Harvard Newspaper Rails Against Communism: ‘100 Million’ Deaths in Just 100 Years

An op-ed in the Harvard Crimson published last week railed against communism, claiming it took 100 million lives during the 20th century.

“In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back,” author Laura M. Nicolae wrote. “For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again.”

Nicolae argues that campus culture gives students a warped view of Marxism, rather than a philosophy that may be directly responsible for millions of deaths.

“After spending four years on a campus saturated with Marxist memes and jokes about communist revolutions, my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives,” she wrote.

“Last month marked 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you precisely the opposite impression,” she added. “Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence. Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.”

Nicolae argued that communism robs individuals of their autonomy. “Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends upon it,” Nicolae wrote. “In the communist society, the collective is supreme. Personal autonomy is nonexistent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia; they have no value of their own.”

She finishes by arguing that the stories of survivors, like those of her father, must be told so that future generations aren’t doomed to face similar outcomes.

As of Monday evening, Nicolae’s column is the most-read article on the Crimson website. The responses to it have been overwhelmingly positive. “Thank you,” one user wrote. “I have still given up hope in Harvard, but it glad that someone made it through.”