The human cost of communism
You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Breaking too many eggs, however, can be an awful strain – and if those eggs are human lives, a tragedy. Already famous in most European countries and the United States, “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression” is the first comprehensive attempt to estimate the number of lives taken in the effort to realize the communist utopia. The writers of this international best seller, which was recently brought out in Greek (Hestia, 2001) have explored the previously undisclosed archives of former Soviet bloc countries to provide a detailed account of the crimes committed under communist regimes around the world over 70 years: terror, torture, famine, deportations, and mass executions. The book reads like a criminal indictment against the Soviet Union of Stalin, the China of Mao, Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Vietnam under “Uncle Ho,” Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Neto’s Angola, Afghanistan under Najibullah, and so on. The indictment is even more compelling as most of its contributors are former communists, who at some point realized that the road to hell was paved with good intentions. Not surprisingly, the publication of “The Black Book of Communism” in France in 1997 instantly touched off a heated political and intellectual debate – even among its own contributors, many of whom quickly dissociated themselves from the introduction and the conclusion of the book written by Stephane Courtois. According to Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, Courtois’s estimate of the number of victims was overblown. The introduction to the book provides an approximation of the number of civilians murdered by communist regimes between 1917 and 1991: The Soviet Union: 20 million; China: 65 million; Vietnam: 1 million; North Korea: 2 million; Cambodia: 2 million; Eastern Europe: 1 million; Latin America: 150,000; Africa: 1.7 million; Afghanistan: 1.5 million. In total, about 100 million people. Contentious as these numbers may be for some, other claims made in the introduction provoked even more controversy. Teleology and class genocide Courtois asserts that the high toll was no accident but a systemic element of a doctrine that promised to erase class distinctions by erasing entire classes and the people who composed them. As such, the argument goes, there is little to distinguish Lenin’s and Stalin’s practice of “class genocide” from Hitler’s “race genocide.” Needless to say, Courtois’s claim stirred fierce reactions among left-wing sympathizers who identify with the anti-fascist movement and who immediately lashed out at what they saw as Courtois’s revisionism. Dimitris Dimitrakos, who wrote the introduction to the Greek edition in which he also sets out to defend the book against criticism from the left, endorses Courtois’s opinion that crime is an inherent characteristic of communist philosophy. But what matters most, he argues, is not communist intentions or programs but the victims, both the known and unknown. To borrow a phrase from Italian writer Ignazio Silone, “Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit.” In the same spirit, Dimitrakos claims that if the criminal activity that is attributed to communism derives from its totalitarian nature then there is no reason not to compare it to other totalitarian movements and regimes such as fascism and Nazism. The book describes communist atrocities in numbing detail albeit in a sober fashion. The violent episodes, the devastation, and the social evils documented in the book illustrate how Marxism transformed itself from an empirical science into an intolerant religion, persecuting those who did not conform; how concrete reality is bent to fit a preordained scheme, enslaving the individual; how the individual, as Camus puts it, “must bow to the iron laws of the class struggle as the party interprets them;” how, through the deification of history, all human actions receive their legitimization ex posto facto, at the end of the dialectic – the communist state. Simply put, they illustrate the basic mantra of communist leaders: If the facts do not agree with the theory, well, change the facts. Critics have argued that there is no single communism, but rather different versions which were implemented at different times and places, hence there can be no total and indiscriminate estimate of the people who died under communist rule (for such an account, see the “The Century of Communisms,” which was published as a response to “The Black Book of Communism”). To this Dimitrakos replies that producing an aggregate of the victims of communism does not mean denying the heterogeneity of the circumstances in which they died. It rather means that the criminality of these regimes is systematic and not coincidental. The Greek author also replies to those who say that under different circumstances, communism could have taken a different path; a more human, a more peaceful, a more democratic and, perhaps, a more viable one. Historical experience, however, has dashed any such hopes. The utopian experiment, Dimitrakos notes, took place in 15 countries and lasted about 70 years. The majority of communist regimes collapsed from within and not under external pressure. This proves that communist regimes are unable to transform themselves into something else, into something more democratic. The Greek edition of “The Black Book of Communism” contains a chapter by Ilios Yiannakakis, history professor at the University of Lille, on the Greek victims of communism: The ethnic Greeks that were persecuted by the communists in the Soviet Union as well as the people who were subjected to terror and repression in the areas controlled by the Greek Communist Party (KKE). The Greek edition closes with an addendum written by journalist Rihardos Someritis wherein he castigates the lack of historical memory in this country. Any reference to communist crimes, he says, is, at best, treated with suspicion or, at worst, denounced as hubris. But, one can see systematic use of the crimes committed by the “others”. “The Cold War has ended everywhere but Greece,” he says. But it’s time Greece looked its past in the eye. “Incredibly,” Courtois says, “the crimes of communism have yet to receive a fair and just assessment from both historical and moral viewpoints.” More than a decade after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there are still a few shaken but unrepentant souls who still desire communism. Most people however, to paraphrase Vladimir Bukovski, have seen the broken eggs but never tasted the omelet. “Surely, then,” as the foreword to the English edition declares, “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.”
