Page 74 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
72

14 and 16 hours a day, and were executed by camp guards on the least
excuse. Some inmates were deliberately starved to death; others died,
their physical health broken from lack of nourishment and terrible living
conditions. Many others were made to work in light and shredded cloth-
ing, froze to death in the Siberian cold. First a prisoner's fingers and toes
would freeze and fall off, then his ear or nose would "break off."
Hundreds of thousands are known to have suffered and died in this
way. In The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, the famous Russian author
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gives further examples of this horror.

Red Terror in the Eastern Block

Stalin died in 1953. The terror begun by Lenin, which he had con-
tinued and extended, left tens of millions dead and subjected dozens of
different ethnic groups to torture and anguish. The Black Book of
Communism gives a broad outline of Communist savagery in the
Leninist-Stalinist era:
The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without trial,
and the murder of hundreds of thousands or rebellious workers and peas-
ants from 1918 and 1922
The famine of 1922, which caused the deaths of 5 million people
The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920
The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930
The liquidation of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937-38
The deportation of 2 million kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930-1932
The destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means of
an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine in 1932-33
The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts,
Moldovans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944-45
The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941
The wholesale deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1943
The wholesale deportation of the Chechens in 1944
The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 1944 51
After Stalin's death, the Soviet regime entered a softer period, lim-
ited though it was. But his "reign of fear" continued to govern a society