Politicide is a form of mass, targeted killings in which a group of people are destroyed because of their political or ideological beliefs. It is similar to genocide, but different in that politicide does not specifically target ethnic, racial or cultural groups.
The phrase is sometimes used to describe the campaigns of killing committed by Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, in which many individuals were killed because of their anti-communist or "bourgeois" political views. Large groups of anarchists and libertarian socialists were also systematically killed by Stalin.