Darwinism was of such great importance to Communism that only months after Darwin's book was published, Engels wrote to Marx, "Darwin, whom I am just now reading, is splendid."78

Marx wrote back to Engels on December 19, 1860, saying, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."79

In a letter Marx wrote to Lassalle, another socialist friend of his, on January 16, 1861, he said: "Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history."80 thus revealing the importance of the theory of evolution for Communism.

Marx revealed his sympathy for Darwin by dedicating his most important work, Das Kapital, to him. Darwin's copy of Marx's first volume was inscribed by Marx, describing himself as a "sincere admirer" of the English naturalist.81

Engels too admitted his admiration for Darwin elsewhere:

Nature is the test of dialectics, and it must be said... that in the last resort nature works dialectically and not metaphysically... In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others.82

Engels praised Darwin and Marx as being the same, "Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history" he said.83

In another of his works,Engels stressed the importance of Darwin's having developed a theory opposed to religion:

He (Darwin) dealt the metaphysical conception of nature the heaviest blow by his proof that the organic world of today — plants, animals, and consequently man too — is the product of a process of evolution going on through millions of years.84

As well as this, Engels at once showed how he had accepted Darwin's theory by writing an article titled "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man."

The American researcher Conway Zirckle explains why the founders of Communism immediately accepted Darwin's theory" Marx and Engels accepted evolution almost immediately after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Evolution, of course, was just what the founders of communism needed to explain how mankind could have come into being without the intervention of any supernatural force, and consequently it could be used to bolster the foundations of their materialistic philosophy. In addition, Darwin's interpretation of evolution–that evolution had come about through the operation of natural selection–gave them an alternative hypothesis to the prevailing teleological explanation of the observed fact that all forms of life are adapted to their conditions.85

Tom Bethell, of Harper's Magazine, explains the fundamental link between Marx and Darwin in the following manner:

Marx admired Darwin's book not for economic reasons but for the more fundamental one that Darwin's universe was purely materialistic, and the explication of it no longer involved any reference to unobservable, nonmaterial causes outside or 'beyond' it. In that important respect, Darwin and Marx were truly comrades.86

Today the link between Darwinism and Marxism is an obvious truth accepted by everyone. Biographies of Marx always make this plain. For example, a biography of Karl Marx describes the link in this way:

"Darwinism presented a whole string of truth supporting Marxism and proving and developing the truth of it. The spread of Darwinist evolutionary ideas created a fertile ground for Marxist ideas as a whole to be taken on board by the working class… Marx, Engels, and Lenin attached great value to the ideas of Darwin and pointed to their scientific importance, and in this way the spread of these ideas was accelerated."87

As we have seen, Marx and Engels were delighted to believe that Darwin's concept of evolution formed a scientific support for their own atheist world view. But this delight proved to be premature. The theory of evolution saw wide acceptance because it was proposed in a primitive 19th century scientific environment and was full of errors lacking any sort of scientific proof. Science, which developed in the second half of the 20th century, revealed the invalidity of the theory of evolution. This meant the collapse of Communist and materialist thinking as much as it did of Darwinism. (For further details see The Evolution Deceit by Harun Yahya). But because scientists with materialist views knew that the collapse of Darwinism also meant the collapse of their own ideologies they tried all possible methods to conceal Darwinism's collapse from people. 

The Admiration of the Followers of Marx and Engels for Darwin

Marx and Engels' followers, who brought about the deaths of millions of people and were the reason for hundreds of millions of others living in pain, fear, and violence, accepted the theory of evolution with great joy and interest.

John N. Moore speaks of the links between evolution and the Soviet leaders who implemented Marx and Engels' ideas in Russia:

The thinking of the leaders of the USSR is rooted deeply in an evolutionary outlook.88

It was Lenin who made Marx's project of Communist revolution come true. Lenin, the leader of the Communist Bolshevik movement in Russia, aimed to bring down the Tsarist regime in Russia by force of arms. The chaos after World War I gave the Bolsheviks the opportunity they had been seeking. With Lenin at their head, the Communists seized power by the use of arms in October 1917. After the revolution Russia was the scene of a bloody three-year civil war between Communists and supporters of the tsar.

Like the other Communist leaders, Lenin often stressed that Darwin's theory was the fundamental basis of dialectical materialist philosophy.

One of his statements reveals his view of Darwinism:

Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to one another, except by chance, and that they were created by God, and hence immutable.89

Trotsky, counted the most important architect of the Bolshevik revolution after Lenin, again attached great importance to Darwinism. He declared his admiration for Darwin in the following way, Darwin's discovery is the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter.90

Following Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin, widely regarded as the bloodiest dictator in the history of the world, passed to the leadership of the Communist Party. Throughout his 30 years in power, Stalin would try to prove just what a ruthless system Communism was.

Stalin's first important move was to take over the fields of the peasants who made up 80 percent of the population of Russia in the name of the state. In the name of this policy of collectivisation which was intended to do away with private property, all the Russian villagers' crops were collected by armed officials. As a result these was a terrible famine, millions of women, children, and the elderly who could find nothing to eat ended their lives writhing in hunger. The death toll in the Caucasus alone was 1 million.

Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of people who tried to resist this policy to Siberia's dreadful labour camps. These camps, where the prisoners were worked to death, became the grave of most of these people. On the other hand tens of thousands of people were executed by Stalin's secret police. Millions of people were forced to migrate to the furthest corners of Russia, including the Crimean and Turkestan Turks.

By these bloody policies Stalin killed some 20 million people. Historians have revealed that this savagery gave him enormous personal pleasure. It gave him great pleasure to sit at his desk in the Kremlin and examine the lists of those who had died in the concentration camps or who had been executed.

Apart from his personal psychological state, the main influence which lead him to become such a ruthless killer was the materialist philosophy he believed in. In Stalin's own words, the fundamental basis of this philosophy was Darwin's theory of evolution. He explained the importance he attached to Darwin's ideas:

There are three things that we do to disabuse the minds of our seminary students. We had to teach them the age of the earth, the geologic origin, and Darwin's teachings.91

While Stalin was still alive a close childhood friend of his recounted how Stalin had become an atheist in the book Landmarks in the Life of Stalin: 

At a very early age, while still a pupil in the ecclesiastical school, Comrade Stalin developed a critical mind and revolutionary sentiments. He began to read Darwin and became an atheist.92

In the same book, G. Glurdjidze, a boyhood friend of Stalin's relates how Stalin had stopped believing in God and had told him that the reason for this was Darwin's book, pressurising him into reading it too.93

One important indication of Stalin's blind faith in the theory of evolution was the Soviet education system's rejection of Mendel's genetic laws in the period when he came to power. These laws, which had been accepted by the whole world of science since the start of the 20th century, denied Lamarck's claim that "acquired traits can be passed on to later generations." The Russian scientist Lysenko saw this as a heavy blow to the theory of evolution and at the same time a great danger, and told Stalin his ideas. Stalin was impressed by Lysenko's ideas and made him head of the official scientific associations. Thus genetic science, which had dealt a heavy blow to evolution, was not accepted in any Soviet Union scientific association or school until Stalin's death.

In Stalin's period the Soviet Union had turned into an environment of chaos where for millions of people life was permanently under threat, and where they could be taken away, though innocent of any crime, at any moment, to suffer unimagined torments. Not just Communism, but the history of Fascism, too, is full of such attitudes.

Some commentators on history fall into the error, when evaluating these events, of trying to show that the basic cause of all this savagery and mercilessness was that as people, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Mussolini had unbalanced and psychopathic natures. What kind of coincidence is it, that the whole world should have fallen into the hands of psychologically unbalanced people at the same time?

It is an obvious and definite truth that these people and ideologies all drank from the same well and that they were all portrayed as justified and the only way by the same source. In short there was another guilty party behind these people. The cause of these inhuman and unbalanced leaders dragging millions along behind them, and which allowed them to commit crimes, was the apparent scientific force and support given to them by materialist philosophy and Darwinism.