The assessment of communist crimes
By Eric Conan

The Black Book of Communism should have been prefaced by François Furet, who disappeared last July. He considered this sum as the complement of his bestseller The Past of an Illusion, in which he wondered about this political passion that pushed so many men to commit so many massacres before, very often, being crushed by the system they had served. Perhaps the presence of the great historian would have prevented this unprecedented undertaking from ending in confusion: at the end of three years of work, the publisher managed to publish the book for this 80th anniversary of October 1917, but its authors, divided, no longer speak, anticipating the polemics that will not fail to arise. Because it is another memory, this one still taboo, that The Black Book attacks, by proposing the first assessment, on a global scale, of the crimes committed by the communist regimes. Terrifying accounting: the various attempts to build the "new man" have caused, around the world, the death of 65 to 85 million people.

Under the direction of Stéphane Courtois, a dozen historians have divided the task according to their regional skills. Nicolas Werth's contribution on the USSR, which occupies almost a third of the work, constitutes a decisive contribution to the history of Soviet repression. Russian-speaking, well-versed in local archives and the work of the new generation of Russian historians, Nicolas Werth has produced an overwhelming synthesis on methods that served as a model throughout the world. From the archives of the period 1917-1921, he shows that the exercise of "terror as a mode of government" was conceived long before the outbreak of the civil war and was therefore not a consequence: the criminal impulse, very early, returns to Lenin. Stalin only took over the legacy of a dictatorship waging a war on the whole of society.

The Soviet death toll (about 15 million dead) was greatly exceeded by Mao's China. Jean-Louis Margolin estimates that the range of victims oscillates between 45 and 72 million deaths. Maoism adds this particularity of having wanted to "re-educate an entire society". But the palm of the murderous madness belongs to the Khmer Rouge, who eliminated, from 1975 to 1979, between 1.3 and 2.3 million people out of a population of 7.5 million Cambodians. The addition undertaken by The Black Book continues with Eastern Europe (Karel Bartosek), North Korea (Pierre Rigoulot), Africa (Yves Santamaria), Latin America (Pascal Fontaine). Not to mention the Comintern (Jean-Louis Panné and Stéphane Courtois), an international paramilitary structure led by Moscow and which, during the Spanish Civil War, murdered many members of the International Brigades who were not "in line".

The authors of the Black Book have not divided on the problem of the minimization of which these crimes continue to be the object in the West, and particularly in France. "The crimes of communism have not been subjected to a legitimate and normal evaluation, both from the historical point of view and from the moral point of view," rightly specifies Stéphane Courtois. There are no shortage of examples: for example, last summer, a mass grave of 9,000 victims of Stalin was discovered in a Karelian forest. The French press didn't say a word about it. Historians have also not divided about the use that the National Front, which demands a "Nuremberg of Communism", would not fail to make of their work. For the most part former communists, Maoists or Trotskyists, the authors of the Black Book, who always assert themselves as leftists, agree with Stéphane Courtois to "not allow an increasingly present extreme right the privilege of telling the truth: it is in the name of democratic values, and not national-fascist ideals, that we must analyze and condemn the crimes of communism".

The crime against humanity

Their conflict is deeper. And more interesting. It concerns the interpretation of the notion of "crimes". Are these "communist crimes" or "crimes of communism"? Can we talk about "crimes against humanity"? The initial drafting, by Stéphane Courtois, of the introduction and the conclusion provoked the anger of Werth, Margolin and Bartosek, editors of the essential chapters. The conflict was violent: retention of manuscripts, exchanges of lawyers, summonses from bailiffs, threats of trial...

Stéphane Courtois has modified his texts a lot, but the content of the book still reflects these polemics. Purely historical texts, with all the usual scientific scruples (Nicolas Werth's on the USSR offers a model), rub shoulders with critical analyses or which even plead for the criminalization of the crimes mentioned. In a text that is no longer a conclusion - "Why?- Stéphane Courtois wonders about the mystery that led activists engaged in a "logic of political combat towards a logic of exclusion, then towards an eliminationist logic and, finally, exterminationist of all impure elements. At the end of this logic, there is the crime against humanity". All the terms of the debate are thus summarized. The massive crimes involved are among the peaks of the horror of this century, but can we say that the "mass crime" constitutes the common denominator, even the essence, of communism? The absence of freedom and daily repression seem to be more universal criteria of communism than the "mass crime", absent in many states.
As for the application of the concept of crime against humanity, the discussion appears biased by the desire to bring the crimes of communism into the Nuremberg definition at all costs. They have not been tried, and Stéphane Courtois would like them to be: "The death by hunger of a child from a Ukrainian kulak deliberately cornered to starvation by the Stalinist regime?worth? the starving death of a Jewish child from the Warsaw ghetto cornered to starvation by the Nazi regime."So here is the other subject of controversy: the comparison with the crimes of Nazism, already outlined by François Furet. "The remodeling of these two companies was considered in the same way, even if the exclusion criteria were not the same," writes Stéphane Courtois. This comparison is legitimate, but must be conducted with caution. It must consist in bringing together - because human damage rivals in horror - but also in distinguishing. The projects present themselves differently: rationalist and universalist ideology, on the one hand; revolution based on the exaltation of instinct and race for the benefit of a single people, on the other. But there is no doubt that the cases of elimination, in the USSR, of certain social strata (including women and children) as a hereditary class do not in any way give way to Nazi crimes. Likewise, it seems legitimate to talk about "genocide" about the Khmer Rouge.

Between the two totalitarisms

However, isn't this desire for semantic equivalence historically reductive? Because, if we can discuss endlessly on the comparison between Nazism and communism and on the respective magnitude of the misfortunes that they caused (25 million victims in twelve years of Nazism; more than 65 million in eighty years of communism), their assimilation is not possible. And this is all the less so since Nazism has a unique characteristic: the denial of humanity that constitutes the enterprise of integral destruction of populations. A singularity to which are attached other practices that have no equivalent in communist regimes: mass sterilization, the murder of the disabled and mentally ill, deadly scientific experiments on human guinea pigs.

On the other hand, a difference between these two bloody totalitarisms appears illegitimate: their unequal condemnation in Western Europe. Several objective reasons explain this asymmetry: we have not known the experience of a Soviet occupation, the USSR participated with the Allies in the fall of Nazism and the communist militants fought, from June 1941, alongside the European Resistances. Let's add the frivolous attachment to the idea of revolution, which François Furet had correctly diagnosed and which has just been illustrated by the recent "Guevaramania", while the "Che", who mixed work camps and firing squads, was not a Disneyland hero.

Many activists and intellectuals sang the merits of Stalin and Mao. Many argue that they "didn't know". Complicit ignorance and guilty blindness: in the 50s and 60s, crimes became indisputable. A communist intellectual, associate professor of history, could still write, in 1978, that the Leninist power "was undoubtedly one of the revolutionary governments in history that applied itself the most to spare lives" and whose first years "irreversibly caused Russian society to make a considerable leap forward in terms of real and formal freedoms".

Today, no one defends Stalinism, Maoism, or this "necessary cruelty" from which "the blue eyes of the Revolution" shone (Aragon). The PCF, its fellow travelers and the former leftists have broken with their past. But without thinking about it. Nor explain himself. In this season of repentance, there are, on this side, opportunities that are lost.