The Cost of Communism

Only two blocks from the White House, a small museum in an elegant Beaux Arts mansion draws our attention to one of the deadliest ideologies of all time: communism. The Victims of Communism Museum opened only last year after decades of thoughtful planning, and the care that went into the project shows. Visiting the museum is a powerful experience.

As you enter the building, a placard declares the startling human cost of world communism: Over 100 million people have been killed since Lenin took power. Josef Stalin supposedly said that whereas one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. He would certainly know. The mind cannot comprehend such mass misery; it glazes over. The VOC Museum’s curators overcome this problem by highlighting individual human tragedies. Visitors are shown in the most vivid way possible—through recordings, written testimonies, and more—that the casualties of communism were individual human beings.

In a sense, the victims of communism number far more than 100 million. If we consider those forced to live under this tyrannical system, tortured by it, or driven from their homes because of it, then the numbers are far greater. My grandparents were German-speaking Anabaptists living in Ukraine over one hundred years ago. As the Bolshevik revolution plunged the region into deepening repression, famine, and civil war, violent anarchists as well as communists struggled for control over local villages. Pacifist peasant communities that successfully built a life for themselves over preceding generations were a natural target. My grandfather’s family was terrorized, and his father was killed. Desperate to survive, the remaining members of the family managed to travel to the Baltic, then across the Atlantic Ocean. Settling in Western Canada during the early 1920s, they created a new life for themselves, just as their ancestors once did. Working hard in a free country, they farmed the land, went to church, raised a family, and smiled. But they passed on to their grandson a profound mistrust toward the supposed benefits of socialism.

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