Hennessy to estimate that Kim’s annual cognac budget
before the sanctions could have been as high as $800,000
a year.
It is impossible to understand many of the poorest
regions of the world at the end of the twentieth century
without understanding the new absolutism of the twentieth
century: communism. Marx’s vision was a system that
would generate prosperity under more humane conditions
and without inequality. Lenin and his Communist Party were
inspired by Marx, but the practice could not have been
more different from the theory. The Bolshevik Revolution of
1917 was a bloody affair, and there was no humane aspect
to it. Equality was not 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