The Crimes of Communism
Life cannot withstand death, but memory is gaining in its struggle against nothingness. — Tzvetan Todorov, Les abus de la mémoire.
It has been written that “history is the science of human misfortune.”[1] Our bloodstained century of violence amply confirms this statement. In previous centuries few people and countries were spared from mass violence. The major European powers were involved in the African slave trade. The French Republic practiced colonization, which despite some good was tarnished by repugnant episodes that persisted until recently. The United States remains heavily influenced by a culture of violence deeply rooted in two major historical tragedies—the enslavement of black Africans and the extermination of Native Americans.
The fact remains that our century has outdone its predecessors in its bloodthirstiness. A quick glance at the past leads to one damning conclusion: ours is the century of human catastrophes—two world wars and Nazism, to say nothing of more localized tragedies, such as those in Armenia, Biafra, and Rwanda. The Ottoman Empire was undoubtedly involved in the genocide of the Armenians, and Germany in the genocide of the Jews and Gypsies. Italy under Mussolini slaughtered Ethiopians. The Czechs are reluctant to admit that their behavior toward the Sudeten Germans in 1945 and 1946 was by no means exemplary. Even Switzerland has recently been embroiled in a scandal over its role in administering gold stolen by the Nazis from exterminated Jews, although the country’s behavior is not on the same level as genocide.
Communism has its place in this historical setting overflowing with tragedies. Indeed, it occupies one of the most violent and most significant places of all. Communism, the defining characteristic of the “short twentieth century” that began in Sarajevo in 1914 and ended in Moscow in 1991, finds itself at center stage in the story. Communism predated fascism and Nazism, outlived both, and left its mark on four continents.
What exactly do we mean by the term “Communism”? We must make a distinction between the doctrine of communism and its practice. As a political philosophy, communism has existed for centuries, even millennia. Was it not Plato who in his Republicintroduced the concept of an ideal city, in which people would not be corrupted by money and power and in which wisdom, reason, and justice would prevail? And consider the scholar and statesman Sir Thomas More, chancellor of England in 1530, author of Utopia, and victim of the executioner’s ax by order of Henry VIII, who also described an ideal society. Utopian philosophy may have its place as a technique for evaluating society. It draws its sustenance from ideas, the lifeblood of the world’s democracies. But the Communism that concerns us does not exist in the transcendent sphere of ideas. This Communism is altogether real; it has existed at key moments of history and in particular countries, brought to life by its famous leaders—Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Josif Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and, in France, by Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos, and Georges Marehais.
Regardless of the role that theoretical communist doctrines may have played in the practice of real Communism before 1917—and we shall return to this later—it was flesh-and-blood Communism that imposed wholesale repression, culminating in a state-sponsored reign of terror. Is the ideology itself blameless? There will always be some nitpickers who maintain that actual Communism has nothing in common with theoretical communism. And of course it would be absurd to claim that doctrines expounded prior to Jesus Christ, during the Renaissance, or even in the nineteenth century were responsible for the events that took place in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, as Ignazio Silone has written, “Revolutions, like trees, are recognized by the fruit they bear.” It was not without reason that the Russian Social Democrats, better known to history as the Bolsheviks, decided in November 1917 to call themselves “Communists.” They had a reason for erecting at the Kremlin a monument to those whom they considered to be their predecessors, namely Sir Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella.
Having gone beyond individual crimes and small-scale ad-hoc massacres, the Communist regimes, in order to consolidate their grip on power, turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government. After varying periods, ranging from a few years in Eastern Europe to several decades in the U.S.S.R. and China, the terror faded, and the regimes settled into a routine of administering repressive measures on a daily basis, as well as censoring all means of communication, controlling borders, and expelling dissidents. However, the memory of the terror has continued to preserve the credibility, and thus the effectiveness, of the threat of repression. None of the Communist regimes currently in vogue in the West is an exception to this rule—not the China of the “Great Helmsman,” nor the North Korea of Kim Il Sung, nor even the Vietnam of “good old Uncle Ho” or the Cuba of the flamboyant Fidel Castro, flanked by the hard-liner Che Guevara. Nor can we forget Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam, Angola under Agostinho Neto, or Afghanistan under Mohammed Najibullah.
Incredibly, the crimes of Communism have yet to receive a fair and just assessment from both historical and moral viewpoints. This book is one of the first attempts to study Communism with a focus on its criminal dimensions, in both the central regions of Communist rule and the farthest reaches of the globe. Some will say that most of these crimes were actions conducted in accordance with a system of law that was enforced by the regimes’ official institutions, which were recognized internationally and whose heads of state continued to be welcomed with open arms. But was this not the case with Nazism as well? The crimes we shall expose are to be judged not by the standards of Communist regimes, but by the unwritten code of the natural laws of humanity.
The history of Communist regimes and parties, their policies, and their relations with their own national societies and with the international community are of course not purely synonymous with criminal behavior, let alone with terror and repression. In the U.S.S.R. and in the “people’s democracies” after Stalin’s death, as well as in China after Mao, terror became less pronounced, society began to recover something of its old normalcy, and “peaceful coexistence”—if only as “the pursuit of the class struggle by other means”—had become an international fact of life. Nevertheless, many archives and witnesses prove conclusively that terror has always been one of the basic ingredients of modern Communism. Let us abandon once and for all the idea that the execution of hostages by firing squads, the slaughter of rebellious workers, and the forced starvation of the peasantry were only short-term “accidents” peculiar to a specific country or era. Our approach will encompass all geographic areas and focus on crime as a defining characteristic of the Communist system throughout its existence.
Exactly what crimes are we going to examine? Communism has committed a multitude of crimes not only against individual human beings but also against world civilization and national cultures. Stalin demolished dozens of churches in Moscow; Nicolae Ceauşescu destroyed the historical heart of Bucharest to give free rein to his megalomania; Pol Pot dismantled the Phnom Penh cathedral stone by stone and allowed the jungle to take over the temples of Angkor Wat; and during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, priceless treasures were smashed or burned by the Red Guards. Yet however terrible this destruction may ultimately prove for the nations in question and for humanity as a whole, how does it compare with the mass murder of human beings—of men, women, and children?
Thus we have delimited crimes against civilians as the essence of the phenomenon of terror. These crimes tend to fit a recognizable pattern even if the practices vary to some extent by regime. The pattern includes execution by various means, such as firing squads, hanging, drowning, battering, and, in certain cases, gassing, poisoning, or “car accidents”; destruction of the population by starvation, through man-made famine, the withholding of food, or both; deportation, through which death can occur in transit (either through physical exhaustion or through confinement in an enclosed space), at one’s place of residence, or through forced labor (exhaustion, illness, hunger, cold). Periods described as times of “civil war” are more complex—it is not always easy to distinguish between events caused by fighting between rulers and rebels and events that can properly be described only as a massacre of the civilian population.
Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. The following rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates, gives some sense of the scale and gravity of these crimes:
- U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths
- China: 65 million deaths
- Vietnam: 1 million deaths
- North Korea: 2 million deaths
- Cambodia: 2 million deaths
- Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths
- Latin America: 150,000 deaths
- Africa: 1.7 million deaths
- Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths
- The international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths
The total approaches 100 million people killed.
The immense number of deaths conceals some wide disparities according to context. Unquestionably, if we approach these figures in terms of relative weight, first place goes to Cambodia, where Pol Pot, in three and a half years, engaged in the most atrocious slaughter, through torture and widespread famine, of about one-fourth of the country’s total population. However, China’s experience under Mao is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of people who lost their lives. As for the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, the blood turns cold at its venture into planned, logical, and “politically correct” mass slaughter.
***
This bare-bones approach inevitably fails to do justice to the numerous issues involved. A thorough investigation requires a “qualitative” study based on a meaningful definition of the term “crime.” Objective and legal criteria are also important. The legal ramifications of crimes committed by a specific country were first confronted in 1945 at the Nuremberg Tribunal, which was organized by the Allies to consider the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The nature of these crimes was defined by Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which identified three major offenses: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. An examination of all the crimes committed by the Leninist/Stalinist regime, and in the Communist world as a whole, reveals crimes that fit into each of these three categories.
Crimes against peace, defined by Article 6a, are concerned with the “planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.” Unquestionably, Stalin committed such a crime by secretly negotiating two treaties with Hitler—those of 23 August and 28 September 1939 on the partition of Poland and on the annexation of the Baltic states, northern Bukovina, and Bessarabia to the U.S.S.R., respectively. By freeing Germany from the risk of waging war on two fronts, the treaty of 23 August 1939 led directly to the outbreak of World War II. Stalin perpetrated yet another crime against peace by attacking Finland on 30 November 1939. The unexpected incursion into South Korea by North Korea on 25 June 1950 and the massive intervention in that war by the Chinese army are of comparable magnitude. The methods of subversion long used by the Moscow-backed Communist parties likewise deserve categorization as crimes against peace, since they began wars; thus a Communist coup in Afghanistan led to a massive Soviet military intervention on 27 December 1979, unleashing a conflict that continues to this day.
War crimes are defined in Article 6b as “violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, the ill-treatment or deportation of civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labor camps or for any other purpose, the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, the killing of hostages, the plunder of public or private property, the wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, and any devastation not justified by military necessity.” The laws and customs of war are written down in various conventions, particularly the Hague Convention of 1907, which states that in times of war “the inhabitants and the belligerents remain under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among civilized peoples, from laws of humanity, and the dictates of the public conscience.”
Stalin gave the go-ahead for large numbers of war crimes. The liquidation of almost all the Polish officers taken prisoner in 1939, with 4,500 men butchered at Katyń, is only one such episode, albeit the most spectacular. However, other crimes on a much larger scale are habitually overlooked, including the murder or death in the gulag of tens of thousands of German soldiers taken prisoner from 1943 to 1945. Nor should we forget the rape of countless German women by Red Army soldiers in occupied Germany, as well as the systematic plundering of all industrial equipment in the countries occupied by the Red Army. Also covered by Article 6b would be the organized resistance fighters who openly waged war against Communist rulers and who were executed by firing squads or deported after being taken prisoner—for example, the soldiers of the anti-Nazi Polish resistance organizations, members of various Ukrainian and Baltic armed partisan organizations, and Afghan resistance fighters.
The expression “crime against humanity” first appeared on 19 May 1915 in a joint French, British, and Russian declaration condemning Turkey’s massacre of the Armenians as a “new crime by Turkey against humanity and civilization.” The atrocities committed by the Nazis obliged the Nuremberg Tribunal to redefine the concept, as stated in Article 6c: “Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.”
In his arguments at Nuremberg the French prosecutor general, François de Menthon, emphasized the ideological dimension of these crimes:
I propose today to prove to you that all this organized and vast criminality springs from what I may be allowed to call a crime against the spirit, I mean a doctrine that, by denying all spiritual, rational, or moral values by which nations have tried for thousands of years to improve human conditions, aims to plunge humanity back into barbarism, no longer the natural and spontaneous barbarism of primitive nations, but into a diabolical barbarism, conscious of itself and using for its ends all material means put at the disposal of humanity by contemporary science. This sin against the spirit is the original sin of National Socialism from which all crimes spring.
This monstrous doctrine is that of racism …
Whether we consider a crime against peace or war crimes, we are therefore not faced by an accidental or an occasional criminality that events could explain without justifying it. We are in fact faced by systematic criminality, which derives directly and of necessity from a monstrous doctrine put into practice with deliberate intent by the masters of Nazi Germany.
François de Menthon also noted that deportations were meant to provide additional labor for the German war machine, and the fact that the Nazis sought to exterminate their opponents was merely “a natural consequence of the National Socialist doctrine for which man has no intrinsic value unless he serves the German race.” All statements made to the Nuremberg Tribunal stressed one of the chief characteristics of crimes against humanity—the fact that the power of the state is placed in the service of criminal policies and practice. However, the jurisdiction of the Nuremberg Tribunal was limited to crimes committed during World War II. Therefore, we must broaden the legal definition of war crimes to include situations that extend beyond that war. The new French criminal code, adopted on 23 July 1992, defines war crimes in the following way: “The deportation, enslavement, or mass-scale and systematic practice of summary executions, abduction of persons following their disappearance, torture, or inhuman acts inspired by political, philosophical, racial, or religious motives, and organized for the purpose of implementing a concerted effort against a civilian population group” (emphasis added).
All these definitions, especially the recent French definition, are relevant to any number of crimes committed by Lenin and above all by Stalin and subsequently by the leaders of all Communist countries, with the exception (we hope) of Cuba and the Nicaragua of the Sandinistas. Nevertheless, the main conclusions are inescapable—Communist regimes have acted “in the name of a state practicing a policy of ideological hegemony.” Thus in the name of an ideological belief system were tens of millions of innocent victims systematically butchered, unless of course it is a crime to be middle-class, of noble birth, a kulak, a Ukrainian, or even a worker or a member of the Communist Party. Active intolerance was high on the Communists’ agenda. It was Mikhail Tomsky, the leader of the Soviet trade unions, who in the 13 November 1927 issue of Trud (Labor) stated: “We allow other parties to exist. However, the fundamental principle that distinguishes us from the West is as follows: one party rules, and all the others are in jail!”[2]
The concept of a crime against humanity is a complex one and is directly relevant to the crimes under consideration here. One of the most specific is genocide. Following the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, and in order to clarify Article 6c of the Nuremberg Tribunal, crimes against humanity were defined by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide of 9 December 1948 in the following way: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The new French criminal code defines genocide still more broadly: “The deed of executing a concerted effort that strives to destroy totally or partially a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, or a group that has been determined on the basis of any other arbitrary criterion” (emphasis added). This legal definition is not inconsistent with the philosophical approach of André Frossard, who believes that “it is a crime against humanity when someone is put to death purely by virtue of his or her birth.”[3] And in his short but magnificent novel Forever Floating, Vasily Grossman says of his hero, Ivan Grigorevich, who has returned from the camps, “he had remained exactly what he had been from his birth: a human being.”[4] That, of course, was precisely why he was singled out in the first place. The French definition helps remind us that genocide comes in many shapes and sizes—it can be racial (as in the case of the Jews), but it can also target social groups. In The Red Terror in Russia, published in Berlin in 1924, the Russian historian and socialist Sergei Melgunov cited Martin Latsis, one of the first leaders of the Cheka (the Soviet political police), as giving the following order on 1 November 1918 to his henchmen: “We don’t make war against any people in particular. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. In your investigations don’t look for documents and pieces of evidence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or acting against Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots, his education, his training, and his occupation.”[5]
Lenin and his comrades initially found themselves embroiled in a merciless “class war,” in which political and ideological adversaries, as well as the more recalcitrant members of the general public, were branded as enemies and marked for destruction. The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal and physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute power. This strategy applied not only to groups with opposing political views, but also to such social groups as the nobility, the middle class, the intelligentsia, and the clergy, as well as professional groups such as military officers and the police. Sometimes the Bolsheviks subjected these people to genocide. The policy of “de-Cossackization” begun in 1920 corresponds largely to our definition of genocide: a population group firmly established in a particular territory, the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women, children, and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over to new, non-Cossack occupants. Lenin compared the Cossacks to the Vendée during the French Revolution and gladly subjected them to a program of what Gracchus Babeuf, the “inventor” of modern Communism, characterized in 1795 as “populicide.”[6]
The “dekulakization” of 1930–1932 repeated the policy of “de-Cossackization” but on a much grander scale. Its primary objective, in accordance with the official order issued for this operation (and the regime’s propaganda), was “to exterminate the kulaks as a class.” The kulaks who resisted collectivization were shot, and the others were deported with their wives, children, and elderly family members. Although not all kulaks were exterminated directly, sentences of forced labor in wilderness areas of Siberia or the far north left them with scant chance of survival. Several tens of thousands perished there; the exact number of victims remains unknown. As for the great famine in Ukraine in 1932–33, which resulted from the rural population’s resistance to forced collectivization, 6 million died in a period of several months.
Here, the genocide of a “class” may well be tantamount to the genocide of a “race”—the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine caused by Stalin’s regime “is equal to” the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime. Such arguments in no way detract from the unique nature of Auschwitz—the mobilization of leading-edge technological resources and their use in an “industrial process” involving the construction of an “extermination factory,” the use of gas, and cremation. However, this argument highlights one particular feature of many Communist regimes—their systematic use of famine as a weapon. The regime aimed to control the total available food supply and, with immense ingenuity, to distribute food purely on the basis of “merits” and “demerits” earned by individuals. This policy was a recipe for creating famine on a massive scale. Remember that in the period after 1918, only Communist countries experienced such famines, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. And again in the 1980s, two African countries that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist, Ethiopia and Mozambique, were the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines.
A preliminary global accounting of the crimes committed by Communist regimes shows the following:
- The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without trial, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922
- The famine of 1922, which caused the deaths of 5 million people
- The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920
- The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930
- The liquidation of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937–38
- The deportation of 2 million kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930–1932
- The destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means of an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine in 1932–33
- The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldovans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944–45
- The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941
- The wholesale deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943
- The wholesale deportation of the Chechens in 1944
- The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 1944
- The deportation and extermination of the urban population in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978
- The slow destruction of the Tibetans by the Chinese since 1950
No list of the crimes committed in the name of Leninism and Stalinism would be complete without mentioning the virtually identical crimes committed by the regimes of Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, and Pol Pot.
A difficult epistemological question remains: Should the historian employ the primarily legal categories of “crime against humanity” and “genocide”? Are these concepts not unduly time specific—focusing on the condemnation of Nazism at Nuremberg—for use in historical research aimed at deriving relevant medium-term conclusions? On the other hand, are these concepts not somewhat tainted with questionable “values” that distort the objectivity of historical research?
First and foremost, the history of the twentieth century has shown us that the Nazis had no monopoly over the use of mass murder by states and party-states. The recent experiences in Bosnia and Rwanda indicate that this practice continues as one of the hallmarks of this century.
Second, although it might not be appropriate to revive historical methods of the nineteenth century, whereby historians performed research more for the purpose of passing judgment than for understanding the issue in question, the immense human tragedies directly caused by certain ideologies and political concepts make it impossible to ignore the humanist ideas implicit in our Judeo-Christian civilization and democratic traditions—for example, the idea of respect for human life. A number of renowned historians readily use the expression “crime against humanity” to describe Nazi crimes, including Jean-Perre Azema in his article “Auschwitz”[7] and Pierre Vidal-Naquet on the trial of Paul Touvier.[8] Therefore, it does not seem inappropriate to use such terms and concepts to characterize the crimes committed by Communist regimes.
In addition to the question of whether the Communists in power were directly responsible for these crimes, there is also the issue of complicity. Article 7(3.77) of the Canadian criminal code, amended in 1987, states that crimes against humanity include infractions of attempting, conspiring, counseling, aiding, and providing encouragement for de facto complicity.[9] This accords with the definition of crimes against humanity in Article 7(3.76) of the same code: “attempting or conspiring to commit, counseling any person to commit, aiding or abetting any person in the commission of, or being an accessory after the fact in relation to the act” (emphasis added). Incredibly, from the 1920s to the 1950s, when hundreds of thousands of people served in the ranks of the Communist International and local sections of the “world party of the revolution,” Communists and fellow-travelers around the world warmly approved Lenin’s and subsequently Stalin’s policies. From the 1950s to the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people sang the praises of the “Great Helmsman” of the Chinese Revolution and extolled the virtues of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Much closer to our time, there was widespread rejoicing when Pol Pot came to power.[10] Many will say that they “didn’t know.” Undoubtedly, of course, it was not always easy to learn the facts or to discover the truth, for Communist regimes had mastered the art of censorship as their favorite technique for concealing their true activities. But quite often this ignorance was merely the result of ideologically motivated self-deception. Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, many facts about these atrocities had become public knowledge and undeniable. And although many of these apologists have cast aside their gods of yesterday, they have done so quietly and discreetly. What are we to make of a profoundly amoral doctrine that seeks to stamp out every last trace of civic-mindedness in men’s souls, and damn the consequences?
In 1968 one of the pioneers in the study of Communist terror, Robert Conquest, wrote: “The fact that so many people ‘swallowed’ [the Great Terror] hook, line, and sinker was probably one of the reasons that the Terror succeeded so well. In particular, the trials would not be so significant had they not received the blessing of some ‘independent’ foreign commentators. These pundits should be held accountable as accomplices in the bloody politics of the purges or at least blamed for the fact that the political assassinations resumed when the first show trial, regarding Zinoviev in 1936, was given an ill-deserved stamp of approval.”[11] If the moral and intellectual complicity of a number of non-Communists is judged by this criterion, what can be said of the complicity of the Communists? Louis Aragon, for one, has publicly expressed regret for having appealed in a 1931 poem for the creation of a Communist political police in France.[12]
Joseph Berger, a former Comintern official who was “purged” and then exiled to the camps, quotes a letter received from a former gulag deportee who remained a Party member even after her return:
My generation of Communists everywhere accepted the Stalinist form of leadership. We acquiesced in the crimes. That is true not only of Soviet Communists, but of Communists all over the world. We, especially the active and leading members of the Party, carry a stain on our consciences individually and collectively. The only way we can erase it is to make sure that nothing of the sort ever happens again. How was all this possible? Did we all go crazy, or have we now become traitors to Communism? The truth is that all of us, including the leaders directly under Stalin, saw these crimes as the opposite of what they were. We believed that they were important contributions to the victory of socialism. We thought everything that promoted the power politics of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and in the world was good for socialism. We never suspected that conflict between Communist politics and Communist ethics was possible.[13]
Berger, however, tries to have it both ways. “On the other hand, I personally feel that there is a difference between criticizing people for having accepted Stalin’s policy, which many Communists did not do, and blaming them for not having prevented his crimes. To suppose that this could have been done by any individual, no matter how important he might have been, is to misunderstand Stalin’s byzantine tyranny.”[14] Thus Berger has found an excuse for having been in the U.S.S.R. and for having been caught up in its infernal machine without any means of escape. But what self-deception kept Western European Communists, who had not been directly arrested by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD, the secret police), blindly babbling away about the system and its leader? Why could they not hear the wake-up call at the very start? In his remarkable work on the Russian Revolution, The Soviet Tragedy, Martin Malia lifts a corner of the curtain when he speaks of “this paradox … that … [it] takes a great ideal to produce a great crime.”[15] Annie Kriegel, another major student of Communism, insists that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two faces of Communism, as surely as day follows night.
Tzvetan Todorov offered the first response to this paradox:
A citizen of a Western democracy fondly imagines that totalitarianism lies utterly beyond the pale of normal human aspirations. And yet, totalitarianism could never have survived so long had it not been able to draw so many people into its fold. There is something else—it is a formidably efficient machine. Communist ideology offers an idealized model for society and exhorts us toward it. The desire to change the world in the name of an ideal is, after all, an essential characteristic of human identity.… Furthermore, Communist society strips the individual of his responsibilities. It is always “somebody else” who makes the decisions. Remember, individual responsibility can feel like a crushing burden.… The attraction of a totalitarian system, which has had a powerful allure for many, has its roots in a fear of freedom and responsibility. This explains the popularity of authoritarian regimes (which is Erich Fromm’s thesis in Escape from Freedom). None of this is new; Boethius had the right idea long ago when he spoke of “voluntary servitude.”[16]
The complicity of those who rushed into voluntary servitude has not always been as abstract and theoretical as it may seem. Simple acceptance and/or dissemination of propaganda designed to conceal the truth is invariably a symptom of active complicity. Although it may not always succeed, as is demonstrated by the tragedy in Rwanda, the glare of the spotlight is the only effective response to mass crimes that are committed in secret and kept hidden from prying eyes.
***
An analysis of terror and dictatorship—the defining characteristics of Communists in power—is no easy task. Jean Ellenstein has defined Stalinism as a combination of Greek tragedy and Oriental despotism. This definition is appealing, but it fails to account for the sheer modernity of the Communist experience, its totalitarian impact distinct from previously existing forms of dictatorship. A comparative synopsis may help to put it in context.
First, we should consider the possibility that responsibility for the crimes of Communism can be traced to a Russian penchant for oppression. However, the tsarist regime of terror against which the Bolsheviks fought pales in comparison with the horrors committed by the Bolsheviks when they took power. The tsar allowed political prisoners to face a meaningful justice system. The counsel for the defendant could represent his client up to the time of indictment and even beyond, and he could also appeal to national and international public opinion, an option unavailable under Communist regimes. Prisoners and convicts benefited from a set of rules governing the prisons, and the system of imprisonment and deportation was relatively lenient. Those who were deported could take their families, read and write as they pleased, go hunting and fishing, and talk about their “misfortune” with their companions. Lenin and Stalin had firsthand experience of this. Even the events described by Fyodor Dostoevsky in Memoirs from the House of the Dead, which had such a great impact when it was published, seem tame by comparison with the horrors of Communism. True, riots and insurrections were brutally crushed by the ancien régime. However, from 1825 to 1917 the total number of people sentenced to death in Russia for their political beliefs or activities was 6,360, of whom only 3,932 were executed. This number can be subdivided chronologically into 191 for the years 1825–1905 and 3,741 for 1906–1910. These figures were surpassed by the Bolsheviks in March 1918, after they had been in power for only four months. It follows that tsarist repression was not in the same league as Communist dictatorship.
From the 1920s to the 1940s, Communism set a standard for terror to which fascist regimes could aspire. A glance at the figures for these regimes shows that a comparison may not be as straightforward as it would first appear. Italian Fascism, the first regime of its kind and the first that openly claimed to be “totalitarian,” undoubtedly imprisoned and regularly mistreated its political opponents. Although incarceration seldom led to death, during the 1930s Italy had a few hundred political prisoners and several hundred confinati, placed under house arrest on the country’s coastal islands. In addition, of course, there were tens of thousands of political exiles.
Before World War II, Nazi terror targeted several groups. Opponents of the Nazi regime, consisting mostly of Communists, Socialists, anarchists, and trade union activists, were incarcerated in prisons and invariably interned in concentration camps, where they were subjected to extreme brutality. All told, from 1933 to 1939 about 20,000 left-wing militants were killed after trial or without trial in the camps and prisons. These figures do not include the slaughter of other Nazis to settle old scores, as in “The Night of the Long Knives” in June 1934. Another category of victims doomed to die were Germans who did not meet the proper racial criteria of “tall blond Aryans,” such as those who were old or mentally or physically defective. As a result of the war, Hitler forged ahead with a euthanasia program—70,000 Germans were gassed between the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1941, when churches began to demand that this program be stopped. The gassing methods devised for this euthanasia program were applied to the third group of victims, the Jews.
Before World War II, crackdowns against the Jews were widespread; persecution reached its peak during Kristallnacht, with several hundred deaths and 35,000 rounded up for internment in concentration camps. These figures apply only to the period before the invasion of the Soviet Union. Thereafter the full terror of the Nazis was unleashed, producing the following body count—15 million civilians killed in occupied countries, 6 million Jews, 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.1 million deportees who died in the camps, and several hundred thousand Gypsies. We should add another 8 million who succumbed to the ravages of forced labor and 1.6 million surviving inmates of the concentration camps.
The Nazi terror captures the imagination for three reasons. First, it touched the lives of Europeans so closely. Second, because the Nazis were vanquished and their leaders prosecuted at Nuremberg, their crimes have been officially exposed and categorized as crimes. And finally, the revelation of the genocide carried out against the Jews outraged the conscience of humanity by its irrationality, racism, and unprecedented bloodthirstiness.
Our purpose here is not to devise some kind of macabre comparative system for crunching numbers, some kind of grand total that doubles the horror, some kind of hierarchy of cruelty. But the intransigent facts demonstrate that Communist regimes have victimized approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis. This clear record should provide at least some basis for assessing the similarity between the Nazi regime, which since 1945 has been considered the most viciously criminal regime of this century, and the Communist system, which as late as 1991 had preserved its international legitimacy unimpaired and which, even today, is still in power in certain countries and continues to protect its supporters the world over. And even though many Communist parties have belatedly acknowledged Stalinism’s crimes, most have not abandoned Lenin’s principles and scarcely question their own involvement in acts of terrorism.
The methods implemented by Lenin and perfected by Stalin and their henchmen bring to mind the methods used by the Nazis, but most often this is because the latter adopted the techniques developed by the former. Rudolf Hess, charged with organizing the camp at Auschwitz, and later appointed its commandant, is a perfect example: “The Reich Security Head Office issued to the commandants a full collection of reports concerning the Russian concentration camps. These described in great detail the conditions in, and organization of, the Russian camps, as supplied by former prisoners who had managed to escape. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Russians, by their massive employment of forced labor, had destroyed whole peoples.”[17] However, the fact that the techniques of mass violence and the intensity of their use originated with the Communists and that the Nazis were inspired by them does not imply, in our view, that one can postulate a cause-and-effect relationship between the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of Nazism.
From the end of the 1920s, the State Political Directorate (GPU, the new name for the Cheka) introduced a quota method—each region and district had to arrest, deport, or shoot a certain percentage ot people who were members of several “enemy” social classes. These quotas were centrally defined under the supervision of the Party. The mania for planning and maintaining statistics was not confined to the economy: it was also an important weapon in the arsenal of terror. From 1920 on, with the victory of the Red Army over the White Army in the Crimea, statistical and sociological methods made an appearance, with victims selected according to precise criteria on the basis of a compulsory questionnaire. The same “sociological” methods were used by the Soviet Union to organize mass deportations and liquidations in the Baltic states and occupied Poland in 1939–1941. As with the Nazis, the transportation of deportees in cattle cars ushered in “aberrations.” In 1943 and 1944, in the middle of the war, Stalin diverted thousands of trucks and hundreds of thousands of soldiers serving in the special NKVD troops from the front on a short-term basis in order to deport the various peoples living in the Caucasus. This genocidal impulse, which aims at “the total or partial destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, or a group that has been determined on the basis of any other arbitrary criterion,” was applied by Communist rulers against groups branded as enemies and to entire segments of society, and was pursued to its maximum by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.
Efforts to draw parallels between Nazism and Communism on the basis of their respective extermination tactics may give offense to some people. However, we should recall how in Forever Flowing Vasils Grossman, whose mother was killed by the Nazis in the Berdychiv ghetto, who authored the first work on Treblinka, and who was one of the editors of the Black Book on the extermination of Soviet Jews, has one of his characters describe the famine in Ukraine: “writers kept writing … Stalin himself, too: the kulaks are parasites; they are burning grain; they are killing children. And it was openly proclaimed that ‘the rage and wrath of the masses must be inflamed against them, they must be destroyed as a class, because they are accursed.’” He adds: “To massacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings, just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Thus did Lenin and Stalin say: kulaks are not human beings.” In conclusion, Grossman says of the children of the kulaks: “That is exactly how the Nazis put the Jewish children into the Nazi gas chambers: ‘You are not allowed to live, you are all Jews!’”[18]
Time and again the focus of the terror was less on targeted individuals than on groups of people. The purpose of the terror was to exterminate a group that had been designated as the enemy. Even though it might be only a small fraction of society, it had to be stamped out to satisfy this genocidal impulse. Thus, the techniques of segregation and exclusion employed in a “class-based totalitarianism” closely resemble the techniques of “race-based totalitarianism.” The future Nazi society was to be built upon a “pure race,” and the future Communist society was to be built upon a proletarian people purified of the dregs of the bourgeoisie. The restructuring of these two societies was envisioned in the same way, even if the crackdowns were different. Therefore, it would be foolish to pretend that Communism is a form of universalism. Communism may have a worldwide purpose, but like Nazism it deems a part of humanity unworthy of existence. The difference is that the Communist model is based on the class system, the Nazi model on race and territory. Thus the transgressions of Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge pose a fresh challenge for humanity, and particularly for legal scholars and historians: specifically, how do we describe a crime designed to exterminate not merely individuals or opposing groups but entire segments of society on a massive scale for their political and ideological beliefs? A whole new language is needed for this. Some authors in the English-speaking countries use the term “politicide.” Or is the term “Communist crimes,” suggested by Czech legal scholars, preferable?
***
How are we to assess Communism’s crimes? What lessons are we to learn from them? Why has it been necessary to wait until the end of the twentieth century for this subject to show up on the academic radar screen? It is undoubtedly the case that the study of Stalinist and Communist terror, when compared to the study of Nazi crimes, has a great deal of catching-up to do (although such research is gaining popularity in Eastern Europe).
One cannot help noticing the strong contrast between the study of Nazi and Communist crimes. The victors of 1945 legitimately made Nazi crimes—and especially the genocide of the Jews—the central focus of their condemnation of Nazism. A number of researchers around the world have been working on these issues for decades. Thousands of books and dozens of films—most notably Night and Fog, Shoah, Sophie’s Choice, and Schindler’s List—have been devoted to the subject. Raul Hilberg, to name but one example, has centered his major work upon a detailed description of the methods used to put Jews to death in the Third Reich.[19]
Yet scholars have neglected the crimes committed by the Communists. While names such as Himmler and Eichmann are recognized around the world as bywords for twentieth-century barbarism, the names of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Genrikh Yagoda, and Nikolai Ezhov languish in obscurity. As for Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and even Stalin, they have always enjoyed a surprising reverence. A French government agency, the National Lottery, was crazy enough to use Stalin and Mao in one of its advertising campaigns. Would anyone even dare to come up with the idea of featuring Hitler or Goebbels in commercials?
The extraordinary attention paid to Hitler’s crimes is entirely justified. It respects the wishes of the surviving witnesses, it satisfies the needs of researchers trying to understand these events, and it reflects the desire of moral and political authorities to strengthen democratic values. But the revelations concerning Communist crimes cause barely a stir. Why is there such an awkward silence from politicians? Why such a deafening silence from the academic world regarding the Communist catastrophe, which touched the lives of about one-third of humanity on four continents during a period spanning eighty years? Why is there such widespread reluctance to make such a crucial factor as crime—mass crime, systematic crime, and crime against humanity—a central factor in the analysis of Communism? Is this really something that is beyond human understanding? Or are we talking about a refusal to scrutinize the subject too closely for fear of learning the truth about it?
The reasons for this reticence are many and various. First, there is the dictators’ understandable urge to erase their crimes and to justify the actions they cannot hide. Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” of 1956 was the first admission of Communist atrocities by a Communist leader. It was also the statement of a tyrant seeking to gloss over the crimes he himself committed when he headed the Ukrainian Communist Party at the height of the terror, crimes that he cleverly attributed to Stalin by claiming that he and his henchmen were merely obeying orders. To cover up the vast majority of Communist offenses, Khrushchev spoke only of victims who were Communists, although they were far fewer in number than the other kind. He defined these crimes with a euphemism, describing them in his conclusion as “abuses committed under Stalin” in order to justify the continuity of the system that retained the same principles, the same structure, and the same people.
In his inimitable fashion Khrushchev described the opposition he faced while preparing his “Secret Speech,” especially from one of Stalin’s confidants: “[Lazar] Kaganovich was such a yes-man that he would have cut his own father’s throat if Stalin had winked and said it was in the interests of the cause—the Stalinist cause, that is.… He was arguing against me out of a selfish fear for his own hide. He was motivated entirely by his eagerness to escape any responsibility for what had happened. If crimes had been committed, Kaganovich wanted to make sure his own tracks were covered.”[20] The absolute denial of access to archives in Communist countries, the total control of the print and other media as well as of border crossings, the propaganda trumpeting the regime’s “successes,” and the entire apparatus for keeping information under lock and key were designed primarily to ensure that the awful truth would never see the light of day.
Not satisfied with the concealment of their misdeeds, the tyrants systematically attacked all who dared to expose their crimes. After World War II this became starkly clear on two occasions in France. From January to April 1949, the “trial” of Viktor Kravchenko—a former senior official who wrote I Chose Freedom, in which he described Stalin’s dictatorship—was conducted in Paris in the pages of the Communist magazine Les lettres françaises, which was managed by Louis Aragon and which heaped abuse on Kravchenko. From November 1950 to January 1951, again in Paris, Les lettres françaises held another “trial”—of David Rousset, an intellectual and former Trotskyite who was deported to Germany by the Nazis and who in 1946 received the Renaudot Prize for his book The World of Concentration Camps. On 12 November 1949 Rousset urged all former Nazi camp deportees to form a commission of inquiry into the Soviet camp system and was savagely attacked by the Communist press, which denied the existence of such camps. Following Rousset’s call, Margaret Buber-Neumann recounted her experience of being twice deported to concentration camps—once to a Nazi camp and once to a Soviet camp—in an article published on 25 February 1950 in Figaro litteraire, “An Inquiry on Soviet Camps: Who Is Worse, Satan or Beelzebub?”
Despite these efforts to enlighten humankind, the tyrants continued to wheel out heavy artillery to silence all those who stood in their way anywhere in the world. The Communist assassins set out to incapacitate, discredit, and intimidate their adversaries. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Aleksandr Zinoviev, and Leonid Plyushch were expelled from their own country; Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky; General Petro Hryhorenko was thrown into a psychiatric hospital; and Georgi Markov was assassinated with an umbrella that fired pellets filled with poison.
In the face of such incessant intimidation and cover-ups, the victims grew reluctant to speak out and were effectively prevented from reentering mainstream society, where their accusers and executioners were ever-present. Vasily Grossman eloquently describes their despair.[21] In contrast to the Jewish Holocaust, which the international Jewish community has actively commemorated, it has been impossible for victims of Communism and their legal advocates to keep the memory of the tragedy alive, and any requests for commemoration or demands for reparation are brushed aside.
When the tyrants could no longer hide the truth—the firing squads, the concentration camps, the man-made famine—they did their best to justify these atrocities by glossing them over. After admitting the use of terror, they justified it as a necessary aspect of revolution through the use of such catchphrases as “When you cut down a forest, the shavings get blown away” or “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Vladimir Bukovsky retorted that he had seen the broken eggs, but no one he knew had ever tasted the omelet! Perhaps the single greatest evil was the perversion of language. As if by magic, the concentration-camp system was turned into a “reeducation system,” and the tyrants became “educators” who transformed the people of the old society into “new people.” The zeks, a term used for Soviet concentration camp prisoners, were forcibly “invited” to place their trust in a system that enslaved them. In China the concentration-camp prisoner is called a “student,” and he is required to study the correct thoughts of the Party and to reform his own faulty thinking.
As is usually the case, a lie is not, strictly speaking, the opposite of the truth, and a lie will generally contain an element of truth. Perverted words are situated in a twisted vision that distorts the landscape; one is confronted with a myopic social and political philosophy. Attitudes twisted by Communist propaganda are easy to correct, but it is monumentally difficult to instruct false prophets in the ways of intellectual tolerance. The first impression is always the one that lingers. Like martial artists, the Communists, thanks to their incomparable propaganda strength grounded in the subversion of language, successfully turned the tables on the criticisms leveled against their terrorist tactics, continually uniting the ranks of their militants and sympathizers by renewing the Communist act of faith. Thus they held fast to their fundamental principle of ideological belief, as formulated by Tertullian for his own era: “I believe, because it is absurd.”
Like common prostitutes, intellectuals found themselves inveigled into counterpropaganda operations. In 1928 Maksim Gorky accepted an invitation to go on an “excursion” to the Solovetski Islands, an experimental concentration camp that would “metastasize” (to use Solzhenitsyn’s word) into the Gulag system. On his return Gorky wrote a book extolling the glories of the Solovetski camps and the Soviet government. A French writer, Henri Barbusse, recipient of the 1916 Prix Goncourt, did not hesitate to praise Stalin’s regime for a fee. His 1928 book on “marvelous Georgia” made no mention of the massacre carried out there in 1921 by Stalin and his henchman Sergo Ordzhonikidze. It also ignored Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, who was noteworthy for his Machiavellian sensibility and his sadism. In 1935 Barbusse brought out the first official biography of Stalin. More recently Maria Antonietta Macciochi spoke gushingly about Mao Zedong, and Alain Peyrefitte echoed the same sentiments to a lesser degree, while Danielle Mitterrand chimed in to praise the deeds of Fidel Castro. Cupidity, spinelessness, vanity, fascination with power, violence, and revolutionary fervor—whatever the motivation, totalitarian dictatorships have always found plenty of diehard supporters when they had need of them, and the same is true of Communist as of other dictatorships.
Confronted with this onslaught of Communist propaganda, the West has long labored under an extraordinary self-deception, simultaneously fueled by naïveté in the face of a particularly devious system, by the fear of Soviet power, and by the cynicism of politicians. There was self-deception at the meeting in Yalta, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin in return for a solemn undertaking that the latter would hold free elections at the earliest opportunity. Realism and resignation had a rendezvous with destiny in Moscow in December 1944, when General Charles de Gaulle abandoned hapless Poland to the devil in return for guarantees of social and political peace, duly assured by Maurice Thorez on his return to Paris.
This self-deception was a source of comfort and was given quasi-legitimacy by the widespread belief among Communists (and many leftists) in the West that while these countries were “building socialism,” the Communist “Utopia,” a breeding ground for social and political conflicts, would remain safely distant. Simone Weil epitomized this pro-Communist trendiness when she said, “revolutionary workers are only too thankful to have a state backing them—a state that gives an official character, legitimacy, and reality to their actions as only a state can, and that at the same time is sufficiently far away from them geographically to avoid seeming oppressive.”[22] Communism was supposedly showing its true colors—it claimed to be an emissary of the Enlightenment, of a tradition of social and human emancipation, of a dream of “true equality,” and of “happiness for all” as envisioned by Gracchus Babeuf. And paradoxically, it was this image of “enlightenment” that helped keep the true nature of its evil almost entirely concealed.
Whether intentional or not, when dealing with this ignorance of the criminal dimension of Communism, our contemporaries’ indifference to their fellow humans can never be forgotten. It is not that these individuals are coldhearted. On the contrary, in certain situations they can draw on vast untapped reserves of brotherhood, friendship, affection, even love. However, as Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out, “remembrance of our own woes prevents us from perceiving the suffering of others.”[23] And at the end of both world wars, no European or Asian nation was spared the endless grief and sorrow of licking its own wounds. France’s own hesitancy to confront the history of the dark years of the Occupation is a compelling illustration in and of itself. The history, or rather nonhistory, of the Occupation continues to overshadow the French conscience. We encounter the same pattern, albeit to a lesser degree, with the history of the “Nazi” period in Germany, the “Fascist” period in Italy, the “Franco” era in Spain, the civil war in Greece, and so on. In this century of blood and iron, everyone has been too preoccupied with his own misfortunes to worry much about the misfortunes of others.
However, there are three more specific reasons for the cover-up of the criminal aspects of Communism. The first is the fascination with the whole notion of revolution itself. In today’s world, breast-beating over the idea of “revolution,” as dreamed about in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is far from over. The icons of revolution—the red flag, the International, and the raised fist—reemerge with each social movement and on a grand scale. Che Guevara is back in fashion. Openly revolutionary groups are active and enjoy every legal right to state their views, hurling abuse on even the mildest criticisms of crimes committed by their predecessors and only too eager to spout the eternal verities regarding the “achievements” of Lenin, Trotsky, or Mao. This revolutionary fervor is not embraced solely by revolutionaries. Many contributors to this book themselves used to believe in Communist propaganda.
The second reason is the participation of the Soviet Union in the victory over Nazism, which allowed the Communists to use fervent patriotism as a mask to conceal their latest plans to take power into their own hands. From June 1941, Communists in all occupied countries commenced an active and frequently armed resistance against Nazi or Italian occupation forces. Like resistance fighters everywhere, they paid the price for their efforts, with thousands being executed by firing squad, slaughtered, or deported. And they “played the martyr” in order to sanctify the Communist cause and to silence all criticism of it. In addition to this, during the Resistance many non-Communists became comrades-in-arms, forged bonds of solidarity, and shed their blood alongside their Communist fellows. As a result of this past these non-Communists may have been willing to turn a blind eye to certain things. In France, the Gaullist attitude was often influenced bv this shared memory and was a factor behind the politics of General de Gaulle, who tried to play off the Soviet Union against the Americans.[24]
The Communists’ participation in the war and in the victory over Nazism institutionalized the whole notion of antifascism as an article of faith for the left. The Communists, of course, portrayed themselves as the best representatives and defenders of this antifascism. For Communism, antifascism became a brilliantly effective label that could be used to silence one’s opponents quickly. François Furet wrote some superb articles on the subject. The defeated Nazism was labeled the “Supreme Evil” by the Allies, and Communism thus automatically wound up on the side of Good. This was made crystal clear during the Nuremberg trials, where Soviet jurists were among the prosecutors. Thus a veil was drawn over embarrassing antidemocratic episodes, such as the German-Soviet pact of 1939 and the massacre at Katyń. Victory over the Nazis was supposed to demonstrate the superiority of the Communist system. In the Europe liberated by the British and the Americans (which was spared the sufferings of occupation) this was done for propaganda purposes to arouse a keen sense of gratitude to the Red Army and a sense of guilt for the sacrifices made by the peoples of the U.S.S.R. The Communists did not hesitate to play upon the sentiments of Europeans in spreading the Communist message.
By the same token, the ways in which Eastern Europe was “liberated” by the Red Army remain largely unknown in the West, where historians assimilate two very different kinds of “liberation,” one leading to the restoration of democracies, the other paving the way for the advent of dictatorships. In Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet system succeeded the Thousand Year Reich, and Witold Gombrowicz neatly captured the tragedy facing these peoples: “The end of the war did not bring liberation to the Poles. In the battlegrounds of Central Europe, it simply meant swapping one form of evil for another, Hitler’s henchmen for Stalin’s. While sycophants cheered and rejoiced at the ’emancipation of the Polish people from the feudal yoke,’ the same lit cigarette was simply passed from hand to hand in Poland and continued to burn the skin of people.”[25] Therein lay the fault line between two European folk memories. However, a number of publications have lifted the curtain to show how the U.S.S.R. “liberated” the Poles, Germans, Czechs, and Slovaks from Nazism.[26]
The final reason for the gentle treatment of Communism is subtler and a little trickier to explain. Alter 1945 the Jewish genocide became a byword for modern barbarism, the epitome of twentieth-century mass terror. After initially disputing the unique nature of the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, the Communists soon grasped the benefits involved in immortalizing the Holocaust as a way of rekindling antifascism on a more systematic basis. The specter of “the filthy beast whose stomach is fertile again”—to use Bertolt Brecht’s famous phrase—was invoked incessantly and constantly. More recently, a single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has also prevented an assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world. After all, it seems scarcely plausible that the victors who had helped bring about the destruction of a genocidal apparatus might themselves have put the very same methods into practice. When faced with this paradox, people generally preferred to bury their heads in the sand.
***
The first turning point in the official recognition of Communist crimes came on the evening of 24 February 1956, when First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev took the podium at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the CPSU. The proceedings were conducted behind closed doors; only delegates to the Congress were present. In absolute silence, stunned by what they were hearing, the delegates listened as the first secretary of the Party systematically dismantled the image of the “little father of the peoples,” of the “genius Stalin,” who for thirty years had been the hero of world Communism. This report, immortalized as Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” was one of the watersheds in the life of contemporary Communism. For the first time, a high-ranking Communist leader had officially acknowledged, albeit only as a tactical concession, that the regime that assumed power in 1917 had undergone a criminal “deviation.”
Khrushchev’s motivations for breaking one of the great taboos of the Soviet regime were numerous. Khrushchev’s primary aim was to attribute the crimes of Communism only to Stalin, thus circumscribing the evil, and to eradicate it once and for all in an effort to salvage the Communist regime. A determination to carry out an attack on Stalin’s clique, which stood in the way of Khrushchev’s power and believed in the methods practiced by their former boss, entered equally into his decision. Beginning in June 1957, these men were systematically removed from office. However, for the first time since 1934, the act of “being put to death politically” was not followed by an actual death, and this telling detail itself illustrates that Khrushchev’s motives were more complex. Having been the boss of Ukraine for years and, in this capacity, having carried out and covered up the slaughter of innocent civilians on a massive scale, he may have grown weary of all this bloodshed. In his memoirs, in which he was naturally concerned with portraying himself in a flattering light, Khrushchev recalled his feelings: “The Congress will end, and resolutions will be passed, all as a matter of form. But then what? The hundreds and thousands of people who were shot will stay on our consciences.” As a result, he severely reprimanded his colleagues:
What are we going to do about all those who were arrested and eliminated?… We now know that the people who suffered during the repressions were innocent. We have indisputable proof that, far from being enemies of the people, they were honest men and women, devoted to the Party, dedicated to the Revolution, and committed to the Leninist cause and to the building of Socialism and Communism in the Soviet Union.… I still think it’s impossible to cover evervthing up. Sooner or later people will be coming out of the prisons and the camps, and they’ll return to the cities. They’ll tell their relatives, friends, and comrades, and everyone back home what happened … we’re obliged to speak candidly to the delegates about the conduct of the Party leadership during the years in question.… How can we pretend not to know what happened? We know there was a reign of repression and arbitrary rule in the Party, and we must tell the Congress what we know.… In the life of anyone who has committed a crime, there comes a moment when a confession will assure him leniency if not exculpation.[27]
Among some of the men who had had a hand in the crimes perpetrated under Stalin and who generally owed their promotions to the extermination of their predecessors in office, a certain kind of remorse took hold—a lukewarm remorse, a self-interested remorse, the remorse of a politician, but remorse nonetheless. It was necessary for someone to put a stop to the slaughter. Khrushchev had the courage to do this even if, in 1956, he sent Soviet tanks into Budapest.
In 1961, during the Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev recalled not only the victims who were Communists but all of Stalin’s victims and even proposed that a monument be erected in their memory. At this point Khrushchev may have overstepped the invisible boundary beyond which the very raison d’être of Communism was being challenged—namely, the absolute monopoly on power reserved for the Communist Party. The monument never saw the light of day. In 1962 the first secretary authorized the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. On 24 October 1964 Khrushchev was stripped of his powers, but his life was spared, and he died in obscurity in 1971.
There is a substantial degree of scholarly consensus regarding the importance of the “Secret Speech,” which represented a fundamental break in Communism’s twentieth-century trajectory. François Furet, on the verge of quitting the French Communist Parry in 1954, wrote these words on the subject:
Now all of a sudden the “Secret Speech” of February 1956 had single- handedly shattered the Communist idea then prevailing around the world. The voice that denounced Stalin’s crimes did not come from the West but from Moscow, and from the “holy of holies” in Moscow, the Kremlin. It was not the voice of a Communist who had been ostracized but the voice of the leading Communist in the world, the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Thus, instead of being tainted by the suspicion that was invariably leveled at accusations made by ex-Communists, Khrushchev’s remarks gained the luster that reflected glory upon its leader.… The extraordinary power of the “Secret Speech” on the mind stemmed from the fact that it did not have any opponents.[28]
This event was especially paradoxical inasmuch as a number of contemporaries had long warned the Bolsheviks about the inherent dangers of this course of action. From 1917 to 1918 disgruntlement arose even within the socialist movement itself, including among believers in the “great light from the East,” who were suddenly relentless in their criticism of the Bolsheviks. Essentially the dispute centered upon the methods used by Lenin: violence, crime, and terror. From the 1920s to the 1950s, while the dark side of Bolshevism was being exposed by a number of witnesses, victims, and skilled observers (as well as in countless articles and other publications), people had to bide their time until the Communist rulers would recognize this themselves. Alas, the significance of this undoubtedly important development was misinterpreted by the growing body of public opinion as a recognition of the errors of Communism. This was indeed a misinterpretation, since the “Secret Speech” tackled only the question of Communists as victims; but at least this was a step in the right direction. It was the first confirmation of the testimony by witnesses and of previous studies, and it corroborated long-standing suspicions that Communism was responsible for creating a colossal tragedy in Russia.
The leaders of many “fraternal parties” were initially unconvinced of the need to jump on Khrushchev’s bandwagon. After some delay, a few leaders in other countries did follow Khrushchev’s lead in exposing these atrocities. However, it was not until 1979 that the Chinese Communist Party divided Mao’s policies between “great merits,” which lasted until 1957, and “great errors,” which came afterward. The Vietnamese contented themselves with oblique references to the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot. As for Castro, the atrocities committed under him have been denied.
Before Khrushchev’s speech, denunciation of crimes committed by Communists came only from their enemies or from Trotskyite dissidents or anarchists; and such denunciations had not been especially effective. The desire to bear witness was as strong among the survivors of Communist massacres as it had been among those who survived the Nazi slaughters. However, the survivors were few and far between, especially in France, where tangible experience of the Soviet concentration-camp system had directly affected only a few isolated groups, such as “In Spite of Ourselves,” from Alsace-Lorraine.[29] Most of the time, however, the witness statements and the work carried out by independent commissions, such as David Rousset’s International Commission on the Concentration Camp System and the Commission to Find the Truth about Stalin’s Crimes, have been buried beneath an avalanche of Communist propaganda, aided and abetted by a silence born of cowardliness or indifference. This silence generally managed to win out over the sporadic moments of self-awareness resulting from the appearance of a new analytical work (such as Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago) or an irreproachable eyewitness account (such as Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and Pin Yathay’s Stay Alive, My Son).[30]Regrettably, it was most tenacious in Western societies whenever the phenomenon of Communism came under the microscope. Until now they have refused to face the reality that the Communist system, albeit in varying degrees, possessed fundamentally criminal underpinnings. By refusing to acknowledge this, they were co-conspirators in “the lie,” as perhaps best summed up by Friedrich Nietzsche: “Men believe in the truth of anything so long as they see that others strongly believe it is true.”
Despite widespread reluctance to confront the issue, a number of observers have risen to the challenge. From the 1920s to the 1950s, for want of more reliable data (which were assiduously concealed by the Soviet regime) researchers were wholly reliant on information provided by defectors. Not only were these eyewitness accounts subject to the normal skepticism with which historians treat such testimony; they were also systematically discredited by sympathizers of the Communist system, who accused the defectors of being motivated by vengeance or of being the tools of anti-Communist powers. Who would have thought, in 1959, that a description of the Gulag could be provided by a high-ranking KGB defector, as in the book by Paul Barton?[31] And who would have thought of consulting Barton himself, an exile from Czechoslovakia whose real name was Jiří Veltrušký, who was one of the organizers of the anti-Nazi insurrections in Prague in 1945 and who was forced to flee his country in 1948? Yet anyone who confronts the information held in recently opened classified archives will find that the accounts provided in 1959 were totally accurate.
In the 1960s and 1980s, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and later the “Red Wheel” cycle on the Russian Revolution produced a quantum shift in public opinion. Precisely because it was literature, and from a master craftsman, The Gulag Archipelago captured the true nature of an unspeakable system. However, even Solzhenitsyn had trouble piercing the veil. In 1975 one journalist from a major French daily compared Solzhenitsyn to Pierre Laval, Jacques Doriot, and Marcel Déat, “who welcomed the Nazis as liberators.”[32]Nonetheless, his account was instrumental in exposing the system in much the same way that Shalamov brought Kolyma to life and Pin Yathay laid bare the atrocities in Cambodia. More recently still, Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the leading Soviet dissidents under Leonid Brezhnev, cried out in protest in Reckoning with Moscow, demanding the establishment of a new Nuremberg Tribunal to judge the criminal activities of the Communist regime. His book enjoyed considerable success in the West. At the same time, however, publications rehabilitating Stalin began to appear.[33]
***
At the end of the twentieth century, what motivation impels us to explore an issue so mired in tragedy, confusion, and controversy? Today, archives confirm these sporadic accounts of yesteryear, but they also allow us to go a step further. The internal archives maintained by the repressive apparatuses of the former Soviet Union, of the former “people’s democracies,” and of Cambodia bring to light the ghastly truth of the massive and systematic nature of the terror, which all too often resulted in full-scale crimes against humanity. The time has come to take a scholarly approach to this subject by documenting hard facts and by illuminating the political and ideological issues that obscure the matter at hand, the key issue that all these observers have raised: What is the true significance of crime in the Communist system?
From this perspective, what scholarly support can we count on? In the first place, our methods reflect our sense of duty to history. A good historian leaves no stone unturned. No other factors or considerations, be they political, ideological, or personal, should hinder the historian from engaging in the quest for knowledge, the unearthing and interpretation of facts, especially when these facts have been long and deliberately buried in the immense recesses of government archives and the conscience of the people. This history of Communist terror is one of the major chapters in the history of Europe and is directly linked to the two goals of the study of historical writing on totalitarianism. After all, we all know about the Hitlerian brand of totalitarianism; but we must not forget that there was also a Leninist and Stalinist version. It is no longer good enough to write partial histories that ignore the Communist brand of totalitarianism. It is untenable to draw a veil over the issue to ensure that the history of Communism is narrowed to its national, social, and cultural dimensions. The justice of this argument is amply confirmed by the fact that the phenomenon of totalitarianism was not limited to Europe and the Soviet period. The same applies to Maoist China, North Korea, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Each national Communism has been linked by an umbilical cord to the Soviet womb, with its goal of expanding the worldwide movement. The history with which wre are dealing is the history of a phenomenon that has spread throughout the world and that concerns all of humanity.
The second purpose of this book is to serve as a memorial. There is a moral obligation to honor the memory of the innocent and anonymous victims of a juggernaut that has systematically sought to erase even their memory. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism’s center of power in Moscow, Europe, the continent that played host to the twentieth century’s many tragedies, has set itself the task of reconstructing popular memory. This book is our contribution to that effort. The authors of this hook carry that memory within themselves. Two of our contributors have a particular attachment to Central Europe, while the others are connected by firsthand experience with the theory and practice of revolution in 1968 or more recently.
This book, as both memorial and history, covers very diverse settings. It touches on countries in which Communism had almost no practical influence, either on society or on government power—Great Britain, Australia, Belgium, and others. Elsewhere Communism would show up as a powerful source of fear—in the United States after 1946—or as a strong movement (even if it never actually seized power there), as in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal. In still other countries, where it had lost its decades-long grip on power, Communism is again reasserting itself—in Eastern Europe and Russia. Finally, its small flame is wavering in countries in which Communism still formally prevails—China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam.
Others may have different perspectives on the issues of history and memory. In countries in which Communism had little influence or was merely dreaded, these issues will require a simple course of study and understanding. The countries that actually experienced the Communist system will have to address the issue of national reconciliation and decide whether the former Communist rulers are to be punished. In this connection, the reunified Germany may represent the most surprising and “miraculous” example—one need only think of the Yugoslav disaster by way of contrast. However, the former Czechoslovakia—now the Czech Republic and Slovakia—Poland, and Cambodia alike confront considerable trauma and suffering in their memory and history of Communism. In such places a modicum of amnesia, whether conscious or unconscious, may seem indispensable in helping to heal the spiritual, mental, emotional, personal, and collective wounds inflicted by a half-century or more of Communism. Where Communism still clings to power, the tyrants and their successors have either systematically covered up their actions, as in Cuba and China, or have continued to promote terror as a form of government, as in North Korea.
The responsibility for preserving history and memory undoubtedly has a moral dimension. Those whom we condemn may respond, “Who has given you the authority to say what is Good and what is Bad?”
According to the criteria proposed here, this issue was addressed well by the Catholic Church when Pope Pius XI condemned Nazism and Communism respectively in the encyclicals Mit Brennender Sorge of 14 March 1937 and Divini redemptoris of 19 March 1937. The latter proclaimed that God endowed humanity with certain rights, “the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to the necessary means of existence; the right to pursue one’s ultimate goal in the path marked out for him by God; the right of association, and the right to possess and use property.” Even though there is a certain hypocrisy in the church’s pronouncement against the excessive enrichment of one class of people at the expense of others, the importance of the pope’s appeal for the respect of human dignity is beyond question.
As early as 1931, Pius XI had proclaimed in the encyclical Quadragesimo anno: “Communism teaches and seeks two objectives: unrelenting class warfare and the complete eradication of private ownership. Not secretly or by hidden methods does it do this, but publicly, openly, and by employing any means possible, even the most violent. To achieve these objectives there is nothing it is afraid to do, nothing for which it has respect or reverence. When it comes to power, it is ferocious in its cruelty and inhumanity. The horrible slaughter and destruction through which it has laid waste to vast regions of Eastern Europe and Asia give evidence of this.” Admittedly, these words originated from an institution that for several centuries had systematically justified the murder of non-Christians, spread the Inquisition, stilled freedom of thought, and supported dictatorial regimes such as those of General Francisco Franco and António Salazar.
However, even if the church was functioning in its capacity as a guardian of morality, how is a historian to respond when confronted by a “heroic” saga of Communist partisans or by a heartbreaking account from their victims? In his Memoirs François-René de Chateaubriand wrote: “When in the silence of abjection, no sound can be heard save that of the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; when all tremble before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to merit his displeasure, the historian appears, entrusted with the vengeance of the people. Nero prospers in vain, for Tacitus has already been born within the Empire.”[34] Far be it from us to advocate the cryptic concept of the “vengeance of the people.” Chateaubriand no longer believed in this idea by the end of his life. However, at some modest level and almost despite himself, the historian can speak on behalf of those who have had their voices silenced as a result of terror. The historian is there to produce works of scholarship, and his first task is to establish the facts and data that will then become knowledge. Moreover, the historian’s relationship to the history of Communism is an unusual one: Historians are obligated to chronicle the historiography of “the lie.” And even if the opening of archives has provided them with access to essential materials, historians must guard against naïveté in the face of a number of complicated factors that are deviously calculated to stir up controversy. Nonetheless, this kind of historical knowledge cannot be seen in isolation from certain fundamental principles, such as respect for the rules of a representative democracy and, above all, respect for life and human dignity. This is the yardstick that historians use to “judge” the actors on the stage of history.
For these general reasons, no work of history or human memory can remain untouched by personal motives. Some of the contributors to this book were not always strangers to the fascinations of Communism. Sometimes they themselves took part (even if only on a modest scale) in the Communist system, either in the orthodox Leninist-Stalinist school or in its related or dissident varieties (Trotskyite, Maoist). And if they still remain closely wedded to the left—or, rather, precisely because they are still wedded to the left—it is necessary to take a closer look at the reasons for their self-deception. This mindset has led them down a certain intellectual pathway, characterized by the choice of topics they study, by their scholarly publications, and by the journals (such as La nouvelle alternativeand Communisme) in which they publish. This book can do no more than provide an impetus for this particular type of reassessment. If these leftists pursue the task conscientiously, they will show that they too have a right to be heard on this issue, rather than leaving it to the increasingly influential extreme right wing. The crimes of Communism need to be judged from the standpoint of democratic values, not from the standpoint of ultranationalist or fascist philosophies.
This approach calls for cross-country analysis, including comparisons of China and the U.S.S.R., Cuba and Vietnam, and others. Alas, the documents currently available are decidedly mixed in quantity and quality; in some cases the archives have not yet been opened. However, we felt that we should carry on regardless, confining ourselves to facts that are crystal-clear and beyond question. We want this book to be a groundbreaking work that will lay a broad foundation for further study and thought by others.
This book contains many words but few pictures. The dearth of pictures is one of the more delicate issues involved in the cover-up of Communist crimes. In a media-saturated global society, the photographed or televised image has become the fount of “truth.” Alas, we have only a handful of rare archival photographs of the Gulag and the laogai. There are no photographs of dekulakization or of the famine during the Great Leap Forward. The victorious powers at Nuremberg could at least photograph and film the thousands of bodies found at Bergen-Belsen. Those investigators also found photographs that had been taken by the tyrants themselves—for example, the picture of a Nazi shooting point blank at a woman with an infant in her arms. No such parallels existed in the darkness of the Communist world, where terror had been organized in strictest secrecy.
Readers may feel less than satisfied with the few photographic documents assembled here. They will need time to read, page after page, about the ordeal to which millions of people were subjected. They will have to make an effort to imagine the scale of the tragedy and to realize and appreciate how it will leave its mark on the history of the world for decades to come. Then readers must ask themselves the essential question, “Why?” Why did Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and others believe it necessary to exterminate all those whom they had branded as “enemies”? What made them imagine they could violate one of the basic tenets of civilization, “Thou shall not kill”? We will try, through this book, to answer that question.
footnotes
[1] Raymond Queneau, Une histoire modèle (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 9.
[2] Quoted in Kostas Papaionannou, Marx et les marxistes, rev. ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1972).
[3] André Frossard, Le crime contre l’humanité (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987).
[4] Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 247.
[5] Quoted in Jacques Baynac, La terreur sous Lénine (Paris: Le Sagittaire, 1975), p. 75.
[6] Gracchus Babeuf, La guerre de Vendée et le système de dépopulation (Paris: Tallandier, 1987).
[7] Jean-Pierre Azema, “Auschwitz,” in J.-P. Azema and F. Bédarida, Dictionnaire des années de tourmente(Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 777.
[8] Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Réflexions sur le génocide (Paris: La Découverte, 1995), p. 268. Moreover, Vidal-Naquet wrote, “There has been discussion of Katyń and the massacre in 1940 of Polish officers who were held as prisoners by the Soviets. Katyń dovetails perfectly with the definition of Nuremberg.”
[9] Denis Szabo and Alain Joffé, “La répression des crimes contre l’humanité et des crimes de guerre au Canada,” in Marcel Colin, Le crime contre l’humanité (Paris: Erès, 1996), p. 655.
[10] See the analysis by Jean-Noël Darde, Le ministère de la vérité : Histoire d’un génocide dans le journal(Paris: L’Humanité, Le Seuil, 1984).
[11] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
[12] Louis Aragon, Prélude au temps des cerises (Paris: Minuit, 1944).
[13] Quoted in Joseph Berger, Shipwreck of a Generation: The Memoirs of Joseph Berger (London: Harvill Press, 1971), p. 247.
[15] Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 4.
[16] Tzvetan Todorov, L’homme dépaysé (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), p. 36.
[17] Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hess, trans. Constantine FitzGibbon (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1959), p. 180.
[18] Grossman, Forever Flowing, pp. 142, 144, and 155.
[19] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction oj the European Jews, rev. ed. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967).
[20] Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 345–348.
[21] Grossman, Forever Flowing.
[22] Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties toward Mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), p. 125.
[23] Tzvetan Todorov, “La morale de l’historien,” paper presented at the colloquium “L’homme, la langue, les camps,” Paris IV-Sorbonne, May 1997, p. 13.
[24] See Pierre Nora, “Gaullistes et Communistes,” in Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
[25] Witold Gombrowicz, Testament: Entretiens avec Dominique de Roux (Paris: Folio, 1996), p. 109.
[26] See Piotr Pigorov, J’ai quitté ma patrie (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1952); or Michel Koryakoff, Je me mets hors la loi (Paris: Editions du Monde Nouveau, 1947).
[27] Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 347–349.
[28] François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 501.
[29] See Pierre Rigolout, Les Français au goulag (Paris: Fayard, 1984); and esp. Jacques Rossi, Le Goulag de A à Z (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1997).
[30] Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980); Pin Yathay with John Man, Stay Alive, My Son (London: Bloomsbury, 1987).
[31] Paul Barton (pseud.), L’institution concentrationnaire en Russie, 1930–1957 (Paris: Plon, 1959).
[32] Bernard Chapuis, Le monde, 3 July 1975.
[33] See, e.g., Ludo Martens, Un autre regard sur Staline (Paris: EPO, 1994); and, in a less fawning style, Lilly Marcou, Staline, vie privée (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1996).
[34] François-René Chateaubriand, Memoirs of Chateaubriand, trans. and ed. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 218.
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