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Seeking Justice
Book review

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin translation from the French by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer Harvard University Press, 1999 Cambridge, Massachusetts 858 pages

E. Ostryzniuk
It appears that communism - and particularly, the practitioners of its various militant forms that emerged from Russian Bolshevism - has a lot to answer for. A team of European scholars, mainly French, have assembled a monumental compendium that catalogues the crimes of communism throughout the world. Their book once and for all tears the cloak of legitimacy or 'good intentions' from the grotesque body of twentieth century communism, which its many Western apologists have refused to touch for fear of revealing the truth. The Black Book of Communism is a condemnation of the creation and implementation execution of irrational systems of tenor and coercion for the sake of rational, scientific Utopias that were never realized or even seriously attempted.

The authors of Black Book are academic specialists in the fields of communism, political science and history. Courtois, for example, is a director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and editor of the review Communisme. Margolin is a lecturer at the University of Provence specializing in Southeast Asia. Paczkowski and Bartosek are historians at leading institutes in Poland and the Czech Republic respectively.

At 858 pages, including copious references, the tome attempts to cover all of the successful and unsuccessful violent communist movements around the globe, that is, those movements which tried to emulate the successful revolution or coup d'etat which Lenin and his Bolsheviks orchestrated in 1917-20.

The communist parties of Western Europe and North America are considered only within the context of the activities of the Communist International established by Lenin in 1919 to coordinate a European communist revolution. In this context, the Spanish Civil War receives much attention, but other counties - for example, Italy and its Red Brigade of more recent times - receive scant mention. The arguments presented by Black Book for seriously addressing the crimes against humanity committed by communist movements around the world are particularly relevant today because of the debate over how the West should deal with the recent civil wars in the Balkans. More precisely stated, at what point does war-time brutality for the sake of self-preservation become outright murder and the systematic destruction of peoples and cultures, thus calling for the involvement of the International Human Rights Tribunal at the Hague?

The book asks an important question, and the authors go to great lengths to illustrate and compare communist atrocities with those committed by the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s. At several points, the authors seem to be just listing the names of death camps and numbers of victims in order to emphatically illustrate the irrational and murderous nature of the system in question. Black Book is divided into five sections, which deal with the Soviet Union, the Communist International, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Third World. The section on the Soviet Union is the largest and covers the October Revolution, the Civil War, the war against the peasants and enemies of the state, the formation of the Gulag prison system, and all things Stalinist.

Given the scale of its suffering from Bolshevik atrocities, Ukraine receives a prominent place in this section. There is an impressive interpretation of the Ukrainian peasant revolts during the Civil War and the foreign nature of Bolshevism in Ukraine, although the Great Famine of 1932-33 takes center stage.

Werth takes great pains to dissect the systematic manner in which soviet authorities took control of every aspect of the countryside in order to force collectivization on the peasants, despite the absence of any reason to believe that such 'scientifically-managed' farms would be more efficient than the private peasant ones. Werth also describes the deliberate infliction of terror on the people, the random nature of arrests and incarcerations throughout the Stalinist period, and the state's massive efforts to cover up its crimes. Werth as well as the others, argues that collectivization and forced labor could not have been justified on the grounds that their victims were class enemies because most of the arrests were random and the results of these campaigns were economically ineffective because most inmates died.

The attempts to foment class warfare, an essential feature of militant communism, largely failed because the communist understanding of class relations always differed from reality. The end result was a crass barbarism and the destruction of the most progressive strata of the population.

For those who wish to keep score, the number of communist victims is staggering in terms of deaths:
Soviet Union . 20mn
China 65mn
Vietnam Imn
North Korea 2mn
Cambodia 2mn
Eastern Europe Imn
Africa 1.7mn
Afghanistan 1.5mn
Latin America 150,000
Total l00 mn

The weakest section of the book deals with the Third World, mainly because communist governments are still in power there and very little information has emerged. Of all these regimes, Castro's Cuba appears to be the best. Although his government practiced forced labor and enforced political unity, there was little in the way of terrorism or mass executions.

This and all of the other sections demonstrate the ultimately self-defeating nature of these revolutions and the lesson that a revolution always devours its children. This suggests that militant communism is less about economic egalitarianism and more about the accumulation of political power.

In every Communist state, the rulers impose ideological conformity, not only on the populace, also on the party itself to the point of physically annihilating cadres for the sake of power. The end result has always been -not only the decimation of party ranks - but also the simplification of communist ideology to the point of meaningless platitudes.

This ultimately impedes a truly rational organization of the state and assists in the irrational destruction of the best people. The Great Terror in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s are evidence of this apparent inevitability.

Black Book sparked a bitter debate in France where there is a strong Communist movement and a history of producing soviet sympathizers and apologists. According to Reuters, several project members dropped out after confrontations with the project's main organizer Courtois, whom they accused of twisting their research. They actually challenged aspects of his central thesis, namely, that terror is a central characteristic of communism and that communist regimes practice a class-based genocide similar to racially-based mass murder. In his preface, Courtois openly compares communist regimes with the Nazi regime Hitler founded in 1933, and this annoyed a number of French intellectuals. Former hard-line leader of the Communist Party of France Georges Marchais went on record stating, "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union," and that communism is about the liberation of people and not genocide.

In any case, the untold deaths and suffering of millions in the last century at the hands of those claiming to be standard-bearers of the famous nineteenth century German philosopher and economic theorist should be enough to condemn the communist movement outright.

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