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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27342 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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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.

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.

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:

I don’t see why it’s inaccurate to use the term “Russian” since colloquially it meant “anyone who lived under the Soviet regime”.

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.

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.

lest someone be tempted to pick nits as an excuse to ignore the thrust of the argument

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.

  1. Direct deliberate killing (guys from NKVD come to apartment, take guy away in car and kill him).
  2. Indirect killing (guys come to farm and take away all the grain, farmers die).
  3. Deaths through negligence or just because communism isn't a very good economic system.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think it's quite reasonable to ascribe all civil war deaths to the Bolsheviks because they did consciously started it.

and there is good reason to believe it given for example the Holodomor

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.

I think Russians will probably be more fine with that than ex-Soviet non-Russians would be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Holodomor, Kazakh famine which mainly implicitly or explicitly targeted other ethnicities than Russians

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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