The concept that fits better than propaganda is ideology, which in Marxist and Marx-influenced thinking refers to the ideas that give legitimacy to the status quo. People ordinarily think along the lines of ideology, and repeat ideological ideas, without knowing they’re doing it.
Propaganda is the deliberate shaping of public opinion, but the ideas that hold up capitalism don’t take that form—they are more organic and unconscious. I gave some examples in another discussion:
But you’re right that there’s always a risk of being condescending, and of claiming special enlightened status.
But how does ideology relate to the claims that the OP is addressing?
Before doing anything else, something has to be clarified. As @tabemann has been explaining, there’s a distinction between big C Communism and small c communism. This doesn’t seem to be well-understood even among educated people in the West.
The government of the Soviet Union never claimed that the country had become a communist society. The internal propaganda was always along the lines of if we struggle on and remain dedicated to the cause of the party, we shall reach communism. Kruschev in 1961 said this:
Мы руководствуемся строго научными расчётами. А расчёты показывают, что за 20 годы мы построим в основном коммунистическое общество.
We are guided by strictly scientific calculations. And the calculations show that in twenty years we will build, in the main, a communist society.
—Khrushchev, Nikita, 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1961
Long before 1980, this had become an embarrasment among the nomenklatura and a joke among the people in general.
The ruling party was called the Communist Party because its job was to guide the country towards communism. At some point, though, “Communism” became a label for countries ruled by such Communist Parties, thus “communism” came to refer to the bureaucratic authoritarian state socialist regimes that had been created by self-declared Marxists.
And this is why we now have to use big-C “Communism,” to distinguish it from the imagined stateless, classless, post-scarcity society of communism.
We can now understand more clearly what is going on in the statements from the OP:
If this claim is meant to refer to Communism, then historians mostly agree that in Communist countries, authorities were responsible for millions of deaths. Denials and excuses are, in my opinion, intellectually and morally execrable. The same goes for this whataboutism:
One’s complaints about the suffering caused by capitalism lose all force when one minimizes or dismisses suffering under Communist regimes. It should be admitted that what was attempted in Russia was a disaster, and was carried out by people who were variously bloodthirsty, cruel, ruthless, willing to use millions of people as a means to an end, willing to reduce people to their class or ethnic origin, and even willing to kill those who had ensured the success of the revolution (in case you’re not aware of the history, that description covers all the bases: Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky).
And whether or not the regime was forced to turn nasty because of pressure from the imperialist countries is not the point. The point is what they chose to do and how they did it, and that they did all this in the name of communism.
However, the common inference, that therefore all attempts to build a communist society will result in the horrors inflicted on humanity by Communists, does not follow.
To conclude on this point: if you want to keep communism alive, you have to abandon and condemn Communism without reservation. This is the only way to separate the “communism killed 100/x million people” claim from communism as such.
This claim is a bit more complicated, because there are two versions of it: the sophisticated and the unsophisticated. The unsophisticated version assumes that communism, and Marxist movements motivated to build a communist society, must be aligned with the Communist Parties of the twentieth century. Because the thing is, they are more or less right that a country organized like the Soviet Union will tend to be authoritarian and bureaucratic (to put it quite mildly).
The sophisticated version is that the dictatorship of the proletariat will inevitably degenerate into a self-serving authoritarian bureaucracy. This criticism comes from other Marxists outside the Marxist-Leninist tradition, and from many other leftists. So it’s by no means just capitalist ideology. And Marxists of all kinds have to face up to this criticism, because the dictatorship of the proletariat is an idea that goes right back to Marx himself.
So, back to ideology. I would say that Western Cold War ideology, in demonizing the Soviet Union simplistically, also demonized communism and Marxism. Back then, the concept of propaganda describes what was going on on both sides pretty well, but what we have now is an ideological (but generally non-propagandist) legacy of the Cold War, but one that is reinforced every time a Marxist defends, say, Lenin’s hanging order:
Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be ruthlessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ‘the last decisive battle’ with the kulaks is now underway everywhere. An example must be made.
- Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, fatcats, bloodsuckers.
- Publish their names.
- Seize all grain from them.
- Designate hostages - in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.
Do it in such a fashion, that for hundreds of verst around the people see, tremble, know, shout: “the bloodsucking kulaks are being strangled and will be strangled”.
Telegraph the receipt and implementation. Yours, Lenin.
P.S. Find tougher people.
—Telegram from Lenin to the Penza Soviet, August 1918 (Lenin’s hanging order)
(In case anyone wants to jump to his defence by supplying the Civil War context, it should be noted (a) that the people targeted were just those who resisted grain requisitioning, who in many cases did so because they didn’t have enough to eat; and (b) that the Bolsheviks at this time were already receiving criticism for their brutality and authoritarian rule, from communists.)