ABSTRACT
Ideology and absolute power are the critical variables in soviet democide. They explain how individual communists could beat, torture, and murder by the hundreds, and sleep well at night. Probably almost 62 million people, nearly 54,800,000 of them citizens, have been murdered by the Communist Party — the government — of the Soviet Union. It is impossible to comprehend this democide. Focusing on the most probable estimate of almost 62 million murdered, it is over four times the battle dead (15 million) for all nations in the Second World War. Indeed, it exceeds total number of deaths (nearly 34 million) from all this century's international, civil, guerrilla, and liberation wars, including the Russian civil war. Moreover, communists have not been immune to the lust for power for its own sake. Surely, the cliches of power — power aggrandizes itself, power can only be limited by power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely apply no less to Marxists than to other rulers.
