When the Bolsheviks first seized power in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin declared that the new Communist regime would renounce all the unequal treaties Tsarist Russia had imposed on China and relinquish the privileges it had taken from Chinese territory. This political blank cheque immediately captivated many Chinese intellectuals, who saw in the first ever Communist regime a sense of moral idealism and justice. But when some of them later travelled to the Soviet Union, the illusion shattered. What they discovered was not liberation, but the grim reality of despair.
Xu Zhimo, one of China’s renowned intellectuals, wrote in his journal: “The farther I travelled inland; the more apparent the people’s suffering became… At Chita station, ragged children – some barely three or four years old, pleaded with travellers for alms… The old aristocratic grace of Russia had completely disappeared… The entire society described by Tolstoy and Turgenev — gone.”
Nearly a century later, Communism continues to inflict new forms of tragedy and violence. Regimes such as the Chinese Communist Party and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un stand as stark reminders that Communism’s legacy did not end with the twentieth century, and that its threats to human freedom and global security persist.
Yet, many still choose to defend and glorify the very ideology that sustains this oppression.
Hence, on this day, November 7th, which honours the Victims of Communism, we remember the hypocrisy and devastation the ideology unleashed. This day marks the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, which gave rise to the first Communist regime, and ushered in a century of human catastrophe that left some of the deepest wounds in modern history.
Across continents and decades, Communism claimed more than one hundred million lives through executions, forced labour camps, engineered famines, and political purges. This staggering toll includes more than twenty million in the Soviet Union, forty-five million in Mao’s China, and millions more in Cambodia, North Korea, Eastern Europe and beyond.
Behind each number was a life extinguished, a family destroyed.
The historian George Watson once described Karl Marx as “the ancestor of modern political genocide”. This observation points to how Marx’s doctrine of class struggle introduced a perilous moral logic into politics, one that could render mass violence appear virtuous when justified as historical progress. Whether or not one accepts Watson’s formulation, the observation reveals a reality: once killing is sanctified as a moral duty, its victims are no longer regarded as human.
Communism often presents itself as a philosophy of equality, its supposed ideals forming a utopian vision that continues to attract many young people with the promise of justice. Yet behind this façade lies the belief in an unending war between classes. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels made this clear: their aims, could be achieved through the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions – a call to destruction that became the political movement’s defining gene.
Once realised in power, Communism followed the same path everywhere it spread, concentrating control in one party and one leader, silencing freedom, faith, the press, and dissent. The lesson has been written in blood across the last century: every Communist revolution ends not in justice, but in tyranny.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the Soviet Union, where the promise of equality gave way to brutality. In the years after the Russian Revolution, countless were executed, and more than seven million children were left orphaned, wandering through stations and marketplaces, hollow-eyed and starving. In order to establish the illusion of a flawless socialist order, the Soviet regime erased this misery from sight through brutal ‘cleansing’ campaigns that swept away orphaned children – carried out relentlessly to preserve the image of a perfect socialist capital. The killings went on day and night as officials raced to meet, and exceed, their quotas.
As Communism took hold, the limits of the morality dissolved. Nothing was too monstrous to attempt, only new cruelties the world had yet to imagine. While the horrors of Nazism, its concentration camps and gas chambers, have been firmly embedded in historical memory, the Soviet terror machine had already been operating decades before the first Nazi concentration camp was established. In the 1930s, Gestapo envoys reportedly travelled to the USSR to study its model of concentration camps.
Though Communism’s machinery of terror collapsed in the East, its ideological remnants have lingered in the West. Today, the crimes of Communism are half-forgotten. When memory fades, its slogans return dressed in softer tones and moral excuses. For many in the younger generation, Communism has reappeared as a fashionable idea. Across Australia’s universities, the same revolutionary slogans that once justified terror now appear on banners and T-shirts, ignorant of the pain they once caused. Violence is again justified, propaganda returns, and the language of equality is once again used to erode the foundations of freedom.
This is why remembrance matters. On November 7, we honour and remember the victims of Communism, not only to mourn the past, but to guard the present. It is only through remembrance that we can confront the hypocrisy of Communism – so often masked as virtue – and resist the manipulation that would have us forget.
To find out more about the IPA’s work remembering the victims of Communism visit: https://ipa.org.au/victimsofcommunism
