Criticisms of Communist Party Rule - Areas of Criticism

Areas of Criticism

Criticisms of communist regimes have centered on many topics, including their effects on the economic development, human rights, foreign policy, scientific progress, and environmental degradation of the countries they rule.

Political repression is a topic in many influential works critical of communist rule, including Robert Conquest's accounts of Stalin's Great Purge in The Great Terror and the Soviet famine of 1932-1934 in The Harvest of Sorrow; Richard Pipes' account of the "Red Terror" during the Russian Civil War; R. J. Rummel's work on "democide"; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account of Stalin's forced labor camps in The Gulag Archipelago; and Stéphane Courtois' account of executions, forced labor camps, and mass starvation in communist regimes as a general category, with particular attention to the USSR under Stalin and China under Mao Zedong.

Soviet-style central planning and state ownership has been another topic of criticism of communist rule. Works by economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman argue that the economic structures associated with communist rule resulted in economic stagnation. Other topics of criticism of communist rule include foreign policies of "expansionism", environmental degradation, and the suppression of free cultural expression.

Criticisms of anticommunist accounts of political repression and economic development under communist rule are diverse. On one hand, supporters of various ruling communist parties have argued that accounts of political repression are exaggerated by anticommunists, that repression was unfortunate but necessary to preserve social stability, and that communist rule provided some human rights not found under liberal democracies. They further claim that countries under communist party rule experienced greater economic development than they would have otherwise, or that communist leaders were forced to take harsh measures to defend their countries against the West during the Cold War. On the other hand, some noncommunist academic historians have argued that various attacks on communist rule should be more strongly contextualized, while not denying their factuality or concerning themselves with justifying the actions of ruling communist parties.