Red Terror in the Eastern Block

Stalin died in 1953. The terror begun by Lenin, which he had continued 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 peasants 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 194442

After Stalin's death, the Soviet regime entered a softer period, limited though it was. But his "reign of fear" continued to govern a society founded on fear. In a later section, we'll examine more closely the fear that held sway in the Soviet Union and all other Communist societies, and how it was organized.

A Message Of Fear To Society :Mass Executions

In Stalin's era, prisoners were sometimes executed in public to send a message of fear to the people. This picture shows opponents of the regime, hanged by the secret police in a public square in 1946.

The Soviets did not limit terror to their own people. The outbreak of World War II let the Soviet Union spread throughout Eastern Europe. When the war ended, a number of countries had fallen under Soviet influence. Within a few years, by means of various political plots and maneuvers, Moscow took them all under its hegemony. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and East Germany fell into the clutches of Stalin's bloody legacy.

The red savagery inflicted a hellish life on these countries. Those opposed to the regime were arrested one by one and subjected to torture and execution. In a short time, fear and horror pervaded the whole of society. Long after in the early 1990's, after the fall of Bulgaria's Communist regime, a woman filmed in a Bulgarian documentary describes what happened to her in the autumn of 1944:

The day after my father was first arrested, another policeman arrived around midday and instructed my mother to go to Police Station No. 10 at five o'clock that afternoon. My mother, a beautiful and kind woman, got dressed and left. We, her three children, all waited for her at home. She came back at half past one in the morning, white as a sheet, with her clothes tattered and torn. As soon as she came in, she went to the stove, opened the door, took off all her clothes, and burned them. Then she took a bath, and only then took us in her arms. We went to bed. The next day she made her first suicide attempt, and there were three more after that, and she tried to poison herself twice. She's still alive, I look after her, but she's quite severely mentally ill. I have never found out what they actually did to her.43

Prisoners suffered terribly. The Black Book of Communism describes the torture inflicted by Nicolae Ceausescu's regime in Romania:

Romania was probably the first country in Europe to introduce the methods of brainwashing used by the Communists in Asia. Indeed, these tactics may well have been perfected there before they were used on a massive scale in Asia. The evil goal of the enterprise was to induce prisoners to torture one another. The idea was conceived in the prison in Piteşti. The experiment began in early December 1949 and lasted approximately three years… The goal of the organization was the reeducation of political prisoners, combining study of the texts of Communist dogma with mental and physical torture.44

The purpose of this was to destroy the prisoners' religious faith; at the end of it they were expected to deny the existence of God:

The Securitate, the Romanian secret police, used all the classic methods of torture during their interrogations: beatings, blows to the soles of the feet, hanging people upside down, and so forth. But in the prison built in the 1930's in Piteşti, about 110 kilometers from Bucharest, the cruelty far surpassed those usual methods: The philosopher Virgil Ierunca recalls: "The most vile tortures imaginable were practiced in Piteşti. Prisoners' whole bodies were burned with cigarettes: their buttocks would begin to rot, and their skin fell off, as though they suffered from leprosy. Others were forced to swallow spoonfuls of excrement, and when they threw it back up, they were forced to eat their own vomit.

...According to Virgil Ierunca, reeducation occurred in four phases. The first phase was known as "exterior unmasking." The prisoner had to prove his loyalty by admitting what he had hidden when the case had been brought against him and, in particular, admit his links with his friends on the outside. The second phase was "interior unmasking," when he was forced to denounce the people who had helped him inside the prison. The third phase was "public moral unmasking," when the accused was ordered to curse all the things that he held sacred, including his friends and family, his wife or girlfriend, and his God if he was a believer. In the fourth phase, candidates for joining the OPCB [Organization of Prisoners with Communist Beliefs] had to "reeducate" their own best friend, torturing him with their own hands and thus becoming executioners themselves.

...Eugen Turcanu [head of the OPCB, the purpose of which was the reeducation of political prisoners, combining study of the texts of Communist dogma with mental and physical torture] devised especially diabolical measures to force seminarians to renounce their faith. Some had their heads repeatedly plunged into a bucket of urine and fecal matter, while the guards intoned a parody of the baptismal rite.45

Skulls With Bullet Holes

Stalin's secret police carried out most executions secretly. These skulls, taken from a mass grave in Chelyabinsk, belong to people killed by a bullet in the head by Stalin's secret service (NKVD) You can see the bullet hole in the skull on the right.

People in every country of the Eastern Bloc were subjected to Communism's crazed murderous impulse and passionate hatred of religion. The Darwinist-Materialist philosophy that regards human beings as animals and maintains that constant violence, torture, and fear are needed to subdue these so-called "animals," brought about a terrible regime of torture in Communist prisons.

The Soviet Union brought Communism and brutality to occupied countries of the Eastern Bloc. Every movement against Moscow was repressed with bloody reprisals. After an independence movement sprang up in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968, the Red Army occupied the country. (Above) Soviet tanks in Prague during the occupation in August 1968.

This is why those who regard Darwinism as no danger, or think its theories are harmless, must read this book carefully. The Darwinist-Communist ideology's final aim is to turn people against one another, to alienate them from every moral and spiritual value, thereby bestializing human society into a "herd" that can easily be domesticated and governed. No matter with what ideology they disguise themselves, their aim is all the same, as history has witnessed.