DEMOCIDE IN TOTALITARIAN STATES:
MORTACRACIES AND MEGAMURDERERS--
AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY*
By R.J. Rummel
| Democide: The murder of any person or people by a government. Mortacracy: A type of political system that habitually and systematically murders large numbers of its own citizens. Megamurderer: A government that has murdered 1,000,000 people or more. |
Note that I completed this study in the summer of 1993 while still engaged in collecting democide data. Not all the democide totals I give here are complete, therefore. For final figures, see my summary Table 1.2 in my Death By Government
THE NEW CONCEPT OF DEMOCIDE
In international conventions and the general literature, genocide has been defined as intentional killing by government of people because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or other indelible group membership. While killing people because of their politics or for political reasons has been explicitly excluded from the international Genocide Convention, some scholars nonetheless have included such killing in their study of genocide (Fein, 1984; Kuper, 1981; Porter, 1982). Some have extended the definition of genocide to cover any mass murder by government (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1988; Charny, 1991); some have even stretched it much further to characterize the unintentional spread of disease to indigenous populations during European colonization, including that of the American West (Stannard, 1992).
The problem is becoming conceptually acute. The early generic meaning of genocide was clear, although by its exclusion of political killing, controversial. The present extension of genocide's meaning, however, creates conceptual confusion and lumps together types of killing that theoretically should be kept distinct. If for example, genocide comes to mean all deaths due to government actions, whether lining up people and machine-gunning them, executing prisoners of war, gassing Jews, creating a famine due to bad agricultural policies, the death of children because of ignorant welfare policies, or the accidental creation of fatal disease among subject natives, then we would have to invent a concept to cover the intentional murder of people by virtue of their group identity. Since we already have the concept of genocide for that purpose, we really should create allied concepts to define other types of deaths due to government.
One concept, already suggested in the literature (Harff and Gurr, 1988; Rummel, 1900) is politicide. This defines that killing done intentionally by government for political-ideological purposes, including those killed because of their politics or political views. This is not purely exclusive of genocide, since there are cases, as in the Soviet deportation and murder of ethnic Germans during World War II, that are both genocide and politicide. Generally, however, I have found that this overlap will be but a smaller part of the politicide carried out by mortacracies, even for Nazi Germany. It usually would include, for example, executing purged communist party members, or murdering anti-communists, counterrevolutionaries, social democrats, dissidents, or critics.
Another concept is mass murder, or government's intentional and indiscriminate murder of a large number of people. Obviously, in meaning this can overlap with genocide and politicide, but it can also include random executions of civilians, as in the German reprisals against partisan sabotage in Yugoslavia; working prisoners to death, as in the Soviet Kolyma mining camps; the blanket fire bombing of cities, as in the American bombing of Tokyo-Yokohama in 1945 or atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; or atrocities committed by soldiers, as in the 1937 Japanese rape and pillage of Nanking (which probably killed some 200,000 people).
But then there is killing that does not easily fit into any or these categories. There is, for example, murder by quota carried out by the Soviets, Chinese communists, and North Vietnamese. Government (or party) agencies would order subordinate units to kill a certain number of "enemies of the people," "rightists," or "tyrants," and the precise application of the order was left to the units involved. Moreover, millions of people died in labor or concentration camps not because of their social identity or political beliefs, but simply because they got in the way, violated some Draconian rule, did not express sufficient exuberance over the regime, innocently sat on a newspaper with the picture of Stalin showing, or simply was a body that was needed for labor (as the Nazis would grab women innocently walking along a road in Ukraine and deport them to Germany for forced labor). And there are the hundreds of thousands of peasants that slowly died of disease, malnutrition, overwork, and hunger in Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge forced them under penalty of death to labor in the collectivized fields, expropriating virtually their whole harvest and refusing them adequate medical care.
I have covered all this murder as well as genocide and politicide by the concept of democide. Table 1 provides the definition [in place of the table, see Chapter 2 of Death By Government]; Table 2 gives an overview of this and the other concepts mentioned above, placing them into the context of other sources of mass death.
Democide is meant to define the killing by states as the concept of murder does individual killing in domestic society. Here intentionality (premeditation) is critical. This also includes practical intentionality. If a government causes deaths through a reckless and depraved indifference to human life, the deaths were as though intended. If through neglect a mother lets her baby die of malnutrition, this is murder. If we imprison a girl in our home, force her to do exhausting work fourteen hours a day, not even minimally feed and clothe her, and watch her gradually die a little each day without helping her, then her inevitable death is not only our fault, but our practical intention. It is murder. Similarly, for example, the Soviet system for forcibly transporting prisoners to labor camps was lethal. In transit hundreds of thousands of political prisoners died at the hands of criminals or guards, or from heat, cold, or inadequate food or water. Although not intended (indeed, this deprived the regime of their labor), the deaths were still murder. They were democide.
THE CONCEPT OF A TOTALITARIAN STATE
Power kills, absolute Power kills absolutely.
This Power Principle is the message emerging from research on the causes of war and current, comparative study of democide in this century. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more it is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of Power, totalitarian governments have slaughtered their people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT DEMOCRACIES?
This belligerence of nondemocracies, that is, authoritarian and totalitarian states, is not an artifact of either a small number of democracies nor of our era. For one thing the number of democracies ("free" states) in 1991 numbered 75 out of 171, or about 44 percent of the world's states.[3] Yet we have had no war among them. Nor is there any threat of war. They create an oasis of peace.
Moreover, this is historically true of democracies as well. If one relaxes the definition of democracy to mean simply the restraint on Power by the participation of middle and lower classes in the determination of power holders and policy making, then there have been many democracies throughout history. And whether considering the classical Greek democracies, democratic forest states of Switzerland, or other historical democratic polities, they did not fight each other (depending on how war and democracy is defined, some might prefer to say that they rarely fought each other). Moreover, once those states that had been mortal enemies, that had frequently gone to war (as have France and Germany in recent centuries), became democratic, war ceased between them. Paradigmatic of this is Western Europe since 1945. The cauldron of our most disastrous wars for many centuries, in 1945 one would find few experts so foolhardy as to predict not only forty-six years of peace, but that at the end of that time there would be a European community with central government institutions, moves toward a joint European military force by France and Germany, and zero expectation of violence between any of these formerly hostile states. Yet such has happened. All because they are all democracies. Even among primitive tribes, it seems, where Power is divided and limited, war is less likely.
Were all to be said about Power is that it causes war and the attendant slaughter of the young and most capable of our species, this would be enough. But much worse is that even without the excuse of combat, Power also murders in cold blood even more of those helpless people it controls, near four times more of them.
Consider Table 4 and Figure 1 , the list and its graph of this century's megamurderers--those states killing in cold blood, aside from warfare, 1,000,000 or more men, women, and children. At present count,[4] these eleven megamurderers have wiped out 142,902,000 people, almost four times the battle-dead in all this century's international and civil wars.[5]
Absolute Power, that is the U.S.S.R., Communist China, Nazi Germany, Militarist Japan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Communist Vietnam, and Communist Yugoslavia account for 128,744,000 of them, or 90 percent. Absolute Power breeds mortacracies.
Then there are the kilomurderers, or those states that have killed innocents by the tens or hundreds of thousands, such as Communist Afghanistan, Angola, Laos, Ethiopia, North Korea, and Rumania, non-communist totalitarian Iran (post-1979) and Croatia (1941-44), as well as authoritarian Argentina, Burundi, Chile, Czechoslovakia (1945-46), Indonesia, Iraq, Rwanda, Spain, Sudan, and Uganda. These and other kilomurderers, and I am still counting, add an additional 8,361,000 people killed to the democide for this century, as shown in Table 4 .
Now, democracies themselves are responsible for some of this democide. Detailed estimates have yet to be made, but preliminarily work suggests that some 2,000,000 foreigners have been killed in cold blood by democracies. This would include those killed in indiscriminate or civilian targeted city bombing, as of Germany and Japan in World War II.[6] It would include the large scale massacres of Filipinos during the bloody American colonization of the Philippines at the beginning of this century, deaths in British concentration camps in South Africa during the Boar War, civilian deaths due to starvation during the British blockade of Germany in and after World War I, the rape and murder of helpless Chinese in and around Peking in 1900, the atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam, the murder of helpless Algerians during the Algerian War by the French, and the unnatural deaths of German prisoners of war in French and American POW camps after World War II.
Moreover, the secret services of democracies may also carry on subversive activities in other states, support deadly coups, and actually encourage or support rebel or military forces that are involved in democidal activities. Such was done, for example, by the American CIA in the 1952 coup against Iran Prime Minister Mossadeq and the 1973 coup against Chile's democratically elected President Allende by General Pinochet. Then there was the secret support given the military in El Salvador and Guatemala although they were slaughtering thousands of presumed communist supporters, and that of the Contras in their war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in spite of their atrocities. Particularly reprehensible was the covert support given to the Generals in Indonesia as they murdered hundreds of thousands of communists and others after the alleged attempted communist coup in 1965, and the continued secret support given to General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan of Pakistan even as he was involved in murdering over a million Bengalis in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
All this killing of foreigners by democracies, complicity in such killing, or winking at allies doing such killing, may seem to violate the Power Principle, but really underlines it. For in each case, the killing or related activities were carried out in secret, behind a conscious cover of lies and deceit by those agencies and power-holders involved. In most cases they were shielded by tight censorship of the press and control of journalists. Even the indiscriminate bombing of German cities by the British was disguised before the House of Commons and in press releases as attacks on German military targets. That the general strategic bombing policy was to attack working men's homes was kept secret for long after the war.
The upshot is that even in democracies, Power can take root in particular institutions, remain unchecked and undisciplined, and hide its activities, and murder en masse. Such Power usually flourishes during wartime, for then the military are often given far greater power, democratic controls over civilian leaders are weak, and the press labors under strict reigns. Indeed, democracies then become garrison states, Power is freed from many institutional restraints (note how easy it was during World War II to put tens of thousands of American citizens--Japanese Americans--in concentration camps for nothing more than being of Japanese ancestry), and where it can become absolute, as in the military, it may kill absolutely. Witness Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[7]
THE DYNAMICS OF POWER
These specific causes or factors accelerate the likelihood of war or democide once some trigger event occurs and absolute or near absolute Power is present. That is, Power is a necessary cause for war or democide. When the elite have absolute power, war or democide is part of the following process (which I call the "conflict helix" [Rummel, 1991]).
In any society, including the international one, relations between individuals and groups is structured by social contracts determined by previous conflicts, accommodations, and adjustments among them. These social contracts define a structure of expectations that guide and regulate the social order, including Power. And this structure is based on a particular balance of powers (understood as an equation of interests, capabilities, and wills) among individuals and groups. That is, previous conflict and possibly violence determine a balance of power between competing individuals and groups and a congruent structure of expectations (as for example, war or revolution ends in a new balance of powers between nations or groups and an associated peace treaty or constitution). This structure of expectations often consists of new laws and norms defining a social order more consistent with the underlying distribution of relative power.
However, relative power never remains constant. It shifts as the interests, capabilities, and will of the parties change. The death of a charismatic leader, the outrage of significant groups, the loss of foreign support by out groups, the entry into war and the resulting freedom of the elite to use force under the guise of war-time necessity, and so on, can significantly alter the balance of power between groups. Where such a shift in power is in favor of the governing elite, Power can now achieve its potential. Where also the elite have built up frustrations regarding those who have lost power or nonetheless feel threatened by them, where they see them as outside the moral universe, where they have dehumanized them, where the outgroup is culturally or ethnically distinct and the elite perceive them as inferior, or where any other such factors are present, Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster that will justify beginning the murder en masse.
The result of such violence will be a new balance of power and attendant social contract. In some cases this may end the democide, as by the elimination of the "inferior" group (as of the Armenians by the Turks). In many cases this will subdue and cower the survivors (as the Ukrainians who lived through Stalin's collectivization campaign and intentional famine). In some cases, this establishes a new balance of power so skewed toward the elite that they may throughout their reign continue to murder at will. Murder as public policy becomes part of the new structure of expectations of the new social order. Consider the social orders of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and their henchmen.
As should be clear from all this, I believe that war and democide can be understood within a common framework. It is part of a social process, a balancing of powers, where Power is supreme.
It is not clear from this, however, why among states where Power is limited and accountable, war and significant democide do not take place. Two concepts explain this: cross pressures and the associated political culture. Where Power is diffused, checked, accountable, society is riven by myriad independent groups, disparate institutions, and multiple interests. These overlap and contend; they section loyalties and divide desires and wants. Churches, unions, corporations, government bureaucracies, political parties, the media, special interest groups, and such, fight for and protect their interests. Individuals and the elite are pushed and pulled by their membership in several such groups and institutions. And it is difficult for any one driving interest to form. They are divided, weak, ambivalent; they are cross-pressured. And for the elite to sufficiently coalesce to commit itself to murdering its own citizens, there must be a near fanatical, driving interest. But even were such present among a few, the diversity of interests across the political elite and associated bureaucracies, the freedom of the media to dig out what is being planned or done, and the ever present potential leaks and fear of such leaks of disaffected elite to the media, brake such tendencies.
As to the possibility of war between democracies, diversity and resulting cross-pressures operate as well. Not only is it very difficult for the elite to unify public interests and opinion sufficiently to make war, but there are usually diverse, economic, social, and political bonds between democracies that tie them together and oppose violence.
But there is more to these restraints on Power in a democracy. Cross-pressures is a social force that operates wherever individual and group freedom predominates. It is natural to a spontaneous social field. But human behavior is not only a matter of social forces, it also depends on the meanings and values that things have and on individual norms. That is, democratic culture is also essential. When Power is checked and accountable, when cross-pressures limit the operation of Power, a particular democratic culture develops. This culture involves debate, demonstrations, protests, but also negotiation, compromise, and tolerance. It involves the arts of conflict resolution and the acceptance of democratic procedures at all levels of society. The ballot replaces the bullet, and particularly, people and groups come to accept a loss on this or that interest as only an unfortunate outcome of the way the legitimate game is played ("Lose today, win tomorrow").
That democratic political elite would kill opponents or commit genocide for some public policy is unthinkable (although such does occur in the isolated and secret corners of government where Power can still lurk). Even in modern democracies, publicly defining and dehumanizing outgroups has become a social and political evil. Witness the current potency of such allegations as "racism" or "sexism." Of course, the culture of democracy operates between democracies as well. Diplomacy, negotiating a middle-way, seeking common interests, is part of the operating medium among democracies. A detailed political history of the growth of the European Community would well display this. Since each democracy takes the legitimacy of the other and their interests for granted, conflict then is only a process of nonviolent learning and adjustment between them. Conferences, not war, is the instrumentality for settling disputes.
THE STATUS OF THE LITERATURE ON DEMOCIDE
Moreover, even the toll of war itself is not well understood. Many estimate that World War II, for example, killed 40,000,000 to 60,000,000 people. But the problem with such figures is that they include tens of millions killed in democide. Many war-time governments massacred civilians and foreigners, committed atrocities or genocide against them, and subjected them to reprisals. Aside from battle or military engagements, during the war the Nazis murdered some 20,946,000 civilians and prisoners of war; the Japanese, 5,890,000; the Chinese Nationalists, 5,907,000; the Chinese communists, 250,000; the Nazi satellite Croatians, 655,000; the Tito partisans, 600,000; and Stalin, 13,053,000 (above the 20,000,000 war-dead and democide by the Nazis of Soviet Jews and Slavs). I also should mention the civilian targeted bombing by the Allies that killed hundreds of thousands. Most of these deaths are usually included among the war-dead. But those killed in battle versus in democide form distinct conceptual and theoretical categories and should not be confused. That these separate categories have been consistently and sometimes intentionally combined helps raise the toll during World War II, for example, to some 60,000,000 people, way above the estimated 15,000,000 killed in battle and military action (Small and Singer, 1982). Even the almost universally accepted count of genocide during this war of "6,000,000" Jews has been generally included in the total dead for the war, which has further muddled our research and thought.[8]
Even more, our appreciation of the incredible scale of this century's democide has been stultified by lack of concepts and data. Democide is committed by absolute Power, its agency is government. The discipline for studying and analyzing power and government and associated genocide and mass murder is political science. But except for a few specific cases, such as the Holocaust and Armenian genocide, and a precious few more general works, one is hard put to find political science research specifically on this.
One university course I teach is "Introduction to Political Science." Each semester I review several possible introductory texts (the best measure of the discipline) for the course. At this stage of my research on democide, with the results shown in Table 4, I often just shake my head at what I find. The concepts and views promoted in standard political science texts appear grossly unrealistic; they do not fit or explain, and are even contradictory to the existence of a Hell-State like Pol Pot's Cambodia, a Gulag-State like Stalin's Soviet Union, or a Genocide-State like Hitler's Germany.
For instance, one textbook I recently read spends a chapter on describing the functions of government. Among these were law and order, individual security, cultural maintenance, and social welfare. Political scientists are still writing this eventhough we now have numerous examples of governments that kill millions of their own citizens, enslave the rest, and abolish traditional culture (it took only about a year for the Khmer Rouge to completely uproot and extinguish Buddhism, which had been the heart and soul of Cambodian culture). A systems approach to politics still dominates the field. Through this lens, politics is a matter of inputs and outputs, of citizen inputs, aggregation by political parties, government determining policy, and bureaucracies implementing it. There is especially the common and fundamental justification of government that it exists to protect citizens against the anarchic jungle that would otherwise threaten their lives and property. Such archaic or sterile views show no appreciation of democide's existence and all its related horrors and suffering. They are inconsistent with a regime that stands astride society like a gang of thugs over hikers they have captured in the woods, robbing all, raping some, torturing others for fun, murdering those they don't like, and terrorizing the rest into servile obedience. This is an exact characterization of many past and present governments, e.g., Idi Amin's Uganda, and it hardly squares with conventional political science.
Consider also that many books have been written on the possible nature and consequences of nuclear war and how it might be avoided. Yet, in the toll from democide, possibly even more than 350,000,000 people killed at the high end or the range, we have experienced in this century the equivalent of nuclear war. Yet to my knowledge, there is only one book dealing with the human cost of this "nuclear war"--Gil Elliot's Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, and to my knowledge he is not a political scientist.
What is needed is a reconceptualization of government and politics consistent with what we now know about democide and related misery. New concepts have to be invented, old ones realigned to correct our perception of Power. We need to invent concepts for governments that turn their states into a border-to-border concentration camp, that purposely starve to death millions of their citizens, that set up quotas of those that should be killed from one village or town to another (although murder by quota was carried out by the Soviets, Chinese communists, and Vietnamese, I could not find in any introductory or general political science texts even a recognition that governments can be so incredibly inhumane). We have no concept for murder as an aim of public policy, determined by discussion among the governing elite in the highest councils, and imposed through government bureaucracy. Indeed, in virtually no index to any general book on politics and government will one find a reference to genocide, mass murder, killed, dead, executed, or massacre. Such is not even usually indexed in books on the Soviet Union or China. Most even omit index references to concentration or labor camps or gulag, even though they may have a paragraph or so on them.
The preeminent fact about government is that some murder millions in cold blood. This is where absolute Power reigns. The second fact is that some, usually the same governments, murder tens of thousands more through foreign aggression and intervention. Absolute Power again. These two facts alone must be the basis of our reconceptualization and taxonomies; not, as it is today, only whether states are developed or not, third world or not, powerful or not, large or not. But also and what is more important, whether Power is absolute and has engaged in genocide, politicide, and mass murder--whether they are mortacracies or not.
THE LITERATURE IN ENGLISH ON TOTALITARIAN DEMOCIDE
This is not to deny that there are some guesses and calculations about democide in the literature. Nor should one ignore the work on particular totalitarian engines of death, such as the Soviet labor or concentration camp or the secret police, although this work has also been terribly scarce compared to research on Soviet military power, political institutions, or economy. Indeed, besides my own, I could find only five works in English that have primarily focused on the overall democide of specific totalitarian states (Conquest, 1970; Dyadkin, 1983; Shalom, 1984, Walker, 1971, Wytwycky, 1980), and only one of them (Dyadkin) is a book.
As I have gone through stack after stack of books on a particular totalitarian state, I have been aghast at the number and detail of tables on such as their steel production, pigs, urban work force, tractors in use, railroads, exports, literacy, population, and on and on, by comparison to the lack of even snippets of data or "guesstimates" on concentration camps, forced laborers, arrests, executions, prison population, tortures, disappearances, massacres, genocide, suicides, deported, formally ostracized (in effect a sentence of death by starvation), famine deaths, and so on. Do economic, demographic, and trade statistics really matter, even where they are not falsified by the regime, when it is murdering hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions, of its citizens and millions more suffer and die at slave labor? Of what moment is it to know that the estimated 1976 gross national product for the Hell State of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was $540 million when Pol Pot was in the process of murdering between one-fourth to one-third of the total population. It is as though we concerned ourselves with the income and hours worked of our neighbor while he was starving his children to death. Going through this literature for information on democide is like mining gold: so many stacks of books will produce so many sentences of useful information. Then, sometimes one will hit a rich vein, such as the work of Robert Conquest (1968) on the Soviet Union or Hoang Van Chi (1964) on Vietnam.
In the following bibliography I have focused on the rare works in English that at least give an occasional nugget of information. Moreover, I have also included works that provide useful background for understanding when democide occurred and why. A frustrating amount of selectivity was required, and not all readers will agree that the works included are the best for this purpose. They are, however, the ones that I found most useful for my work on democide.
NOTES
* Published as Rummel, R.J. "Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers." In Israel Charny (Ed.), The Widening Circle of Genocide: Genocide: A critical Bibliographic Review Vol. 3, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1994.1. Power capitalized stands for power and its holders (such as Stalin), agencies (such as government departments and bureaucracies), and instruments (such as armies, concentration camps, and propaganda).2. An exception would appear to be barely democratic Finland, which joined Nazi Germany in its war on the Soviet Union during World War II and thus was technically at war with the Democratic Allies. No military action took place between Finland and the Allies, however.3. See Freedom House's Freedom Review, 22 (January-February 1992), 6.4. I am still in the process of collecting statistics and counting the democide for states and groups in this century. The final figures will be [have been] published in Rummel ( 1997). Moreover, the totals for all states except the USSR, PRC, and Nazi Germany are preliminary totals.5. The reason these figures are not rounded to millions or tens of millions is that they result from the summation and calculation of hundreds of sub-estimates, and therefore if rounded would differ from the correct sum, often by hundreds of thousands.6. Deliberately targeting civilians with explosive and incendiary bombs simply because they happen to be under the command and control of an enemy Power is no better than lining them up and machine-gunning them, a clear atrocity. In 1972, the International Red Cross held a conference of experts out of which came a protocol defining the limits of air warfare. This has become widely accepted (although not ratified) and probably expresses customary international law. It outlaws any direct air attacks on civilians, including the type of terror and anti-morale attacks Great Britain and the United States carried out on German and Japanese cities.7. Until I did a comparative study of democide, I had accepted the argument that this slaughter of civilians shortened the war and avoided perhaps more than a million being killed in the Allied invasion of Japan. However, this strategic reason for killing innocent civilians in wartime has been used throughout history. The Japanese terror bombing of Chinese cities during the Sino-Japanese War was justified as a method to shorten the war. The killing of all inhabitants of a city by the Mongols once its defense were breached was justified by the terror it caused among inhabitants of other cities, who would then surrender at once rather than suffer the same fate. Even the Nazi reprisal murders of tens of thousands of civilians in occupied countries was justified by them as a way of terrorizing civilians into compliance and served to protect German lives.8. During the war the Soviets committed genocide against at least nine of their distinct ethnic-linguistic sub-nations, including ethnic Germans, ethnic Greeks, Crimean Tatars, and Balkars. Genocides by others include those of the Germans against Slavs, Gypsies, and homosexuals; Croatians against the Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies; the Serbs against Croatians and Moslems; the Hungarians against their Jews; the Serbs, Poles, and Czechs against their ethnic Germans.9. The Turkish 1915-1918 genocide against the Armenians in 1915-1918 in which perhaps 1,000,000 or more were murdered is not included here. At the time the government of the Young Turks was largely authoritarian, not totalitarian. Separate communities in Turkey had a great deal of autonomy, the economy was largely a free market, and the dictatorial government mainly restricted itself, as had the Ottoman Empire, to maintaining and assuring its power and repressing any political competition or opposition.
REFERENCES
Fein, Helen (1984). "Scenarios of Genocide: Models of Genocide and Critical Responses," In Charny, Israel W. Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide. Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 3-31.
Porter, Jack Nusan (1982). "Introduction: What is Genocide? Notes toward a Definition," In Genocide and Human Rights: A Global Anthology, [edited] by Jack Nusan Porter. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, pp. 2-32.
Rummel, R.J. (1991). The Conflict Helix: Principles and Practices of Interpersonal, Social, and International Conflict and Cooperation. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. 297 pp.
Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder in the Twentieth Century.
Small, M., and Singer, J. David (1976). The war-proneness of democratic regimes, 1816-1965. Jerusalem Journal International Relations, 1 (Summer), 50-69.
Small, Melvin, and Singer, J. David (1982). Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816-1980. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.
Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
General Works
These are sources providing general or comparative analyses that include totalitarian states, or statistics on democide in more than one of them. Throughout the annotations, when the authors use "genocide" broadly to mean what I am calling democide, I employ the latter term to describe their work.Chalk, Frank, and Jonassohn, Kurt (1990). The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analysis and Case Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press. 461 pp. [Published in cooperation with the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies]
This is an important and seminal overview of democide throughout history. Through excerpts from major and often original works on genocide and mass murder, the authors also cover the most infamous cases of democide in this century. Most relevant here are there chapters on the Holocaust and Stalin's and Pol Pot's democides.
Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) (1984). Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide. Boulder: Westview Press. 396 pp.
This collection of papers on genocide and mass murder is a path-breaking contribution to our knowledge of such killing. Besides chapters dealing with the Holocaust, these papers also cover the genocide by China in Tibet, the Cambodian democide, and the Soviet genocidal famine in Ukraine.
Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) (1988). Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review. London: Mansell Publishing Co., and New York: Facts on File Publications. 273 pp.
Has bibliographic chapters on the Holocaust, the Cambodian democide, and the Soviet genocidal famine in Ukraine.
Charny, Israel W. (1991). Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, Volume 2. London: Mansell Publishing Co., and New York: Facts on File Publications, 432 pp.
Has bibliographic chapters on the Holocaust and a number of general chapters relevant to democide by totalitarian states.
Glaser, Kurt, and Possony, Stefan T. (1979). Victims of Politics: The State of Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press. 614 pp.
In considering human rights, the authors comprehensively deal with all aspects of mass murder, including the Holocaust and Soviet and Communist Chinese democide. Moreover, these are treated as relevant in chapters on torture, forced labor, genocide (see particularly the chronology of genocide, mass expulsions and forced migrations, and the oppression of nationalities). This is one of the most comprehensive works on human rights in all its meanings and a useful starting work for those beginning study in this area.
Horowitz, Irving Louis (1980). Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power. [Third edition] New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. 199 pp.
In this revision of his 1976 Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder, he argues for a new typology of societies that would take into account their mass killing of human beings. At one side of a scale he suggests would-be genocidal societies, at the other permissive societies. This is an innovative work and ideal source for those doing conceptual-theoretical work on democide.
Kuper, Leo (1981). Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 255 pp.
This is a must read for students of democide. It overviews state murder, while covering the historical and political context and the relevant international conventions It presents an helpful overview of theories of democide, and its social structure and process. His analysis of democide and the sovereign state is important for those who neglect this international legal framework that permits such mass murder.
Totten, Samuel, and Parsons, William S. (Eds.) (1991). Special section: Teaching about Genocide. Social Education, 55 (2), 84-133.
Articles deal with the Nazi genocide of the Jews and Gypsies, and the Cambodian and Soviet democides; presents a brief list of genocidal acts during this century (p. 129).
Veenhoven, Willem A., and Crum Ewing, Winifred (Eds.) (1975-1976). Case Studies on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms: A World Survey, 5 v. The Hague: Nijhoff. [Published for the Foundation for the Study of Plural Societies]
Includes chapters on Eastern Europe, communist China, and the Soviet gulag. Some articles, such as the one on gulag, provide much specific information on democide.
Wallimann, Isidor, and Dobkowski, Michael N. (Eds.) (1987). Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death. NY: Greenwood Press. 322 pp. [Afterword by Richard L. Rubenstein]
Contains important taxonomic, theoretical, and overview chapters. The theoretical chapters on the Holocaust by John K. Roth, Alan Rosenberg, and Robert G.L. Waite are of particular relevance here.
Calculations of Overall Democide
Elliot, Gil (1972). Twentieth Century Book of the Dead. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press. 242 pp.
Until recently this was the only work in English that tried to total all deaths from war and democide in this century. In many of the statistics the two are lumped together, and there usually are no sources given for them. Moreover, the usefulness of many of the subclassifications are questionable, such as those killed by "small guns" versus "big guns." However, as a pioneering effort it breaks new ground, and provides a helpful context for understanding a major democide by trying to see it through the eyes of an average victim. It concludes that major 20th century violence has caused 110,000,000 deaths (p. 215), which in the light of current research is much too low.
Foreign Affairs Research Institute (1979). The current death toll of international communism. Paper. London: 12 pp. [Arrow House, 27-31 Whitehall, London SW1A, United Kingdom]
Details, with citations, the democide in each communist state, and concludes that the toll "could not be lower than 70 million and must number at some point up to twice that conservative minimum" (p. 11).
Harff, Barbara, and Gurr, Ted Robert (1988). Toward empirical theory of genocides and politicides: Identification and measurement of cases since 1945. International Studies Quarterly, 32 (3), 359-371.
Pursuant to developing a typology of democide, the authors provide (without sources) what is meant to be a comprehensive listing of democides since World War II. The list is limited, however, as can be seen from their total of 7,000,000 to 16,000,000 killed (p. 370), the high being near half of the number probably killed by communist China alone since 1949. Nonetheless, this work is pioneering, and their list and typology useful.
Rummel, R.J. (1986). War isn't this century's biggest killer. The Wall Street Journal, (7 July). [Editorial page]
Presents the result of a preliminary survey of democide in this century, and gives the figure of 119,400,000 killed in democide (95,200,000 by communist states) compared to 35,700,000 battle-dead in all foreign and domestic wars.
Rummel, R.J. (1987). Deadlier than war. IPA Review, 41 (2), 24-30. [Institute of Public Affairs, 6th Floor, 83 William Street, Melbourne, 3000, Australia]
This presents the overall results given in the above Wall Street Journal article, in addition to breakdown of the total for each country and the sources of information. A theoretical elaboration is also given, emphasizing the role of freedom in preventing democide.
Rummel, R.J. (1988). As though a nuclear war: the death toll of absolutism. International Journal on World Peace, 5 (3), 27-43.
This is a republication of the above IPA article in a generally more accessible source.
Stewart-Smith, D. G. (1964) The Defeat of Communism. London: Ludgate Press. 482 pp.
A book-length narrative chronology of communism. Provides relevant war and democide statistics at points in the chronology. Concludes that the communists killed 83,500,000 people in war and democide, excluding World War II (p. 223).
SOVIET UNION
General Works
Heller, Mikhail and Nekrich, Aleksandr (1986). Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present. New York: Summit Books, 1986. 877 pp. [Translated by Phyllis B. Carlos]One of the best histories of the Soviet Union, it provides insight into motives and processes, while being sensitive to how, when, and what of democide.Kravchenko, Victor (1946). I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 496 pp.
This is a must read. It is the first hand account of much of the party's thinking, democide, and related events by one intimately involved as an official. So damaging was the publication of this book that the Soviets launched a very effective propaganda and disinformation campaign against it.
Calculations of Soviet Democide
Conquest, Robert (1970). The Human Cost of Soviet Communism. Washington, DC: United States Senate, 91st. Congress, 2d Session, Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 25 pp.A very useful overview of Soviet killing and one of the few attempts to calculate the overall Soviet democide. Conquest concludes by quoting the minimum of 20,000,000 dead calculated in his Great Terror (see below), and then adds that at least several million would have to be added to the figure for the Stalin-Yezhov period.Dyadkin, Iosif G. (1983). Unnatural Deaths in the USSR, 1928-1954. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 80 pp. [Translated by Tania Deruguine. Introduction by Nick Eberstadt]
Until recently, this was the only book in English wholly devoted to determining Soviet democide. A former professor of geophysics at the All-Union Geophysical Research Institute, Kalinin, USSR, Dyadkin wrote this former samizdat (underground literature) based on "census" returns. He calculated that for the years 1926 to 1954, repression cost 26,000,000 to 35,450,000 lives, excluding war-dead (pp. 41, 48, 55, 60). For the same period he determined that the population deficit was 78,000,000, including unborn, were there no repression (p. 59). For this samizdat he was imprisoned in the gulag for three years.Maximoff, G. P. (1940). The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (Data and Documents) . Chicago: The Chicago Section of the Alexander Berkman Fund. 624 pp. [Translated from Russian]
An important and statistics-filled attempt to document Lenin's democide in the years immediately following the Bolshevik coup in 1917. For example, Maximoff calculates a democide of at least 70,000 in 1921, including a "most conservative" 30,000 to 40,000 executed (p. 199). This is an eye opener for those who insist that Lenin had little blood on his hands.Rummel, R.J. (1990.). Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. New Brunswick, NJ : Transaction Publishers. 268 pp.
A historical and statistical analysis of Soviet democide. Concludes that 61,911,000 people probably were killed, including 54,767,000 citizens.
Stalin and His Period
In the bloody history of the Soviet Union, Stalin's reign from 1928 to 1953 was the most ruthless. At an absolute minimum, he and his communist henchmen murdered at least 19,641,000 people through terror, deportations, gulag, the intentional Ukrainian famine, purges, and collectivization, possibly as many as 91,685,000; a most reasonable figure is probably around 42,672,000. The following studies focus particularly on Stalin, but relevant figures also are given by most of the general or topical studies listed for the Soviet Union.Antonov-Ovseenko, Anton (1981). The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny. New York: Harper & Row. 374 pp. [Translated by George Saunders. Introduction by Stephen F. Cohen]
An in-depth treatment and analysis of this period, with helpful information on Stalin's various democides. He claims that Stalin killed 30,000,000 to 40,000,000 people (p. 126).Conquest, Robert (1968). The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties. New York: Macmillan. 633 pp.
A thorough investigation into the background, reasons, and consequences of Stalin's great purge of the communist party from 1937 to 1938 in which perhaps 1,000,000 people were executed (p. 532). Packed full of details and useful information on the 1930s. Conquest presents an appendix in which he carefully considers diverse evidence on the human toll under Stalin and finds that for twenty-three years of his rule, "we get a figure of 20 million dead, which is almost certainly too low and might require an increase of 50 percent or so" (p. 533). This is perhaps the most widely quoted figure about Soviet democide in the literature.Conquest, Robert (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press. 570 pp.
Based on the most recent information revealed as a result of greater freedom in the Soviet Union, Conquest reconsiders the above calculated democide under Stalin and, without explicitly altering his above estimate, he concludes that "the sheer magnitudes of the Stalin holocaust are now beyond doubt" (p. 487).Medvedev, Roy A. (1979). On Stalin and Stalinism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 205 pp. [Translated by Ellen de Kadt]
As a judicious and insightful analysis of Soviet communism and Stalin's period by a Marxist historian, this work is an important corrective to the work of many Western Sovietologists. He cites demographer M. Maksudov's claim that from 1918 to 1953 there were 22,000,000 to 23,000,000 unnatural deaths (pp. 140-41).Tolstoy, Nikolai (1981). Stalin's Secret War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 463 pp.
A fact-filled and democide-sensitive analysis of Stalin's period and a good source of different kinds of democide statistics.
Gulag
The concentration and forced labor camps, the system of which is now known as gulag, were the most lethal Soviet institutions. Their major product was death, and only secondarily work. Established by Lenin, the camps were vastly developed by Stalin such that in the post World War II period they contained perhaps 12,000,000 prisoners, even possibly 20,000,000. The overall toll in gulag, including those dying in transit to or between camps, was probably from 15,919,000 to 82,281,000 prisoners, most likely 39,464,000. The following works help substantiate these figures while providing a feel for the slow and miserable deaths underlying these figures.Conquest, Robert (1978). Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps. New York: Viking Press. 254 pp.
A must read. This is a chilling and detailed history of the forced labor mining camps in Kolyma (northeastern Siberia). Life expectancy in some of these camps was measured in months; in some no one survived. The overall rough average death rate was 25 percent per year (p. 220); and Conquest calculates that from the 1930s to the 1950s, 2,000,000 to 5,500,000 died in these camps alone (pp. 227-28).Kosyk, Volodymyr (1962). Concentration Camps in the USSR. London: Ukrainian Publishers.
This is a careful statistical analysis of the number of prisoners in the camps and approximate number of deaths for each year from 1927 to 1958. He concludes that overall 32,600,000 died in the camps, but he also says this figure is probably too low (p. 79).Panin, Dimitri (1976). The Notebooks of Sologdin. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 320 pp. [Translated by John Moore]
Written by a mechanical engineer who spent over a dozen years in the camps, this is an excellent analysis of Soviet democide and particularly of gulag. He estimates that 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 people were murdered from 1922 to 1928 (p. 93n), a period that many Sovietologists claim was relatively free of terror and mass killing. Overall, from 1917 to 1953, he puts the democide at 57,000,000 to 69,500,000 people (p. 93n).Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I (1973). The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volumes I-II. New York: Harper & Row. 660 pp. [Translated by Thomas P. Whitney]
This and the following two volumes not only have received international acclaim for their personal, historical, and analytical description of gulag, but they caused many Westerners to reconsider their pro-communism or sympathy for the Soviet Union. These must be read by anyone wishing to get a feel for the camps, their administration, sheer misery, and death. Of particular worth is that the camps are treated as part of a process, beginning with the very nature of communist rule, its terror, the arrest, torture and sentencing, prison, transit to the camps, life and death in the camps, administrative resentencing, and for survivors, conditional release.Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. (1975). The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volumes III-IV. NY: Harper & Row. 712 pp. [Translated by Thomas P. Whitney]
Solzhenitsyn cites a professor of statistics Kurnanov, who claims that "internal repression" cost 66,000,000 lives (p. 10).
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. (1978). The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volumes V-VII. New York: Harper & Row. 558 pp. [Translated by Harry Willetts]
Zorin, Libushe (1980). Soviet Prisons and Concentration Camps: An Annotated Bibliography 1917-1980. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners. 118 pp.
Ukraine Famine
From 1932 to 1933, Stalin purposely starved to death 5,000,000, maybe even 10,000,000 Ukrainians, probably to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and destroy peasant opposition to collectivism. Many works have recently been published on this, and only the most noteworthy can be listed here. Several excellent studies are also included in the general works listed earlier at the beginning of this bibliography.Conquest, Robert (1986). The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. New York: Oxford University Press. 412 pp.
This is the best work on the famine. It gives details and evidence not widely available. Conquest carefully considers whether the famine was in fact intentional, and after weighing opposing arguments he concludes that it had to be. He also evaluates separate estimates of the toll and gives his reasoning for selecting his estimate that 5,000,000 thus died in the Ukraine (p. 306).Dalrymple, Dana G. (1964). The Soviet famine of 1932-1934. Soviet Studies, 15 (3), 250-284.
Perhaps the first scholarly study published on the famine that views it as intentional. He compares a variety of estimates of the toll and accepts a figure around 5,000,000 for the famine in and outside the Ukraine (p. 250).Mace, James E. (1984). Famine and nationalism in Soviet Ukraine. Problems of Communism, (May-June), 37-50.
An excellent presentation of the information on the famine and its context. Mace argues that according to accepted international definitions, this famine was genocide (p. 37). Using demographic statistics, he calculates that 7,500,000 Ukrainians died as a result (p. 39).Serbyn, Roman, and Krawchenko, Bohdan (Eds.) (1986). Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta.
A collection of factual and significant studies on the famine
World War II Repatriation
Tolstoy, Nikolai (1979). Victims of Yalta. London: Corgi Books. 640 pp. [Revised and updated edition]This is a detailed historical study of the forced repatriation of Soviet citizens and others into Soviet hands by the Allies as World War II came to an end and after. Some 5,500,000 people were repatriated, among whom (based on statistics Tolstoy gives) perhaps 825,000 to 1,100,000 were killed (pp. 515-16), many within hours of being repatriated.
Treatment of Occupied or Absorbed Nations
Gross, Jan T. (1988). Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. 334 pp.A description of the Soviet rape of Poland from 1939 to 1940, mass murder of Poles, and the deportation of 1,250,000 others (p. 146) to inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union; through September 1941, 300,000 Poles died from deportation and in concentration camps (p. 229).Misiunas, Romuald J., and Taagepera, Rein (1983). The Baltic States: Years of Dependence 1940-1980. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. 333 pp.
An excellent history of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. Gives a statistical appendix, which includes figures on war and occupation deaths 1940-1945 (with a "very approximate 'questimate'" of 550,000 dead). Also presents information on the deportation of Balts in which many died, perhaps over 100,000 in 1949 and after (p. 100).Conquest, Robert (1970). The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities. London: Macmillan. 222 pp. [Revision of the 1960 ed. published under the title: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities]
This is a balanced description of the deportation of Soviet national and ethnic groups during World War II, including a conservative analysis of the numbers deported and their deaths. In total, 1,850,000 people from eight national/ethnic groups were deported (pp. 65-66), with a likely 530,000 dying as a result (p. 162).
COMMUNIST CHINA
General
In the magnitude of its killing, communist China is only second to the Soviet Union. Since they formerly seized power in 1949 and up to 1987, the Chinese communists killed 5,999,000 to 102,671,000 people, most likely 35,236,000 (not counting the toll of the great famine of 1959 to 1961, nor the 3,466,000 killed by the communists before they assumed total control). The following works particularly help understand this democide and provide supporting statistics.Chow Ching-wen (1960). Ten Years of Storm: The True Story of the Communist Regime in China. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 323 pp. [Translated and edited by Lai Ming. Foreword by Lin Yutang]
Chu, Valentin (1963). Ta Ta, Tan Tan: The Inside Story of Communist China. New York: W. W. Norton. 320 pp.[Ta ta, tan tan means fight fight, talk talk]
Garside, Roger (1981). Coming Alive: China After Mao. New York: McGraw-Hill. 458 pp.
Guillermaz, Jacques (1976). The Chinese Communist Party in Power 1949-1976. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 614 pp. [Translated by Anne Destenay]
Hunter, Edward (1958). The Black Book on China: the Continuing Revolt. New York: The Bookmailer. 136 pp.
Hunter believes the communist democide to be closer to 50,000,000 than to 30,000,000 (p. 137).
Labin, Suzanne (1960). The Anthill: The Human Condition in Communist China. New York: Praeger. 442 pp. [Translated by Edward Fitzgerald]
Tang, Peter S. H., and Maloney, Joan M. (1967). Communist China: The Domestic Scene 1949-1967. South Orange, NJ: Seton Hall University Press. 606 pp. [Introduction by John B. Tsu]
Calculations of Overall Democide
Li Cheng-Chung (1979). The Question of Human Rights on China Mainland. Republic of China: World Anti-Communist League, China Chapter. 180 pp.A description of the various ways in which the communist have violated human rights. Based on statistics from the Republic of China, the author calculates the democide as 78,860,000 people for 1949 to 1968, not counting the Korean War and guerrilla dead (p. 153).
Shalom, Stephen Rosskamm (1984). Deaths in China Due to Communism: Propaganda Versus Reality. Tempe, AZ: Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University. 234 pp. [Occasional Paper No. 15]
A must study for anyone interested in China's overall democide. This is a careful and detailed line by line critique of Walker's democide statistics (see below), which Shalom concludes are far too high. Rather, he calculates that 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 were killed from 1949 to 1970 (p. 111).Walker, Richard L. (1971) The Human Cost of Communism in China. Washington, DC: United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Government Printing Office. 28 pp.
He outlines the nature of communist Chinese democide and also gives a widely quoted table of democide organized by type, which adds up to a total (ignoring Korean War dead) of 31,750,000 to 58,500,000 killed between 1949 to 1970 (p. 16).Rummel, R.J. (1991.). China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. 333 pp.
Presents an historical and statistical analysis of communist democide from 1928 to 1987. Finds that the democide by the People's Republic of China probably amounted to 35,236,000 killed.
Mao Tse-tung
Mao Tse-tung (1967). Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, 4 vols. , Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press. [In English]This collection contains many selections that are essential reading for understanding the background of Mao's later policies and the underlying rationale for the associated democide.
Paloczi-Horvath, George (1963). Mao Tse-Tung: Emperor of the Blue Ants. NY: Doubleday. 393 pp.
Gulag
From 1949 to 1987, possibly as many as 15,720,000 Chinese died in the Chinese forced labor camps. Unlike for the Soviet gulag, there are few works on the Chinese camps system. Following are a some of the most relevant. Bao Ruo-Wang (Jean Pasqualini), and Chelminski, Rudolph (1973). Prisoner of Mao. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan. White Book on Forced Labour and Concentration Camps in the People's Republic of China I: The Hearings. (1956 circa) Paris: Commission Internationale Contre Le Régime Concentrationnaire. White Book on Forced Labour and Concentration Camps in the People's Republic of China: II: The Record. (1959 circa) Paris: Commission Internationale Contre Le Régime Concentrationnaire. Whyte, Martin King (1973). Corrective labor camps in China. Asian Survey, 13 (3), 253-269.Cultural Revolution
From 1964 to 1968, during the height of the killing associated with the violent cultural revolution, some 1,000,000 Chinese were murdered or otherwise killed. Few social revolutions have been as violent. The following works provide analysis and background for appreciating this democide and associated events.Domes, Jürgen (1973). The Internal Politics of China 1949-1972. New York: Praeger. 258 pp. [Translated by Rüdiger Machetzki]
An informative analysis of the events and debate among the top leaders that led to and comprised the Cultural Revolution.
Liu Guokai (1987). A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution. New York: M. E. Sharpe. 151 pp. [guest editor Anita Chan]
An abridged translated version of the author's essay published in China, this is a first rate analysis of the revolution by a participant.
Thurston, Anne F. (1987). Enemies of the People. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
NAZI GERMANY
General
Berenbaum, Michael (Ed.) (1990). Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis. New York: New York University Press. 244 pp.This is an especially important collection of articles that cover topics and provide information not easily available in other works. For example, there are chapters on Nazi policies in Ukraine, the U.S.S.R. proper, Poland, Belgium and France, as well as on the Slavs, the Nazi euthanasia program, forced labor, pacifists, and Croatia.Hirschfeld, Gerhard, (Ed.) (1986). The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany. London: Allen & Unwin. 172 pp. [Introduction by Wolfgang J. Mommsen] Kogon, Eugen (1960). The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. New York: The Berkley Publishing Co. 328 pp. [Translated by Heinz Norden]
Although relatively short in treatment, this gives a useful history and accounting of the Nazi concentration-death camp system. Kogon has a chapter on the "statistics of mortality" that gives a yearly breakdown of the concentration camp population and calculates the overall concentration/death camp death toll as 7,125,000 people (p. 251).
Calculations of Democide
Rummel, R. J. (1993.). Democide: Nazi Genocides and Mass Murder. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.150 pp.An attempt to outline and explain Nazi democide and collect available statistics to calculate the overall toll, including that in occupied countries. Finds that 20,946,000 people probably were murdered by the Nazis, including Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, and many others. The author argues that along with the democide of the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, this is another example that absolute ideology coupled with an absolute power of the state is deadly to human life.Wytwycky, Bohdan (1980). The Other Holocaust: Many Circles of Hell. Washington, D. C.: The Novak Report on the New Ethnicity. 93 pp.
Tries to explain and calculate the overall Nazi democide, especially focused on the Slavs. Wytwycky concludes that 15,450,000 to 16,300,000 Jews, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, Ukrainians, Poles, and Byelorrussians were murdered (pp. 91-2).
Holocaust: Genocide of the Jews
Among the many works on the Holocaust, the following have been selected for the detail and excellence of their treatment, the understanding they provide to a non-Holocaust scholar, and the usefulness of their calculations of the total genocide.Reitlinger, Gerald (1968). The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939-1945. London: Vallentine, Mitchell, and Co. 668 pp. [Second revised and augmented edition]
Gives in Appendix I a country-by-country statistical summary and analysis of the genocide. "Conjectures" that 4,204,400 to 4,575,400 Jews were thus murdered (p. 546), the lowest count by any reputable study.
Bauer, Yehuda (1982). A History of the Holocaust. New York: Franklin Watts. 398 pp. [With the assistance of Nili Keren]
Presents a through history of the Holocaust and related events, with pertinent statistical tables; touches also on other genocides. Gives a country breakdown of the Holocaust, which Bauer totals to 5,820,960 Jews murdered (p. 335).
Dawidowicz, Lucy S. (1975). The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 460 pp.
In addition to a general analysis and history of the genocide, Dawidowicz also gives an Appendix providing a brief account for each country of what happened to the Jews and their toll, which overall sums to 5,933,900 murdered (p. 403).
Fein, Helen (1979). Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust. New York: The Free Press. 468 pp.
A unique and careful social science and statistical attempt (including the use of multiple regression) to explain the Holocaust. There is much important information of value given in its various tables, themselves well worth separate study. Fein calculates that 4,610,000 Jews were lost (p. 21), not counting the U.S.S.R. (p. 21).
Fein, Helen (1981). Reviewing the toll: Jewish dead, losses and victims of the Holocaust. Shoah, 2 (2), 20-26.
Compares a variety of estimates of the Holocaust's toll and tries to account for their differences. Concludes that "all sources suggest the likelihood that competent estimates will fall . . . between five and six million" (p. 23).
Fleming, Gerald (1984). Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 219 pp. [Introduction by Saul Friedlander]
Gives a country breakdown of the genocide toll, which he sums to 4,975,477 murdered (p. 193).
Gilbert, Martin (1982). The Macmillan Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan, 256 pp.
An excellent collection of maps on a variety of aspects of the genocide, including where anti-Jewish pogroms and persecutions have occurred, Poland's major Jewish communities, the destruction of the Jews of Croatia, deportations and revolt, death camps, and the Jews of Bessarabia. Many of the maps also give statistics, and one in particular maps the toll by each country which totals slightly over 5,750,000 (pp. 244-45).
Hilberg, Raul (1985). The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes & Meier. 1273 pp. [Revised and definitive edition]
Deservedly, perhaps the most quoted work on the genocide. Historically and statistically thorough. In Appendix III, Hilberg tabulates a statistical recapitulation by killing operation and country, totalling 5,100,000 Jews murdered.
Gutman, Israel, and Rozett, Robert (1990). Estimated Jewish losses in the Holocaust. In Gutman, Israel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 4. New York: Macmillan, pp. 1797-1802.
Gutman, who is editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia, analyzes the Jewish losses by country and totals them up to 5,596,029 to 5,860,129 (p. 1799).
Slavs
Dallin, Alexander (1981). German Rule in Russia 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies. New York: Macmillan. 707 pp. [2nd revised edition]Must reading for an understanding of Nazi democide in the Soviet Union. The book is historically and analytically thorough.
Gross, Jan Tomasz (1979). Polish Society Under German Occupation: The Generalgouvernement, 1939-1944. Princeton, NJ: University Press. 343 pp.
Kamenetsky, Ihor (1961). Secret Nazi Plans for Eastern Europe: A Study of Lebensraum Policies. New Haven, CT : College and University Press. 263 pp.
Gypsies
Kenrick, Donald, and Puxon, Grattan (1972). The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies. New York: Basic Books. 256 pp.This is a major and rare work on the Nazi genocide of the Gypsies. The author's give the overall toll as 219,700 Gypsies murdered (p. 184).
Trynauer, Gabrielle (1989). Gypsies and the Holocaust: A Bibliography and Introductory Essay. Montreal: Interuniversity Center for European Studies and the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies. 51 pp.
Homosexuals
Rector, Frank (1981). The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals. New York: Stein and Day. 189 pp.One of the few major works in English on the Nazi treatment of homosexuals, which amounted to genocide. He concludes that at least 500,000 homosexuals were murdered (p. 116).
Porter, Jack Nusan (1991). Sexual Politics In the Third Reich: The Persecution of the Homosexuals During the Holocaust: A Bibliography and Introductory Essay. Newton, MA: The Spencer Press, April 1991, 35pp.
An annotated bibliography of German and English language on the sex, homosexuality, and the Nazis.
MILITARIST JAPAN
General
Dower, John W. (1986) War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books. 398 pp.This is an excellent and comprehensive non-military work on the Pacific War. It not only includes much material relevant to various Japanese democides, as in China and Indonesia, but also includes an extensive discussion of the American side of the war and their atrocities. He argues that this was a racial war for Americans.James, David H. (1951). The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire. London: George Allen & Unwin. 409 pp.
A most helpful analytical description and analysis of the Japanese empire and particularly of the Japanese treatment of Western POWs by a scholar who was such a prisoner himself.Kerr, E. Bartlett (1985). Surrender and Survival: The Experience of American POWs in the Pacific 1941-1945. New York: William Morrow and Co. 356 pp. Pritchard, R. John, and Zaide, Sonia Magbanua (Eds.) (1981). The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 22 volumes. New York: Garland Publishing. The complete transcripts of the proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
A first source for serious study of Japanese democide, it is an excellent collection of testimony and facts on Japanese democide. Included is an excellent index, that contains items on massacres and atrocities.Williams, Peter, and Wallace, David (1989). Unit 731: The Japanese Army's Secret of Secrets. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 366 pp.
An account of the Japanese development of bacteriological weapons, from their testing stage to actual field testing in China. Gives limited information on numbers killed, but essential information on the how and why.
Sino-Japanese War
Most of Japan's democide was against the Chinese during the 1937-1945 Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese murdered a conservatively estimated 3,949,000 Chinese. There are no works on this democide per se, although the following and the above volumes provide some understanding of it.Dorn, Frank (1974). The Sino-Japanese War, 1937-41: From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor. New York: Macmillan. 477 pp.
Timperley, H. J. (1938). Japanese Terror in China. New York: Modern Age Books. 220 pp.
KHMER ROUGE CAMBODIA
Becker, Elizabeth (1986). When the War Was Over: Cambodia's Revolution and the Voices of Its People. New York: Simon & Shuster. 501 pp.
This is an excellent starting point on the Khmer Rouge period by a reporter who covered the war in Cambodia for The Washington Post. Becker claims that 2,000,000 died from the Khmer Rouge (pp. 19-20).
Jackson, Karl D. (Ed.) (1989). Cambodia 1975-1978: Rendezvous with Death. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 334 pp.
A collection of first-rate articles by experts on the Khmer Rouge period, particularly focusing on the context for understanding the Khmer Rouge, the dynamics of power among them, and the nature and consequences of their economic politics. Contains translations of important Khmer Rouge documents.
Kampuchean Inquiry Commission (1982). Kampuchea in the Seventies: Report of a Finnish Inquiry Commission. Helsinki, Finland, 114 pp.
A detailed investigation into conditions under the Khmer Rouge. Gives the toll as nearly 1,000,000 (p. 35).
Kiernan, Ben, and Boua, Chanthou (1982). Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-1981. London: Zed Press. 401 pp.
This has become classic collection of relevant, in depth scholarly studies that provide a helpful background for understanding the Khmer Rouge and their rule. It is particularly helpful in understanding the material and social conditions of the peasantry and the communist movement and Pol Pot's role in it. Also useful for perspective and context are the large number of testimonies from Cambodians who lived under the Khmer Rouge.
Barron, John, and Paul, Anthony (1977). Peace With Horror: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 234 pp. [American edition titled Murder of a Gentle Land. New York: Reader's Digest Press-Thomas Y. Crowell]
Based on refugee reports, this was among the first and most influential reports of the horror and mass killing under the Khmer Rouge in its first year-and-a-half. It is detailed and close to the experience of the average Cambodian. Barron and Paul estimate the democide toll as 1,200,000 in the first twenty-one months (p. 206), which they subsequently believed much too low.
Ponchaud, François (1977). Cambodia Year Zero. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 212 pp. [Translated by Nancy Amphoux]
A report on what happened under the Khmer Rouge in its first year or so by a Frenchman who had lived among Cambodian peasants and is fluent in the language. This independently complements the above work by Barron and Paul. Ponchaud estimates the early democide toll as "certainly" over 1,000,000 (p. 71).
Democide
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (1980). Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe. , Washington, DC, 14 pp. [A January research paper of the National Foreign Assessment Center]This is a widely quoted attempt by the CIA to determine from demographic statistics the extent of the toll under the Khmer Rouge. They calculate the absolute population decline under the Khmer Rouge as 1,200,000 to 1,800,000 (p. 5).
Vickery, Michael (1982). Democratic Kampuchea--CIA to the rescue. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 14 (October-December), 45-54.
This is a hostile but important critique of the above CIA report. Vickery calculates that the CIA estimate of 1,300,000 dead should be reduced to about 290,000 to 425,000 (p. 54), figures he subsequently admits are much too low.
Kiernan, Ben (1988). Orphans of genocide: The Cham Muslims of Kampuchea under Pol Pot. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 20 (4), 2-33.
This is a scholarly and detailed account of the Khmer Rouge genocide against the Chams by a first rate scholar on Cambodia. Out of some 250,000 Chams in 1975 (p. 6), Kiernan estimates that 90,000 were killed (p. 30).
Kiernan, Ben (1990). The genocide in Cambodia, 1975-79. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 22 (2), 35-40.
Responding to Michael Vickery's critique of the above article, Kiernan provides more calculations on the Cham genocide, and then outlines the genocide against other groups in Cambodia and presents statistics on the overall democide. He estimates this as 1,500,000 (p. 38).
COMMUNIST VIETNAM
General
Canh, Nguyen Van (1983). Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. 312 pp. [With Earle Cooper. Foreword by Robert A. Scalapino]By a Vietnamese and former law professor, this is an important description and analysis of life in Vietnam after the North Vietnamese takeover of the South. Must reading for an assessment of this period and its democide.Chi, Hoang Van (1964). From Colonialism to Communism: A Case History of North Vietnam. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. 252 pp.
Based on personal experience and extensive research, the work by a Vietnamese nationalist gives a detailed account of the communist suppression of the nationalist movement and consolidation of power in the North after 1945, and the subsequent land reform and purges of the party. This is essential reading for understanding the associated democide. The author believes that just in the Land Reform Campaign of 1953 to 1956 he believes 500,000 Vietnamese were "sacrificed" (pp. 72, 205).
Lewy, Guenter (1978). America in Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press. 540 pp.
Among the best and most balanced works on the Vietnam War, Lewy also provides information on communist democide in the South during the war and judiciously weighs allegations of extensive American massacres and atrocities.
Democide
Desbarats, Jacqueline (1990). Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: executions and population relocation." In Moore, John Norton (Ed.), The Vietnam Debate: A Fresh Look at the Arguments. New York: University Press of America, pp. 193-201.Based on extensive interviews of Vietnamese refugees, Desbarats reports her discovery and surprise at the extent of executions in Vietnam after the Vietnam War. Concludes that over 100,000 people must have been executed (p. 197).
United States Senate, 92d Congress, 2d Session, Committee on the Judiciary, (1972). The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 119 pp.
This compiles excerpts of publications that describe North Vietnamese democide and present relevant analyses. The aim is to predict the bloodbath that would occur in case of the North's victory in the Vietnam War.
Hosmer, Stephen (1970). Viet Cong Repression and Its Implications for the Future. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company. 176 pp. [a Rand Corporation report]
This is a study of the communist use of terror and repression as a method of revolutionary warfare. It helps to understand why democide was seen as a legitimate tool, and the extent and variety of its uses during the Vietnam War.
Wiesner, Louis (1988). Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 448 pp. [Foreword by Phan Quang Dan]
This work by an internationally recognized expert on refugees gives the best overall view of the refugee problem during the Vietnam War. It is full of statistics and facts, and contains diverse information on the democide in the South by the North Vietnamese such as attacks on refugee movements or camps.
Boat People
Since 1975, perhaps as many as 1,500,000 Vietnamese have fled Vietnam, many in rickety boats, risking storms and pirates in order to reach an uncertain haven. Many thus died at sea, perhaps 500,000 of them. This constitutes democide by Vietnam for those who thus died while fleeing for their lives. Virtually all that has been written on the so-called boat people is in newspapers or popular magazines. The following are among the few more serious discussions of their flight and plight.Cerquone, Joseph (1987 October). Uncertain harbors: the plight of Vietnamese boat people. Issue Paper of the U.S. Committee for Refugees. Washington, DC: American Council for Nationalities Service. 39 pp.
Hugo, Graeme (1987). Postwar refugee migration in Southeast Asia: patterns, problems, and policies. In Rigge, John R. (Ed.),Refugees: A Third World Dilemma. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 237-252.
OTHER TOTALITARIAN DEMOCIDE
Paris, Edmond (1961). Genocide in Satellite Croatia, 1941-1945: A Record of Racial and Religious Persecutions and Massacres. Chicago: American Institute for Balkan Affairs. 322 pp. [Translated by Lois Perkins]
Prcela, John, and Guldescu, Stanko (Eds.) (1970). Operation Slaughterhouse: Eyewitness Accounts of Postwar Massacres in Yugoslavia. Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co. 557 pp.This gives analysis, facts, and personal testimonials on the genocide of Serbians by Croatia under totalitarian Ustashi rule during the Second World War. While the book ignores the counterpart genocide of the Croatians carried out by the Serbs when the war was ending and afterward (see Prcela and Guldescu below), it establishes in horrible detail the extent of this mass murder. Paris claims that 750,000 were killed, almost all Serbs (pp. 4, 9, 211).
This describes much of the democide of Croatians and others by Tito's communist (partisan) forces as World War II ended in their victory, and gives testimonials of eyewitnesses, often survivors of particular massacres. The book ignores the genocide of the Serbs by the Croatians described in the above work. Prcela and a colleague calculated that 600,000 Croats were murdered by the Tito regime (p. 121).
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