Communist Crimes and French Intellectuals

...Nazism's premise was a metaphysical commitment of the regime to the complete disappearance of the Jews, while Stalinist terror, even when its effects were genocidal, as in the Ukraine during 1932-1933, did not intend to exterminate all Ukranians but to enforce compliance through mass murder...

...Especially in those countries occupied by the Nazis, he notes, the members of the resistance paid such a high price that they were able, after the war, to take on "the role of martyrs in order to sacralize the communist cause and obstruct all criticism of it...

...If, as originally planned, the preface had been written by Francois Furet, the historian of the French Revolution and author of a major study of the allure of communism, Le Passe dune illusion (Paris: Robert Laffont/Calmann Levy, 1995), Le Livre noir would likely have ended up on specialists' shelves...

...that is, on all sides of the conflict...

...Distancing themselves from Courtois's conclusion that one finds on "every page the bloody essence of communism," Werth and Margolin countered that "everywhere communism was in power it was antidemocratic and repressive, but it was not everywhere nor perpetually a slaughter...

...neither in France, England, nor the United States, was the genocide of the Jews "placed at the center of their condemnation of the Nazis" after the war...

...At issue was not his comparison of Nazism with communism per se, which has its own intellectual history, begun before World War II by figures like George Orwell and Dwight Macdonald, and best exemplified by Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism...

...That statement is irrefutable, but it says nothing about the differences between a state-induced famine designed to subdue an independent peasantry and a state-directed genocide designed to eliminate the possibility of Jewish children now and forever...

...THE UPROAR over Le Livre noir also caused a mini-crisis in French governing circles...

...But they also require prudent and subtle distinctions...

...Werth condemned Courtois's manipulation of the figures, his use of shocking formulations, and his juxtaposition of diverse histories to affirm the identity of communist crimes...

...The Socialists argued that by applauding Courtois's conclusions, the UDF was opening the door "in the long run, to an alliance with the extreme right...

...But this had little to do with the quality of its scholarship or even the arguments among its six authors...

...In East European countries—Germany and the Czech Republic excepted—a "thick black line" has been drawn through the communist era, creating a de jure or de facto exemption from all legal responsibility for the crimes of the old regimes...

...As Furet argued, the victory over "absolute evil" rewarded communism with the mantle of "the good," while the purges, the years of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the massacres perpetrated by the Red Army were obliterated...

...According to Courtois, the facts demonstrate irrefutably that the communist regimes killed about one hundred million people, while it was about 25 million [under Nazism...

...By underscoring the "sinister side" of communism and putting it on a par with the Holocaust, Courtois attacked a fundamental premise of contemporary French politics: that today's communists are historically the heirs of Enlightenment ideals of justice and the patriotic antifascist resistance...

...But Hue also conceded that the party would have to confront "a certain number of errors" in its own Stalinist history...

...He charges them with an "exceptional blindness" toward communist terror, a fatal inability to distinguish what Kriegel called the "luminous face" of communism, its dream of equality and justice, from its darker, more "sinister face...

...ANSON RABINBACH is professor of European History and director of European Cultural Studies at Princeton University...

...The balance, he writes, is "100 million dead," a fig62,• DISSENT /Fail 1998 ure that neither squares with those presented by Le Livre noir itself nor with its advertising, which proclaims "85 million dead...

...second, the moral prestige that the Soviet victory over Nazism lent to communism after 1945...

...Writing in Le Monde, historian Annette Wieviorka condemned Courtois for his "agitprop" attempt to create sufficient "shock-value" to "transform a book which might otherwise have had a different status into a politically managed operation under the guise of 'scholarship.' " Courtois does not dispute the uniqueness of the Holocaust, though he reduces it to the method of annihilation, "the use of modern technical resources...

...Sweeping aside all the relevant comparisons between these regimes, during different historical periods, and under distinct circumstances, the question is reduced to what Alain Blum called "the macabre amassing of the dead...

...Courtois admits that the "long history" of communism cannot be reduced to an accounting procedure, nor to periods of terror, repression, and famine...

...a massive compendium of the crimes perpetrated by communist regimes created a public sensation in France and quickly became a bestseller...

...Though the COMMUNIST CRIMES AND FRENCH INTELLECTUALS book offers little that is not already known, Werth's 250-page contribution is a serious preliminary synthesis of the new (largely American and Russian) research based on the Soviet archives...

...As Tony Judt notes in his Past Imperfect, "Rousset's efforts forced Les Temps modernes to address the question of Soviet camps for the first time in January 1950 and elicited from Maurice Merleau-Ponty the confession that the facts 'put altogether into quesDISSENT / Fall 1998 n 63 COMMUNIST CRIMES AND FRENCH INTELLECTUALS tion the meaning of the Russian system.' " By contrast, it was not until the 1980s that a debate about French participation in the deportation of the Jews was aired nationally...

...The reason underscores yet another salient feature of communist terror: victims and perpetrators were often caught up in a common history and biography and, therefore, a shared complicity...

...As Bernard Henri-Levy pointed out, few DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 65 COMMUNIST CRIMES AND FRENCH INTELLECTUALS of the protagonists in the controversy over Le Livre noir would deny that there are similarities between Auschwitz and the Gulag, or between the ideological components of totalitarian terror...

...French Communists were among the last to acknowledge that they had followed Moscow's mandates throughout the Stalinist and post-Stalinist era...

...Because the full extent of Stalin's crimes was as yet unknown, the choice between Hitler and Stalin in 1941 was not at all ambiguous...

...Once the fruits of appeasing Hitler were apparent—and not just to the left—Western diplomats, politicians, and the "man on the street" (in 1939, 83 percent of the American public favored a Soviet victory over Germany if a war were to occur) understood that what would soon be called the "Soviet menace" was fundamentally different from the "German menace," and that the threat to civilization required embracing the lesser evil...

...If postcommunist governments have shown little interest in commemorating past crimes, the deficit cannot be blamed on a preoccupation with the Jewish genocide, but is perhaps symptomatic of the fact, as was also the case after World War II, that the generation of perpetrators and victims is less inclined to remembrance than their children...

...There has indeed been little justice for communist crimes because Asian communism is still in power, the Soviet Union existed until 1991, and most postcommunist regimes have not allowed an open confrontation with the past...

...Timed to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Le Livre noir was an immediate success...

...r E LIVRE Nam's most important authors, Werth and Margolin, condemned J Courtois's failure to provide a "serious and penetrating discussion that demands complex and delicate questions about the comparison between fascism and communism, or about the presence of terrorist potential in Marxist theory itself...

...Le Livre noir is yet another chapter in the intellectual history of French disillusionment with the profoundly one-sided philocommunism of the postwar generation...

...In the passage omitted by Courtois, however, Grossman's narrator continues: "And it was impossible to understand, grasp, comprehend...

...On March 20, which the Socialists called "a dark day for the Republic," the National Front showed its muscle by electing five UDF regional council presidents, deeply dividing the conservativeright between local leaders who welcomed the new alliance and UDF president Francois Leotard, who declared the pact unacceptable and suspended the five new presidents...

...The UDF demonstrably walked out while Jacques Chirac's Gaullists stood firmly behind their wartime allies...

...Rather, Courtois created a scandal because he blamed the world's "silence" about the crimes of communism on exclusive attention to the Holocaust: "After 1945, the genocide of the Jews has appeared as the paradigm for modern barbarism, so as to occupy all of the space reserved for the mass terror of the twentieth century...

...If anything, the cold war brought the crimes of Stalinism to the attention of the Western public long before there was any significant discussion of the Holocaust...

...His modestly argued contribution is a scholarly accomplishment, "betrayed," as one commentator put it, by his own editor...

...Their project was begun immediately after the war and suppressed during the anti-Semitic, "anti-cosmopolitan" purges of the late 1940s...

...The controversy over Le Livre noir reached even the chambers of Parliament, not to mention television and radio...

...In France, the demand for "a Nuremberg trial of communism" has a particular connotation, frequently reiterated by Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front, to justify not prosecuting French crimes of the Vichy era...

...The antisemitic terror ultimately lost all connection to the political realm from which it originated...

...Courtois is also right that any "economy of remembrance" that establishes a hierarchy of Nazi genocide above Stalin's terror or Pol Pot's killing fields is unjust to the victims of communism...

...Raul Hilberg's pathbreaking The Destruction of the European Jews was published in 1961 by a small press after being turned down by several major publishers...

...Le Livre noir appeared just when the decade-long national controversy over responsibility for the deportations of French Jews was reaching its apogee in the trial of Maurice Papon on charges of "complicity in the crime against humanity...

...Before World War II only a tiny minority on the left, like Dwight Macdonald, counseled neutrality rather than support an alliance with the Stalinist variant of totalitarianism against Hitler...

...and how it reached a crescendo after 1928 in the Stalinist terror against an already pacified society...

...It is historically false...

...Nor was it the point, first argued by Arendt, that "the concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve[d] as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible [was] being verified...

...Predictably, the French Communist Party, which has only haltingly confronted its proSoviet past, reacted defensively to the book's publication...

...Last year, the PCF took the unprecedented step of "condemning without reservation" the expulsion of some of its most prominent militants during the cold war...

...66 n DISSENT / Fall 1998...

...These genocides were not "lesser" crimes than the Nazi genocide, but they are different crimes, requiring an approach that scrupulously avoids conflating the moral and the analytical, the juridical and the historical...

...He reminded the Parliament that in 1945 French Communists were included in the Resistance government led by General De Gaulle, and that the French Communist Party (PCF) "if somewhat belatedly," had "drawn the lessons from its history...

...After Le Livre noir appeared, Claude Cabane, editor of the party daily, L'Humanite, went so far as to cite Primo Levi's remark that "one cannot think of Nazism without the gas chambers, nor of communism without the camps...

...Even the Khmer Rouge genocide was carried out in the interest of maintaining political control, its victims selected according to arbitrary political criteria applied to highly disparate social and ethnic groups...

...But that is precisely what he does when he lumps together all those whose deaths could be attributed to "the single global system of communism" since 1917, by whatever means, under more than a dozen communist regimes, in an area encompassing many countries and several continents...

...Faced with starving children, the protagonist Ivan Grigoryevich remarks that "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...

...Werth's question highlights the real tragedy of Le Livre noir—that Courtois's introduction all but foreclosed the opportunity for a serious discussion of its contents...

...Werth carefully documents how the new regime began to apply terror as a political instrument as early as 1917 in confrontations with armed Russian peasants who defied requisitions and conscription...

...In fact, and despite those efforts, both trials resulted in legal victories...

...His computation of twenty million dead for the period of Soviet rule does not jibe with Werth's calculation of about fifteen million, a figure that, as Werth is careful to underline, includes the eleven million who died of hunger, starvation, and disease during the civil war (1921-1922) and the "programmed" famine in the Ukraine (1932-1933), as well as the approximately four million who perished in the mass deportations of kulaks and ethnic minorities, and those who died in the Great Purge (1937-38) and in the Gulag...

...Leftist antifascism regarded the Nazi regime as yet another variety of generic fascism, which in turn was a cynical instrument of capitalist economic domination...

...Soviet authorities even melted down the lead type of the book (it appeared in France in 1995...

...COURTOIS BLAMES what he regards as the "enormous lag" in the public and academic acknowledgment of the crimes of communism on three factors: first, the idea of the revolution itself, the passionate attachment of intellectuals to the symbols of an idealism still being mourned...

...What gives the entire Livre noir controversy its particularly French accent is that Courtois's anger is ultimately directed against French intellectuals, whom he accuses of "cupidity, flabbiness, vanity, and fascination with force and violence...

...Jospin affirmed his "total condemnation of the Gulag" while declaring that he was "proud" of his coalition partners...

...At one level, however, Courtois is right that communism and Nazism have never been treated equally...

...Unlike history, memory is always consecrated by those whose aim is to recognize the victims of a particular suffering...

...Rather, the essential point is that the Holocaust is not reducible to the sum of its victims or to the method of their annihilation...

...He draws subtle distinctions between the early campaigns and the Great Terror of 1937-1938, demonstrating that the mechanisms of communist repression were diverse, encompassed a wide range of political, social, and ethnic victims, and oscillated between relatively quiescent periods and periods of "intensely spiraling terror" driven by zealousness at its base and manipulation from above...

...As FURET pointed out in a posthumously published exchange of letters with the German political scientist Ernst Nolte (whose remarks on the Holocaust provoked the "Historians' Controversy" over a decade ago [see Anson Rabinbach, "German Historians Debate the Nazi Past," Dissent, Spring 19881) the fact that "the annihilation of the Jews has acceded to the pinnacle of crimes that have been committed in the name of political ideologies" does not excuse the massacres of the kulaks during the 1930s, the mass murder of the Polish elite in Katyn, the horrors of the Great Leap Forward, or the Cambodian genocide...

...Writing in Le Monde diplomatique, Maurice Lemoine concluded that the discrepancy can only be explained if Courtois counts as communist victims all those killed in the Nicaraguan civil war against the Somoza regime and in the war between the contras and the Sandinistas...

...This simple procedure should at least provoke reflection about the similarities that exist between the Nazi regime, which since 1945 has been regarded as the most criminal regime of the century, and the communist regimes, whose legitimacy at the international level was unassailable until 1991, which remain in power in a numCOMMUNIST CRIMES AND FRENCH INTELLECTUALS ber of countries, and which still claim followers throughout the entire world...

...Courtois's footnotes betray the fact that Hilberg's book appeared in French just ten years ago...

...Since Lionel Jospin's ruling Socialist government currently includes three Communist ministers, Le Livre noir prompted members of the anti-Gaullist center-right confederation, the UDF, to confront the prime minister in Parliament and demand "that he identify those responsible for supporting this horror...

...THAT DISTINCTION was the substance of the comparison between the Ukrainian famine and the Nazi death camps poignantly drawn by the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman in his novel Forever Flowing, which is only partially cited by Courtois...

...Though the communists initially denied the uniqueness of the Holocaust, "they soon recognized the advantage which acknowledgment of that singularity could reap for the perpetual mobilization of antifascism...

...In all other respects he draws no distinction between the "class totalitarianism" of communism, and the "race totalitarianism" of the Nazis: "the future Nazi society would be built on the 'pure race,' the DISSENT 1 Fall 1998 n 61 COMMUNIST CRIMES AND FRENCH INTELLECTUALS future communist society on the proletarian people freed of all bourgeois dross...

...Courtois claims 150,000 victims of communism in Latin America, though Pascal Fontaine's chapter gives less than a third of that (including those murdered by Peru's Shining Path) as a plausible figure...

...how its use was amplified during the campaigns against the Cossacks, kulaks, and ethnic minorities during the 1920s...

...The point, however, is not accuracy, which is admittedly an elusive goal given the fact that no archives are yet available for China, North Korea, Cambodia, or Vietnam, and that those in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have only recently been opened...

...If communists and Nazis were equally genocidal, then why should Communists be included in a government, and not neofascists like JeanMarie Le Pen and his heir apparent Bruno Megret...

...In France the question of a tactical alliance between conservatives and the National Front is no academic matter...

...But when Furet died suddenly in July 1997, Le Livre noir's editor, Stephane Courtois, longtime associate of France's premier ex-communist intellectual, Annie Kriegel, and editor of the review Communisme, added the missing ingredients of sensation, hyperbole, and denunciation...

...And the government was a government of workers and peasants...

...Much of Courtois's introduction is concerned with the juridical arguments for charging communism with "crimes against humanity" according to the criteria established at Nuremberg and subsequent trials...

...These children were Russians, and those who were putting them to death were Russians...

...Racial genocide was ultimately incomprehensible to that logic...

...Rather, what made the book a media event was Courtois's introduction, which asserts that because of the attention given to Nazism and the Holocaust, communism has been virtually ignored as the most genocidal political phenomenon of the twentieth century...

...Even where anti-Semitism was a theme, as in Jean-Paul Sartre's Reflexions sur la question juive (1946), Hitler and the gas chambers were mentioned only in passing, and the role of Vichy in the deportations not at all...

...What distinguishes the Jewish Holocaust from those other incarnations of evil, Furet continued, was that "the liquidation of the Jews aimed at men, women, and children, solely on the basis of the fact that they were horn Jews, which was entirely independent of any conceivable calculation that might have ensued from a struggle over power...

...Courtois's criteria for equating the two systems are ultimately not analytic but moral: "The child of a Ukrainian kulak deliberately starved to death by the Stalinist regime is 'worth' no less than a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto starved to death by the Nazi regime...

...Ironically, Le Livre noir would have done greater justice to the memory of the victims of communism if it had appeared without Courtois's clumsy attempt at leveling the horrors...

...Comparisons are not only necessary, they are fundamental to historical comprehension and criticism...

...Courtois himself draws on the example of two sensational French libel trials—the first initiated in 1949 by Viktor Kravchenko, whose I Chose Freedom (1945) revealed the existence of Soviet concentration camps, the second in 1951, by David Rousset, an anti-Nazi partisan and former Buchenwald inmate, who launched an investigation into the Soviet camps— to demonstrate how relentless was the French procommunist press in its efforts to discredit and deny the veracity of reports about the Gulag...

...This assertion is not merely bizarre and myopic...

...The uniqueness of the Holocaust focuses attention on the exceptional atrocity, while impeding perception of other realities of the same order in the communist world...

...Also at stake in the controversy was Courtois's attempt to render a statistical account of those killed under communism...

...In short, communism, like Nazism, "installed mass murder as a veritable system of government...

...The third factor, Courtois claims, is that the "victors of 1945 legitimately placed their crimes—in particular the genocide of the Jews—at the center of their condemnation of the Nazis...

...Consequently, antifascist intellectuals in the West and the East European people's republics, which enshrined antifascism as state doctrine, uniformly suppressed acknowledgment of racism as the central element of what they called "German fascism"—and so rendered the mass extermination of the Jews all but invisible...

...For these children were Soviet children and those putting them to death were Soviet people...

...In that context, Courtois's argument that for victims of communism "all commemoration and demands for reparation lwere prohibited," while "the international Jewish community took charge of the commemoration of the genocide," is an invidious comparison...

...In short, communist regimes were far more murderous than Nazism and should not be given second rank in the moral ledger of twentiethcentury genocide...

...The moral triumph of resistance forces created a consensus that afforded the Soviet Union and the Red Army far greater legitimacy and support than elsewhere in Europe...

...Courtois withheld his introduction from his co-authors, so egregiously violating the senus communis among the contributors that two of them, Nicolas Werth, the author of the most substantial chapter—a book-length study of terror in the Soviet Union—and Jean-Louis Margolin, the author of the chapter on China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, broke ranks and publicly disavowed it in several lengthy articles and interviews...

...Afterward, it became more difficult for French intellectuals to pretend that the aura of the resistance could be extended morally and geographically to the Soviet Union...

...The debate that ensued all but ignored the bulk of the volume, focusing largely on Courtois's contribution...

...Certainly not at Nuremberg, nor in any of the countries of the "victors of 1945...

...Indeed, after 1945 most French in64 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 tellectuals believed they had to chose between antifascism, which depicted communism as patriotic and invoked the memory of the resistance, and antitotalitarianism, which depicted communism as brutally repressive, and rejected that memory as essentially corrupted...

...The original Livre noir of Nazi genocide in the Soviet Union was painstakingly compiled by Ilya Ehrenbourg and Vasily Grossman in order to counter the state-sanctioned obliteration of the genocide...

...Why this massacre...

...But he defended the "reality of the object: the communist system.' " "Does there not exist all in all a common terrain," he asked in an interview in the journal L'Histoire (January 1998), "a new ruthlessness, constituted by the practical politics instituted in all the countries that were claimed by communism and which persisted through the great and terrible sequences of repression, indeed, which at certain moments were enormously criminal...

...Robert Hue, PCF leader since Georges Marchais stepped down in 1994, condemned Courtois "for playing the game of the extreme right," and evoked the memory of communist participation in the resistance, in the Popular Front, and in the anticolonial movements...

...It did not take long for the National Front to include Le Livre noir on its essential reading list, advertising the book with the slogan: "We are awaiting an act of repentance from the French Communists...

...Nor is Courtois's purpose to elaborate on problems of comparing different communist regimes, which should have been at the center of the introduction to a volume attempting a preliminary accounting of the crimes of communism, but to score points in what amounts to a "double-entry bookkeeping of the horrors...