January 21, 2026

Life has improved, comrades. Life has become more joyous.

Iosif Stalin

Gulag prisoners haul a multi-ton bolder across a log bridge during the construction of the White Sea Canal, completed in exchange for some 25,000 of the condemned. c. 1931–1933.
Alexander Wienerberger. A child lies starved to death on steps by a canal in Kharkiv, Ukrainian SSR, during forced collectivization; one of perhaps 5 million deaths. 1933.
A contingent of the 192 Estonians executed by the Soviet NKVD in Tartu Prison. July 8, 1941.
Decaying bodies of Polish army officers, executed by the NKVD in 1940—but a fraction of the 21,857—lie exhumed in the hundreds outside Katyin’, Smolyensk Oblast’. April 30, 1943.

Democracy is practiced within the ranks of the people, who enjoy the rights of freedom of speech, assembly, association and so on.

Máo Zédōng

A Chinese farmer is humiliated at gunpoint while a “court” of party officials expropriates his family’s land. July 1952.
A family of starving peasants lies exhausted in a wasted field, the Great Leap Forward relieving a reckoned 55 million such “workers” of their lives. c. 1958–1961.
Tibetan monks who have risen for the sake of the exiled Dalai Lama lay down their arms before a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army; the start of reprisals which will kill 87,000 of the occupied out of a final 1.2 million. c. March 1959.
Lǐ Zhènshèng. A party secretary and the wife of another official are daubed with ink as enemies of the revolution at a rally in a Harbin stadium—two of around 1.5 million sacrificed to the Cultural Revolution. 1966.

I am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun.

Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro, posing with a Russian submachine gun during a cross-country “victory” tour. 1959.
Cuban dissident Armando Valladares Pérez, imprisoned between 1960 and 1982 for refusing to place an “I’m with Fidel” sign on his desk, including eight years in solitary confinement—naked, ravaged by mosquitoes, and splashed with human waste—was temporarily reduced to a wheelchair after multiple hunger strikes.
Replica of the solitary confinement cell of Cuban dissident Óscar Elías Biscet González, confined to “Cinco y Medio” prison in Pinar del Rio between 2002 and 2011 for discussing a human rights petition campaign. September 8, 2004.
The Victims of Communism Museum’s map of the 287 prisons throughout Cuba—as compared to 10 prior to the revolution—23 of which are converted schools. 2023.

Our policy was to provide an affluent life for the people. There were mistakes made in carrying it out. Several thousand people may have died.

Pol Pot

A Thai border patrol officer shows journalists a decomposing child shot by Khmer Rouge troops. 1977.
The most loathed of the “races” the Khmer Rouge designated for extermination—one which appears to have been utterly successful within Cambodia—a group of Vietnamese lie dead at Ba Chúc in An Giang after the cross-border invasion. April 1978.
Denis D. Gray. A mass grave is unearthed near Phnom Penh, its occupants once bound together by a rope; but a small sliver of the eventual 1.5 to 2 million who accompany them. April 17, 1981.
Paul Mannix. Photographs of the “guilty” thousands (at least 18,133) eliminated at Security Prison 21 (S-21) on display at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh. October 9, 2008.

We want to build a new society, a free society where all men are equal, a society where industry, thrift, integrity and uprightness prevail; hence we must wipe out all bad habits of the old society.

Hồ Chí Minh

Horst Faas. Liberated by South Vietnamese and U.S. battalions, bewildered, bloodied civilians emerge from a bunker after surviving the Việt Cộng assault on Đồng Xoài; the roughly 300 dead were among an estimated 1.25 million murdered by communist agents between 1945 and 1987. June 1965.
John M. McGrath. Imprisoned at the “Hanoi Hilton” between 1967 and 1973, Lieutenant Commander McGrath—one of 591 American POWs held by war’s end—was tortured regularly, such as with the “Vietnamese rope trick,” which he rendered himself from memory in his 1975 memoir Prisoner of War: Six Years in Hanoi.
Hubert van Es. Dozens of Vietnamese clamber to flee the fall of Saigon via an American Huey helicopter, knowing that their only hope will never return. April 29, 1975.
Michel Setboum. Boat people escaping Vietnam are rescued by French aid workers in the South China Sea, just a few of the nearly 800,000 who fled between 1975 and 1995; of those, perhaps half never again saw land. 1982.