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A Mark of Communism: Famine

Communist governments promised to create a fair society where everyone had enough to eat. Yet their policies actually led to millions of people starving to death. In this section, we'll explore two devastating famines that occurred as a direct result of communist policies: The Great Leap Forward in China and the Holodomor in Ukraine. These weren't natural disasters — they were man-made catastrophes that followed a chilling pattern:

1. A communist leader claims they want to make society equitable.
2. The government takes control of farms and food production.
3. Farmers lose their independence and are forced to follow government orders.
4. The government's plans fail terribly.
5. Millions of innocent people — men, women, and children — suffer and die from starvation.

As we dive into these historical events, try to spot this deadly pattern in action. You'll see how policies meant to create a "perfect" society instead led to unimaginable tragedy.These stories serve as a stark reminder of how dangerous it can be when radicals speaking the language of justice, fairness, or equity impose their ideology on society.

A The Bolshevik Revolution: From Beautiful Ideas to Bloody Realities

The first major attempt to implement Marx's ideas occurred in Russia during the early 20th century, in a country that was far from the industrialized society Marx had envisioned as ripe for revolution.In 1917, Russia was in turmoil. The country was exhausted by World War I, and the people were suffering from severe shortages of food and fuel. Amid this chaos, a revolutionary group known as the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, saw an opportunity to seize power.

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In October 1917, the Bolsheviks successfully overthrew the existing government in what is known as the October Revolution. They established a new government based on communist ideals, aiming to dismantle the old class structures and redistribute land and resources.However, the Bolsheviks faced immediate resistance, leading to a brutal civil war. In their quest to maintain control and transform society, the Bolsheviks resorted to extreme measures. They confiscated land and property, suppressed political opposition, and used violence to enforce their policies. Lenin encouraged brutal methods, such as publicly hanging wealthy peasants to terrify local people into submission.The Bolsheviks also ruthlessly persecuted political opponents and dissidents. They closed down the only democratic institution that had ever existed in Russian history up to that point and set about governing Russia by means of terror. There was an all-out attack on religion, with churches destroyed and priests murdered.This period marked the beginning of a series of events that would lead to a century of widespread suffering and death. The Bolshevik Revolution set the stage for the rise of the Soviet Union, a regime that would become infamous for its oppressive tactics.The Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath demonstrate how the economic logic of communism was bound to fail, inevitably requiring coercion and terror to overcome the natural resistance of ordinary people when they realized they had been duped.Communism, as envisioned by Marx and implemented by regimes like the Soviet Union, requires a massive concentration of power in the hands of the state to achieve its goals. To abolish private property, redistribute wealth, and centrally plan the entire economy, communist governments need nearly unlimited authority to override individual rights and control all aspects of society. This unchecked power inevitably leads to authoritarianism. Without checks and balances or limits on government control, communist leaders can easily become dictators, using force and repression to maintain their rule. The supposed "dictatorship of the proletariat" becomes a dictatorship in the literal sense. The result is a totalitarian state where the government dominates all areas of life — the exact opposite of the free and equal society that communism claims to create.‍

Famine: A Closer Look

China: The Great Leap Forward

‍Mao Zedong, the leader of Communist China, promised to transform China, much of it poor and agrarian, into an equitable, modern industrialized powerhouse. Instead, his “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 to 1962 became one of history’s most brutal catastrophes. As part of Mao's broader cultural revolution, there was a push to eliminate old ideas, customs, habits, and culture (known as “the Four Olds”). This aspect of Mao's ideology, while more prominently featured in the subsequent Cultural Revolution, had its roots in the Great Leap Forward period.At the time, China's economy was mostly agricultural and about 85% of the population were classified as peasants.

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For centuries, most peasants had been poor and owned little or no land; but they had to work in the fields and were often taken advantage of by the land owners.  Mao's goal was to break down the old system and eliminate the "landlord class."  Knowing that workers were unlikely to revolt without encouragement, Mao stirred up anger in the working people against the landlords, intellectuals, and professionals. Mao's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) encouraged the peasants to rise up against their “oppressors” in bloody, violent ways. Mao demanded a huge increase in steel production and recruited peasants to build roads and dams. Peasant women were forced to cut their hair, as hair had the necessary carbon to make iron into steel. Under Mao’s agrarian reform, land was confiscated from landowners.All privately owned homes, animals, and property were outlawed and individuals were forced to live "collective lives" in communes. Families who owned land were forced to work the fields together with other landowners in "collective farms" in order to be more productive. Children were taken from families and placed in "collective nurseries" and "collective schools" to train the children in the communist ways and to free their parents up to work longer hours. Families did not cook or eat as families. Instead, food was served out of large pots hastily so that workers could get back out to the fields and continue to work.The government officials imposed rules on crop production. They set unrealistic quotas, and when crops failed, officials lied about the harvests to avoid punishment. This led to even higher quotas and more lies. Food became scarce, and commune leaders had to decide who would eat. Vulnerable groups like children, the elderly, and those deemed “unfit” were left to starve.But that didn't stop Mao. In order to make his plan to modernize China a reality, Mao borrowed significant amounts of money from the Soviet Union to build factories and purchase farming equipment. With a large debt to repay, Mao forced the communes to compete with each other for production to try and "motivate" the workers to work harder, longer and faster. Instead, the leaders of the communes reduced the amount of food that they fed to the workers. To try to keep the government happy and avoid violent punishment, the commune leaders would lie to the CCP about how much food was being harvested.Because they feared Mao's punishment for not meeting food production quotas, the leaders of the communes had to decide who would get to eat. They adopted a policy of "those who don't work, don't eat." People were put into categories: those deemed "unfit," like children, pregnant women, the elderly, and others considered not to work hard enough, were given little to no food and left to starve.Desperate to survive, the workers ate whatever they could find, including mud, insects, leaves, tree bark, and roots. In some horrific cases, people even resorted to cannibalism, consuming the flesh of deceased family members who had died from starvation.Mao knew about the widespread famine. “When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death,” Mao is reported to have said in a 1959 conference. “It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.” Mao wanted to hide the extent of the famine; therefore, people in the cities were not allowed to travel freely and were unaware of the suffering in the countryside. He demanded that the number of deaths be kept secret, and commune leaders reported fake numbers.In the meantime, the Chinese elite, including Mao, were well fed. The government had plenty of food from the collective farms but kept it for themselves.To this day, the Great Famine caused by the Great Leap Forward is not openly discussed in China. Mao's regime inflicted immense harm on its own people, possibly surpassing even the brutality of Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Third Reich. The Chinese Communist Party's policies under Mao resulted in widespread suffering, economic collapse, and millions of deaths. Chinese historians estimate that between 36 and 55 million people died as a result of the Great Famine caused by Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward policies.

Ukrane: The Holodomor

‍Ukraine was briefly an independent country before being forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union by its Red Army. To maintain some level of support from the Ukrainian people, the Soviet Union initially allowed Ukraine to retain its cultural independence, including its language, art, literature, and education. However, this autonomy did not last long. By the end of the 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin decided to curtail Ukraine's cultural freedoms. The Red Army began arresting, imprisoning, and executing thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, church leaders, and anyone who supported Ukrainian cultural identity.

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At the same time, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and since most Ukrainians were farmers who produced just what their families needed to survive, they fought back strongly against the idea. However the Soviet government confiscated all of the property of the independent farmers and forced them to work on government collective farms. In 1932, the government of the Soviet Union began to set impossibly high quotas for the amount of grain the Ukrainian collective farms were required to give to the government. When the villages were not able to meet the quotas, the government intensified their mission to take from the collective farms; they even confiscated the seed for planting and fined the farmers, making them pay those fines in meat and potatoes. Violent teams of Stalin's crop collectors were sent in to search and forcibly seize other foods from the homes as well and if they found that the families had food hidden or buried for them to keep to feed themselves and their children, they were accused of being "hoarders" and faced beatings, imprisonment or execution. Guards were often posted in watchtowers and the "theft" of the smallest amount of grain could be punishable by execution. This period is called “the holodomor" because it means "death by hunger" in Ukrainian.Starving farmers tried to leave the collective farms and villages to search for places with more food so Stalin put a policy in place making it illegal for Ukrainians to leave. Many died along the way and others were caught by Stalin's police and sent back to the villages to starve. Ukrainian peasants were forced to take desperate methods in the effort to stay alive, including killing and eating their pets and eating flowers, leaves, and tree roots and bark.While the exact number of Ukrainians who starved to death during the year of Holodomor will never be known, the death toll is estimated to be between 3.9-7 million.