Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917

by R. J. Rummel

Release Date: May, 1996

Edition: Paperback

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The Soviet Killing Fields

This book details the blood-drenched history of the Soviet regime, an evil empire founded on slavery and mass murder. Calculating the death toll at nearly 62 million, it exposes the practical results of Lenin's dictum that those who are against cruelty do not understand the most basic Marxism.

Rummel shows that the Bolsheviks created a police state from the very beginning, provoking hundreds of popular rebellions from the first moment of their coup. By the end of the Civil War, Lenin and Trotsky had massacred perhaps half a million innocent people - between 50,000 and 150,000 were butchered in the Crimea alone - while establishing over 300 concentration camps. But their worst crime was the man-made famine which killed some 5 million men, women and children - a catastrophe caused by Soviet plunder and prolonged by the deliberate export of vital food supplies.

Most of the book, however, is devoted to the seemingly endless catalogue of bloodbaths and genocides inflicted by Stalin, starting with the slaughter of the kulaks and the forced famine in the Ukraine, and proceeding through the Great Terror and the climax of the Gulag during and after the Second World War. While millions were being brutally worked to death in subzero temperatures - the Kolyma camps alone killed 3 million people, more than twice the death toll at Auschwitz - the Soviets were deporting millions more from the newly subjugated colonies of Eastern Europe. As Rummel demonstrates, the communists targeted not only so-called class enemies but also entire national, ethnic and religious minorities as well as ordinary people who were murdered simply in order to meet state killing quotas.

The book concludes with the little-known post-Stalin death toll. During this period several million people quietly disappeared in the Gulag, and the Red Army committed genocide against the people of Afghanistan.

Readers may also wish to consult Rummel's book China's Bloody Century (which addresses the strikingly similar crimes of Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Tse-Tung), as well as his Death by Government (which discusses Marxist bloodbaths in Yugoslavia, North Korea, Cambodia and Vietnam). Rummel's book is also an excellent companion to Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism.

Soviet Genocide

This is the best book ever written about the Soviet Union - in fact, it is one of the very few which are even honest. The author, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii, demonstrates that the Soviet Union committed terrible crimes against humanity, including huge massacres, forced famines and slave labour. The atrocities began with the October Revolution in 1917 and continued with Stalin's genocides against national, religious & socio-economic groups, the mass purges in Eastern Europe and the silent deaths of millions in the Gulag during the '50s, '60s, & '70s. The book concludes with the genocidal invasion of Afghanistan.