ABSTRACT
Enemies are not people. We’re allowed to do what we like with them. People indeed! Soviet secret police interrogator to Eugenia Ginzburg, in Journey into the
Whirlwind
“No other state in history,” writes genocide scholar Richard Rubenstein, “has ever initiated policies designed to eliminate so many of its own citizens as has the Soviet Union.”1 The judgment must be moderated both in relative and absolute terms: the proportion of the Cambodian population killed as a direct result of Khmer Rouge policies (Chapter 7) approached one-quarter, while in absolute terms Mao Zedong has been accused of inflicting a death-toll, mostly through famine, that may have dwarfed even the Soviet Union’s. Nonetheless, there is very little in the record of human experience to match the violence unleashed between 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power, and 1953, when Joseph Stalin died and the Soviet Union moved to adopt a more restrained and largely non-murderous domestic policy.
