ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three cases of mass murder committed by Communist regimes. The first of these concerns Stalin’s deportation of a variety of groups, most specifically the Kulaks and the several national minorities that he found ideologically and politically threatening. The second is the Holodomor, the lethal famine in the Ukraine in the first half of the 1930s. Third is the extraordinary violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The historical record reveals cases where the “Other” is created on the grounds of class, sex, color, race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality. So, for example, the majority of Stalin’s victims were identified as “class enemies.” The most notorious example of such class war was directed at the Kulaks, though his entire massive campaign against the peasantry as represented by his forced drive to collectivize agriculture, was based on the notion of class. The undisguised desire for autonomy and independence by the minorities threatened the dismemberment of the Soviet state.
