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Do communist governments and institutions have a unique tendency to suppress dissent? I definitely get that feeling based on my observations of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, combined with my observations of Leftist organizations. So I am tempted to ask what, if anything, is inherent in communism which results in this type of behavior. (Ok, I admit that this is just a little boo-outgroup. I hate Leftists with a passion and I like the idea that there is something inherent in their thinking which leads to repression.)
That being said, it occurs to me that there is a threshold question. Perhaps all governments and institutions have a tendency to suppress dissent and there are a few exceptions, e,g, the United States, which combine (relatively) free markets with (relatively) free speech.
I'm spitballing a bit here, but my guess is that to some extent it's a matter of valuing individualism versus valuing collectivism. Perhaps people, institutions, and governments who value collectivism are more comfortable with the idea of suppressing dissent just as they are more comfortable with the idea of forcibly transferring wealth for some perceived greater good.
All entities with a capacity for action will attempt to modify their environment to be more favorable to them. Communist states. Other states. People. Liberal democracies usually market themselves with free speech as a selling point, but observe them in action and you will notice that over time, they do their best to qualify and restrict that nominally free speech, to penalize undesirable utilizations of speech under some pretense, or to raise up institutions that exercise nominally non-state pressure to suppress certain types of speech.
This isn't unique to communism. Communism just tends to skip a lot of the foreplay, since totalitarian and authoritarian societies either don't run on public approval or never pretended to place value on free speech.
I'd say it's a little worse in communism, ironically because communist societies are supposed to earn public approval.
In a strongman dictatorship "I'm strong enough to crush all who oppose me" is something you brag about. In a theocracy you can say "we speak for God; better to crush blasphemy ourselves now than leave it for God to do later". Even in right-wing societies that are nominally run for all their members' benefit, there's no dogma that all their members opinions have value. A good muscle cell helps pick up the heavy thing it was told to and doesn't whine to the brain cells about the weight or about whether it should be picking up something else instead. If the people dissenting aren't actually respected then their dissent isn't as much of a threat, and you don't have to squelch it unless it seriously risks infecting your relatively small selectorate. (In practice right-wing authoritarians do squelch more than they have to, perhaps out of a cautious estimation of the risks here, perhaps because authoritarians are all dicks.)
But communism? That was supposed to be a utopia of equality! Sure, maybe we have to go through a "socialist" stage where we still have a state with leaders, and those leaders are super-empowered so they can design and implement the plans that improve our economy and our people and get us all ready for the final communist end stage and the withering away of the state, but even life under socialism is supposed to just be getting better and better, accruing public approval on top of the approval levels that were necessary to begin the communist project in the first place.
So what do you do when "One by one, these plans are attempted, fail, and are discarded"? (Communism also jumps in as a serious contributing factor to your problems at this point, via poor understanding of economics and mechanism design.) In @FCfromSSC's fascinating theory this "policy starvation" pushes even liberals to extremism; what must it do to people who began as communists? In a democracy the process initially just risks incumbent leaders losing elections. In a state with super-empowered leadership it risks incumbent leaders losing their lives! The peasants complaining might not really be part of your selectorate, but the ideology that you used as a Schelling point to organize and justify your state says that they matter, and so it's vitally important to you that their complaints don't cast enough blame on your part of the ruling coalition to make you one of the scapegoats for your collective failures. Letting them say what they want is, once your economy exhibits enough problems to make them persuasive, an existential threat to you! You almost have to declaim them as "wreckers" and punish them accordingly.
Well then we're just back at "Real communism has never been tried", and we can never judge it.
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