Your Holocausts of Communism Test Score

You correctly answered...

27.5 %

of the questions. This marks you as

an Intermediate

student of Communist atrocities.

Analysis of Your Test Answers

1. Most of the people killed by Lenin were...
   1. Czarist officials
   2. Merchants
   3. Cossacks
   4. Peasants
   5. Mensheviks
   6. Orthodox clergy

   
   

   Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was D.

   Peasants were by far the most numerous class of person in Lenin's Russia; the other groups mentioned were singled out for persecution, but were far less numerous to begin with. The Don Cossacks were probably the second greatest victim group: since they were hostile to Lenin's regime, this ethnicity, numbering around 1 million pre-war, was nigh exterminated. For further reading, see Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: the History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present.

2. During World War II and its aftermath, Stalin ordered several entire nationalities within the Soviet Union deported to Siberia. Among these were...
   1. Volga Germans, Kalmyks, and Chechens
   2. Greeks, Koreans, and Chechens
   3. Volga Germans, Chechens, and White Russians
   4. Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and Don Cossacks
   5. Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Buryat Mongols
   6. Volga Germans, Jews, and Koreans

   
   

   Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was A.

   The Crimean Tatars were also deported after the reconquest of the Crimean peninsula in World War II; ethnic Greeks and Koreans suffered similar treatment before 1941. The other nationalities mentioned were subjected to other forms of persecution during Stalin's reign, but were not deported en masse during this period. For more information, see Robert Conquest, The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities.

3. About 400,000 of the Czar's subjects perished in the horrible famine of 1891-92. About how many Soviet citizens died in the famine of 1920-21?
   1. 100,000
   2. 250,000
   3. 400,000
   4. 1,000,000
   5. 5,000,000
   6. 30,000,000

   
   

   Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was E.

   The fact that Lenin's famine was over 10 times as severe as the last major famine under the Czars shows how feeble the "bad weather" explanation was. The severity of this famine was confirmed by contemporary Soviet sources - see Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements.

4. Lenin appears to have caused the post-Civil War famine deliberately, or at least acted with malevolent indifference. What are the main facts establishing this contention?
   1. The weather conditions in 1920-21 were actually favorable.
   2. Lenin reversed his agricultural policies once starvation appeared to threaten the survival of the Soviet regime.
   3. Substantial stockpiles of grain held by the Whites were captured in 1920.
   4. Seed grain as well as food for family consumption was requisitioned from peasants as a punitive measure.
   5. Both A and D, but not C.
   6. B, C, and D, but not A.

   
   

   Your answer, E, was incorrect. The correct answer was F.

   A drought did contribute to the famine, but it was far from the most important factor. See Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution.

5. The odds of surviving a 10-year sentence in one of Lenin or Stalin's typical slave labor camps were around...
   1. 80%.
   2. 60%.
   3. 30%.
   4. 10%.
   5. under 3%.
   6. under 1%.

   
   

   Your answer, D, was correct.

   R.J. Rummel's Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917, surveying various estimates of attrition rates in Soviet camps, finds the typical camp death rate ranged between 10 and 30%. Taking the middle estimate (20%) and using basic arithmetic, one arrives at the 10% figure.

6. Lenin set the precedent for each of Stalin's major crimes, EXCEPT:
   1. Deporting "counter-revolutionary" nationalities to Siberia.
   2. Executing other socialists.
   3. Ordering the assassination or execution of other high-ranking Communists.
   4. Ordering the secret police to use political prisoners as slave laborers on dangerous construction projects.
   5. A and C.
   6. B and C.

   
   

   Your answer, A, was incorrect. The correct answer was C.

   Lenin refrained from taking the lives of fellow Communists, but there was nothing else he shied away from. Many neglect the deportations of the Don Cossacks, assuming that ethnic persecution began only under Stalin during World War II. For more details, see Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime.

7. During the Russian Civil War, Trotsky advocated the "militarization of labor." This was:
   1. A wartime expedient, requiring unneeded workers to join the Red Army.
   2. Never implemented, but would have required "counter-revolutionaries" to contribute at least 20 hours of labor each week to the war effort.
   3. Argued to be integral to the very concept of a centrally planned economy.
   4. Substantially implemented by the war's end, for inflation had almost totally eroded the monetary value of the ruble.
   5. Explicitly stated to be inconsistent with a workers' right to choose his occupation.
   6. C, D, and E.

   
   

   Your answer, F, was correct.

   Trotsky explicitly advocated stripping workers of the "freedom of labor" - not just during wartime, but as a permanent policy. Workers would perform the work assigned to them in exchange for their official rations. Price controls combined with massive printing press finance meant that this ideal was in fact implemented by the end of the Civil War. See Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution.

8. Trotsky's military policies included:
   1. Imposing the death penalty for retreat.
   2. Purging the Red Army of former Czarist officers.
   3. Executing prisoners of war.
   4. Ordering pogroms against Jewish communities to silence complaints that he favored other Jews.
   5. A and C.
   6. A, B, C, and D.

   
   

   Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was E.

   Trotsky had a life-long love affair with the death penalty, which he used on both his own and enemy troops. But far from purging former Czarist officers, Trotsky conscripted them into the Red Army. Pogroms were mostly carried out by White forces, not the Bolsheviks. See Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements for details.

9. EXCLUSIVE of the Ukrainian famine in 1932-33, the numbered of "kulaks," or better-off peasants (and their families) murdered by Stalin numbered about:
   1. Only a few thousand village leaders - almost all of the "kulak" fatalities actually occurred during the Ukrainian famine following the dekulakization campaign.
   2. 100,000 - about as many Japanese who died from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
   3. 250,000 - about equal to the number of Gypsies exterminated by Hitler.
   4. 1.5 million - about as many as the Turks killed in the Armenian holocaust.
   5. 2 million - about as many as killed by Pol Pot in Cambodia.
   6. 6.5 million - somewhat more than the number of Jews murdered by Hitler.

   
   

   Your answer, A, was incorrect. The correct answer was F.

   "Dekulakization" was truly the crime of the century - for not only did it exterminate on a Hitlerian scale, but it also largely escaped the world's attention then and since. The mass deportations of kulak families preceded forced collectivization - it was apparently directed at "decapitating" peasant communities of any leaders who might organize resistance to Stalin's policies. "Kulaks," incidentally, were often very poor - an extra cow or a careless word spoken to a Party member were easy ways to earn this deadly label. While Soviet sources long denied the Ukrainian famine, they have always admitted that entire kulak families were "liquidated" on a large scale. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.

10. Stalin's famine in 1932-33 - in which about 7 million peasants starved to death - appears to have been deliberately planned, because:
    1. The grain quotas for the Ukraine and Cossack regions were set abnormally high, even for relatively infertile zones.
    2. Authorities were ordered to move seed grain to secure urban granaries in autumn of 1932.
    3. The Ukraine was internally blockaded, so that food in nearby Russia could not be brought in, and Ukrainian peasants could not go out.
    4. Secret police chief Menzhinsky was executed - and replaced with the anti-Ukrainian Yagoda - after protesting against Stalin's policies towards the Ukraine.
    5. A, B, and C.
    6. A, B, C, and D.

    
    

    Your answer, D, was incorrect. The correct answer was E.

    All of these signs of deliberate intent were real - except that Menzhinsky was not executed, nor was he pro-Ukrainian. There were however other Party members who spoke their minds to Stalin and paid the ultimate price. Stalin's second wife appears to have committed suicide when she learned of his role in this horrible crime. The world socialist community generally realized what Stalin had done: see the discussion by the democratic socialist historian Carl Landauer in his European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements.

    But let us be generous. We will not shoot them. We will not pour salt water into them, nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle them up into a "swan dive," nor keep them on sleepless "stand-up" for a week, nor kick them with jackboots, nor beat them with rubber truncheons, nor squeeze their skulls with iron rings, nor push them into a cell so that they lie atop one another like pieces of baggage - we will not do any of the things they did! But for the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly: "Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer." --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

    
    

11. At least 1 million Kazakhs perished of starvation around the same time as the Ukrainian famine. This famine ...
    1. was deadly because it forced migratory nomads to abandon their traditional way of life, without adequately preparing them to do anything else.
    2. concentrated on crushing the Islamic faith.
    3. was a response to perceived pro-German sentiment among Kazakhs.
    4. was, like the Ukrainian famine, deliberately inflicted.
    5. provoked only token violent resistance.
    6. A, D, and E.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was A.

    The massive famine among the Kazakhs has received even less attention than that in the Ukraine. By most accounts, it was not planned for its own sake - as the Ukrainian famine was - although surely it still qualifies as murder under the "malevolent indifference" standard. The Kazakhs resisted collectivization with large-scale rebellion - as indeed they had resisted Russian authority from World War I onwards. Over 1 million Kazakhs also fled across the border to western China - as shown in Martin Gilbert's Atlas of Russian History>.

12. During 1936-8, Stalin purged perceived enemies within the Communist Party. Out of 1966 delegates to the 1934 Party Congress, how many had been arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes by the 1939 Party Congress?
    1. 115.
    2. About 300.
    3. About 500.
    4. 1108.
    5. All but 115.
    6. All of them.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was D.

    For these and other interesting figures, see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment.

13. By the conclusion of the Great Terror, so many foreign Communists living in exile in the Soviet Union had been executed or imprisoned that the Communist Parties of the following nations were formally dissolved:
    1. Poland and Germany.
    2. Germany, Italy, and Japan.
    3. Poland and Korea.
    4. The Baltic nations, Finland, and Romania.
    5. Poland, Germany, and Spain.
    6. Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Greece.

    
    

    Your answer, A, was incorrect. The correct answer was C.

    The article on Tito in Rodger Swearingen, ed., Leaders of the Communist World describes how Tito's Yugoslavian Party narrowly avoided the fate of the Polish and Korean parties.

14. The population of Stalin's slave labor camps increased from about 100,000 under Lenin, to around 1,000,000 by 1930. The population then:
    1. Stabilized, with the incoming waves of deported kulaks approximately equaling the annual attrition rate.
    2. Stabilized at around 10,000,000 in 1940, after over 1 million Poles were sentenced to the camps.
    3. Did not increase significantly until the Great Terror, when the camp population doubled in size.
    4. Grew sharply as a result of delukization, then slowly declined in spite of the Great Terror.
    5. Never stabilized - reaching 20,000,000 by the end of World War II, and 25,000,000 by Stalin's death.
    6. Declined to 1 million during World War II - as prisoners were given amnesties if they joined the Red Army - only to peak again at 3 million in 1948.

    
    

    Your answer, E, was incorrect. The correct answer was B.

    These figures, found in e.g. Conquest's The Great Terror and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, have also been confirmed by Marxists such Roy Medvedev.

15. "Kolyma, wonderful planet,/Twelve months winter, the rest summer." - this couplet refers to:
    1. The deadliest of the slave labor camps in Siberia, where over 2 million perished.
    2. The treatment received by purged Party members, totally ostracized by their former friends and family.
    3. The canal built between the Baltic and the White Seas, constructed by slave laborers under conditions of extreme hardship.
    4. The NKVD's solitary confinement cells in Moscow, which were completely unheated.
    5. Stalin, by one of his revolutionary aliases.
    6. Stalin's first wife, noted for her icy personality.

    
    

    Your answer, A, was correct.

    Kolyma had a smaller population than other parts of the Gulag, but the death rate was so high that more people perished there than any other. In 1944, a camp in Kolyma was visited by United States Vice President Henry Wallace. A combination of massive deception (prisoners were replaced with wed-fed undercover secret policemen) and willful self-delusion left Wallace in rapt praise of Soviet penology. In 1948, Wallace ran for President on a third-party ticket with active backing of the CPUSA. On Kolyma, see Conquest, The Great Terror; on Wallace, see David Caute, The Fellow Travellers.

16. In late 1939, Hitler invaded Poland from the west, while Stalin's forces attacked from the east. During the two following years of peace between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia:
    1. Stalin exterminated over 3 times as many Poles as Hitler did, even though the eastern zone held only half the population of the western zone.
    2. Millions of Poles fled to the Soviet zone to escape even worse conditions inflicted by the Nazis.
    3. Approximately equal numbers of Poles died in both zones, although the Nazi kill ratio was greater.
    4. Tens of thousands of Polish intellectuals, officers, and other community leaders were executed by a special unified task force of the German and Russian secret police.
    5. B and C.
    6. A, B, and C.

    
    

    Your answer, D, was incorrect. The correct answer was A.

    During the first two years of occupation, the Nazis killed about 120,000 inhabitants of Poland, while the Communists killed 400,000. See the interesting discussion in Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945.

17. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact contained secret protocols divided up eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Under the auspices of this treaty:
    1. The Soviet sphere initially included eastern Poland, all three Baltic states, Finland, and part of Romania.
    2. Germany "swapped" Lithuania for part of Poland.
    3. Hitler and Stalin exchanged political prisoners to secure release of jailed comrades.
    4. Stalin had annexed Finland by 1941.
    5. 2-4% of the population of the Baltic states was deported to Siberia.
    6. B and E.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was correct.

    Few realize the closeness of the Nazi-Soviet alliance from 1939-1941 - it was a military, economic, and political relationship of great importance. Militarily, there was the joint invasion of Poland. Economically, there were important supplies sent to Germany by Stalin, which made the British blockade of Germany ineffective. Politically, Hitler and Stalin systematically divided eastern Europe between them.

    Hitler and Stalin exchanged prisoners not to secure their release, but to help each other kill escaped enemies. Hitler and Stalin swapped Russian emigres living in Germany for German Communists living in Russia. Stalin's invasion of Finland faltered and was (temporarily) abandoned; but he won important border concessions. The League of Nations expelled the U.S.S.R. for its invasion of Finland. For more interesting facts, see Anthony Brown and Charles MacDonald, On A Field of Red: The Communist International and the Coming of World War II.

18. Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941:
    1. Showed that Stalin's Great Terror had successfully eliminated most potential collaborators.
    2. Convinced Stalin to immediately purge the Red Army, including the famed Marshall Tukhachevsky.
    3. Convinced Stalin to temporarily dissolve the collective farms and internal passport system.
    4. Sparked guerrilla uprisings amongst Ukrainians and Chechens.
    5. Now appears to have been a pre-emptive strike against a planned Soviet invasion of the German Reich.
    6. Was encouraged by the ability of the Baltic states to fight the Red Army to a standstill for almost four months.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was D.

    Hitler's invasion showed that Stalin's Terror had bred as much hatred as it had fear. Ukrainian and Chechen guerrilla armies rose in revolt against Stalin's oppression. It was Stalin's purge of the army in the mid-30's, along with the failed invasion of Finland that persuaded Hitler that the Soviet Union was too weak to resist invasion. Anthony Brown and Charles MacDonald, On A Field of Red: The Communist International and the Coming of World War II give more details - including evidence that the Gestapo helped fabricate evidence implicating Tuchachevsky and other generals.

19. With the conclusion of World War II, Stalin's slave labor camps were replenished with:
    1. Large numbers of Japanese POWs.
    2. Ethnic Germans, both POWs and civilians.
    3. Millions of Soviet POWs.
    4. Over half the population of Georgia and Armenia.
    5. About 10% of the population of the Ukraine.
    6. B and C.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was correct.

    Not only German POWs, but ethnic German civilians from all over eastern Europe, were taken prisoner and sent to Siberia for slave labor. As for Soviet POWs, Stalin declared that there were no Soviet prisoners, only "Soviet traitors" and gave them traitors' sentences to Siberia. See Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950 for more on the post-war atrocities against ethnic Germans. On the treatment accorded to Soviet POWs, see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago. U.S. and British troops had orders - in disregard of the usual rules of political asylum - to repatriate Soviet POWs, irrespective of the possible punishment they might face at home. These orders were generally carried out to the letter - making the governments of the United States and Great Britain willing accomplices in one of Stalin's major war crimes. In his "secret speech" in 1956, Khrushchev claimed that Stalin wanted to deport the entire Ukrainian nation, but abandoned the plans since there were too many of them.

20. The Yalta agreements authorized the "orderly" and "humane" expulsions of ethnic Germans from much of eastern Europe. In fact:
    1. Over 10 million ethnic Germans were expelled from eastern Europe, and about 2 million perished.
    2. After the Red Army had passed through eastern Europe, there were few ethnic Germans remaining to expel.
    3. About 2 million ethnic Germans were expelled by the Communist-dominated governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia.
    4. Over half of the "expelles" were deported east to Siberia, not west to Germany.
    5. The United States and Britain typically ordered German refugees to return to their country of origin.
    6. C and D.

    
    

    Your answer, A, was correct.

    After border changes, western Poland and the Sudentenland's population were overwhelmingly German. 14 million of these ethnic Germans were expelled under deadly conditions. 2 million did not survive. For details, see Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950. Some German civilians were taken to Siberia as slave laborers, but far less than half. The U.S. and Britain repatriated Soviet POWs, but rarely forced Germans fleeing Poland or Czechoslovakia to return home.

    Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns - or dollars. Take your choice - there is no other - and your time is running out. --Ayn Rand

    
    

21. Between the end of World War II and the victory of Mao's forces in China in 1949:
    1. Soviet troops seized much of the industry of Manchuria.
    2. Stalin refused to recognize the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai Shek.
    3. Large numbers of landlords and "counter-revolutionaries" were executed in territory controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
    4. Mao's forces conquered Tibet and sent over 1 million Tibetans to slave labor camps.
    5. A and C.
    6. A, B, and D.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was E.

    Soviet troops captured Manchuria about the same time Japan surrendered. Before pulling out, they stripped the country of much of its capital stock and took it home with them. Chiang's troops replaced the Soviet occupiers, although Mao's forces were given much of the captured military supplies. Mao did not wait for final victory before beginning widespread killing - during the '40's the Chinese Communists executed large numbers of landlords, "counter-revolutionaries," and other standard scapegoats. Laszlo Ladany, The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985 has more details. The conquest and persecution of Tibet did not begin until after Mao's 1949 victory in China proper.

22. Soon after Stalin's death, Soviet secret police chief Lavrenti Beria was arrested and executed. Thus, Beria met the same fate as his predecessors:
    1. Dzerzhinski and Trotsky.
    2. Yagoda and Tukhachevsky.
    3. Kamenev and Zinoviev.
    4. Kirov and Bukharin.
    5. Kirov and Yagoda.
    6. Yagoda and Yezhov.

    
    

    Your answer, A, was incorrect. The correct answer was F.

    Trotsky and (as we now know) Kirov were assassinated on Stalin's orders; the rest were executed during the 1930's - except for Dzerzhinski, who died a natural death. Of those executed, however, only Yagoda and Yezhov were, like Beria, heads of the secret police. See Conquest, The Great Terror.

23. Mao's relations with Stalin were sometimes uneasy, because:
    1. Stalin tried to veto Mao's effort to form a coalition government with Chiang's forces.
    2. Soviet troops occupied Tibet during the 1930's.
    3. Mao disapproved of the show trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev.
    4. Stalin vetoed a joint Soviet-Chinese invasion of Japan.
    5. Stalin doubted Mao's chances for success, and therefore gave him little assistance.
    6. All of the above.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was E.

    Mao received surprisingly little help from Stalin, who seems to have advised him to work with Chiang. Mao, however, was a life-long Stalinist, who resisted any "revisionism" criticizing Stalin's Great Terror. Answers B and D are purely imaginary - there was never a plan to invade Japan, and it was Mao's forces that invaded Tibet in the 1950's.

24. During the 1920's, the Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party:
    1. Permitted joint membership in the Chinese Communist Party.
    2. Accepted several prominent Soviet advisors.
    3. Sent Chiang to Moscow to work out a deal for military aid.
    4. Had its army's officer corp trained by Soviet experts on Whampoa Island.
    5. Appointed Mao Zedong as second in command of its Propaganda Ministry.
    6. All of the above.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was correct.

    Few realize the intimate ties between not only the Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang, but between the Kuomintang and the Soviet Union. (This does much to explain Chiang's 4th-place ranking among the century's greatest mass murderers after Stalin, Mao, and Hitler). During the 20's there was a serious possibility that the Kuomintang might become the official representative of the Comintern in China, but largely for personal reasons it didn't work out. See Franz Borkenau, World Communism.

25. Between 1949 and 1960, the Soviet Union provided Communist China with:
    1. Economic advisors.
    2. Assistance in setting up a "Chinese Gulag."
    3. Large grants and no-interest loans for purchase of technical equipment.
    4. Nuclear weapons.
    5. A and B.
    6. A, C, and D.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was E.

    The Soviets gave their Chinese allies help in making their economic plans, and the services of technical experts (including experts in the "science" of slave labor). But economic assistance was limited - creating much friction. The Soviet-Chinese break around 1960 appears to be related to Khrushchev's decision to refuse to help the Chinese build atomic weapons. See Laszlo Ladany, The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985 and Joseph Camilleri, Chinese Foreign Policy: The Maoist Era and Its Aftermath.

26. Under Mao, the slave labor camp population of China:
    1. Had an annual death rate in excess of Stalin's Gulag.
    2. Had over 10,000,000 inmates.
    3. Had little economic function.
    4. Consisted mainly of Chinese POWs from the Korean War.
    5. A and B.
    6. C and D.

    
    

    Your answer, E, was incorrect. The correct answer was B.

    According to R.J. Rummel's China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900, Mao's camps had 10-15 million inmates, but a lower death rate than the Soviet Gulag - partly because of greater effort to keep the Chinese slave laborers in working condition.

27. Three related nation-wide political programs were initiated in China during 1950-51, which resulted in several million killings. These were:
    1. Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Sufan Purge.
    2. The Resist-US-Aid-Korea campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign.
    3. Land Reform, "suppression of counter-revolutionaries," and Resist-US-Aid-Korea.
    4. Collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, and the Gang of Four trial.
    5. Collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.
    6. Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign.

    
    

    Your answer, A, was incorrect. The correct answer was C.

    Laszlo Ladany, The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985 describes the early Maoist initiatives in detail.

28. Mao's deadliest campaign, which cost an estimate 30 million Chinese lives, was:
    1. Land Reform.
    2. Farm collectivization.
    3. The Great Leap Forward.
    4. The Cultural Revolution.
    5. The Lin Biao purge.
    6. The Gang of Four trial.

    
    

    Your answer, A, was incorrect. The correct answer was C.

    Recent work by Becker (Hungry Ghosts) confirms earlier studies finding that 30,000,000 Chinese starved to death as a result of the Great Leap Forward - a mad agricultural policy that made Stalin's collective farms seem mild in comparison.

29. The Great Leap Forward:
    1. Took back the land given to the peasants in the Land Reform campaign.
    2. Collectivized agricultural and purged millions of "kulaks," or wealthy peasants.
    3. Consolidated collective farms, and introduced common barracks and kitchens.
    4. Required villages to set up makeshift steel mills fed with scrap metal.
    5. C and D.
    6. A, B, C, and D.

    
    

    Your answer, A, was incorrect. The correct answer was E.

    Before the Great Leap Forward, Mao imposed forced collectivization upon the hapless peasantry, who believed that the land they received during Land Reform was theirs for good. The Great Leap Forward consolidated the pre-existing collective farms, seizing personal property and forcing peasants into common barracks and kitchens. See R.J. Rummel, China's Bloody Century, and Laszlo Ladany, The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985.

30. During the Great Leap Forward, peasants retained the right to:
    1. Move to the city.
    2. Choose their occupation.
    3. Demand payment for their work for the commune.
    4. Keep the house they occupied.
    5. Keep their own tools.
    6. None of the above.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was correct.

    The Great Leap Forward stripped the collectivized Chinese peasantry of what little freedom still remained to them - turning a whole nation into virtual slave laborers.

    Homo Sovieticus is like the prostitute who believes that all women are whores because she is. Soviet man believes that the whole world is divided into parties and that every man is a member of one party or another, and that there is no real honesty. No one stands for the truth. And if anyone says he is above Party and is trying to speak the truth alone, he is lying. --Andrei Sakharov

31. Mao's Cultural Revolution persecuted and propagandized against alleged:
    1. Trotskyists.
    2. Stalinists.
    3. Nationalists.
    4. Revisionists.
    5. Dengists.
    6. Emperor-worshippers.

    
    

    Your answer, C, was incorrect. The correct answer was D.

    Mao condemned his former allies in the Soviet Union as "revisionists" who had abandoned the one true Communism of Stalin. Anyone in the Chinese Party sympathetic to liberalization received the same label, and massive persecution. In addition to Rummel and Laszlo, see also Anne Thurston, Enemies of the People: the Ordeal of the Intellectuals in China's Great Cultural Revolution.

32. During the 1950's, Khrushchev released millions of slave laborers, relaxed censorship, gave a "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's worst crimes, and announced the goal of peaceful co-existence with the West. Mao's reaction to these reforms was:
    1. Strongly and increasingly negative, leading him to announce that the Soviet Union was ruled by revisionists who had restored capitalism.
    2. Mixed, since the Chinese Communists had been treated so poorly by Stalin.
    3. Mixed, because Khrushchev was able to win China the diplomatic recognition of the United States.
    4. Generally positive, though he defended Stalin's memory to win the support of the Indonesian Communist Party and the Khmer Rouge.
    5. Positive, although he opposed the relaxation of censorship.
    6. Unconditionally supportive, for Mao like most of the Chinese Communist Party was used to sudden reversals in the Party line.

    
    

    Your answer, B, was incorrect. The correct answer was A.

    Mao always opposed any attempt to downgrade Stalin, and for most of his career he declared that peaceful coexistence with "imperialism" was an impossibility. He changed his tune in the early 70's, when Chinese relations with the U.S. warmed up.

33. The Cultural Revolution has received more attention than any of Mao's other atrocities because:
    1. Mao seems to have struggled to prevent it.
    2. It targeted intellectuals who later denounced the Cultural Revolution in their work.
    3. Some of its victims ultimately regained power.
    4. It provoked border clashes with India.
    5. B and C.
    6. A, B, and D.

    
    

    Your answer, E, was correct.

    Both the Cultural Revolution and the Great Terror receive a disproportionate amount of attention because its victims were often prominent and articulate. Stalin and Mao both murdered far more Russian and Chinese peasants than intellectuals or dissident Communists.

34. The single greatest atrocity committed in eastern Europe (outside of the Soviet Union) from 1945 on was:
    1. The post-war expulsions of ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries.
    2. Deportation of Poles to Siberia.
    3. The 1956 invasion of Hungary and subsequent deportations.
    4. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.
    5. Tito's "anti-Cominformist" persecutions.
    6. Executions of persons attempting to escape from East Germany.

    
    

    Your answer, A, was correct.

    Again, see Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950, which shows that about 2 million ethnic Germans died as a result of state action. Over a million Poles were sent to Siberia - but this was mostly in 1939 and 1940 rather than after World War II.

35. Which of the following Communist leaders were not trained in the Soviet Union under Stalin?
    1. Tito.
    2. Kim Il-sung.
    3. Pol Pot.
    4. Ho Chi Minh.
    5. A and C.
    6. C and D.

    
    

    Your answer, A, was incorrect. The correct answer was C.

    Tito, Kim Il-sung, and Ho Chi Minh - along with numerous other prominent Communists - at one time received training in the Soviet Union. Kim was actually a lieutenant in the Soviet army and an NKVD agent during World War II. See Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, as well as Rodger Swearingen, ed., Leaders of the Communist World.

36. Kim Il-sung's North Korean dictatorship:
    1. Was unable to maintain its hold on power without the continuing presence of Soviet occupation troops.
    2. Tried to moderate the abuses of Stalin's "personality cult."
    3. At one point "rented" slave laborers to the Soviets for use in Siberia.
    4. Officially registered about 50% of the population as a "hostile class."
    5. A and C.
    6. C and D.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was C.

    Kim was eventually able to build an independent Communist regime that dwarfed even the personality cults of Stalin and Mao. The shroud of secrecy around North Korea is so great that it is difficult to estimate the number of victims, but reports from Soviet citizens on joint actions with Kim (including the slave "rentals") suggest that it is very large indeed. Kim's government in 1964 classified 25% of the citizens of North Korea as "hostile" - which excluded them from most occupations and opportunities. See R.J. Rummel's Death by Government for more facts and conjectures about Kim's reign.

37. Ho Chi Minh:
    1. Worked as a Comintern agent in China during the 1920's.
    2. Waited until French withdrawal to execute nationalists and purge the Communist Party of "Trotskyists."
    3. Killed several hundred thousand Vietnamese landlords and their families during the 1950's.
    4. Set up "re-education camps" and "special economic zones" in 1975 to punish his opponents in South Vietnam.
    5. A and C.
    6. A, B, C, and D.

    
    

    Your answer, F, was incorrect. The correct answer was E.

    While many prefer to view Ho as a "nationalist," he was a founding member of the French Communist Party, received training in the Soviet Union, and worked for the Comintern in China before taking a leading role in Vietnam. His rule was bloody from the start - right after World War II, he began exterminations of all rivals within the Party and without. Ho however died before the end of the Vietnam War, so the guilt for the post-war atrocities rest upon his successors.

38. The Communist government of Vietnam appears to be guilty of the killings of over 1,000,000 non-combatants. Of these:
    1. Over 95% were Vietnamese.
    2. Many were "boat people," or refugees who were forced to flee Vietnam on unseaworthy boats to avoid execution or slave labor camps.
    3. Few were killed in "re-education camps," which were atypically mild for a Communist regime.
    4. Almost all were exterminated during wartime.
    5. A and B.
    6. A, B, and D.

    
    

    Your answer, E, was incorrect. The correct answer was B.

    Several hundred thousand victims of the Vietnamese Communists were Cambodians, so A is false. The "re-education camps" were quite deadly in many cases, contrary to official propaganda. Much of the killing in Vietnam happened during peacetime - both after the victory over the French in the mid 50's, and over the South Vietnamese regime in the mid 70's. See Rummel, Death by Government for more detailed numbers and comparisons.

39. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime killed about 2 million people - 25% of the population of Cambodia. Aspects of this "auto-genocide" included:
    1. Forcing the entire urban population into forced agricultural collectives, where they worked under conditions of extreme hardship.
    2. Exterminating ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese, and other minorities.
    3. Executing Cambodians unable to speak French.
    4. Imposing Buddhism on Cambodia's Catholic and Muslim minorities.
    5. A and B.
    6. A, B, and D.

    
    

    Your answer, E, was correct.

    Pol Pot's regime forced millions of city-dwellers into rural collective farms, where executions, forced labor, and man-made famine became difficult to distinguish. It also killed ethnic minorities in large numbers, along with the educated and those who could speak foreign languages. While Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge was nationalist as well as Communist, they attacked both the dominant Cambodian religion - Buddhism - along with minority Catholic and Muslim sects. Rummel's Death by Government is again a good source.

40. Communist Vietnam overthrew Pol Pot's government in 1979, and imposed a puppet ruler, Heng Samrin. Samrin:
    1. Was a moderate socialist who ended large-scale killing in Cambodia.
    2. Worked closely with Vietnamese forces as they murdered several hundred thousand additional Cambodians.
    3. Largely abolished Cambodia's slave labor camps.
    4. Had about 5% the annual murder rate of Pol Pot's regime.
    5. A, B, and C.
    6. B and D.

    
    

    Your answer, B, was incorrect. The correct answer was F.

    Heng Samrin was in fact a dissident member of Pol Pot's murderous Khmer Rouge. Once in power, the killing merely slowed, but hardly stopped. In cooperation with his Vietnamese allies, Samrin killed several hundred thousand additional Cambodians; but Pol Pot's regime was so hellish that Samrin's murder rate was one-twentieth that of the previous regime.

View the Results for the Holocausts of Communism Test

Click here to learn more about Communism.

Click here to read my FAQ about Communism.

Would you like to volunteer to translate this test into another language? Let me know!

Comments? Send them to me.

Want to see the perl code for the Holocausts of Communism Test? Click here

Return to Bryan Caplan's Homepage

Copyright @ 2010 by Fathers' Manifesto & Christian Party