INTRODUCTION: MARXIST REVOLUTIONARIES

All accounts of 20th-century mass murder include the Communist regimes. Some call their deeds genocide, though I shall not. I discuss the three that caused the most terrible human losses: Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. These saw themselves as belonging to a single socialist family, and all referred to a Marxist tradition of development theory. They murderously cleansed in similar ways, though to different degrees. Later regimes consciously adapted their practices to the perceived successes and failures of earlier ones. The Khmer Rouge used China and the Soviet Union (and Vietnam and North Korea) as reference societies, while China used the Soviet Union. All addressed the same basic problem – how to apply a revolutionary vision of a future industrial society to a presently agrarian one. Cambodia was more agrarian than China, which was more agrarian than the Soviet Union. These two dimensions, of time and agrarian backwardness, help account for many of their differences.

These cases differ from those discussed so far. They were not mainly targeted against ethnic groups, and so key terms used so far do not quite fit. Not genocide, since the intent was almost never to eliminate whole peoples, and ethnic targeting was uncommon. Communists perceived their main enemies in terms of class, not ethnicity. For them, the notion of rule by the people became confused with rule by the proletariat or, rather, rule by the vanguard party of the proletariat, not rule by an ethnic group.