Should jedi stay out of politcal office

After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives became available, containing official records of the execution of approximately 800,000 prisoners under Stalin for either political or criminal offenses, around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulags and some 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement – for a total of about 3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[54]

Estimates on the number of deaths brought about by Stalin's rule are hotly debated by scholars in the field of Soviet and communist studies.[55][56] The published results vary depending on the time when the estimate was made, on the criteria and methods used for the estimates, and sources available for estimates. Some historians attempt to make separate estimates for different periods of the Soviet history, with casualties for the Stalinist period varying from 8 to 61 million.[57][58][59] Several scholars, among them Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore, former Politburo member Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev and the director of Yale's "Annals of Communism" series Jonathan Brent, put the death toll at about 20 million.[60][61][62][63][64][65][66] Robert Conquest, in the latest revision (2007) of his book The Great Terror, estimates that while exact numbers will never be certain, the communist leaders of the USSR were responsible for no fewer than 15 million deaths.[67]

According to Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Stalin's regime can be charged with causing the "purposive deaths" of about a million people, although the number of deaths caused by the regime's "criminal neglect" and "ruthlessness" was considerably higher, and perhaps exceed Hitler's.[4] Wheatcroft excludes all famine deaths as "purposive deaths," and claims those that do qualify fit more closely the category of "execution" rather than "murder."[4] However, some of the actions of Stalin's regime, not only those during the Holodomor but also Dekulakization and targeted campaigns against particular ethnic groups, can be considered as genocide, [68] [69] at least in its loose definition.[70]

Genocide scholar Adam Jones claims that "there is very little in the record of human experience to match the violence unleashed between 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power, and 1953, when Joseph Stalin died and the Soviet Union moved to adopt a more restrained and largely non-murderous domestic policy." He notes the exceptions being the Khmer Rouge (in relative terms) and Mao's rule in China (in absolute terms).[71]

Red Terror
Main articles: Red Terror, Decossackization, and Lenin's Hanging Order
During the Russian Civil War, both sides unleashed terror campaigns (the Red and White Terrors). The Red Terror culminated in the summary execution of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people" by the political police, the Cheka.[72][copyright violation?][volume & issue needed][73][74][75] Many victims were 'bourgeois hostages' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[76] Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tambov Rebellion. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions."[77] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[78][79]

The policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory," according to Nicolas Werth.[80] In the early months of 1919, some 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[81][82][verification needed] and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[83]

Great Purge (Yezhovshchina)
Main article: Great Purge
Stalin's attempts to solidify his position as leader of the Soviet Union lead to an escalation in detentions and executions of various people, climaxing in 1937–38 (a period sometimes referred to as the "Yezhovshchina," or Yezhov era), and continuing until Stalin's death in 1953. Around 700,000 of these were executed by a gunshot to the back of the head,[84] others perished from beatings and torture while in "investigative custody"[85] and in the Gulag due to starvation, disease, exposure and overwork.[86]

Arrests were typically made citing counter-revolutionary laws, which included failure to report treasonous actions and, in an amendment added in 1937, failing to fulfill one's appointed duties. In the cases investigated by the State Security Department of the NKVD (GUGB NKVD) October 1936 – November 1938, at least 1,710,000 people were arrested and 724,000 people executed.[87]

Regarding the persecution of clergy, Michael Ellman has stated that "...the 1937–38 terror against the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church and of other religions (Binner & Junge 2004) might also qualify as genocide".[70] Citing church documents, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev has estimated that over 100,000 priests, monks and nuns were executed during this time.[89]

Former "kulaks" and their families made up the majority of victims, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed.[90]

National operations of the NKVD
Main article: National operations of the NKVD
In 1930s, the NKVD conducted a series of national operations, which targeted some "national contingents" suspected in counter-revolutionary activity.[70] A total of 350,000 were arrested and 247,157 were executed.[91] Of these, the Polish operation, which targeted the members of already non-existing Polska Organizacja Wojskowa appears to have been the largest, with 140,000 arrests and 111,000 executions.[70] Although these operation might well constitute genocide as defined by the UN convention,[70] or "a mini-genocide" according to Montefiore,[91] there is as yet no authoritative ruling on the legal characterisation of these events.[70]

Great purge in Mongolia
Main article: Stalinist repressions in Mongolia
In the summer and autumn of 1937, Joseph Stalin sent NKVD agents to the Mongolian People's Republic and engineered a Mongolian Great Terror[92] in which some 22,000[93] and 35,000[94] people were executed. Around 18,000 victims were Buddhist lamas.[93]

Soviet killings during World War II
Main articles: Katyn Massacre, NKVD prisoner massacres, and Soviet war crimes In September 1939, following the Soviet invasion of Poland, NKVD task forces started removing "Soviet-hostile elements" from the conquered territories.[95] The NKVD systematically practiced torture, which often resulted in death.[96][97]

The most notorious killings occurred in the spring of 1940, when the NKVD executed some 21,857 Polish POWs and intellectual leaders in what has become known as the Katyn massacre.[98][99][100] According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, 150,000 Polish citizens perished due to Soviet repression during the war.[101][102]

Executions were also carried out after the annexation of the Baltic states.[103] And during the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa, the NKVD and attached units of the Red Army massacred prisoners and political opponents by the tens of thousands before fleeing from the advancing Axis forces.[104]

People's Republic of China
Main article: History of the People's Republic of China (1949–1976)
The Chinese Communist Party came to power in China in 1949, when Chinese communist revolution ended a long and bloody civil war between communists and nationalists. There is a general consensus among historians that after Mao Zedong seized power, his policies and political purges caused directly or indirectly the deaths of tens of millions of people.[105][106] Based on the Soviets' experience, Mao considered violence necessary to achieve an ideal society derived from Marxism and planned and executed violence on a grand scale.[107][108]

Land reform and the suppression of counterrevolutionaries
Main article: Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries
The first large-scale killings under Mao took place during land reform and the counterrevolutionary campaign. In official study materials published in 1948, Mao envisaged that "one-tenth of the peasants" (or about 50,000,000) "would have to be destroyed" to facilitate agrarian reform.[108] Actual numbers killed in land reform are believed to have been lower, but at least one million.[107][109]

The suppression of counterrevolutionaries targeted mainly former Kuomintang officials and intellectuals suspected of disloyalty.[110] At least 712,000 people were executed, 1,290,000 were imprisoned in labor camps and 1,200,000 were "subject to control at various times."[111]

The Great Leap Forward
Main article: Great Leap Forward
Benjamin Valentino says that the Great Leap Forward was a cause of the Great Chinese Famine and that the worst effects of the famine were steered towards the regime's enemies.[112] Those labeled as "black elements" (religious leaders, rightists, rich peasants, etc.) in any earlier campaign died in the greatest numbers, as they were given the lowest priority in the allocation of food.[112] In Mao's Great Famine, historian Frank Dikötter writes that "coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the very foundation of the Great Leap Forward" and it "motivated one of the most deadly mass killings of human history."[113] His research in local and provincial Chinese archives indicates the death toll was at least 45 million, and that "In most cases the party knew very well that it was starving its own people to death."[114] In a secret meeting at Shanghai in 1959, Mao issued the order to procure one third of all grain from the countryside. He said: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”[114] Dikötter estimates that at least 2.5 million people were summarily killed or tortured to death during this period.[115]

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
Main article: Cultural Revolution
Sinologists Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals estimate that between 750,000 and 1.5 million people were killed in the violence of the Cultural Revolution, in rural China alone.[116] Mao's Red Guards were given carte blanche to abuse and kill the revolution's enemies.[117] For example, in August 1966, over 100 teachers were murdered by their students in western Beijing alone.[118]

Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea)
See also: Cambodian genocide Helen Fein, a genocide scholar, notes that, although Cambodian leaders declared adherence to an exotic version of agrarian communist doctrine, the xenophobic ideology of the Khmer Rouge regime resembles more a phenomenon of national socialism, or fascism.[119] Daniel Goldhagen explains that the Khmer Rouge were xenophobic because they believed the Khmer were "the one authentic people capable of building true communism."[120] Sociologist Martin Shaw described the Cambodian genocide as "the purest genocide of the Cold War era".[121]

The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Vietnam War. At least 200,000 people were executed by the Khmer Rouge,[122] while estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.4 to 2.2 million out of a population of around 7 million.[123]

Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge) experienced serious hardships due to the effects of war and disrupted economic activity. According to Michael Vickery, 740,800 people in Cambodia in a population of about 7 million died due to disease, overwork, and political repression.[124] Other estimates suggest approximately 1.7 million and it is described by the Yale University Cambodian Genocide Program as "one of the worst human tragedies of the last century."[125]

Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching some 20,000 grave sites, he concludes that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,112,829 victims of execution."[124]

Steven Rosefielde claims that Democratic Kampuchea was the deadliest of all communist regimes on a per capita basis, primarily because it "lacked a viable productive core" and "failed to set boundaries on mass murder."[126]

In 1997 the Cambodian Government asked the United Nations assistance in setting up a genocide tribunal.[127][128][129] The investigating judges were presented with the names of five possible suspects by the prosecution on July 18, 2007.[127] On September 19, 2007 Nuon Chea, second in command of the Khmer Rouge and its most senior surviving member, was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not charged with genocide. He will face Cambodian and foreign judges at the special genocide tribunal.[130]

Others
Mass killings have also occurred in Vietnam,[132] North Korea[133] and Romania.[134] It has been suggested that there may also have been other mass killings (on a smaller scale) in communist states such as Bulgaria and East Germany, although lack of documentation prevents definitive judgement about the scale of these events and the motives of the perpetrators.[135]

According to Benjamin Valentino, most regimes that described themselves as Communist did not commit mass killings.[2] However, some mass killings may have occurred in some Eastern European countries, although insufficient documentary evidence makes it impossible to make a definitive judgement about the scale, intentionality and the causes of those events.[136]

Bulgaria
According to Benjamin Valentino, available evidence suggests that between 50,000 and 100,000 people may have been killed in Bulgaria beginning in 1944 as part of agricultural collectivization and political repression, although there is insufficient documentation to make a definitive judgement.[135] Dinyu Sharlanov, in his book History of Communism in Bulgaria, accounts for about 31,000 people killed under the regime between 1944 and 1989.[137][138]

East Germany
According to Valentino, between 80,000 and 100,000 people may have been killed in East Germany beginning in 1945 as part of political repression by the Soviet Union.[135]

Romania
Further information: Communist Romania
According to Valentino, between 60,000 and 300,000 people may have been killed in Romania beginning in 1945 as part of agricultural collectivization and political repression.[135]

Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Further information: North Korea
According to R.J. Rummel, forced labor, executions, and concentration camps were responsible for over one million deaths in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from 1948 to 1987;[139] others have estimated 400,000 deaths in concentration camps alone.[140] Pierre Rigoulot estimates 100,000 executions, 1.5 million deaths through concentration camps and slave labor, 500,000 deaths from famine, and 1.3 million killed in the Korean war.[141] Estimates based on the most recent North Korean census suggest that 240,000 to 420,000 people died as a result of the 1990s famine and that there were 600,000 to 850,000 excess deaths in North Korea from 1993 to 2008.[142] The famine, which claimed as many as one million lives, has been described as the result of the economic policies of the North Korean government,[143] and as deliberate "terror-starvation".[144] In 2009, Steven Rosefielde stated that the Red Holocaust "still persists in North Korea" as Kim Jong Il "refuses to abandon mass killing."[145]

Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Further information: North Vietnam
In the early 1950s, the Communist government in North Vietnam launched a land reform program, which, according to Steven Rosefielde, was "aimed at exterminating class enemies."[146] Victims were chosen in an arbitrary manner, following a quota of four to five percent.[147] Torture was used on a wide scale, so much so that by 1954 Ho Chi Minh became concerned, and had it banned.[147] It is estimated that some 50,000[147] to 172,000[146] people perished in the campaigns against wealthy farmers and landowners. Rosefielde discusses much higher estimates that range from 200,000 to 900,000, which includes summary executions of National People's Party members.[146]

People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Main article: Red Terror (Ethiopia)
Amnesty International estimates that a total of half a million people were killed during the Red Terror of 1977 and 1978.[148][149][150] During the terror groups of people were herded into churches that were then burned down, and women were subjected to systematic rape by soldiers.[151] The Save the Children Fund reported that the victims of the Red Terror included not only adults, but 1,000 or more children, mostly aged between eleven and thirteen, whose corpses were left in the streets of Addis Ababa.[148] Mengistu Haile Mariam himself is alleged to have killed political opponents with his bare hands.[152]

Hungary
See also: Red Terror (Hungary), People's Republic of Hungary, and House of Terror
During the period of the short lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 the Lenin Boys committed crimes against the political opponents. After World War II, the communist State Protection Authority maintained concentration camps and committed mass genocides.