What Future for the Future? Reflections on The Black Book of Communism

John Torpey

The verdict is increasingly clear: the twentieth century was an unmitigated disaster, a shattered mirror that lies in shards at our feet. This is a remarkable judgment about a century that was regarded with unparalleled optimism by those who anticipated its advent 100 years ago. At least in Europe, people in the late 1800s took for granted that the coming century would be an era of progress and improvement. That view was unsettled when the Great War dem- onstrated the appalling destructiveness of which humans were capable when mobilized by the newly ascendant nation-state. In the aftermath of World War I, Freud found that he could no longer dismiss the evidence before him, and moved Beyond the Pleasure Principle to include an aggressive death instinct in his model of the mind. Freud's shift in tone heralded the coming of a new era that would sadly disappoint the more nafve optimists.Yet even the cataclysmic face-off between the Nazis and their opponents failed to keep the irrepressible"modernization theorists"from proclaiming that Euro- American development was a model for all the world. More or less simulta- neously with the American debacle in Vietnam, however, critics dismissed modernization theory as the transparently fatuous self-congratulation of the "American century." Things have been going downhill with"modernity" ever since.

In view of the multiple catastrophes driven by the search for one or another vision of paradise on earth, the century came to be seen as an Age of Extremes. At the millennium's dawn, Europe---once thought of as the homeland of the Enlightenment--replaces Africa as the Dark Continent; Henry Louis Gates com- pletes the reversal of representations with a public television series on"rlhe Wonders of the African World." Stoked by post-modernist critiques of"grand narratives" and the celebration of small-d"difference" over capital-U Univer- salism, the end-of-the-century meets The End of Utopia. Perhaps the grandest of the grand narratives, socialism, is now routinely dismissed as a form of utopianism that leads inevitably to the gulag. We find ourselves in a "post- socialist condition" that prefers the cautious liberalism of an Isaiah Berlin to the futuristic enthusiasms of an Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward,

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2000-1887 looked forward to grand advances in the human condition by the time of our own millennial year. 1

It is in this post-utopian context that The Black Book of Communism, a grim litany of the "crimes of Communism,"makes its appearance. First published in Frm~ce in 1997, the volume set off a firestorm of controversy and sold well over 150,000 copies. So loud was the buzz stimulated by the book in Paris that a right-wing member of parliament rose from the benches to demand that the French Prime Minister, the Socialist Lionel Jospin, explain why he had in his cabinet three Communist ministers who had"failed to repent of their'criminal past'. ''2 In Italy, Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema--himself a former mem- ber of the PCI and leader of its successor, the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS)--pushed forward his party's arrivederci to the legacy of the PCI by an- nouncing that the party under Palmiro Togliatti shared responsibility for the "dark years of Stalinism. "3 In Germany, where The Black Book went through ten printings in its first seven months, a vigorous dispute over its significance has been collected into a volume tellingly called The Red Holocaust and the Germans. 4 In view of the predominance of the Nazi past in German public memory, the provocative title reminds us malgr~-lui that it is difficult to imag- ine that The Black Book could have originated in Germany.

Much of the uproar created in France by the publication of The Black Book must be chalked up to the persistent provincialism of the French intellectual scene. Symptomatic of the situation is the fact that Raymond Aron's The Opium of the Intellectuals, which appeared in an English translation in the imme- diate wake of the pivotal 20 th Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956, was first published in French only in 1995. 5 Anywhere else in the West, it wouid be positively absurd to claim that there has been a"cover-up of the criminal aspects of Communism"and that we have had to "wait until the end of the twent ie th century for this subject to show up on the academic radar screen. "6 After all, the extensive preoccupation with the structure and misdeeds of"totalitarianism" was the stock-in-trade of much (though by no means all) of the field of"Sovietology" throughout the Cold War else- where in the West.

In France, however, the esteem in which such Communist sympathizers as Jean-Paul Sartre were long held, along with the continued prominence of the PCt, helped to obscure the viciousness of Communist regimes around the world far longer than elsewhere. A passing of the intellectualpolitical torch began in the 1980s with the rise of the nouvelles philosophes and the liberal historian Francois Furet.Yet perhaps only in France could one conceivably speak today of Mao's China, the North Korea of Kim I1 Sung, etc., as of "Communist regimes currently in vogue in the West, "7 though even in France the claim seems overwrought. The book bespeaks the shocked--shocked!---disenchant- ment of former true believers on a mission to awaken their unsuspecting com- patriots to a danger that is at this point far from clear and present. The Black

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Book seems designed to inoculate the unwary against a virus which, if not entirely eradicated, is no longer likely to be a major cause of illness.

If people in the old Soviet bloc used to wait expectantly for the "biological solution"to leadership succession, The Black Book offers a "statistical solution" to the question of the"crime of the century." Over long stretches, the volume reads like a dry quantitative tract from one of the sociological journals, the motto of which seems to be "life is elsewhere." The essay by Jean-Louis Margolin on China mercifully departs from this style to offer a compelling description of life (or rather, of death) under Mao's megalomaniacal rule. Similarly, Margolin's portrait of Pol Pot's regime, while thoughtfully attentive to the ongoing de- bates over statistical details, is chilling in its characterization of the vast con- centration camp that was Cambodia during the late 1970s. One of the more memorable official sayings from those years pointedly captures the Khmer Rouge's disdain toward the population:"Losing you is not a loss, and keeping you is no specific gain. "8 Stylistic shortcomings aside, The Black Book relent- lessly documents the perverse and disturbing consequences worldwide of a movement thought by many of its supporters to have been a beacon of libera- tion from what Max Weber once called the"masterless slavery" of capitalism.

Still, there is relatively little in the volume that is novel to anyone who has paid much attention to these matters at all. Only Nicholas Werth's book-length contribution on the Soviet Union,"A State Against its People," draws signifi- cantly on new archival sources, and even he admits that his contribution does "not pretend to offer any new revelations about the use of state violence in the U.S.S.R. "9 It therefore seems unlikely that the book will have nearly the reso- nance in the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world that it had in France, although it has surely elicited a raft of indignant "I told you so"commentaries from conservative reviewers.

What made the book so controversial in Europe was not merely its macabre catalogue of global Communist cruelty, but what appears to have been an intentionally incendiary introduction by the lead author/editor, St6phane Courtois. Using the figure of 100 million deaths said to be attributable to Com- munist regimes and movements worldwide, Courtois claimed that Commu- nism was more perfidious than Nazism. For making this assertion, an editorialist in Le Monde rather predictably raised the charge that the introduction was anti-Semitic. Even more remarkably, two of the book's co-authors publicly distanced themselves from Courtois'introductory essay, objecting to"the ma- nipulation of the figures of the number of people killed" and to "the use of shock formulas, the juxtaposition of histories aimed at asserting the compara- bility and, next, the identities of fascism, and Nazism, and communism. "1~

Nearly 15 years ago, arguments of this kind that were mounted by Ernst Nolte and others in Germany set off the watershed Historikerstreit (historians' controversy), the ultimate outcome of which was the general acceptance among serious-minded people that the evils of Nazism were more insidious than those

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of Communism, even if the number of deaths attributable to the former was smaller. Despite Courtois' effort to persuade us that Communism was more evil than Nazism because it killed so many more people, the verdict of the Historikerstreit remains convincing. Contrary to Courtois, one can indeed ar- gue that "Communism was a form of universalism,'at least in ideological terms: adherents who discovered that a Communist regime was engaged in egre- gious killing and unnecessary oppression might complain that this was a be- trayal of the ideals of the cause (and many did so). I am not aware that any Nazis ever made this objection, other than to save their skins after the fact.

Moreover, Courtois' claims about the parallels between the Nazis'"racial genocide" and what he calls"class genocide" cannot be sustained. To be sure, the Communists in various instances"racialized"their alleged ethnic and"class enemies," imputing to the members of various groups hereditary traits, in- cluding antagonism to the regime, which rendered them suspect as such. Sum- ming up the Cambodian and Chinese cases, Jean-Louis Margolin writes:" [F] or the Khmer Rouge, as for the Chinese Communists, some social groups were criminal by nature, and this criminality was seen as transmittable [sicl from husband to wife, as well as an inherited trait .... We can speak of the racialization of social groups, and the crime of genocide therefore can be applied to their physical elimination. "u

It is of course true that members of certain groups were singled out for deportation and death not for what they did, but because of what they were, as Hannah Arendt pointed out some time ago. 12 Yet as Charles Maier argued in his masterful discussion of The Unmasterable Past, Jews faced the certainty of death if they fell into the hands of the Nazis after late 1941, whereas the kulaks and other"class enemies"in the Soviet Union had to contend with an agoniz- ing uncertainty about their fate, which depended on the whims of officials from the top to the bottom of the Communist hierarchy. 13 Even in Brother Number One's Cambodia, notes Margolin,"what was most terrifying was the mysterious and seemingly random nature of the disappearances"of those who had run afoul of the regime. 14

Courtois'introduction to The Black Book, as well as some of the arguments of the various chapters themselves, thus reprise the opening salvos of the earlier political-cum-historiographical donnybrook on the other side of the Rhine. Despite their repudiation of Courtois' inflammatory remarks, Werth and Margolin are not as innocent as they might have us believe of the charge that their scholarly labors are intended to trump the Holocaust in the competition for historical primacy. This sort of race for worst-maligned status is perhaps inevitable, given the degree to which the Nazi genocide against the Jews has become a kind of"gold standard"in discussions of historical wrongs) s A good example of the need to demonstrate comparability to the Holocaust in any attempt to establish the bona tides of an historical atrocity can be found in the recent (French) film East-West, which opens with a scene of"selections" be-

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tween the more and less fit among those disembarking from a boatload of Russian 6migr6s returning to the Soviet Union after World War II. Similarly, Werth's discussion of the deportations of the ethnic Germans and other groups in the Soviet Union during World War II conjures up the familiar trope of the irrationality of the Nazi transports of Jews on rolling stock that would have been more sensibly dedicated to the w a r effort . 16

These actions clearly demonstrate the Soviets' willingness to persecute groups based solely on their ethnicity. Still, the wartime deportation of the Germans to Siberia appears a less uniquely Communist transgression if one recalls that the United States and Canada also removed from militarily sensi- tive areas substantial numbers of persons based exclusively on their ethnic identity. The difference, of course, is that North Americans of Japanese de- scent did not face murderous conditions in the camps and eventually received compensation for their wartime maltreatment, whereas those ethnic groups deported for their alleged collaboration with the Nazis received no such com- pensation after Khrushchev lightened their burden in the wake of his"Secret Speech"reckoning with the crimes of Stalinism at the 20 th Par ty Congress. 17

In view of The Black Bool~s relatively scanty scholarly contribution, it is hard to read the book in other than political terms. In this regard, The Black Book may be seen as an effort to legitimize the claims to memorialization and repa- rations of those who suffered under Communism. Such claims have become high stakes in an era that frequently rewards those who can demonstrate that they, too, have been victimized in the past. TM Courtois puts the matter suc- cinctly: "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 reparations are brushed aside .... [A] single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to char- acterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has also prevented an assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world. "19 What are we to make of this extraordinary outburst?

In reality, the situation is exactly the opposite of what Courtois asserts. What has happened in recent years is not that the "single-minded focus on the Jew- ish Holocaust" has crowded out other demands for recognition and compen- sation, but rather that this mode of dealing with past misdeeds has become generalized to all kinds of g roups-on ly some of which, however, are success- ful in making their claims. Part of the reason that the victims of Communism have been relatively less successful in gaining recognition of their suffering lies in the fact that the victims of the Nazis seem so clearly defined, whereas those of the Communists appear to have been more random and the dividing line between perpetrators and victims more fluid. The Black Book aims to sharpen the boundaries defining the groups persecuted by Communists, as both Courtois'term "class genocide"and Margolin's discussion of the "racialization"

140 Human Rights Review, lanuary-March 2001

of Communist enemies suggest.Victims of "genocide" are more likely to gain recognition than a grab-bag of "class enemies."

Jewish reparations claims grew decidedly more vocal and prominent in the aftermath (though hardly only because) of the publication of Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which portrayed "ordinary Germans" as blood-thirsty killers who needed only the sanction of a criminal regime to slake their "eliminationist anti-Semitism." The book endorsed a view of Ger- mans that would have been incomprehensible to figures such as Victor Klemperer, the diarist who stayed far too long in Germany because he thought himself German rather than Jewish (yet survived), but no matter. Hitler's Willing Execut/oners' sharp re-assertion of the victim-perpetrator division added fuel to the notion that contemporary Germans should pay for the crimes of theft ancestors, and thus both reflected and reinforced a mood in which reparations--billions of dollars of which have been paid out by the (West) German government since the reparations agreements of the early 1950s--were back on the agenda. And this not only for Jews, but for American blacks, Africans, indigenous peoples, vari- ous World War II victims of the Japanese, and many others besides. 2~

Politically speaking, if part of the"Goldhagen effect"was to strengthen de- mands for reparations, The Black Book indirectly supports J6rg Haider's insis- tence that the Sudeten Germans expelled from post-war Czechoslovakia and Austrian slave laborers in wartime Soviet camps should receive compensation equivalent to that awarded to the Jews. Under the circumstances now prevail- ing, Haider's demand is hard to dismiss, even if it suggests an immoral parallel between those who suffered extermination under the Nazis and those who suffered expulsion or forced labor for their ethnic affinities to the Nazis. In other words, the English publication of The Black Book must be seen at least in part as an attempt to say not"tu quoque," as many on the left were fond of saying of Western misbehavior when the "Free World"complained about Com- munist transgressions, but "moi aussi'--as an effort to pile up a body count so large that victims of Communism, too, should be able in the future to make plausible claims for recognition, commemoration, and perhaps even some kind of material reparations. The desire to have one's claims to historical suffering acknowledged is powerful in a political context in which there are real re- wards for standing up and being counted...as a victim.

The problem here lies in the logic of turning history into a large class action suit, as has occurred increasingly in recent years. Groups that can make a plau- sible claim to having suffered in the past have a claim to "standing" in the court of history, but only they. The future-oriented emancipatory project once pronounced by labor and socialist movements ("they have a world to win") has been extensively handed over to the lawyers, resulting for example in the odd spectacle of Americans trying to sue their way through to handgun con- trol. In the process, for many groups, at least, politics shrinks to the establish- ment of victim status and the adjudication of claims for historical damages.

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Naturally, the success of one's case often depends on the skillfulness of one's legal counsel, rather than the righteousness of one's cause. Those without good representation or a sympathetic cause of action lose out.

The difficulty with the politics of historical victimization is that it hardens group boundaries, and thus tends to undermine broad, future-oriented coali- tions rooted in common interests and concerns. Such a politics, even where it might ameliorate the disadvantage of groups that have suffered discrimina- tory treatment (as it well may), is intrinsically backward-looking. The Twilight of Common Dreams 21 dimmed the star of progressive politics in precisely the sense that, until recently, progressives had always been defined by their for- ward-looking qualities--a fact attested in the titles of many of their more ven- erable publications, such as the leftist Jewish Forward, the German Social Democrats' Vorwfirts, and the Italian Socialists' Avanti! For obvious reasons, making a political project of the past has in contrast always been a conserva- tive venture. A product of the foreshortened horizons characteristic of the"post- socialist condition," the political pursuit of the past is a cul-de-sac that may seem to open new vistas but in fact closes them off. For, once we have won the lawsuit about the past, what then?

Bound as they are to the law, lawyers tend to be inherently conservative, and a politics rooted in tort claims cannot energize broad groups because such claims will often seem a case of special pleading.Yet the legal innovations that have flowed from the disasters of World War II and the subsequent war crimes trials--chief among them, of course, the notion of"crimes against human- ity"--have helped us to imagine a world in which dictators will no longer be able to make the moral equivalent of war on their citizens and get away with it.There is the risk that this shift will impel such rulers to prolong their hold on power, as well as the possibility that this attack on official impunity will fur- ther undermine popular faith in the usefulness of states (which, in contrast to private corporations, face at least the hypothetical burden of measuring up to democratic standards). Still, this is a development redolent with possibilities and hope for the future.

Similarly, the concept of genocide came to be institutionalized as a result of the Nazis'lethal project, even if the definition ("intent to destroy, in whole or in part...") and practical relevance of the term remain distressingly unclear. So far, the signatories of the Genocide Convention (1948) have not once invoked the procedure for making a charge of genocide, presumably because the up- holding of such a charge would compel real, concrete action on their part.This reticence on the part of the"international community"recalls the continuing predominance of Realpolitik over humanitarian considerations in states' deci- sions to intervene to stop bloodshed beyond their borders. These legal inno- vations are nonetheless important achievements that the twentieth century, for all its brutality, has bequeathed to posterity, and ones upon which others can build in the search for a better future.

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With the growing appeal of the past as a site of political struggle, however, the party of the future has trouble gaining adherents. Courtois admonishes us "to imagine the scale of the [Communist] tragedy and to realize and appreci- ate how it will leave its mark on the history of the world for decades to come .,22 To be sure, Communism profoundly transformed the societies in which it held sway, creating ponderous legacies of public mistrust and private misfortune that exacerbate the difficulties of any "transition to democracy." But will it re- ally"leave its mark on the history of the world for decades to come"? Other than as a cautionary tale, this seems less certain. Even in the territories of the former Soviet Union itself, the Communist past seems"to lie very much further back than eight or ten years .... New problems have pushed history out of the head- lines. "23 Surely few are likely in the foreseeable future to proclaim the radiant Communist future; Communist parties (except, once again, in France) have gen- erally had to renounce their past and their names in order to stay in business, and to the extent that Communist regimes persist, it seems probable that these will go (or effectively put themselves) out of business before very long.

If Courtois is outraged that no one had drawn up the criminal indictment of Communism that he thought necessary, this is not because they secretly wish for its resurgence, but because"nobody knows what more to say. "24 As many who have examined the corpse will attest, the Communist body had been in critical condition for some time before 1989/1991, the unwitting victim of so- cial arteriosclerosis and waning brain functioning. Outside of France, at least, this was well known since the Prague Spring (1968) at the latest, after which Vaclav Havel famously announced that "the fun was definitely over."

In the meantime, politics has turned increasingly in the direction of efforts to make an asset of prior victimization. This has its virtues as well as its vices. Yet it is difficult to draw inspiration from an expiration. We need a full ac- counting of the past--yes, absolutely, and with no taboos on comparisons among brutal regimes. But if we are to make a better future, it may be best to leave behind the ugly history of Communism and the other disasters of the twentieth century, and move ahead with the lessons learned.

Notes

1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (NewYork:Vintage, 1996); Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (NewYork: Knopf, 1998); Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (NewYork: Basic, 1999); Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997); Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (New York: New American Library, 1989 [1887]).

2. Michael ScammeU,"Where, when, and why 85 million people died~The price of an idea," New Republic, December 20, 1999.

3. Helmut Altrichter,"'Offene GrossbausteUe Russland': Reflexionen fiber das'Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus'," Vierteljahreshefie fiir Zeitgeschichte 47:3 (July 1999): 322.

4. Horst M611er, Der rote Holocaust und die Deutschen: Die Debatte urn das "Schwarzbuch des Komrnunisraus" (Munchen: Piper, 1999).

Torpey 143

5. Noted in Martin Malia's useful"Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity," in Courtois et. al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 760, n. 9.

6. St6phane Courtois,"Introduction: The Crimes of Communism," in Courtois et. al., The Black Book, 17, 21.

7. Courtois,"Introduction," 3. 8. Quoted in Jean-Louis Margolin,"Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes,"in

Courtois et. al., The Black Book, 597. 9. Nicholas Werth,"A State Against its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet

Union, ' in Courtois et. al., The Black Book, 261. For a valuable discussion of just what The Black Book contributes in scholarly terms, see Altrichter,"'Offene Grossbaustelle Russland'."

10. Quoted in Stanley Hoffman's review of Le livre noir du communisme in Foreign Policy, Spring 1998: 167.

11. See Margolin,"Cambodia,'634; for an extended discussion of the"racialization" of social groups and its relation to state-sponsored killing, see Eric Weitz,"Race, Nation, Class: Das 'Schwarzbuch des K o m m u n i s m u s ' und das Problem des Vergleichs zwischen nationalsozialistischen und sowjetischen Verbrechen," Werkstatt Geschichte 22 (1999): 75- 91.

12. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975 [1951]).

13. See Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Iden- tity, with a new preface (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997 [1988]), Chapter 3.

14. Margolin,"Cambodia," 610. 15. For a dissenting view on the desirability of this phenomenon, see Peter Novick, The Holo-

caust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Among myriad examples, one might mention the frequent use of the term"American Holocaust"in visitors' reactions to the recent exhibition at the New York Historical Society, "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America."

16. See Werth,"A State Against its People,'255-256. 17. On the history of the Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian internments and their

struggle for reparations, see Mitchell T. Maki et. al., Achieving the Impossible Dream: tlow Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

18. See the discussions in Ian Buruma,"The Joys and Perils of Victimhood," New York Review of Books, April 8, 1999 and in Charles Maier,"A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial," History and Memory 5:2 (Fall-Winter 1993): 136-151.

19. Courtois,"Introduction," 23. My italics. 20. For a surve)4 see Roy Brooks, ed., When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy Over Apoh)gies

and Reparations for Human Injustice (NewYork: NewYork University Press, 1999). 21. See Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars

(NewYork: Metropolitan Books, 1996). 22. Courtois,"Introduction," 31. 23. Altrichter,"'Offene Grossbaustelle Russland',"361. 24. Alan Ryan,"The Evil Empire,"New York Ttmes Book Review, January 2, 2000.