-Caveat Lector-
The Wall Street Journal
October 25, 1999
Bookshelf
The Gruesome Consequences Of a Political Idea
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
The history of communism has not just been about terror, torture,
deportations and massacres. It has also been about the illusions of
Western intellectuals. Whether it is Günter Grass receiving the Nobel
Prize partly for his novelistic effusions about the coziness of East
Germany or revisionist historians playing down Stalin's
culpability for the great purges, communism has enjoyed, and continues
to enjoy, a reputation as an ideology that supposedly pursued lofty
humanitarian ends, even if it went astray at times. Indeed, the big
intellectual no-no has been to liken it to the other great totalitarian
movement of the 20th century -- Nazism.
So when "The Black Book of Communism" appeared in Europe in 1997
detailing communism's crimes, it created a furor. Scrupulously
documented and soberly written by several historians, it is a masterful
work. It is, in fact, a reckoning. With this translation by Jonathan
Murphy and Mark Kramer, English-language readers may now see for
themselves what all the commotion was about.
In his introduction, Stéphane Courtois, himself a former communist,
breaks with the postwar taboo on comparing the Gulag with the Holocaust.
He notes that the communist body count of more than 100 million exceeds
that of the Nazis. He compares the "class genocide" of communism with
the "race genocide" of Nazism and states that both were "crimes against
humanity."
So controversial was this comparison that two of Mr. Courtois's
editor-collaborators -- Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin -- later
distanced themselves from what he wrote. And predictably, the French
left lashed itself into a frenzy, denouncing the book's contributors for
traducing the noble communist fight against fascism.
In Germany, by contrast, Mr. Courtois's views met with a somewhat less
chilly reception. A decade before a bitter historians' dispute had
erupted when leftist intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas accused
conservative historians of attempting to whitewash the Nazi past by
playing up communist atrocities, which some, not all, were indeed trying
to do. But this didn't justify the left's refusal to confront the
horrors of communism.
Eventually, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the revelation of
communist abuses in East Germany helped to overturn old dogmas, and "The
Black Book" prompted many Germans to take another look at the
relationship between communism and Nazism.
That relationship may never be fully understood. But the Russian Red
Terror, in its emphasis on the elimination of entire classes of peoples,
in its description of opponents as "vermin" to be exterminated, does
seem like a precursor of the German concentration camps. Moreover,
Nazism profited greatly not only from
Lenin's and Stalin's Gulag system -- Rudolf Hoess, commandant of
Auschwitz, solicited reports about the operations of Soviet camps -- but
also from Bolshevism itself, which served as both a whipping boy and, at
times, a political idea that could be collaborated with. The two
ideologies validated each other.
After World War II, the prestige of the Soviet Union was at its height.
The country had fought on the side of the democracies, U.S. war
propaganda had painted pipe-smoking "Uncle Joe Stalin" as a friendly
fellow. In Europe, communists made a comeback in France, Italy and
Germany with the flowering of the myth that
communists were merely heroic anti-fascist freedom fighters. Thus the
gruesome Soviet record was suppressed.
"That the Soviet Union had paid the heaviest human toll for its victory
over Nazism," writes Mr. Werth, "served to mask the character of the
Stalinist dictatorship." In fact, "the Soviet prisons had never held as
many prisoners as they did in the year of victory: a grand total of
nearly 5.5 million people."
Mr. Werth astutely notes that the Gulag was filled with "criminals"
because almost any action, however innocuous, could be branded as
illegal dissent. The Gulag,you might say, was the distilled essence of
the Soviet Union. Once Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes, the Soviet
Union began to unravel, however slowly,
having lost its reason for being.
After the halo wore off the Soviet Union, China emerged as a new beacon
for credulous Westerners. Mr. Margolin writes that "one myth was common
in the West:the idea that China was far from being a model democracy,
but that at least Mao had managed to give a bowl of rice to every
Chinese person." In fact, nothing was
further than the truth. Mao, like Stalin, deliberately engineered a
famine that killed untold millions.
Today the hermit kingdom of North Korea is, by all accounts, continuing
this tradition by systematically starving much of its population. Pierre
Rigoulot estimates in "The Black Book" that the regime has already
killed 500,000 people through malnutrition. Over the past 50 years, he
concludes, North Korea's Communist Party has wiped out three million
people in a country of 23 million. The more we learn about communism,
the worse it appears.
Still, communism remains in better odor than Nazism. Martin Malia, in
his fine foreword to this edition of "The Black Book," observes that,
whereas Nazism was defeated at the height of its evil, "by the time of
communism's fall the liberal world had had fifty years to settle into a
double standard regarding its two late
adversaries." Indeed, almost no communist officials have been put on
trial and communist parties have become reborn under new names in
Poland, the former East Germany and other countries. Yet when Jörg
Haider, the far-right leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, comes in
second in national elections, as he did a few
weeks ago, the Western media sound the alarm.
Is this a double-standard? Or was there something uniquely odious about
Nazism that justifies the different response? This work is surely not
the last word on the subject, but it superbly illuminates the shocking
record of communist regimes and their Western votaries.
Mr. Heilbrunn is a senior editor of The New Republic.
URL for this Article:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB940813743253040784.djm
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