“Lessons From History” #2: The Soviet Union

“Lessons From History” #2: The Soviet Union

THE SHORT VERSION: In 1917, Russia’s communists promised workers a paradise. What they built was 74 years of famine, terror, and economic ruin — ending in 1991 with the whole experiment collapsing under its own weight.

NOW THE FULL STORY:

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Lenin promised “peace, land, and bread.” The land went to the state, not the peasants. By 1922 the Soviet Union was born — the first nation built on the idea that the government should own everything.

Then came Joseph Stalin. In 1928 he launched forced collectivization: millions of family farms were seized and merged into state-run collectives. Resisters — branded “kulaks” — were shot, deported, or starved. When Ukraine’s peasants resisted, Stalin sealed the region and confiscated the grain. The 1932–33 Holodomor starved an estimated 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians while the state exported grain abroad. Across the USSR, the collectivization famines killed roughly 5 to 7 million people.

Stalin’s Five-Year Plans forced breakneck industrialization — enforced by the secret police. The Great Purge of 1936–38 executed some 700,000 people, many for nothing. Millions more went to the Gulag, where around 1.6 million died of cold, hunger, and overwork. The total death toll of Soviet communism is commonly estimated at about 20 million.

And the economy? Without prices or private ownership, planners in Moscow set quotas for some 24 million products — and got it wrong constantly. By the 1980s the USSR’s per-person output was roughly a third of America’s, shelves sat empty, and citizens stood in breadlines. In December 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved itself. The experiment was over.

THE LESSON: The Soviet Union wasn’t a betrayal of communism — it was communism at full scale, with total power and no opposition. The result was the largest peacetime death toll in human history and an economy that couldn’t feed its own people. Scale didn’t fix the idea. It magnified the failure.

Tomorrow: Mao’s China — tried on 600 million people, with an even higher death toll.

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