>>/168823/
Throughout history, various communist regimes and movements have employed killing, violence, and state terror as a deliberate practice for political intimidation, eliminating opposition, and maintaining power.
Key examples include:
The Red Terror (Soviet Union): Initiated in 1918 by the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin and carried out by the Cheka (secret police), this campaign of mass executions and repression targeted political opponents (such as tsarists, liberals, and non-Bolshevik socialists), clergy, and even rebellious workers and peasants. Leon Trotsky, a Red Army leader, explicitly stated that "Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy... The revolution...kills individuals, and intimidates thousands".
The Great Purge (Soviet Union): From the mid-1930s to 1938, Joseph Stalin orchestrated a series of campaigns to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party, military leaders, and unaffiliated citizens whom he considered a threat. The NKVD (secret police) used torture to extract forced confessions in public "show trials" to create a climate of widespread fear and establish one-person rule. Estimates of deaths range from 700,000 to over a million people.
Mass Killings in China: During the Chinese Communist Revolution and subsequent periods, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used violence extensively.
In the early 1950s, the "Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries" resulted in at least 712,000 executions to consolidate power.
During the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), public "struggle sessions" and torture were used to intimidate peasants into obeying officials and meeting grain quotas, contributing to a famine that killed millions, with some estimate that 7% of those who died during this period were tortured to death or summarily killed.
The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) also featured widespread violence and terror, with Red Guards encouraged to "bombard the headquarters" to remove bureaucrats from power.
The Khmer Rouge (Cambodia): The communist regime in Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979) was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 2 million people through executions, forced labor, and famine as part of a radical social engineering project.
Other Regimes: Similar patterns of using state terror, political purges, and mass killings to maintain control have been documented in other communist states, including North Korea, Vietnam, and in Eastern European countries under Soviet influence.
The use of such violence was rooted in an ideology of class struggle, where the "class enemy" was to be eliminated, and any means, including terror, were considered legitimate to achieve the aims of the revolution and solidify political power.
google ai