The Arithmetic of Atrocity

National Interest, The, Winter, 1999 by Peter Rutland

Stephane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1120 pp., $37.50.

TWO YEARS AGO a group of French intellectuals published The Black Book of Communism, an 860-page indictment of the bloody swathe that communism cut across the twentieth century. The book, timed to coincide with the eightieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, sold 150,000 copies and produced a storm of controversy, whose waves reached the shores of Cambridge and Manhattan.

Editor Stephane Courtois argued in his introduction that there was a moral equivalence between Stalinism and Nazism, that Stalin's "class genocide" paralleled Hitler's destruction of the Jews. Indeed, communism was even worse, because it lasted longer, spread to more countries, and thus killed more people: nearly 100 million, versus 25 million for the Nazis.

The Black Book is now available in English from Harvard University Press. Books about communism and atrocities sell well: they are the thinking person's equivalent of the horror movie. But the book's impact in the United States is likely to be more muted than in France. The political context of anti-communism in the two countries is radically different; and the scholarly merits of the book, while significant, do not substantially add to the picture presented in the earlier works of Robert Conquest and others.

In France there are still plenty of people willing to believe that communism has some redeeming features. At the time of the book's publication there were three communist ministers in the French government, and some of the book's eleven authors were themselves recovering Maoists and Trotskyites. The Russian Revolution was modeled after its French predecessor, after all; and French society had signally failed to deal with the Vichy regime's collaboration with the Nazis. This meant that French Leftists were willing to turn a blind eye to communism's failings. Things only started to change with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in the mid-1970s, and with the contemporaneous news of the Cambodian genocide.

In contrast, since the 1940s communist ideas have made minimal inroads into American society, even among American intellectuals. Indeed, what French intellectuals were shocked to discover in the 1980s (that communism was bad news) had long been conventional wisdom for ordinary Americans--for anyone who subscribed to Reader's Digest or read George Orwell's 1984 in high school. That did not stop most American reviewers of the French edition of The Black Book from praising it for its willingness to confront the legacy of Stalinism.

Grappling With the Beast

THE BLACK ROOK sets out to provide a comprehensive and definitive account of communism's "crimes, terror and repression" worldwide, drawing upon the latest available archival materials and secondary research. It also seeks to furnish an explanation for why and how these crimes occurred. Unfortunately, due to unevenness in the quality of the written chapters, the book does not quite deliver on either of these two goals. It is more successful with respect to the first (description) than the second (explanation).

The geographical sweep of the book is impressive, encompassing not only Russia and Eastern Europe, China and Cambodia, but also the minor-league players and wannabes: from Afghanistan, North Korea and Cuba down to Peru's Sendero Luminoso and even Carlos the Jackal. Unfortunately, in practice the book's coverage is rather lopsided.

The first third is rightly devoted to the mother ship of communism, the Soviet Union. However, author Nicholas Werth devotes 220 pages to a detailed historical study of the first 35 years of Soviet power, leaving only 10 pages for the next 40 years. Certainly it is important to document the years of high Stalinism, and to show that repression began as soon as Lenin took power. But surely any catalogue of communism should include a thorough account of the stultifying decades of the Soviet Union after 1953: the persecution of dissidents; the oppression of workers (such as the shooting of dozens of protestors in the city of Novocherkassk in June 1962, which is not mentioned); and the reckless and near-suicidal nuclear arms race with the West.

Also excluded from Werth's analysis is the Soviet collapse, a regrettable omission. Gorbachev's efforts to confront the Stalinist legacy led to the speedy demise of all the communist states in Europe, including the break-up of the Soviet state itself. But the repression continued, on a lower scale, even during the Gorbachev years. One can learn a great deal about how an organism worked by studying how it died. The ability of the Russian state to escape its Stalinist past is still an open and urgent question (especially now, with bombs once more falling on Chechnya).

In contrast to Werth, the other chapters take history right up to the present. Karel Bartosek contributes a brilliant chapter in which the entire sweep of communist rule in Eastern and Central Europe and the Balkans is surveyed in a mere sixty pages. He covers the Stalinist terror, the long decades of "normalization", and the final collapse. Provocatively, he suggests that the purges of the early 1950s may in part have been intended to prepare for an all-out war with the West. Poland gets a whole chapter to itself, a fine dissection of the mechanics of repression by Andrzej Paczkowski. Curiously, East Germany is ignored, and that most striking icon of the evil of communism, the Berlin Wall, is mentioned in only two sentences. (A special chapter on East Germany was added for the German edition.) A whole sixty-page chapter is devoted to the machinations of the Comintern, and another to the Spanish Civil War. The sacrifice of international socialism on the altar of Soviet national interests is not news, nor was it particularly evil. (Would it have been better if Stalin had been a true internationalist?) The most damaging action of the Comintern--its refusal to work with the socialists to block Hitler's rise--is discussed in a single paragraph.