COLUMNIST, Virginia
Many critics
like to pick on big government. They say it’s so huge and bureaucratic that it
can’t get anything done right. That may
be true. But there’s one thing that big government does well: kill people. The blood-soaked 20th century
proved that.
Among the most brutal big government killers of that time was the communist Soviet Union. Ten years ago this month it marked the anniversary of its collapse. That remarkable event in 1991 will be remembered as a great victory for liberty, even if there is little evidence that a conversion to the true Faith is underway, as Our Lady of Fatima said there would be if her requests of 1917 were met. Of course, Russia today is no Eden—it’s still in the early stages of recovery after 74 years of totalitarian self-destruction. But the terror and bleakness of communism no longer dominate every facet of life there.
And the dead? The millions
murdered for the State? They are resurfacing, in photographs and documents from
Soviet archives, and in countless mass graves being discovered all over the
vast Russian land. A cold harvest of corpses.
They should not be
forgotten. Tens of millions of people—women, children, fathers, families—were
murdered by the biggest big government in history. The nationalized, planned
economy—socialism in one country—ran itself on terror. A free market, a laissez faire economy,
could not and has not done what the iron fist of the Soviet State did. And we
should—we hope—learn from this.
Hitler and the Nazis did not
build the first concentration camps of the 20th century. Lenin and Stalin and the Bolsheviks built
them. By the 1950s, hundreds of these camps—the Gulag Archipelago—darted the
landscape. So-called enemies of the State, including religious (Jews,
Catholics, Orthodox), were sent to the camps, along with criminals. There they were literally worked to death. A
conservative estimate puts the number of camp deaths at 16 million. Many of the
camps were still operating under Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 1919, hundreds of
thousands of Cossacks, who had served as cavalrymen in the czarist army, were
murdered by the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB.
In Ukraine in 1932-33, an
estimated 5 million peasants were intentionally starved to death because of a
grain-quota system crafted by Soviet bureaucrats and Stalin. The people were deliberately killed as part
of state planning.
In 1933, President Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s administration—riddled with communist sympathizers and agents,
as Soviet and U.S. documents now confirm—officially recognized the Soviet
government. In the mid- to late-1930s, the infamous Soviet Show Trials began.
This launched the Great Terror, in which an estimated one million Russians were
killed. Stalin signed execution orders daily. In one, culled from Soviet
archives and published in “The Black Book of Communism,” Stalin signed an order
authorizing the death of 6,600 political opponents.
Things got so bad, reported
historian Robert Conquest, that sometimes up to 200 people a day were being
shot at the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. At the same time, about 6.5 million
kulaks—better off peasants opposed to the state policy of collectivization—were
murdered by the Cheka, according to historian R.J. Rummel.
In 1939, the Soviets entered
into a “non-aggression pact,” i.e., treaty, with the Nazis and launched World
War II. The German army invaded Poland from the west and the Red army invaded
from the east. The national socialist
Soviets brutalized Poland. They
murdered some 15,000 Polish army officers and buried them in mass graves in the
Katyn forest. They also marched more
than one million Poles back to Russia and on to the Gulag. Rape was standard
Soviet practice for soldiers, and countless Polish women and girls were violated
and died from the brutality.
After Hitler turned on
Stalin in 1941, President Roosevelt and his administration started to aid
“Uncle Joe” and the Soviets. A lot of
the military and material aid provided—paid for by American taxpayers—was used to
enforce the terror and genocide in the USSR. The aid went to Soviet state
officials and departments. It was used
to defend and strengthen Stalin and the Soviet government. (Lenin and Stalin
had already killed more than 12 million “enemies of the state” before Hitler
and the Nazis took power in 1933.)
By the time Stalin died in
1953, about 25-30 million people had died as a result of government policies in
the USSR. From the 1950s and through the 1980s, countless Russians continued to
suffer because of State policies. “Enemies” were still sent to the Gulag or to
psychiatric hospitals for “treatment.” And the people, in general, had to
endure a near-Third World existence because socialist planning did not work.
Even today, potable water is rationed in Moscow.
Neo-socialist critics, many
of whom dominate America’s universities and centers of influence, often
complain that the invisible hand of capitalism is ruthless—that the less
advantaged suffer because of it. But
compare a free market, a laissez faire economy and limited government with a
Soviet style socialist economy and what does one see?
Unlimited government is the
most efficient killer.
Remnant columnist Michael Chapman is a writer in
Washington, D.C. Send him email at fatima1917@hotmail.com.