Historian R.J. Rummell. I’ll try and find the site where he breaks his numbers down (he breaks them down in various ways). Lennin is in the top 10 for killers (if I remember correctly)…but Stalin is at the top of every list. He has more deaths associated with him than any two others (including Hitler) on the list.
-XT
Couldn’t find a site that shows Rummell’s raw data, but found this (ironically) on the Straightdope:
Bolding mine. I was wrong btw…I guess Stalin DIDN’T wack more than any two others combined. My bad.
This is interesting as well:
Its interesting to note that NONE of the top 12 killer regimes is a social democracy…hell, you could say that all the social democracies combined don’t get on the page. Oh, we don’t get off for free…in fact, the US and others DID kill thousands…even hundreds of thousands. However, compared to the communists (or even the facists) we are pikers in the death toll department.
He doesn’t go into it, but I’m sure you could add several hundred thousand to the French in Vietnam and various african adventures as well. The point being that the various social-democracies aren’t even in the same league.
-XT
OoooH! OooooH! OooooooooH!
I call it. I want to be the local Feudalist. I promise to quote 14th century treatises on the benefits of Royal rule and chilvalry. I have a membership in the SCA.
So, as the newly (self) apointed advocate for Feudalism, I’d like to point out the it does have a very beneficail effect on the Marxian world. Namely the elimination of class struggles. If your class (and every other thing about your rights, responsibilities, and privaleges) is determined by birth, then you have no need to struggle. It is only in the reactionary ideas of the renaissance which have lead to all of the troubles of the past few centuries. The kings of old had a great deal of trouble fighitng anything like “world wars”. You free thinkers seem to have one every 20 to 50 years. Besides which, the periodic famines are just a myth. Can you show me anyone who remembers such a thing? Huh?
This is about weapons, but you will notice nowhere does it mention tanks or A-Bombs.
Dr. R. J. Rummell is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He studies what he calls “democide”…the deliberate killing by a state of its citizens. Here’s his website:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html
You can find tables giving a breakdown there (you might have to magnify them)…here’s the one for the 1917-1922 period, with sources:
And here’s 1923-1928:
Three questions, one factual, two theoretical.
First, for anybody:
14 nations attacked the Soviet Union after the revolution?? The revolution occurred in 1917, when the allies and the central powers had a few other minor details on their hands. After 1918 there weren’t 14 strong military powers in the world. Even the ones that did exist, france, Britain, and the U.S. were pretty exhausted after WW1. I know the U.S. sent some troops in, but I thought they were only a token force. Anyone have any cites for troop strengths and which nations were involved? seriously, I realize I sound incredulous right now, but I’m genuinly curious. (I really don’t know alot about this period of history.)
Question two:
No one has demonstrated why we in the U.S. or the west or anyone in the world would want a violent marxist revolution. Let’s take the U.S. What specific problems here are so bad we would want to replace our current system with communism? Only a minority of the population lives below the poverty line, and even they are better off than people in most parts of the world. What advantages would the average American gain by a switch to a communist order?
Note that I am not saying there is nothing wrong with the U.S. I’m as worried by lousy health care and miserable public schools as anybody else. Liberals and conservatives can have a debate as to how to fix these problems. I just want to know why anyone would think things are so bad we need a violent bloody revolution?
Question three:
How would the damn thing work? Let’s take a specific product. Say, computers. (Something everyone here obviously uses.) Who decides how many to make, who gets one, where they are made, what portion of resources goes into their maufacture etc.? How are they distributed? Do they cost money or are they handed out in some sort of lottery? Do you have to prove to some soviet council that you need and deserve a computer? Who decides what designs to use, Macs or PC’s? What rewards are given to people who dream up faster processors or other improvements? etc., etc.?
Larry, good example (computers). I was just thinking that.
In Soviet Russia, computer finds you!
*Originally posted by Larry Borgia *
I don’t know if I can answer your question adequately, but I think one approach that might work on a much larger scale (i.e national) would be similar to the one already in place in the Basque region of Spain - Mondragon.
http://www.mondragon.mcc.es/ing/index.asp
http://www.sfworlds.com/linkworld/mondragon.html
http://www.ping.be/jvwit/Mondragon.html
Of course, Mondragon is a hybrid of Communist/Socialist and Capitalistic ideals and practices.
Oh, really? Singlehandedly, eh?
(statistics from http://www.eisenhowerinstitute.org/programs/livinghistory/SovietExperienceww2.htm )
Well, not a historian myself, I’ll just venture to say that the number of Germans killed on each front might be a barometer as to whether or not the Western front had nothing to do with the fall of the Nazis.
Germans killed by the Red Army: 2,415,690
Germans killed by the Western allies: 834,314
Now, the stats say that for every German killed in the west, three were killed in the east. Now, it’s obvious that the Soviets did more than the other allies, but come on! “Singlehandedly?” You’ve got to be kidding. “The allies had no role?” Wrong.
Don’t forget about the Allied blockade of Italian shipping, Operations Overlord and Dragoon, the defeat of Mr Rommell’s Afrika Korps, British aid to the Greek resistance, and the deciphering of Enigma. None of these had anything to do with the defeat of the Nazis?
And don’t forget about the Japanese who were kept busy east and south of USSR due in no small part to American and British forces.
Also shall we compare the tons of supplies that went to and from USSR and America?
I’m willing to concede that the USSR was more skilled at killing people than the Anglo-Americans. And certainly more skilled than the French. After all, the USSR had all that practice killing it’s own civilians…
But seriously, there’s no disputing that the USSR bore the brunt of the European fighting in WWII. Just as the USA bore the brunt of fighting Japan. (With help from the Chinese, Communist and Nationalist.)
To paraphrase Churchhill again, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I’d put in a good word for Satan.” In helping defeat Nazism/Fascism/Japanese militarism, the Communists did a good thing. But the fact that your neighbor helped you chase some third party off your lawn doesn’t make up for the fact that he’s murdered several of his children.
Thanks for the links, eponymous. Pretty interesting stuff.
I’ve only skimmed them, so far, so my initial readings may be pretty off base.
However, I’m not sure if the system mondragon uses would apply to a whole nation, particularly one has diverse as the U.S. That being said I should say that I have nothing against the idea of co-operatives or worker owned companies. (Isn’t one of the major U.S. airlines worker owned?) Some of the smaller European countries operate in a vaguely similar manner, though not to the extent mondragon does. But these countries and companies operate within a larger capitalist system. I’m just not sure if I believe that a co-op here and there really validates the idea of a centralized economy controlling every facet of production and society.
That was a very interesting article and a good read. Thanks for bringing that up. However, I notice one glaring contradiction in Rachleff’s thinking. He criticizes the Bolsheviks for developing a national organization around the Soviets and the factory committees, whose
Yet not two paragraphs previously he notes
Clearly the Bolsheviks based their organizational strategy on the situation obtaining at the time. There was no effort on the part of the factory committees to organize around the question of social power; the Soviets, on the other hand, had spent their time since the February revolution actively trying to suppress the factory committees. (This, of course, cannot be laid at the feet of the Bolsheviks because they didn’t have a majority in the Soviets until the fall of 1917.) How can the Bolsheviks be accused of undermining the factory committees when the factory committees themselves weren’t making the necessary political efforts?
As for the immediate post-revolutionary period, Rachleff ignores quite a bit of relevant history in favor of a completely unsupported (not “unsupportable”; there’s a difference) assertion that the factory committees were attempting to create their own national organization.
Firstly, workers’ control (ie, the administration of factories by the factory committees) was an explicit Bolshevik policy almost from Day One. The Bolsheviks issued a Decree on Workers’ Control less than three weeks after the October Revolution; like the organizational strategy discussed previously it was a policy based on the situation as it was on the ground. The Bolsheviks didn’t create workers’ control, of course, but they could give it the stamp of legal authority once they’d taken power. That in turn provoked a huge wave of sabotage by the capitalists who had previously owned the factories; the All-Russian Congress of Employers’ Associations declared they would close any factory in which management’s administration was actively interfered with. In response, individual factories were nationalized. One British source from 1948 (M. Dobb, “Soviet Economic Development since 1917”, pp 84-5) estimates that only 100 out of the over 500 nationalizations that occurred before July 1918 were done by decree of the government; the remaning 400+ (or over 80%) were done by the factory workers themselves to keep the workplaces open after the capitalists either abandoned them or tried to force shutdowns. After the outbreak of civil war in July 1918, according to a 1929 Russian economic survey (V.P. Miliutin, “Istoriia ekonomicheskogo razvitiia SSSR”, p.115), the average rate of worker-initiated nationalizations went down to 70%. In other words, for almost a full year after the October Revolution, workers’ control as exercised through the factory committees operated largely unchecked.
Whatever form the national organization of factory committees was supposed to have taken (and Rachleff remains rather silent on the question), it was apparently not enough to stave off serious problems. For the most part, workers’ control of factories meant that the committees were concerned with their own individual enterprise and not with the industry as a whole. A. Pankratova, whom Rachleff does not quote directly but grossly misinterprets, describes the situation in her 1927 book “Fabzakomy i profsoiuzy v revoliutsii 1917 goda” as follows:
(p. 238)
Shliapnikov, the People’s Commissar of Labor, described the state of the country’s railroad system in detail in a speech on 20 March 1918. He summed it up thus:
Under such conditions the further centralisation of workers control is clearly absolutely necessary. Tony Cliff illustrates the point nicely in the Lenin biography I cited earlier:
The factory committees had to give up some of their autonomy to a more central authority in order to ensure that both the industry and the enterprises within it continued to function, period.
There’s a large difference between being shaky and being outright dangerous. You’ll note in the FAQ you linked to in a previous post that it states Makhno ended up fighting against pretty much everybody else in Ukraine at the time - from the Bolsheviks to the Whites and all parties in between. What the FAQ doesn’t mention, however, is that Makhno didn’t do that completely independently - when he was fighting the Whites, he did it alongside the Bolsheviks; when he fought the Bolsheviks, he did it alongside the Whites. If the Bolsheviks had let Makhno do as he pleased simply because he was fighting the counterrevolutionaries that particular day, they would have laid themselves wide open for those same counterrevolutionaries as soon as Makhno decided the Bolsheviks were now the greater of the two evils.
Captain Amazing, thank you very much for those links to the data. I’ll be looking at the 1917-1922 table very closely over the next couple of days and working up an analysis. It’s stuff like that which keeps these debates interesting.
It’s not all that frequently discussed. This is one sitethat addresses the question of troop strength and presence at least partially. The chart midway down the page gives eight foreign armies, and with the Turks and Azeris in Baku, that brings us to 10. I’m still working on tracking down the other 4, although I admit the possibility that I’ve remembered the figure wrong. But right now it’s 3:15 AM and I gotta get some sleep.
Its better than that. There’s a very high chance that Russia would have failed without the vast amount of supplies that moved to her. Rail stock, factory equipment, and desperately needed half-ton trucks - even aside from direct military aid in the form of tanks and so forth, the SOvUnion gained vast amounts of industrial goods, which IMO they could not have won without. The Russian winter might have beaten Germany initially, but without the available industry they could not have turned the war around.
*Originally posted by Larry Borgia *
I agree that it doesn’t really validate the idea of a centralized economy controlling every facet of production in society. But it does point out an example that economy activity can incorporate a more democratic approach than current market economies.
Personally, I can’t think how the Mondragon system could be applied at the national level as well. I also don’t think it could be applied just anywhere on a regional level. I think one of the reasons for its sucess has to do with where it is located in Spain - in the heart of Basque country, where a sense of cultural identity is quite strong. There’s possibly a strong sense of unity within the cooperatives as they compete against other firms (i.e Spanish) within the overall economy of Spain.
Olentzero,
Thanks for the follow up. I’ll defer to your interpretation since 1) my background in this area is extremely limited and 2) I am extremely impressed by your ability in formulating a counter argument. It’s quite obvious that the anarchists do have a bit of an ideological axe to grind against the Bolsheviks (on the other hand, what ideological axe don’t they have to grind regarding other idelogies as well?)
I still contend that an argument can be made for actions undertaken by the Lenin/Trotsky/Bolsheviks hurt the revolution and helped pave the way for what followed in its wake (i.e bureucraticization and Stalinism). Obviously, I wasn’t able to do that in this instance. However, I reserve the right to bring issues related to this topic in the future (after I do my homework, of course). 
Might you recommend some good sources? I do intend to get and read “Before Stalinism” by Farber.
Curious thing about that “poverty line.”
It is based solely on income. Rarely is the NET WORTH discussed.
If I lived in a $500,000 home and had $10,000,000 in a safe deposit box and ZERO INCOME. I would be below the poverty line. Could we have ended poverty by now if accounting had been mandatory since 1945?
The Marxist, Capitalist or Socialists don’t say anything about that.
Dal Timgar
Dude, you are so weird.
Don’t thank me, thank the conservatives on this message board. This isn’t the first debate we’ve had on the subject, and if there’s one thing I learned in arguing with those people who don’t agree with me, it’s that it is very important to know what the hell you’re talking about and to get sources to back you up.
Sure thing.
Chris Harman’s pamphlet “Russia: How the Revolution Was Lost” (reviewed in one of the sites you linked to) is an excellent starting point. A more in-depth analysis is “Russia: From Workers’ State to State Capitalism” by Peter Binns, Tony Cliff, and Chris Harman. It’s just been reprinted by Haymarket Books, but it doesn’t seem to be in the online catalog quite yet. Well worth the effort to procure once you can locate it.