Home > Media > Books > Jean-Louis Margolin, Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne - The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
Jean-Louis Margolin, Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne - The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
zhulin's Full Review: Jean-Louis Margolin, Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczko...
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression was written by a number of French scholars in a effort to examine the crimes of the Communist regimes that had been a complete secret until these regimes collapsed suddenly in 1989. The book begins by focusing on the ideals that are involved in the ideas and writings of Marx and Lenin, which call for class war by workers to overthrow capitalism and establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat". The book also states that claiming Communism was a more dangerous ideology than Nazism is difficult for a number of reasons. These include the contempt with which popular Western culture treats ex-Nazis, and the fact that Nazism's secret were bared fifty years ago because Nazism was overthrown at the height of its savage butchery and thus Nazi archives were opened for all to see back then.
However, the bias of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is seen patently even here. Whilst it states that Nazism, but not Communism, has been a constant presence on Western television in recent years, it never mentions that most politicians and business leaders in the West admired and supported Hitler throughout the 1930s (leading to the West's horrific refusal to accept Jewish refugees because they knew workers' unity might threaten politicians' and corporations' power - and the Nazis first task on coming to power was to crush unions). In contrast, the West has devoted vast military resources to stop the spread of Communism from the moment Lenin took power until today, very frequently supporting the most tyrannical leaders purely because of their anti-communism.
The first, lengthy part of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression deals with the Soviet Union and the regimes of Lenin and Stalin. The authors state that newly available Soviet archives shows that Lenin must not be seen as a benevolent despot - Lenin began campaigns to murder and torture opponents of the regime from the moment he seized power in November 1917. We see how Lenin attempted to outlaw both opposition political parties and how the Cheka ruthlessly executed political opponents during the Russian Civil War. We then see how Lenin and Trotsky crushed the Kronstadt rebellion in the early 1920s. We see how the demands of feeding the Red Army in the Russian Civil War led to famines (especially in 1922) and to large numbers of people feeding the country.
In the next part of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression we not only see the well-known accounts of the way in which ten million kulaks were murdered in Stalin's campaign to collectivise Soviet agriculture during the early 1930s, but also how severe the 1933 famine in the Ukraine was. More startling is the way in which Stalin referred to intellectual and even professionals as "foreign" elements and removed them ruthlessly from not only political influence, but from society as a whole. Those removed were in some cases of considerable use as engineers in sectors of heavy industry Stalin regarded as important. The next section focuses on the familiar Great Terror (or Yezhovschina) and asserts that in fact as many as seven million people were murdered for completely contrived charges of plotting to take control of the Soviet Union. We also see that the Gulag (meaning "main adminstration for camps") system of forced labour first set up by Lenin in 1917 produced frequent riots and strikes that were crushed in the most merciless way. Random killings of people in Soviet concentration camps were apparently common in order to maintain absolute authority in the hands of the Cheka/OGPU/NKVD/MVD. In Lenin's effort to spread the revolution to an advanced country in Europe (regarded by Marxism as essential for survival of socialism) there were large numbers of attempted coups d‘etat by Comintern guerillas throught France, Germany, Poland and Hungary (where Béla Kun's government collapsed shortly after gaining power in 1919). Once the revolution in Western Europe failed, the Comintern turned its attention to China, where similar guerilla tactics were developed in the later 1920s in the struggle with Chiang Kai Shek. Comintern archives in Moscow show that Communism continued to have a significant role in international terrorism in later years. This was most clearly seen in the way in which the Soviet government murdered numerous antifascists, Trotskyists and anarchists who had escaped from Germany, Italy and Spain when fascist regimes took over in those countries. We see that in the Spanish Civil War the NKVD played a major role in the destruction of anarchists and other anti-fascist groups to force the Republicans onto a Stalinist line - and in the end a defeat at the hands of Franco's Falange Espańol. (In effect, one could call this a collaboration with Hitler and Mussolini).
After dealing with the last years of Stalin, the book goes onto Eastern Europe, where Stalin installed numerous puppet regimes after World War II in order to protect Russia from an attack from the West (which he had always feared since eliminating Bukharin in 1929). Earlier in the book it is noted how Stalin was instrumental in the murder of over two million Sudeten Germans following the Potsdam Conference in 1945 - expanding Soviet territory through forced relocation. Once the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe were in place, there were numerous major inter-party struggles and rivalries, with large numbers of leaders being purged in Stalin's last days by hardline leaders like Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary. Leaders were purged on the basis of their past life histories - not on the basis of their politics. We also see the way in which the revolts of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia were put down with thousands killed, including in Hungary many secret police officers shot by rebels. The sections on Yugoslavia and Albania, though informative, could be more detailed - especially on the political prisons in those countries that are only briefly described - despite the inaccessibility of Yugoslavian archives and lack of research on Hoxha's Albania.
The next part focuses on the Mao regime in China, describing the way in which intellectuals were supressed in the Hundred Flowers campaign, and the vast famine caused by the Great Leap Forward - an attempt to produce a kind of agrarian utopia - which is said dubiously to have killed 65 million people, though other statistics suggest only a fraction of that number died. Then we read about the Cultural Revolution in which Mao attempted to eliminate "revisionism" - in reality Mao was promoting his own cult. However, the difficulty of finding good data with Chinese government archives tightly sealed is evident - for instance, we know nothing about the disappearance of Lin Biao in 1971. The Maoist regime of Pol Pot is the next subject, where the worst genocide in history was carried out in an attempt to instantly produce the type of peasant utopia promoted by Mao. Huge number of Cambodians were killed and the whole two million population of Phnom Penh relocated to the countryside under order - with many people, as is clearly shown, relocated many times. In North Korea, the Kim family has, according to South Korean intelligence sources, consolidated its power by a vast series of Party purges continuing to the present. North Korea has developed a society strictly segregated from the top down through restrictions, for instance, on which people can live in the capital P'yongyang. Manual workers are confined to outer fringes of the city.
Whilst this is admitted to disadvantage workers, the situation beautifully described in the North Korean chapter illustrated the fact that Communist regimes' policies were in fact disadvantaging the group that Marxism was supposed to liberate - industrial workers. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression does admit this in the case of Stalin's policies during the 1930s, but it fails to consider how these facts are used logically by Trotskyite and anarchist groups to argue that the "Communist" regimes described herein were not in fact "socialist" but rather state capitalist. Rather, the only focus on how the ideology of Communism might have caused this violence is found in the introductory chapters and is focused too much of Marx's own writings, rather than those of Stalin or more recent dictators.
The last part of the book is focused on Communism in Africa and Latin America, with a discussion of the political prisoners in Cuba who were forced to flee in totally unsuitable craft to the United States, and on the murders of political opponents by the Sandinista regime that came to power in Nicaragua in 1979. However, there is no discussion at all of the violence of the US-sponsored contras in Nicaragua or the activities of wealthy Cubans in the early 1960s who tried to overthrow Castro. These were certainly violent and responsible for many deaths, but all crimes are apparently attributed to the Sandinistas. The same thing, indeed, is found in the study of Lenin's Russia where no crimes or murders are ever attributed to the White Armies. There is the belief that Communist regimes in these cases (and in Vietnam) did not act violently out of the need to prevent counter-revolution, but rather based on Marx's own writings. Everywhere that Communist parties have threatened to take power, America and Western Europe have sponsored violent counter-revolutionary forces. In the case of Afghanistan, where a revolution overthrew the King in 1978, crimes committed by the Communists are taken seriously but the American support for fanatical Muslim fundamentalist terror groups (including Osama Bin Laden!) is not mentioned at all. In Africa, the book focuses on the Ethiopian and Mozambican regimes which seized power in the 1970s and presided over vast repression of political dissents and major famines during drought in the 1980s. Contrary to Marx's teachings of a revolution by the workers, Mengistu Haile Mariam was an army officer under the previous imperial regime who merely shifted to Marxist beliefs after taking power. Angola and Mozambique were former Portuguese colonies where Marxist guerillas - not the workers as Marx advocated - took power after a revolution in Portugal.
Nonetheless, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression contains not a single word comparing the background of most Communist leaders and/or revolutions in the Third World or Eastern Europe with Marx's teachings. This gives the book a very serious bias beyond the book's assumption of innocence in counterrevolutionary forces - which is a patent falsehood everywhere. A balanced account of Communism must take into account the crimes committed by pro-US anti-Communist forces in the Third World.
Despite its generally highly comprehensive nature, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression fails to include a study of the brutal Soviet puppet regime in Mongolia under Sukhbaatar and Choibalsan between 1921 and 1952. (Mongolia continued to be a Soviet satellite until 1989). The forced collectivisation of Mongolia's vast livestock herds was apparently more brutal than most of the crimes actually described in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression - and archival information concerning Mongolia should not be too difficult to obtain. It would also be extremely interesting to find out how traditionally nomadic Mongol society struggled against the demands of a large collective farming system demanded by Choibalsan. Also omitted is the supposedly "socialist" People's Democratic Republic Of Yemen - though I would imagine few archival documents remain after the civil war of 1990-1994.
On the whole, though vast, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is never in any way really difficult to read. However, the fact that the book is so biased and paints anticommunists as untainted means that one should look for more balanced and better analysed sources to seriously study these regimes.
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