No victims in any category below have been double-counted.

 

Outside Peru, no war-related deaths or imprisonments have been included.

​

​

​Communism vs. Villagers

• 400,000 dead.............Cambodian rural (1)

• 19.5 million dead..........Chinese peasants (2)

• 250,000 dead.............Ethiopian nomads (3)​

• 5 million dead..............Soviet peasants (4)

• 340,000 dead.............Tibetan rural (5)

​

Communism vs. Landowners

• 3 million dead.............Chinese landowners (6)

• 100,000 dead.............Vietnamese landowners (8)
  Note: Soviet kulaks are counted among the villagers.

​

Communism vs. Religion​

• 47,000 dead ..................Cambodian Buddhists (9)   

• 13,000 imprisoned.........Czech priests / religious (10) 

• 7,000 imprisoned.........Mozambican Jehovah's Witnesses (11)

• 100,000 imprisoned.........North Korean Christians (12)

• 2,100 imprisoned..........Polish priests & Jehovah's Witnesses (13)

• 200,000 dead...................Soviet clergy (15)

• ​2,000 dead ...................Tibetan monks & pilgrims (18)

• 400 dead...................Romanian Christians (14)

Moreover, Christians suffered the following in Romanian prison:
 

In a "baptism of immersion,"

inmates' heads were plunged into
buckets of urine and feces, while
guards chanted baptismal rites.

 

Near the point of drowning the

Christian's head was let up for
air and then plunged back into
the sewage (65).

​
​

Communism vs. Cossacks

• 400,000 dead or deported ethnics  (20)

​​​

Photo: Bolshevik instructions on "the
need to do away with the cossacks." (21)

​

 

"Order no.7: In the event of

an unauthorized exit of a

registered [Cossack] family,

the family shall be shot."

​

"Order no. 8: This execution shall

be carried out among every

family member."

​

"Order no. 9: All property of the

executed [Cossack] shall be

confiscated and given to the poor."

​

​

Communism vs. Native Americans

​

• 6,000 dead..............................Ashaninka (Peru/luminoso-22) 

• 5,000 imprisoned...................Ashaninka (Peru/luminoso-22)

• 10,000 forcibly relocated.........Ashaninka (Peru/luminoso-22)

• 35 destroyed......................Ashaninka communities (Peru/luminoso-22)

• 35,000 imprisoned or forcibly relocated.....Nicaraguan tribesmen  (Sandinistas-23)       

 

Communism vs. Unclassified Dissidents *

 

• 5,000  dead.....................Albanian dissidents (24)

• 10,000 dead......................Angolan dissidents (25)

• 29,000  dead.....................Bulgarian dissidents (26)

• 1 million dead......................Cambodian dissidents (27)

• 43 million dead.......................Chinese dissidents (28)

• 16,000 dead......................Cuban dissidents (29)

​

Moreover, in Cuba's concentration camps, inmates faced
the following "punishments." They were forced to

• "cut grass with their teeth"

• endure "mock executions"

• live in iron cages "1 meter

wide, 1.8 meters high"

• sit for hours in toilet ditches

• withstand shock treatment

• die by the hundreds from starvation

and lack of medical attention (30)

​

• 44,000 dead.........................East German dissidents (31)

• 10,000 dead.........................Ethiopian dissidents (32)

• 50,000 dead.........................Hungarian dissidents (33)

• 3,000 dead ........................Nicaraguan dissidents (34)

​

Moreover, 11,000 Nicaraguans were tortured at the
hands of the Sandinistas.  This included their being

• skinned alive & then executed

• drawn & quartered

• forced to watch wives and
  daughters sexually assaulted.

• caged in cubicles less than a square meter

• "punished" via electric shock

• deprived food and water (35)

​

• 1.6 million dead....................North Korean dissidents (36)

• 21,857 dead......................Polish dissidents (37)

• 120,000 dead......................Romanian dissidents (38)

• 8 million dead.......................Soviet dissidents (39)

• 425,000 dead.....................Tibetan dissidents (40)

​

Moreover, Tibetans suffered the following atrocities at
the hands of the Chinese.  They faced

• crucifixion

• drowning

• beheading

• boiling alive

• burying alive

• mutilation (41)

​

​

Communism vs. Gay Rights

​

• 25,000 imprisoned.............Cuban gays and other "deviants" (42)

• 500 dead.........................Peruvian gays, bisexuals, and transgendered (43)

• 11,000 arrested...................Polish gays (44)

• 100,000s imprisoned............Soviet gays in slave labor camps (45)

​

Moreover, Chinese gays were targeted for persecution

although numbers are impossible to quantify (46)

​

​

Communism vs. Collective Laborers
 

• 160 dead.................East German strikers (47)
  demonstrators killed after protesting a
  10% increase in work quotas.   

• 110 dead................Nicaraguan strikers
  executed by the sandinistas after
  demanding back pay (48)   

• 31 dead................Novocherkassk strikers (Kruschev)
  24 killed on the spot; 7 later executed; over 100 workers arrested. (49)

• 51 dead...............Peruvian union leaders (50) 

• 106 dead................Polish strikers
  Poznan demonstrators killed after
  protesting working conditions & pay
  issues; others killed in later strikes;
  thousands attacked by military (51)

• 3,000 dead.............Soviet strikers (Lenin /Trotsky)

some shot / others, as N. Werth
describes,"loaded onto barges and then
thrown by the hundreds into the Volga
with stones around their necks" (52)

Moreover;

Massive factory protests in China

strikers beaten back by 30,000 red
soldiers after disputing wages (53)

Striking outlawed in Cuba (54).

organizers sentenced to as many as

                                          26 years in prison (55)

* Here the term refers to those who are traditionally defined as "political dissidents," but also,

in a more general sense, to anyone whose behavior breaks with (or is suspected to break with)
authority's demand for unity among the proletariat. Here we find the artist, the intellectual,
even the teller of political jokes or the glib parents turned in by their own children, or the
scapegoat of the scapegoat who is trying to shine the spotlight away from him or herself
in order to escape communism's horrors. The term also refers to those unfortunate victims of
communism who were arrested in order to fill arrest quotas (60). Often, the above dissidents were
referred to as enemies of the people although many such "enemies of the people" fall into one of
the earlier categories and thus, for our purposes, may not be included with the dissidents. Perhaps
the most difficult victims to classify are those urban residents who were killed during the Great
Leap Forward, (64) although for our purposes they too are considered dissidents.  

And then there are questions outside the scope of the above chart that are still relevant to the
the overall totals--questions that must be dealt with, such as how many people did Stalin kill.  
At the low end of the spectrum we find Yale professor Timothy Snyder's estimate of 6 to 9 million
unnatural deaths under Stalin (61), and at the upper end of the spectrum, we find British historian
Norman Davies' claim of 50 million deaths (62).  Somewhere in the middle is historian and American
Medal of Freedom winner Robert Conquest's oft-cited estimate of at least 20 million deaths (63).  

Perhaps the best we can do is err on the conservative side and in so doing, arrive at figures
that are almost impossible for apologists to rebut. For example, in an effort to limit communist
genocide figures to peacetime deaths, I have not included mass killings from the first Soviet famine
since it was thinly connected to previous war and intermittent climate disruption. This choice
lowers the death toll for all communist countries from 90 million to around 85 million. Such logic
governs  many of the choices made over the course of compiling these facts and statistics, as do
other attempts to err on the low side when calculating the number of deaths under communism.
Concerning the number of deaths due to Stalin alone,  I've chosen to veer toward professor
Snyder's  estimate, which is also consistent with Stephane Courtois' count of 20 million
Soviet peacetime casualties in all regimes.  And certainly neither Snyder nor Courtois are
communist apologists, especially considering that the latter was one of the chiefs behind
The Black Book of Communism,  the bible for anti-communists. This choice
is consistent with the overall means for determining numbers. When choosing from a range
of numbers, I've typically chosen the lowest number  (in addition to Snyder's Stalin count,
see "Cambodian clergy killed")  or a median number  (see "Chinese landowners killed").  

But ultimately, the purpose of this website is educational: to chart communism's human-rights
violations in a format in which its horrors can quickly and accessibly be comprehended.
After more than a century of bloodshed, it should be clear that the differences between capitalism
and communism are as grounded in morality as in economics.  It's unfortunate that when
studying the morality of capitalism vs. the morality of communism, so many students are
first introduced to an abstract notion of "capitalist greed," rather than a concrete measurement
of communist genocide, slavery, torture, mass homicide, false imprisonment, and deliberate starvation.

If forced to answer the question how many people did communism kill, I would
have to approximate--after totalling the deaths from all demographics--that peacetime communism
killed  85 million people. While this figure is a conservative estimate, the number is high enough
that it puts communist apologists in the unenviable position of having to pretzel themselves
into embarrassingly bad logic and outright falsehoods over the course of 34 point-by-point
calculations, all for the privilege of arguing that it was only 30 or 40 million innocents who were
slaughtered by their mentors.