collective punishment).
To be woke, by the woke definition of wokeness, is to be a noble thing indeed: a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the ethos of a fairy tale hero like Robin Hood, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the big bad wolf and saves Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old grandma. Not coincidentally, it has also been the stated agenda of every mass murdering tyrant in modern history.
The propaganda of Soviet communism was rife with woke sounding platitudes. For example,
The problem is that Soviet communism did not really accomplish any of those things. What it did accomplish was to murder some 20 million people [source], and to terrorize hundreds of millions more over multiple generations. The people of the Russian empire, including many of the soon-to-be victims of Soviet terror, for the most part did not see this coming. As Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote,
Now I invite you to consider the scenes Solzhenitsyn describes above, imagine them as vividly as you can, and multiply by 20 million. Next, imagine the continuous, lifelong fear that you could be next no matter what you do, and that you will be next if you say publicly certain things that you know to be true; multiply that by 300 million (over three generations), and add to the total. If you can get your head around that quantity of human suffering and loss, then you have grasped the magnitude of the evil of Soviet Communism.
As merciless and malevolent as Soviet communism was, how could the Russian people, especially the intelligentsia, have failed to apprehend its true nature until it was too late? First, the Bolshevik revolutionaries didn't say they were gathering strength to mount a campaign of murder and oppression; quite the opposite! Who could be against their stated agenda of fighting tyranny no matter what class of the people it affects? or self-determination for historically marginalized peoples? or abolishing oppression of some by others? One of the lessons of the Russian Revolution -- along with the histories of Naziism and of Chinese communism which followed later in the same century -- is that when the leaders of a political movement expound the lofty mission of defending the downtrodden and looking out for the little guy, that may not be what they are actually up to. Often, indeed, they are up to the very opposite, and it is not always easy to tell.
On the other hand, it is not outright impossible to tell. Tyrannical movements may wear sheep's clothing, but they cannot hide their fangs. Hallmarks of tyranny, which are often visible even in the early stages of tyrannical movements, include identity politics, censorship, thuggery, and authoritarianism. Soviet communism exhibited these hallmarks from its beginnings, as did the Naziism in Germany and communism in China. This essay will discuss the visible role of identity politics in the early stages of the communist movement in Russia.
2. Identity Politics in Soviet Russia
The chief intellectual and political leader of the Russian communist revolution was a one Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known today as Vladimir Lenin. Like the thinker Karl Marx before him, the doer Lenin often spoke in terms of "class enemies": not individuals who had exploited other individuals, but kinds of people who had historically exploited other kinds of people. For example, in 1905, closely following the fashion of Marx, Lenin wrote:
For Lenin and the Bolshevik party he led, the exploiting class, namely the bourgeoisie, consisted of (1) the aristocracy, (2) kulaks (farmers who owned at least 8 acres of land), (3) industrialists, and (4) ideological enemies -- meaning basically any white-collar worker who was not a communist. Anyone denounced as falling into one of these four categories would eventually be marked for persecution and often death in the USSR, regardless of their personal history as an alleged exploiter.
It is true that working class Russians of Lenin's time often lived in grinding poverty, and that many aristocrats and industrialists enriched themselves at the expense of that working class, and that these same aristocrats and industrialists often exhibited depraved indifference to the wellbeing of their fellow men. At the same time, it is also true that not all landowners and industrialists were equally exploitative, and that some dealt more honestly and charitably with their fellow men than most workers would have done in the same shoes. Moreover, it is also true, especially of the kulaks (successful peasant farmers), that many earned their way, partly or wholly, into their positions of relative wealth by their own diligence and foresight. But the communist picture of the world washes over the whole story of individual difference in merit, conduct, or culpability. Lenin's narrative of class struggle conveniently drew a circle around everyone who owned land or other valuables, labeling them as "parasites" and "class exploiters". This in turn licensed the indiscriminate looting and confiscation of those valuables -- first by rioting thugs and later by the communist government -- not only with a clear conscience, but with a pretext of righteous indignation. So one signal that was missed by the Russian intelligentsia was this: when an ideology labels a group of people wholesale as historical class exploiters -- be it the Jews, the Tootsies, the bourgeoisie, straight white men, or any other group -- this telegraphs a predatory intent toward that group, which may remain largely hidden unless and until the predators gather enough strength to act on it.
In 1916, just before coming to power, Lenin's tone was confrontational, but not as overtly malicious as it would later become. On the eve of his successful coup d'etat, Lenin wrote that violence would probably be necessary to bring about the revolution, but that it might not, and that in some sense he hoped it would not:
In hindsight the last clause (violence is alien to our ideals) was a complete lie. Within two months of assuming to power, Lenin was taking a far more menacing tone:
We now know that Lenin's talk of war and death was not just talk. After seizing control of the government, the Bolsheviks instituted the Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police. The immediate business of the Cheka was to carry out the Red Terror, which would take the lives of tens of thousands of allegedly "bourgeois" Russian civilians. This terror campaign was consciously named and patterned after the infamous Reign of Terror that had followed the French Revolution in the late 18'th century.
As important as the extermination (Lenin's word) of class enemies, another job of the Cheka was to systematically confiscate the belongings of all "enemies of the people" -- where an enemy of the people, again, was anyone with enough property to be worth stealing. There were some obstacles to achieving this objective: gold, jewels, and works of art, and other valuables could be carefully hidden, and it often were. Indeed, the stories of men, women, and children desperately hiding themselves and anything of owned of value is one of the most poignant chapters in the story of the revolution. But the Cheka soon found a solution to that problem, which became part of their standard playbook: (1) kidnap a member of the bourgeois offender's family, and then (2) collect whatever payment the family could come up with, or kill the captive, or both. Thousands of the deaths in the Red Terror were the results of this scheme.
Martin Latsis, one of the men appointed to oversee the Cheka, wrote explicitly of the role of identity politics in the Red Terror:
Publicly, Lenin stated that Latsis's methods were excessive and that he talked too much about collective punishment -- but in hindsignt it seems that Lenin simply didn't want the quiet part said out loud. Lenin never removed Latsis from his position -- and Latsis's views, as reflected in the quotation above, essentially governed the tactics of the Cheka under Lenin's command. The Red Terror was the first modern experiment in social justice -- carried out under the same pretext embraced by the contemporary social justice movement (historical class exploitation), and with indiscriminate cruelty that was scarcely hinted at before the fact.
Um.
-Bertrand Barère (translated), September 1793
-Maximilien Robespierre (translated), February 1794
The term "Terror" as a description of the period (note that in French it's simply called "the Terror") does seem to have descended from these and other invocations by the Terror's architects, even if it wasn't the official name at the time.
Good point. Thanks. Edit made.
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This is also where the term "terrorism" originated, even though it has shifted from its original meaning of state-driven activities to that of non-state actors.
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Great post. I have a couple of quibbles:
Describing the approach the communist leaders adopted towards their enemies as "identity politics". As I and many others use the term, "identity politics" refers to politics based on immutable identity characteristics (race, sex, caste, ethnicity etc.). It appears that (with the possible exception of the aristocracy, depending on how hereditary privileges worked at the time), none of the groups targeted by the communist regime meet this description: kulaks can sell their land and immediately become non-kulaks, industrialists can sell their factories. By contrast, even non-practising Jews were targeted for extermination by the Nazis; nothing a Tutsi does can make him any less of a Tutsi.
Describing the Reign of Terror as a "pogrom". I've only ever seen this term used to describe a systemic mass killing of Jews. I understand that you're using it figuratively, but it seems ripe for misinterpretation.
The communists considered "kulak", "industrialist", and "capitalist" to be immutable characteristics. Their whole ideology was built on the idea that social conditions shaped individuals immutably. that was the whole point: to create a system which made immutably-good people, which would then self-perpetuate. New Soviet Man.
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Thanks for the feedback.
I am surprised you didn't cite a dictionary in your semantic "quibbles". According to Webster's online dictionary, for example,
and per dictionary.com:
In light of that, I left in the reference to "identity politics", but changed "pogrom" to "campaign of political violence" to avoid the suggestion (though not the strict denotation) of a pogrom specifically against Jews.
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This doesn't really hold within the Soviet system.
First, birth-class was not so easily washed away for many. It was probably true that a lower-class Kulak could slip into the category of Laborer easily enough by divesting himself of his goods, but he would not have the option of selling them for cash, he would need to donate them or otherwise expropriate himself while carefully avoiding accumulating anything.
Second, the Soviet system did not entirely allow people to renounce their prior statements. If you were once a Capitalist, and made any public statements to that effect, it was difficult if not impossible to "convert." You might succeed, but you might fail, you would never be truly safe.
Consider the Duc D'Egalite:
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I would too hesitate in calling it "identity politics" (feels intuitively wrong), but I would not say the rest. In the Soviet system the circumstances of your birth were not so easily washed away. One might become a "reformed" ex-noble or ex-bourgeois who is a true believer in the promise of Communism, yet somehow these people always tended to be the first ones swept up in any new or recurring wave of paranoia. There were also in practice discriminatory measures applied against people who had "class traitor" backgrounds, even multiple generations past.
Also the Soviet state effected very real ethnic discrimination, either purposefully or via other less deliberate means. Ethnic minorities were perpetual sources of paranoia and distrust; in the lead-up to WWII and during for example there were a number of purges, forced displacements, mass imprisonments, killings, etc. that might not qualify as genocide but come very very close (and morally deserve little distinction). The Holodomor is the most famous but there are probably some you've never even heard of like the Polish Operation or the deportation of Tatars. These are just some of the more notable ones, there was a whole history of "population transfers" which sounds like a sort of benign planning thing but in reality was often a very brutal form of ethnic violence.
And this is without getting into the more passive bigotry within the Soviet system of preferences towards certain groups over others with respect to everything from university spots to food allocation. Systemic racism is kind of a big deal when the system is a totalitarian one that controls almost every aspect of your life.
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Not all, but some, including large numbers of Red Army soldiers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history_in_the_Soviet_Union#LGBT_history_under_Stalin:_1933%E2%80%931953
Never underestimate the capacity of communist regimes to target a wide range of people.
Thanks, I should have said "none of the groups targeted by the communist regime and specifically listed in the OP".
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There are some possible interpretations of this paragraph:
That being said, I think your overall point is not wrong. Left wing ideologies could be classified on a splintered-dogmatic axis. The splintered left might agree on hating fascism and strongly disliking capitalism, but have a multitude of opinions on what kind (if any) of state they want, if feminism was a distraction from the class struggle or an essential problem to be solved first and so on. The central example of the dogmatic left would be the communist parties. I am not sure how the ratio of contrarians to dogmatists was at the best of times (say Western students in the 1960ies), but I think there were some genuine object level discussions not entirely unlike in the ratsphere. I was not born back then, so I can not say for sure.
Of course, the big atrocities of the left have mostly been committed by the dogmatists following the party line with a comical overconfidence that what they did was right.
I find social justice progressivism firmly on the dogmatic side. Where 20 years ago the Israel-Palestine conflict would have ripped apart leftist groups in the middle, today the consensus of SJP seems to be that Israel are the 'white' colonizers and therefore in the wrong, end of story.
And unlike my own Grey Tribe, the left (especially the dogmatic left) has never been very great at noticing the skulls.
There are two definitions of woke on the table; there is the dictionary definition and there is what people refer to in practice as "woke". These are not the same and I am referring explicitly to the Oxford dictionary definition, which does not reference leftism in any way. Hitler definitely espoused a message of wokeness in the dictionary sense, casting the Jews, Slavs, industrialists as historical class exploiters and using this as a pretext for seizing various assets on behalf of the Volk (folks; people). A case can be made that the Ayatollahs were/are woke as well. I don't consider Hirohito a "mass murdering tyrant" because he was beloved by his people and didn't directly kill them.
Virtually everyone sees their ingroup as a victim who is treated unjustly by their outgroup. If we apply that standard, then virtually qualifies as woke. Hamas? Woke. Fundamentalist Israeli settlers? Woke. Third gen feminist? Woke. MRA? Woke. A medieval knight following an honor code of protecting the weak from oppression? Woke.
MAGA contains the narrative that the US was taken over by the coastal elites with their pronouns who are completely out of touch with the hardworking, down-to-earth (possibly white) Americans who are actually the backbone of the country, with DJT as a hero of these downtrodden draining the swamp and making the world right again. By your definition, this makes Trump about as woke as Biden.
Very few political parties have the slogan "things are swell right now, let's keep everything exactly as it is", because this does not mobilize voters much. The very least one needs is "keep us in power or you will become the oppressed", which makes one the champion of the people who would otherwise be oppressed in the future, which is also a big part of the classic hero of the downtrodden movement.
I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage. It would be like defining 'porn' wide enough that it includes the Muppet Show (furries!), then arguing that most school shooters were exposed to 'porn' in their childhood and that therefore we need to do more to keep porn (see what I did there) from kids by forcing onlyfans to do age verification.
This, partly, was my point. The definition of wokeness I was applying, taken from the Oxford dictionary (explicitly, using the phrase "in the dictionary sense"), does not reflect the common use of the word. If you read carefully, I never said Hitler, Stalin, etc. were woke. I said (1) their propaganda was rife with woke sounding platitudes, and that (2) their stated agendas fit the dictionary definition (but not the actual meaning in common sense) of wokeness.
But the reader shouldn't have to read that carefully to get the message, so I edited the first paragraph as follows to clarify that the dictionary definition of "woke" that I am using here does not reflect the common use of the word:
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Newspeak (like "porn", "violent video games", and "woke") is useful because it prevents your opponents from putting a name to your face.
It has no downsides that are recognizable by the people who practice this kind of politics.
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I think this covers up an important truth. There is an important difference in this respect between "virtually everyone" on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk. It is one thing to feel like your clan has gotten the short end of some particular stick, but it is another thing to feel like that justifies negating the human rights of your countrymen in the entire offending class. Of course you can find, to some degree, talking heads of any class talking about how their group has been treated unfairly, but when that rises to a certain pitch and tone, you'd best keep your rifle clean.
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To be fair, "defending the oppressed" inspires and excuses actions. Uniforms do not.
Originally I picked uniforms kind of at random, but thinking more about it, it seems like a fun hill to die on.
Uniforms have been part of most armies for centuries. Kind of weird as a fashion choice? I think that the reason is that uniforms serve a useful purpose in the military: they erase differences in class and culture between the troops, and emphasize the difference between the troops and the enemy or civilians. This increases group cohesion: instead of seeing Bob the bully lying bleeding in the barbed wires in their stupid blue sweater, you see a fellow brother in arms. This unit cohesion and the sublimation of individual responsibility to the chain of command are then useful for military operations such as winning a battle or murdering a village.
"beliefs they are fighting for the oppressed" and "wears uniforms" are both Bayesian evidence for someone being more likely to drag you from your home and murdering you. Of course, there are some important difference in details between the postmen and the Einsatzgruppen, but there are also some important differences in details between the Stalinists and campus protesters.
People literally say "I am planting this bomb to fight for the oppressed". They don't say "I am planting this bomb to get cool uniforms". There's a big difference in how direct the connection is, even if both of them can be classified as increases in Bayseian probability.
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All justice is "social justice". All politics is "identity politics". It's just a matter of who you care to ingroup and outgroup, how far into the future your mind can wander, and how good your brain is at pattern recognition.
No one who has been forced into a precarious situation settles for equal suffering and death. Everyone wants to live. What separates people is how daring and how prepared they are to do what must be done. And anyone who sits on a fence, safe and sound, warm and well fed, commenting on the situation like a disembodied brain pretending to be above it all is stupid. Walking their progeny from a good place to a bad one. You are going to have to fight. If not you then your descendants or theirs.
Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents made the point that what separates most people from right wing radicals is foresight. I feel this echo throughout a lot of western culture and politics. There seems to be a distinct lack of care or awareness of the future. Even with regards to the most salient 'future' driven contention of 'the left'; the environment. It is fraught with short sighted stupidity. The warming of the globe is not a bad thing for the globe. It's bad for the people living on it. Yet overpopulation is not seen as a problem. Immigration is great and so on.
There is no serious thought going on. No realism. No foresight. It's all short sighted nonsense that leaves an entire portion of the world incapable of understanding sacrifices for their future.
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They also promised to terminate Russian involvement in the ongoing world war and sue for a separate peace. Which, I guess, was more important of a factor than this.
That was certainly an important factor in the popularity of the Bolshevik regime from 1914 to 1918, and perhaps as you suggest a more important factor -- but the question being addressed here (as indicated by the first sentence of the paragraph you quoted) is not why the 1917 Revolution was successful, but why the murderous despotism of the emerging Communist regime was not more widely foreseen from within Russia (or, for that matter, from within the United States and Western Europe), even before Russian involvement World War I.
I guess not even the intelligentsia is immune from getting too emotionally caught up in the desire for peace, a promise of a new beginning etc. and thus focusing on that one goal while ignoring all the red flags (heh).
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Soviet communism was very murderous, don't get me wrong, but that it killed 40 million Russian people is extremely unlikely. I don't even think that Soviet communism killed 40 million Soviet people or 40 million "people who were living in what used to be the Russian Empire". A figure of maybe about 10 million people who were living in what used to be the Russian Empire killed is more realistic, maybe 15 million at most.
Is there a country on earth in which you would be arrested for saying this, vs, top of my head example 'maybe about a million people, 2 at most' about the holocaust?
There's nothing to do about this discrepancy but 'don't pass go, go straight to jail'
If someone claimed that the Nazis killed 20 million Jews, you would in fact not be arrested for saying that the commonly estimated amount is 5-6 million Jews.
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I don't know if you would get arrested as opposed to just fined, but there are countries with laws against denying certain Soviet atrocities.
Generally speaking, I don't know how likely one would actually be to face legal penalties, but I think that there are many places in the former Warsaw Pact where claiming in public that Soviet atrocities were exaggerated could lead to physical violence coming from ordinary citizens.
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Corrected this to "What it did accomplish was to murder 25 million Russian people, plus or minus 15 million,". 25 million seems to be the midpoint of the mainstream scholarly estimates, with a low of around 10 and a high of around 40, according to Wikipedia.
Personally, I find R.J. Rummel credible, and he put the Soviet number at 60 million in his book Death by Government [source], which in my opinion justifies my original claim of 40 million plus or minus 20 -- but you reminded me that I should use more conservative numbers, lest someone be tempted to pick nits as an excuse to ignore the spirit of the argument. They will probably find another excuse anyway, but I want to do due diligence.
Currently, I do think it's a nitpick to insist that "Russian" means "ethnically Russian", but I will check with my Russian friends and see what they think.
Update: One of my Russian friends responds as follows:
Thanks for the correction.
Rummel was writing before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives to western historians. There was a good 15ish year window after 1991 where western historians got a good insight into the history of the Soviet Union and that deflated a lot of the more extravagant numerical claims with respect to the death toll of the Soviet regime.
He was also writing before woke radical leftism took over the humanities in American academia. So who knows?
/u/johnfabian referred to a good 15-year window after 1991, ie 1991~2006. Do you think this is the period when woke radical leftism had taken over the humanities? It certainly precedes the word "woke".
A claim that Soviets killed 10-15 million instead of 40-60 million would be an exceedingly odd one from a point of radical leftism, since it's still far too many killed people for communists to be comfortable with it, and anarchists and others would presumably not care that much either way, since they would see Soviet Union as a bad thing either way.
I don't think it's odd at all. They can't completely whitewash the numbers in one generation, but they want an excuse to (1) quibble with anyone who points out the atrocities by disputing their numbers, (2) use that as an excuse not to listen to them, and (3) doctor the numbers so that they can say that Naziism, or the Westward expansion of the United States, or something else besides the philosophy they espouse killed the most people ever.
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Yep, so I want to be clear, my interest in this matter is not to try to defend Soviet communism. It was a very brutal system, at least in its first few decades. I am just interested in historical accuracy.
I think that you should try to clearly define what you mean by Soviet communism having killed somebody.
For me, it makes sense to count #1 and #2, but not #3. Partly this is because it is extremely hard to accurately count #3.
And do you count military deaths in wars, or just civilian deaths as a result of political persecution?
When you say that mainstream scholarly estimates are about 25 million, how does that break down between the three categories above? 25 million doesn't make much sense to me just because: Russian civil war deaths were about 10 million and I think at most you could probably only ascribe about third of those to direct or indirect killing of civilians by communists. Estimates of the Holodomor death range from about 3-7 million. The Great Purge killed fewer than a million, and if you add all the other purges on top it probably adds another few hundred thousand as far as I know. Various ethnic resettlements killed maybe another million.
If you count every civilian killed as a result of Soviet military actions, that would add another 5 million or so, but that would not help a critique of communism much because the US and its allies also killed millions of civilians during WW2 and the Cold War, so killing large numbers of civilians in war time seems to be more a feature of large scale war, rather than of a country's political system.
I think Russians will probably be more fine with that than ex-Soviet non-Russians would be. Only a minority of Lithuanians or Ukrainians would be ok with being called Russians, on the other hand there are probably plenty of Russians who, while not considering Lithuanians or Ukrainians to be ethnically Russian, would still be more or less ok with them being called Russian in a certain sense of the word Russian if they were re-incorporated into the Moscow-based empire.
But I didn't bring it up in order to nit-pick, it's actually important because I wasn't sure if you actually meant ethnic Russians, or you meant Soviets in general. I understand now that you meant Soviets in general, but I had no way of knowing that when I first read your post.
The Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic empire and even modern Russia is also still a multi-ethnic empire despite not having as much territory as the Soviet Union had.
A lot of the bad blood from the Soviet times comes down to people arguing about whether:
Theory A: The Soviet Union was pro-Russian and oppressed other ethnicities. Ethnic non-Russian nationalists tend to agree with this, and there is good reason to believe it given for example the Holodomor. On the other hand, many of the Holodomor's architects were not ethnic Russians.
Theory B: The Soviet Union was anti-Russian and actually helped non-Russian ethnicities to form their own nationalist movements. Ethnic Russian nationalists tend to agree with this. The idea that the Soviet Union was anti-Russian might seem strange, but the Russian ethnonationalists who argue for this point of view point out that the Soviet Union's leadership in its important years was not particularly ethnically Russian (Lenin was probably part Kalmyk, part Jewish... Trotsky was Jewish... Stalin was Georgian...) and that the Soviets had a policy of (Korenizatsiia)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia]. On the other hand, given that the Soviet Union was about 50% ethnic Russian (in practice, you could probably say even more because back then, many people who in modern terms are non-ethnic Russians were maybe more likely to view themselves and be viewed as ethnic Russian than they are now), it's also clear that Russians were the dominant ethnicity by population size at least - no other single ethnicity had nearly such a fraction of the population.
I think it's quite reasonable to ascribe all civil war deaths to the Bolsheviks because they did consciously started it.
1.5 million of Russians and similar amount of Kazakhs, not counting many other smaller ethnicities also died in the collectivization caused famine. Turning this international communist caused tragedy in the "genocide" against specifically Ukrainians in the eyes of the public is the great achievement of Ukrainian nationalists.
Maybe, but that isn't a good argument in the context of trying to write a critique of communism because by that standard, all American Revolution deaths are the fault of the revolutionaries, and so on. Which might be a valid argument, but my point is that it sheds no light on communism versus other political beliefs. All political movements that start revolutions can be blamed for all of the resulting deaths, by this standard, so it is not something that distinguishes communism from other ideologies.
I take your point, but on the other hand, think of it this way: the American Revolution, the French Revolution(s) and the Russian Revolution were all radical overhauls of society that required tens of thousands of people to die for the movement to succeed. That seems like valuable information that shouldn't necessarily be discarded in a general analysis unless you are performing a specific comparison of one armed revolutionary movement* against another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
https://www.history.com/news/revolutionary-war-deaths
*The question of how far you can hold an ideology responsible for the movements that it produces is vexed, obviously, but if there's a strongish link between a given ideology and violent rebellion I think you have to take that into account to some degree.
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Here historian Stephens Kotkin attributes 18 to 20 million deliberate killings of civilians to Lenin and Stalin combined, not including war deaths or deaths by mismanagement. I do not know what events he totals to get that number.
My original numbers came from combining the low and high numbers for Stalin and Lenin from the table found here, but the numbers have changed since I last looked at them. The range from the current table would 10 million to 52 million (30 million plus or minus 20 million) depending on how you count. However, now that I read more closely, the high number can't be justified as a total murdered because it includes all excess deaths.
So, fair enough, I removed the word "Russian" and replaced the numbers with "some 20 million", citing Kotkin as the source.
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Yes, the biggest Soviet killings would have been the Holodomor, Kazakh famine, ethnic campaigns and the Great Purge, the three first of which mainly implicitly or explicitly targeted other ethnicities than Russians (unless one is Great-Russian enough in mentality to just consider Ukrainians to be funny-speaking Russians) and the last targetting communists of all ethnicities.
With regard to the so-called ethnic campaigns I think it's necessary to point out that the ethnic minorities who were targeted (in a loose sense) in the purges all had ethnic homelands of their own which bordered the USSR and were either hostile states, former wartime adversaries like Poland or Finland, or colonized by a hostile state, such as Korea under Japanese rule. While this was never expressed officially, the purges and terror waves targeted individuals with any ties abroad, no matter how insignificant, because the regime accused foreign governments of secretly plotting to overthrow the Soviet system with the assistance of recruited internal wreckers, spies, traitors, terrorists etc. It is for this reason that Korean, Latvian, Polish etc. minorities were hugely overrepresented among the victims of state terror, not because the regime wanted to stick it to non-Russians as such.
It's very hard, without large scale immigration (either of you versus the equivalent of the native Americans, or of the minorities), to be in a situation where your country's ethnic minorities are not one of those.
Also, by this standard, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the US wouldn't count as anti-ethnic because the US was at war with Japan.
It would though. Not because of the state of war, but because all people of Japanese ancestry under US government, with or without US citizenship, were interned. In contrast, the ethnic operations of the NKVD during the Great Purge did not target nationalities as a whole, with the exception of Koreans. The Soviet forced resettlement of 'traitor' minorities in wartime, however, did.
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At least million and a half of Russians died in this collectivization caused famine, among them my great grandfather. That's so insane that post-soviet nationalists successfully reframed this tragedy caused by communist ideology, engineered by Georgian head of state and turned into reality by local ethnic party bureaucrats(orders related to Holodomor were written in Ukrainian after all) into genocide done by imperialistic evil Russians against minorities, at least in the minds of Western public.
The more common Western opinion (if they have heard of the holodomor at all) is that it was caused by communism. That said, the only people who really discuss it are either American libertarians/conservatives or generic neoliberal NATOwave type Central Europeans who vote center-right and see Russia and communism as essentially the same thing.
Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by the European Parliament with 507 votes for (and 12 votes against). Even a plurality of the far-left group GUE/NGL voted for it.
There's an obvious political motive to this. From a casual scanning of the academic literature historians generally do not consider the Holodomor a genocide (but this doesn't really change the moral aspect of it much).
Obviously, the point being that Holodomor is not that obscure a thing, particularly after 2022, and it's not just people broadly on the right who care about it.
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