This is the crux of the problem. See, communism only really succeeded in places where the overriding culture was so bad that mass terror and death were preferable to what they had before. It isn’t that communism lends itself to corruption - though, it can be argued it is less resilient in the face of corruption - it’s that corruption lent itself to communism and didn’t go away when the communists took over.
It’s hard to really capture a culture of corruption in words. It’s something you have to see first hand, or really engage with locals who escaped such a place to fathom.
Imagine if all laws were a joke, all cops existed to extort money from you (and laugh alongside you at said laws, provided you forked over the money), Might Makes Absolutely Right in all instances, and that you would have to be a blithering idiot to do anything that wasn’t immediately in your self interest - like, say, do your job at the DMV without a hefty bribe. That’s where Communism in Tsarist Russia & Republican China started.
Giving the people who excelled in such a system absolute, totalitarian power just compounded preexisting issues.
Because the clerk who took down the report only did so because the reporter gave him a $50 and the accused committed no crime.
Of course he would. He could bribe the better lawyer under the table, bribe the judge, bribe the mob to bump off the accuser/lawyer… the options are endless.
Democratic Socialism borrows heavily from classic Socialism without going full kilter. It generally tends to produce better outcomes for the majority of society than either laissez faire capitalism or marxist-leninism/maoism by a wide margin. It also only exists in societies that first enshrined a rejection of corruption, respect for the rule of law, and other general enlightenment principles.
Democracy is similar. It generally sucks for countries that don’t have certain cultural traits - specifically an intollerance for corruption. That the US tolerates more and more corruption is worrisome in my eyes for this very reason.
I’m going to partly agree and partly disagree here.
There are certainly some low-HDI democracies out there. Since 1991 or so many African nations democratized, and some of the successful democracies include very poor countries.
The Soviet Union wasn’t really “middle class, healthy and educated” it was a middle income country with good education levels and standard health indicators for its income.
Three industrialized countries tried communism: the eastern portions of Germany, Czechoslovakia and (a borderline case) Hungary. Relative to the circumstances economic growth was pretty good in East Germany and in Hungary (the numbers here are from Gerhard Heske for the GDR and from Angus Maddison for Hungary) but disappointing in Czechoslovakia. All three were authoritarian one-party states (none of them in the mass murder league though all had some political executions). But it’s interesting Czechoslovakia was the only Warsaw Pact country where the communists ever won a free election (though by a plurality not a majority), and there it was the more industrialized Czech portions that voted communist rather than the poorer Slovak portions.
The Bolsheviks didn’t overthrow the Russian Empire. There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917. The first was the February Revolution; in that revolution the Empire was overthrown and Russia became a democratic republic. Russia had a multi-party legislature and an elected leader, Alexander Kerensky. Then there was a second revolution, the October Revolution. That was the one where the Bolsheviks overthrew the republican government.
Reminds me a bit of the Jacobins during the French revolution.
They had ideals that on paper didn’t seem too outrageous. In order to pursue that goal they instituted the reign of terror.
That’s the problem with many revolutions. You use violence to overthrow the existing regime then use violence to protect the new regime from the dozen other groups that have a different idea than you do about how things should be run and/or who should be in charge.
Also North Korea and Cambodia, and Ethiopia. But this is definitely true in general, almost all Marxist regimes were authoritarian, but not all of them featured mass murder.
To be more precise though the Soviet Union had a significant death toll pre-Stalin too, and Trotsky would probably have been as bad or worse. I think Bukharin would have been a really good leader though and would have taken a slow approach to communism that didn’t try to impose rapid collectivization on the kulaks (with the subsequent famine).
They weren’t deposed. They both died of natural causes after long lives.
Saying they were deposed implies that the communist regimes in their countries were able to correct the problems of having Stalin or Mao in power. They didn’t; all they did was outlast the mortal lifespan of those dictators.
Totalitarian dictatorships are a lot more stable than people want to think about. Very few totalitarian dictators get overthrown from forces within their own country because they brutally crush any opposition before it has a chance to grow into a meaningful threat.
Totalitarian dictators usually lose power in one of two ways: they die or they’re overthrown by another country.
And they only lasted in that form for a generation or so. Because in the beginning the population was self-selected idealists. And after a generation that went away, and the system didn’t work without the idealism/sacrifice.
Kibbutzim still exist, and some prosper, but they are hardly “communist” anymore.
The converse point is noteworthy too, that Marxism is essentially religious. By carrying out good works and striving for the perfectabiliry of human nature, we will build an ineffable shining city on the hill.
IIRC, Marx said that True Communism would happen automatically when all the proletariats (i.e., capitalists) were overthrown. The State would wither away since it was no longer needed.
Since this planet has never reached that state, it is necessary to force it to happen. Any means is accepted if it leads to the desired end, since the desired end is an ideal utopia, well worth the sacrifice.
At least that’s the excuse wanna-be dictators use.
The Communist Party was more powerful than the state itself and refused to allow itself to be bound by law. The government was always fighting revolution, so it couldn’t allow enemies of the state to use the law to thwart the will of the people and their party.
Show trials started as soon as Lenin seized power. When elections gave the Socialists the majority of seats and not the Communist Party, Lenin had the navy shut down the parliament. Under Stalin, you could advance in government by denouncing those above you. There was no check and balance. There was no independent judiciary. Such things were anti-revolutionary bourgeois ideas. Everything was put under the party.
It didn’t help much that the whole economic system was pretty much unsustainable either. It’s estimated that 5 1/2 million to 8 million people died in the man made famine of 1932 which was pretty much all manmade. This doesn’t include the 200,000 people sentenced to death during collectivization. Millions more died being sentenced to labor to build the great Soviet state too.
As to why communism leads to mass murder; I don’t think corruption is the correct answer, or at least not the main answer. Communism goes against human nature more than Capitalism. Here when I mean Communism I mean the real Soviet or Sino varieties of communism. For any political or economic system to go against human nature the system has to be oppressive to “succeed”. It’s then an easy leap from oppression to downright mass murder. I don’t think it coincidence the communist system that probably worked best was the Stalinist system. It was under Stalin that Five Year Plans were being fulfilled in 4 glorious years. The later(and far softer) Brezhnev era was instead one of economic stagnation. Violence is inherent in any meaningful state communist system. When the threat of mass violence is not present the Proletariat will not produce their Five Year quota in four years; they will produce it in twelve years. As violence, incentives and skills become lost the Five Year Plan after that takes something like twenty years to fulfill. Violence, and a lot of it, is required.
In official Marxist terminology, there is the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. A transitory (right) phase between Capitalism and true Communism. A government to force the switch over. Supposed to be benevolent and all that (again, right).
But the usual jerks exploit this concept to impose brutal dictatorships, stay in power, yadda yadda yadda.
So they just have to point out from time to time that it’s temporary and the worker’s paradise will blossom once all the capitalists and counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the state and so on are all wiped out.
Communism did not become a governing force anywhere until quite some time after Karl Marx more or less came up with it. Where it did, it became the governing force in places where the apparatus of state had basically collapsed - the Russian Empire and China being the two obvious and largest examples. Both countries saw Communism arise as the winner from long and hideous wars, or multiple wars in fact, and saw the collapse of an imperial government, massive foreign invasion, and subsequent collapse of another government.
One could argue - and I am not staking a hard position on this, just proposing - that Russia and China were doomed to slaughter and misery irrespective of who won those civil wars, and that dictatorship and horror was going to follow the resolution of those wars whether the strongman in charge was a Communist, a fascist, a new king, or whatever the case might have been.
This is, I think, rather different from Nazism and Germany. Germany was hit very hard by the Depression, but it was not a failed, collapsed state. In 1932 it was a functioning, civilized country struggling with high unemployment, and its people chose to elect Nazis, who took over a functioning country and then chose to make war and murder their chief export.
The fact that the revolution happened in Russia precisely because of Lenin’s ruthlessness, in a context where the habits of democracy were hardly known to most (let alone culturally ingrained), the one formal attempt at it (the Constituent Assembly) was forcibly overthrown before it even got off the ground, then degenerated into Stalin’s paranoiac use of even more ruthless tactics against anyone, even those close to him, whose face didn’t fit.
Where it was tried in other countries (not that, say, Hungary or Bavaria had that much more of a democratic tradition) the parties that established Soviet governments didn’t have the strength and manpower to resist the reaction and were themselves overthrown within a matter of months.
In more democratic countries, it never won enough support to be ingrained into the constitutional system in the first place.
Communism is inherently violent. As Marx said “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror” and Engels “A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.”
In communist doctrine there is a necessary struggle between labor and capital and between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries.
Such a violent doctrine attracts violent people.
Because Communism presents itself as scientific and inevitable there is no room for reform or changing the course. Thus the only reason for lack of success is either a lack or revolutionary zeal or opposition from the counter-revolutionaries. This attracts fanatics to whom any doubt or reservation is akin to opposition.
Thus the leaders of communist revolution are violent fanatics. When they seize power and implement communism failures are inevitable since communist economics has no basis in reality. Thus for the revolutionary government there is a cycle of big plans, then failure, then blame, then terror, and then new big plans. This continues until the leader dies and then next generation of leadership are bureaucrats whose main skill is surviving.
The following is a point that is somewhat reflected in some posts above, but not adequately crystalized. Because it’s a broader issue which is not specific to Communism let alone the Russian revolution.
IMHO the experience of Communism is a warning of the dangers of too much idealism. If you see yourself and what you’re trying to accomplish as being ultimate good, and - by extension, if nothing else - your opponents and what their believe in as the ultimate bad, then there’s nothing you can’t justify.
On the one hand, the victims of your violence are such evil evil people that whatever suffering they get is well deserved. OTOH, even if not, on occasion, well what you’re trying to accomplish is so great and so significant that the suffering of an occasional innocent is a small sacrifice to pay for the Cause. You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Some purged Old Bolsheviks themselves (possibly including Bukharin IIRC) justified their own suffering at the hands of Stalin because the Revolution required it.
In sum, people have an inborn conscience which mitigates their doing atrocious acts to other people, this is lessened to the extent that they can view these acts as being moral and in service of a higher cause.
It’s very similar to what allows religious people to commit enormous violence and inflict massive suffering in the name of their religion. Because they can do it and still feel good about themselves - they are making the world a better place.
It’s something to think about when contemplating the various Righteous Causes that people get worked up about these days. That can have a positive aspect in getting people to support their cause (assuming it’s a valid cause to begin with) but also has the potential to cause enormous harm and disrupt society as well.
Sure, the Communists weren’t alone. But they were among the armed violent groups that overthrew the Czar by force, and then they used violence to overthrow the interim government. If Kerensky was going to establish some sort of republican government, he was going to have to successfully use force to crush the Communists. He failed, the Bolsheviks won.
Sure, the Kerensky government is a particularly poignant “what if” moment. But it wasn’t like everything would have been fine, if only the Communists hadn’t seized power. Like, how exactly was it that they were able to seize power? It was because the nominal Kerensky government wasn’t strong enough to resist them. And if there were a non-Communist government strong enough to crush the Communists, then that government would almost certainly have been some kind of authoritarian regime.
But of course a “normal” authoritarian dictatorship would certainly have been preferable to the ideological totalitarian rule of the murderous Communists. Of course liberal democracy would be better than either, but if you can’t rally the people to fight off both the Reds and the Whites then you can’t get there from here.