How many people has radical socialism killed? It is a stark question, and it is also a difficult one to answer honestly. The number most often quoted comes from The Black Book of Communism, a 1997 work by French historians, which put the total at about 94 million deaths under communist regimes in the twentieth century. That figure has shaped public debate ever since, and it has also been fiercely contested. Some of the book’s own contributors distanced themselves from its totals, and other historians argue that its methods were flawed and that some of its estimates were too high. The argument over the number is not a footnote. It is the subject of this chapter, because how the dead are counted determines what the number means.
The video at the center of this chapter works through the record case by case, and this article follows its approach while adding the cautions the subject requires. A death toll is not like a score. Behind each figure is a different kind of killing, a different set of records, and often a different argument about who is responsible. Counting the victims of radical socialism means deciding what to count, and that decision is where the debate begins and where it often ends.
What The Black Book Claimed
The Black Book of Communism was the work of several historians, edited by Stéphane Courtois, and it set out to document the crimes of communist regimes across the world. Its largest figures were assigned to China, where it estimated about 65 million deaths, and to the Soviet Union, where it estimated about 20 million. Smaller totals were given for Cambodia, North Korea, Vietnam, and other states. Added together, the authors arrived at a figure of about 94 million. The book’s publication was a major event, and its totals were soon quoted in newspapers, classrooms, and political speeches as if they were settled facts.
The criticism came quickly, and some of it came from inside the project. Two of the book’s contributors argued publicly that Courtois’s introduction had pressed toward a headline total and had blurred the difference between very different kinds of death. Other historians questioned particular figures, above all for the Soviet Union and for the famine that followed China’s Great Leap Forward, where the evidence is incomplete and the range of serious estimates is wide. The point was not that the crimes were small. It was that a single, precise-sounding total could conceal as much as it revealed.
Three Kinds of Death
The most important distinction in the record is between three different kinds of death. The first is execution: people shot or otherwise killed directly by the state, in purges, in the Red Terror that followed the Russian Revolution, in the Great Terror of the 1930s under Stalin, and in the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields, where educated and urban Cambodians were singled out for murder. These are, in one sense, the easiest deaths to count, because they were deliberate acts, but even here the records are often incomplete, secret, or destroyed.
The second kind is death in camps and prisons. The Soviet Gulag held millions of people in forced labor camps, where prisoners died of cold, hunger, overwork, and disease. China’s labor camps served a similar purpose, and North Korea’s prison camp system, which still exists, has been described by survivors and by human rights investigators as a place where starvation and brutality are routine. These deaths are harder to count, because they took place away from public view, and because a death from disease in a camp may not have been recorded at all.
The third kind is death by famine, and it is the largest and most contested category. The famine in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward in China from 1959 to 1961, and the famine in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge together account for tens of millions of deaths. Historians disagree about the size of each famine, and they disagree about how much blame belongs to policy and how much to weather, war, or other causes. That disagreement matters, because a famine caused by a policy is a different moral matter from a famine that a policy merely failed to prevent.
The Famines
The Soviet famine of the early 1930s followed forced collectivization, when Stalin’s government seized land, grain, and livestock from peasants and imposed state control over farming. Ukraine suffered with particular severity, in an event remembered as the Holodomor, and scholars estimate that several million people died. Whether the famine is called a genocide is a separate argument, and historians differ, but few dispute that state policy turned a food crisis into a catastrophe by taking grain and punishing those who tried to keep it.
The Chinese famine was larger still. The Great Leap Forward, launched by Mao Zedong in 1958, sought to industrialize and collectivize China in a single leap, and its failures, including backyard furnaces, inflated harvest reports, and the seizure of grain, left the countryside without enough food. Serious estimates of the deaths run into the tens of millions, with a wide range between them, and the true figure may never be known with precision. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge’s attempt to remake society from the ground up, emptying cities and forcing people to work in the fields, is commonly estimated to have killed about 1.7 million people, roughly a quarter of the population, through execution, overwork, and starvation.
Why the Number Is Argued About
The argument over the total is not only about arithmetic. It is also about what a count is for. Critics of the Black Book’s approach argue that lumping executions, camp deaths, and famines into a single total can obscure the variety of the crimes and the variety of the causes. Supporters answer that the lump is the point: that a political movement which, in country after country, produced the same pattern of repression, terror, and famine should be judged by the pattern as a whole, not by each incident in isolation. Both arguments have force, and neither is settled by a bigger number.
The Lesson
The human cost of radical socialism in the twentieth century was vast by any serious measure. Whether the total is 94 million, or a lower figure reached by more cautious methods, or a higher one reached by counting differently, the record includes purges, camps, and famines on a scale that few other political movements match. The victims were not, for the most part, soldiers in a war. They were farmers, workers, teachers, priests, and families whose only crime was to be in the way of a plan, or to belong to a class the regime had condemned. Remembering them requires getting the numbers as right as the evidence allows, and admitting where the evidence runs out. A chapter that inflates its figures to make a point does not honor the dead. It uses them, and it invites the skepticism that has damaged this argument before. The honest figure, with its sources and its uncertainties stated plainly, is the one that survives scrutiny.