By eliminating the alienated and scaring the rest.
>> small groups of people getting massive amounts of power
In part, yes. But in part it was because in any revolution not everyone will support your kooky ideas. Those folks will fight you after you succeed. The only known way of pacifying them is by murdering them all. You see this every time.
>> you have to understand Marxism
I'd argue you're the one who needs to "understand" in this case. I lived the consequences of Marxism for the first 22 years of my life. I want no part of that shit here in the US, no matter how it's sold to me.
> By eliminating the alienated and scaring the rest.
"They make a desert and call it peace." That's not peace, and what you describe isn't a lack of alienation either. The people who survived and worked in the Soviet Union were mostly just as alienated as in capitalist societies. They just had a different boss. And the people who were murdered were not relieved of alienation but of their lives. A doctor who kills his patient has not cured him.
"I'd argue you're the one who needs to "understand" in this case. I lived the consequences of Marxism for the first 22 years of my life. I want no part of that shit here in the US, no matter how it's sold to me."
You didn't live under Marxism, but under a brutal totalitarian dictatorship, and you are confusing the two. That is not what Marx had in mind, and in fact Marx's own writings were edited and censored by the regime to put them in line with their own ideas.
Where in Marx do you find exhortations to torture and imprison millions of innocent people, create sham trials, make corruption and bribery the norm and use slave labor to achieve your utopia? Nowhere.
This was a creation of power-hungry individuals who will do whatever it takes to get and retain power. Note that after the Soviet Union fell and stopped being Communist (not that it ever was, but it stopped being Communist in name now, and became Capitalist) the abuses did not stop. Arguably, in many ways Russia is worse off now than it was even under Communist rule, as the organization formerly known as the KGB and organized crime now rule the country.
You can't radically change people's way of life without doing all of these things. So it's implicit. Western liberals especially find this very hard to acknowledge. Lenin had no such misunderstanding: dude was perfectly fine with mass murdering peasants and starving children to death. The ends, in his mind, justified the means.
Marx's writings were also descriptive, not prescriptive. He imagined how things could be if everything went perfectly, rather than gave you a concrete set of steps to get there. The problem is with the latter, not the former. It's a "sperical cow in a vacuum" kind of thinking, very black and white, not in the least suitable for the real world, and at odds with human nature.
That's different from saying that what Marx envisioned as a utopia (or even the path to get to utopia) was what the Soviet Union became. He did not foresee that nightmare and he did not want that nightmare, and I genuinely believe that most Marxists don't either. They are, if anything, a bit too well meaning and naive, and think that everything will turn out for the best once the proletariat gain control over the means of production.
I'm not sure I agree with you about human nature, but I do think an army of unscrupulous people stand ready and willing to subvert that sort of system and to use true believers to further their own welfare rather than the welfare of society as a whole.
True believers willing to kill others to build their utopia appear all throughout history, not just in ostensibly Marxist or Communist societies, but in the Inquisition, the Crusades, Nazi Germany, and many other horrific places and times, and they never end well (even if you think some ideal ends justify such bloody means).
If a true utopia is ever to arise (if that's even possible), it has to do so and be sustained through non-violent means.
Also, it's widely disputed that the USSR was actually a Marxist society. I've heard it described as "State Capitalism".
Regardless, it's pretty clear that the mass murder in places like the USSR, China, and Cambodia was due to small groups of people getting massive amounts of power, abusing that power, and being completely insensitive to the suffering they cause, and not as a consequence of their economic systems.
Bloodthirsty despots come in all stripes and are happy to wear any mask as long as it helps them to gain and maintain power. A prime example is Hitler paying lip service to socialism while undermining worker's rights in favor of corporations, murdering socialists, using slave labor, and most of all strengthening his own grip on power.
Just for the record, I'm not a Marxist nor a Communist, nor do I advocate for either. But I do think you have to understand Marxism to adequately critique it, and it's pretty clear that the author of the article this HN post links to does not.