The Arithmetic of Atrocity

National Interest, The, Winter, 1999 by Peter Rutland

Treating communism as an absolute evil leads to an ahistorical approach in which complicating and contextual factors are downplayed. Differences between countries are not systematically addressed; rather, the assumption is that the countries are variations on a single theme. Perhaps it was not accidental that Stalinism happened in Russia?

One should note that many of the authors try to break out of the book's framework and stress culture-specific factors. Margolin stresses that communism in Asia is a "national affair", differing from country to country. Ideology played a pivotal role in the Maoist system, which stemmed in part from China's Confucian tradition. Cambodia, where communism turned into genocide, was not touched by Confucianism, although Pal Pot did take from China the idea of a Great Leap Forward, with murderous results.

How Good a Documentary Record?

IF THE BLACK BOOK does not break new ground in explaining the phenomenon of communism, then its main value should be as a documentary record. Regrettably, there are some lapses from scholarly propriety that inhibit its contribution.

Scattered through the Soviet chapters are fascinating new documents from the archives, such as the correspondence between Stalin and Mikhail Sholokhov about the torture of peasants during collectivization; a 1937 note from Ezhov ordering the liquidation of Polish communists; a letter from Beria to Stalin, in which he reports ordering 25,700 Polish officers killed in 1940; and a 1941 Gulag commandant report. Strangely, no citation is given for the source of these documents. There is no reason to believe that they are fake, but it would have been nice to know where they came from.

The use of sources is erratic. While some authors provide scrupulous documentation, others litter the text with figures and quotations seemingly plucked from thin air. Thus, for example, we learn that 70 percent of respondents in the 1937 Soviet census said they believed in God; or that there were 2,044 Soviet military advisers in Spain "according to one Soviet source"--but no source is assigned in either case. A whole paragraph of data is presented without sources on postwar expulsions of Greeks. Chapter one has no footnotes at all. Estimates for deaths in Chinese purges are said to range from 81,000 to 770,000 in 1954 and from 400,000 to 700,000 in 1957--again without any citations provided.

Inevitably, some important atrocities are left out. There is a cryptic sentence on page 323: "This survey would not be complete without mention of the 900,000 Japanese soldiers taken prisoner in Manchuria" (in 1945). But that is all the reader will learn of their fate. The deportation of 400,000 Japanese civilians from Sakhalin, which also took place in 1945, is not mentioned. Surely if a shootout in the Norwegian communist offices in 1949 rates a paragraph, one could give a couple of sentences to 1.3 million Japanese? The Soviet takeover of Mongolia and the systematic destruction of its culture is not included, nor is the devastating effect of the purges on the Kazakhs. Kazakh intellectuals claim Stalin killed one-third of the Kazakh population, a level of suffering close to that of the Tibetans. The Black Book merely mentions that some Kazakhs fled to China. The Kuropaty graves, where thousands of slain Belarusians were buried, are not discussed. They are significant because they were the first mass graves uncovered in the Gorbachev era.