Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

part of the equation, either, since the first thing Lenin and his
entourage did was to create a new elite, themselves, at the head of
the Bolshevik Party. In doing so, they purged and murdered not only
non-communist elements, but also other communists who could have
threatened their power. But the real tragedies were yet to come: first
with the Civil War, and then under Stalin’s collectivization and his
all-too-frequent purges, which may have killed as many as forty
million people. Russian communism was brutal, repressive, and
bloody, but not unique. The economic consequences and the human
suffering were quite typical of what happened elsewhere—for
example, in Cambodia in the 1970s under the Khmer Rouge, in China,
and in North Korea. In all cases communism brought vicious
dictatorships and widespread human rights abuses. Beyond the
human suffering and carnage, the communist regimes all set up
various types of extractive institutions. The economic institutions,
with or without markets, were designed to extract resources from the
people, and by entirely abhorring property rights, they often created
poverty instead of prosperity. In the Soviet case, as we saw in 
chapter
5
, the Communist system at first generated rapid growth, but then

---

faltered and led to stagnation. The consequences were much more
devastating in China under Mao, in Cambodia under the Khmer
Rouge, and in North Korea, where the Communist economic
institutions led to economic collapse and famine.
The Communist economic institutions were in turn supported by
extractive political institutions, concentrating all power in the hands
of Communist parties and introducing no constraints on the exercise
of this power. Though these were different extractive institutions in
form, they had similar effects on the livelihoods of the people as the
extractive institutions in Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone.