nov 6, 2017 - "The legacy of 100 years of communism: 65 million deaths" -Chicago Tribune 2017, Nov 6

Description:

One hundred years ago Tuesday, the Bolsheviks’ Big Lie took lethal root in Russia. Vladimir Lenin and his followers commandeered the vast empire and set in motion a breathtakingly cruel experiment in economics and social engineering. Lenin and his followers promised a system that would release the repressed, empower the proletariat against a wealthy bourgeoisie and create a land of abundance and social justice. Communism would bury capitalism.

Instead, communism slaughtered and buried at least 65 million people over the century, not just in Russia (later the Soviet Union) but Eastern Europe, Africa and China, Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton professor of history and international affairs, writes in The Wall Street Journal. His chilling conclusion: “A century of communism in power — with holdouts even now in Cuba, North Korea and China — has made clear the human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing capitalism. Again and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has brought about the deaths of an astounding number of people. ... Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror — a model established by Lenin and especially by his successor, Joseph Stalin.”