PART 1: THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM:CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION

The Black Book of COMMUNISM CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION Stephane Courtois Nicolas Werth Jean-Louis Panne Andrzej Paczkowski Karel Bartosek Jean-Louis Margolin Translated by Jonathan Murphy

Foreword

Communism has been the great story of the twentieth century. Bursting into history from the most unlikely corner of Europe amid the trauma of World War I, in the wake of the cataclysm of 1939-1945 it made a great leap westward to the middle of Germany and an even greater one eastward to the China Seas. With this feat, the apogee of its fortunes, it had come to rule a third of mankind and seemed poised to advance indefinitely. For seven decades it haunted world politics, polarizing opinion between those who saw it as the socialist end of history and those who considered it history's most total tyranny. 

One might therefore expect that a priority of modern historians would be to explain why Communism's power grew for so long only to collapse like a house of cards. Yet surprisingly, more than eighty years after 1917, probing examination of the Big Questions raised by the Marxist-Leninist phenomenon has hardly begun. Can The Black Book of Communism, recently a sensation in France and much of Europe, provide the salutary shock that will make a difference? 

Because a serious historiography was precluded in Soviet Russia by the regime's mandatory ideology, scholarly investigation of Communism has until recently fallen disproportionately to Westerners. And though these outside observers could not entirely escape the ideological magnetic field emanating from their subject, in the half-century after World War II they indeed accomplished an impressive amount. 1 Even so, a basic problem remains: the conceptual poverty of the Western empirical effort.

This poverty flows from the premise that Communism can be understood, in an aseptic and value-free mode, as the pure product of social process. Accordingly, researchers have endlessly insisted that the October Revolution was a workers' revolt and not a Party coup d'etat, when it was obviously the latter riding piggyback on the former. Besides, the central issue in Communist history is not the Party's ephemeral worker "base"; it is what the intelligentsia victors of October later did with their permanent coup d'etat, and so far this has scarcely been explored. 

More exactly, the matter has been obscured by two fantasies holding out the promise of a better Soviet socialism than the one the Bolsheviks actually built. The first is the "Bukharin alternative" to Stalin, a thesis that purports to offer a nonviolent, market road to socialism—that is, Marx's integral socialism, which necessitates the full suppression of private property, profit, and the market.2 The second fantasy purports to find the impetus behind Stalin's "revolution from above" of 1929-1933 in a "cultural revolution" from below by Party activists and workers against the "bourgeois" specialists dear to Bukharin, a revolution ultimately leading to massive upward mobility from the factory bench.3 

With such fables now consigned to what Trotsky called "the ash heap of history," perhaps a moral, rather than a social, approach to the Communist phenomenon can yield a truer understanding—for the much-investigated Soviet social process claimed victims on a scale that has never aroused a scholarly curiosity at all proportionate to the magnitude of the disaster. The Black Book offers us the first attempt to determine, overall, the actual magnitude of what occurred, by systematically detailing Leninism's "crimes, terror, and repression" from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989. 

This factual approach puts Communism in what is, after all, its basic human perspective. For it was in truth a "tragedy of planetary dimensions" (in the French publisher's characterization), with a grand total of victims variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million. Either way, the Communist record offers the most colossal case of political carnage in history. And when this fact began to sink in with the French public, an apparently dry academic work became a publishing sensation, the focus of impassioned political and intellectual debate. 

The shocking dimensions of the Communist tragedy, however, are hardly news to any serious student of twentieth-century history, at least when the different Leninist regimes are taken individually The real news is that at this late date the truth should come as such a shock to the public at large. To be sure, each major episode of the tragedy—Stalin's Gulag, Mao Zedong's Great Foreword XI Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge—had its moment of notoriety. But these horrors soon faded away into "history"; nor did anyone trouble to add up the total and set it before the public. The surprising size of this total, then, partly explains the shock the volume provoked. 

The full power of the shock, however, was delivered by the unavoidable comparison of this sum with that for Nazism, which at an estimated 25 million turns out to be distinctly less murderous than Communism. And the volume's editor, Stephane Courtois, rather than let the figures speak for themselves, spelled out the comparison, thereby making the volume a firebrand. Arguing from the fact that some Nuremberg jurisprudence has been incorporated into French law (to accommodate such cases as that of Maurice Papon, a former minister of Giscard d'Estaing tried in 1997-98 for complicity in deporting Jews while a local official of Vichy), Courtois explicitly equated the "class genocide" of Communism with the "race genocide" of Nazism, and categorized both as "crimes against humanity." What is more, he raised the question of the "complicity" with Communist crime of the legions of Western apologists for Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and indeed Pol Pot who, even when they "abandoned their idols of yesteryear, did so discreetly and in silence." 

These issues have a special resonance in France. Since the 1930's, the left has been able to come to power only as a popular front of Socialists and Communists (whether under Leon Blum or Francois Mitterrand), a tandem in which the democratic partner was always compromised by its ally's allegiance to totalitarian Moscow. Conversely, since 1940 the right has been tainted by Vichy's links with Nazism (the subtext of the Papon affair). In such a historical context, "knowing the truth about the US.S.R." has never been an academic matter.

Furthermore, it happens that at the time the volume appeared the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin stood in need of Communist votes to assemble a parliamentary majority Orators of the right, therefore, citing The Black Book, rose in the National Assembly to attack his government for harboring allies with an unrepentant "criminal past." Jospin countered by recalling the Liberation coalition between Gaullist's and Communists (which was fair game), only the better to conclude that he was "proud" to govern with them too (which was a gaffe, for at the Liberation the Gulag was not yet known). Nor was this just a hasty choice of words; in the eyes of the left that he leads, the Communists, despite their past errors, belong to the camp of democratic progress, whereas the right is open to suspicion of softness toward the National Front of the "fascist" Jean-Marie Le Pen (after all, the conservatives had once rallied to Vichy). The incident ended with the non-Gaullist right walking out of the chamber, while the Gaullists remained awkwardly in place. Thereupon the debate spread to television and the press. 

Indeed, the debate divides the book's own authors. All are research scholars associated with the Center d'Etude d'Histoire et de Sociologie du Communisme and its review, Communisme. Founded by the pioneer of academic Communist studies, the late Annie Kriegel, its mission is to exploit our new access to Soviet archives in conjunction with younger Russian historians. Equally to the point, these researchers are former Communists or close fellow-travelers; and it is over the assessment of their common past that they divide. Thus, once The Black Book raised the foreseeable political storm, Courtois's two key collaborators—Nicolas Werth for Russia, and Jean-Louis Margolin for China—publicly dissociated themselves from his bolder conclusions. 

So let us begin with the debate, which is hardly specific to France. It breaks out wherever the question of the moral equivalence of our century's two totalitarianism's is raised, indeed whenever the very concept of "totalitarianism" is invoked. For Nazism's unique status as "absolute evil" is now so entrenched that any comparison with it easily appears suspect. 

Of the several reasons for this assessment of Nazism, the most obvious is that the Western democracies fought World War II in a kind of global "popular front" against "fascism." Moreover, whereas the Nazis occupied most of Europe, the Communists during the Cold War menaced only from afar. Thus, although the stakes for democracy in the new conflict were as high as in its hot predecessor, the stress of waging it was significantly lower; and it ended with the last general secretary of the "evil empire," Mikhail Gorbachev, in the comradely embrace of the ultimate cold warrior, President Ronald Reagan. Communism's fall, therefore, brought with it no Nuremberg trial, and hence no de-Communization to solemnly put Leninism beyond the pale of civilization; and of course there still exist Communist regimes in international good standing. 

Another reason for our dual perception is that defeat cut down Nazism in the prime of its iniquity, thereby eternally fixing its full horror in the world's memory. By contrast, Communism, at the peak of its iniquity, was rewarded with an epic victory—and thereby gained a half-century in which to lose its dynamism, to half-repent of Stalin, and even, in the case of some unsuccessful leaders (such as Czechoslovakia's Alexander Dubcek in 1968), to attempt giving the system a "human face." As a result of these contrasting endings of the two totalitarianism's all Nazism's secrets were bared fifty years ago, whereas we are only beginning to explore Soviet archives, and those of East Asia and Cuba remain sealed. 

The effect of this unequal access to information was magnified by more subjective considerations. Nazism seemed all the more monstrous to Westerners for having arisen in the heart of civilized Europe, in the homeland of Luther, Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, and indeed Marx. Communism, by contrast, Foreword XIII appeared as less of a historical aberration in the Russian borderland of Europe—almost "Asia" after all where, despite Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, civilization had never taken deep root. 

The ultimate distinguishing characteristic of Nazism, of course, is the Holocaust, considered as the historically unique crime of seeking the extermination of an entire people, a crime for which the term "genocide" was coined around the time of Nuremberg. And therewith the Jewish people acquired the solemn obligation to keep the memory of its martyrs alive in the conscience of the world. Even so, general awareness of the Final Solution was slow to emerge, in fact coming only in the 1970's and 1980's—the very years when Communism was gradually mellowing. So between these contrasting circumstances, 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. 

Accordingly, Hitler and Nazism are now a constant presence in Western print and on Western television, whereas Stalin and Communism materialize only sporadically. The status of ex-Communist carries with it no stigma, even when unaccompanied by any expression of regret; past contact with Nazism, however, no matter how marginal or remote, confers an indelible stain. Thus Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man have been enduringly compromised and the substance of their thought tainted. By contrast, Louis Aragon, for years under Stalin the editor of the French Communist Party's literary magazine, in 1996 was published among the classics of the Pleiade; the press was lyrical in praise of his art, while virtually mute about his politics. (The Black Book reproduces a 1931 poem to the KGB's predecessor, the GPU) Likewise, the Stalinist poet and Nobel laureate, Pablo Neruda, in the same year was sentimentalized, together with his cause, by an acclaimed film, II postino—even though in 1939 as a Chilean diplomat in Spain he acted as a defacto agent of the Comintern, and in 1953 mourned Stalin with a fulsome ode. And this list of unparalleled lives could be extended indefinitely. 

Even more skewed is the situation in the East. No Gulag camps have been turned into museums to commemorate their inmates; all were bulldozed into the ground during Khrushchev's de-Stalinization. The only memorial to Stalin's victims is a modest stone brought to Moscow from the Arctic camp of Solovki and placed in Lubyanka Square (though well off to the side), where the KGB's former headquarters still stands. Nor are there any regular visitors to this lonely slab (one must cross a stream of traffic to reach it) and no more than an occasional wilted bouquet. By contrast, Lenin's statue still dominates most city centers, and his mummy reposes honorably in its Mausoleum. 

Throughout the former Communist world, moreover, virtually none of its responsible officials has been put on trial or punished. Indeed, everywhere Communist parties, though usually under new names, compete in politics.Thus, in Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, onetime member of General Jaruzelski's government, in 1996 won the presidency against the symbol of resistance to Communism, Lech Walesa (admittedly an inept campaigner). Gulya Horn, the prime minister of Hungary from 1994 to 1998, was a member of the country's last Communist government, and a member of the militia that helped suppress the 1956 revolt alongside the Soviet army. In neighboring Austria, by contrast, former president Kurt Waldheim was ostracized worldwide once his Nazi past was uncovered. Granted, card-carrying Western literati and latter-day Eastern apparatchik never served as executioners for Stalin. Even so, does the present silence about their past mean that Communism was all that less bad than Nazism? 

The debate around The Black Book can help frame an answer. On the one side, commentators in the liberal Le Monde argue that it is illegitimate to speak of a single Communist movement from Phnom Penh to Paris. Rather, the rampage of the Khmer Rouge is like the ethnic massacres of third-world Rwanda; or the "rural" Communism of Asia is radically different from the "urban" Communism of Europe; or Asian Communism is really only anticolonial nationalism. The subtext of such Eurocentric condescension is that conflating sociologically diverse movements is merely a stratagem to obtain a higher body count against Communism, and thus against all the left. In answer, commentators in the conservative Le Figaro, spurning reductionist sociology as a device to exculpate Communism, reply that Marxist-Leninist regimes are cast in the same ideological and organizational mold throughout the world. And this pertinent point also has its admonitory subtext: that socialists of whatever stripe cannot be trusted to resist their ever-present demons on the far left (those popular fronts were no accident after all). 

Yet if we let the divided contributors to The Black Book arbitrate the dispute, we find no disagreement in this matter: the Leninist matrix indeed served for all the once "fraternal" parties. To be sure, the model was applied differently in different cultural settings. As Margolin points out, the chief agent of represssion in Russia was a specially created political police, the ChekaGPU-NKVD-KGB, while in China it was the People's Liberation Army, and in Cambodia it was gun-toting adolescents from the countryside: thus popular ideological mobilization went deeper in Asia than in Russia. Still, everywhere the aim was to repress "enemies of the people"—"like noxious insects," as Lenin said early on, thus inaugurating Commmunism's "animalization" of its adversaries. Moreover, the line of inheritance from Stalin, to Mao, to Ho, to Kim II Sung, to Pol Pot was quite clear, with each new leader receiving both materia] aid and ideological inspiration from his predecessor. And, to come full circle, Pol Pot first learned his Marxism in Paris in 1952 (when such philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were explaining how terror could be the midwife of "humanism").4 So if the debate remains on the level of the quantitative atrocity, the double standard collapses, and Communism appears as the more criminal totalitarianism. 

But if the debate is shifted to qualitative crime, this outcome is easily reversed. And here the decisive factor is, again, the Holocaust as the confirmation of Nazism's uniquely evil nature. Indeed, this standard has become so universal that other persecuted groups, from Armenians to the native peoples of both Americas, have appropriated (with varying degrees of plausibility) the term "genocide" to characterize their own experience. Not surprisingly, many of these implicit comparisons to the Holocaust have been rejected as illegitimate, even slanderous. And in fact one overexcited op-ed piece in Le Monde, from a respected researcher, denounced Courtois's introduction as antisemitic. 

Yet there are other, less emotionally charged arguments for assigning a significant distinctiveness to Nazi terror. The criminal law everywhere distinguishes degrees of murder, according to the motivation, the cruelty of the means employed, and so on. Thus, Raymond Aron long ago, and Francois Furet recently, though both unequivocal about the evil of Communism, distinguished between extermination practiced to achieve a political objective, no matter how perverse, and extermination as an end in itself. 5 And in this perspective, Communism once again comes off as less evil than Nazism. 

This plausible distinction, however, can easily be turned on its head. In particular, Eastern European dissidents have argued that mass murder in the name of a noble ideal is more perverse than it is in the name of a base one. 6 The Nazis, after all, never pretended to be virtuous. The Communists, by contrast, trumpeting their humanism, hoodwinked millions around the globe for decades, and so got away with murder on the ultimate scale. The Nazis, moreover, killed off their victims without ideological ceremony; the Communists, by contrast, usually compelled their prey to confess their "guilt" in signed depositions thereby acknowledging the Party line's political "correctness." Nazism, finally, was a unique case (Mussolini's Facism was not really competitive), and it developed no worldwide clientele. By contrast, Communism's universal-ism permitted it to metastasize worldwide. 

A final position, forcefully expressed by Alain Besancon, is that murder is murder whatever the ideological motivation; and this is undeniably true for the equally dead victims of both Nazism and Communism.7 Such absolute equivalence is also expressed in Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism: both systems massacred their victims not for what they did (such as resisting the regime) but for who they were, whether Jews or kulaks. In this perspective, the distinction made by some, that the term petit-bourgeois "kulak" is more elastic and hence less lethal than biological "Jew," is invalidated: the social and the racial categories are equally psuedo scientific. 

Yet none of these qualitative arguments can be "clinched"—unlike an empirically established victim count. And since there can be no consensus regarding degrees of political "evil," some researchers would claim that all value judgments merely express the ideological preferences of their authors. 

Such "Positivist" social scientists, therefore, have averred that moral questions are irrelevant to understanding the past. An example is a recent volume devoted to political denunciation in modern Europe. 8 The introduction presents some fascinating facts: in 1939 the Gestapo employed 7,500 people in contrast to the N.K.V.D's 366,000 (including Gulag personnel); and the Communist Party made denunciation an obligation, whereas the Nazi Party did not. But no conclusions are drawn from these contrasts. Instead we are told that under both regimes the population was given to denunciation as "an everyday practice," and for reasons of self-advancement more than for reasons of ideology. We arc told further that denunciation was endemic in pre-revolutionary rural Russia, and that it flourished under the French Jacobins and the English Puritans, the Spanish Inquisition and American McCarthyism. And in fact all the "witch crazes" enumerated in the introduction did have some traits in common. 

The rub is, however, that this perspective reduces politics and ideology everywhere to anthropology. And with this accomplished, the editors blandly assure us that, contrary to Hannah Arendt, the "Nazi/Soviet similarities" arc insufficient to make denunciation "a specifically 'totalitarian' phenomenon." What is more, the difference between Nazi/Communist systems and Western ones is "not qualitative but quantitative." By implication, therefore, singling out Communist and Nazi terror in order to equate them becomes Cold War slander—the ideological subtext, as it happens, of twenty-five years of "revisionist," social-reductionist Sovietology. 

By the same token, this fact-for-fact's-sake approach suggests that there is nothing specifically Communist about Communist terror—and, it would seem, nothing particularly Nazi about Nazi terror either. So the bloody Soviet experiment is banalized in one great gray anthropological blur; and the Soviet Union is transmogrified into just another country in just another age, neither more nor less evil than any other regime going. But this is obviously nonsense. Hence we are back with the problem of moral judgment, which is inseparable from any real understanding of the past—indeed, inseparable from being human, 

In the twentieth century, however, morality is not primarily a matter of eternal verities or transcendental imperatives. It is above all a matter of political allegiances. That is, it is a matter of left versus right, roughly defined as the Foreword XVII priority of compassionate egalitarianism for the one, and as the primacy of prudential order for the other. Yet since neither principle can be applied absolutely without destroying society, the modern world lives in perpetual tension between the irresistible pressure for equality and the functional necessity of hierarchy. 

It is this syndrome that gives the permanent qualitative advantage to Communism over Nazism in any evaluation of their quantitative atrocities. For the Communist project, in origin, claimed commitment to universalistic and egalitarian goals, whereas the Nazi project offered only unabashed national egoism. Small matter, then, that their practices were comparable; their moral auras were antithetical, and it is the latter feature that counts in Western, domestic politics. And so we arrive at the fulcrum of the debate: A moral man can have "no enemies to the left," a perspective in which undue insistence on Communist crime only "plays into the hands of the right"—if, indeed, any anticommunism is not simply a mask for anti-liberalism. 

In this spirit, Le Monde's editorialist deemed The Black Book inopportune because equating Communism with Nazism removed the "last barriers to legitimating the extreme right," that is, Le Pen. It is true that Le Pen's party and similar hate-mongering, xenophobic movements elsewhere in Europe represent an alarming new phenomenon that properly concerns all liberal democrats. But it in no way follows that Communism's criminal past should be ignored or minimized. Such an argument is only a variant, in new historical circumstances, of Sartre's celebrated sophism that one should keep silent about Soviet camps "pour ne pas descsperer Billancout" (in order not to throw the auto workers of Billancout into despair). To which his onetime colleague, Albert Camus, long ago replied that the truth is the truth, and denying it mocks the causes both of humanity and of morality.9 

In fact, the persistence of such sophistry is precisely why The Black Book is so opportune. What, therefore, do its provocative pages contain? Without pretension to originality, it presents a balance sheet of our current knowledge of Communism's human costs, archival based where possible and elsewhere drawing on the best available secondary evidence, and with due allowance for the difficulties of quantification. Yet the very sobriety of this inventory is what gives the book its power; and indeed, as we are led from country to country and from horror to horror, the cumulative impact is overwhelming. 

At the same time, the book quietly advances a number of important analytical points. The first is that Communist regimes did not just commit criminal acts (all states do so 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. Werth's section on the Soviet Union is thus

titled "A State against Its People" and takes us methodically through the successive cycles of terror, from Great October in 1917 to Stalin's death in 1953. By way of comparison, he notes that between 1825 and 1917 Czarism carried out 6,321 political executions (most of them during the revolution of 1905-1907), whereas in two months of official "Red Terror" in the fall of 1918 Bolshevism achieved some 15,000. And so on for a third of a century; for example, 6 million deaths during the collectivization famine of 1932-33, 720,000 executions during the Great Purge, 7 million people entering the Gulag (where huge numbers died) in the years 1934-1941, and 2,750,000 still there at Stalin's death. True, these aggregates represent different modes of state violence, not all of them immediately lethal; but all betoken terror as a routine means of government. 

And the less familiar figures in Margolin's chapter on China's "Long March into Night" are even more staggering: at a minimum, 10 million "direct victims"; probably 20 million deaths out of the multitudes that passed through China's "hidden Gulag," the laogai; more than 20 million deaths from the "political famine" of the Great Leap Forward of 1959-1961, the largest famine in history. Finally, in Pol Pot's aping of Mao's Great Leap, around one Cambodian in seven perished, the highest proportion of the population in any Communist country. 

The book's second point is that there never was a benign, initial phase of Communism before some mythical "wrong turn" threw it off track. From the start Lenin expected, indeed wanted, civil war to crush all "class enemies"; and this war, principally against the peasants, continued with only short pauses until 1953. So much for the fable of "good Lenin/bad Stalin." (And if anyone doubts that it is still necessary to make this case, the answer may be found, for example, in the maudlin article "Lenin" in the current edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.) Still another point is of a "technical" nature: the use of famine to break peasant resistance to regime economic "plans." And ever since Solzhenitsyn, such "pharaonic" methods have been contrasted with the technologically advanced Nazi gas chamber. 

A more basic point is that Red terror cannot be explained as the prolongation of pre-revolutionary political cultures. Communist repression did not originate from above, in traditional autocracies; nor was it simply an intensification of violent folk practices from below—whether the peasant anarchism of Russia, or the cyclical millenarian revolts of China, or the exacerbated nationalism of Cambodia, although all these traditions were exploited by the new regime. Nor does the source of Communist practices reside in the violence of the two world wars, important though this brutal conditioning was. Rather, in each case, mass violence against the population was a deliberate policy of the new revolutionary order; and its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past.  

A final point, insisted on by Courtois yet clear also in his colleagues' accounts, is that Communism's recourse to "permanent civil war" rested on the "scientific" Marxist belief in class struggle as the "violent midwife of history," in Marx's famous metaphor. Similarly, Courtois adds, Nazi violence was founded on a scientific social Darwinism promising national regeneration through racial struggle. 

This valid emphasis on ideology as the wellspring of Communist mass murder reaches its apogee in Margolin's depiction of escalating radicalism as the revolution moved East. Stalin, of course, had already begun the escalation by presenting himself as the "Lenin of today" and his first Five-Year Plan as a second October. Then, in 1953, four years after Mao came to power, his heirs ended mass terror: it had simply become too costly to their now superpuissant regime. To the Chinese comrades, however, Moscow's moderation amounted to "betrayal" of the world revolution just as it was taking off^in Asia. Consequently, in 1959-1961 Mao was goaded to surpass his Soviet mentors by a "Great Leap Forward" beyond mere socialism, Moscow style, to full Communism as Marx had imagined it in the Communist Manifesto and the Critique of the Gotha Program. And in 1966-1976, by directing the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution against his own Party, he proceeded to outdo Stalin's Great Purge of his Party in 1937-1939. But the most demented spin off of this whole tradition was Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge of 1975-1979; for this rampage against urban, "bourgeois" civilization expressed nothing less than an ambition to propel tiny Cambodia beyond Mao's "achievements" into the front rank of world revolution. 

Yet the long-term inefficiency of such "progress" eventually led Mao's heirs, in their turn, to "betray" the Marxist-Leninist impetus by halting mass terror and turning halfway to the market. Thereby, after 1979, Deng Xiaoping ended worldwide the perverse Prometheanism launched in October 1917. Thus the Communist trajectory, as The Black Book traces it from Petrograd to the China Seas, inevitably suggests that ideology, not social process, fueled the movement's meteoric rise, and that ideology's practical failure produced its precipitate fall. 

This transnational perspective goes far toward answering the great question posed by Communist history: namely, why did a doctrine premised on proletarian revolution in industrial societies come to power only in predominantly agrarian ones, by Marxist definition those least prepared for "socialism"?  But socialist revolution for Marx was not just a matter of economic development; it was at bottom an eschatological "leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom." Since such quasi-miraculous transformation has the strongest allure for those who have the greatest lag to overcome, it is hardly surprising that Marxism's line of march turned out to lead ever farther into the politically and economically backward East. Only by taking account of this paradoxical eastward escalation through increasingly extravagant "leaps" can we build a real historiography of the great twentieth-century story that was Communism. 

And this brings us back to the vexed—and vexing—question raised by Stephane Courtois in The Black Book: What of the moral equivalence of Communism with Nazism? After fifty years of debate, it is clear that no matter what the hard facts are, degrees of totalitarian evil will be measured as much in terms of present politics as in terms of past realities. So we will always encounter a double standard as long as there exist a left and a right—which will be a very long time indeed. No matter how thoroughly the Communist failure may come to be documented (and new research makes it look worse every day), we will always have reactions such as that of a Moscow correspondent for a major Western paper, who, after the fall, could still privately salute the Russian people with: "Thanks for having tried!"; and there will always be kindred spirits to dismiss The Black Book, a priori, as "right-wing anti-Communist rhetoric." For more mundane observers, however, it is at last becoming clear that our current qualitative judgments are scandalously out of line with the century's real balance sheet of political crime. 

And this very absurdity perhaps brings us to a turning point. Ten years ago, the authors of The Black Book would have refused to believe what they now write. And exploration of the Soviet archives—and eventually those of East Asia—will continue to redress the balance. This comes at a time, moreover, when historical writing is turning increasingly to retrospective affirmative action, to fulfilling our "duty of remembrance" to all the oppressed of the past—indeed, when governments and churches formally apologize for their historic sins. Surely, then, the Party of humanity can spare a little compassion for the victims of the inhumanity so long meted out by so many of its own partisans. 

Even so, such an effort at retrospective justice will always encounter one intractable obstacle. Any realistic accounting of Communist crime would effectively shut the door on Utopia; and too many good souls in this unjust world cannot abandon hope for an absolute end to inequality (and some less good souls will always offer them "rational" curative nostrums). And so, all comrade-questers after historical truth should gird their loins for a very Long March indeed before Communism is accorded its fair share of absolute evil.

Introduction: 

The Crimes of Communism 

Stephane Courtois 

Life cannot withstand death, but memory is gaining in its struggle against nothingness. 

Tzvetan Todorov, Les abus de la memoire 

It has been written that "history is the science of human misfortune." 1 Our bloodstained century of violence amply confirms this statement. In previous centuries few people and countries were spared from mass violence. The major European powers were involved in the African slave trade. The French Republic practiced colonization, which despite some good was tarnished by repugnant episodes that persisted until recently. The United States remains heavily influenced by a culture of violence deeply rooted in two major historical tragedies—the enslavement of black Africans and the extermination of Native Americans. 

The fact remains that our century has outdone its predecessors in its bloodthirstiness. A quick glance at the past leads to one damning conclusion: ours is the century of human catastrophes—two world wars and Nazism, to say nothing of more localized tragedies, such as those in Armenia, Biafra, and Rwanda, The Ottoman Empire was undoubtedly involved in the genocide of the Armenians, and Germany in the genocide of the Jews and Gypsies. Italy under Mussolini slaughtered Ethiopians. The Czechs are reluctant to admit that their behavior toward the Sudeten Germans in 1945 and 1946 was by no means exemplary. Even Switzerland has recently been embroiled in a scandal over its role in administering gold stolen by the Nazis from exterminated Jews, although the country's behavior is not on the same level as genocide.

Communism has its place in this historical setting overflowing with tragedies. Indeed, it occupies one of the most violent and most significant places of all. Communism, the defining characteristic of the "short twentieth century" that began in Sarajevo in 1914 and ended in Moscow in 1991, finds itself at center stage in the story. Communism predated fascism and Nazism, outlived both, and left its mark on four continents. 

What exactly do we mean by the term "Communism" '? We must make a distinction between the doctrine of communism and its practice. As a political philosophy, communism has existed for centuries, even millennia. Was it not Plato who in his Republic introduced the concept of an ideal city, in which people would not be corrupted by money and power and in which wisdom, reason, and justice would prevail? And consider the scholar and statesman Sir Thomas More, chancellor of England in 1530, author of Utopia, and victim of the executioner's ax by order of Henry VIII, who also described an ideal society. Utopian philosophy may have its place as a technique for evaluating society. It draws its sustenance from ideas, the lifeblood of the world's democracies. But the Communism that concerns us does not exist in the transcendent sphere of ideas. This Communism is altogether real; it has existed at key moments of history and in particular countries, brought to life by its famous leaders — Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Josif Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and, in France, by Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos, and Georges Marchais. 

Regardless of the role that theoretical communist doctrines may have played in the practice of real Communism before 1917—and we shall return to this later—it was flesh-and-blood Communism that imposed wholesale repression, culminating in a state-sponsored reign of terror. Is the ideology itself blameless? There will always be some nitpickers who maintain that actual Communism has nothing in common with theoretical communism. And of course it would be absurd to claim that doctrines expounded prior to Jesus Christ, during the Renaissance, or even in the nineteenth century were responsible for the events that took place in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, as Ignazio Silone has written, "Revolutions, like trees, are recognized by the fruit they bear." It was not without reason that the Russian Social Democrats, better known to history as the Bolsheviks, decided in November 1917 to call themselves "Communists," They had a reason for erecting at the Kremlin a monument to those whom they considered to be their predecessors, namely Sir Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella. 

Having gone beyond individual crimes and small-scale ad-hoc massacres, the Communist regimes, in order to consolidate their grip on power, turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government. After varying periods, ranging from a few years in Eastern Europe to several decades in the U.S.S.R. and China, the terror faded, and the regimes settled into a routine of administering repressive measures on a daily basis, as well as censoring all means of communication, controlling borders, and expelling dissidents. However, the memory of the terror has continued to preserve the credibility, and thus the effectiveness, of the threat of repression. None of the Communist regimes currently in vogue in the West is an exception to this rule—not the China of the "Great Helmsman," nor the North Korea of Kim II Sung, nor even the Vietnam of "good old Uncle Ho" or the Cuba of the flamboyant Fidel Castro, flanked by the hard-liner Che Guevara. Nor can we forget Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam, Angola under Agostinho Neto, or Afghanistan under Mohammed Najibullah. 

Incredibly, the crimes of Communism have yet to receive a fair and just assessment from both historical and moral viewpoints. This book is one of the first attempts to study Communism with a focus on its criminal dimensions, in both the central regions of Communist rule and the farthest reaches of the globe. Some will say that most of these crimes were actions conducted in accordance with a system of law that was enforced by the regimes' official institutions, which were recognized internationally and whose heads of state continued to be welcomed with open arms. But was this not the case with Nazism as well? The crimes we shall expose are to be judged not by the standards of Communist regimes, but by the unwritten code of the natural laws of humanity. 

The history of Communist regimes and parties, their policies, and their relations with their own national societies and with the international community are of course not purely synonymous with criminal behavior, let alone with terror and repression. In the U.S.S.R. and in the "people's democracies" after Stalin's death, as well as in China after Mao, terror became less pronounced, society began to recover something of its old normalcy, and "peaceful coexistence",if only as "the pursuit of the class struggle by other means",had become an international fact of life. Nevertheless, many archives and witnesses prove conclusively that terror has always been one of the basic ingredients of modern Communism. Let us abandon once and for all the idea that the execution of hostages by firing squads, the slaughter of rebellious workers, and the forced starvation of the peasantry were only short-term "accidents" peculiar to a specific country or era. Our approach will encompass all geographic areas and focus on crime as a defining characteristic of the Communist system throughout its existence. 

Exactly what crimes are we going to examine? Communism has committed a multitude of crimes not only against individual human beings but also against world civilization and national cultures. Stalin demolished dozens of churches in Moscow; Nicolae Ceausescu destroyed the historical heart of Bucharest to give free rein to his megalomania; Pol Pot dismantled the Phnom Penh cathedral stone by stone and allowed the jungle to take over the temples of Angkor Wat; and during Mao's Cultural Revolution, priceless treasures were smashed or burned by the Red Guards. Yet however terrible this destruction may ultimately prove for the nations in question and for humanity as a whole, how does it compare with the mass murder of human beings,of men, women, and children? 

Thus we have delimited crimes against civilians as the essence of the phenomenon of terror. These crimes tend to fit a recognizable pattern even if the practices vary to some extent by regime. The pattern includes execution by various means, such as firing squads, hanging, drowning, battering, and, in certain cases, gassing, poisoning, or "car accidents"; destruction of the population by starvation, through man-made famine, the withholding of food, or both; deportation, through which death can occur in transit (either through physical exhaustion or through confinement in an enclosed space), at one's place of residence, or through forced labor (exhaustion, illness, hunger, cold). Periods described as times of "civil war" are more complex—it is not always easy to distinguish between events caused by fighting between rulers and rebels and events that can properly be described only as a massacre of the civilian population. 

Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. The following rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates, gives some sense of the scale and gravity of these crimes: 

U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths 

China: 65 million deaths 

Vietnam: 1 million deaths 

North Korea: 2 million deaths 

Cambodia: 2 million deaths 

Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths 

Latin America: 150,000 deaths 

Africa: 1.7 million deaths 

Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths 

The international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths 

The total approaches 100 million people killed. The immense number of deaths conceals some wide disparities according to context. Unquestionably, if we approach these figures in terms of relative weight, first place goes to Cambodia, where Pol Pot, in three and a half years, engaged in the most atrocious slaughter, through torture and widespread famine, of about one-fourth of the country's total population. However, China's The Crimes of Communism experience under Mao is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of people who lost their lives. As for the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, the blood turns cold at its venture into planned, logical, and "politically correct" mass slaughter. 

This bare-bones approach inevitably fails to do justice to the numerous issues involved. A thorough investigation requires a "qualitative" study based on a meaningful definition of the term "crime." Objective and legal criteria are also important. The legal ramifications of crimes committed by a specific country were first confronted in 1945 at the Nuremberg Tribunal, which was organized by the Allies to consider the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The nature of these crimes was defined by Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which identified three major offenses: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. An examination of all the crimes committed by the Leninist/Stalinist regime, and in the Communist world as a whole, reveals crimes that fit into each of these three categories. 

Crimes against peace, defined by Article 6a, are concerned with the "planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing." Unquestionably, Stalin committed such a crime by secretly negotiating two treaties with Hitler—those of 23 August and 28 September 1939 on the partition of Poland and on the annexation of the Baltic states, northern Bukovina, and Bessarabia to the U.S.S.R., respectively. By freeing Germany from the risk of waging war on two fronts, the treaty of 23 August 1939 led directly to the outbreak of World War II. Stalin perpetrated yet another crime against peace by attacking Finland on 30 November 1939. The unexpected incursion into South Korea by North Korea on 25 June 1950 and the massive intervention in that war by the Chinese army are of comparable magnitude. The methods of subversion long used by the Moscow-backed Communist parties likewise deserve categorization as crimes against peace, since they began wars; thus a Communist coup in Afghanistan led to a massive Soviet military intervention on 27 December 1979, unleashing a conflict that continues to this day. 

War crimes are defined in Article 6b as "violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, the ill-treatment or deportation of civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labor camps or for any other purpose, the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, the killing of hostages, the plunder of public or private property, the wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, and any devastation not justified by military necessity." The laws and customs of war are written down in various conventions, particularly the Hague Convention of 1907, which states that in times of war "the inhabitants and the belligerents remain under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among civilized peoples, from laws of humanity, and the dictates of the public conscience." 

Stalin gave the go-ahead for large numbers of war crimes. The liquidation of almost all the Polish officers taken prisoner in 1939, with 4,500 men butchered at Katyri, is only one such episode, albeit the most spectacular. However, other crimes on a much larger scale are habitually overlooked, including the murder or death in the gulag of tens of thousands of German soldiers taken prisoner from 1943 to 1945. Nor should we forget the rape of countless German women by Red Army soldiers in occupied Germany, as well as the systematic plundering of all industrial equipment in the countries occupied by the Red Army Also covered by Article 6b would be the organized resistance fighters who openly waged war against Communist rulers and who were executed by firing squads or deported after being taken prisoner—for example, the soldiers of the anti-Nazi Polish resistance organizations, members of various Ukrainian and Baltic armed partisan organizations, and Afghan resistance fighters. 

The expression "crime against humanity" first appeared on 19 May 1915 in a joint French, British, and Russian declaration condemning Turkey's massacre of the Armenians as a "new crime by Turkey against humanity and civilization." The atrocities committed by the Nazis obliged the Nuremberg Tribunal to redefine the concept, as stated in Article 6c:"Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated." 

In his arguments at Nuremberg the French prosecutor general, Francois de Menthon, emphasized the ideological dimension of these crimes: 

I propose today to prove to you that all this organized and vast criminality springs from what I may be allowed to call a crime against the spirit, I mean a doctrine that, by denying all spiritual, rational, or moral values by which nations have tried for thousands of years to improve human conditions, aims to plunge humanity back into barbarism, no longer the natural and spontaneous barbarism of primitive nations, but into a diabolical barbarism, conscious of itself and using for its ends all material means put at the disposal of humanity by contemporary science. This sin against the spirit is the original sin of National Socialism from which all crimes spring. 

This monstrous doctrine is that of racism . . . 

Whether we consider a crime against peace or war crimes, we are therefore not faced by an accidental or an occasional criminality that events could explain without justifying it. We are in fact faced by systematic criminality, which derives directly and of necessity from a monstrous doctrine put into practice with deliberate intent by the masters of Nazi Germany. 

Francois de Menthon also noted that deportations were meant to provide additional labor for the German war machine, and the fact that the Nazis sought to exterminate their opponents was merely "a natural consequence of the National Socialist doctrine for which man has no intrinsic value unless he serves the German race." All statements made to the Nuremberg Tribunal stressed one of the chief characteristics of crimes against humanity—the fact that the power of the state is placed in the service of criminal policies and practice. However, the jurisdiction of the Nuremberg Tribunal was limited to crimes committed during World War II. Therefore, we must broaden the legal definition of war crimes to include situations that extend beyond that war. The new French criminal code, adopted on 23 July 1992, defines war crimes in the following way: "The deportation, enslavement, or mass-scale and systematic practice of summary executions, abduction of persons following their disappearance, torture, or inhuman acts inspired by political, philosophical racial, or religious motives, and organized for the purpose of implementing a concerted effort against a civilian population group" (emphasis added). 

All these definitions, especially the recent French definition, are relevant to any number of crimes committed by Lenin and above all by Stalin and subsequently by the leaders of all Communist countries, with the exception (we hope) of Cuba and the Nicaragua of the Sandinista's, Nevertheless, the main conclusions are inescapable—Communist regimes have acted "in the name of a state practicing a policy of ideological hegemony." Thus in the name of an ideological belief system were tens of millions of innocent victims systematically butchered, unless of course it is a crime to be middle-class, of noble birth, a kulak, a Ukrainian, or even a worker or a member of the Communist Party. Active intolerance was high on the Communists' agenda. It was Mikhail Tomsky, the leader of the Soviet trade unions, who in the 13 November 1927 issue of Trud (Labor) stated: "We allow other parties to exist. However, the fundamental principle that distinguishes us from the West is as follows: one party rules, and all the others are in jail!" 2 

The concept of a crime against humanity is a complex one and is directly relevant to the crimes under consideration here. One of the most specific is genocide. Following the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, and in order to clarify Article 6c of the Nuremberg Tribunal, crimes against humanity were defined by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide of 9 December 1948 in the following way: "Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." 

The new French criminal code defines genocide still more broadly: "The deed of executing a concerted effort that strives to destroy totally or partially a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, or a group that has been determined on the basis of any other arbitrary criterion" (emphasis added). This legal definition is not inconsistent with the philosophical approach of Andre Frossard, who believes that "it is a crime against humanity when someone is put to death purely by virtue of his or her birth." 3 And in his short but magnificent novel Forever Flowing, Vasily Grossman says of his hero, Ivan Grigorevich, who has returned from the camps, "he had remained exactly what he had been from his birth: a human being."4 That, of course, was precisely why he was singled out in the first place. The French definition helps remind us that genocide comes in many shapes and sizes—it can be racial (as in the case of the Jews), but it can also target social groups. In The Red Terror in Russia, published in Berlin in 1924, the Russian historian and socialist Sergei Melgunov cited Martin Latsis, one of the first leaders of the Cheka (the Soviet political police), as giving the following order on 1 November 1918 to his henchmen: "We don't make war against any people in particular. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. In your investigations don't look for documents and pieces of evidence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or acting against Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots, his education, his training, and his occupation." 5 

Lenin and his comrades initially found themselves embroiled in a merciless "class war," in which political and ideological adversaries, as well as the more recalcitrant members of the general public, were branded as enemies and marked for destruction. The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal and physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute power. This strategy applied not only to groups with opposing political views, but also to such social groups as the nobility, the middle class, the intelligentsia, and the clergy, as well as professional groups such as military officers and the police. Sometimes the Bolsheviks subjected these people to genocide. The policy of "de-Cossackization" begun in 1920 corresponds largely to our definition of genocide: a population group firmly established in a particular territory,  the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women, children, and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over to new, non Cossack occupants. Lenin compared the Cossack's to the Vendee during the French Revolution and gladly subjected them to a program of what Gracchus Babeuf, the "inventor" of modern Communism, characterized in 1795 as "populicide."6 

The "dekulakization" of 1930-1932 repeated the policy of "de-Cossackization" but on a much grander scale. Its primary objective, in accordance with the official order issued for this operation (and the regime's propaganda), was "to exterminate the kulaks as a class." The kulaks who resisted collectivization were shot, and the others were deported with their wives, children, and elderly family members. Although not all kulaks were exterminated directly, sentences of forced labor in wilderness areas of Siberia or the far north left them with scant chance of survival. Several tens of thousands perished there; the exact number of victims remains unknown. As for the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, which resulted from the rural population's resistance to forced collectivization, 6 million died in a period of several months. 

Here, the genocide of a "class" may well be tantamount to the genocide of a "race"—the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's regime "is equal to" the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime. Such arguments in no way detract from the unique nature of Auschwitz—the mobilization of leading-edge technological resources and their use in an "industrial process" involving the construction of an "extermination factory," the use of gas, and cremation. However, this argument highlights one particular feature of many Communist regimes—their systematic use of famine as a weapon. The regime aimed to control the total available food supply and, with immense ingenuity, to distribute food purely on the basis of "merits" and "demerits" earned by individuals. This policy was a recipe for creating famine on a massive scale. Remember that in the period after 1918, only Communist countries experienced such famines, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. And again in the 1980's, two African countries that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist, Ethiopia and Mozambique, were the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines. 

A preliminary global accounting of the crimes committed by Communist regimes shows the following: 

The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without trial, and the murder of hundreds of thousands or rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922.

The famine of 1922, which caused the deaths of 5 million people.

The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossack's in 1920 

• The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930 

• The liquidation of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937-38 

.The deportation of 2 million kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930-1932 

The destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means of an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine in 1932-33 

• The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Baits, Moldovans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944-45 

The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941 

The wholesale deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943 

• The wholesale deportation of the Chechens in 1944 

The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 1944 

The deportation and extermination of the urban population in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978 

• The slow destruction of the Tibetans by the Chinese since 1950 

No list of the crimes committed in the name of Leninism and Stalinism would be complete without mentioning the virtually identical crimes committed by the regimes of Mao Zedong, Kim II Sung, and Pol Pot. 

A difficult epistemological question remains: Should the historian employ the primarily legal categories of "crime against humanity" and "genocide"? Are these concepts not unduly time specific—focusing on the condemnation of Nazism at Nuremberg—for use in historical research aimed at deriving relevant medium-term conclusions? On the other hand, are these concepts not some- what tainted with questionable "values'' that distort the objectivity of historical research? 

First and foremost, the history of the twentieth century has shown us that the Nazis had no monopoly over the use of mass murder by states and party states. The recent experiences in Bosnia and Rwanda indicate that this practice continues as one of the hallmarks of this century. 

Second, although it might not be appropriate to revive historical methods of the nineteenth century, whereby historians performed research more for the purpose of passing judgment than for understanding the issue in question, the immense human tragedies directly caused by certain ideologies and political concepts make it impossible to ignore the humanist ideas implicit in our Judaeo/Christian civilization and democratic traditions—for example, the idea of re- spect for human life. A number of renowned historians readily use the expression "crime against humanity" to describe Nazi crimes, including Jean- Perre Azema in his article "Auschwitz"7 and Pierre Vidal-Naquet on the trial of Paul Touvier. 8 Therefore, it does not seem inappropriate to use such terms and concepts to characterize the crimes committed by Communist regimes.  

In addition to the question of whether the Communists in power were directly responsible for these crimes, there is also the issue of complicity. Article 7(3.77) of the Canadian criminal code, amended in 1987, states that crimes against humanity include infractions of attempting, conspiring, counseling, aiding, and providing encouragement for de facto complicity? This accords with the definition of crimes against humanity in Article 7(3.76) of the same code: "attempting or conspiring to commit, counseling any person to commit, aiding or abetting any person in the commission of, or being an accessory after the fact in relation to the act" (emphasis added). Incredibly, from the 1920's to the 1950's, when hundreds of thousands of people served in the ranks of the Communist International and local sections of the "world party of the revolution," Communists and fellow-travelers around the world warmly approved Lenin's and subsequently Stalin's policies. From the 1950's to the 1970's, hundreds of thousands of people sang the praises of the "Great Helmsman" of the Chinese Revolution and extolled the virtues of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Much closer to our time, there was widespread rejoicing when Pol Pot came to power. 10 Many will say that they "didn't know." Undoubtedly, of course, it was not always easy to learn the facts or to discover the truth, for Communist regimes had mastered the art of censorship as their favorite technique for concealing their true activities. But quite often this ignorance was merely the result of ideologically motivated self-deception. Starting in the 1940's and 1950's, many facts about these atrocities had become public knowledge and undeniable. And although many of these apologists have cast aside their gods of yesterday, they have done so quietly and discreetly. What are we to make of a profoundly amoral doctrine that seeks to stamp out every last trace of civic-mindedness in men's souls, and damn the consequences? 

In 1968 one of the pioneers in the study of Communist terror, Robert Conquest, wrote: "The fact that so many people 'swallowed' [the Great Terror! hook, line, and sinker was probably one of the reasons that the Terror succeeded so well. In particular, the trials would not be so significant had they not received the blessing of some 'independent' foreign commentators. These pundits should be held accountable as accomplices in the bloody politics of the purges or at least blamed for the fact that the political assassinations resumed when the first show trial, regarding Zinoviev in 1936, was given an ill-deserved stamp of approval." 11 If the moral and intellectual complicity of a number of non-Communists is judged by this criterion, what can be said of the complicity of the Communists? Louis Aragon, for one, has publicly expressed regret for having appealed in a 1931 poem for the creation of a Communist political police in France. 12 

Joseph Berger, a former Comintern official who was "purged" and then exiled to the camps, quotes a letter received from a former gulag deportee who remained a Party member even after her return:

My generation of Communists everywhere accepted the Stalinist form of leadership. We acquiesced in the crimes. That is true not only of Soviet Communists, but of Communists all over the world. We, especially the active and leading members of the Party, carry a stain on our consciences individually and collectively. The only way we can erase it is to make sure that nothing of the sort ever happens again. How was all this possible? Did we all go crazy, or have we now become traitors to Communism? The truth is that all of us, including the leaders directly under Stalin, saw these crimes as the opposite of what they were. We believed that they were important contributions to the victory of social- ism. We thought everything that promoted the power politics of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and in the world was good for socialism. We never suspected that conflict between Communist politics and Communist ethics was possible. 13 

Berger, however, tries to have it both ways. "On the other hand, I personally feel that there is a difference between criticizing people for having accepted Stalin's policy, which many Communists did not do, and blaming them for not having prevented his crimes. To suppose that this could have been done by any individual, no matter how important he might have been, is to misunderstand Stalin's byzantine tyranny." 14 Thus Berger has found an excuse for having been in the US.S.R. and for having been caught up in its infernal machine without any means of escape. But what self-deception kept Western European Communists, who had not been directly arrested by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (N.K.V.D, the secret police), blindly babbling away about the system and its leader? Why could they not hear the wake-up call at the very start? In his remarkable work on the Russian Revolution, The Soviet Tragedy, Martin Malia lifts a corner of the curtain when he speaks of "this paradox . . . that . . . it takes a great ideal to produce a great crime." 15 Annie Kriegel, another major student of Communism, insists that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two faces of Communism, as surely as day follows night. 

Tzvetan Todorov offered the first response to this paradox: 

A citizen of a Western democracy fondly imagines that totalitarianism lies utterly beyond the pale of normal human aspirations. And yet, totalitarianism could never have survived so long had it not been able to draw so many people into its fold. There is something else—it is a formidably efficient machine. Communist ideology offers an idealized model for society and exhorts us toward it. The desire to change the world in the name of an ideal is, after all, an essential characteristic of human identity , . . Furthermore, Communist society strips the individual of his responsibilities. It is always "somebody else" who makes the decisions. Remember, individual responsibility can feel like a crushing burden . . . The attraction of a totalitarian system, which has had a powerful allure for many, has its roots in a fear of freedom and responsibility. This explains the popularity of authoritarian regimes (which is Frieh Fromm's thesis in Escape from Freedom). None of this is new; Boethius had the right idea long ago when he spoke of "voluntary servitude."16  

The complicity of those who rushed into voluntary servitude has not always been as abstract and theoretical as it may seem. Simple acceptance and or dissemination of propaganda designed to conceal the truth is invariably a symptom of active complicity. Although it may not always succeed, as is demonstrated by the tragedy in Rwanda, the glare of the spotlight is the only effective response to mass crimes that are committed in secret and kept hidden from prying eyes. 

An analysis of terror and dictatorship—the defining characteristics of Communists in power is no easy task. Jean Kuenstein has defined Stalinism as a combination of Greek tragedy and Oriental despotism. This definition is appealing, but it fails to account for the sheer modernity of the Communist experience, its totalitarian impact distinct from previously existing forms of dictatorship. A comparative synopsis may help to put it in context. 

First, we should consider the possibility that responsibility for the crimes of Communism can be traced to a Russian penchant for oppression. However, the Czarist regime of terror against which the Bolsheviks fought pales in comparison with the horrors committed by the Bolsheviks when they took power. The Czar allowed political prisoners to face a meaningful justice system. The counsel for the defendant could represent his client up to the time of indictment and even beyond, and he could also appeal to national and international public opinion, an option unavailable under Communist regimes. Prisoners and convicts benefited from a set of rules governing the prisons, and the system of imprisonment and deportation was relatively lenient. Those who were deported could take their families, read and write as they pleased, go hunting and fishing, and talk about their "misfortune" with their companions. Lenin and Stalin had firsthand experience of this. Even the events described by Fyodor Dostoevsky in Memoirs from (The House of the Dead, which had such a great impact when it was published, seem tame by comparison with the horrors of Communism. True, riots and insurrections were brutally crushed by the ancient regime. However, from 1825 to 1917 the total number of people sentenced to death in Russia for their political beliefs or activities was 6,360, of whom only 3,932 were executed. This number can be subdivided chronologically into 191 for the years 1825-1905 and 3,741 for 1906-1910. These figures were surpassed by the Bolsheviks in March 1918, after they had been in power for only four months. It follows that Czarist repression was not in the same league as Communist dictatorship.

From the 1920's to the 1940's, Communism set a standard for terror to which fascist regimes could aspire. A glance at the figures for these regimes shows that a comparison may not be as straightforward as it would first appear. Italian Fascism, the first regime of its kind and the first that openly claimed to be "totalitarian," undoubtedly imprisoned and regularly mistreated its political opponents. Although incarceration seldom led to death, during the 1930's Italy had a few hundred political prisoners and several hundred confinati, placed under house arrest on the country's coastal islands. In addition, of course, there were tens of thousands of political exiles. 

Before World War II, Nazi terror targeted several groups. Opponents of the Nazi regime, consisting mostly of Communists, Socialists, anarchists, and trade union activists, were incarcerated in prisons and invariably interned in concentration camps, where they were subjected to extreme brutality. All told, from 1933 to 1939 about 20,000 left-wing militants were killed after trial or without trial in the camps and prisons, These figures do not include the slaughter of other Nazis to settle old scores, as in "The Night of the Long Knives" in June 1934. Another category of victims doomed to die were Germans who did not meet the proper racial criteria of "tall blond Aryans" such as those who were old or mentally or physically defective. As a result of the war, Hitler forged ahead with a euthanasia program —70,000 Germans were gassed between the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1941, when churches began to demand that this program be stopped. The gassing methods devised for this euthanasia program were applied to the third group of victims, the Jews. 

Before World War II, crackdowns against the Jews were widespread; persecution reached its peak during Kristullnacht, with several hundred deaths and 35,000 rounded up for internment in concentration camps. These figures apply only to the period before the invasion of the Soviet Union. Thereafter the full terror of the Nazis was unleashed, producing the following body count- 15 million civilians killed in occupied countries, 6 million Jews, 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.1 million deportees who died in the camps, and several hundred thousand Gypsies. We should add another 8 million who succumbed to the ravages of forced labor and 1.6 million surviving inmates of the concentration camps. 

The Nazi terror captures the imagination for three reasons. First, it touched the lives of Europeans so closely. Second, because the Nazis were vanquished and their leaders prosecuted at Nuremberg, their crimes have been officially exposed and categorized as crimes. And finally, the revelation of the  genocide carried out against the Jews outraged the conscience of humanity by its irrationality, racism, and unprecedented bloodthirstiness. 

Our purpose here is not to devise some kind of macabre comparative system for crunching numbers, some kind of grand total that doubles the horror, some kind of hierarchy of cruelty. But the intransigent facts demonstrate that Communist regimes have victimized approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis. This clear record should provide at least some basis for assessing the similarity between the Nazi regime, which since 1945 has been considered the most viciously criminal regime of this century, and the Communist system, which as late as 1991 had preserved its international legitimacy unimpaired and which, even today, is still in power in certain countries and continues to protect its supporters the world over. And even though many Communist parties have belatedly acknowledged Stalin-ism's crimes, most have not abandoned Lenin's principles and scarcely question their own involvement in acts of terrorism. 

The methods implemented by Lenin and perfected by Stalin and their henchmen bring to mind the methods used by the Nazis, but most often this is because the latter adopted the techniques developed by the former. Rudolf Hess, charged with organizing the camp at Auschwitz and later appointed its commandant, is a perfect example: "The Reich Security I lead Office issued to the commandants a full collection of reports concerning the Russian concentration camps. These described in great detail the conditions in, and organization of, the Russian camps, as supplied by former prisoners who had managed to escape. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Russians, by their massive employment of forced labor, had destroyed whole peoples." 17 However, the fact that the techniques of mass violence and the intensity of their use originated with the Communists and that the Nazis were inspired by them does not imply, in our view, that one can postulate a cause-and-effect relationship between the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of Nazism. 

From the end of the 1920's, the State Political Directorate (G.P.U, the new name for the Checka) introduced a quota method—each region and district had to arrest, deport, or shoot a certain percentage of people who were members of several "enemy" social classes. These quotas were centrally defined under the supervision of the Party. The mania for planning and maintaining statistics was not confined to the economy: it was also an important weapon in the arsenal of terror. From 1920 on, with the victory of the Red Army over the White Army in the Crimea, statistical and sociological methods made an appearance, with victims selected according to precise criteria on the basis of a compulsory questionnaire. The same "sociological" methods were used by the Soviet Union to organize mass deportations and liquidations in the Baltic states and occupied Poland in 1939-1941. As with the Nazis, the transportation of deportees in cattle cars ushered in "aberrations." In 1943 and 1944, in the middle of the war, Stalin diverted thousands of trucks and hundreds of thousands of soldiers serving in the special N.K.V.D troops from the front on a short-term basis in order to deport, the various peoples living in the Caucasus. This genocidal impulse, which aims at "the total or partial destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, or a group that has been determined on the basis of any other arbitrary criterion," was applied by Communist rulers against groups branded as enemies and to entire segments of society, and was pursued to its maximum by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

Efforts to draw parallels between Nazism and Communism on the basis of their respective extermination tactics may give offense to some people. However, we should recall how in Forever Flowing Vasily Grossman, whose mother was killed by the Nazis in the Berdychiv ghetto, who authored the first work on Treblinka, and who was one of the editors of the Black Booh on the extermination of Soviet Jews, has one of his characters describe the famine in Ukraine: "writers kept writing . . . Stalin himself, too: the kulaks are parasites; they are burning grain; they are killing children. And it was openly proclaimed 'that the rage and wrath of the masses must be inflamed against them, they must be destroyed as a class, because they are accursed." He adds: "To massacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings, just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Thus did Lenin and Stalin say: kulaks are not human beings." In conclusion, Grossman says of the children of the kulaks: "That is exactly how the Nazis put the Jewish children into the Nazi gas chambers: 'You are not allowed to live you are all Jews!'" 18

Time and again the focus of the terror was less on targeted individuals than on groups of people. The purpose of the terror was to exterminate a group that had been designated as the enemy. Even though it might be only a small fraction of society, it had to be stamped out to satisfy this genocidal impulse. Thus, the techniques of segregation and exclusion employed in a "class-based totalitarianism" closely resemble the techniques of "race-based totalitarian- ism." The future Nazi society was to be built upon a "pure race," and the future Communist society was to be built upon a proletarian people purified of the dregs of the bourgeoisie. The restructuring of these two societies was envisioned in the same way, even if the crackdowns were different. Therefore, it would be foolish to pretend that Communism is a form of universal-ism. Communism may have a worldwide purpose, but like Nazism it deems a part of humanity unworthy of existence. The difference is that the Communist model is based on the class system, the Nazi model on race and territory Thus the transgressions of Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge pose a fresh challenge for humanity, and particularly for legal scholars and historians: specifically, how do we describe a crime designed to exterminate not merely individuals or opposing groups but entire segments of society on a massive scale for their political and ideological beliefs? A whole new language is needed for this. Some authors in the English-speaking countries use the term "politicide." Or is the term "Communist crimes," suggested by Czech legal scholars, preferable? 

How are we to assess Communism's crimes? What lessons are we to learn from them? Why has it been necessary to wait until the end of the twentieth century for this subject to show up on the academic radar screen? It is undoubtedly the case that the study of Stalinist and Communist terror, when compared to the study of Nazi crimes, has a great deal of catching-up to do (although such research is gaining popularity in Eastern Europe). 

One cannot help noticing the strong contrast between the study of Nazi and Communist crimes. The victors of 1945 legitimately made Nazi crimes — and especially the genocide of the Jews—the central focus of their condemnation of Nazism. A number of researchers around the world have been working on these issues for decades. Thousands of books and dozens of films—most notably Night arid Fog, Shoah, Sophie's Choice, and Schmdlers List—have been devoted to the subject. Raul Hilberg, to name but one example, has centered his major work upon a detailed description of the methods used to put Jews to death in the Third Reich. 19 

Yet scholars have neglected the crimes committed by the Communists. While names such as Himmler and Eichmann are recognized around the world as bywords for twentieth-century barbarism, the names of Feliks Dzerzhinsky,[T.L] Genrikh Yagoda,[T.R] and Nikolai Ezhov[B] languish in obscurity. As for Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minn, and even Stalin, they have always enjoyed a surprising reverence. A French government agency, the National Lottery, was crazy enough to use Stalin and Mao in one of its advertising campaigns. Would anyone even dare to come up with the idea of featuring Hitler or Goebbels in commercials? 

The extraordinary attention paid to Hitler's crimes is entirely justified. It respects the wishes of the surviving witnesses, it satisfies the needs of re- searchers trying to understand these events, and it reflects the desire of moral and political authorities to strengthen democratic values. But the revelations concerning Communist crimes cause barely a stir. Why is there such an awkward silence from politicians? Why such a deafening silence from the academic world regarding the Communist catastrophe, which touched the lives of about one-third of humanity on four continents during a period spanning eighty years? Why is there such widespread reluctance to make such a crucial factor as crime—mass crime, systematic crime, and crime against humanity—a central factor in the analysis of Communism? Is this really something that is beyond human understanding? Or are we talking: about a refusal to scrutinize the subject too closely for fear of learning the truth about it? 

The reasons for this reticence are many and various. First, there is the dictators' understandable urge to erase their crimes and to justify the actions they cannot hide. Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" of 1956 was the first admission of Communist atrocities by a Communist leader. It was also the statement of a tyrant seeking to gloss over the crimes he himself committed when he headed the Ukrainian Communist Party at the height of the terror, crimes that he cleverly attributed to Stalin by claiming that he and his henchmen were merely obeying orders. To cover up the vast majority of Communist offenses, Khrushchev spoke only of victims who were Communists, although they were far fewer in number than the other kind. He defined these crimes with a euphemism, describing them in his conclusion as "abuses committed under Stalin" in order to justify the continuity of the system that retained the same principles, the same structure, and the same people. 

In his inimitable fashion Khrushchev described the opposition he faced while preparing his "Secret Speech" especially from one of Stalin's confidants: 

" Lazar Kaganovich was such a yes-man that he would have cut his own father's throat if Stalin had winked and said it was in the interests of the cause—the Stalinist cause, that is . . . He was arguing against me out of a selfish fear for his own hide. He was motivated entirely by his eagerness to escape am responsibility for what had happened. If crimes had been committed, Kaganovich wanted to make sure his own tracks were covered." 20 The absolute denial of access to archives in Communist countries, the total control of the print and other media as well as of border crossings, the propaganda trumpeting the regime's "successes" and the entire apparatus for keeping information under lock and key were designed primarily to ensure that the awful truth would never see the light of day. 

Not satisfied with the concealment of their misdeeds, the tyrants systematically attacked all who dared to expose their crimes. After World War II this became starkly clear on two occasions in France. From January to April 1949, the "trial" of Viktor Kravchenko[L]—a former senior official who wrote I Chose Freedom, in which he described Stalin's dictatorship—was conducted in Pans in the pages of the Communist magazine Les letlres francaiscs, which was managed by Louis Aragon and which heaped abuse on Kravchenko. From November 1950 to January 1951, again in Paris, Les letlres franchises held another "trial" —of David Rousset[R], an intellectual and former Trotskvite who was deported to Germany by the Nazis and who in 1946 received the Renaudot Prize for his book The World of Concentration Camps. On 12 November 1949 Rousset urged all former Nazi camp deportees to form a commission of inquiry into the Soviet camp system and was savagely attacked by the Communist press, which denied the existence of such camps. Following Rousset's call, Margaret Buber-Neumann recounted her experience of being twice deported to concentration camps—once to a Nazi camp and once to a Soviet camp—in an article published on 25 February 1950 in Figaro iitteratre, u An Inquiry on Soviet Camps: Who Is Worse, Satan or Beelzebub?" 

Despite these efforts to enlighten humankind, the tyrants continued to wheel out heavy artillery to silence all those who stood in their way anywhere in the world. The Communist assassins set out to incapacitate, discredit, and intimidate their adversaries. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Aleksandr Zinoviev, and Feomd Plyushch were expelled from their own country; Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky; General Petro Hryhorenko was thrown into a psychiatric hospital; and Georgi Markov was assassinated with an umbrella that fired pellets filled with poison. 

In the face of such incessant intimidation and cover-ups, the victims grew reluctant to speak out and were effectively prevented from reentering mainstream society, where their accusers and executioners were ever-present. Vasily Grossman eloquently describes their despair. 21 In contrast to the Jewish Holocaust, which the international Jewish community has actively commemorated, it has been impossible for victims of Communism and their legal advocates to keep the memory of the tragedy alive, and any requests for commemoration or demands for reparation are brushed aside. 

When the tyrants could no longer hide the truth—the firing squads, the concentration camps, the man-made famine—they did their best to justify these atrocities by glossing them over. After admitting the use of terror, they justified it as a necessary aspect of revolution through the use of such catchphrases as "When you cut down a forest, the shavings get blown away" or "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Vladimir Bukovsky retorted that he had seen the broken eggs, but no one he knew had ever tasted the omelet! Perhaps the single greatest evil was the perversion of language. As if by magic, the concentration-Lamp system was turned into a "reeducation system," and the tyrants became "educators" who transformed the people of the old society into "new people." The zeks, a term used for Soviet concentration camp prisoners, were forcibly "invited" to place their trust in a system that enslaved them. In China the concentration-camp prisoner is called a "student," and he is required to study the correct thoughts of the Party and to reform his own faulty thinking. 

As is usually the case, a lie is not, strictly speaking, the opposite of the truth, and a lie will generally contain an element of truth. Perverted words are situated in a twisted vision that distorts the landscape; one is confronted with a myopic social and political philosophy. Attitudes twisted by Communist propaganda are easy to correct, but it is monumentally difficult to instruct false prophets in the ways of intellectual tolerance. The first impression is always the one that lingers. Like martial artists, the Communists, thanks to their incomparable propaganda strength grounded in the subversion of language, successfully turned the tables on the criticisms leveled against their terrorist tactics, continually uniting the ranks of their militants and sympathizers by renewing the Communist act of faith. Thus they held fast to their fundamental principle of ideological belief, as formulated by Tertullian for his own era: "I believe, because it is absurd."

Like common prostitutes, intellectuals found themselves inveigled into counter-propaganda operations. In 1928 Maksim Gorky accepted an invitation to go on an "excursion" to the Solovetski Islands, an experimental concentration camp that would '"metastasize" (to use Solzhenitsyn's word) into the Gulag system. On his return Gorky wrote a book extolling the glories of the Solovetski camps and the Soviet government. A French writer, Henri Barbusse, recipient of the 1916 Prix Goncourt, did not hesitate to praise Stalin's regime for a fee. His 1928 book on "marvelous Georgia" made no mention of the massacre carried out there in 1921 by Stalin and his henchman Sergo Ordzhonikidze.[T.L] It also ignored Lavrenti Beria,[T.R] head of the N.K.V.D, who was noteworthy for his Machiavellian sensibility and his sadism. In 1935 Barbusse brought out the first official biography of Stalin. More recently Maria Antonietta Macciochi spoke gushingly about Mao Zedong, and Alain Peyrefitte echoed the same sentiments to a lesser degree, while Danielle Mitterrand chimed in to praise the deeds of Fidel Castro. Cupidity, spinelessness, vanity, fascination with power, violence, and revolutionary fervor—whatever the motivation, totalitarian dictatorships have always found plenty of die hard supporters when they had need of them, and the same is true of Communist as of other dictatorships. 

Confronted with this onslaught of Communist propaganda, the West has long labored under an extraordinary self-deception, simultaneously fueled by naivete in the face of a particularly devious system, by the fear of Soviet power, and by the cynicism of politicians. There was self-deception at the meeting in Yalta, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin in return for a solemn undertaking that the latter would hold free elections at the earliest opportunity. Realism and resignation had a rendezvous with destiny in Moscow in December 1944, when General Charles de Gaulle abandoned hapless Poland to the devil in return for guarantees of social and political peace, duly assured by Maurice Thorez on his return to Paris. 

This self-deception was a source of comfort and was given quasi-legitimacy by the widespread belief among Communists (and many leftists) in the West that while these countries were "building socialism," the Communist "Utopia," a breeding ground for social and political conflicts, would remain safely distant. Simone Weil epitomized this pro-Communist trendiness when she said, "revolutionary workers are only too thankful to have a state backing them a state that gives an official character, legitimacy, and reality to their actions as only a state can, and that at the same time is sufficiently far away from them geographically to avoid seeming oppressive." 22 Communism was supposedly showing its true colors it claimed to be an emissary of the Enlightenment, of a tradition of social and human emancipation, of a dream of "true equality," and of "happiness for all" as envisioned by Gracchus Babeuf. And paradoxically, it was this image of "enlightenment" that helped keep the true nature of its evil almost entirely concealed. 

Whether intentional or not, when dealing with this ignorance of the criminal dimension of Communism, our contemporaries' indifference to their fellow humans can never be forgotten. It is not that these individuals are cold hearted. On the contrary, in certain situations they can draw on vast untapped reserves of brotherhood, friendship, affection, even love. However, as Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out, "remembrance of our own woes prevents us from perceiving the suffering of others." 23 And at the end of both world wars, no European or Asian nation was spared the endless grief and sorrow of licking its own wounds. France's own hesitancy to confront the history of the dark years of the Occupation is a compelling illustration in and of itself The history, or rather non-history, of the Occupation continues to overshadow the French conscience. We encounter the same pattern, albeit to a lesser degree, with the history of the "Nazi" period in Germany, the "Fascist" period in Italy, the "Franco" era in Spain, the civil war in Greece, and so on. In this century of blood and iron, everyone has been too preoccupied with his own misfortunes to worry much about the misfortunes of others. 

However, there are three more specific reasons for the cover-up of the criminal aspects of Communism. The first is the fascination with the whole notion of revolution itself. In today's world, breast-beating over the idea of "revolution," as dreamed about in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is far from over. The icons of revolution—the red flag, the International, and the raised fist, reemerge with each social movement and on a grand scale. Che Guevara is back in fashion. Openly revolutionary groups are active and enjoy every legal right to state their views, hurling abuse on even the mildest criticisms of crimes committed by their predecessors and only too eager to spout the eternal verities regarding the "achievements" of Lenin, Trotsky, or Mao. This revolutionary fervor is not embraced solely by revolutionaries. Many contributors to this book themselves used to believe in Communist propaganda. 

The second reason is the participation of the Soviet Union in the victory over Nazism, which allowed the Communists to use fervent patriotism as a mask to conceal their latest plans to take power into their own hands. From June 1941, Communists in all occupied countries commenced an active and frequently armed resistance against Nazi or Italian occupation forces. Like resistance fighters everywhere, they paid the price for their efforts, with thou- sands being executed by firing squad, slaughtered, or deported. And they "played the martyr" in order to sanctify the Communist cause and to silence all criticism of it. In addition to this, during the Resistance many non- Communists became comrades-in-arms, forged bonds of solidarity, and shed their blood alongside their Communist fellows. As a result of this past these non-Communists may have been willing to turn a blind eye to certain things. In France, the Gaul list attitude was often influenced by this shared memory and was a factor behind the politics of General dc Gaulle, who tried to play off the Soviet Union against the Americans. 24 

The Communists  participation in the war and in the victory over Nazism institutionalized the whole notion of anti-fascism as an article of faith for the left. The Communists, of course, portrayed themselves as the best representatives and defenders of this anti-fascism. For Communism, anti-fascism became a brilliantly effective label that could be used to silence one's opponents quickly. Francois Furet wrote some superb articles on the subject. The defeated Nazism was labeled the "Supreme Evil" by the Allies, and Communism thus automatically wound up on the side of Good. This was made crystal clear during the Nuremberg trials, where Soviet jurists were among the prosecutors. Thus a veil was drawn over embarrassing antidemocratic episodes, such as the German-Soviet pact of 1939 and the massacre at Katyn. Victory over the Nazis was supposed to demonstrate the superiority of the Communist system. In the Europe liberated by the British and the Americans (which was spared the sufferings of occupation) this was done for propaganda purposes to arouse a keen sense of gratitude to the Red Army and a sense of guilt for the sacrifices made by the peoples of the US.S.R. The Communists did not hesitate to play upon the sentiments of Europeans in spreading the Communist message. 

By the same token, the ways in which Eastern Europe was "liberated" by the Red Army remain largely unknown in the West, where historians assimilate two very different kinds of "liberation", one leading to the restoration of democracies, the other paving the way for the advent of dictatorships. In Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet system succeeded the Thousand Year Reich, and Witold Gombrowicz neatly captured the tragedy facing these peoples: "The end of the war did not bring liberation to the Poles. In the battlegrounds of Central Europe, it simply meant swapping one form of evil for another, Hitler's henchmen for Stalin's. While sycophants cheered and rejoiced at the 'emancipation of the Polish people from the feudal yoke,' the same lit cigarette was simply passed from hand to hand in Poland and continued to burn the skin of people." 25 Therein lay the fault line between two European folk memories. However, a number of publications have lifted the curtain to show  how the US.S.R. "liberated" the Poles, Germans, Czechs, and Slovaks from Nazism. 26 

The final reason for the gentle treatment of Communism is subtler and a little trickier to explain. 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 anti-fascism on a more systematic basis. The specter of "the filthy beast whose stomach is fertile again" to use Bertolt Brecht's famous phrase—was invoked incessantly and constantly. 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. After all, it seems scarcely plausible that the victors who had helped bring about the destruction of a genocidal apparatus might themselves have put the very same methods into practice. When faced with this paradox, people generally preferred to bury their heads in the sand. 

The first turning point in the official recognition of Communist crimes came on the evening of 24 February 1956, when First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev took the podium at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the C.P.S.U The proceedings were conducted behind closed doors; only delegates to the Congress were present. In absolute silence, stunned by what they were hearing, the delegates listened as the first secretary of the Party systematically dismantled the image of the "little father of the peoples," of the "genius Stalin," who for thirty years had been the hero of world Communism. This report, immortalized as Khrushchev's "Secret Speech," was one of the watersheds in the life of contemporary Communism. For the first time, a high-ranking Communist leader had officially acknowledged, albeit only as a tactical concession, that the regime that assumed power in 1917 had undergone a criminal "deviation." 

Khrushchev's motivations for breaking one of the great taboos of the Soviet regime were numerous. Khrushchev's primary aim was to attribute the crimes of Communism only to Stalin, thus circumscribing the evil, and to eradicate it once and for all in an effort to salvage the Communist regime. A determination to carry out an attack on Stalin's clique, which stood in the way of Khrushchev's power and believed in the methods practiced by their former boss, entered equally into his decision. Beginning in June 1957, these men were systematically removed from office. However, for the first time since 1934, the act of "being put to death politically" was not followed by an actual death, and this telling detail itself illustrates that Khrushchev's motives were more complex. Having been the boss of Ukraine for years and, in this capacity, having carried out and covered up the slaughter of innocent civilians on a massive scale, he may have grown weary of all this bloodshed. In his memoirs, in which he was naturally concerned with portraying himself in a flattering light, Khrushchev recalled his feelings: "The Congress will end, and resolutions will be passed, all as a matter of form. But then what? The hundreds and thousands of people who were shot will stay on our consciences," As a result, he severely reprimanded his colleagues: 

What are we going to do about all those who were arrested and eliminated? . . . We now know that the people who suffered during the repressions were innocent. We have indisputable proof that, far from being enemies of the people, they were honest men and women, devoted to the Party, dedicated to the Revolution, and committed to the Leninist cause and to the building of" Socialism and Communism in the Soviet Union ... I still think it's impossible to cover everything up. Sooner or later people will be coming out of the prisons and the camps, and they'll return to the cities. They'll tell their relatives, friends, and comrades, and everyone back home what happened . . . we're obliged to speak candidly to the delegates about the conduct of the Party leadership during the years in question . . . How can we pretend not to know what happened ? We know there was a reign of repression and arbitrary rule in the Party, and We must tell the Congress what we know ... In the life of anyone who has committed a crime, there comes a moment when a confession will assure him leniency if not exculpation.27 

Among some of the men who had had a hand in the crimes perpetrated under Stalin and who generally owed their promotions to the extermination of their predecessors in office, a certain kind of remorse took hold—a lukewarm remorse, a self-interested remorse, the remorse of a politician, but remorse nonetheless. It was necessary for someone to put a stop to the slaughter. Khrushchev had the courage to do this even if, in 1956, he sent Soviet tanks into Budapest. 

In 1961, during the Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev recalled not only the victims who were Communists but all of Stalin's victims and even proposed that a monument be erected in their memory. At this point Khrushchev may have overstepped the invisible boundary beyond which the very raison d'etre of Communism was being challenged—namely, the absolute monopoly on power reserved for the Communist Party. The monument never saw the light of day. In 1962 the first secretary authorized the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Dermovkh, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsvn. On 24 October 1964 Khrushchev was stripped of his powers, but his life was spared, and he died in obscurity in 1971. 

There is a substantial degree of scholarly consensus regarding the importance of the "Secret Speech," which represented a fundamental break in Communism's twentieth-century trajectory. Francois Furet, on the verge of quitting the French Communist Party in 1954, wrote these words on the subject: 

Now all of a sudden the "Secret Speech" of February 1956 had singlehandedly shattered the Communist idea then prevailing around the world. The voice that denounced Stalin's crimes did not come from the West but from Moscow, and from the "holy of holies" in Moscow, the Kremlin. It was not the voice of a Communist who had been ostracized but the voice of the leading Communist in the world, the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Thus, instead of being tainted by the suspicion that was invariably leveled at accusations made by ex-Communists, Khrushchev's remarks gained the luster that reflected glory upon its leader . . . The extraordinary power of the "Secret Speech" on the mind stemmed from the fact that it did not have any opponents. 28 

This event was especially paradoxical inasmuch as a number of contemporaries had long warned the Bolsheviks about the inherent dangers of this course of action. From 1917 to 1918 disgruntlement arose even within the socialist movement itself, including among believers in the "great light from the East," who were suddenly relentless in their criticism of the Bolsheviks. Essentially the dispute centered upon the methods used by Lenin: violence, crime, and terror. From the 1920's to the 1950's, while the dark side of Bolshevism was being exposed by a number of witnesses, victims, and skilled observers (as well as in countless articles and other publications), people had to bide their time until the Communist rulers would recognize this themselves. Alas, the significance of this undoubtedly important development was misinterpreted by the growing body of public opinion as a recognition of the errors of Communism. This was indeed a misinterpretation, since the "Secret Speech" tackled only the question of Communists as victims; but at least this was a step in the right direction. It was the first confirmation of the testimony by witnesses and of previous studies, and it corroborated long-standing suspicions that Communism was responsible for creating a colossal tragedy in Russia.

The leaders of many "fraternal parties" were initially unconvinced of the need to jump on Khrushchev's bandwagon. After some delay, a few leaders in other countries did follow Khrushchev's lead in exposing these atrocities. However, it was not until 1979 that the Chinese Communist Party divided Mao's policies between "great merits" which lasted until 1957, and "great errors," which came afterward. The Vietnamese contented themselves with oblique references to the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot. As for Castro, the atrocities committed under him have been denied. 

Before Khrushchev's speech, denunciation of crimes committed by Communists came only from their enemies or from Trotskyite dissidents or anarchists; and such denunciations had not been especially effective. The desire to bear witness was as strong among the survivors of Communist massacres as it had been among those who survived the Nazi slaughters. However, the survivors were few and far between, especially in France, where tangible experience of the Soviet concentration-camp system had directly affected only a few isolated groups, such as a "In Spite of Ourselves," from Alsace-Lorraine.29 Most of the time, however, the witness statements and the work carried out by independent commissions, such as David Roussct's International Commission on the Concentration Camp System and the Commission to Find the Truth about Stalin's Crimes, have been buried beneath an avalanche of Communist propaganda, aided and abetted by a silence born of cowardliness or indifference. This silence generally managed to win out over the sporadic moments ol self-awareness resulting from the appearance of a new analytical work (such as Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago) or an irreproachable eyewitness account (such as Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales and Pin Yathay's Stay Alive, My Son).30 Regrettably, it was most tenacious in Western societies whenever the phenomenon of Communism came under the microscope. Until now they have refused to face the reality that the Communist system, albeit in varying degrees, possessed fundamentally criminal underpinnings. By refusing to acknowledge this, they were co-conspirators in "the lie," as perhaps best summed up by Friedrich Nietzsche: "Men believe in the truth of anything so long as they see that others strongly believe it is true.'' 

Despite widespread reluctance to confront the issue, a number of observers have risen to the challenge. From the 1920's to the 1950's, lor want of more reliable data (which were assiduously concealed by the Soviet regime) researchers were wholly reliant on information provided by defectors. Not only were these eyewitness accounts subject to the normal skepticism with which historians treat such testimony; they were also systematically discredited by sympathizers of the Communist system, who accused the defectors of being motivated by vengeance or of being the tools of anti-Communist powers. Who would have thought, in 1959, that a description of the Gulag could be provided by a high-ranking KGB defector, as in the book by Paul Barton?-" And who would have thought of consulting Barton himself, an exile from Czechoslovakia whose real name was Jin Veltrusky, who was one of the organizers of the anti-Nazi insurrections in Prague in 1945 and who was forced to flee his country in 1948? Yet anyone who confronts the information held in recently opened classified archives will find that the accounts provided in 1959 were totally accurate. 

In the 1960's and 1980's, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and later the "Red Wheel" cycle on the Russian Revolution produced a quantum shift in public opinion. Precisely because it was literature, and from a master craftsman, The Gulag Archipelago captured the true nature of an unspeakable system. However, even Solzhenitsyn had trouble piercing the veil. In 1975 one journalist from a major French daily compared Solzhenitsyn to Pierre Laval, Jacques Doriot, and Marcel Deat, "who welcomed the Nazis as liberators."32 Nonetheless, his account was instrumental in exposing the system in much the same way that Shalamov brought Kolyma to life and Pin Yathay laid bare the atrocities in Cambodia. More recently still, Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the leading Soviet dissidents under Leonid Brezhnev, cried out in protest in Reckoning with Moscow, demanding the establishment of a new Nuremberg Tribunal to judge the criminal activities of the Communist regime. His book enjoyed considerable success in the West. At the same time, however, publications rehabilitating Stalin began to appear. 33 

At the end of the twentieth century, what motivation impels us to explore an issue so mired in tragedy, confusion, and controversy? Today, archives confirm these sporadic accounts of yesteryear, but they also allow us to go a step further. The internal archives maintained by the repressive apparatuses of the former Soviet Union, of the former u people\s democracies," and of Cambodia bring to light the ghastly truth of the massive and systematic nature of the terror, which all too often resulted in full-scale crimes against humanity. The time has come to take a scholarly approach to this subject by documenting hard facts and by illuminating the political and ideological issues that obscure the matter at hand, the key issue that all these observers have raised: What is the true significance of crime in the Communist system? 

From this perspective, what scholarly support can we count on? In the first place, our methods reflect our sense of duty to history. A good historian leaves no stone unturned. No other factors or considerations, be they political, ideological, or personal, should hinder the historian from engaging in the quest for knowledge, the unearthing and interpretation of facts, especially when these facts have been long and deliberately buried in the immense recesses of government archives and the conscience of the people. This history of Communist terror is one of the major chapters in the history of Europe and is directly linked to the two goals of the study of historical writing on totalitarianism. After all, we all know about the Hitlerian brand of totalitarianism; but we must not forget that there was also a Leninist and Stalinist version. It is no longer good enough to write partial histories that ignore the Communist brand of totalitarianism. It is untenable to draw a veil over the issue to ensure that the history of Communism is narrowed to its national, social, and cultural dimensions. The justice of this argument is amply confirmed by the fact that the phenomenon of totalitarianism was not limited to Europe and the Soviet period. The same applies to Maoist China, North Korea, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. Each national Communism has been linked by an umbilical cord to the Soviet womb, with its goal of expanding the worldwide movement. The history with which we are dealing is the history of a phenomenon that has spread throughout the world and that concerns all of humanity. 

The second purpose of this book is to serve as a memorial. There is a moral obligation to honor the memory of the innocent and anonymous victims of a juggernaut that has systematically sought to erase even their memory. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism's center of power in Moscow, Europe, the continent that played host to the twentieth century's many tragedies, has set itself the task of reconstructing popular memory. This book is our contribution to that effort. The authors of this book carry that memory within themselves. Two of our contributors have a particular attachment to Central Europe, while the others are connected by firsthand experience with the theory and practice of revolution in 1968 or more recently. 

This book, as both memorial and history, covers very diverse settings. It touches on countries in which Communism had almost no practical influence, either on society or on government power—Great Britain, Australia, Belgium, and others. Elsewhere Communism would show up as a powerful source of fear—in the United States after 1946—or as a strong movement (even if it never actually seized power there), as in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal. In still other countries, where it had lost its decades-long grip on power, Communism is again reasserting itself—in Eastern Europe and Russia. Finally, its small flame is wavering in countries in which Communism still formally prevails—China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. 

Others may have different perspectives on the issues of history and memory. In countries in which Communism had little influence or was merely dreaded, these issues will require a simple course of study and understanding. The countries that actually experienced the Communist system will have to address the issue of national reconciliation and decide whether the former Communist rulers are to be punished. In this connection, the reunified Germany may represent the most surprising and "miraculous" example—one need only think of the Yugoslav disaster by way of contrast. However, the former Czechoslovakia—now the Czech Republic and Slovakia—Poland, and Cambodia alike confront considerable trauma and suffering in their memory and history of Communism. In such places a modicum of amnesia, whether conscious or unconscious, may seem indispensable in helping to heal the spiritual, mental, emotional, personal, and collective wounds inflicted by a half-century or more of Communism. Where Communism still clings to power, the tyrants and their successors have either systematically covered up their actions, as in Cuba and China, or have continued to promote terror as a form of government, as in North Korea. 

The responsibility for preserving history and memory undoubtedly has a moral dimension. Those whom we condemn may respond, "Who has given you the authority to say what is Good and what is Bad?" According to the criteria proposed here, this issue was addressed well by the Catholic Church when Pope Pius XI condemned Nazism and Communism respectively in the encyclicals Mil Rrennemier Snrg* of 14 March 1937 and Diniii rciiemptoris of 19 March 1937. The latter proclaimed that God endowed humanity with certain rights, "the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to the necessary means of existence; the right to pursue one's ultimate goal in the path marked out for him by God; the right of association, and the right to possess and use property." Even though there is certain hypocrisy in the church's pronouncement against the excessive enrichment of one class of people at the expense of others, the importance of the pope's appeal for the respect of human dignity is beyond question. 

As early as 1931, Pius XI had proclaimed in the encyclical Quadragesima anno; "Communism teaches and seeks two objectives: unrelenting class warfare and the complete eradication of private ownership. Not secretly or by hidden methods does it do this, but publicly, openly, and by employing any means possible, even the most violent. To achieve these objectives there is nothing it is afraid to do, nothing for which it has respect or reverence. When it comes to power, it is ferocious in its cruelty and inhumanity. The horrible slaughter and destruction through which it has laid waste to vast regions of Eastern Europe and Asia give evidence of this." Admittedly, these words originated from an institution that for several centuries had systematically justified the murder of non-Christians, spread the Inquisition, stilled freedom of thought, and supported dictatorial regimes such as those of General Francisco Franco and Antonio Salazar. 

However, even if the church was functioning in its capacity as a guardian of morality, how is a historian to respond when confronted by a "heroic" saga of Communist partisans or bv a heartbreaking account from their victims? In his Memoirs Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand wrote: "When in the silence of abjection, no sound can be heard save that of the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; when all tremble before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to merit his displeasure, the historian appears, entrusted with the vengeance of the people. Nero prospers in vain, for Tacitus has already been born within the Empire." 34 Far be it from us to advocate the cryptic concept of the "vengeance of the people." Chateaubriand no longer believed in this idea by the end of his life. However, at some modest level and almost despite himself, the historian can speak on behalf of those who have had their voices silenced as a result of terror. The historian is there to produce works of scholarship, and his first task is to establish the facts and data that will then become knowledge. Moreover, the historian's relationship to the history of Communism is an unusual one: Historians are obligated to chronicle the historiography of "the lie." And even if the opening of archives has provided them with access to essential materials, historians must guard against naivete in the face of a number of complicated factors that are deviously calculated to stir up controversy. Nonetheless, this kind of historical knowledge cannot be seen in isolation from certain fundamental principles, such as respect for the rules of a representative democracy and, above all, respect for life and human dignity. This is the yardstick that historians use to "judge" the actors on the stage of history. 

For these general reasons, no work of history or human memory can remain untouched by personal motives. Some of the contributors to this book were not always strangers to the fascinations of Communism. Sometimes they themselves took part (even if only on a modest scale) in the Communist system, either in the orthodox Leninist-Stalinist school or in its related or dissident varieties (Trotskyite, Maoist). And if they still remain closely wedded to the left—or, rather, precisely because they are still wedded to the left—it is neces- sary to take a closer look at the reasons for their self-deception. This mindset has led them down a certain intellectual pathway, characterized by the choice of topics they study, by their scholarly publications, and by the journals (such as La nouvelle alternative and Commumsme) in which they publish. This book can do no more than provide an impetus for this particular type of reassessment. If these leftists pursue the task conscientiously, they will show that they too have a right to be heard on this issue, rather than leaving it to the increasingly influential extreme right wing. The crimes of Communism need to be judged from the standpoint of democratic values, not from the standpoint of ultra-nationalist or fascist philosophies. 

This approach calls for cross-country analysis, including comparisons of China and the US.S.R., Cuba and Vietnam, and others. Alas, the documents currently available are decidedly mixed in quantity and quality; in some cases the archives have not yet been opened. However, we felt that we should carry on regardless, confining ourselves to facts that are crystal-clear and beyond question. We want this book to be a groundbreaking work that will lay a broad foundation for further study and thought by others. 

This book contains many words but few pictures. The dearth of pictures is one of the more delicate issues involved in the cover-up of Communist crimes. In a media-saturated global society, the photographed or televised image has become the fount of "truth." Alas, we have only a handful of rare archival photographs of the Gulag and the iaogai. There are no photographs of dekulakization or of the famine during the Great Leap Forward. The victorious powers at Nuremberg could at least photograph and film the thousands of bodies found at Bergen-Belsen. Those investigators also found photographs that had been taken by the tyrants themselves—for example, the picture of a Nazi shooting point blank at a woman with an infant in her arms. No such parallels existed in the darkness of the Communist world, where terror had been organized in strictest secrecy. 

Readers may feel less than satisfied with the few photographic documents assembled here. They will need time to read, page after page, about the ordeal to which millions of people were subjected. They will have to make an effort to imagine the scale of the tragedy and to realize and appreciate how it will leave its mark on the history of the world for decades to come. Then readers must ask themselves the essential question, "Why?" Why did Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and others believe it necessary to exterminate all those whom they had branded as "enemies"? What made them imagine they could violate one of the basic tenets of civilization, "Thou shall not kill"? We will try, through this book, to answer that question.

A State against Its People: 

Violence, Repression, and 

Terror in the Soviet Union 

By Nicolas Werth

"With the fall of Communism, the necessity of demonstrating the 'historically inevitable' character of the Great Socialist October Revolution faded into the background, and 1917 could at last become a 'normal' historical event. Unfortunately, historians, like everyone else in our society, seem unwilling to break with the founding myth of Year Zero, of the year when it all seemed to begin the happiness or misery of the Russian People." 

These words, by a contemporary Russian historian, serve to illustrate an idea that has become a constant theme, More than eighty years after the event, the battle for control over the story of 1917 continues to rage. 

For one historical school, which includes the proponents of what we might term the "liberal" version of events, the October Revolution was nothing more than a putsch imposed on a passive society. For these historians, October was the result of a clever conspiracy dreamed up by a handful of resourceful and cynical fanatics who had no real support anywhere else in the country. Today this is the preferred version of events for almost all Russian historians, as well as for the cultured elite and the leaders of post-Communist Russia. Deprived of all social and historical weight, the October Revolution of 1917 is reread as an accident that changed the course of history, diverting a prosperous, hard- working prerevolutionary Russia, well on its way to democracy, from its natural course. This view is defended quite loudly and fiercely, and as long as there exists a remarkable continuity in the power structure of post-Soviet Russia (nearly all of whose leaders are former Communist officials), there is a clear benefit to distancing present Russian society from the "monstrous Soviet parenthesis." All too clearly, it serves to liberate Russian society from any burden of guilt, and it marks a break with those obvious, public acts of contrition elicited by the painful rediscovery of Stalinism during the perestroiku years. If it can be shown that the Bolshevik coup d'etat of 1917 was nothing more than an accident, it follows that the Russian people were the collective innocent victims of these events. 

Alternatively, Soviet historiography has attempted to demonstrate that the events of October 1917 were the logical, foreseeable, and inevitable culmination of a process of liberation undertaken by the masses, who consciously rallied to Bolshevism. In its various forms, this current of historiography has connected the story of 1917 to the issue of the legitimacy of the whole Soviet regime. If the Great Socialist October Revolution was the result of the inexorable march of history, and if it was an event that conveyed a message of emancipation to the entire world, then the Soviet political system and the state institutions that resulted from the revolution, despite the errors of the Stalinist period, were all necessarily legitimate. The fall of the Soviet regime naturally brought both a wholesale delegitimarion of the October Revolution and the disappearance of the traditional Marxist view, which in its turn was consigned, in the famous Bolshevik formula, to "the dustbin of history." Nonetheless, like the memory of the Stalinist terror, the memory of the Marxist version of events lives on, perhaps even more vividly in the West than it does in the former U.S.S.R. 

Rejecting both the liberal view and Marxist dogma, a third historiographic current has recently attempted to remove ideology from the history of the Russian Revolution altogether, in order to make clear, in the words of Marc Ferro, "why the uprising of October 1917 was simultaneously a mass movement and an event in which so few people actually took part." Among the many questions arising from the events of 1917, historians who refuse to accept the dominant oversimplified liberal view of events have identified some key problems. What role was played by the militarization of the economy and by the social unrest following from the entry of the Russian empire into World War I? Did a specific current of violence emerge that paved the way for political violence exercised against society in general? How did it come about that an essentially popular and plebeian movement, which was profoundly anti-authoritarian and anti-state, brought to power the most dictatorial and most statist of political groups? Finally, what linkage can be established between the undeniable radicalization of Russian society throughout the year 1917 and the specific phenomenon of Bolshevism? 

With the passage of time, and as a result of much recent stimulating and lively debate among historians, the October Revolution of 1917 now appears as the momentary convergence of two movements: on the one hand the carefully organized seizure of power by a party that differed radically in its practices, its ideology, and its organization from all other participants in the revolutionary process; and on the other a vast social revolution, which took many forms. The social revolution had many facets, including an immensely powerful and deep rooted movement of rebellion among the peasantry, a rebellion whose origins stretched far back into Russian history and which was marked not simply by a hatred of the landowners, but also by profound distrust of both the city and the outside world in general—a distrust, in practice, of any form of state intervention. 

The summer and autumn of 1917 thus appear as the culmination of the great cycle of revolts that began in 1902, and whose first real effects were felt from 1905 to 1907. The year 1917 was a decisive stage in the great agrarian revolution, a confrontation between the peasantry and the great landowners over the ownership of land, and, in the eyes of the peasants, the final longed-for realization of the "Black-Earth partition," or distribution of land according to the number of mouths to be fed in each family. But it was also an important stage in the confrontation between the peasantry and the state, in which the peasantry rejected all control by the city over the countryside. Seen from this point of view, 1917 was no more than a stage in the series of confrontations that continued in 1918-1922 and 1929-1933, and that ended in total defeat for the countryside as a result of enforced collectivization. 

Throughout 1917, at the same time that the peasant revolution was gaining momentum, a process of fundamental decay was taking place in the army, which was made up of more than 10 million peasant soldiers mobilized to fight a war whose significance escaped them. Russian generals unanimously deplored the lack of patriotism among these peasant soldiers, whose civic horizons seldom extended beyond the boundaries of their own rural communities. 

A third basic movement arose within the politically active industrial working class, highly concentrated in the big cities, which accounted for scarcely 3 percent of the working population. The urban milieu distilled all the social contradictions arising from a process of economic modernization that had lasted no more than a single generation. From this environment was born a movement aimed at the protection of the rights of workers, understood through a few key political slogans such as "workers power" and "power to the Soviets." 

The fourth and final movement originated in the rapid emancipation of the diverse nations under imperial Russian rule. Many of these nations demanded first autonomy, then independence. 

Each of these movements progressed at its own pace, according to its own internal dynamic; and each had its own specific aspirations, aspirations that clearly were not reducible to Bolshevik slogans or the political activities of that party. But each of these became a catalyst for the destruction of traditional institutions and the erosion of all forms of authority. For a brief but decisive instant in October 1917, the Bolshevik revolt—the action of a political minority acting in what was effectively a political vacuum—coincided with the aspirations of all these other movements, despite their disparate medium- and long term objectives. For a short time the political coup d'etat and social revolution coincided, or, more precisely, were telescoped together, before they moved apart again in the ensuing decades of dictatorship. 

The social and national movements that exploded in the autumn of 1917 developed out of a particular conjunction of circumstances, including severe economic crisis, upheavals in social relations, the general failure of the apparatus of the state, and, perhaps most important, a total war that contributed to the general climate of brutality. 

Far from reviving the Czarist regime and reinforcing the imperfect cohesion of society, World War 1 ruthlessly revealed the fragility of an autocracy already shaken by the revolution of 1905-06 and progressively weakened by political vacillation between insufficient concessions and reversions to stubborn conservatism. The war also underscored the weaknesses of an incomplete economic modernization dependent on regular inflows of foreign capital, specialists, and technology. Finally, the war reinforced the deep divide between urban Russia, the seat of power and industry, and rural Russia, the locus of largely independent and traditional communities. 

Like all the other participants in the conflict, the Czarist government had counted on a quick war. Russia's lack of access to the sea and the economic blockade brutally revealed the extent of the country's dependence on foreign suppliers. The loss of its western provinces after the 1915 invasion by Austro- Hungarian forces deprived Russia of the products of Poland's highly developed industry. The domestic economy did not long withstand the test of war: a lack of spare parts plunged the transportation system into chaos as early as 1915. The almost complete conversion of Russian factories to the war effort squeezed production for domestic consumption, and within a few months shortages were common and inflation and poverty rampant. The situation deteriorated rapidly in the countryside: an abrupt end to agricultural loans and land reallocation, a large-scale mobilization of men into the army, the requisitioning of livestock and grain, the scarcity of manufactured goods, and the destruction of networks of exchange between town and country all brought the process of agrarian transformation, begun in 1906 by Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (assassinated in 1911), to a grinding halt. Three consecutive years of war strengthened the peasant belief that the state was an alien and hostile force. Daily privations in an army in which soldiers were treated more like serfs than like citizens exacerbated the tensions between officers and their men, while a series of defeats undercut the little prestige remaining to the imperial regime. The deep-seated tradition of violence in the Russian countryside, expressed in the immense uprisings of 1902-1906, grew ever stronger. 

By the end of 1915 it was clear that the forces of law and order no longer existed. In the face of the regime's apparent passivity, committees and associations began to spring up everywhere, taking control of services no longer provided by the state, such as tending to the sick and bringing food to the cities and the army. The Russians in effect began to govern themselves; a great movement took shape whose depth and scope no one could have predicted. But in order to prevail, this movement would have needed encouragement and help from the seat of power, whose forces were concurrently dissolving. 

Instead of attempting to build bridges between the government and the most advanced elements of civic society, Nicholas II clung to the image of himself as a populist monarch, the good paterfamilias of the state and the peasantry, he assumed personal command of the armies, a suicidal act for an autocracy staring national defeat in the face. Isolated in his private train at the Mogilev headquarters, from the autumn of 1915 onward, Nicholas II ceased to govern the country, surrendering that task to the Empress Alexandra, whose German origins made her very unpopular. 

In fact the government had been losing its grip on power throughout 1916. The Duma, Russia's first nationally elected assembly, sat for only a few weeks a year, and governments and ministers, all equally unpopular and incompetent, came and went in quick succession. Rumors abounded that the Empress Alexandra's coterie, which included Rasputin, had conspired to open the country to enemy invasion. It became clear that the autocracy was incapable of winning the war, and by the end of 1916 the country was in effect ungovernable. In an atmosphere of political crisis, typified by the assassination of Rasputin on 31 December, strikes, which had been extremely rare at the outbreak of the war, became increasingly common. Unrest spread to the army, and the total chaos of the transport system broke the munitions distribution network. The days of February 1917 thus overtook an entirely discredited and weakened regime. 

The fall of the Czarist regime, which came after just five days of workers' demonstrations and the mutiny of a few thousand men in the Petrograd garrison, revealed not only the weakness of the regime and the disarray of an army whose commanders did not even dare try to quell the popular uprising, but also the unpreparedness of the profoundly divided opposition, from the liberals of the Constitutional Democratic Party to the Social Democrats. 

At no time did the political forces of the opposition shape or guide this spontaneous popular revolution, which began in the streets and ended in the plush suites of the Tauride Palace, the seat of the Duma. The liberals feared the mob; the socialists feared military reaction. Protracted negotiations between the liberals, who were concerned about the spread of the disturbances, and the socialists, who saw this "bourgeois" revolution as perhaps the first step on the long path to a socialist revolution, resulted in a vague idea of power-sharing. The liberal and socialist camps came to be represented in two distinct and incompatible institutions. The provisional government, concerned with the liberal objectives of social order and parliamentary democracy, strove to build a Russia that was modern, capitalist, and resolutely faithful to its French and British allies. Its arch rival was the Petrograd Soviet, created by a handful of militant socialists in the great tradition of the St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905 to represent directly the revolutionary will of "the masses." But this soviet was itself a rapidly evolving phenomenon, at the mercy of its own expanding, decentralized structure and of the ever-changing public opinion it claimed to represent. 

The three successive provisional governments that ruled Russia from 2 March to 25 October 1917 proved incapable of solving the problems inherited from the ancien regime: the economic crisis, the failing war effort, working-class unrest, and the agrarian problem. The new men in power—the liberals of the Constitutional Democratic Party, the majority in the first two governments, and the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, the majority in the third —belonged to the cultivated urban elite, those advanced elements of civil society who were torn between a naive, blind trust in the "people" and a fear of the incomprehensible  "dark masses" who engulfed them. For the most part, at least for the first few months of a revolution remarkable for its pacific nature, they gave free rein to the democratic impulse that had emerged with the fall of the old regime. Idealists like Prince Lvov, the head of the first two provisional governments, dreamed of making Russia "the freest country in the world." "The spirit of the Russian people," he wrote in one of his first manifestos, "has shown itself, of its own accord, to be a universally democratic spirit. It is a spirit that seeks not only to dissolve into universal democracy, but also to lead the way proudly down the path first marked out by the French revolution, toward Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." 

Guided by these beliefs, the provisional government extended democratic principles to as many as it could, bringing new freedoms and universal suffrage, outlawing all discrimination on grounds of class, race, or religion, recognizing the rights of both Poland and Finland to home rule, and promising autonomy to nationalist minorities. The government imagined that all these efforts would have far-reaching effects, causing an upsurge in patriotism, consolidating social cohesion, assuring military victory alongside the Allied forces, and solidly linking the new regime to other Western democracies. But out of a finicky solicitude for legality the government refused, in wartime conditions, to adopt measures that would have secured the future. It held firmly to remaining "provisional" and deliberately left unresolved the most pressing issues: the problem of the war and the problem of land. In the few months of its rule the provisional government proved no more capable than its predecessor of coping with the economic crisis, closely linked to the waging of the war; problems of supply, poverty, inflation, the breakdown of economic networks, the closing of businesses, and the massive upsurge in unemployment all exacerbated the climate of social tension. 

In the face of the government's passivity, society continued to organize itself independently. Within a few weeks thousands of Soviets, neighborhood and factor)' committees, armed groups of workers (the Red Guards), and committees of soldiers, peasants, Cossack's, and housewives sprang into existence. These were new forms of political expression in Russia, providing previously unknown forums for public opinion, claims for compensation, new initiatives, and debates. It was a veritable festival of liberty, which became more violent day by day, as the February revolution had unleashed resentment and social frustration long held in check. Mitingovunie ("the never-ending meeting") was the opposite of the democratic parliamentary process envisaged by the politicians of the new regime. The radicalization of social movements continued throughout 1917. 

The workers  demands evolved from the economic,an eight-hour day, an end to fines and other onerous regulations, social insurance, wage increases,to political demands that implied a radical shift in social relations between workers and employers. Workers organized into factory committees whose chief objectives were control of the hiring process, the prevention of factory closings, and even control of the means of production. But to be viable, worker control required a completely new form of government, "soviet power," which alone was capable of radical measures, especially the seizure and nationalization of business, an aim that had been inconceivable in the spring of 1917.

The role of the peasant-soldiers—a mass of 10 million mobilized men — was decisive in the revolutions of 1917. The rapid dissolution of the Russian army, hastened by desertion and pacifism, propelled the collapse of state institutions. Basing their authority on the first decree issued by the provisional government—the famous "Order Number One," abolishing the worst of the disciplinary rules for soldiers in the imperial army—committees of soldiers pushed the limits of their power. They elected new officers and even took part in planning military strategies and tactics. This idea of "soldier power" paved the way for what General Aleksei Brusilov, commander in chief of the Russian army, termed a "Bolshevism of the trenches." In his description, "The soldiers didn't have the faintest idea of what Communism, the proletariat, or the constitution actually meant. They wanted peace, land, and the freedom to live without laws, without officers, and without landlords. Their Bolshevism was nothing more than a longing for an idealized sort of liberty—anarchy, in fact." 

After the failure of the last Russian offensive in June 1917, the army began to fall apart; hundreds of officers, accused by the troops of being counterrevolutionaries, were arrested by the soldiers and massacred. The number of desertions soared—by August and September there were tens of thousands every day. The peasant-soldiers had one goal—to return home as quickly as possible, so as not to miss out on the distribution of land and livestock previously belonging to the landowners. From June to October 1917 more than 2 million soldiers, tired of the fighting and of the appalling deprivations they had lived through in their garrisons and trenches, deserted the rapidly disintegrating army. Inevitably their return increased the unrest pervading the countryside. 

Until the summer of 1917, the agrarian trouble spots had been relatively localized, particularly in comparison with the agrarian revolts during the revolution of 1905-06. Once news of the Czar's abdication had spread, a peasant assembly met and drew up a petition containing their grievances and demands; the land should be given to whose who worked it, fallow land belonging to the landowners should be immediately redistributed, and all rents should be drastically reduced. Slowly the peasants became more and more organized, setting up agricultural committees on local and regional levels headed by leading members of the rural intelligentsia such as schoolteachers, agronomists, doctors, and Orthodox priests, all of whom sympathized with the aims of the Socialist Revolutionaries. From May and June onward, many agrarian committees simply seized agricultural material and livestock belonging to the land- owners and appropriated woods, pastures, and fallow land. In this battle for land, the main victims clearly were the great land barons, but the kulaks (the better-off peasants, who had taken advantage of Stolypin's reforms to set up small holdings on their own and thus become free of obligations to the community) also suffered as a group. Even before the October Revolution the kulaks, who had been the soft targets of Bolshevik rhetoric—which caricatured them in slogans as "money-grubbing peasants,'' "the rural bourgeoisie," and "blood-sucking kulaks"—were no longer the important force they had been, in fact by this point many of them had been forced to return most of their livestock, machinery, and land to the community, which then redistributed it according to the ancestral egalitarian principle that counted the number of mouths to be fed. 

During the summer the agrarian troubles became more and more violent, fueled by the return of hundreds of thousands of armed deserters. By the end of August, disillusioned by the broken promises of a government that seemed to be delaying agrarian reforms, the peasants mounted assaults on the manor  houses, burning and sacking them in the hope of driving out the hated land- owners once and for all. In Ukraine and in the central provinces of Russia — Tambov, Penza, Voronezh, Saratov, Orel, Tula, and Ryazan—thousands of houses were burned and hundreds of landowners killed. 

Faced with the expansion of this social revolution, the ruling elite and the political parties—with the notable exception of the Bolsheviks—all wavered between the desire to control the movement in some fashion and the temptation of a simple military putsch. After taking their places in the government in May, both the Mensheviks, who were popular in working-class areas, and the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had a stronger base in the countryside than any other political group, proved unable to carry out the reforms they had always demanded — particularly in the case of the Socialist Revolutionaries, land reform. For the most part, this failure stemmed from the fact that they were cooperating with a government concerned primarily with social order and law-abiding- behavior. Once they had become the managers and leaders of an essentially bourgeois state, the moderate socialist parties left the more radical calls for reform to the Bolsheviks, without, however, reaping any great benefit from their participation in a government that was slowly losing its grip on the political realities in the country. 

In the face of this growing anarchy, the captains of industry, the landowners, the leaders of the army, and some of the more disillusioned liberals considered mounting a military coup, an idea proposed by General Lavr Kornilov. Most of them abandoned the idea, since a military putsch would inevitably have destroyed the civil power of the elected provisional government led by Aleksandr Kerensky. The failure of General Kornilov's putsch on 24-27 August did, however, lead to the final crisis of the provisional government. While the proponents of civil versus military dictatorships engaged in fruitless arguments, the central institutions of the state—the justice system, the civil service, the army —were disintegrating. 

But it would be a mistake to describe the radicalization of the urban and rural populations as a process of "Bolshevization." The shared slogans — "workers' power" and "power to the Soviets" —had different meanings for the militant workers and the Bolshevik leaders. In the army, the "Bolshevism of the trenches" reflected above all a general aspiration for peace, shared by combatants from all the countries engaged in the bloodiest and most all- consuming war that the world had ever seen. The peasant revolution followed a more or less autonomous course, more sympathetic to the Socialist Revolutionary program, which favored the "Black-Earth partition" of land. The Bolshevik approach to the agrarian question was in fact antithetical to peasant wishes, favoring the nationalization of all land and its subsequent exploitation through enormous collective farms. In the countryside little was known about the Bolsheviks except for the confused reports brought home by deserters,whose message could be summed up in those two magic words 'land" and "peace." Membership in the Bolshevik movement seems to have numbered no more than two thousand at the beginning of October 1917. But as a constellation of committees, Soviets, and other small groups rushed to rill the wholesale institutional vacuum of that autumn, the environment was perfect for a small, well-organized group to exercise a disproportionate amount of power. And that is exactly what the Bolshevik Party did. 

Since its founding in 1903, the party had remained outside the other currents of social democracy in both Russia and Europe, chiefly because of its will to break radically with the existing social and political order and because of its conception of itself as a highly structured, disciplined, elitist avant-garde of professional revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks were thus the complete opposite of the Menshevik and other European social-democratic parties, which allowed large memberships and widely differing points of view. 

World War I further distilled Leninist Bolshevism. Rejecting collaboration with all other currents of social democracy, Lenin became increasingly isolated, justifying his theoretical position in essays like Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He began to argue that the revolution was destined to occur not in countries where capitalism was most advanced, but rather in countries like Russia that were considerably less developed economically, provided that the revolutionary movement was led by a disciplined avant-garde of revolutionaries who were prepared to go to extremes. That meant, in this case, creating a dictatorship of the proletariat and transforming "the imperialist war 11 into a civil war. 

In a letter of 17 October 1917 to Aleksandr Shlyapnikov, Lenin wrote: 

The least bad thing that could happen in the short term would be the defeat of czarism in the war . . , The essence of our work (which must be persistent, systematic, and perhaps extremely long-term) is to aim for the transformation of the war into a civil war. When that will happen is another question, as it is not yet clear. We must wait for the moment to ripen, and systematically force it to ripen . . . We can neither promise civil war nor decree it, but we must work toward that end for as long as we have to. 

Throughout the war Lenin returned to the idea that the Bolsheviks had to be ready to encourage civil war by all possible means. "Anyone who believes in class war," he wrote in September 1916, "must recognize that civil war, in any class-based society, is the natural continuation, development, and result of class war." 

After the February revolution (which occurred while most of the Bolsheviks were in exile or abroad), Lenin—unlike the vast majority of the leaders of Paradoxes of the October Revolution 49 his party—predicted the failure of the conciliatory policies pursued by the provisional government. In his four Letters from Abroad, penned in Zurich on 20-25 March 1917, of which the Bolshevik daily Pravda dared print only the first (so far were they from the political ideas held at the time by the leaders of the Petrograd Bolsheviks), he demanded an immediate rupture between the Petrograd Soviet and the provisional government, as well as active preparations for the subsequent "proletarian" stage of the revolution. As he saw it, the appearance of the Soviets was the sign that the revolution had already passed through its "bourgeois phase." Revolutionary agents should now seize power by force and put a stop to the imperialist war, even if this meant the beginning of a civil war. 

When he returned to Russia on 3 April 1917, Lenin continued to defend these extreme positions. In his famous April Theses he reiterated his implacable hostility to both a parliamentary republic and the democratic process. Met with blank incomprehension and outright hostility by most of the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd, Lenin's ideas nevertheless began to take hold, particularly among the new recruits to the party, whom Stalin termed praktiki, "practitioners" (as opposed to the theoreticians). Within a few months plebeian elements, including peasant-soldiers, occupied a central place in the party and outnumbered the urban and intellectual elements. These militants, with their more humble ori- gins, brought with them the violence of Russian peasant culture exacerbated bv three vears of war. With little background in politics, they sought to trans- form the original theoretical and intellectual Bolshevism unhindered by any of the limitations imposed by Marxist dogma. In particular, they had little interest in the question of whether a "bourgeois stage" was necessary in the transition to real socialism. Believing only in direct action and in force, they supported a strand of Bolshevism in which theoretical debates increasingly gave way to the far more pressing issue of the seizure of power. 

Lenin was caught between two opposing forces: a plebeian mass increasingly impatient for action, made up of the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd, certain regiments in the capital, and the worker battalions of Red Guards in Vyborg; and a group of leaders haunted by fear that an overhasty insurrection would fail. Contrary to commonly held historical opinion, throughout 1917 the Bolshevik Party was profoundly divided, torn between the timidity of one group and the overenthusiastic of the other. At this stage the famous party discipline was more an act of faith than a concrete reality. In July 1917, as a result of troubles at the naval base and confrontations with the government forces, the Bolshevik Party was very nearly destroyed altogether. In the aftermath of the bloody demonstrations in Petrograd from 3 to 5 July, its leaders were arrested, and some, like Lenin himself, were forced into exile. 

But the Bolshevik Party resurfaced at the end of August 1917, in a situation quite favorable for an armed seizure of power. The powerlessness of the government to resolve the great problems it faced had become clear, particularly in the wake of the decay of traditional institutions and authorities, the growth of social movements, and the failure of General Kornilov's attempted military coup.

Again Lenin's personal role, both as theorist and as strategist of the seizure of power, was decisive. In the weeks preceding the Bolshevik coup d'etat of 25 October 1917, he personally prepared all the necessary stages for the military takeover. He was to be deterred neither by an unforeseen uprising of the masses nor by the "revolutionary legalism" of Bolsheviks such as Grigory Zinoviev[L] and Lev Kamenev[R], who, made cautious by the bitter experience of the July days, preferred to have the support of a majority of social democrats and revolutionary socialists of all tendencies. From exile in Finland, Lenin sent a constant stream of articles and letters to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, calling for the uprising to begin. "By making immediate offers of peace and giving land to the peasants, the Bolsheviks will establish a power base that no one will be able to overturn," he wrote. "There is no point in waiting for a formal majority for the Bolsheviks; revolutions do not wait for such things. History will never forgive us if we do not seize power immediately." 

Lenin's urgency in the face of an increasingly revolutionary situation left most of the Bolshevik leaders skeptical and perplexed. It was surely enough, they believed, to stick behind the masses and incite them to spontaneous acts of violence, to encourage the disruptive influence of social movements, and to sit tight until the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, planned for 20 October. It was more than likely that the Bolsheviks would achieve a plurality at the assembly, since they would be over represented by the Soviets from the great working-class areas and from the army. Lenin, however, greatly feared the power-sharing that might result if the transfer of power took place as a result of a vote at the Congress of Soviets. For months he had been clamoring for power to devolve to the Bolsheviks alone, and he wanted at all costs to ensure that the Bolsheviks seized power through a military insurrection, before the opening of the Second Congress. He knew that the other socialist parties would universally condemn such a move, and thus effectively force themselves into opposition, leaving all power in the hands of the Bolsheviks. 

On 10 October, having returned secretly to Petrograd, Lenin gathered together twelve of the twenty-one members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. After ten hours of negotiations he persuaded a majority to vote in favor of the most important decision ever made by the party —to undertake an immediate armed uprising. The decision was approved by ten to two, the dissenters being Zinoviev and Kamenev, who wished to wait for the Second Paradoxes of the October Revolution 51 Congress of Soviets. On 16 October, despite opposition from the moderate socialists, Trotsky therefore set up the Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee (P.R.M.C), a military organization theoretically under the control of the Petrograd Soviet but in fact run by the Bolsheviks. Its task was to organize the seizure of power through an armed insurrection —and thus to prevent a popular anarchist uprising that might have eclipsed the Bolshevik Party. 

In accordance with Lenin's wishes, the number of direct participants in the Great Socialist October Revolution was extremely limited—a few thousand soldiers, the sailors from Kronstadt, Red Guards who had rallied to the cause of the P.R.M.C, and a few hundred militant Bolsheviks from factory committees. Careful preparation and a lack of opposition allowed the whole operation to proceed smoothly and with very few casualties. Significantly, the seizure of power was accomplished in the name of the P.R.M.C. Thus the Bolshevik leaders attributed all their power to a single event that no one outside the party's Central Committee could link to the Congress of Soviets. 

Lenin's strategy worked. Faced with this fait accompli, the moderate socialists, alter denouncing "an organized military action deliberately planned behind the back of the Soviets," simply walked out of the Congress. Only the small group of left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries remained, and they joined the Bolsheviks in ratifying the coup, voting in a text drawn up by Lenin that gave "all power to the Soviets." This purely formal resolution allowed the Bolsheviks to authenticate a fiction that was to deceive credulous generations for decades to come—that they governed in the name of the people in "the Soviet state." A few hours later, before breaking up, the Congress ratified a new Bolshevik government —the Soviet Council of People's Commissars (SNK), presided over by Lenin—and approved two decrees about peace and land. 

Very soon misunderstandings and conflicts arose between the new regime and the social movements, which until then had acted independently to destroy the old political, social, and economic order. The first conflict of interest concerned the agrarian revolution. The Bolsheviks, who had always stood for the nationalization of all land, were now compelled by a combination of unfavorable circumstances to hijack the Socialist Revolutionary program and to approve the redistribution of land to the peasants, The "Decree on Land" stated that "all right of property regarding the land is hereby abolished without indemnity, and all land is hereby put at the disposal of local agrarian committees for redistribution" In practice it did little more than legitimate what had already taken place since the summer of 1917, namely the peasant confiscation of land from the landlords and the kulaks. Forced to go along with this autonomous peasant resolution because it had facilitated their own seizure of power, the Bolsheviks were to wait a decade before having their way. The enforced collectivization of the countryside, which was to be the bitterest confrontation between the Soviet regime and the peasantry, was the tragic resolution of the 1917 conflict.

The second conflict arose between the Bolshevik Party and all the spontaneous new social structures, such as factory committees, unions, socialist parties, neighborhood organizations, Red Guards, and above all Soviets, which had helped destroy traditional institutions of power and were now fighting for the extension of their own mandates. In a few weeks these structures found themselves either subordinated to the Bolshevik Party or suppressed altogether. By a clever sleight-of-hand, "All power to the Soviets" probably the single most popular slogan in the whole of Russia in October 1917, became a cloak hiding the power of the Bolshevik Party over the Soviets. "Workers control," another major demand of the workers, in whose interest the Bolsheviks claimed to be acting, was rapidly sidelined in favor of state control in the name of the workers over businesses and work forces. A mutual incomprehension was born between the workers, who were obsessed by unemployment, decline in real wages, and ever-present hunger, and a state whose only concern was economic efficiency. From as early as December 1917 the new regime was forced to confront mounting claims from workers and an increasing number of strikes. In a few- weeks the Bolsheviks lost the greater part of the confidence that they had carefully cultivated in the labor force throughout the year.

The third misunderstanding developed between the Bolsheviks and the satellite nations of the former czarist empire. The Bolshevik coup d'etat had accelerated their desire for independence, and they thought that the new regime would support their cause. In recognizing the equality and sovereignty of the peoples of the old empire, as well as their right to self-determination and secession, the Bolsheviks seemed to have invited these peoples to break away from centralized Russian control. In a few months the Finns, Poles, Baltic nations, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis were claiming their independence. Overwhelmed, the Bolsheviks soon put their own economic needs before the rights of these nations, since Ukrainian wheat, the petroleum and minerals of the Caucasus, and all the other vital economic interests of the new state were perceived to be irreplaceable. In terms of the control it exercised over its territories, the new regime proved itself to be a more worthy inheritor of the empire than even the provisional government had been.

These conflicts and misunderstandings were never truly resolved, but continued to grow, spawning an ever increasing divide between the new Soviet regime and society as a whole. Faced with new obstacles and the seeming intransigence of the population, the Bolshevik regime turned to terror and violence to consolidate its hold on the institutions of power.

next[37s]
The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

footnotes
Foreword 
1. For the development of American historical writing on Russia and the Soviet Union see Martin Malia, "Clio in Tauris: American Historiography on Russia," in Contemporary Historiography in America, ed. Gordon Wood and Anthony Mohlo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), For recent American scholarship on Soviet history see Stephen Kotkin, "1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks," Journal of Modem History, 70, no. 2 (June 1998). 
2. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharm and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); and Moshe Lewin, The Political Undercurrents of Soviet Economic Debates; From Bukharm to the Modern Reformers (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1974). 
3. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), especially the editor's introduction, and her Russian Revolution 1917-1932, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, trans. John O'Neil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 
5. Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism, trans. Valence Ionescu (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968); and Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism tn the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
6. For example, Aleksander Wat, My Century; The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, ed. and trans. Richard Lourie, with a foreword by Czeslaw Milosz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). 
7. Alain Besancon, Le malheur du Steele: Sur le communisme, le nazisme, et Funic ite de la Shoah (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 
8. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately, eds,, Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1 789-1989 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 
9. For the ideological delusions of the time see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Oliver Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, rrans. Benjamin Ivry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). The great classic of political philosophy to emerge from this debate is Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, trans. Terence Kilmartin (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1957, first published in French, 1995),

Introduction 
1 . Raymond Queneau, Line histoire modele (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 9. 
2. Quoted in Kostas Papaionannou, Marx et les marxtstes, rev. ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1972). 
3. Andre Frossard, Le crime conire Vhumamte (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987). 
4. Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 247. 
5. Quoted in Jacques Baynac, La terreur sous Lenine (Paris: Le Sagittaire, 1975), p. 75. 
6. Gracchus Babeuf, La guerre de Vendee et le systeme de depopulation (Paris: Tallandier, 1987). 
7. Jean-Pierre Azema, "Auschwitz," in J. -P. Azema and F. Bedarida, Dtctwnnaire des anneesde tourmente (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 777. 
8. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Reflexions sur le genocide (Paris: La Decouverte, 1995), p. 268. Moreover, Vidal-Naquet wrote, "There has been discussion of Katyn and the massacre in 1940 of Polish officers who were held as prisoners by the Soviets. Katyn dovetails perfectly with the definition of Nuremberg." 
9. Denis Szabo and Alain Joffe, "La repression des crimes contre Thumanite et des crimes de guerre au Canada,' 1 in Marcel Colin, Le crime contre Thumanite (Paris: Eres, 1996), p 655. 
10. See the analysis by Jean-Noel Darde, Le ministere de la vente: Histoire dun genocide dans le journal (Paris: L'Humanite, Le Seuil, 1984). 
11. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the 'Thirties, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 
12. Louis Aragon, Prelude au temps des cerises (Paris: Minuit, 1944). 
13. Quoted in Joseph Berger, Shipwreck of a Generation: The Memoirs of Joseph Berger (London: Harvill Press, 1971), p. 247. Notes to Pages 12-54 761 
14. Ibid. 
15. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 4. 
16. Tzvctan Todorov, /. homme depayse (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), p. 36. 
17. Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hess, trans. Constantine FitzGibbon (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1959), p. 180. 
18. Grossman, Forever Flowing, pp. 142, 144, and 155. 
19. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, rev. ed. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967). 
20. Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans, and ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 345-348. 
21. Grossman, Forever Flowing. 
22. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties toward Mankind, rrans. Arthur Wills (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), p. 125. 
23. Tzvetan Todorov, "La morale de Phistorien," paper presented at the colloquium "L'homme, la langue, les camps," Paris lV-Sorbonne, May 1997, p. 13. 
24. See Pierre Nora, "Gaullistes et Communistes," in Les lieux de mernotre, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). 
25. Witold Gombrowicz, Testament: Entretiens avec Dominique de Roux (Paris: Folio, 1996), p 109. 
26. See Piorr Pigorov,7i// quitte ma pa trie (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1952); or Michel Koryakoff, Je me mets hors la lot (Paris: Editions du Monde Nouveau, 1947). 
27. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 347-349, 
28. Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 501. 
29. See Pierre Rigolout, Les Francais au goulag (Paris: Fayard, 1984); and esp. Jacques Rossi, Le Goulag de A a /(Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1997). 
30. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980); Pin Yathay with John Man, Stay Alive, My Son (London: Bloomsbury, 1987). 
31. Paul Barton (pseud.), Dnstitution amcentratwnnaire en Russie, 193(J~l 957 (Paris: Plon, 1959). 
32. Bernard Chapuis, Le monde, 3 July 1975. 
33. See, e.g., Ludo Martens, Un autre regard sur Sta line (Paris: EPO, 1994); and, in a less fawning style, Lilly Marcou, Staline, vie privee (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1996). 
34. Francois-Rene Chateaubriand, Memoirs of Chateaubriand, trans, and ed. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 218