BLACK BOOK - the crimes of communism the crimes of communism

The black book of communism (excerpt)

Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin

Excerpt from Introduction: the crimes of communism by Stéphane Courtois

[pg. 3] However, the memory of the terror has continued to preserve the credibility, and thus the effectiveness, of the threat of repression. None of the Communist regimes currently in vogue in the West is an exception to this rule–not the China of the “Great Helmsman,” nor the North Korea of Kim Il Sung, nor even the Vietnam of “good old Uncle Ho” or the Cuba of the flamboyant Fidel Castro, flanked by the hard-liner Che Guevara. Nor can we forget Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam, Angola under Agostinho Neto, or Afghanistan under Mohammed Najibullah.

Incredibly, the crimes of Communism have yet to receive a fair and just assessment from both historical and moral viewpoints. This book is one of the first attempts to study Communism with a focus on its criminal dimensions, in both the central regions of Communist rule and the farthest reaches of the globe. Some will say that most of these crimes were actions conducted in accordance with a system of law that was enforced by the regimes’ official institutions, which were recognized internationally and whose heads of state continued to be welcomed with open arms. But was this not the case with Nazism as well? The crimes we shall expose are to be judged not by the standards of Communist regimes, but by the unwritten code of the natural laws of humanity.

The history of Communist regimes and parties, their policies, and their relations with their own national societies and with the international community are of course not purely synonymous with criminal behavior, let alone with terror and repression. In the US.S.R. and in the “people’s democracies” after Stalin’s death, as well as in China after Mao, terror became less pronounced, society began to recover something of its old normalcy, and “peaceful coexistence”–if only as “the pursuit of the class struggle by other means”–had become an international fact of life. Nevertheless, many archives and witnesses prove conclusively that terror has always been one of the basic ingredients of modern Communism. Let us abandon once and for all the idea that the execution of hostages by firing squads, the slaughter of rebellious workers, and the forced starvation of the peasantry were only short-term “accidents” peculiar to a specific country or era. Our approach will encompass all geographic areas and focus on crime as a defining characteristic of the Communist system throughout its existence.

Exactly what crimes are we going to examine? Communism has committed a multitude of crimes not only against individual human beings but also against world civilization and national cultures. Stalin demolished dozens of churches in Moscow; Nicolae Ceausescu destroyed the historical heart of Bucharest to give free rein to his megalomania; Pol Pot dismantled the Phnom Penh cathedral stone by stone and allowed the jungle to take over the temples of Angkor Wat; and during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, priceless treasures were smashed or burned by the Red Guards. Yet however terrible this destruction may ultimately prove for the nations in question and for humanity as a whole, how does it compare with the mass murder of human beings–of men, women, and children?

Thus we have delimited crimes against civilians as the essence of the phenomenon of terror. These crimes tend to fit a recognizable pattern even if the practices vary to some extent by regime. The pattern includes execution by various means, such as firing squads, hanging, drowning, battering, and, in certain cases, gassing, poisoning, or “car accidents”; destruction of the population by starvation, through man-made famine, the withholding of food, or both; deportation, through which death can occur in transit (either through physical exhaustion or through confinement in an enclosed space), at one’s place of residence, or through forced labor (exhaustion, illness, hunger, cold). Periods described as times of “civil war” are more complex–it is not always easy to distinguish between events caused by fighting between rulers and rebels and events that can properly be described only as a massacre of the civilian population.

Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. The following rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates, gives some sense of the scale and gravity of these crimes:

U.S.S.R.:                                                                                  20 million deaths
China:                                                                                              65 million deaths
Vietnam:                                                                                             1 million deaths
North Korea:                                                                                      2 million deaths
Cambodia:                                                                                          2 million deaths
Eastern Europe:                                                                                   1 million deaths
Latin America:                                                                                     150,000 deaths
Africa:                                                                                                 1.7 million deaths
Afghanistan:                                                                                         1.5 million deaths
International Communist parties not in power:                                  about 10,000 deaths
The total approaches             100 million people killed.

The immense number of deaths conceals some wide disparities according to context. Unquestionably, if we approach these figures in terms of relative weight, first place goes to Cambodia, where Pol Pot, in three and a half years, engaged in the most atrocious slaughter, through torture and widespread famine, of about one-fourth of the country’s total population. However, China’s experience under Mao is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of people who lost their lives. As for the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, the blood turns cold at its venture into planned, logical, and “politically correct” mass slaughter.

This bare-bones approach inevitably fails to do justice to the numerous issues involved. A thorough investigation requires a “qualitative” study based on a meaningful definition of the term “crime.” Objective and legal criteria are also important. The legal ramifications of crimes committed by a specific country were first confronted in 1945 at the Nuremberg Tribunal, which was organized by the Allies to consider the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The nature of these crimes was defined by Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which identified three major offenses: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. An examination of all the crimes committed by the Leninist/Stalinist regime, and in the Communist world as a whole, reveals crimes that fit into each of these three categories.

Crimes against peace, defined by Article 6a, are concerned with the “planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.” Unquestionably, Stalin committed such a crime by secretly negotiating two treaties with Hitler–those of 23 August and 28 September 1939 on the partition of Poland and on the annexation of the Baltic states, northern Bukovina, and Bessarabia to the U.S.S.R., respectively. By freeing Germany from the risk of waging war on two fronts, the treaty of 23 August 1939 led directly to the outbreak of World War II. Stalin perpetrated yet another crime against peace by attacking Finland on 30 November 1939. The unexpected incursion into South Korea by North Korea on 25 June 1950 and the massive intervention in that war by the Chinese army are of comparable magnitude. The methods of subversion long used by the Moscow-backed Communist parties likewise deserve categorization as crimes against peace, since they began wars; thus a Communist coup in Afghanistan led to a massive Soviet military intervention on 27 December 1979, unleashing a conflict that continues to this day.

War crimes are defined in Article 6b as “violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, the ill-treatment or deportation of civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labor camps or for any other purpose, the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, the killing of hostages, the plunder of public or private property, the wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, and any devastation not justified by military necessity.” The laws and customs of war are written down in various conventions, particularly the Hague Convention of 1907, which states that in times of war “the inhabitants and the belligerents remain under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among civilized peoples, from laws of humanity, and the dictates of the public conscience.”

Stalin gave the go-ahead for large numbers of war crimes. The liquidation of almost all the Polish officers taken prisoner in 1939, with 4,500 men butchered at Katyn, is only one such episode, albeit the most spectacular. However, other crimes on a much larger scale are habitually overlooked, including the murder or death in the gulag of tens of thousands of German soldiers taken prisoner from 1943 to 1945. Nor should we forget the rape of countless German women by Red Army soldiers in occupied Germany, as well as the systematic plundering of all industrial equipment in the countries occupied by the Red Army. Also coveted by Article 6b would be the organized resistance fighters who openly waged war against Communist rulers and who were executed by firing squads or deported after being taken prisoner–for example, the soldiers of the anti-Nazi Polish resistance organizations, members of various Ukrainian and Baltic armed partisan organizations, and Afghan resistance fighters.

The expression “crime against humanity” first appeared on 19 May 1915 in a joint French, British, and Russian declaration condemning Turkey’s massacre of the Armenians as a “new crime by Turkey against humanity and civilization.” The atrocities committed by the Nazis obliged the Nuremberg Tribunal to redefine the concept, as stated in Article 6c: “Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.”

In his arguments at Nuremberg the French prosecutor general, Francois de Menthon, emphasized the ideological dimension of these crimes: “I propose today to prove to you that all this organized and vast criminality springs from what I may be allowed to call a crime against the spirit, I mean a doctrine that, by denying all spiritual, rational, or moral values by which nations have tried for thousands of years to improve human conditions, aims to plunge humanity back into barbarism, no longer the natural and spontaneous barbarism of primitive nations, but into a diabolical barbarism, conscious of itself and using for its ends all material means put at the disposal of humanity by contemporary science. This sin against the spirit is the original sin of National Socialism from which all crimes spring. This monstrous doctrine is that of racism. . . .Whether we consider a crime against peace or war crimes, we are therefore not faced by an accidental or an occasional criminality that events could explain without justifying it. We are in fact faced by systematic criminality, which derives directly and of necessity from a monstrous doctrine put into practice with deliberate intent by the masters of Nazi Germany.”

Francois de Menthon also noted that deportations were meant to provide additional labor for the German war machine, and the fact that the Nazis sought to exterminate their opponents was merely “a natural consequence of the National Socialist doctrine for which man has no intrinsic value unless he serves the German race.” All statements made to the Nuremberg Tribunal stressed one of the chief characteristics of crimes against humanity–the fact that the power of the state is placed in the service of criminal policies and practice. However, the jurisdiction of the Nuremberg Tribunal was limited to crimes committed during World War II. Therefore, we must broaden the legal definition of war crimes to include situations that extend beyond that war. The new French criminal code, adopted on 23 July 1992, defines war crimes in the following way: “The deportation, enslavement, or mass-scale and systematic practice of summary executions, abduction of persons following their disappearance, torture, or inhuman acts inspired by political, philosophical, racial, or religious motives, and organized for the purpose of implementing a concerted effort against a civilian population group” (emphasis added).

All these definitions, especially the recent French definition, are relevant to any number of crimes committed by Lenin and above all by Stalin and subsequently by the leaders of all Communist countries, with the exception (we hope) of Cuba and the Nicaragua of the Sandinistas. Nevertheless, the main conclusions are inescapable–Communist regimes have acted “in the name of a state practicing a policy of ideological hegemony.” Thus in the name of an ideological belief system were tens of millions of innocent victims systematically butchered, unless of course it is a crime to be middle-class, of noble birth, a kulak, a Ukrainian, or even a worker or a member of the Communist Party. Active intolerance was high on the Communists’ agenda. It was Mikhail Tomsky, the leader of the Soviet trade unions, who in the 13 November 1927 issue of Trud (Labor) stated: “We allow other parties to exist. However, the fundamental principle that distinguishes us from the West is as follows: one party rules, and all the others are in jail!”

The concept of a crime against humanity is a complex one and is directly relevant to the crimes under consideration here. One of the most specific is genocide. Following the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, and in order to clarify Article 6c of the Nuremberg Tribunal, crimes against humanity were defined by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide of 9 December 1948 in the following way: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The new French criminal code defines genocide still more broadly: “The deed of executing a concerted effort that strives to destroy totally or partially a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, or a group that has been determined on the basis of any other arbitrary criterion” (emphasis added). This legal definition is not inconsistent with the philosophical approach of Andre Frossard, who believes that “it is a crime against humanity when someone is put to death purely by virtue of his or her birth.” And in his short but magnificent novel Forever Flowing, Vasily Grossman says of his hero, Ivan Grigorevich, who has returned from the camps, “he had remained exactly what he had been from his birth: a human being.” That, of course, was precisely why he was singled out in the first place. The French definition helps remind us that genocide comes in many shapes and sizes–it can be racial (as in the case of the Jews), but it can also target social groups. In The Red Terror in Russia, published in Berlin in 1924, the Russian historian and socialist Sergei Melgunov cited Martin Latsis, one of the first leaders of the Cheka (the Soviet political police), as giving the following order on 1 November 1918 to his henchmen: “We don’t make war against any people in particular. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. In your investigations don’t look for documents and pieces of evidence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or acting against Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots, his education, his training, and his occupation.”

Lenin and his comrades initially found themselves embroiled in a merciless “class war,” in which political and ideological adversaries, as well as the more recalcitrant members of the general public, were branded as enemies and marked for destruction. The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal and physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute power. This strategy applied not only to groups with opposing political views, but also to such social groups as the nobility, the middle class, the intelligentsia, and the clergy, as well as professional groups such as military officers and the police. Sometimes the Bolsheviks subjected these people to genocide. The policy of “de-Cossackization” begun in 1920 corresponds largely to our definition of genocide: a population group firmly established in a particular territory, the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women, children, and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over to new, non-Cossack occupants. Lenin compared the Cossacks to the Vendee during the French Revolution and gladly subjected them to a program of what Gracchus Babeuf, the “inventor” of modern Communism, characterized in 1795 as “populicide.”

The “dekulakization” of 1930-1932 repeated the policy of “de-Cossackization” but on a much grander scale. Its primary objective, in accordance with the official order issued for this operation (and the regime’s propaganda), was “to exterminate the kulaks as a class.” The kulaks who resisted collectivization were shot, and the others were deported with their wives, children, and elderly family members. Although not all kulaks were exterminated directly, sentences of forced labor in wilderness areas of Siberia or the far north left them with scant chance of survival. Several tens of thousands perished there; the exact number of victims remains unknown. As for the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, which resulted from the rural population’s resistance to forced collectivization, 6 million died in a period of several months.

Here, the genocide of a “class” may well be tantamount to the genocide of a “race”–the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine caused by Stalin’s regime “is equal to” the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime. Such arguments in no way detract from the unique nature of Auschwitz–the mobilization of leading-edge technological resources and their use in an “industrial process” involving the construction of an “extermination factory,” the use of gas, and cremation. However, this argument highlights one particular feature of many Communist regimes–their systematic use of famine as a weapon. The regime aimed to control the total available food supply and, with immense ingenuity, to distribute food purely on the basis of “merits” and “demerits” earned by individuals. This policy was a recipe for creating famine on a massive scale. Remember that in the period after 1918, only Communist countries experienced such famines, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. And again in the 1980s, two African countries that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist, Ethiopia and Mozambique, were the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines.

A preliminary global accounting of the crimes committed by Communist regimes shows the following: The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without trial, and the murder of hundreds of thousands or rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922; The famine of 1922, which caused the deaths of 5 million people; The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920; The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930; The liquidation of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937-38; The deportation of 2 million kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930-1932; The destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means of an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine in 1932-33; The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldovans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944-45; The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941; The wholesale deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943; The wholesale deportation of the Chechens in 1944; The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 1944; The deportation and extermination of the urban population in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978; The slow destruction of the Tibetans by the Chinese since 1950.

No list of the crimes committed in the name of Leninism and Stalinism would be complete without mentioning the virtually identical crimes committed by the regimes of Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, and Pol Pot.

A difficult epistemological question remains: Should the historian employ the primarily legal categories of “crime against humanity” and “genocide”? Are these concepts not unduly time specific–focusing on the condemnation of Nazism at Nuremberg–for use in historical research aimed at deriving relevant medium-term conclusions? On the other hand, are these concepts not somewhat tainted with questionable “values” that distort the objectivity of historical research?

First and foremost, the, history of the twentieth century has shown us that the Nazis had no monopoly over the use of mass murder by states and party-states. The recent experiences in Bosnia and Rwanda indicate that this practice continues as one of the hallmarks of this century.

Second, although it might not be appropriate to revive historical methods of the nineteenth century, whereby historians performed research more for the purpose of passing judgment than for understanding the issue in question, the immense human tragedies directly caused by certain ideologies and political concepts make it impossible to ignore the humanist ideas implicit in our Judeo-Christian civilization and democratic traditions–for example, the idea of respect for human life. A number of renowned historians readily use the expression “crime against humanity” to describe Nazi crimes, including Jean Perre Azema in his article “Auschwitz” and Pierre Vidal-Naquet on the trial of Paul Touvier. Therefore, it does not seem inappropriate to use such terms and concepts to characterize the crimes committed by Communist regimes.

In addition to the question of whether the Communists in power were directly responsible for these crimes, there is also the issue of complicity. Article 7(3.77) of the Canadian criminal code, amended in 1987, states that crimes against humanity include infractions of attempting, conspiring, counseling, aiding, and providing encouragement for de facto complicity. This accords with the definition of crimes against humanity in Article 7(3.76) of the same code: “attempting or conspiring to commit, counseling any person to commit, aiding or abetting any person in the commission of, or being an accessory after the fact in relation to the act” (emphasis added). Incredibly, from the 1920s to the 1950s, when hundreds of thousands of people served in the ranks of the Communist International and local sections of the “world party of the revolution,” Communists and fellow-travelers around the world warmly approved Lenin’s and subsequently Stalin’s policies. From the 1950s to the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people sang the praises of the “Great Helmsman” of the Chinese Revolution and extolled the virtues of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Much closer to our time, there was widespread rejoicing when Pol Pot came to power. Many will say that they “didn’t know.” Undoubtedly, of course, it was not always easy to learn the facts or to discover the truth, for Communist regimes had mastered the art of censorship as their favorite technique for concealing their true activities. But quite often this ignorance was merely the result of ideologically motivated self-deception. Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, many facts about these atrocities had become public knowledge and undeniable. And although many of these apologists have cast aside their gods of yesterday, they have done so quietly and discreetly. What are we to make of a profoundly amoral doctrine that seeks to stamp out every last trace of civic-mindedness in men’s souls, and damn the consequences?

In 1968 one of the pioneers in the study of Communist terror, Robert Conquest, wrote: “The fact that so many people ‘swallowed’ [the Great Terror] hook, line, and sinker was probably one of the reasons that the Terror succeeded so well. In particular, the trials would not be so significant had they not received the blessing of some ‘independent’ foreign commentators. These pundits should be held accountable as accomplices in the bloody politics of the purges or at least blamed for the fact that the political assassinations resumed when the first show trial, regarding Zinoviev in 1936, was given an ill-deserved stamp of approval.” If the moral and intellectual complicity of a number of non-Communists is judged by this criterion, what can be said of the complicity of the Communists? Louis Aragon, for one, has publicly expressed regret for having appealed in a 1931 poem for the creation of a Communist political police in France.

[… pg. 14] Before World War II, crackdowns against the Jews were widespread; persecution reached its peak during Kristallnacht, with several hundred deaths and 35,000 rounded up for internment in concentration camps. These figures apply only to the period before the invasion of the Soviet Union. Thereafter the full terror of the Nazis was unleashed, producing the following body count-15 million civilians killed in occupied countries, 6 million Jews, 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.1 million deportees who died in the camps, and several hundred thousand Gypsies. We should add another 8 million who succumbed to the ravages of forced labor and 1.6 million surviving inmates of the concentration camps.

The Nazi terror captures the imagination for three reasons. First, it touched the lives of Europeans so closely. Second, because the Nazis were vanquished and their leaders prosecuted at Nuremberg, their crimes have been officially exposed and categorized as crimes. And finally, the revelation of the genocide carried out against the Jews outraged the conscience of humanity by its irrationality, racism, and unprecedented bloodthirstiness.

[… pg. 16]  Efforts to draw parallels between Nazism and Communism on the basis of their respective extermination tactics may give offense to some people. However, we should recall how in Forever FlowingVasily Grossman, whose mother was killed by the Nazis in the Berdychiv ghetto, who authored the first work on Treblinka, and who was one of the editors of the Black Book on the extermination of Soviet Jews, has one of his characters describe the famine in Ukraine: “writers kept writing. . . Stalin himself, too: the kulaks are parasites; they are burning grain; they are killing children. And it was openly proclaimed “that the rage and wrath of the masses must be inflamed against them, they must be destroyed as a class, because they are accursed.” He adds: “To massacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings, just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Thus did Lenin and Stalin say: kulaks are not human beings.” In conclusion, Grossman says of the children of the kulaks: “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!'”

Time and again the focus of the terror was less on targeted individuals than on groups of people. The purpose of the terror was to exterminate a group that had been designated as the enemy. Even though it might be only a small fraction of society, it had to be stamped out to satisfy this genocidal impulse. Thus, the techniques of segregation and exclusion employed in a “class-based totalitarianism” closely resemble the techniques of “race-based totalitarianism.” The future Nazi society was to be built upon a “pure race,” and the future Communist society was to be built upon a proletarian people purified of the dregs of the bourgeoisie. The restructuring of these two societies was envisioned in the same way, even if the crackdowns were different. Therefore, it would be foolish to pretend that Communism is a form of universalism. Communism may have a worldwide purpose, but like Nazism it deems a part of humanity unworthy of existence. The difference is that the Communist model is based on the class system, the Nazi model on race and territory. Thus the transgressions of Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge pose a fresh challenge for humanity, and particularly for legal scholars and historians: specifically, how do we describe a crime designed to exterminate not merely individuals or opposing groups but entire segments of society on a massive scale for their political and ideological beliefs? A whole new language is needed for this. Some authors in the English-speaking countries use the term “politicide.” Or is the term “Communist crimes,” suggested by Czech legal scholars, preferable?

How are we to assess Communism’s crimes? What lessons are we to learn from them? Why has it been necessary to wait until the end of the twentieth century for this subject to show up on the academic radar screen? It is undoubtedly the case that the study of Stalinist and Communist terror, when compared to the study of Nazi crimes, has a great deal of catching-up to do (although such research is gaining popularity in Eastern Europe).

One cannot help noticing the strong contrast between the study of Nazi and Communist crimes. The victors of 1945 legitimately made Nazi crimes– and especially the genocide of the Jews–the central focus of their condemnation of Nazism. A number of researchers around the world have been working on these issues for decades. Thousands of books and dozens of films–most notably Night and Fog, Shoah, Sophie’s Choice, and Schindler’s List–have been devoted to the subject. Raul Hilberg, to name but one example, has centered his major work upon a detailed description of the methods used to put Jews to death in the Third Reich.

Yet scholars have neglected the crimes committed by the Communists. While names such as Himmler and Eichmann are recognized around the world as bywords for twentieth-century barbarism, the names of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Genrikh Yagoda, and Nikolai Ezhov languish in obscurity. As for Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and even Stalin, they have always enjoyed a surprising reverence. A French government agency, the National Lottery, was crazy enough to use Stalin and Mao in one of its advertising campaigns. Would anyone even dare to come up with the idea of featuring Hitler or Goebbels in commercials?

The extraordinary attention paid to Hitler’s crimes is entirely justified. It respects the wishes of the surviving witnesses, it satisfies the needs of researchers trying to understand these events, and it reflects the desire of moral and political authorities to strengthen democratic values. But the revelations Concerning Communist crimes cause barely a stir. Why is there such an awkward silence from politicians? Why such a deafening silence from the academic world regarding the Communist catastrophe, which touched the lives of about one-third of humanity on four continents during a period spanning eighty years? Why is there such widespread reluctance to make such a crucial factor as crime–mass crime, systematic crime, and crime against humanity–a central factor in the analysis of Communism?

[… pg. 28]  It is untenable to draw a veil over the issue to ensure that the history of Communism is narrowed to its national, social, and cultural dimensions. The justice of this argument is amply confirmed by the fact that the phenomenon of totalitarianism was not limited to Europe ‘and the Soviet period. The same applies to Maoist China, North Korea, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Each national Communism has been linked by an umbilical cord to the Soviet womb, with its goal of expanding the worldwide movement. The history with which we are dealing is the history of a phenomenon that has spread throughout the world and that concerns all of humanity.

The second purpose of this book is to serve as a memorial. There is a moral obligation to honor the memory of the innocent and anonymous victims of a juggernaut that has systematically sought to erase even their memory. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism’s center of power in Moscow, Europe, the continent that played host to the twentieth century’s many tragedies, has set itself the task of reconstructing popular memory. This book is our contribution to that effort. The authors of this book carry that memory within themselves. Two of our contributors have a particular attachment to Central Europe, while the others are connected by firsthand experience with the theory and practice of revolution in 1968 or more recently.

This book, as both memorial and history, covers very diverse settings. It touches on countries in which Communism had almost no practical influence, either on society or on government power–Great Britain, Australia, Belgium, and others. Elsewhere Communism would show up as a powerful source of fear–in the United States after 1946–or as a strong movement (even if it never actually seized power there), as in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal. In still other countries, where it had lost its decades-long grip on power, Communism is again reasserting itself–in Eastern Europe and Russia. Finally, its small flame is wavering in countries in which Communism still formally prevails–China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam.

Others may have different perspectives on the issues of history and memory. In countries in which Communism had little influence or was, merely dreaded, these issues will require a simple course of study and understanding. The countries that actually experienced the Communist system will have to address the issue of national reconciliation and decide whether the former Communist rulers are to be punished. In this connection, the reunified Germany may represent the most surprising and “miraculous” example–one need only think of the Yugoslav disaster by way of contrast. However, the former Czechoslovakia–now the Czech Republic and Slovakia–Poland, and Cambodia alike confront considerable trauma and suffering in their memory and history of Communism. In such places a modicum of amnesia, whether conscious or unconscious, may seem indispensable in helping to heal the spiritual, mental, emotional, personal, and collective wounds inflicted by a half-century or more of Communism. Where Communism still clings to power, the tyrants and their successors have either systematically covered up their actions, as in Cuba and China, or have continued to promote terror as a form of government, as in North Korea.

The responsibility for preserving history and memory undoubtedly has a moral dimension. Those whom we condemn may respond, “Who has given you the authority to say what is Good and what is Bad?”

According to the criteria proposed here, this issue was addressed well by the Catholic Church when Pope Pius XI condemned Nazism and Communism respectively in the encyclicals Mit Brennender Sorge of 14 March 1937 and Divini redemptoris of 19 March 1937. The latter proclaimed that God endowed humanity with certain rights, “the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to the necessary means of existence; the right to pursue one’s ultimate goal in the path marked out for him by God; the right of association, and the right to possess and use property.” Even though there is a certain hypocrisy in the church’s pronouncement against the excessive enrichment of one class of people at the expense of others, the importance of the pope’s appeal for the respect of human dignity is beyond question.

As early as 1931, Pius XI had proclaimed in the encyclical Quadragesimo anno: “Communism teaches and seeks two objectives: unrelenting class warfare and the complete eradication of private ownership. Not secretly or by hidden methods does it do this, but publicly, openly, and by employing any means possible, even the most violent. To achieve these objectives there is nothing it is afraid to do, nothing for which it has respect or reverence. When it comes to power, it is ferocious in its cruelty and inhumanity. The horrible slaughter and destruction through which it has laid waste to vast regions of Eastern Europe and Asia give evidence of this.” Admittedly, these words originated from an institution that for several centuries had systematically justified the murder of non-Christians, spread the Inquisition, stifled freedom of thought, and supported dictatorial regimes such as those of General Francisco Franco and Antonio Salazar.

However, even if the church was functioning in its capacity as a guardian of morality, how is a historian to respond when confronted by a “heroic” saga of Communist partisans or by a heartbreaking account from their victims? In his Memoirs Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand wrote: “When in the silence of abjection, no sound can be heard save that of the chains of the slave and the voice of the informer; when all tremble before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to merit his displeasure, the historian appears, entrusted with the vengeance of the people.

Marx and Lenin

Marx and Lenin By Thomas G. West Posted October 10, 2006 The dispute over the relationship between Marx and Lenin concerns the meaning of Marxism in practice, especially in the Soviet Union. Was the Lenin-led Russian revolution of 1917 a Marxist revolution? And beyond that, is the post-Lenin Soviet Union, including that of Stalin, faithfully executing Marx's vision and testament? Is Soviet communism a political movement guided by a radically revolutionary Western philosophical teaching? Or is it better explained as an outgrowth of a native Russian tradition of violent, bureaucratic despotism? At stake is an adequate understanding of Soviet (and non-Soviet) communism today and the nature of its danger for constitutional democracy. The two principal lines of interpretation are well settled. On one side, hard-line Soviet communists agree: Lenin, and the Soviet Union, are thoroughly Marxist.1 On the other side Western liberals like Robert Tucker, the editor of the Marx collection cited in this essay, generally insist that there is a break between Marx and Lenin, and between Lenin and Stalin. (As for Western anti-communists, they are often curiously reluctant to affirm a definite continuity between Marx, Lenin, and the Soviet Union.)2 The core of Marx's thought, I will show, was his lifelong dedication to the revolutionary transformation and liberation of humanity. His relative indifference toward the historical-determinist, supposedly scientific side of his own doctrine can be seen most easily in his repudiation of "orthodox Marxism" in the case of Russia. At the end of his life Marx decided that Russia could probably achieve socialism without having to pass through the stage of capitalism. Therefore Lenin's revisions of Marxist dogma, undertaken in order to make possible the radical revolution in Russia, conformed to the essential Marx. And Stalin's extension of Lenin was executed in the same spirit. Marx Marx's fundamental conception of the political mission of philosophy never wavered from the time of its first statement in his 1843 essay, "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel'sPhilosophy of Right: Introduction."3 In this early work Marx sets forth the kernel of his revolutionary thesis. Philosophy, he says, has already exposed the false promise of otherworldly salvation put forward by religion, a promise that was meant to conceal the political oppression under which people actually live. The next and final task, initiated by Marx, is to abolish the political conditions for the religious illusion by destroying the existing order of society and liberating men from their dependence on men, just as they have been liberated from their supposed dependence on God and nature. The spirit of this revolution is Marx's radicalized Hegelianism; the matter must be found in the one class of men in existing society that has nothing of its own, has no stake in maintaining the current order, and has everything to gain from a complete annihilation of it. That class, says Marx, is the proletariat. The philosophical core of Marx's program lies in the novel account of the relation of theory to practice, of head to heart, of reason to passion. Theory and practice, which have hitherto been distinct, will become one through the revolution. Practice, the revolutionary negation of the existing state of things, will be perfectly theoretical, for it will now be informed by the philosophical consciousness that seeks and will attain the liberation of mankind from chains. On the other hand, thought without action is now meaningless. With the successful culmination of the critique of religion in atheism, thinking has gone as far as it can go without becoming politically active. Philosophy is ready to be at once completed and abolished (aufgehoben). Matter is ready to be informed by reason: the only barrier to the embodiment of reason in things is some men's passionate attachments to existing conditions. Hence passion, the anger of the revolutionaries, can cancel the reactionary passion of the defenders of the old order, issuing in a future state of affairs that is completely rational. Physical violence in the service of negation of the present is reason, for through violence the long night of men's dependence on God, on other men, and on things external to themselves will finally end. As a prelude to the incipient union of theory and practice, theory becomes criticism, not for the sake of stating the truth in speech, but to destroy the enemy: Its [criticism's] essential feeling is indignation, its essential task denunciation. . . . It is not a matter of knowing whether the opponent is a noble, equal-born, or interesting opponent; what matters is to strike him. Reason becomes passion; but the passion of the philosophers is not enough. "It is the philosopher in whose brain the revolution begins." But: "The weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force, but theory too becomes a material force as soon as it seizes the masses." The insight of the philosopher, passionately expounded, will become the angry consciousness of the masses. The masses, the material embodiment of philosophy, will then carry out the revolution that will culminate in "universal human emancipation." In this essay on Hegel (as in "On the Jewish Question," discussed by Sanderson Schaub below), it is evident that Marx has already made up his mind about the nature of the revolution before he ever applies the techniques of so-called empirical social-science analysis to the actual men and women supposedly oppressed in their factories. Instead, the proletariat first comes to sight in Marx's writing as that group in society which is capable of being seized by his theory. Its expected openness to Marxism is attributed to its supposed utter degradation, its "radical chains," its total enslavement in contemporary society. Marx explicitly calls it the "passive" vehicle of the revolutionary consciousness and purposediscovered by philosophy. It is this passive capability that defines the proletariat here, not the empirical fact of its being the industrial working class. It is worth noting that in this Hegel essay Marx speaks of man as essentially free, not as laborer. His later account of man as laborer may be understood as an elaboration on the present statement of man as free, for the meaning of human labor is that man transforms the external world of nature, which in turn appears to him as his mirror. He sees in the products of his labor--especially in the modern, bourgeois world, in which man really has conquered nature by technology--himself: as his own product, he does not depend for what he is on anything outside of himself. He is absolutely free of God, of nature, and of those men (the owners of bourgeois private property) who would not permit him to view his products as his own.4 From here we turn to the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology for an account of "universal human emancipation" or communism, the goal of the revolution. We do so in order to explain more fully Marx's theoretical convictions about human nature. Communism is that condition in which no individual man is dependent on any other man. That requires man to be completely in control of his external world as well as of himself. The existence of private property, property held by some to the exclusion of others, not only makes the nonowners dependent on the owners for their subsistence; property also enkindles the artificial passion of avarice in the heart of the owner, a passion that attaches him to something outside himself, his property. By abolishing private property, communism will abolish all desire that people now have to possess things of their own to the exclusion of others (pp. 70-93). Even the bodily senses, which we might have thought were irreducibly private, will change their character. From being narrowly individual, they will become human and social. "Need or enjoyment have consequently lost their egotistical nature. . . . In the same way, the senses and enjoyments of other men have become my own appropriation" (p. 88). Communism will overcome not only private property but privacy as such. The family too, with private spouses and private children, will be abolished. In such a state of things there will no longer be a distinction between "one's own" and "the common," for men will not think of their own as anything apart from the community. Therefore the rule of some men over other for the sake of their own private advantage will disappear. With the only ground of controversy abolished, politics will give way to the noncontroversial administration of economic production (p. 193). Marx's communist vision rests on the remarkable premise--especially remarkable for a professed materialist--that man's body, with its seemingly indisputable quality of belonging to each, can become essentially common. The indubitable fact that each dies his own death cannot faze Marx's deep faith in man's socialized destiny.5 It may be that Marx believes that death itself will eventually be conquered: communism means "the casting-off of all natural limitations" (p. 192, my emphasis). If man is to be truly free, he must become in every sense "master and owner of nature," in Descartes' phrase.6 The expectations from communism in Plato's Republic, by contrast, are less extravagant because Socrates is aware that nothing can change the private character of the body. The "community of pleasure and pain," wherein all together feel the pains and pleasures of each individual, is presented as an unattainable goal. Moreover, this total communization is presented as desirable only to the extent that individual happiness is forgotten, for the philosopher who leaves the cave--the only man called truly happy in the Republic--must tear himself away from the illusion of complete oneness with his cave-dwelling fellows. As Marx grew older he began to realize that the existing working classes were not quite totally dehumanized have-nots, human prime matter waiting to be formed by Marx's theory-inspired indignation in the service of revolution. The real-world workers never ceased disappointing Marx with their contemptible backsliding and gullibility to bourgeois blandishments. In their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, Marx and Engels alert their fellow communists to the danger that the liberal democrats will try to "bribe the workers by more or less concealed alms" such as better wages, job security, and welfare payments (p. 505). Therefore Marx gradually developed a doctrine of a party organization of intellectuals who could lead the proletariat into the revolution. A party distinct from the workers themselves becomes necessary to the extent that the workers are not the embodiment of pure negation posited in the Hegel essay. So far as the workers dohave things of their own--and of course most workers were and are far from the destitute, explosive, pure potentiality Marx had spoken of--they will be afflicted by the very same selfish passions and opinions that move their rulers. As far as I know, Marx never confronted the reason for proletarian backwardness with the clarity that I have just stated it, but his doctrine of the party is implicitly addressed to this difficulty. The Communist Manifesto says that the party has "over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement." In other words, the workers themselves do not know where they are going and how to get there. That is why they are susceptible to the bourgeois "bribes" mentioned in the Address to the Communist League. Further, says the Manifesto, the Communist party aims at the "formation of the proletariat into a class" (p. 484). Without the party, it would appear from this statement, the workers will not even have what later comes to be called class consciousness. The party, then, is the organizational embodiment of the philosophical truth announced in the Hegel essay, and it mediates between the isolated philosopher Marx in his study and the ignorant, unformed masses of the workers. Marx also came to see that a communist revolution would require "the most determined centralization of power in the hands of the state authority" as well as a deliberately "terrorist" policy undertaken by the party in the course of seizing and exercising political power. "Far from opposing so-called excesses--instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings with hateful associations--these must not only be tolerated but the leadership of them must be taken in hand" (Address to the League, pp. 507, 509). In this connection Marx speaks of "France in 1793" as the model. It is worth mentioning some of the measures undertaken in France in 1793 for the sake of the French Revolution. This was the time of the Reign of Terror, presided over by a tiny dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. The judicial heart of the Terror was the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris. Its "proceedings became mere public pillorying of the already condemned. Death was the only sentence." Similar tribunals were set up around France by the Committee of General Security, and these tribunals were "the real shock troops of the Revolution." They were "entrusted with the pursuit of 'suspects.'"7 In short, Marx is already looking forward here to a tightly centralized small party transforming a nation by means of the most ruthless terror, administered without scruple against the Revolution's proven enemies as well as against mere "suspects." It may also be worth mentioning in this connection an all-too-typical example of Western liberal scholarship on Marx. This particular falsehood comes from David McLellan, widely regarded as a leading Marx scholar: [Marx] never (except briefly in 1848 and under Tsarist conditions in Russia) approved of the use of revolutionary terror. He strongly criticized the Jacobins' use of terror in the French Revolution; its use was for him a sign of the weakness and immaturity of that revolution, which had to impose by violence what was not yet inherent in society.8 Marx and Engels, of course, wrote the Address to the Communist League in 1850. However, if the authority of such a prestigious scholar as David McLellan still raises doubts for the reader, consider these excerpts from the correspondence of Marx and Engels, assembled by Solzhenitsyn: There is only one way of shortening, simplifying, and concentrating the bloodthirsty death-throes of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new--revolutionary terror. . . . We are pitiless and we ask no pity from you. When our time comes, we shall not conceal terrorism with hypocritical phrases. . . . The vengeance of the people will break forth with such ferocity that not even the year 1793 enables us to envisage it. . . . We shall be constrained to undertake communist experiments and extravagant measures, the untimeliness of which we know better than anyone else. . . . Until the world is able to form a historical judgment of such events, we shall be considered "beasts," which doesn't matter! Finally: Marx and Engels reiterated on many occasions that "once we are at the helm, we shall be obliged to reenact the year 1793."9 Since Marx never faced (except in passing) the degree to which the workers were infected by bourgeois passions or otherwise failed to develop real revolutionary ardor, he never felt the need to conduct an explicit discussion of the gap between the workers and the communist party.10 Perhaps Marx suppressed the problem for tactical reasons: he might have feared the charge of "Blanquism," of forcing an elitist revolution from the top down onto an unwilling populace. Or perhaps he deceived himself by allowing his fervent hope for revolution to divert him from a cold reckoning with the fact of worker recalcitrance. In any event, Marx also avoided any thematic discussion of the role of the party during and after a revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat. There is a direct proportion between the strength of lingering bourgeois habits in the workers and the need for a philosophical elite to oversee the transition to communism. Marx's silence on this question provided a legitimate opening for Lenin, who was compelled to grapple with the fact, by the year 1900 obvious to everyone, of worker indifference to radical revolution. The doctrines for which Marx is so famous--dialectical materialism, the internal contradictions of capitalism, the invariable stages of the history of economic development, the historical inevitability of revolution11--all these were part of Marx's articulation of the changing structure of material conditions that renders them ripe for revolution. Marx of course was convinced that the logic of the historical process points without question to man's ultimate liberation and socialization. But whenever a conflict arose between the details of any of these doctrines and the possibility of achieving the revolution in some other way, the doctrines were always the first to go. Just as Marx's Hegel essay anticipates, the project for the emancipation of man is the essential core, and the material setting for its realization is only the optional periphery. Evidence for this point goes well beyond the notorious sketchiness and self-contradictions of Marx's written statements on many of his best-known doctrines.12 It is above all this: during the last several years of his life, Marx explicitly and repeatedly jettisoned the "orthodox Marxism" of his earlier career, and he did so precisely with a view to Russia. Tibor Szamuely has summarized the relevant letters and statements of Marx and Engels on this topic in The Russian Tradition.13 Throughout most of his life, Marx's opinions on Russia had been governed by this statement in the Critique of Political Economy: No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. (p. 5) Since Russia was still mired in its feudal stage, no communist revolution could be expected until capitalism had fully developed. Engels' 1875 attack on the Russian Populist Tkachev, undertaken at Marx's instigation, was strictly orthodox. He ridiculed Tkachev for believing that Russia's tradition of the village commune (obshchina) could provide a unique opportunity for bypassing the ravages of capitalism and proceeding directly to a socialist revolution (Szamuely, pp. 294-300). But suddenly Marx changed his mind. In an 1881 letter to the Russian Marxist Vera Zasulich, he asserted that "there is no inevitability about a capitalist development in Russia--rather, the contrary." In a draft for the letter Marx went even further: "If the revolution takes place at the proper time, if it concentrates all its forces on assuring the untrammelled development of the village commune, then this latter would shortly become the basic feature of the rebirth of Russian society and the basic feature of its superiority to the countries that remain under the yoke of capitalism" (Szamuely, pp. 378-379). Kolakowski makes this comment: "Neither Vera Zasulich nor Plekhanov thought fit to publish the letter, as they evidently feared it would give valuable ammunition to the populists; it came to light only after the Revolution." A clear indication of Marx against orthodox Marxism! Marx himself was evidently reluctant to announce his new views clearly to the world; no doubt he was aware of their embarrassing contradiction to his earlier pronouncements. Therefore Marx repeated the point somewhat more cautiously in his 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto. There he says a Russian commune-based revolution that bypasses the capitalist stage will only succeed "if the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other" (Marx-Engels Reader, p. 472). From then on Marx threw his tactical support to the Russian Narodnaya Volya ("People's Will"), a conspiratorial terrorist organization aiming at a seizure of political power on behalf of the people, and not to the orthodox Russian Marxists. It should be noted that the most radical of the Populist theorists, Tkachev (mentioned above), anticipated the political teaching of Pol Pot and the Cambodian communists, who murdered about three million of their own people in their attempt to institute a pure agrarian communism during their three-year reign after the American defeat in Vietnam. Tkachev called for the compulsory equalization of all on the basis on a strictly peasant-based society without any of the technology developed by capitalism as well as for the abolition of every vestige of the old order. "The perfect society will suppress any possibility of exceptional individuals arising and will create equal conditions of life and education for all its members; a centralized authority of the enlightened avant-garde will plan every aspect of public life."14 Engels had attacked Tkachev earlier, but by the 1880s Marx and Engels assumed as their own much of Tkachev's argument about the special conditions of Russia. After Marx's death in 1883 Engels carried on this new Marxism that anticipated revolution without a capitalist development and without broad participation by the proletariat or people. Russia, he said, "is one of those exceptional cases where a handful of people can make a revolution. . . . And if ever the Blanquist fantasy of convulsing an entire society by means of a small conspiracy had any chance of success then the place is undoubtedly Petersburg" (Szamuely, p. 402). In other words, the Blanquist "fantasy"--revolution from the top down by a minority party willing to use force and violence--is not a fantasy at all! Remarkably, this letter was written as a deliberate repudiation of Plekhanov, the founder of orthodox Marxism in Russia, who had been conscientiously attempting to apply the principles of Marxist fundamentalism to the Russian situation. This revealing episode in the careers of Marx and Engels is typically suppressed or casually dismissed in scholarly as well as Soviet treatments of Marxism. For example, Kolakowski seems unaware of its comprehensive significance for Marx's thought. His laconic comment is: "Altogether it may be said that on this crucial issue in Russian polemics at the time, Marx was much less of a Marxist than his Russian disciples." Tucker does include a few lines (eight) from the 1881 letter to Zasulich in his selections "On Social Relations in Russia" in The Marx-Engels Reader. But he obscures their significance by including as well Engels' 1874 attack on Tkachev without mentioning the fact that he and Marx changed their minds on much of the material in this Engels letter by the 1880s. Shlomo Avineri tries to explain the incident away by reference to an 1877 letter in which Marx says that the analysis of Capital only applies to Western Europe, not necessarily anywhere else in the world. However, as Kolakowski, again laconically, points out, "there is no hint of this limitation in Capital itself." What Kolakowski and Avineri inexplicably do not point out is that this casual assertion by Marx in effect undermines the entire edifice of his scientific account of capitalism, which was always presented as part of a comprehensive account of man's universal historical development. Isaiah Berlin, author of a much-read older biography of Marx, mentions the episode but passes it over with minimal comment.15 But Marx and Engels' reversal is so striking, and lasted so long, that it cannot be ignored. They were clearly opposing their earlier "scientific" doctrine, which had only apparently been "founded not on conspiracy but on the laws of historical development, encompassing not a small elite but the whole working class, directed not at a coup d'etat but a great popular socialist revolution" (Szamuely, p. 388). Engels reports that in Marx's later years he was accustomed to say, with a view to the rapid popularization of orthodox Marxism, "In that case I know only that I am not a Marxist myself!" For Marx the core was always the revolution. Everything else in his teaching was subject to revision. When prospects for a European upheaval began to fade, especially after the utter failure of the Paris Commune in 1871, Marx began to lose heart (Szamuely, pp. 373-376). The dramatic successes of the Russian terrorists may have kindled in Marx a new hope, one that was not dependent on the unreliable industrial proletariat. His turn to the avowedly violent, elitist "Populist" movement in Russia is in an important sense a return to the original, radical Marx: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.16 If there was no present likelihood of revolution in Europe, Russia seemed to offer a new opportunity. If Marx had lived long enough, he might have elaborated the implications of his embracing the Populists, which certainly could have led to a reassessment of the revolutionary potential of the workers. Instead, after his death, the power of the orthodox doctrines that he had spelled out over so many years overwhelmed the lesser known (and, as I noted, to some extent deliberately suppressed) cautious steps he had taken more recently in a different direction. However, the revolutionary heart of Marx, most visible in his earlier writings, but pulsing beneath the surface of all his works, endured. A kindred spirit was needed to revive this Marx from the detritus of his admirers and revisers. That spirit was Lenin. Lenin What Is to Be Done? (1902), Lenin's most important book, puts forward a renewed revolutionary Marxism that frankly confronts the disappointing non-revolutionary character of the working class in the late nineteenth century. Lenin argues that the workers are incapable of spontaneously developing true revolutionary consciousness and that a tightly organized, elite, conspiratorial Marxist party must therefore take upon itself the task of leading the workers to revolution. The background of What Is to Be Done? is as follows. Marx's economic predictions had turned out to be totally incorrect. The growing "Industrial Reserve Army" of the unemployed, the declining rate of profit, the impoverishment of the workers, the collapse of the middle class between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the increasing radicalization of the workers17--none of these things has occurred or appeared likely to occur. Quite the contrary: profits were increasing, and so were workers' wages; unemployment was low; the middle class was growing; and workers were increasingly satisfied with their material circumstances. Where had Marx gone wrong? Eduard Bernstein, whose Premises of Socialism appeared in 1899, provided one response. Following Marx's own teaching that Marxism is a workers' movement based on empirical analysis of actual conditions, Bernstein argued that the workers' party should follow the spontaneous desires of the workers for social and economic reforms, postponing indefinitely the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Bernstein's "revisionism" became the ancestor of today's European Socialist parties. Within Russia, Bernstein's views were adopted by a portion of the Marxist Social-Democratic party that became known as "Economists." Lenin directs most of his fire in What Is to Be Done? against this heresy of Economism. By postponing indefinitely the destruction of capitalism, under which men can never be free, he argues, the Economists have abandoned Marxism. Lenin's alternative stresses two points: First, the revolutionary consciousness which the intellectuals already possess will never be attained by the workers through the spontaneous development of working-class anger in the historical dialectic; second, the party is the instrument for the formation, preservation, and dissemination of that consciousness. Lenin explains his first point through the observation that by themselves, spontaneously, the workers can only achieve trade union consciousness (concern with wages, job security, unemployment compensation, and the like) and not revolutionary consciousness (which seeks to destroy capitalism root and branch). Left to themselves, the workers will be dominated by the regnant bourgeois ideology (Chapter 2). They will only become revolutionary when the intellectuals, armed with Marxist theory, come into active contact with them. Hence the central importance of agitation and propaganda. The vehicle of this activity is the party. The teaching on the party is Lenin's second point. There is an essential difference, he insists, between an organization of workers and an organization of revolutionaries (Chapter 4). A trade union must be large and open to all workers. But a revolutionary organization must be small, secret, and conspiratorial. It is essential that those in the party know what they are about, and they can only do so if they are thoroughly educated in the tenets of Marxism. Most workers are not. Talent and intelligence are rare qualities, and they are indispensible for effective political action. Only dedicated, educated, full-time professionals can form the proletariat into a revolutionary class, and only they will be immune from the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology. There can therefore be no place for freedom of criticism within the party (Chapter 1): since the party professionals are already in possession of the truth, freedom to criticize amounts to freedom to advocate bourgeois ideology. Nor should the party be democratic; only those who know the truth are qualified to determine its leadership and membership. Finally, the party organization must be tightly centralized so that there will be no confusion about the mission to be accomplished or the means to be adopted. There is no doubt that Lenin in What Is to Be Done? goes beyond Marx's explicit statements. But there is also no doubt that he is responding here to a very real problem for orthodox Marxism--namely, worker indifference to the revolution--in the spirit of the young (and old) Marx. The primacy of consciousness over the spontaneous historical process goes back to Marx's initial assertions in the Hegel essay. There he presented himself as a philosopher whose conclusions compelled him to look for a historical, material vehicle for the realization of his theory. And Lenin's doctrine of the party follows from the discovery of worker recalcitrance. In the face of that recalcitrance, Lenin appropriately turns to an organization that will institutionalize Marx's insight and infuse it into the proletariat. The temporary split between Marxist intellectuals and actual workers had already been alluded to by Marx in the Communist Manifesto and the Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League. Lenin faced that difference squarely and proceeded to think through what kind of party would be needed to close the split. The historical facts at the turn of the century were such that either the core of Marx had to go, or the periphery. Lenin threw out the periphery, Bernstein the core. Lenin, however, did not want to reject Marx's teaching on capitalism. He tried to preserve it in the face of the manifest continuing strength of the system of private ownership of property by attributing that strength to the export of finance capital to the countries and colonies of what is now called the "Third World." The super-profits gained through thisImperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism (as he entitled his 1917 book), enabled the European bourgeoisie to bribe its proletariat into contented submission. His argument contains the germ of the now familiar Soviet claim of Western exploitation of the Third World, and it even suggests the inference that entire countries can stand to other countries in the relation of bourgeoisie to proletariat.18 This clever revision certainly cannot claim to represent orthodox Marxism. But again, it modifies obviously false Marxist dogma in the spirit of Marx's teaching that the material conditions are becoming ripe for revolutionary upheaval. In Imperialism Lenin followed Marx in his quest for a dialectical-materialist historical process, known by science, that would guarantee the overthrow of capitalism and the transition to socialism. Therefore his overall teaching, like Marx's, suffers from a tension between its philosophical-voluntarist core and its apparently determinist periphery. Also like Marx, Lenin never satisfactorily explained the relation between the two strains in his thought. And finally, both men turned away from determinism when they dealt with the Russian situation, Marx in his support of the Populists, Lenin during the actual experience of the Russian revolution, as we will now see. Lenin takes the final step in his extension of Marx to cover the actual condition of the workers in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Written in 1920, during the third year of Bolshevik rule in Russia, it reflects the harsh lessons of the revolution. Lenin had learned that his earlier account of the workers' consciousness was if anything too optimistic. They are not only indifferent to revolution; they oppose it. To some extent the workers are positively reactionary (Lenin Anthology, pp. 573-575). Although industrial capitalism has been abolished in Russia and all the landlords, bankers, and factory owners have been killed or driven out, the bourgeoisie is stronger after the revolution than before it (pp. 552-553). The class struggle will continue "for years after the proletariat's conquest of power" (p. 596). The institutions of capitalism were easy to overthrow, but two stubborn obstacles remain: "force of habit," the powerful attachment to "the forces and traditions of the old society," and "small-scale production," which continues "spontaneously and on a mass scale" (pp. 569, 553). Lenin calls "habit" what we referred to earlier, using a Marxian category, as "bourgeois passions," the inclination of people to acquire, love, and defend what is their own to the exclusion of others in the community. Springing from and reinforcing this "force of habit in millions and tens of millions" are "millions upon millions of petty proprietors" and "small commodity producers" whose private mode of production continues to foster the nonsocialist habits that stand in the way of transition to communism (pp. 569-570). "Small-scale production" presumably includes everything from helping a neighbor mend a fence to raising vegetables in a private garden. Since the workers (and a fortiori the rest of the people) "can (and must) be remodeled and re-educated only by very prolonged, slow, cautious organizational work," the party must continue to rule dictatorially on behalf of the workers just as it earlier took the lead in making the revolution (p. 569). This process will take "very many years" (p. 574). The "proletarian vanguard," Lenin admits, is the Politburo of the party, consisting of Lenin and a handful of close colleagues (p. 572). We may infer that the tenacity and breadth of lingering bourgeois habits, which Lenin apparently did not foresee, led him to this logical restriction of revolutionary authority to the small body of unquestionably trustworthy and enlightened officials at the head of the party. Lenin's unbreakable faith in Marx's vision of emancipated humanity at the end of the struggle permitted him no other solution. He is simply extending the principle of What Is to Be Done?, namely, that those who possess the philosophic wisdom concerning what is to be done must exclude others from power to the extent that those others remain unenlightened and tainted by bourgeois ideology. The stronger the bourgeois "force of habit," the smaller and more despotic must be the governing organization of revolutionaries. Against such immense resistance, against the disheartening appearance that human nature remains the same after the revolution as before it, only the wisest and firmest men can be entrusted with the difficult mission--now seen to involve an indefinite period of conflict, terror, and blood--of leading mankind to communism. With Stalin we reach the end of this road. In the face of such nearly unanimous opposition, both within and without the Soviet Union, even within the party itself, only one man, the wisest and strongest of all, can be entrusted with the task of building socialism. And this man must not flinch from inflicting mass killings, deliberate famines, and torture involving the suffering and deaths of many millions of people. The Wise Man must employ whatever means he deems necessary to root out the millions of enemies of the people so that he can lead men to perpetual peace, happiness, and total communization. Lenin is sometimes reproached for vulgarizing Marx, making him crude, blurring his philosophical subtleties because of his own preoccupation with the revolution.19 This charge is in the most important respect self-refuting: "Marx's philosophy" means nothing if not the union of theory and practice. It is true that Lenin's incessant talk about the tactics and strategy of revolution appears rather crude in contrast with Marx's wide-ranging and sophisticated interests, especially to Western scholars whose belief that all values are equal often leads them to forget that philosophy, even non-Marxist philosophy, is supposed to be a guide to life, not a vehicle for personal self-expression or creativity. But the more insistent practical focus of Lenin's writings may also be taken as a sign that he was a better Marxist than Marx himself, from Marx's own point of view! Nor can Lenin's understanding of the fundamentals of Marxism be faulted. If anything, he correctly drew the conclusions about the role of the party that Marx approached but never fully faced--and which were certainly implicit, at least for the Russian situation, in his post-1877 embrace of the Russian Populist movement. The real "vulgarizers" are those scholars who miss the central point of Marx's life when they appeal to the superiority of pristine theory over rude practice. In this opinion they show that they are still unawares under the spell of the view, endlessly derided by Marx, that philosophical insight is not to be sullied in the passionate and rude world of action. Likewise, it is often asserted that Lenin's real roots are to be found in "the native Russian, non-Marxist revolutionary tradition," and indirectly in the Russian autocratic tradition" of the Tsars, onto which he supposedly engrafted his own highly idiosyncratic brand of Marxism.20In the first place, the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries, far from arising spontaneously from native soil, were inspired almost entirely by the French Revolution (whence the name "Russian Jacobinism") and by French and German socialists and communists. And beginning with Tkachev in the 1850s, these revolutionaries were directly influenced by Marx himself.21 Narodnaya Volya explicitly held Marx in high regard (Szamuely, pp. 381-384). Second, the supposed Russian tradition of autocracy has been much exaggerated. Religious and political customs restrained the authority of the Tsars, and by the eve of World War I there was a considerable degree of political and private liberty in Russia. Certainly old Russia had its share of cruel monarchs; so did England and France. Peter the Great, who is often singled out as the exemplary Russian autocrat, hated the Russian traditions he inherited, and he tried to destroy them by whatever means he could; he was, in fact, a utopian Western revolutionist. In return, Peter was "probably personally the most hated of the Russian Tsars."22 Nor can it be said that the Russian people submitted quietly to communist despotism, as might have been expected from the slavish habits they had supposedly acquired under the Tsars. Far from it. When Lenin seized power by force of arms in 1917, he was compelled to employ "organized, systematic mass terror" in order to secure his dictatorship against the opposition and then revolt of "every stratum of the Russian people."23 We have shown in what sense Lenin was a Marxist. It should now be evident that the government of the Soviet Union, including and especially the reign of Stalin, has remained entirely faithful to the fundamental goal of Marx: the transformation of the human condition through revolutionary action. After 1917, now that the dictatorship of the proletariat or rather of its vanguard has become actual, the manifest persistence of what Marxists insist on calling bourgeois habits and ideals must somehow be dealt with. So the violence praised by Marx in the Hegel essay as the embodiment of reason becomes applied not only against former members of the bourgeoisie, but also against those workers (and others) who continue to betray their adherence to the old ways. Even party members, who fervently profess their Marxism, are suspect, for their ranks are shot through with place-seekers and men ambitious for private gain. Hence violence may be used against them as well. In fact, insofar as anyone in the society still partakes of the old, bourgeois passions, the chief of which is the desire to have things of one's own apart from the community--whether one's own thoughts or one's own material possessions--all men are enemies of the people and are legitimately subject to despotic treatment as long as those passions endure. The despotism and wholesale violence of Marxism in practice arise not in spite of but because of the high ideals of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. The Bernsteinian revisionists and other "soft" Marxists24 who lowered their sights became good parliamentary democrats. Radical Marxism maintains that what was traditionally called human nature is changeable--"man makes himself"--and that man can and will become a wholly social, communal being, leaving behind forever his private passions and concerns. All can live together in harmony and peace. All can share--what James Madison denied in Federalist No. 10--the same opinions, passions, and interests. If Marxism is right--about both the feasibility and the desirability of its goal--mankind should pay any price and bear any burden in order to bring about this millennium. To accept and to accommodate man's selfishness and other present limitations would be a betrayal of humanity. The ignorant, reactionary masses must be compelled for their own good to adopt the ideas and attitudes that will make possible the eventual transition to pure communism. The ruling wise men or man must stop at nothing to eradicate the remaining bourgeois passions and ideology, especially if education and propaganda alone have not yet yielded their expected result. If the current governments of the Soviet Union and China appear moderate in contrast with the Stalin and Mao periods, that is probably mainly because the party officials have learned that they, like Stalin's and Mao's underlings, might well be caught in the whirlwind--or else because they have tacitly abandoned their Marxist faith. But if the future rulers of those and other communist countries remain faithful to Marx's vision, the time of limitless bloodletting will come again as it did for three million in Pol Pot's Cambodia from 1975 to 1978, when, in the words of the then national anthem: The red, red blood splatters the cities and plains of the Cambodian fatherland, The sublime blood of the workers and peasants, The blood of revolutionary combatants of both sexes. That blood spills out into great indignation and a resolute urge to fight. 17 April, that day under the revolutionary flag, The blood certainly liberates us from slavery. But what if Marx's premise is wrong--as it so obviously is for anyone with eyes to see? What if ambition, the desire for private gain, and the preference for one's own are sown in the nature of man? What if the love of immortality and truth, man's deepest longing, can only be satisfied through religious tradition and faith? Or through the activity of philosophizing, which can be fully shared only by a few thoughtful friends--an activity which, when politicized, never escapes the despotism of authoritative opinion from which it seeks to depart? Religion no less than philosophy will ever be the objects of Marxism's murderous hatred, for both separate man from man, as man seeks union with God and truth. If these things are so--and Marxist theory and practice confirm that they are--every Marxist-Leninist political regime will always be in a state of cold or hot war against the most powerful as well as the most noble propensities of human nature, and people will forever and perforce be hiding their true concerns from the party's hateful eye. The supposedly wise rulers of this dreary despotism will consist partly of a fanatical minority which, like Lenin, places its faith in the illusory promise of the eventual total liberation and total socialization of humanity; partly of a larger group of those giving mouth-loyalty to Marxism for the sake of the private profit or honor that comes from political power; and partly--mostly--of those animated by a confused mixture of Marxist faith and private desire. Marxism-Leninism exercises a tremendous attraction over Westerners disgusted by the crass display of greed and self-indulgence unleashed by modern liberalism, which has increasingly forgotten its roots, particularly in America, in self-restraint and respect for the higher law, divine as well as natural. It also appeals strongly to non-Westerners who, having seen their own traditions corroded by Western skepticism and freedom, and wishing to vent their inchoate resentment fueled by this loss, enviously desire to pull down those who have profited under the post-traditional liberty and gladly embrace a "scientific" excuse for their own despotic passions. Marxism is also impressively backed by the authority and might of the Soviet Union, now emerging as the world's most powerful nation, and that is no mean factor in its influence. Of course, on the other side is the uniformly gloomy experience of slavery, poverty, arbitrary arrests, concentration camps, death, and suppression of religion and free inquiry in every nation that has experienced a Marxist government at first hand. In light of these facts, the most urgent theoretical question of our time is the question concerning the nature of man. For unless this question is answered rightly, we will not know whether Marxism-Leninism is mankind's best hope or a monstrous injustice. But we are hardly in the dark about this question. For our own Declaration of Independence epitomizes, according to its author, the thought of a long tradition of political philosophy stretching back to Cicero and Aristotle.25 That tradition, whatever its internal disagreements, teaches men to respect and to cultivate their reason yet without forgetting the limits forever imposed on reason by the passions. A return to the classical roots of free government will enable us confidently to oppose the radical prescriptions of Marxism-Leninism in argument and in action. Postscript One might wonder why an essay on "Marx and Lenin" needs to be written, considering that scholars have been writing on the subject for half a century and more. The unfortunate fact is that scholarship on this and other Marxian themes has in general not been satisfactory. For some reason Western scholars have been reluctant to call a spade a spade. The majority of them keep trying to assure us that Marx and Lenin are not such bad fellows after all. Why an entire class of educated people, including many at our most prestigious institutions of higher learning, should want to hide the truth about Marx and communism from others, perhaps even from themselves, is hard to understand. It may be that only a psychologist of the rank of Nietzsche could fully penetrate the phenomenon--historically unprecedented as far as I know--of the intellectual leadership of a strong and free society making every effort to find reasons not to criticize its main enemy and to denounce those who do criticize it. At work, no doubt, is the self-loathing that Paul Hollander detected over and over again in his study of the long history of favorable responses to communism by Western scholars and students.26 But whence arises this self-loathing? Nietzsche said that man would rather will nothingness than not will. People who have lost their faith that life has a higher purpose may believe, deep down and almost unnoticed, that their life is not worth living. Thus the definitive refutation of Marx may not even be possible until the leading classes in our society are once again composed of men who reject root and branch the modern idea, stemming from Descartes, Hobbes, and others, that human life has no ultimate meaning beyond what human beings themselves will that it have. This paper was assisted by a grant from the Earhart Foundation. It was presented at the 1980 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association on a panel sponsored by The Claremont Institute. The heart of the thesis argued here was worked out by my Dallas colleague Leo Paul S. de Alvarez, who generously made available to me his unpublished lectures on Marx and Lenin. Endnotes 1 The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982), "written by a team of leading Soviet philosophers" according to the dust jacket, concentrates on the "scientific" aspects of Marxist doctrine. The Basics of Marxist-Leninist Theory, ed. G. N. Volkov, Progress Guides to the Social Sciences (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979), concentrates on the political teaching of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and the meaning of that teaching for the world today. These books are available through Imported Publications, Chicago.(Return) 2 Paul Johnson, Modern Times (New York: Harper, 1983), p. 54; Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner's, 1974); Gerhart Niemeyer, Between Nothingness and Paradise (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), p. 120; Bertram D. Wolfe,Three Who Made a Revolution (4th ed. rev.; New York: Dell Delta, 1964); Alfred G. Meyer,Leninism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), Introduction. Assuming my argument in this article is right, why do these men hesitate to tie Marx to Lenin? Do they in some way see him as a fellow intellectual who needs to be protected from the taint of his followers' despotism? Or do they simply not detect the enormity of Marx's project? (Consider the essay of Schaub that follows.)(Return) 3 The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (2nd ed.; New York: Norton, 1978) pp. 53-65. Quotations from this essay in the text are my translations from "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung," Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961), I, 378-391.(Return) 4 Marx describes man as homo faber in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 70-93. Page references to Marx's writings in the text will be to this edition.(Return) 5 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 1: The Founders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 413-414.(Return) 6 Discourse on Method, Part 6. The logic of Marx's (and generally the modern) attitude toward nature and human nature, especially with regard to the conquest of death, is vividly portrayed by C. S. Lewis in his novel That Hideous Strength. (Return) 7 Crane Brinton, A Decade of Revolution, 1789-1799 (1934; repub. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), pp. 117-128. (Return) 8 McLellan, Karl Marx, Penguin Modern Masters series, general editor Frank Kermode (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 68.(Return) 9 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Mortal Danger: How Misconceptions about Russia Imperil America (2nd ed.; New York: Harper Colophon, 1981), pp. 113-114.(Return) 10 Besides the Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League quoted here, Marx touches on this gap in the circular letter "Der Generalrat an den Foederalrat der romanischen Schweiz" ("The General Council [for the International Workingman's Association] to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland," 1870), Marx and Engels,Werke, XVI, 386-387.(Return) 11 Clear statements of these doctrines may be found in Critique of Political Economy (Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 3-6), The German Ideology (pp. 148-163), and Capital (pp. 294-302).(Return) 12 Kolakowski, pp. 325-334, 363-375.(Return) 13 New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.(Return) 14 This is from Kolakowski's summary of Tkachev, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. II: The Golden Age, pp. 324-325.(Return) 15 Kolakowski, vol. I, p. 259, and vol. II, pp. 323-324. Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 665-675. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 151-152. Berlin, Karl Marx (3rd ed.; London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 273-274. Szamuely refers to Western and Soviet treatments of the topic on pp. 371 and 402.(Return) 16 "Theses on Feuerbach," no. 11, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 145.(Return) 17 These claims are advanced in Capital and the Communist Manifesto.(Return) 18 The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 251-259.(Return) 19 Lenin, p. xlviii; see the disparaging remarks of Kolakowski on what he calls Lenin's "excursion into philosophy," vol. II, pp. 447-458 (although Kolakowski's general assessment of Lenin's relation to Marx is close to my own: pp. 381-384).(Return) 20 Tucker, in the Lenin Anthology, pp. xxvi and xxxiii; on Lenin's debt to Tkachev, see also David Shub, Lenin: A Biography (rev. ed.; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 73.(Return) 21 Szamuely, pp. 194-195, 223, 289. Although Szamuely makes every effort to minimize the connection between the Russian revolutionary tradition and its European antecedents, the evidence he presents rather supports the opposite view, as Solzhenitsyn shows when he goes over the same ground in The Mortal Danger (New York: Harper Colophon, 1981).(Return) 22 The quotation is from Szamuely, p. 93. The evidence cited in his discussion of Peter on pp. 92-110 contradicts his contention that Peter was merely a variant on an older Russian despotic tradition. Solzhenitsyn, The Mortal Danger, makes a thoroughly convincing case that Soviet Marxism is not at all to be understood as a native product. This book is a healthy antidote to the widespread tendency in Western scholarship to attribute the evils of Soviet politics to the Russian heritage rather than to Marxism. That tendency is well represented in the book itself, which includes vituperative responses to Solzhenitsyn from Robert Tucker and other prominent scholars, but also a definitive answer from Solzhenitsyn.(Return) 23 Shub, Lenin, pp. 348, 353. My emphasis.(Return) 24 The expression is from Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, p. 157.(Return) 25 Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825.(Return) 26 Political Pilgrims (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).(Return)