Victims of the Red Terror in the Spanish Revolution

Here's a video by a Communist praising the Spanish Communist uprising, and downloaded from YouTube.Do take note of one image featured in the video. If you don't know what they're firing at, I'll give you a clue: Spanish Communist Revolutionaries open fire on Statue of Christ The communist & atheist makes it all seem so "promising," so very enlightening and filled with hope. They don't point out the over 100,000,000 of innocent victims (mostly poor and defenseless) who suffered and died under communist regimes. Tactics much like Hitler and the Nazi regime who used the poor and rabble class to gain power and once obtaining state authority, used that same power to murder the very people who put them into office. A utopian lie for enlightened fools.

Originally published on www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/05/spanish-civil-war-bodies-removed-mass-grave Spanish civil war victims' bodies finally removed from mass grave Spain's government publishes first country-wide map of locations of more than 2,000 mass graves from the civil war Giles Tremlett in Madrid guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 May 2011 20.01 BST The bones of 62-year-old Severina Gómez and 23 others whose remains had lain together for 75 years, surrounded by bullet cases and with hands tied behind backs, have finally been removed from their mass grave in countryside near the central Spanish village of Loma de Montija. Anxious family members watched last week as forensic archaeologists and volunteers scraped through layers of mud to uncover evidence of a crime committed in the heat of a civil war that still haunts parts of Spain – and that served as a curtain raiser to the bloodshed of the second world war. After a decade of bitter debate over how to heal the wounds left by conflict and dictatorship without stoking ancient hatreds, Spain's government on Thursday published on the internet the first countrywide map showing the location of more than 2,000 mass graves from the civil war. The map is part of a series of measures, including a searchable database of victims and graves, designed to satisfy the demands of people such as Gómez's grandson, Agustín Fernández, who led a local campaign to dig up the Loma de Montija grave. "We used to go and lay flowers there on All Saints' Day, but the police would try to stop us and others would take them away. Even now the village is split," said Fernández, 64, who is waiting for DNA tests to identify his grandmother. Severina Gómez was one of some 120,000 leftwing sympathisers killed away from the frontline by the nationalist forces of the rightwing dictator General Francisco Franco after he rebelled against Spain's elected government in 1936. "My father died with the pain of never having recovered his mother's corpse," Fernández said. In 2007 the socialist government introduced what became known as the "historical memory" law, which recognised victims of the Franco regime. Other measures by the government have included removing 570 Francoist monuments and symbols from public places, awarding 13,400 pensions to people orphaned or sent into exile as children and giving Spanish nationality to 188,000 descendants of exiles. Presenting the results of almost four years of work, the interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, said: "No human being should be buried in a ditch." Not everyone, however, agrees that the government of prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has achieved its aim of closing wounds. "It is an aberration," complained Maria Eugenia Yague, daughter of one of Franco's most infamous civil war generals, in a recent letter to the defence ministry after her father's bust was removed from a sports centre in nearby Burgos. "This is no way to govern." Others think the government should do much more. "It is great that the government publishes a map," said Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. "But I don't understand why it refuses to look for and dig up the victims itself, leaving it to volunteer groups like us. "The crimes are as bad as they can get: kidnapping, torture, murder and the concealment of corpses," he said, adding that his group received just ¤46,000 (£41,000) a year to carry out the work. So far, about 250 of the more than 2,000 mass graves have been excavated, with 5,400 bodies found. He also criticised an announcement by Rubalcaba that it would be too difficult to recover and identify the tens of thousands of corpses that Franco ordered to be moved to the Valley of the Fallen basilica near Madrid, where he himself would be buried two decades after the civil war. Silva is the man who sparked the historical memory movement by digging up his own grandfather and a dozen other victims from a mass grave in the northern town of Priaranza del Bierzo in October 2000. A grassroots campaign to dig up graves eventually broke down decades of government silence and popular fear of raking over the coals of the civil war, which often pitted neighbour against neighbour and left lasting wounds in towns and villages across the country. With archives finally open for proper study, volunteers and local historians across Spain have slowly revealed the full scope of Francoist repression for the first time. Last month the British historian and Franco biographer Paul Preston published, in Spanish, a definitive study of the repression on both sides of the civil war called The Spanish Holocaust, which is to be published in English later this year. He distinguishes between the impulsive violence of uncontrolled thugs and leftwing extremists among those defending the republic and the systematic, deliberate nationalist repression which one Francoist general called an attempt to eliminate "all those who do not think like us". "A programme of terror and annihilation constituted the central plank of their plan," says Prof Preston.

Communists do tend to praise creating conditions ripe for genocide and social conflict.

Wikipedia, Red Terror

The 'Red Terror' in Spain (Spanish: Terror Rojo en España) is the name given by historians to various acts committed "by sections of nearly all the leftist groups" such as the killing of tens of thousands of people (including 6,832 members of the Catholic clergy, the vast majority in the summer of 1936 in the wake of the military rising), as well as attacks on landowners, industrialists, and politicians, and the desecration and burning of monasteries and churches. News of the military coup unleashed a social revolutionary response and no republican region escaped revolutionary and anticlerical violence - though in the Basque Country this was minimal.
A process of political polarisation had characterised the Spanish Second Republic – party divisions became increasingly embittered and questions of religious identity came to assume a major political significance. Electorally, the Church had identified itself with the Right, which had set itself against social reform.
The insurgents had expected a rapid alzamiento, or rising, to be followed by military rule, and they had not counted on the strength of working-class resistance. In the Catholic heartlands, where the rising with the exception of the Basque territory did enjoy instant success, the repression of Republicans of all kinds followed. General Mola believed that terror behind the lines was essential. Likewise, the failed pronunciamiento of 1936 set loose a violent onslaught on those that revolutionaries in the Republican zone identified as enemies - " where the rebellion failed, for several months afterwards merely to be identified as a priest, a religious or simply a militant Christian or member of some apostolic or pious organization, was enough for a person to be executed without trial."
In recent years the Catholic Church has beatified hundreds of the victims, 233 of them on 11 March 2001 in a spectacular ceremony, the largest single number of beatifications in the church's history.
Some estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000 to 72,344 lives. Paul Preston, speaking in 2012 at the time of the publication of his book The Spanish Holocaust, put the figure at a little under 50,000.
Historian Julio de la Cueva has written that, "despite the fact that the Church...suffer[ed] appalling persecution" in the Loyalist rearguard, the events have so far met not only with "the embarrassing partiality of ecclesiastical scholars, but also with the embarrassed silence or attempts at justification of a large number of historians and memoirists." Analysts critical of Francisco Franco's military rebellion, a rebellion that emerged to challenge Spain's democratic institutions and elected government, like Helen Graham, have pointed out that it was the military coup that allowed the culture of brutal violence to flourish and " its original act of violence was that it killed off the possibility of other forms of peaceful political evolution."
Following the outbreak of full-scale civil war there was an explosion of atrocities in both the Nationalist and Republican zones.
The days of the greatest anticlerical bloodletting were at the beginning of the civil war, in the aftermath of the generals' rising, and large areas of the country fell under the control of local loyalists and militias. A large part of the terror consisted of a perceived settlement of accounts against bosses and clergy as they lost their powerful position in the social revolution and move towards extremism that took place in the first months of the civil war. According to historian Anthony Beevor: "In republican territory the worst of the violence was mainly a sudden and quickly spent reaction of suppressed fear, exacerbated by desires of revenge for the past" - in contrast with, "the relentless purging of 'reds and atheists' in nationalist territory." After the generals' coup d'état on 17-18 July 1936 the remaining days in July saw 861 priests and religious lose their lives, 95 of them on 25 July, feast day of St James, patron saint of Spain. August saw a further 2,077 clerical victims. After just two months of civil war, 3400 priests, monks and nuns had been murdered.
According to recent research, the Republican death squads were heavily staffed by members of the Soviet secret police, or NKVD. According to author Donald Rayfield, "Stalin, Yezhov, and Beria distrusted Soviet participants in the Spanish war. Military advisors like Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, journalists like Koltsov were open to infection by the heresies, especially Trotsky's, prevalent among the Republic's supporters. NKVD agents sent to Spain were therefore keener on abducting and murdering anti-Stalinists among Republican leaders and International Brigade commanders than on fighting Francisco Franco. The defeat of the Republic, in Stalin's eyes, was caused not by the NKVD's diversionary efforts, but by the treachery of the heretics.
The most famous member of the Loyalist assassination squads was Erich Mielke, the future head of the East German Ministry for State Security.
"During the first months of the fighting most of the deaths did not come from combat on the battlefield but from political executions in the rear—the 'Red' and 'White' terrors. The terror consisted of semi-organized actions perpetrated by almost all of the leftist groups, Basque nationalists, largely Catholic but still mostly aligned with the Republicans, being an exception. Unlike the repression by the right, which "was concentrated against the most dangerous opposition elements", the Republican attacks were more irrational, "murdering innocent people and letting some of the more dangerous go free. Moreover, one of the main targets of the Red terror was the clergy, most of whom were not engaged in overt opposition."
Describing specifically the Red Terror, Stanley Payne states that it "began with the murder of some of the rebels as they attempted to surrender after their revolt had failed in several of the key cities. From there it broadened out to wholesale arrests, and sometimes wholesale executions, of landowners and industrialists, people associated with right-wing groups or the Catholic Church."[20] The Red Terror was "not an irrepressible outpouring of hatred by the man in the street for his 'oppressors,' but a semi-organized activity carried out by sections of nearly all the leftist groups."
As early as 11 May 1931, when mob violence against the Republic's perceived enemies had led to the burning of churches, convents, and religious schools, the Church had sometimes been seen as the ally of the authoritarian right. The academic Mary Vincent has written that: "There was no doubt that the Church would line up with the rebels against the Republic. The Jesuit priests of the city of Salamanca were among the first volunteers to present themselves to the military authorities...The tragedy of the Second Republic was that it abetted its own destruction; the tragedy of the Church was that it became so closely allied with its self-styled defenders."[22] During the war the nationalists claimed that 20,000 priests had been killed; today the figure is put at 4,184 priests, 2,365 members of other religious institutes and 283 nuns, the vast majority during the summer of 1936.
Historian Stanley Payne has called the terror the "most extensive and violent persecution of Catholicism in Western History, in some way even more intense than that of the French Revolution", driving Catholics, left then with little alternative, to the Nationalists even more than would have been expected.

Death toll
Figures for the Red Terror range from 38,000 to 110,000.
In his recent, updated history of the Spanish Civil War, Antony Beevor "reckons Franco's ensuing 'white terror' claimed 200,000 lives. The 'red terror' had already, according to Beevor, killed 38,000." According to Julio de la Cueva, the toll of the Red Terror was 72,344 lives. Hugh Thomas and Paul Preston said that the death toll was 55,000, and the Spanish historian Julian Casanova said that the death toll was fewer than 60,000.
Previously, Payne had suggested that, "The toll taken by the respective terrors may never be known exactly. The left slaughtered more in the first months, but the Nationalist repression probably reached its height only after the war had ended, when punishment was exacted and vengeance wreaked on the vanquished left. The White Terror may have slain 50,000, perhaps fewer, during the war. The Franco government now gives the names of 61,000 victims of the Red Terror, but this is not subject to objective verification. The number of victims of the Nationalist repression, during and after the war, was undoubtedly greater than that." In Checas de Madrid (ISBN 84-9793-168-8), journalist and historian César Vidal comes to a nationwide total of 110,965 victims of Republican repression; 11,705 people being killed in Madrid alone. Historian Santos Juliá, in the work Víctimas de la guerra civil provides approximate figures: about 50,000 victims of the Republican repression; about 100,000 victims of the Francoist repression during the war with some 40,000 after the war.

Toll on clergy
See also: Martyrs of the Spanish Civil War
In the course of the Red Terror, 6,832 members of the Catholic clergy, 20% percent of the nation's clergy, were killed. The figures break down the as follows: Some 283 women religious were killed. Some of them were badly tortured. 13 bishops were killed from the dioceses of Siguenza Lleida, Cuenca, Barbastro, Segorbe, Jaén, Ciudad Real, Almeria, Guadix, Barcelona, Teruel and the auxiliary of Tarragona. Aware of the dangers, they all decided to remain in their cities. I cannot go, only here is my responsibility, whatever may happen, so said the Bishop of Cuenca. In addition 4,172 diocesan priests, 2,364 monks and friars, among them 259 Claretians, 226 Franciscans, 204 Piarists, 176 Brothers of Mary, 165 Christian Brothers (also called the De La Salle Brothers), 155 Augustinians, 132 Dominicans, and 114 Jesuits were killed. In some dioceses, the number of secular priests killed are overwhelming:
In Barbastro 123 of 140 priests were killed, about 88 percent of the secular clergy were murdered, 66 percent
In Lleida, 270 of 410 priests were killed. about 62 percent
In Tortosa, 44 percent of the secular priests were killed.
In Toledo 286 of 600 priests were killed.
In the dioceses of Málaga, Minorca and Segorbe, about half of the priests were killed"
In 2001 the Catholic Church beatified hundreds of Martyrs of the Spanish Civil War and beatified 498 more on October 28, 2007.
In October 2008, the Spanish newspaper La Razon published an article on the number of people murdered for practicing Catholicism."
May 1931: 100 church buildings are burned while firefighters refuse to extinguish the flames.
1932: 3000 Jesuits expelled. Church buildings burned with impunity in 7 cities.
1934: 33 priests murdered in the Asturias Revolution.
1936: just a day before July 18, the day the war started, there already have been 17 clergymen murdered.
From July 18 to August 1: 861 clergymen murdered in 2 weeks.
August 1936: 2077 clergymen murdered, more than 70 a day. 10 of them bishops.
Septiembre 14: 3400 clergymen murdered during the first stages of the war.
1939: end of the war; a total of 7000 clergymen and 3000 religious people murdered for practicing Catholicism.

Hugh Thomas, Spanish Civil War ...well worth reading, if only to recall what human beings are capable of. It was a war marked by furious ideological passions, a version in miniature of the titanic struggle between fascism and Communism that was to follow it. Especially in the beginning, but throughout the war, both sides systematically hunted down and shot any person of talent they had any reason to believe might favor the other side. Many tens of thousands of Spain’s best and brightest were squandered in this national decapitation that is such a trademark of the 20th century, mimicking the even more devastating self-immolation that reached its peak of fury in the Soviet Union at the same time, and decades later in Cambodia. Imagine what it would be like if people in a town 20 or 30 miles from yours grabbed weapons, climbed onto trucks and drove to where you live, and then began systematically going door to door, shooting down 100′s of your neighbors for the flimsiest of reasons, including pure malice and personal revenge. That’s what it was like. We forget such events at our peril. They are still quite recent, and could easily happen again. One wonders how many of the later dictators of central and South America were “inspired” by Franco and his fascists. After all, in the end, he “won,” in the sense that his will prevailed. How many of the organizers of death squads, the “revolutionaries” who murdered and still murder whole villages, and the military thugs responsible for the “disappeared ones” learned their lessons from him? It’s ironic to consider what has become of his “victory,” paid for with the blood of so many of Spain’s most talented children. Today she is ruled by a socialist he certainly would have shot back in July or August of ’36. Franco posed as the defender of outraged Christianity. Recently, I saw the Spanish film “Talk to Her,” in which one of the characters claims that those priests who don’t rape nuns are pedophiles...

There's Atheists on YouTube, promising "the dream" of Communist society can happen again, if you can only "Imagine" as John Lennon put it.

But I don't need to "Imagine," I only have to open a history book and read.

Atheism? No thanks!!

The Vatican considers the 498 victims - including two bishops, 24 priests, 462 nuns and monks, three deacons or seminarians and seven lay people - to be martyrs, the requirement of evidence of having performed a miracle was waived. Most were killed in at the start of the war in 1936 by anti-fascist republican forces. The war tore Spain apart after the nationalist uprising of General Francisco Franco against the republican Popular Front government. The Roman Catholic Church strongly supported General Franco's nationalists and called his rebellion a "crusade". An estimated 7,000 clergy were killed by republican forces but Franco's soldiers carried also out thousands of executions. From abc.net.au, Vatican beatifies 498 spanish civil war victims

Why don't they have the backbone to just call these monsters by their right name?? These monsters were not Republicans, they were Communists. They were Atheist mobs, mentally sickened and twisted, maddened on Marxist delusions.

Expansion of Soviet Territory through Terror and War

The Bolshevik Invasions

Source: Unknown Source, this may be a snippet from "The Truth About Communism" narrated by Ronald Reagan.
Video obtained through YouTube.
Apologies for the uploader's comments maligning "Jews" for these atrocities and warmongering. In actuality, to be a member of the Communist Party one must submit themselves to Atheism. Especially the atrocities committed by such high-level ranking Communist criminals, these were Atheists. Therefore, this lie created by Atheistic rightwing socialists (nazis) has no basis in actual historical fact or communist policy. My sincerest apologies to any viewers who faithfully practice the religion Judaism. Jews were murdered in Western Europe by Socialists, and Christians were murdered in Eastern Europe/USSR by Socialists. Jews were murdered in Eastern Europe and USSR by Socialists and Christians were murdered by Socialists in Western Europe. Obviously Socialists do their Atheistic evils and genocide in the name of religion, though all sides, esp. top ranking officials are vehemently amoral and anti-religious at heart.

Communist Tactics

Source: Unknown, retrieved from YouTube

Communist Terror

Source: Unknown, retrieved from YouTube

Estonians Tortured

Source: Unknown, retrieved from YouTube

Handed Over To Communism

Source: Unknown, retrieved from YouTube,
This clip followed the ending of World War II where captive refugees whom had fled Soviet Territory were handed over to the Soviet Union by the Allied Forces. Some preferred suicide than to live under Communist tyranny.

Mass Grave at Vynnytsa, Ukraine, June 1943

Source: Black Book of Communism
Vynnytsa, Ukraine, June 1943.
Here trenches dating from 1937-1938 were opened and hundreds of bodies exhumed. The authorities had built a park and a summer theatre on the site. Similar trenches were discovered in Zhytomyr, Kamenets-Podolski, and other areas. Such macabre discoveries continue even today. In 1997, 1,100 bodies were exhumed in St. Petersburg, and another 9,000 were found in a mass grave in the forests of Karelia. ©D.R.

Images from the Russian Revolution Period

The famine crisis of 1921-1922.

Source: A People's Tragedy, The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Below: Bolshevik commissars inspect the harvest failure in the Volga region, 1921. The crisis was largely the result of Bolshevik over-requisitioning.

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Below: the victims of the crisis; an overcrowded cemetery in the Buzuluk district, 1921.

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Below: Cannibals with their victims, Samara province, 1921.

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Above: When the Bolsheviks started the civil war they unleashed a wave of violence on a scale the world had rarely seen. Here in Orsha in 1918 a Polish officer is hanged and impaled by soldiers of the newly created Red Army.
© L'illustration/Sygma
Source: Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression, Courtois

The Children of the Soviet Empire

And Now My Soul Is Hardened (Online version)
We will focus primarily on youths who spent all, or at least most, of their time in the street. Our gaze thus takes in juveniles who drifted out of families, as well as the more obvious millions orphaned, discarded, or otherwise separated involuntarily from parents. Those who remained at home will not be included, regardless of the abuse or neglect they may have experienced there. Soviet administrators responsible for raising indigent children inclined toward a similar sense of their mission’s scope, for even the narrowest definition of the besprizornye yielded more candidates than state institutions could absorb. The time when other youths, living with parents in unsatisfactory settings, could be lodged in children’s homes together with the nation’s orphans—a goal often avowed immediately following the Revolution—quickly receded far over the horizon.

Thus defined, the besprizornye represented first and foremost a stubborn challenge remaining to confront the Bolsheviks after their victory in the Civil War. The dismaying presence of countless young beggars and thieves underscored how deeply war and famine plague a society long after guns fall silent and crops return to fields. Even a wealthier and more experienced government than the one newly ensconced in Moscow would have been hard pressed to overcome rapidly the adversity bequeathed by nearly a decade of catastrophes. Later in the 1920s, though the street children’s ranks diminished considerably, factors such as rural poverty and the unraveling of traditional families spawned additional urchins at a rate that frustrated the government’s attempts to rid the country of their misfortune. As a result, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s estimation, any description of Soviet urban life in this period remains incomplete without attention to abandoned juveniles, so common were they in train stations, markets, and other public places.[7]

Read, And Now My Soul Is Hardened (Online version)

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From Stalin and his lover aged 13
The story was too shocking to believe. But now that Stalin was dead, his successor Nikita Khrushchev decided he had to investigate the astonishing rumour about the monster's sexual depravity.
It was claimed that when he was in his 30s and before he became leader, Stalin had raped or seduced, even fathered a child with, a girl who was just 13 years old - and had been indicted for the under-age seduction by the police.
The tale had long been dismissed as just another piece of Western anti-Stalin propaganda[...] It had first surfaced soon after he took over from Lenin as Soviet dictator in 1924, appearing in the "scurrilous" tabloids and emigre journals in the West that were banned in the newly-formed Soviet Union.[...]during his reign of terror the rumour had all but disappeared - no one dared breathe a critical word about the tyrant in those years.
But on his death in 1953 it had resurfaced. And now Khrushchev, having heard the story of the under-age girl, had commissioned his KGB boss General Ivan Serov to investigate in great secrecy.
As Stalin's biographer, I had heard the story but it seemed so outrageous as to be incredible: like most historians, I simply believed that it was mere propaganda.
It did not sound like the Stalin we knew: he was married twice but usually he was portrayed, somewhat like Hitler, as a freakish inhuman monster, so unnaturally obsessed with power that he was uninterested in sex.
Yet more than 80 years on from when the rumours first appeared, I found myself examining a most extraordinary document among Stalin's papers in the so-called Presidential archives in Moscow, while researching for my new book on the young Stalin.
Marked top secret and signed by the KGB boss Serov, it was addressed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo.
It was dated 1956 - three years after Stalin's death - and spelt out the results of General Serov's investigation.
Serov reported back to Khrushchev that, amazingly, the entire story of Stalin's affair with a 13-year-old was true. Khrushchev showed it to the Politburo (including Stalin's long-serving henchman Molotov), who all signed it and then filed it in the deepest recesses of the archives where it has remained until now.
I was also able to find in the archives the memoirs of the girl herself, who was called Lidia. She wrote them during Stalin's reign, which is why they make no mention of any sex or the children she had by Stalin - that would have been suicidal.
Using all these and other archive documents, I constructed an astonishing picture of an unknown Stalin - one that painted him as a promiscuous and faithless serial seducer and libertine.
The picture was confirmed by the reminiscences of villagers who lived in the isolated hamlet that was the 13-year-old girl's home in Siberia.
This, then, is the true story of the under-age affair - the most shocking of many conducted during Stalin's mysterious life in the run-up to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
In March 1914 Josef Stalin - a Georgian cobbler's son known to friends as Soso and comrades as Koba - was sentenced for his revolutionary activities by the Tsar to exile close to the Arctic Circle in a tiny hamlet named Kureika.
The place was a freezing hellhole, an isolated twilight world cut off from humanity in winter by the daylong darkness.
In Kureika, only the reindeer, snowfoxes and Tungus indigenous tribesmen could really function in deep midwinter. Everyone wore reindeer fur.
The hamlet contained 67 villagers - 38 men and 29 women - all packed into just eight ramshackle izbas or wooden peasant shacks.
Among them were seven orphans from the same family - the Pereprygins - of whom the youngest was 13-year-old Lidia.
She immediately noticed Stalin, not just because of his good looks but also because he was hopelessly underdressed with only a light coat.
Before long, he was sporting the full local outfit - from boots to hat - of reindeer fur, all of it provided by Lidia Pereprygina.
Stalin in those days was slim, attractive, charming, an accomplished poet and educated in the priesthood, but also a pitiless Marxist terrorist and brutal gangster boss - a Red Godfather who had funded Lenin's Bolsheviks with a series of audaciously bloody acts of bank robbery, piracy and racketeering.
Lidia was a schoolgirl orphan living on the remote frontier where girls matured early.
Some time in the early summer of 1914, the 35-year-old Stalin embarked on an affair with Lidia.
While not admitting to anything explicit in her memoirs, we catch a glimpse in them of Stalin and Lidia together staggering from drinking bout to drinking bout, because she writes of their drunken dancing and singsongs: "In his spare time, Stalin like to go to evening dances - he could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance."
These memoirs of Stalin's 13-year-old mistress - recorded 20 years later at the height of his dictatorship, while she remained a Siberian housewife - were clearly constrained.

Some of the Death Tolls Under Communist Regimes

Images of the Ukrainian Famine

Holodomor: Genocide by Famine
May 27 through January 11, 2009 (extended)
An exhibition that details the horrors and magnitude of the Holodomor – the little-known Ukrainian genocide that resulted in the deaths of some 10 million people – opens at The Ukrainian Museum on Tuesday evening, May 27 at 5:30 p.m.
The exhibition, Holodomor: Genocide by Famine, is one of a series of events taking place around the world to commemorate the 75th anniversary of what James Mace, the director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine (1988), referred to as "the crime of the century that nobody's ever heard of."
The horrific event, known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor (literally, murder by starvation), took place in 1932-1933, less than twenty years after Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. Determined to force all Ukrainian farmers onto collective farms, to crush the burgeoning national revival, and to forestall any calls for Ukraine's independence, the brutal Communist regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin embarked on a campaign to starve the Ukrainian people into submission.
The Soviet government confiscated all the grain produced by Ukrainian farmers, withheld other foodstuffs, executed anyone trying to obtain food, and punished those who attempted to flee. As a result, in the land called the Breadbasket of Europe, millions of men, women, and children were starved to death.
Stalin boasted privately that 10 million people – 25% of Ukraine's population – had perished during the Holodomor. At least 3 million of the victims were children.
Despite the magnitude of the atrocity, the Soviet regime, behind its Iron Curtain, denied the existence of the Holodomor for decades, denouncing any reports as "anti-Soviet propaganda." It was not until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent establishment of an independent Ukraine that the contents of many sealed government archives were uncovered, exposing a wealth of gruesome information.
(ukrainianmuseum.org) "Genocide by Famine"

The Holodomor, Manmade Ukrainian Famine

Source: Stalin's Lies, "Big Lies of the 20th Century"

Chicago-American newspaper, from the Holodomor. Famine used as a weapon to starve 7 million, in effort to break Ukrainian Nationalism during the period between 1932-1933. See leftwing distortions of history on encyclopedia sites such as Wikipedia and Answers.com minimizing the evil of Communism.

Holodomor to Break Ukrainian Nationalism

"I have registered an article on the English Wikipedia to restore balance to the article about the soviet enigneered famine in Ukraine, conducted as a genocide against the Ukrainians. This article has been heavily assaulted by a small group of mostly Russian users, some of them openly declaring they're support for the criminal soviet system. I have made extensive explanations in my edit summaries (eg.: [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]) as well as explained the situation and pointed out sepcific issues ([12], [13]) to which haven't gotten any reasonable reply. --Vernyhora 10:34, 20 December 2006 (UTC)"

Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Vernyhora

"Stalin replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with Five-Year Plans in 1928 and collective farming at roughly the same time. The Soviet Union was transformed from a predominantly peasant society to a major world industrial power by the end of the 1930s. Confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities under his orders contributed to a famine between 1932 and 1934, especially in the key agricultural regions of the Soviet Union, Ukraine Holodomor, Kazakhstan and North Caucasus that resulted in millions of deaths. Many peasants resisted collectivization and grain confiscations, but were repressed, most notably well-off peasants deemed "kulaks".
In the first years of collectivization it was estimated that industrial production would rise by 200% and and agricultural production by 50%[21], but these estimates were not met. Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. (However, kulaks proper made up only 4% of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the slightly better-off peasants who took the brunt of violence from the OGPU and the Komsomol. These peasants were about 60% of the population). Those officially defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge.
The two-stage progress of collectivization—interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, "Dizzy with success" (Pravda, March 2, 1930), and "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades" (Pravda, April 3, 1930)—is a prime example of his capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.

Many historians assert that the disruption caused by collectivization was largely responsible for major famines.
The 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine and the Kuban regions has been termed the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор).

According to Alan Bullock, "the total Soviet grain crop was no worse than that of 1931 … it was not a crop failure but the excessive demands of the state, ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as many as five million Ukrainian peasants." Stalin refused to release large grain reserves that could have alleviated the famine, while continuing to export grain; he was convinced that the Ukrainian peasants had hidden grain away, and strictly enforced draconian new collective-farm theft laws in response.
Other historians hold that it was largely the insufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters that resulted in famine, with the successful harvest of 1933 ending the famine.
Famine affected other parts of the USSR. The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five and ten million people. The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, had caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths.)
Soviet and other historians have argued that the rapid collectivization of agriculture was necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union[citation needed] and ultimately win World War II. This is disputed by other historians; Alec Nove claims that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than because of, its collectivized agriculture.
Retrieved from Soviet democracy

http://www.answers.com/topic/joseph-stalin

"...Other historians..." (questionable credentials) "...the insufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters that resulted in famine..."

Can anyone say, "Communist Propaganda?!?"

Those who make ongoing excuses for this man-made famine holocaust have dealt a blow to every person who has suffered directly or indirectly from Communist policies. Leftwing apologists, Atheists, obviously have no shame or human empathy when they create such blatant distortions of history.

Soviet Democracy

Conditions begin to deteriorate between the Soldiers of Kronstadt and the Bolshevik elite.

The Civil War had ended, the White (or Imperial) Armies had sailed away, but the desperate policies of the Bolshevik party had brought the country to its knees. Many of the Kronstadt sailors' were from peasant families and the letters received from home made for depressing reading. But some of the party elite were beginning to conspicuously beginning to enjoy the priveleges of power.

By the end of 1920, Raskolnokov and Reisner lived a comfortable life in Kronstadt complete with full staff. When not at home they made full use of the flagship and held regular reception parties and they became deeply unpopular with the sailors. The sailors had seen over the civil war, their direct act of democracy in 1917 being replaced with commissars, by people appointed above them, banning of their daily meetings, control of their Soviet and to an extent they had been prepared to put up with that for the civil war period by with as the Civil War had wained, the soldiers anticipated a fulfilment on promises of Soviet Democracy.

Kronstadt Soldiers Duped by Lenin and the Bolsheviks (Part I)

The soldiers of Kronstadt who were the heros of the Russian Revolution, are betrayed by Lenin and the Communist (Bolshevik) Party, and the Red Army advance on Kronstadt. Goals of the 1917 Revolution are lost in the last hope for Russian democracy. (Scene from "Russian Revolution in Color")

Kronstadt Soldiers Duped by Lenin and the Bolsheviks (Part II)

References

Russian Revolution in Color (DVD)
The Russian Revolution and Civil War, this bloodsoaked time from the battlefields, testimonies, and colorized archives help unfold the dramatic story of the Communist rise and seizure of power in 1917.

Peasants of Russian - The Russian Revolution

The unfortunate death toll and affliction the Russian peasants suffered due to the Russian Civil War.

The people of Russia suffered just as much. To feed the urban workers and maintain war production, peasants were forced to hand over their grain surpluses at prices determined by the state. Those who resisted were shot.

Whole villages were wiped out if they failed to hand over their grain to the Checka.

In the worst cases, they also removed the seed grain the peasants needed for planting the following year. At a time of rebellion and drought, this desperate policy lead to another five million deaths.

Trotsky put it in such terms, of the Civil War, 'We got victory in the Civil War, the price was we ruined the country.'

References

Russian Revolution in Color (DVD)
The Russian Revolution and Civil War, this bloodsoaked time from the battlefields, testimonies, and colorized archives help unfold the dramatic story of the Communist rise and seizure of power in 1917.

Allied Forces Support the White Army in the War against the Reds

America, Britain and Japan send support for the White Army to fight the Bolshevik Red Army. The Civil War claims millions of lives, but the Allies feel it is a war they cannot win and pull out, leaving Russia in the hand of the Bolsheviks.

With the collapse of Germany came intervention, or at least support for the Whites becomes a much more serious possibility. The Baltic Sea and Black Sea is open, Turkey has pulled out of the war, and for that allies can move forces into Central Russia.

British Troops occupy the ports of Archangel and Murmansk in the north and advance hundreds of miles inland.

Japan and Britain move into Siberia from Vladivostok in the east, where they are joined by troops from the United States.

France supports the Generals in the south from their base on the coast of the Black Sea.

Russia is now surrounded by former allies and Lenin's paranoia proves itself justifiable. The whole world really was against them.

The different white armies strike again and again at the Reds from almost every direction, but the Red Army has been able to respond to every attack in turn. When Petrograd is threatened with invasion from the White General Yudenich, the sailors from Kronstadt are again dispatched. Again, the whites are defeated. Despite their support, the White armies remain separated by great distances, their supplies are poor and they are unable to coordinate their attacks.

Slowly the white Generals realize that while the Russians maintain control of Russia's industrial heartland they could never succeed. After two years, the last White General is defeated and the allies leave Russia for good.

The Civil War in Russia brutalized life in Russia to an unimaginable degree. Around three million Soviet and enemy troops were killed in action, another two million died of disease. The people of Russia suffered just as much.

References

Russian Revolution in Color (DVD)
The Russian Revolution and Civil War, this bloodsoaked time from the battlefields, testimonies, and colorized archives help unfold the dramatic story of the Communist rise and seizure of power in 1917.