Stalin, Mao, Communism, and Their 21st Century Aftermath in Russia and China
by Miguel A. Faria, Jr. (Cambridge Scholars, 2024)
Jimmy Carter once told Americans that they needed “to get over their inordinate fear of communism.” Like most leftist politicians, Carter saw communism as a matter of good intentions gone awry. The collectivist ideals of Marxism were not bad per se, but communist leaders had gone too far in implementing them. Communism continues to enjoy good press from writers who believe that the path to the good society lies through omnipotent government.
Someone who begs to disagree is Dr. Miguel A. Faria, Jr. He was fortunate to escape from Cuba as a teenager and has a clear-eyed view of the essence of communism, namely force. In his latest book, he surveys the hideous, blood-soaked landscape of communism, revealing how the pursuit of its supposed ideals has left millions of people dead and impoverished.
Faria begins in Russia with Stalin (real name, Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili), who would seize power in the Soviet Union a few years after Lenin’s death. He was, Faria writes, a violent bandit in his native Georgia, happy to steal and kill for himself and to advance communism. His first noteworthy escapade was the bombing of a bank in 1907, which left many people dead and a big haul of rubles for “the cause.” Lenin needed money for his revolution, and Stalin helped provide it.
Once Lenin had gained power in 1917, he went about eliminating the opposition, including many on the left who were not sufficiently zealous in their support of the new regime. His Bolshevik faction was ruthless. Faria writes, “All of the Bolsheviks sanctioned the use of violence, the use of coercive state power, and the use of terror in peacetime or wartime to consolidate Soviet power and subdue the Russian masses in whose name they supposedly ruled.”
As Friedrich Hayek observed, the problem with government is that the worst people tend to get on top. That lesson comes through again and again in the pages of Faria’s book. Power always attracts vicious people willing to do unspeakable things. Stalin once wrote, “To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance and then go to bed … there is nothing sweeter in the world.”
Among the first victims of communism was the rule of law. Nothing could be allowed to obstruct the government in its pursuit of absolute control. Thus the concept of “socialist legality” was introduced, meaning that the state could bend or break laws as the rulers thought necessary. Trials of accused people were for show, with outcomes foreordained by the rulers. (Readers might be inclined to draw parallels between Stalin’s Soviet Union and today’s America in many respects, including this one.)
Mass casualties began during Stalin’s reign. The “kulaks” — farmers who owned their own land — were driven off so the state could begin collective farming. Millions of them were sent off to slave labor camps or killed if they resisted. The body count continued to rise during the famine in Ukraine, a famine caused not by bad weather but by government seizure of food stocks. Then, beginning in 1936, Stalin unleashed “The Great Terror” during which millions more were arrested, convicted, and either sent to slave labor camps or executed. Many of the victims were communist officials suspected of not being utterly loyal to Stalin. The Terror made everyone fearful that any “wrong” statement would be reported to the authorities. Stalin even purged the officer corps of the Red Army since he suspected that some might be plotting against him.
In early 1939, Stalin and Hitler formed a pact. Readers might be surprised, since Communism and Nazism are so often said to be polar opposites politically. But Faria explains: “One must remember that both political philosophies — that is, communism for the Soviets and National Socialism for the Nazis — are of the totalitarian and collectivist variety with only superficial differences.” That September, the Germans attacked Poland from the west and after the Poles were defeated, Stalin ordered the Red Army to attack from the east. As a result, many thousands of Polish soldiers were taken prisoner. In March of 1940, Stalin ordered that all of the officers be killed. Why commit this atrocity in violation of international law? Stalin figured that Poland would more readily fall into communism if those men had been eliminated.
Remember what Hayek said?
In June 1941, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, beginning a long, extraordinarily bloody conflict. And since Germany was allied with Japan, another aggressive nation, Stalin worried that the Japanese would invade from the east. His strategy for avoiding that was to provoke war between the United States and Japan. How was that possible? Faria points out that President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration was riddled with communist sympathizers and they pushed Roosevelt into provocative moves against Japan, especially cutting off oil shipments. That gambit worked to perfection for Stalin. The Japanese attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, enabling Stalin to shift his forces from Siberia to blunt the German offensive as it neared Moscow.
Faria highlights another ugly feature of communism, namely the need for enemies to blame for the miseries of the people. At first, it was landowners who, through their greed, were accused of obstructing the government from bringing about the promised Utopia. Later, after the end of World War II, Stalin switched to blaming Jews. “Stalin was convinced that Israel and Jewish internationalism, including Russian Jews, were a threat to the Soviet state. He cautiously began his anti-cosmopolitan campaign that soon developed a life of its own in Mother Russia, the land of pogroms and anti-Semitism,” our author writes. In 1948, numerous Jewish doctors were accused of plotting against the regime, and Zionists were said to be wrecking Stalin’s great economic plans.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, there was a struggle for power among the leaders, and the one who came out on top was Lavrenti Beria. Faria reveals something quite surprising at this point, namely that Beria wanted to liberalize the Soviet Union and relax its iron grip on the countries of eastern Europe. Late that year, a cabal of hardliners had Beria arrested and executed. Absolute power had to be maintained.
We also learn much about Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the writer who was sent to a slave labor camp during World War II because his letters betrayed a lack of enthusiasm for Stalin’s military prowess. (Remember that people enjoy no privacy under totalitarian rule; the “security” of the state is always paramount, so your communications must be monitored.) He survived his years in the Gulag and would later write (with the utmost secrecy) a number of books that exposed the terrors of communism. After his books were smuggled out and published in the West, Solzhenitsyn was lionized for a few years, but after he gave an address at Harvard in which he voiced his support for traditional values, the leftist intelligentsia turned against him.
That brings up a point that arises several times in the book — the way Western intellectuals are eager to cover for communism. Their books and articles frequently paint totalitarian regimes in soft, glowing terms, spreading the official line about how wonderful things are for the people and turning a blind eye to the widespread poverty and terror.
We also learn much about China under Mao in the book.
A big part of the mythology about Mao and his rule is that he was an “agrarian reformer” who brought fairness and equality to the people. Quite the contrary, Faria shows how Mao brought destitution and fear. During the long war for control of China that began in 1934, areas under Mao’s control suffered badly. He writes, “Beginning in 1937, Mao ruled the Yenan Red Base for the next decade. An ancient and cultured city, Yenan was the hub of thriving commercial activity, and oil had been discovered in the region. However, under Mao’s control, the province was devastated by communist mismanagement and plundered by the Red Army…. All goods and implements were seized from the peasants to force them into compliance. Opium was cultivated and sold with all profits going to Mao’s communists while the general population starved.”
As with Stalin, Mao needed enemies to blame for communism’s failure to deliver on its promises, and he chose China’s intellectual class. In his infamous Cultural Revolution, Mao sent swarms of his young zealots (Red Guards) to torment and even kill educated Chinese who were suspected of harboring any sympathy for traditional values.
Mao also received the benefit of a fawning Western press and intellectual class. Books that told the story of Mao’s rise to power and rule with fawning admiration shaped the attitudes of Western “sophisticates.” Conversely, the few books written by Chinese writers who had experienced the horrors of Mao’s government first-hand have been almost completely ignored.
After Mao’s death in 1976, there was a period of liberalization under Deng Xiaoping. The problem, from the standpoint of the Communist Party, was that too many people now had a taste for freedom. That erupted in 1989, when tens of thousands of young people demonstrated in favor of liberty. That movement was crushed by the military, and ever since, it has been forbidden for Chinese to mention Tiananmen Square. The more powerful the government, the less it can tolerate thoughts that might undermine its authority.
The current Chinese regime, Faria reminds us, commits atrocities against ethnic minority populations and feels the need to send balloons over the United States to gather intelligence that won’t be used for any benign purpose.
Faria has written two books on the way communism has ruined life in his native Cuba — Cuba in Revolution: Escape from a Lost Paradise (2002) and Cuba’s Eternal Revolution through the Prism of Insurgency, Socialism, and Espionage (2023) — and he works some of his knowledge into this book. Just as with Stalin and Mao, Castro’s regime suckered intellectuals with “Potemkin villages” that gave a false impression of what life was like for ordinary people. Castro also employed his propagandists to spout deceptive statistics about the supposed advances in health for the people when in fact medical care had retrogressed terribly for all but the elite.
Another nice feature of the book is its inclusion of many photographs of the people Faria is writing about. You get to look into the cold eyes of the killers and wonder what made them so vicious.
Communism still has lots of apologists. They are busy pushing the United States in the direction of omnipotent, unchallengeable government. After you’ve read this book, I’m certain you will want to prevent that from happening.
This article was originally published in the April 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.
