The Wall Street Journal
January 12, 1998 ANNE APPLEBAUM

Teflon Communism

By ANNE APPLEBAUM

It began in November, became passionate in December, and trickled out again in January. While it lasted, the debate in Paris about the crimes of communism was as fierce as only a French intellectual debate can be: there were headlines in Le Monde, questions in parliament, and no doubt more than one furious discussion on the Left Bank as well. But now the issues have faded away once again, as they always do. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this is a debate that has never quite got off the ground--and it is worth asking why.

This time, the argument was set off by a book put together by a collection of respected analysts and historians: Le Livre Noir du Communism (The Black Book of Communism). One wouldn't expect that over 800 pages of history, photographs and statistics would stir political fury and journalistic interest, but this tome was different. While there are histories of communism's toll in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and in China and Cambodia, this is reportedly the first time that anyone has made a comprehensive study, complete with an estimated body count of 85 to 100 million. Also unusual, the introduction, written by Stephane Courtois of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, argues that these deaths deserve the appellation "crimes against humanity"--the term most closely associated with Nazi genocide.

Why the Controversy?

Those numbers and that phrase triggered the reactions that took Paris by surprise. Intellectuals, including some of the Black Book's co-authors, objected to the implied comparison of Nazism to communism. Some politicians began to question the presence of the French Communist party in the governing coalition. One parliamentary deputy demanded to know how Prime Minister Lionel Jospin intended to "recognize the crimes of communism" and to "establish the responsibility" of those--including those in France--who supported the criminals. Mr. Jospin's response was that he was "proud" of the presence of Communists in his government and shocked by the comparison of communism to Nazism; a group of right-wing deputies marched out of parliament as a result.

What seems extraordinary, in retrospect, is not that the French worked themselves up into a lather over a few numbers quoted in a book, but that any aspect of this subject should still be controversial anywhere at all. At the end of the 20th century, it is no longer possible to say of Marxism, as many once did, that "the ideas were right, but the people failed." Whether you think the death toll comes to 100 million or a mere 10 million, whether you count man-made famines as well as mass terror, whether you include Latin American insurgencies or stick simply to Eastern Europe--in 1998 there really should be no doubt in anybody's mind that the ideas behind Communist regimes were wrong too.

In order to understand this, there is no need to compare Communist crimes to Nazi crimes. It is pointless to argue over which philosophy, communism or fascism, is "worse": both are evil, both should be condemned, those who perpetrated either should be punished, those who sympathized with either should be ashamed.

Of course, the degree of punishment has not been the same. As Mr. Courtois points out in the introduction, there has been no Nuremberg for criminals who perpetrated terror and murder under Communist regimes. In most of Central and Eastern Europe, Stalinist prosecutors, jailers and torturers are living out a peaceful retirement on government pensions. In Russia, the crimes of the past are rarely discussed in public. In China, the camps and torture continue, if not at the same intensity.

While deplorable, and in some cases dangerous to the stability of fragile new democracies, this absence of punishment in the former Communist world can be explained. The transformation of Communist regimes happened gradually; often former Communists remained in power; newly democratic countries found it too difficult to deal with the past when facing immediate economic and political challenges.

Much harder to explain is the absence of shame on the part of the Western sympathizers. While it is impossible to imagine any political party with the word "Nazi" in its name operating successfully anywhere in Europe, Communist and former Communist parties continue to exist and thrive. The word "collaborator" is rarely applied to them, although that is of course what they were. The French Communist party, which remains unembarrassed by its name, was very late to acknowledge the crimes of Stalinism. Lucio Lombardo Radice, a leading Italian "Euro-Communist," famously admitted in 1977 that in the case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, he would want Italy to take the side of the Soviet Union against NATO.

Nor has any stigma been attached to Marxism itself, which continues to attract adherents, as it did during the time of purges and terror in the Soviet Union. As the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov writes in "Facing the Extreme," his recent book on the moral questions posed by concentration camps, Jean-Paul Sartre was among many left-wing French intellectuals who knew about the state crimes of the Soviet Union while they were happening, but refused to discuss them because he "didn't wish to demoralise Billancourt, the working-class suburb of Paris." His contemporary equivalents are no different. Marx's Communist Manifesto sold 60,000 copies in Britain last year, and is still second to the Bible as the best-selling book ever. Marxist philosophy survives in many Western universities, even as it is scorned in Eastern Europe.

This attachment to a philosophy that has been responsible for decades of terror is explained in part by the outcome of World War II: Many in the West still seem unaware that we defeated one murderous regime with the help of another. But, even more alarming, the ideas themselves continue to appeal. The ideal of equality, which lies at the heart of Marxism, also lies at the heart of the social democratic philosophy that spawned the modern welfare states of Europe and America. Even some British Tories and German Christian Democrats found it difficult to condemn Marxist regimes in the past because of the egalitarian ideals they espoused. History has still not taught us, in other words, that the forced imposition of equality--as opposed to the legal creation of equality of opportunity--can only be achieved through coercion, and at the expense of economic and political freedom.

Blame Human Nature?

Nor, 80 years after the bloody, destructive and nevertheless still romanticized Russian Revolution, has history taught us to distinguish between truth and propaganda. The Nazis committed acts of terror and were open about it--more or less--which is why the Nazis are universally condemned. Communists committed acts of terror in the name of a greater good, which is why such a substantial minority of people are offended by a book which condemns Marxist regimes. Perhaps, in fact, the continued tolerance of Communist parties and Marxist philosophy in the West is rooted in human nature, in our capacity for self-deception, in our dreams of a society without conflicts and without poverty, in our refusal to see that all of the quick roads to such a society lead to totalitarianism.

But whatever the reasons, our inability to condemn left- wing acts of terror as forcefully as right-wing acts of terror does leave open a continued source of moral confusion in the West--one which will no doubt continue to erupt in uneasy and unresolved public debate such as the one which has just played itself out in Paris. Until Marxism itself is widely seen as an abhorrent philosophy, it will remain.

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Ms. Applebaum, a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph, is writing a book about the Soviet gulag system.

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