Dead Souls

...Each had his following among his soldiers, police, and fellow citizens...

...In 1947, Viktor Kravchenko's book on life in Soviet Russia, I Choose Freedom, so shocked the French Left that one Communist journal accused him of inventing it, and a spectacular libel trial followed...

...When those archives first became accessible to Western scholars a decade ago, some material was released, some was not...

...Fascinating stories are told only in briefest outline: the tale of the twenty-eight thousand children kidnapped during the Greek civil war by Greek Communists and deported across the border to Albania and Bulgaria, on the grounds that they would have a more humanitarian upbringing in Communist countries, for instance...

...They weren't even able to light fires to ward off the cold...

...Stories of dismal Russian prisons were not popular, and in any case, they could be countered by better stories told by the distinguished French Communists who had visited Russian prisons prepared for that purpose...

...toes...

...The day after the arrival of the first convoy, on 19 May, snow began to fall again, and the wind picked up...

...Signed by an instructor o the party committee in Narym, Western Siberia, and sent to the attention of Stalin in May 1933, it precisely describe the arrival of a group of deported peas ants—labeled "outdated elements"—or the island of Nazino in the Ob river: The first convoy contained 5,070 people, and the second 1,044...

...All of which is a way of explaining the surprising success of The Black Book of Communism when it was published in France in 1997...

...In fact, the Black Book's polemics are confined to the introduction, written specifically to irritate the French...

...But the documents make the camps seem real...

...His language was perfectly calculated to irritate and embarrass the French Left, which has always been far happier to dwell upon its opposition to Hitler than its links to Soviet communism...

...le Monde ran a front-page headline declaring "A Book Has Relaunched the Debate on the Crimes of Communism," with pages of commentary following for weeks...

...But Un Bagne en Russie Rouge was a failure...

...Its author was not famous, and its literary value was minimal...

...Because it appeared at the end of the 1920s, when the bloodiness of the Russian revolution was already fading into memory, it was easily outshone by volumes like LAmour en Russie and Ma Petite Bolchevique, which described the romance and excitement of Soviet Russia...

...Unlike Raymond Duguet, Courtois had political timing on his side...

...6,114 in all...

...This wave o repression, he writes, drove a mere fifteen million peasants, maybe even more, out into the taiga and the tundra...

...Two of Courtois's co-editors denounced his comparison of Nazism and communism and disassociated themselves from the book...

...Nevertheless, the book, published in Paris in 1927, was one of the first to describe the Soviet Union's political prisons on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea...

...After the Kravchenko trial came 1968: Mao, the revolutionary voice of French youth, triumphed over Mao, the man responsible for the greatest famine in world history...

...From Prague to Phnom Penh, the same kind of language was used to dehumanize these enemies—"poiso-nous weeds," "insects"—and the same kind of fate awaited them and their families, in massacres, camps, and exile...

...He mentioned the mosquiA journalist based in Warsaw and London, Anne Applebaum is writing a history of Soviet concentration camps...

...Rather, Courtois wanted to push the memory of Communist crimes back into the cultural mainstream...

...In his introduction, Courtois, a historian of the French Communist party and an ex-Trotskyite, produced a list of the casualties of Stalin, Mao, and other Communist leaders and concluded that Communist repression was responsible for the deaths of a hundred million people in this century...

...The book became a publishing sensation, not only in France, where it sold fifty thousand copies within the first two weeks, but in Germany and Italy, where the reaction of the Italian Left was almost as dramatic as that of the French...

...the comparison of Hitler and Stalin has been made, after all, by historians and political philosophers from Hannah Arendt to Alan Bullock...

...For sixty years, Duguet's book was the most complete source on Solovetsky in the French language...

...Would anyone even dare to come up with the idea of featuring Hitler or Goebbels in its commercials...

...It certainly didn't seem, in 1997, that the French could be shocked by more accounts of Communist repression...

...Nor were its authors the sort usually thought to have mass-market appeal: The Black Book was edited by Stephane Courtois, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scien-tifique in Paris, together with five other scholars—ranging from a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences to a specialist in the history of Southeast Asia at the University of Provence—and a handful of collaborators...

...Starving, emaciated from months of insufficient food, without shelter and without tools, . . . they were trapped...

...Trotsky's death is dispensed with in a paragraph...

...As late as 1977, Mengistu launched a "Red Terror" in Ethiopia...

...With the exception of Cambodia, the chapters on Asia cannot stand up to the chapters on the Soviet Union and Central Europe, since the Communist regimes in Asia are still in power and have not opened their records...

...In the 1930s, French newspapers reported the Moscow show trials...

...He denounced the "cupidity, spinelessness, vanity, fascination with power, violence, and revolutionary fervor" that motivated several generations of Western, and particularly French, intellectuals to ignore or "cover up" these deaths...

...in Russia and Eastern Europe today, certain collections remain closed to some people and opened to others, or simply closed altogether, which leads many to suspect that the most sensational documents have not yet been released...

...In the end, the very repetitiveness of these accounts produces their powerful effect...

...The real moral problem posed by the Black Book is not simply whether Stalin was as bad as Hitler...

...The happy crowds promenade beneath the trees with an air of well-being...

...By August 20, three months later, only 2,200 of 6,114 people were still alive, and those partly thanks to cannibalism...

...The crimes of communism had been described before...

...They may not tell us anything very new...

...The English language edition is unlikely to have any mainstream political impact...

...That is how their new life began...

...The contents of the Black Book were not even very original...

...The transport conditions were appalling: the little food that was available was inedible and the deportees were cramped into nearly airtight spaces...

...In 1997, France was under a Socialist government, and the immediate result of this attack on the Left was a sort of collective howl, well described in the foreward to the American edition by Martin Malia, emeritus professor at Berkeley and a scholar of Soviet history...

...He correctly named prisoners and several guards...

...In the 1970s, Alexander Solzhen-itsyn's Gulag Archipelago had an impact in Paris comparable only to its impact in Moscow: Articles were written, hands were wrung, and Marxism was publicly renounced by many Marxists...

...In others, such as North Korea, all information must still be couched in language like "it is estimated" or "there is no way of knowing exactly...

...It is as if it had not even scarred the Russian conscience...

...But because communism was an anti-traditional ideology that deliberately destroyed older ways of life, the cultural differences between various national Communist parties are not, in the end, nearly as striking as their extraordinary similarities...

...In C'est la Lutte Finale, Magdeleine Marx, a French leftist who traveled to Russia in the late 1920s, wrote: "Such boutiques there are...

...more than three hundred thousand Poles are deported to Siberia in a page and a half...

...Many of the authors in the Black Book attempt to put Communist movements into their cultural contexts, discussing the legacy of peasant rebellion in Russia or of slavery in Cambodia...

...Unfortunately, the enormous impact of archives on the accounting of Communist crimes also makes the Black Book somewhat lopsided...

...These living conditions, however, proved to be luxurious in comparison to what awaited the deportees on the island of Nazino...

...Yet this is to miss the point...

...Dead Souls Tallying the Victims of Communism BY ANNE APPLEBAUM Its pages were yellowed, its cheap binding broken, its typeface uneven: There was nothing imposing about the copy of Un Bagne en Russie Rouge—"A Prison in Red Russia"—someone once handed me as a curiosity...

...Yet something always seemed to intervene to prevent the wider public from appreciating the scale of Communist terror...

...To tell their history, we no longer have to compare survivors' memoirs to the depiction of camps in propaganda films, no longer have to contrast Raymond Duguet on prisons with Magdeleine Marx on Soviet boutiques...

...Each had his claque of supportive intellectuals...

...Courtois's real aim was not to reshape historiography...

...One way or another, in French political and intellectual life, anti-anti-communism always managed to triumph...

...When the editor began, predictably, to deny that his paper had ever supported the Russian dictator, Courtois pulled out the paper, which featured a large portrait of Stalin surrounded by a thick black border of mourning, and waved it dramatically in front of his nose...

...Or the thousands of idealistic Finnish-Americans who emigrated to Karelia, the Finnish-speaking region of the Soviet Union, only to be arrested as spies, sometimes within days of arrival, and shot or deported to concentration camps...

...Yet for a volume whose publication was surrounded by so much politics, the Black Book is for the most part apolitical...

...Words and phrases invented by Lenin and his chief of secret police, Felix Dzherzhinsky, were repeated all over the world, in the most unlikely of places...

...The Black Book's editor, Stephane Courtois, intended to break this cycle...

...Accusing the authors of ignoring the importance of cultural differences, they argued that the history of so many countries could not be told in one volume...

...Some of the Black Book's French critics attacked the book's wide geographical scope for other reasons...

...No appeals to the Russian conscience are necessary to convey the tragedy, no attacks on Stalin or Soviet society, no "you and I as well," are needed to heighten the drama...

...For this is the other aspect of the Black Book that makes it different from its predecessors: Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it makes sense to look back at the evolution of Communist terror as a single phenomenon, to trace the direct lines of influence, ideological and financial, from Lenin to Stalin to Mao Zedong to Ho Chi-Minh to Pol Pot, from Castro to the MPLA in Angola—to examine the spread of concentration camps from Russia to China to North Korea, and the export of the Soviet model of secret police to Cuba and East Germany...

...At this he succeeded, not least because he topped off his scholarship with a series of combative television appearances...

...A French government agency, the National Lottery, was crazy enough to use Stalin and Mao in one of its advertising campaigns," Courtois observes...

...Here, for example, is how Solzhenit syn in The Gulag Archipelago describes the kulak deportations in the late 1920 and early 1930s, a period when richei peasants were removed from collec tivized farms and sent to the far North to work as forced laborers...

...It is rather whether the history of the twentieth century hasn't given us objective and final proof of what the philosophers and theologians of a much earlier era often claimed: that human nature itself is fallen and twisted at its core—and that utopian ideologies of "liberation" which deny this fact end by causing murder on an unprecedented scale...

...And it is the very ordinariness of such documents that matters...

...That we know this information comes from a document written by an ordinary party worker, expressly for Stalin's eyes, is enough...

...In fact, the relative dearth of sensational revelations has been a disappointment to those who hoped the opening of archives would dramatically alter our knowledge of Soviet history...

...Jospin replied that the Revolution of 1917 was "one of the great events of this century" and said he was "proud" to have Communists in his government...

...But even though Europeans bought it primarily because of the controversy surrounding it, the Black Book does indeed surpass many of its predecessors in conveying the grand scale of the Communist tragedy, thanks to its authors' extensive use of the newly opened archives of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...

...After the revelations of the 1930s came the war: Stalin, the conqueror of Hitler, loomed larger than Stalin, the back-stabbing despot...

...And yet Stalin (and you and I as well) committed no crime more heinous than this...

...This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it...

...Solzhenitsyn was slowly discredited, in the anti-American, anti-Reagan France of the 1980s, as an authoritarian, a nationalist, even a fascist...

...The result was a daily mortality rate of 35-40 people...

...Most important, he asked why they were so regularly and popularly played down in comparison with the crimes of Hitler...

...the right-wing politicians walked out of the National Assembly in protest...

...What Jean-Louis Margolin, in his chapter on Cambodia, calls the "mania for classification and elimination of different elements of society" turns out to have been characteristic of nearly all Communist regimes: In Russia they were the "former people" or the "enemies of the people," in China they were the "blacks" as opposed to the "reds," in Cambodia they were the "75'ers," who had been expelled from cities in 1975...

...we've known about the existence of Soviet concentration camps since the early 1920s...

...In some countries, China included, researchers have been able to do field work, and there are excellent secondary sources...

...Each mass murderer learned from his predecessors...

...A serious, scholarly history of Communist crimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Africa, and Latin America, the Black Book did not look like a candidate for the bestseller list: 846 pages in the French edition—1,120 pages in the new American edition, translated by Mark Kramer and Jonathan Murphy—of torture, murder, repression, famine, and terror...

...Quoting survivors, escapees, and what little information had been published in the Soviet press, the author Raymond Duguet accurately described the geography of the islands, the barracks within a former monastery, the lack of food, the mass executions...

...Nevertheless, Courtois and his publishers (he credits them with the idea) were right to include non-European Communist movements...

...The words of the camp guards themselves can be used to describe what happened...

...By contrast, Nicolas Werth, who wrote the chapter on the same period in the Black Book, is able to quote from an official document from the archives in Novosibirsk...

...Courtois told me that he prepared for one show, in which he was to debate the former editor of IIHu-manite, the French Communist newspaper, by digging out the edition from the day of Stalin's death...

...Over the past hundred years, human beings of extremely varied ethnic and political backgrounds have humiliated, imprisoned, and murdered one another in the name of various higher ideals and causes, using an ever-increasing degree of organization and technology...

...Although some of Courtois's comments will annoy the English-speaking academic world (we too have our historians and journalists who were less than forthcoming about Communist crimes, and who will be less than pleased to see Hitler and Stalin mentioned in the same breath), it's hard to see Bill Clinton or Tony Blair getting worked up about it...

...What is available is often quite ordinary: the day-to-day records of the Gulag administration, for example, with inspectors' reports, financial accounts, letters from camp directors to their supervisors in Moscow...

...Worse, the book was mistimed...

...Because it covers so many places over such a long period, it is of necessity condensed, and reads at times like a martyrology...

...A group of right-wing politicians, citing the Black Book, attacked the new prime minister, Lionel Jospin, for including the Communist party with its "criminal past" in his ruling coalition...

...There were no tools, no grain, and no food...