At that apogee, over a third of humanity lived under regimes that professed the “communist” intent: and the encompassed populations represented a tremendous variety of cultures, ethnicities, levels of material attainment, and demographic structures.Ĭommunist Ideology and Its Bearing on Population Policyĭespite their prolixity, the founding theoreticians of Communism offered precious little dispositive guidance to their adherents regarding population affairs. In 1980, the world’s seventeen established Marxist-Leninist states presided over roughly 1.5 billion subjects (out of a total world population of approximately 4.4 billion).
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Communist power was initially established over the Russian Empire (renamed the “U.S.S.R.”, also known as the “Soviet Union”) through the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 over the following seven decades, war and revolution brought many more populations under Communist sway.Īt its zenith–just before the 1989-91 collapse of Eastern European socialism, and the Soviet Union–the reach of Communist-style governments stretched across Eurasia from Berlin and Prague to Vladivostok and Shanghai, and from the frozen Siberian tundra down to Indochina additional Communist outposts could be found in the New World (Cuba) and in sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia). “communism”–free from the injustice, alienation and exploitation that humanity had heretofore suffered under “capitalism” and all other previous historical orders.Ĭommunist governance was distinguished by the absolute and unchallenged primacy of a ruling Marxist-Leninist party, state ownership of major national industries and other critical “means of production”, and a command-style system of “central economic planning” through which political decisions (rather than market forces) allocated goods and services within the national economy.
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Armed with a utopian but atheist ideology and with powerful, far-reaching state apparatuses built to actualize their official ideals, Communist governments were expressly committed to upending existing earthly economic and political arrangements and constructing in their stead a socialized paradise–i.e. Communist rule was the Twentieth Century’s most dramatic, distinctive and fateful political innovation.