George Mason University professor Colin Dueck visits the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. and discovers the deadly cost communism has exacted on the world.
The Cost of Communism
Only two blocks from the White House, a small museum in an elegant Beaux Arts mansion draws our attention to one of the deadliest ideologies of all time: communism. The Victims of Communism Museum opened only last year after decades of thoughtful planning, and the care that went into the project shows. Visiting the museum is a powerful experience.
As you enter the building, a placard declares the startling human cost of world communism: Over 100 million people have been killed since Lenin took power. Josef Stalin supposedly said that whereas one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. He would certainly know. The mind cannot comprehend such mass misery; it glazes over. The VOC Museum’s curators overcome this problem by highlighting individual human tragedies. Visitors are shown in the most vivid way possible—through recordings, written testimonies, and more—that the casualties of communism were individual human beings.
In a sense, the victims of communism number far more than 100 million. If we consider those forced to live under this tyrannical system, tortured by it, or driven from their homes because of it, then the numbers are far greater. My grandparents were German-speaking Anabaptists living in Ukraine over one hundred years ago. As the Bolshevik revolution plunged the region into deepening repression, famine, and civil war, violent anarchists as well as communists struggled for control over local villages. Pacifist peasant communities that successfully built a life for themselves over preceding generations were a natural target. My grandfather’s family was terrorized, and his father was killed. Desperate to survive, the remaining members of the family managed to travel to the Baltic, then across the Atlantic Ocean. Settling in Western Canada during the early 1920s, they created a new life for themselves, just as their ancestors once did. Working hard in a free country, they farmed the land, went to church, raised a family, and smiled. But they passed on to their grandson a profound mistrust toward the supposed benefits of socialism.
The museum’s first gallery focuses on the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Lenin was the first to pioneer the model of one-party totalitarian dictatorship. As the VOC Museum reminds us, some of that model’s features included:
- the creation of a comprehensive police state, with security forces empowered to kill, torture, terrorize, and toss whole categories of innocent people into prison
- the assertion of the Communist Party’s monopolistic authority over private life
- mass executions, deportations, and forced starvation
- the attempted destruction of civil society including any traditional, free, or independent source of authority apart from the new regime
- the existence of a sweeping utopian ideology to justify and encourage all the above
For Lenin, opposition to his regime was necessarily illegitimate, the expression of nothing more than selfish class interests to be crushed.
The museum’s second gallery centers on the victims of Stalin’s rule and informs visitors about the gulags, forced labor camps, purges, and show trials that characterized his dictatorship. We see and hear gripping evidence of the deportations, the mass executions, the ethnic cleansings, and the deliberately engineered famines that killed millions, most notably in Ukraine. Once again, these atrocities are illustrated through vivid examples; visitors are shown the daily ration of one gulag prisoner, which consisted of a small crust of bread. It was mostly sawdust.
The museum’s third gallery describes the postwar expansion of the Leninist model into Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa. Yet even as the Soviet bloc was at the height of its power, the seeds of its destruction were being planted. Especially in the USSR’s European sphere of influence, ordinary people yearned for a better way of life. For them, simply listening to a smuggled revamped Beatles album—one of the many artifacts highlighted by the museum—was an act of joy and resistance. This gallery details the many acts of courage taken by everyday citizens as well as exceptional dissidents to chip away at the tyranny surrounding them, which ultimately led to the stunning collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. Americans can take pride in the indispensable role they played in these efforts.
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