Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, Two Brutal Tyrants of Massive 20th-century Genocide. Have we learned anything yet?

Two massive, and now almost forgotten, genocides occured in the 20th century in the Ukraine, in the 1930's, and in China, from 1958 to 1961, under the brutal tyrants Josef Stalin (1879-1953) and Mao Zedong (a.k.a. Mao Tse-tung, 1893-1976). More than 7 million died in the Ukraine and 30 million in China, both under programs of forced famine and starvation.

The victims of these two genocides, unlike the Jews of the Holocaust, never received the satisfaction of judgement against the perpetrators of the genocide. Stalin, after decimating the population of the Ukraine and of Russia, continued to rule until 1953. Mao decimated China's population and continued to hold power until 1976, as the man with the "little red book of wisdom".

Both men were often idolized and lionized by the political left in the West, much like they have idolized and fictionalized the Arab radical-Muslim terrorists, and Communist killers like Ho Chi Minh, and, closer to home, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

By 1930 the Kulak farmers in the Ukraine were extinguished as a people, whole villages destroyed, as 25,000 of them died per day. Forced famine and starvation (the world's first purely man-made famine) were the means of genocide. As Ivan Stadnyuk wrote in his novel, People Are Not Angels, "The men died first, then the children, and finally the women. "Only one famine, that of China in 1877-78, was more destructive" than this one in the Ukraine. As enemies of the state, 10 million Kulaks were herded into boxcars and sent to Siberia, where they either died or were forced into slave labor. The central issue was to crush the peasant class, no matter what the human cost. When Hitler's Nazis occupied the Ukraine in 1941 they exchanged one reign of terror for another.

Nikolai Bukharin, who Lenin called the "darling of the party", stated that during the Bolshevik Revolution he had seen "things that I would not want even my enemies to see. Yet, 1919, cannot even be compared with what happened between 1930 and 1932. In 1919, we were fighting for our lives. We executed people , but we also risked our lives in the process. In the later period, however, we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenseless men, together with their wives and children." "A real dehumanization" had taken place among the Communist "professional bureaucrats," he felt.

Dr. Julius Margolin was an influential Lithuanian Jewish leader and a friend of the Soviet system prior to World War II. During the Soviet occupation of his country, he was, nevertheless, sent to a Siberian slave camp for seven years, along with hundreds of thousands of his country men. After his release, he wrote " Millions of men are perishing in the camps of the Soviet Union...Since they came into being, the Soviet camps have swallowed more people, have executed more victims, than all the other camps-Hitler included-together; and this lethal engine continues to operate full blast. And those who in reply only shrug their shouldres and try to dismiss the issue with vague and meaningless generalities, I consider moral abetters and accomplices of banditry."

In his definitive work on the Soviet carnage, The Great Terror, British scholar and Sovietologist, Robert Conquest, estimates the total number of people directly killed in the Soviet Union by the Communist athorities since the revolution to be conservatively about 21.5 million, and likely, about 50% higher, which would mean about 32 million directly killed. This was over a period of about 50 years, from about 1919 until 1970, when Conquest wrote. Senator Thomas J. Dodd, the member of the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary, who had requested that Conquest write The Human Cost of Soviet Communism, for the Judiciary Committee, in an introduction to the 1970 U.S government publication, comes up with a "grand total of 35 million human lives as a minimum estimate and 45 million as a more probable estimate." He states," Mr Conquest does not include in his tabulation, although it is the conviction of the undersigned Senator that they belong there, his estimate that the cost of the civil war, from military action, executions, typhus, and famine, totaled 9 million lives, and that the great famine of 1921 which followed the civil war, cost another 5 million lives." How many more people were killed between 1970 and 1991, when the Soviet Union was formally dissolved?

Mao's "Great Leap Forward" program was really a great leap backward, as a formerly agrarian economy collapsed, and the resulting famine resulted in 30 million peasant deaths in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Mao advised other Iron Curtain dictators to follow his example in starving the peasant masses. Only Albania really followed, the others holding Mao somewhat in derision. Mao had "killed off the cream of China's youth and imprisoned the country in poverty," to use Lane Montgomery's words, in her book Never Again, Again, Again..., Genocide: Armenia, The Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovenia, Darfur. "Genocides always serve a purpose. They are are not spontaneous," writes Montgomery, "They occur because governments or tyrants perpetrate them for their own purposes."

Professor Richard L. Walker, who wrote The Human Cost of Communism in China for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 1971, estimated from all the evidence, the human cost of Communism in China to be a minimum of 34 million, and up to as much as 64 million, people dead from the time of the first civil war (1927-36) until about 1970. Even Moscow claimed that "in the course of 10 years, more than 25 million people in China were exterminated... During 1960 alone, Mao Tse Tung's government exterminated more Chinese than were killed in the entire war against Japan." Walker summed up: "The Communist movement in China, despite its proclaimed high ideals, must be judged on performance, and, as regards the human equation, there is little to commend it. Those who wish to rationalize public assassinations, purges of classes and groups or slave labor as a necessary expedient for China's progress are resorting to the same logic which justified a Hitler and his methods for dealing with economic depression in the Third Reich."


Jung Chang and her husband, historian Jon Halliday, have written a massive, scholarly classic, Mao: The Unkown Story, in which Mao is revealed to be the biggest mass murderer in history. This classic should rightly shut the mouths of the Mao cult, unless these fans be either totally sadists, or extreme propagandists, bent on further falsifying history.


From the opening sentence of Chang and Halliday's book, "Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was resposible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader," to the closing page, it carefully documents Mao's reign of terror and brutality. This book should also put to rest the mid-20th century myths perpetuted by Edgar Snow, John K Fairbank, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodore White and other western apologists of Mao and Chinese communism. Theodore White advocated that we be "sponsors of revolution" and that "our policy must offer the masses of Asia the same things that the Russian revolution promises them..." The 'Mao Myth' is centered around the 'Long March' myth, which has long been known to have been fabricated by Edgar Snow. His book of lies is still in print.


Paul Hattaway, in his 650 page 2007 sweeping documentary China's Book of Martyrs (AD 845-present)- The Church in China: Volume 1 of the "Fire and Blood" Series about Christianity in China estimates that since the Nestorians first introduced the gospel to China in the seventh century, about 250,000 Christians have died directly because of their faith, and that "since 1900, more Christians have been killed for Christ in China than in all other countries of the world combined. China's martyrs have included some well know names, such as John and Betty Stam, Eric Liddell, whose life was celebrated in the film Chariots of Fire, and Watchman Nee. But the great majority of China's martyrs have been unsung heroes of the Christian faith: simple men and women, boys and girls who when tested 'did not love so much as to shrink from death' (Revelations 12:10-11)."


Bob Davey in an ongoing scholarly series Reformation Today magazine has traced the slower growth of Christianity in China prior to the 20th century, and the more rapid growth of Christianity in China in the 20th century, the latter which has ocurred in spite of the creeping liberalism within the early-20th century China church and the rise of communism and Mao's 'Long March' to victory. Davey gives succinct accounts of 20th century western and Chinese Christian heroes, faithfully evangelizing the China field-Gladys Aylward, John and Betty Stam, Mildred Cable, Marie Monsen, John Sung, Andrew Gih, Watchman Nee, Pastor Hsi, and others. He gives a positive account of numerical and spiritual growth of the indiginous Chinese Christian church, and of its extension into Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. He has yet to write, in his ongoing series, of the decades from 1940 to the present.


Unfortunately, in the Sudan the tyrant Al-Bashir is now, in the 21st century, using forced famine, starvation, and extermination techniques to wipe out the black African farmers in Sudan, as the world stands by, mostly in silence and apathy. Currently the Muslims in Darfur (western Sudan) are taking the brunt of this policy, but previously it was the Christians and animists in southern Sudan. Haven't we, in the 21st century, learned anything from history, especially from the history of the 20th century?

Further Reading:


Adeny, David H., The Church's Long March, Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1985.


Bays, Daniel, ed., Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Bosshardt, Alfred, The Restraining Hand, Hodder &Stoughton, 1973.

Broomhall, A J, Hudson Taylor and China's Open Century, London: Holder & Stoughton, 7 volumes, 1981-1989.

Burgess, Alan, The Small Woman, Evan Brothers, 1957.Chang, Eileen, Naked Earth, Hong Kong: The Union Press, 1956, 365pp. A novel about China originally published in Chinese by the Tien Feng Press, Hong Kong, 1954.

Chang, Jung and Jon Holliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, New York: Anchor Books (A division of Random House, Inc., 2005, 2006. http://www.anchorbooks.com/

Ching-Weng, Chow, Ten Years of Storm: The True Story of the Communist Regime in China, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960, 323pp., forward by Lin Yutang, preface by author, index.

Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, 570pp., notes, bibliography, index. The definite work on Stalin's purges of the 1930's.

Conquest, Robert, The Human Cost of Soviet Communism, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971. Prepared at the request of Senator Thomas J. Dodd. 33 pp., plus appendix, 6 page index, and 4 page introduction by Senator Thomas J Dodd.


Courtois, Staphane, et al, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Edwards, Lee, The Life and Times of Walter Judd, Missionary for Freedom, NY: Paragon House, 1990, 364pp., notes, bibliography, index.


Fletcher, Jesse C., Bill Wallace of China, Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1996.


Giffiths, Valerie, Not Less Than Everything: the courageous women who carried the Christian gospel to China, Oxford, UK and Grand Rapids, MI, Monarch Books, with Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 2004.


Hefley, James and Marti, By Their Blood: Christian Martyrs of the 20th Century, Mott: Milford, MI, 1979.


Hefley, James and Marti, The Secret File on John Birch, Hannibal, MO: Hannibal Books, 1995.


Huizenga, Lee S., John and Betty Stam: Martyrs, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1935.


Kinnear, Angus, Against the Tide, The Story of Watchman Nee, Kingsway, ed. 1979. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1987.


Lambert, Tony, China's Christian Millions: The Costly Revival, London: Monarch Books, 1999.

Latourette, Kenneth S., A History of Christian Missions in China, New York: Macmillan, 1932.


Latourette, Kenneth S, A History of Modern China, Pelican, 1954.


Lawrence, Carl, The Church in China, Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1985.


Lyall, Leslie, A Passion for the Impossible: The China Inland Mission Story, 1865-1965, Chicago: Moody Press, 1965.


Lyall, Leslie, Red Sky at Night: Communism Confronts Christianity in China, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1956.


Lyall, Leslie, Three of China's Mighty Men, OMF, 1973


Ming-Dao, Wong, A Stone Made Smooth, Mayflower Christian Books, 1981.


Mohler, Albert, "Mao's Reign of Terror," review article of the book Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Holliday, in Reformation Today, volume 211, May-June 2006, pp. 29-32.


Monsen, Marie, The Awakening, Revival in China 1927-1937, China Inland Mission, 1961.


Monsterleet, Jean, Martyrs in China, Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Co., 1956.

Montgomery, Lane H., Never Again, Again, Again...Genocide: Armenia, The Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovenia, Darfur, NY: Rudder Finn Press, 2007, 198pp., Bibliography.


Palmer, Gretta, God's Underground in Asia: The Full Story of the Red War of the Church in China, a Story of Organized Terror and Christian Heroism, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1953.

Pollock, John, A Foreign Devil in China: The Story of L. Nelson Bell, 1971. Reprinted by World Publications, Minneapolis, 1988.


Puebla Institute, The Martyrs of Maoism: China's Persecuted Christians, Washington, D.C.: Puebla Institute, 1992.


Reformation Today, various articles on China and Christianity, by Bob Davey, between Nov.-Dec. 2007 and Jan.-Feb. 2010 (the latter issue has the most recent article, "The Gospel in China 1930-1937".


Roberts, Dana, Understanding Wachman Nee, Plainfield, NJ: Haven, 1980.


Rummel, R. J., China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900, New Jersey: Transaction Publications, 1991.


Shaw-Tong, Liu, Out of Red China, NY: Duell Sloan and Pierce, 1953, 269pp., preface by author, introduction by Dr. Hu Shih.


Shea, Nina, In the Lion's Den: A Shocking Account of Persecution and Martyrdom of Christians Today and How We Should Respond, Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1997.


Spence, Jonathon D., The Gate of Heavenly Peace: the Chinese and Their Cultural Revolution, 1895-1980, New York: Viking Press, 1981


Stewart-Smith, D. G., The Defeat of Communism, London: Ludgate Press, 1964, 482pp, introduction by author, preface by Salvador de Madariaga, bibliography, index, 43 historic photographs, maps.


Taylor, Mrs. Howard (Geraldine), The Triumph of John and Betty Stam, Philadelphia: China Inland Mission, 1960. Reprinted by OMF Books, 1978.


Thomson, D. P., Eric Liddell: Athlete and Missionary, Crieff, Scotland: Research Unit, 1971.


Tien Ju-K'ang, Peaks of Faith: Protestant Mission in Revolutionary China, Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993.


Tucker, Ruth A., From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1983

Walker, Richard Lewis, The Human Cost of Communism in China, Washington, D.C.:U.S Government Printing Office, 1971. 28 pp., plus 5 p. index, 8 p. introduction by Senator James O. Eastland, forward by Walker, and tetter to Eastland by Senator Thomas J. Dodd, who report be prepared. Reprinted by ACU Education and Research Center, 1977.


White, Theodore H. and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder Out of China, New York: William Sloane Associates, 1946.