Communism

Communism is an approach to government with strong centralized control of the economy and a dictatorship of a "vanguard" party, based on the writings of Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin.

Communism was the ruling ideology of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was the first Communist-ruled country, after the overthrow of the democratic government of the Russian Empire, as well as of the nations of Europe which the U.S.S.R. conquered in World War 2 (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria), those taken over by Communist partisans during the retreat of the Nazis, Yugoslavia and Albania, and Cambodia, which became Communist during the Vietnam War. Countries which became Communist-ruled and remain so include the People's Republic of China (though the Communist Party there no longer adheres to socialist economic policy), North Korea, Vietnam (which is also moving away from socialism), Laos, and Cuba. In Africa, Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola and Mozambique had governments which claimed to be Communist, and which were supported by the U.S.S.R., but those governments were more similar to non-Commmunist African dictatorships than to European or Asian communist governments.

Communist rule has frequently been accompanied by large scale starvation as a tool of policy, concentration camps for political opponents of the Communist government, genocide of minority groups, and mass executions. The Black Book of Communism estimates that over one hundred million people were killed by Commmunist governments in the 20th Century.