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Le Livre Noir du Communisme
Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek and Jean-Louis Margolin, Le Livre Noir du Communisme, Paris: Robert Laffont
It may be too soon to make a reckoning of all the crimes that we old Communists defended or denied. Even the great archive now available in Russia is incomplete. For China we have no archives, though there are eye-witnesses to tell us that Mao's dragooning of the peasants brought about the greatest famine in history.
Yet the attempt at a world-wide summary had to be made now, while there are witnesses alive. It was fitting that it should be made in France, where the Communist Party had so much more influence than it ever had in Britain. This book is an act of expiation by old Stalinists, and has been attacked for that very reason. Has their revulsion against their past carried them too far?
In some cases, perhaps, not far enough. Nicolas Werth, author of the section on Russia, thinks Robert Conquest was exaggerating when he put the numbers executed between 1936 and 1938 at about three million, with another two million dying in the camps. Using the archives, Werth puts the total number of deaths in those two years at less than 700,000.
The figure might be right if Stalin's purges had been carried out in such an orderly way that nobody died without some record being kept. This I doubt. To cite one case from a later deportation: if Rosa Rust had not survived and protested, would any document have shown that she had been deported to Kazakhstan by mistake, with the Volga Germans? Her father was trying, for at least two years, to find her. Since her father was Bill Rust, Editor of the Daily Worker, it cannot be assumed that the Russians were deliberately obstructing his enquiries. They may really not have been able to find any record of her.
Is Werth, perhaps, leaving out the atmosphere of those days? The arrests were carried out by men who knew they would be censured if they did not round up enough people, and rewarded if they rounded up too many. Some of them could carry out their tasks only when drunk. There was a bureaucratic procedure for recording arrests and deaths, but how conscientiously was it followed?
Werth has extracted many gems from the archives. He points out that Stalin's unknown victims far outnumber the famous cases like Bukharin and Tukhachevsky. (We need shed no tears for Tukhachevsky. In 1921 he was ordering the use of poison gas against rebellious peasants.)
Among the obscure victims was Vassili Klementovich Sidorov. This 45 year-old peasant lived in a wooden house, eight metres by eight metres. He owned a cow, four sheep, two pigs and some poultry. He was alleged to have said: 'Stalin and his gang don't want to lose power. Stalin has killed a mass of people, but he doesn't want to go. The Bolsheviks hold on to their power and arrest decent people, and you aren't even allowed to say that, without getting put into a camp for twenty-five years'.
To prove him wrong, the authorities shot Sidorov on 3 August 1938 (he was posthumously rehabilitated on 24 January 1989). They seized his wooden house and his livestock, thereby leaving his wife, Anastasia, and daughter, Nina, destitute. But did these two women remain at liberty? The arrest of a whole family, if one member had been shot, was such a matter of routine that it might not have been recorded.
Some critics of this book have argued that a story like Sidorov's, however many times repeated, represents no more than an aberration in the pursuit of a noble ideal. They have protested, too, that it is unjust to lump together all the countries which ever called themselves Communist. What has a maniac like Pol Pot to do, for example, with Castro?
However, the detailed studies of each country in this book reveal a strong family resemblance. We all know what Stalin did to those he suspected of Titoism. But what did Tito do to the 16,000 people he suspected of Stalinism? Some he shot. Many he tortured. Most he put on a barren island in the Adriatic, where they broke hard stones into gravel. Then, to show that the sole aim of the work had been to humiliate them, the gravel was dumped in the sea.
Jean-Louis Margolin, author of the section on China, quotes 'Chine: l'archipel oublié', by Jean-Luc Domenach. 'The intrusion of Utopia into politics has coincided, very exactly, with the intrusion of police terror into society'. Every section of Le Livre Noir has examples to bear this out.
One Communist country after another has tried to force peasants into collective farms, a policy which always leads to hunger, and often to outright famine. Samora Machel of Mozambique, in a self-criticism long overdue, declared: "We forget the fact that our country consists, above all, of peasants. We persist in talking about the working class, and we relegate to the background the majority of the population". Nearly every Communist leader might have said that, and it is a pity that Lenin did not. None of the romantic myths about Lenin can survive a reading of the documents quoted here.
It is a scandal that this book has not been translated into English. It would then be made available to a great many people who now condemn it on hearsay.
Alison Macleod, London
Alison Macleod's memoir of 1956, The Death of Uncle Joe, is reviewed by Nina Fishman in the next Newsletter.
