One of the most important moments for the reevaluation of the role played by Communism (as both an ideology and a regime type) was the publication of The Black Book of Communism and the subsequent debates (in France, Germany, the United States, and so on) generated by this volume and its theses both in the public sphere and among academics. The book initially came out to an enormous success in France, where it sold over 200,000 copies. Its Italian and German translations also became best sellers. The publication of the book in East-Central Europe led to endless polemics and discussions regarding the responsibility for, complicity with, and consequences of Communist crimes. What The Black Book of Communism succeeded in demonstrating is that Communism in its Leninist version (and, one must recognize, this has been the only successful application of the original dogma) was from the outset inimical to individual rights and human freedom. As Martin Malia stated in the foreword to the American edition: “The communist regimes did not just commit criminal acts (all states do on occasion); they were criminal enterprises in their very essence: on principle, so to speak, they all ruled lawlessly, by violence, and without regard for human life.”53 In spite of its overblown rhetoric about emancipation from oppression and necessity, the leap into the kingdom of freedom announced by the founding fathers turned out to be an experiment in ideologically driven, unbounded social engineering.54 The very idea of an independent judiciary was rejected as “rotten liberalism.” The party defined what was legal and what was not: as in Hitler's Germany, where the heinous 1935 Nuremberg Laws were a legal fiction dictated by Nazi racial obsessions, Bolshevism from the outset subordinated justice to party interests. For Lenin, the dictatorship of the proletariat was rule by force and unrestricted by any law. His famous reply to Kautsky speaks volumes about the true ethos of his ideology: “The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained through the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.”55
The class enemy had to be weeded out and destroyed without any mercy. Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin's hysterical prosecutor in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s, carried this macabre logic to its ultimate consequences when he made the defendants’ confessions the main argument for sentencing them to death. In other words, the presumption of innocence was replaced by a universalized presumption of guilt. As for the rhetoric of hatred, comparable to Goebbels's most insanely inflammatory speeches, this passage is worth quoting:
Shoot these rabid dogs! Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism! Let's put these liars out of harm's way, these miserable pygmies who dare to dance around rotting carcasses! Down with these abject animals! Let us put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let their horrible squeals finally come to an end! Let's exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation! Let's push the bestial hatred they bear to our leaders back down their throats!56
Both totalitarianisms “believed in the ubiquity of maleficent adversaries.” Both defined their enemies on the basis of their potential for blocking the realization of the perfect community. Their obsession with eliminating all “objective enemies” on the road to the promised land led first to the replacement of “the suspected offense by the possible crime” (Hannah Arendt), and then to an all-out fixation on universal conspiracies.57
Utopian ideals were used to legitimize the worst abuses against “objective” enemies, defined only in connection with the interests of a self-appointed revolutionary vanguard and the leader's fixations. In Nazi Germany, Hitler's Aryan-centered cosmology hyperbolized the imaginary Jew as simultaneously the organizer of market exploitation and the fomenter of Marxist attempts to overthrow it.58 The mythology of the Judeo-Bolshevik and Judeo-plutocratic plot thrived in the anti-Semitic visions of the East and Central European Far Right (later to reemerge in post-World War II Stalinist anti-Semitism).59 Paranoia regarding infiltrations, subversion, and treason have been enduring features of all Communist political cultures, from Russia and China to Romania and Yugoslavia. Leninist parties officially playing the democratic parliamentary game (in France and Italy after World War II) were no less intolerant of deviation from the orthodox line than similar formations in power (with the difference that they could not physically liquidate alleged spies and agents). Lenin once famously declared that “an organization of real revolutionaries will stop at nothing to rid itself of an unworthy member.”60
Perhaps the best book to read for understanding the nature and meaning of Leninism remains Dostoyevsky's novel Demons. The great Russian writer and political-religious thinker grasped the ominous consequences of nihilistic, extremist revolutionary actions undertaken by ecstatic apostles of universal liberation.61 Indeed, the chapter on Russia in The Black Book as well as Martin Malia's foreword show how Bolshevism had deep roots in the culture of apocalyptical extremism of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. Its morality was embodied only in the “solid, united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters” (Lenin). There is only a small step from such destructive dedication to criminal single-mindedness. In August 1919, the organ of the Cheka, Krasnyi Metch, provided a vision of red horizons for humanity under the impact of the Great October Revolution: “For us everything is permitted, for we are the first in the world to wield the sword not to oppress and enslave, but to liberate mankind from its chains…. Blood? Let blood flow!”62 This is the very essence of Leninism as a totalitarian movement: the conviction that it was building a new civilization, that it was the repository for the discrimination between good and evil, the interpreter of a new truth.63
There was no spectacular revelation in The Black Book: after all, whatever has emerged from the secret archives of the former Soviet bloc countries is just a confirmation of the long-held view that Communists everywhere engaged in revolutionary civil war to accomplish the total transformation of man, economy, society, and culture. What was original was the comprehensive and systematic analysis and interpretation of the crimes and repressions associated with Leninist practices in the twentieth century. I commend the nuanced analyses of differences between stages and countries: Poland and Hungary, especially after Stalin's death, were not exactly totalitarian. After all, the Hungarian revolution was initiated by a group of anti-Stalinist reform Communists. There should have been deeper analysis of the Leninist experience in East Germany, including a discussion of currently available data concerning the infamous Stasi universe of fear and intimidation. As a whole, however, the fundamental merit of the Black Book of Communism, which set the tone for future discussion, was its endeavor to restore the public memory of Communism's crimes and to oppose revisionist efforts aimed at excusing the Communist vision, if not the practices. The volume showed that, as Michael Scammell excellently pointed out, “what matters is that we understand the entirety of this century's terrible history…. As a civilization we are obliged to come to terms with that truth [Communism's criminality], and admit our share of culpability, and draw correct conclusions.”64
The authors of the Black Book succeeded in assembling enough information to construct a big picture that maybe for the first time made an undeniable case that the scale of the crimes against humanity committed by Communist regimes do matter. Despite arguments to the contrary, Communism should not and cannot be studied just like other important events in world history.65 What is unfortunate, and some of Courtois’ controversial introductory statements can be explained on this basis, is that it took too long to learn that “in the sorry story of our century, Communism and Nazism are, and always were, morally indistinguishable.” Indeed, as Tony Judt states, this rather belatedly consensual epiphany “justifies a complete recasting and rewriting of the history of our times.”66
The book came out in France in 1997 and generated tremendous polemics, especially in such publications as Le Monde, Le Débat, and Commentaire. It was published at a time when the French intelligentsia had passionately discussed the mystifying appeals of Communism, as explored by the late François Furet in his masterful Le passé d'une illusion. Statements that were considered acceptable coming from Furet, one of the most respected and highly influential French historians, sounded outrageous to many former leftist intellectuals when presented in a very provocative formulation by the editor of the Black Book, Stéphane Courtois, in his introduction. Initially, the introduction was to be written by Furet himself, but when he passed away, Courtois, the editor of the journal Communisme, wrote a text that managed to irritate many French historians, political scientists, and journalists.67 Within a political and academic culture in which the radical Left had long exerted an inordinate influence (one may even use the term hegemony), Courtois’ blunt and not always very balanced statements regarding the inherent (and, for him, morally mandatory) comparability of Communism and Fascism were perceived as politically charged, a mere simulation of a thoroughgoing historical approach. Furthermore, scholars like Annette Wieworka accused Courtois of an attempt to use this comparison to make Communism look worse than Nazism (at least in terms of the number of victims).68 Two contributors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, decided to dissociate themselves publicly from the main theses of the introduction.
The main problems with Courtois’ introduction were a fixation on figures and a failure to highlight not only similarities but also significant distinctions between Communist and Nazi systems of mass terror and extermination. Courtois opened the door to a practice that continues to haunt discussions about the criminality of Communism, especially in the former Soviet bloc: “an international competition for martyrdom” (in the words of Timothy Snyder). Courtois and others who amplified his model of analysis seemed to believe that “more killing would bring more meaning.” Indeed, one of the central risks incumbent in the comparison between Fascism and Communism is that it can unleash, if its stakes are gaining the upper hand in a competition over round numbers of victims, what Snyder called “martyrological imperialism.” And indeed, as “millions of ghosts of people who never lived”69 are released in various countries’ cultures, the memory of radical evil offers no meaning except for rationalizations in the service of national politics and discourses of historical entitlement.
In comparing the number of victims under Communist regimes (between 85 and 100 million) to the number of people who perished under or because of Nazism (25 million), Courtois downplayed a few crucial facts. In this respect, some of his critics were not wrong. First, as an expansionist global phenomenon, Communism lasted between 1917 and the completion of The Black Book (think of North Korea, China, Cuba, and Vietnam, where it is still alive, if not well). National Socialism lasted from 1933 to 1945. Second, we simply do not know what price Nazism would have taken in victims had Hitler won the war. The logical hypothesis (supported by evidence such as the differences between how the Nazis implemented the day-to-day occupation of Poland and how they occupied Holland) is that not only Jews and Gypsies but also millions of Slavs and other “racially unfit” individuals would have died. According to Ian Kershaw, “The General Plan for the east commissioned by Himmler envisaged the deportation over the subsequent years of 32 million persons, mainly Slavs, beyond the Urals and into Western Siberia.”70 And, as the plan for resettling Jews has shown, such designs were themselves genocidal. Christopher Browning and Lewis Siegelbaum excellently summarized, for Nazi Germany, the core post-1941 identitarian mutation that created the potential for cumulative, irradiating racial exterminism: “The Nazi assertion of German identity as the ‘master race’ meant the destruction of both the freedom and the identity of those whom they ruled. Victory and empire completed the transition of the Volksgemeinschaft from the restoration illusion of a unified community of the German people to the Nazi vision of a racial community waging eternal struggle—a Kampfgemeinschaft.”71 As for the political opponents of Hitler's reign of terror, suffice it to remember Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
Third, in the case of Communism one can identify an inner dynamic that contrasted the original promises to the sordidly criminal practices. In other words, there was a search for reforms, and even for socialism with a human face, within the Communist world, but such a thing would have been unthinkable under Nazism. The chasm between theory and practice, or at least between the moral-humanist Marxian (or socialist) creed, and the Leninist or Stalinist (or Maoist, or Khmer Rouge) experiments was more than an intellectual fantasy. Furthermore, whereas Sovietism and Nazism were equally scornful of traditional morality and legality in their drive to eliminate enemies, one needs to remember that for Lenin and his followers “re-education,” cruel and humiliating as it was, could offer at least some chance for survival for either the class enemy or their offspring. Diaries, letters, transcripts of inquiry commissions, and other public and private transcripts have shown the extent to which “speaking Bolshevik” (Kotkin) or becoming “ordinary Stalinists” (Figes) could become a mechanism on social (re)integration. In the words of an author who has extensively dealt with this issue:
The road to Communist conversion, significantly narrowed during the era of sweeping purges, to be sure, always remained negotiable, though it could be very difficult indeed. The fact that a successful manipulation of the official discourse enabled at least a few to clear their names by distancing themselves from convicted family members points to the importance of the voluntarist kernel in Communism. The right to petition, to write a complaint protesting one's innocence, all this while using public language, did not disappear even during the worst days of the Great Purge. Neither class background nor national origins were an insurmountable obstacle.72
This was not the case with the Nazi treatment of the Jews. As Tony Judt puts it, “If we are not to wallow in helpless despair when it comes to explaining why it came to this, we must keep in view a crucial analytical contrast: there is a difference between regimes that exterminate people in the inhuman pursuit of an arbitrary objective and those whose objective is extermination itself.”73 For the Nazis, and for Hitler in particular, the demonization of the Jews, and implicitly their excision, was part and parcel of the regime's millenarian vision of national salvation.74 Hitler described himself in July 1941 as “the Robert Koch of politics.” The Nazi dictator further explained the comparison: “He [Koch] found the bacillus of tuberculosis and through that showed medical scholarship new ways. I discovered the Jews as the bacillus and ferment of all social decomposition. Their ferment. And I have proved one thing: that a state can live without Jews; that the economy, culture, art, etc. can exist without Jews and indeed better. That is the worst blow dealt to the Jews.”75
The most important pitfall of Courtois’ introduction is the fact that, by often turning a blind eye to these differences, his explanation for the flawed anamnesis regarding Communism's criminality opened the door to dubious interpretations. He stated that “after 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…. 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.”76 This is at best a distortion. As Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Jürgen Kocka, and other prominent historians have shown, it was only after 1970, or even after 1980, that the Holocaust became a central topic in the analysis and understanding of the Third Reich. The difficulties related to a recognition of Communist mass crimes are due to the long decades of state-controlled information in those countries, the belatedness of archival openings, and the nervous reaction of left-wing circles in Western Europe (especially in France, Greece, and Spain) to what they decry as a political instrumentalization of the past.
There were two types of reaction to Courtois’ argument. Reviewers such as Scammell, Judt, Bartov, and Herf admitted that he was justified to a certain extent. Jeffrey Herf, for example, argued that “despite some important exceptions, Courtois has a point: In Western academia, scholars who chose to focus on the crimes of communism were and remain a minority and face the career-blocking danger of being labeled as right-wingers.”77 But, as Scammel and Judt pointed out, this is not a reason for imposing a choice between “our memory of Auschwitz and our memory of the Gulag, because history has mandated that we remember them both.”78 The Black Book builds a successful and convincing case for the equation between Communism and radical evil, thus placing it in the same category as Fascism. And most recently, this position has been endorsed in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and discussed in the EU Parliament, during the presentation of the Prague Declaration (signed by, among others, Václav Havel, Joachim Gauck, and Vytautas Landsbergis). For example, the OSCE's “Resolution on Divided Europe Reunited: Promoting Human Rights and Civil Liberties in the OSCE Region in the Twenty-first Century” states:
Noting that in the twentieth century European countries experienced two major totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which brought about genocide, violations of human rights and freedoms, war crimes and crimes against humanity, acknowledging the uniqueness of the Holocaust … The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly reconfirms its united stand against all totalitarian rule from whatever ideological background … Urges the participating States: a. to continue research into and raise public awareness of the totalitarian legacy; b. to develop and improve educational tools, programs and activities, most notably for younger generations, on totalitarian history, human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms, pluralism, democracy and tolerance; … Expresses deep concern at the glorification of the totalitarian regimes.79
Under the circumstances, one can hardly see the point in trying, as Courtois seemed to do (setting the tone for further rationalizations by others in later years), to appropriate the image of ultimate evil. His argument was turned into cannon fodder by those who wished to dismiss The Black Book altogether. French journalist Nicolas Weil emphatically declared at the time that the book was “an ideological war machine against the theory of the Shoah's uniqueness” which “minimized the memory of the brown period.”80 One cannot agree with such political coloring of the Black Book, but the volume did indeed generate a war of numbers, words, and memories that sometimes, especially in Eastern and Central Europe, had direct or indirect negationist and normalizing tonalities. An implicit causal relationship was established between remembering Jewish suffering and “forgetting” the pain of others, thus setting up a new wave of anti-Semitism in the public sphere.81
The comparison between Communism and Nazism had been long sensitive in Russian, East European, and Western analyses. Courtois pointed to the disturbing writings of Vassily Grossman, the author of the novel Life and Fate, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature (and coauthor with Ilya Ehrenburg, in the aftermath of World War II, of The Black Book of Nazi Crimes against Soviet Jews, a terrifying report that the Stalinists banned).82 Both in that novel and in his shorter book Forever Flowing, Grossman insisted that the Stalinist destruction of the kulaks was fundamentally analogous to Nazi genocidal politics against groups considered racially inferior. The persecution and extermination of the Jews was as much a consequence of ideological tenets held sacred by the Nazi zealots as the destruction of the kulaks during Stalinist collectivization campaigns. One author with extensive knowledge of the Soviet archives argued, “It seems that Stalin and his henchmen believed in irredeemable, hopeless individuals who had to be eliminated no less than Hitler did.”83