The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (review)

Whenever and wherever it gained power, communism has turned into a bloody affair. Regardless of their noble claims and pretenses, communist regimes in Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, North Korea, postwar Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Africa, and Latin America engaged in systematic mass murder. The authors of this book argue that murder was inherent in communist attempts to mold society, as was their dehumanization of enemies and their refusal to accept the legitimacy of civil society-especially in war-torn nations bereft of democratic traditions and institutions. The violations of basic human rights practiced by these regimes, the authors maintain, were worse than those committed by the Nazis. This harsh indictment is supported by a detailed list of atrocities, ranging from mass executions, deadly deportations, state-induced famines and barbaric torture.

Although it adds little data that is new, the list is long, informative, and, for most part, indisputable. Even when the numbers of victims are questionable or obviously inflated, the brutality of communism in power is well established. Moreover, the fact that the atrocities consistently commenced with the seizure of power lends support to the argument for intentionality, particularly in the section on the Soviet Union by Werth, the most subtle and best-documented in the book.

That said, this thick volume is seriously flawed, incoherent, and often prone to mere provocation. Although the authors argue that the logic of communism entails the above atrocities, they go out of their way to salvage Marxist ideology. Following a blurb on Marx's and other socialists' ambivalent view of democracy, Courtois concludes the volume with the assertion that communism owed its destructive nature more to the biological legacy of Darwinism than to the ideology of Karl Marx, both of which arose within the nineteenth-century intellectual milieu. This contention has to be reconciled with Martin Malia's (the author of the forward to the English-language edition and of the well-known The Soviet Tragedy [New York, 1994]) indictment of the socialist idea itself as accountable for the efforts of zealots to construct exclusionary, violent utopias under the Marxist rubric. The fact that communism in power produced calamities everywhere does not mean that its terror was static and unified. It differed and evolved in time and place, as the data presented shows. In the same vein, the authors tend to exempt from examination certain segments of societies in the evolution and application of communist terror, even those with well-documented roles.

Evaluation of academic monographs should not have to involve assessment of the authors' political backgrounds and environments. Regrettably, in the case of the Black Book of Communism, these characteristics are not irrelevant. For American readers in particular, the editor's claim that the dark side of communism remained elusive until the publication of this book rings hollow; it is also telling about the authors. Outside of France, scholars have long debated, and continue to debate, the sources and consequences of communist terror. No reputable scholar on the left or the right has ever been oblivious to the existence of mass repression and murder. Indeed, it seems a distinct problem of the French left that neither the Soviets' own revelations after Joseph Stalin's death nor events in Hungary 1956 or in Czechoslovakia 1968 triggered the kind of response that the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did. New access to the archives furnished more information on the functioning of communist regimes; it did not alter basic data and conventional wisdom about the brutal nature of these regimes.

The comparison with Nazism is inevitable. It is merited on the grounds of the mutual commitment to social engineering through violent means; the ensuing demographic, psychological, and ethical implications; and, not least, the fact that both systems constantly scrutinized one another. Unfortunately, the authors of the Black Book reduce the comparison...