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Both systems promise that a slaughter is necessary but also promise its end. Both systems invariably keep the first promise and violate the second.
In revealing the commonalities of the Reds and the Greens in the Red-Green Axis, we have elucidated their shared goals of violence, wealth redistribution, inequality before the law, a binary world, monopoly rule by the elites, and controlling the totality of society. Here we explore the promise of transitional phase slaughter.
Both Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism make two promises about the violent neutralization of internal rivals. The first is that it will happen: a transitional phase, necessary to secure the new order. The second is that it will end: temporary by design, giving way once the order is secure.
Both systems keep the first promise and break the second.
Marxism states both explicitly. Islamic political theory implies them structurally. Neither system’s own history shows the second promise kept. In both, what was authorized as a passing emergency became, in practice, a standing condition, reopened by each generation against a new list of names.
Marx and Engels wrote that between capitalist and communist society lies a transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin, in The State and Revolution, built an entire argument on the promise attached to that dictatorship: it is temporary by definition because the state itself will “wither away” once class antagonism is eliminated and coercion becomes unnecessary. This is not a minor clause. It is the doctrine’s central justification for tolerating the dictatorship at all.
The Bolsheviks began implementing their slaughter within a year of taking power: the September 5, 1918, Decree on Red Terror, which ordered class enemies isolated in concentration camps and authorized summary execution, was issued after the assassination attempt on Lenin and the killing of the Petrograd Cheka chief.
The promised withering away did not follow. Nineteen years later, NKVD Order No. 00447, signed by Nikolai Yezhov on July 30, 1937, launched a fresh purge against former kulaks, clergy, and members of long-banned opposition parties, with an initial quota of 75,950 executions that regional officials repeatedly petitioned Moscow to raise.
Archival research puts executions under this order specifically at roughly 387,000; combined with parallel operations against national minorities and other categories, the wider Great Terror killed roughly 681,000 by the time it wound down in November 1938. Yezhov himself was arrested within a year of signing the order and executed in February 1940.
Mao’s party, founded in 1921 with Comintern backing and built on the same Leninist premise, reached the identical point on its own: three decades after Russia’s promised transition began, the Cultural Revolution reopened the same category of internal enemy under a different flag. The state did not wither.