The Black Book of COMMUNISM: CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION -Selections by Peter Myers; my comments are shown {thus}. Date August 21, 2001; update July 3, 2004.

You are at http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/courtois.html.

Incomplete - Work in progress

The Black Book of COMMUNISM: CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION by Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer; Consulting Editor Mark Kramer; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Ma, 1999.

{p. 12} But what self-deception kept Western European Communists, who had not been directly arrested by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD, the secret police), blindly babbling away about the system and its leader? Why could they not hear the wake-up call at the very start? In his remarkable work on the Russian Revolution, The Soviet Tragedy, Martin Malia lifts a corner of the curtain when he speaks of "this paradox ... that ... [it] takes a great ideal to produce a great crime." Annie Kriegel, another major student of Communism, insists that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two faces of Communism, as surely as day follows night.

Tzvetan Todorov offered the first response to this paradox:

A citizen of a Western democracy fondly imagines that totalitarianism lies utterly beyond the pale of normal human aspirations. And yet totalitarianism could never have survived so long had it not been able to drag so many people into its fold. There is something else - it is a formidably efficient machine. Communist ideology offers an idealized model for society and exhorts us toward it. The desire to change the world in the name of an ideal is, after all, an essential characteristic of human identity ... Furthermore, Communist society strips the individual of his responsibilities. It is always "somebody else" who makes the

{p. 13} decisions.

An analysis of terror and dictatorship - the defining characteristics of Communists in power - is no easy task. Jean Ellenstein has defined Stalinism as a combination of Greek tragedy and Oriental despotism. This definition is appealing, but it fails to account for the sheer modernity of the Communist experience, its totalitarian impact distinct from previously existing forms of dictatorship. A comparative synopsis may help to put it in context.

First, we should consider the possibility that responsibility for the crimes of Communism can be traced to a Russian penchant for oppression. However, the tsarist regime of terror against which the Bolsheviks fought pales in comparison uith the horrors committed by the Bolsheviks when they took power. The tsar allowed political prisoners to face a meaningful justice system. The counsel for the defendant could represent his client up to the time of indictment and even beyond, and he could also appeal to national and international public opinion, an option unavailable under Communist regimes. Prisoners and convicts benefited from a set of rules governing the prisons, and the system of imprisonment and deportation was relatively lenient. Those who were deported could take their families, read and write as they pleased, go hunting and fishing, and talk about their "misfortune" with their companions. Lenin and Stalin had firsthand experience of this. Even the events described by Fyodor Dostoevsky in Memoirs from the House of the Dead, which had such a great impact when it was published, seem tame by comparison with the horrors of Communism. True, riots and insurrections were brutally crushed by the ancien regime. However, from 1825 to 1917 the total number of people sentenced to death in Russia for their political beliefs or activities was 6,360, of whom only 3,932 were executed. This number can be subdivided chronologically into 191 for the years 1825 - 1905 and 3,741 for 1906 - 1910. These figures were surpassed by the

{p. 14} Bolsheviks in March 1918, after they had been in power for only four months. It follows that tsarist repression was not in the same league as Communist dictatorship.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Communism set a standard for terror to which fascist regimcs could aspire. A glance at the figures for these rcgimcs shows that a comparison may not be as straightforward as it would first appear. Italian Fascism, the first regime of its kind and the first that openly claimed to be "totalitarian," undoubtedly imprisoned and regularly mistreated its political opponents. Although incarceration seldom led to death, during the 1930s Italy had a few hundred political prisoners and several hundred confinati, placed under house arrest on the country's coastal islands. In addition, of course, there were tens of thousands of political exiles.

Before World War II, Nazi terror targeted several groups. Opponents of the Nazi regime, consisting mostly of Communists, Socialists, anarchists, and trade union activists, were incarcerated in prisons and invariably interned in concentration camps, where thev were subjected to extreme brutality. All told, from 1933 to 1939 about 20,000 left-wing militants were killed after trial or without trial in the camps and prisons. These figures do not include the slaughter of other Nazis to settle old scores, as in "The Night of the Long Knives" in June 1934. Another category of victims doomed to die were Germans who did not meet thc proper racial criteria of "tall blond Aryans," such as those who were old or mentally or physically defective. As a result of the war, Hitler forged ahead with a euthanasia program - 70,000 Germans were gassed between the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1941, when churches began to demand that this program be stopped. The gassing methods devised for this euthanasia program were applied to the third group of victims, the Jews.

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

{p. 15} genocide carried out against the Jews outraged the conscience of humanity by its irrationality, racism, and unprecedented bloodthirtstiness.

Our purpose here is not to devise some kind of macacabre comparative System for crunching numbers, some kind of grand total that doubles the horror, some kind of hiearchy of cruelty. But thc intransigent facts demonstrate that Communist regimes have victimized approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximalely 25 million victims of the Nazis. This clear record should provide at least some basis for assessing the similarity between the Nazi regime, which since 1945 has been considered the most viciously criminal regime of this century, and the Communist system, which as late as 1911 had preserved its international legitimacy unimpaired and which, even today, is still in power in certain countries and continues to protect its supporters the world over. And even though many Communist palties have belatedly acknowledged Stalinism's crimes, most have not ahandoned Lenin's principles and scarcely question their own involvement in acts of terrorism.

The methods implemented by Lenin and perfected by Stalin and their henchmen bring to mind the methods used by the Nazis, but most often this is because the latter adopted the techniques developed by the former. Rudolf Hess, charged with organizing the camp at Auschwitz and later appointed its commandant, is a perfect example: "The Reich Security Head Office issued to the commandants a full collection of reports concerning the Russian concentration camps. These described in great detail the conditions in, and organization of, the Russian camps, as supplied by former prisoners who had managed to escape. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Russians, by their massive employment of forced labor, had destroyed whole peoples." However, the fact that the techniques of mass violence and the intensity of their use originated with the Communists and that the Nazis were inspired by them does not imply, in our view, that one can postulate a cause-and-effect relationship between the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of Nazism.

From the end of the 1920s, the State Political Directorate (GPU, the new name for the Cheka) introduced a quota method - each region and district had to arrest, deport, or shoot a certain percentage of people who were members of several "enemy" social classes. These quotas were centrally define d under the supervision of the Party. The mania for planning and maintaining statistics was not confined to the economy: it was also an important weapon in the arsenal of terror. From 1920 on, with the victory of the Red Army over the White Army in the Crimea, statistical and sociological methods made an appearance, with victims selected according to precise criteria on the basis of a compulsory questionnaire. The same "sociological" methods were used by the Soviet Union to organize mass deportations and liquidations in the Baltic states and occupied Poland in 1939-1941. As with the Nazis, the transportation of deportees in

{p. 16} cattle cars ushered in "aberrations." In 1943 and 1944, in the middle of the war, Stalin diverted thousands of trucks and hundreds of thousands of soldiers serving in the special NKVD troops from the front on a short-term basis in order to deport the various peoples living in the Caucasus. This genocidal impulse, which aims at "the total or partial destruction of a national, ethnic racial, or religious group, or a group that has been determined on the basis of any other arbitrary criterion," was applied by Communist rulers against groups branded as enemics and to entire segments of society, and was pursued to its maximum by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

Efforts to draw parallels between Nazism and Communism on the basis of their respective extermination tactics may give offense to some people. Howewer, we should recall how in Forever Flowing Vasily 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 he 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:

{p. 17} 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 - hav-e 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 Dzerzihinsky, 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? Is this really something that is

{p. 18} beyond human understanding? Or are we talking about a refusal to scrutinize the subject too closely for fear of learning the truth ahout it?

Thc reasons for this reticence are many and various. First, there is the dictators' understandable urge to erase their crimes and to justify the actions they cannot hide. Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" of 1956 was the first admission of Communist atrocities by a Communist leader. It was also the statement of a tyrant seeking to gloss over the crimes he himself committed when he headed the Ukrainian Communist Party at the height of the terror, crimes that he clearly attributed to Stalin by claiming that he and his henchmen were merely obeying orders. To cover up the vast majority of Communist offenses, Khrushchev spoke only of victims who were Communists, although they were far fewer in number than the other kind. He defined these crimes with a euphemism, describing them in his conclusion as "abuses committed under Stalin" in order to justify the continuity ot the system that retained the same principles, the same structure, and the same people.

In his inimitable fashion Khrushchev described the opposition he faced while preparing his "Secret Speech," especially from one of Stalin's confidants: "[Lazar] Kaganovich was such a yes-man that he would have cut his own father's throat if Stalin had winked and said it was in the interests of the cause - the Stalinist cause, that is ... He was arguing against me out of a selfish fear for his own hide. He was motivated entirely by his eagerness to escape any responsibility for what had happened. If crimes had been committed, Kaganovich wanted to make sure his own tracks were covered." The absolute denial of access to archives in Communist countries, the total control of the print and other media as well as of border crossings, the propaganda trumpeting the regime's "successes," and the entire apparatus for keeping information under lock and key were designed primarily to ensure that the awful truth would never see the light of day.

Not satisfied with the concealment of their misdeeds, the tyrants systematically attacked all who dared to expose their crimes. After World War II this became starkly clear on two occasions in France. From January to April 1949 the "trial" of Viktor Kravchenko - a former senior official who wrote I Chose Freedom, in which he describcd Stalin's dictatorship - was conducted in Paris in the pages of the Communist magazine Les lettres francaises, which was managed by Louis Alagon and which heaped abuse on Kravchenko. From Novermber 1950 to January 1951, again in Paris, Les lettres francaises held another "trial" - of David Rousset, an intellectual and former Trotskite who was deported to Germany by the Nazis and who in 1946 received the Renaudot Prize for his book The World of Concentration Camps. On 12 November 1949 Rousset urged all former Nazi camp deportees to form a commission of inquiry into thc Soviet camp system and was savagely attacked by the Communist press,

{p. 19} which denied the existence of such camps. Following Rousset's call, Margaret Buber-Neuman recounted her experience of being deported to concentration camps - once to a Nazi camp and once to a Soviet camp - in an article published on 25 February 1950 in Figaro litteraire, "An inquiry on Soviet Camps: Who Is Worse, Satan or Beelzebub?"

Despite these efforts to enlighten humankind, the the tyrants continued to wheel out heavy artillery to silence all those who stood in their way anywhere in the world. The Communist assassins set out to incapacitate, discredit, and intimidate their adversaries. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Aleksandr Zinoviev, and Leonid Plyushch were expelled from their own country; Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky; General Petro Hryhorenko was thrown into a psychiatric hospital; and Georgi Markov was assassinated with an umbrella that fired pellets filled with poison.

In the face of such incessant intimidation and cover-ups, the victims grew reluctant to speak out and were effectively prevented from reentering mainstream society, where their accusers and executioners were ever-present. Vasily Grossman eloquently describes their despair. In contrast to the Jewish Holocaust, which the international Jewish community has actively commemorated, it has been impossible for victims of Communism and their legal advocates to keep the memory of the tragedy alive, and and requests for commemoration or demands for reparation are brushed aside {Given that this is still true, did Communism "lose" the Cold War?}.

When the tyrants could no longer hide the truth - the firing squads, the concentration camps, the man-made famine - they did their best to justify these atrocities by glossing them over. After admitting the use of terror, they justificd it as a necessary aspect of revolution through the use of such catchphrases as "When you cut down a forcst, the shavings get blown away" or "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Vladimir Bukovsky retorted that he had seen the broken eggs, but no one he knew had ever tasted the omelet! Perhaps the single greatest evil was the perversion of language. As if by magic, the concentration-camp system was turned into a "reeducation system," and the tyrants became "educators" who transformed the people of the old society into "new people." The zeks, a term used for Soviet concentration camp prisoners, were forcibly "invited" to place their trust in a system that enslaved them. In China the concentration-camp prisoner is called a "student," and he is required to study the correct thoughts of the Party and to reform his own faulty thinking.

As is usually the case, a lie is not, strictly speaking, the opposite of the truth, and a lie generally contains an element of truth. Perverted words are situated in a twistwd vision that distorts the landscape; one is confronted with a myopic social and political philosophy. Attitudes twisted by Communist propaganda are easy to correct, but it is monumentally difficult to instruct false Prophets in the ways of intellectual tolerance. The first impression is always

{p. 20} the one that lingers. Like martial artists, the Communists, thanks to their incomparable propaganda strength grounded in the subversion of language, successfully turned the tables on the criticisms leveled against their terrorist tactics, continually uniting the ranks of their militants and sympathizers by renewing the Communist act of faith. Thus they held fast to their fundamcntal principle of ideological belief, as formulated by Tertullian for his own era: "I believe, because it is absurd."

Like common prostitutes, intellectuals found themselves inveigled into counterpropaganda operations. In 1928 Maksim Gorky accepted an invitation to go on an "excursion" to the Solovetski Islands, an experimental concentration camp that would "metastasize" (to use Solzhenitsyn's word) into the Gulag system. On his return Gorky wrote a book extolling the glories of the Solovetski camps and the Soviet government. A French writer, Henri Barbusse, recipient of the 1916 Prix Goncourt, did not hesitate to praise Stalin's regime for a fee. His 1928 book on "marvelous Georgia" made no mention of the massacre carried out there in 1921 by Stalin and his henchman Sergo Ordzhonikidze. It also ignored Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, who was noteworthy for his Machiavellian sensibility and his sadism. In 1935 Barbusse brought out the first official biography of Stalin. More recently Maria Antonietta Macciochi spoke gushingly about Mao Zedong, and Alain Peyrefitte echoed the same sentiments to a lesser degree, while Danielle Mitterrand chimed in to praise the deeds of Fidel Castro. Cupidity, spinelessness, vanity, fascination with power, violence, and revolutionary fervor - whatever the motivation, totalitarian dictatorships have always found plenty of diehard supporters when they had need of them, and the same is true of Communist as of other dictatorships.

Confronted with this onslaught of Communist propaganda, the West has long labored under an extraordinary self-deception, simultaneously fueled by naivete in the face of a particularly devious system, by the fear of Soviet power, and by the cynicism of politicians. There was self-deception at the meeting in Yalta, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin in return for a solemn undertaking that the latter would hold free elections at the earliest opportunity. Realism and resignation had a rendezvous with destiny in Moscow in December 1944, when General Charles de Gaulle abandoned hapless Poland to the devil in return for guarantees of social and political peace, duly assured by Maurice Thorez on his return to Paris.

This self-deception was a source of comfort and was given quasi-legitimacy by the widespread belief among Communists (and many leftists) in the West that while these countries were "building socialism," the Communist "Utopia," a breeding ground for social and political conflicts, would remain safely distant. Simone Weil epitomized this pro-Communist trendiness when she said, "revolutionary workers are only too thankful to have a state backing

{p. 21} them - a state that gives an official character, legitimacy, and reality to their actions as only a state can, and that at the same time is sufficiently far away from them geographically to avoid seeming oppressive." Communism was supposedly showing its true colors - it claimed to be an emissary of the Enlightenment, of a tradition of social and human emancipation, of a dream of "true equality," and of "happiness for all ' as envisioned by Gracchus Babeuf. And paradoxically, it was this image of "enlightenment" that helped keep the true nature of its evil almost entirely concealed.

Whether intentional or not, when dealing with this ignorance of the criminal dimension of Communism, our contemporaries' indifference to their fellow humans can never be forgotten. It is not that these individuals are coldhearted. On the contrary, in certain situations they can draw on vast untapped reserves of brotherhood, friendship, affection, even love. However, as Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out, "remembrance of our own woes prevents us from perceiving the suffering of others." And at the end of both world wars, no European or Asian nation was spared the endless grief and sorrow of licking its own wounds. France's own hesitancy to confront the history of the dark years of the Occupation is a compelling illustration in and of itself. The history, or rather nonhistory, of the Occupation continues to overshadow the French conscience. We encounter the same pattern, albeit to a lesser degree, with thc history of the "Nazi" period in Germany, the "Fascist" period in Italy, the "Franco" era in Spain, the civil war in Greece, and so on. In this century of blood and iron, everyone has been too preoccupied with his oun misfortunes to worry much about the misfortunes of others.

However, there are three more specific reasons for the cover-up of the criminal aspects of Communism. The first is the fascination with the whole notion of revolution itself. In today's world, breast-beating over the idea of "revolution," as dreamed about in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is far from over. The icons of revolution - the red flag, the International, and the raised fist - reemerge with each social movement and on a grand scale. Che Guevara is back in fashion. Openly revolutionary groups are active and enjoy every legal right to state their views, hurling abuse on even the mildest criticisms of crimes committed by their predecessors and only too eager to spout the eternal verities regarding the "achievements" of Lenin, Trotsky, or Mao. This revolutionary fervor is not embraced solely by revolutionaries. Many contributors to this book themselves used to believe in Communist propaganda.

The second reason is the participation of the Soviet Union in the victory over Nazism, which allowed the Communists to use fervent patriotism as a mask to conceal thcir latest plans to take power into their own hands. From June 1941, Communists in all occupied countries commenced an active and frequently armed resistance against Nazi or Italian occupation forces. Like

{p. 22} resistance fighters everywhere, they paid the price for their efforts, with thousands being executed by firing squad, slaughtered, or deported. And they "played the martyr" in order to sanctify the Communist cause and to silence all criticism of it. In addition to this, during the Resistance many non-Communists became comrades-in-arms, forged bonds of solidarity, and shed their blood alongside their Communist fellows. As a result of this past these non-Communists may have been willing to turn a blind eye to certain things. In France, the Gaullist attitude was often influenced by this shared memory and was a factor hehind the politics of General de Gaulle, who tried to play off the Soviet Union against the Americans.

The Communists' participation in the war and in the victory over Nazism institutionalized the whole notion of antifascism as an article of faith for the left. The Communists, of course, portrayed themselves as the best representatives and defenders of this antifascism. For Communism, antifascism became a brilliantly effective label that could be used to silence one's opponents quickly. Francois Furet wrote some superb articles on the subject. The defeated Nazism was labeled the "Supreme Evil" by the Allies, and Communism thus automatically wound up on the side of Good. This was made crystal clear during the Nuremberg trials, where Soviet jurists were among the prosecutors. Thus a veil was drawn over embarrassing antidemocratic episodes, such as the German-Soviet pact of 1939 and the massacre at Katyn. Victory over the Nazis was supposed to demonstrate the superiority of the Communist system. In the Europe liberated by the British and the Americans (which was spared the sufferings of occupation) this was done for propaganda purposes to arouse a keen sense of gratitude to the Red Army and a sense of guilt for the sacrifices made by the peoples of the U.S.S.R. The Communists did not hesitate to play upon the sentiments of Europeans in spreading the Communist message.

By the same token, the ways in which Eastern Europe was "liberated" by the Red Army remain largely unknown in the West, where historians assimilate two very different kinds of "liberation," one leading to the restoration of democracies, the other paving the way for the advent of dictatorships. In Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet system succeeded the Thousand Year Reich, and Witold Gombrowicz neatly captured the tragedy facing these peoples: "The end of the war did not bring liberation to the Poles. In the battlegrounds of Central Europe, it simply meant swapping one form of evil for another, Hitler's henchmen for Stalin's. While sycophants cheered and rejoiced at the 'emancipation of the Polish people from the feudal yoke,' the same lit cigarette was simply passed from hand to hand in Poland and continued to burn the skin of people." Therein lay the fault line between two European folk memories. However, a number of publications have lifted the curtain to show

{p. 23} how the U.S.S.R. "liberated" the Poles, Germans, Czechs, and Slovaks from Nazism.

The final reason for the gentle treatment of Communism is subtler and a little trickier to explain. After 1945 the Jewish genocide became a byword for modern barbarism, the epitome of twentieth-century mass terror. After initially disputing the unique nature of the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, the Communists soon grasped the benefits involved in immortalizing the Holocaust as way of rekindling antifascism on a more systematic basis. The specter of "the filthy beast whose stomach is fertile again" - to use Bertold Brecht's famous phrase - was invoked incessantly and constantly. More recently, a singleminded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has also prevented an assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world. After all, it scems scarcely plausible that the victors who had helped bring about the destruction of a genocidal apparatus might themselves have put the very same methods into practice. When faced with this paradox, pcople generally preferred to bury their heads in the sand.

The first turning point in the official recognition of Communist crimes came on the evening of 24 February 1956, when First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev took the podium at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the CPSU. The proceedings were conducted behind closed doors; only delegates to the Congress were present. In absolute silence, stunned by what they were hearing, the delegates listened as the first secretary of the Party systematically dismantled the image of the "little father of the peoples," of the "genius Stalin," who for thirty ycars had been the hero of world Communism. This report, immortalized as Khrushchev's "Secret Speech," was one of the watersheds in the life of contemporary Communism. For the first time, a high-ranking Communist leader had officially acknowledged, albeit only as a tactical concession, that the regime that assumed power in 1917 had undergone a criminal "deviation."

Khrushchev's motivations for breaking one of the great taboos of the Soviet regime were numerous. Khrushchev's primary aim was to attribute the crimes of Communism only to Stalin, thus circumscribing the evil, and to eradicate it once and for all in an effort to salvage the Communist regime. A determination to carry out an attack on Stalin's clique, which stood in the way of Khrushchev's power and believed in the methods practiced hy their former boss, entered equally into his decision. Beginning in June 1957, these men were stematically removed from office. Howeveer, for the first time since 1934, the act of "being put to death politically" was not followed by an actual death, and

{p. 24} this telling detail itself illustrates that Khrushchev's motives were more complex. Having been the boss of Ukraine for years and, in this capacity, having carried out and covered up the slaughter of innocent civilians on a massive scale, he may have grown weary of all this bloodshed. In his memoirs, in which he w asnaturally concerned w ith portraying himself in a flattering light Khrushchev recalled his feelings "The Congress will end, and resolutions wili be passed, all as a matter of form. But then what? The hundreds and thousands of people who were shot will stay on our consciences." As a result, he severely reprimanded his colleagues:

{quote} What are we going to do about all those who were arrested and eliminated? ... We now know that the people who suffered during the repressions were innocent. We have indisputable proof that, far from being enemies of the people, they were honest men and women, devoted to the Party, dedicated to the Revolution, and committed to the Leninist cause and to the building of Socialism and Communism in the Soviet Union. I still think it's impossible to cover everything up. Sooner or later people will be coming out of the prisons and the camps, and they'll return to the cities. They'll tell their relatives, friends, and comrades and everyone back home what happened ... we're obliged to speak candidly to the delegates about the conduct of the Party leadership durmg the years in question. How can we pretend not to know what happened? We know there was a reign of repression and arbitrary rule in the Party, and we must tell the Congress what we know ... In the life of anyone who has committed a crime, there comes a moment when a confession will assure him leniency if not exculpation. {end quote}

Among some of the men who had had a hand in the crimes perpetrated under Stalin and who generally owed their promotions to the extermination of their predecessors in office, a certain kind of remorse took hold - a lukewarm remorse, a self-interested remorse, the remorse of a politician, but remorse nonetheless. It was necessary for someone to put a stop to the slaughter. Khrushchev had the courage to do this even if, in 1956, he sent Soviet tanks into Budapest.

In 1961, during the Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev recalled not only the victims who were Communists but all of Stalin's victims and even proposed that a monument be erected in their memory. At this point Khrushchev may have overstepped the invisible boundary beyond which the very raison d'etre of Communism was being challenged - namely, the absolute monopoly on power reserved for the Communist Party. The monument never saw the light of day. In 1962 the first secretary authorized the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. On 24

{p. 25} October 1964 Khrushchev was stripped of his powers, but his life was spared, and he died in obscurity in 1971. There is a substantial degree of scholarly consensus regarding the importance of the "Secret Speech," which represented a fundamental break in Communism's twentieth-century trajectory.

{But Khruschev was one of those who murdered Stalin; for a more accurate view of the "secret" speech, which takes this into account, see death-of-stalin.html. Further, Courtois does not acknowledge the "Jewish" factor: that the USSR had been created by atheistic Jews (see zioncom.html), and that Stalin had ousted them. Part of his harshness was directed at preventing the same forces from regaining control: stalin.html. Further, Stalin had resisted the American/Zionist proposal for World Government - the Baruch Plan of 1946: baruch-plan.html. One cannot get a balanced perspective on Stalin, or Communism, without taking all these factors into account}

Francois Furet, on the verge of quitting the French Communist Party in 1954, wrote these words on the subject:

{quote} Now all of a sudden the "Secret Speech" of February 1956 had singlehandedly shattered the Communist idea then prevailing around the world. The voice that denounced Stalin's crimes did not come from the West but from Moscow, and from the "holy of holies" in Moscow, the Kremlin. It was not the voice of a Communist who had been ostracized but the voice of the leading Communist in the world, the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Thus, instead of being tainted by the suspicion that was invariably leveled at accusations made by ex-Communists, Khrushchev's remarks gained the luster that reflected glory upon its leader. The extraordinary power of the "Secret Speech" on the mind stemmed from the fact that it did not have any opponents. {end quote}

This event was especially paradoxical inasmuch as a number of contemporaries had long warned the Bolsheviks about the inherent dangers of this course of action. From 1917 to 1918 disgruntlement arose even within the socialist movement itself, including among believers in the "great light from the East " who were suddenly relentless in their criticism of the Bolsheviks. Essentially the dispute centered upon the methods used by Lenin: violence, crime, and terror. From the 1920s to the 1950s, while the dark side of Bolshevism was being exposed by a number of witnesses, victims, and skilled observers (as well as in countless articles and other publications), people had to hide their time until the Communist rulers would recognize this themselves. Alas, the significance of this undoubtedly important development was misinterpreted by the growing body of public opinion as a recognition of the errors of Communism. This was indeed a misinterpretation, since the "Secret Speech" tackled only the question of Communists as victims; but at least this was a step in the right direction. It was the first confirmation of the testimony by witnesses and of previous studies, and it corroborated long-standing suspicions that Communism was responsible for creating a colossal tragedy in Russia.

The leaders of many "fraternal parties" were initially unconvinced of the need to jump on Khrushchev's bandwagon. After some delay, a few leaders in other countries did follow Khrushchev's lead in exposing these atrocities. However, it was not until 1979 that the Chinese Communist Partv divided Mao's

{p. 26} policies between "great merits," which lasted until 1957, and "great errors," which came afterward.

{p. 48} Membership in the Bolshevik movement seems to have numbered no more than two thousand at the beginning of October 1917. But as a constellation of committees, soviets, and other small groups rushed to fill the wholesale institutional vacuum of that autumn, the environment was perfect for a small, well-organized group to exercise a disproportionate amount of powcr. And that is exactly what the Bolshevik Party did.

Since its founding in 1903, the party had remained outside the other currents of social democracy in both Russia and Europe, chiefly because of its will to break radically with the existing social and political order and because of its conception of itself as a highly structured, disciplined, elitist avant-garde of professional revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks were thus the complete opposite of the Menshevik and other European social-democratic parties, which allowed large memberships and widely differing points of view.

World War I further distilled Leninist Bolshevism. Rejecting collaboration with all other currents of social democracy, Lenin became increasingly isolated, justifying his theoretical position in essays like Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He began to argue that the revolution was destined to occur not in countries where capitalism was most advanced, but rather in countries like Russia that were considerably less developed economically, provided that the revolutionary movement was led by a disciplined avant-garde of revolutionaries who were prepared to go to extremes. That meant, in this case, creating a dictatorship of the proletariat and transforming "the imperialist war" into a civil war.

In a letter of 17 October 1917 to Aleksandr Shlvapniko, Lenin wrote:

{quote} The least bad thing that could happen in the short term would be the defeat of tsarism in the war ... The essence of our work (which must be persistent, systematic, and perhaps extremely long-term) is to aim for the transformation of the war into a civil war. When that will happen is another question, as it is not yet clear. We must wait for the moment to ripen, and systematically force it to ripen ... We can neither promise civil war nor decree it, but we must work toward that end for as long as we have to. {endquote}

Throughout the war Lenin returned to the idea that the Bolsheviks had to be ready to encourage civil war by all possible means. "Anyone who believes in class war," he wrote in Scptember 1916, "must recognize that civil war, in any class-based society, is the natural continuation, development, and result of class war."

After the February revolution (which occurred while most of the Bolsheviks were in exile or abroad) Lenin - unlike the vast majority of the leaders of

{p. 49} his party - predicted the failure of the conciliatory policies pursued by the provisional government. ...

Lenin was caught between two opposing forces: a plebeian mass increasingly impatient for action, made up of the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd, certain regiments in the capital, and the worker battalions of Red Guards in Vyborg; and a group of leaders haunted by fear that an overhasty insurrection would fail. Contrary to commonly held historical opinion, throughout 1917 the Bolshevik Party was profoundly divided, torn between the timidity of one group and the overenthusiasm of the other. At this stage the famous party discipline was more an act of faith than a concrete reality. In July 1917, as a result of troubles at the naval base and confrontations with the government forces, the Bolshevik Party was very nearly destroyed altogether. In the aftermath of the bloody demonstrations in Petrograd from 3 to 5 July, its leaders were arrested, and some, like Lenin himself, were forced into exile.

But the Bolsheviki Party resurfaced at the end of August 1917, in a situ-

{p. 50} ation quite favorable for an armed seizure of power. ...

From exile in Finland, Lenin sent a constant stream of articles and letters to the Central Committee of the Bolshe- vik Party, calling for the uprising to begin. "By making immediate offers of peace and giving land to the peasants, the Bolsheviks will establish a power base that no one will be able to overturn," he wrote. "There is no point in aiting for a formal majority for the Bolsheviks; revolutions do not wait for such things. History will never forgive us if we do not seize power immediately "

Lenin's urgency in the face of an increasingly revolutionary situation left most of the Bolshevik leaders skeptical and perplexed. It was surely enough, they believed, to stick behind the masses and incite them to spontaneous acts of violence, to encourage the disruptive influence of social movements, and to sit tight until the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, planned for 20 October. It was more than likely that the Bolsheviks would achieve a plurality at the assembly, since they would be overrepresented by the soviets from the great working-class areas and from the army. Lenin, however, greatly feared the power-sharing that might result if the transfer of power took place as a result of a vote at the Congress of Soviets. For months he had been clamoring for power to devolve to the Bolsheviks alone, and he wanted at all costs to ensure that the Bolsheviks seized power through a military insurrection, before the opening of the Second Congress. He knew that the other socialist parties would universally condemn such a move, and thus effectively force themselves into opposition, leaving all power in the hands of the Bolsheviks.

On 10 October, having returned secretly to Petrograd, Lenin gathered together twelve of the twenty-one members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. After ten hours of negotiations he persuaded a majority to vote in favor of the most important decision ever made by the party - to undertakle an immediate armed uprising. The decision was approved by ten to two, the dissenters being Zinoviev and Kamenev, who ished to wait for the Second

{p. 51} Congress of Soviets. On 16 October, despite opposition from the moderate socialists Trotsky therefore sct up the Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee (PRMC), a military organi7ation theoretically under the control of the Petrograd Soviet but in fact run by the Bolsheviks. Its task was to organize the seizure of power through an armed insurrection - and thus to prevent a popular anarchist uprising that might have eclipsed the Bolshevik Party.

In accordance with Lenin's wishes, the number of direct participants in the Great Socialist October Revolution was extremely limited - a few thousand soldiers, the sailors from Kronstadt, Red Guards who had rallied to the cause of the PRMC, and a few hundred militant Bolsheviks from factory committees. Careful preparation and a lack of opposition allowed the whole operation to proceed smoothly and with very few casualties. Significantly, the seizure of power was accomplished in the name of the PRMC. Thus the Bolshevik leaders attributed all their power to a single event that no one outside the party's Central Committee could link to the Congress of Soviets.

Lenin's strategy worked. Faced with this fait accompli, the moderate socialists, after denouncing "an organized military action deliberately planned behind the back of the soviets," simply walked out of the Congress. Only the small group of left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries remained, and they joined the Bolsheviks in ratifying the coup, voting in a text drawn up by Lenin that gave "all power to the soiets." This purely formal resolution allowed the Bolsheviks to authenticate a fiction that was to deceive credulous generations for decades to come - that they governed in the name of the people in "the Soviet state." A few hours later, before breaking up, the Congress ratified a new Bolshevik government - the Soviet Council of People's Commissars (SNK), presided over by Lenin - and approved two decrees about peace and land.

Very soon misunderstandings and conflicts arose between the new regime and the social movements, which until then had acted independently to destroy the old political, social, and economic order. The first conflict of interest concerned the agrarian revolution. The Bolsheviks, who had always stood for the nationalization of all land, were now compelled by a combination of unfavorable circumstances to hijack the Socialist Revolutionary program and to approve the redistribution of land to the peasants. The "Decree on Land" stated that "all right of property regarding the land is hereby abolished without indemnity and all land is hereby put at the disposal of local agrarian committees for redistribution." In practice it did little more than legitimate what had already taken place since the summer of 1917, namely the peasant confiscation of land from the landlords and the kulaks. Forced to go along with this autonomous peasant rvolution because it had facilitated their own seizure of power, the Bolsheviks were to wait a decade before having their way. The enforced

{p. 52} collectivization of the countryside, which was to be the bitterest confrontation between the Soviet regime and the peasantry, was the tragic resolution of the 1917 conflict.

The second conflict arose between the Bolshevik Party and all the spontaneous new social structures, such as factory committees, unions, socialist parties, neighborhood organizations, Red Guards, and above all soviets, which had helped destroy traditional institutions of power and were now fighting for the extension of their own mandates. In a few weeks these structures found themselves either subordinated to the Bolshevik Party or suppressed altogether. By a clever sleight-of-hand, "All power to the soviets," probably the single most popular slogan in the whole of Russia in October 1917, became a cloak hiding the power of the Bolshevik Party over the soviets. "Workers' control," another major demand of the workers, in whose interest the Bolsheviks claimed to be acting, was rapidly sidelined in favor of state control in the name of the workers over businesses and workforces. A mutual incomprehension was born between the workers, who were obsessed by unemployment, decline in real wages, and ever-present hunger, and a state whose only concern was economic efficiency. From as early as December 1917 the new regime was forced to confront mounting claims from workers and an increasing number of strikes. In a few weeks the Bolsheviks lost the greater part of the confidence that they had carefully cultivated in the labor force throughout the year.

The third misunderstanding developed between the Bolsheviks and the satellite nations of the former tsarist empire. The Bolshevik coup d'etat had accelerated their desire for independence, and they thought that the new regime would support their cause. In recognizing the equality and sovereignty of the peoples of the old empire, as well as their right to self-determination and secession, the Bolsheviks seemed to have invited these peoples to break away from centralized Russian control. In a few months the Finns, Poles, Baltic nations, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis were claiming their independence. Overwhelmed, the Bolsheviks soon put their own economic needs before the rights of these nations, since Ukrainian wheat, the petroleum and minerals of the Caucasus, and all the other vital economic interests of the new state were perceived to be irreplaceable. In terms of the control it exercised over its territories, the new regime proved itself to be a more worthy inheritor of the empire than even the provisional government had been.

These conflicts and misunderstandings were never truly resolved, but continued to grow, spawning an ever increasing divide between the new Soviet regime and society as a whole. Faced with new obstacles and the seeming intransigence of the population, the Bolshevik regime turned to terror and violence to consolidate its hold on the institutions of power.

{p. 53} 2 The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

The new Bolshevik power structure was quite complicated. Its public face, "the power of the soviets," was formally represented by the Central Executive Committee, while the lawmaking apparatus of government was the Soviet Council of People's Commissars (SNK), which struggled to achieve some degree of domestic and international legitimacy and recognition. The government also had its revolutionary organization in the form of the Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee (PRMC), which had been so central in the actual seizure of power. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, who from the earliest days had played a decisive role in the PRMC, characterized it as "a light, flexible structure that could swing into action at a moment's notice, without any bureaucratic interference. There were no restrictions when the time came for the iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat to smite its foe."

How did this "iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat" (an expression later used to describe the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka) work in practice? Its organization was simple and extremely effective. The PRMC was made up of some sixty officials, including forty-eight Bolsheviks, a few Socialist Revolutionaries of the far left, and a handful of anarchists; and it was officially under the diretion ot a chairman, the Socialist Rcvolutionary Aleksandr Lazimir, who as assisted in his operations by a group of four that included Alelisandr Antonov-Ovseenko and Dzerzhinsky. In fact during the fifty-three

{p. 54} days of the PRMC's existencc, more than 6,000 orders were drawn up, most of them scribbled on old bits of paper, and some twenty different people signed their name as chairman or secretary.

The same operational simplicity as to be found in the transmission of directions and the execution of orders: the PRMC acted through the intermediary of a network of nearly onc thousand "commissars," who operated in many different fields in military units, soviets, neighborhood committees, and administrations. Responsible only to the PRMC, these commissars often made decisions independently of the government or of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Beginning on 26 October (8 November), while the Bolshevik leaders were off forming the government, a few obscure, anonymous commissars decided to "strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat" by the folloeing measures: forbidding counterrevolutionary tracts, closing all seven of the capital's principal newspapers (bourgeois and moderate socialist), taking control of radio and telegraph stations, and sctting up a project for the requisitioning of apartments and privately owned cars. The closing of the newspapers was legalized by a government decree a few days later, and within another week, after some quite acrlmonious discussions, it was approved by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets.

Unsure of their strength, and using the same tactic that had succeeded so well earlier, the Bolshevik leaders at first encouraged what the called the "revolutionary spontaneity of the masses." Replying to a delegation of representatives from rural soviets, who had come from the province of Pskov to inquire what measures should be taken to avoid anarchy, Derhinsky explained that

{quote} the task at hand is to break up the old order. We, the Bolsheviks, are not numerous enough to accomplish this task alone. We must allow the revolutionary spontaneity of the masses who are fighting for their emancipation to take its course. After that, we Bolsheviks will show the masses which road to follow. Through the PRMC it is the masses who speak, and who act against their class enemy, against the enemies of the people. We are here only to channel and direct the hate and the legitimate desire for revenge of the oppressed against their oppressors. {endquote}

A few days carlier, at the 29 October (11 November) meeting of the PRMC, a few unidentified people had mentioned a need to combat the "enemies of the people" more vigorously. This formula would meet with great success in the months, years, and decadecs to follow. It was taken up again in the PRMC proclamationl dated 13 November (26 November): "High-ranking functionalies in state administration, banks, the treasury, the railways, and the post and telegraph officcs are sabotaging the measures of the Bolshevik

{p. 55} government. Henceforth such indiiduals are to be described as 'enemies of the people.' Their names will be printed in all newspapers, and lists of the enemies of the people will be put up in public places " A few days after these lists were published, a new proclamation was issued: "All individuals suspected of sabotage, speculation, and opportunism are now liable to be arrested immediately, as enemies of the people and transferred to the Kronstadt prisons." In the space of a few days the PRMC had introduced two new notions that were to have lasting consequences the idea of the "enemy of the people" and the idea of the "suspect."

On 28 November (11 December) the government institutionalized the notion of "enemy of the people." A decree signed by Lenin stipulated that "all leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a party filled with enemies of the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws, and are to be arrested immediately and brought before a revolutionary court." Such courts had just been set up in accordance with "Order Number One regarding the Courts," which effectively abolished all laws that "were in contradiction with the worker and peasant government, or with the political programs of the Social Democratic or Socialist Revolutionary parties." While waiting for the new penal code to be drawn up, judges were granted tremendous latitude to assess the validity of existing legislation "in accordance with revolutionary order and legality," a notion so vague that it encouraged all sorts of abuses. The courts of the old regime were immediately suppressed and replaced by people's courts and revolutionary courts to judge crimes and misdemeanors committed "against the proletarian state," "sabotage," "espionage," "abuse of one's position," and other "counterrevolutionary crimes." As Dmitry Kursky, the people's commissar of justice from 1918 to 1928, recognied, the revolutionary courts were not courts in the normal "bourgeois" sense of the term at all, but courts of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and weapons in the struggle against the counterrevolution, whose main concern was eradication rather than judgment. Among the revolutionary courts was a "revolutionary press court," whose role was to judge all crimes committed by the press and to suspend any publication found to be "sowing discord in the minds of the people by deliberately publishing erroneous news."

While these new and previously unheard-of categories ("suspects," "enemies of the people") were appearing and the new means of dealing with them emerging, the Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee continued its own process of restructuring. In a city in which stocks of flour were so low that rations were less than half a pound of bread per day per adult, the question of the food supply was naturally of great importance.

{p. 56} On 11 (24) November {1917} the Food Commission decided to send special detachments, made up of soldiers, sailors, workers, and Red Guards, to the provinces where cereals were produced "to procure food needed in Petrograd and at the front." This measure, taken by one of the PRMC commissions, prefigured the forced requisitioning policy that was enforced for three years by detachments from the "food army," which was to be the essential factor in the conflicts between the new regime and the peasantry and was to provoke much violence and terror.

The Military Investigation Commission, established on 10 (23) November, was in charge of the arrest of "counterrevolutionary" officers (who were usually denounced by their own soldiers), members of "bourgeois" parties, and functionaries accused of "sabotage." In a very short time this commission was in charge of a diffuse array of issues. In the troubled climate of a starving city where detachments of Red Guards and ad hoc militia groups were constantly requisitioning, commandeering, and pillaging in the name of the revolution, or on the strength of an uncertain mandate signed by some commissar, hundreds of individuals every day were brought before the commission for a wide variety of so-called crimes, including looting, "speculation," "hoarding products of the utmost necessity," "drunkenness," and "belonging to a hostile class."

The Bolshevik appeals to the revolutionary spontaneity of the masses were in practice a difficult tool to use. Violence and the settling of old scores were widespread, as were armed robberies and the looting of shops, particularly of the underground stocks of the Winter Palace and of shops selling alcohol. As time passed the phenomenon became so widespread that at Dzerzhinsky's suggestion the PRMC established a commission to combat drunkenness and civil unrest. On 6 (19) December the commission declared a state of emergency in Petrograd and imposed a curfew to "put an end to the troubles and the unrest brought about by unsavory elements masquerading as revolutionaries." More than these sporadic troubles, what the revolutionary government feared was a widespread strike by state employees, which had started in the immediate aftermath of the coup d'etat of 25 October (7 November). This threat was the pretext for the creation on 7 (20) December of the Vserossiiskaya Chrezvychainava Komissiya po bor'be s kontr-revolvutsiei, spekulvatsiei i sabotazhem - the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat the Counterrevolution, Speculation, and Sabotage - which was to enter history under its initials as the VChK, abbreviated to the Cheka. A few days after the creation of the Cheka, the government decided, not without hesitation, to disband the PRMC. As a provisional operating structure set up on the eve of the insurrection to direct operations on the ground, it had accomplished its task: it had facilitated the sieizure of power and defended the

{p. 57} new regime until it had time to create its own state apparatus. Henceforth, to avoid confusion about power structures and the danger of spreading responsibi1ities too widely, it was to transfer all its prerogatives to the legal government, the Council of People's Commissars.

At a moment judged to be so critical by their leaders, how could the Bolsheviks do without this "iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat"? At a meeting on 6 (19) December the government entrusted "Comrade Dzerzhinskv to establish a special commission to examine means to combat, with the most revolutionary energy possible, the general strike of state employees, and to investigate methods to combat sabotage." What Dzerzhinsky did gave rise to no discussion, as it seemed so clearly to be the correct response. A few days earlier, Lenin, always eager to draw parallels between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution of 1917, had confided in his secretary Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich an urgent need to find "our own Fouquier-Tinville, to combat the counterrevolutionary rabble." On 6 December Lenin's choice of a "solid proletarian Jacobin" resulted in the unanimous election of Dzerzhinsky, who in a few weeks, thanks to his energetic actions as part of the PRMC, had become the great specialist on questions of security. Besides, as Lenin explained to Bonch-Bruevich, "of all of us, it's Feliks who spent the most time behind bars of the tsarist prisons, and who had the most contact with the Okhrana [the tsarist political police]. He knows what he's doing!"

Before the government meeting of 7 (20) December Lenin sent a note to Dzerzhinsky:

{quote} With reference to your report of today, would it not be possible to write a decree with a preamble such as the following: The bourgeoisie are still persistently committing the most abominable crimes and recruiting the very dregs of society to organize riots. The accomplices of the bourgeoisie, notably high-ranking functionaries and bank cadres, are also involved in sabotage and organizing strikes to undermine the measures the government is taking with a view to the socialist transformation of society. The bourgeoisie is even going so far as to sabotage the food supply, thus condemning millions to death by starvation. Exceptional measures will have to be taken to combat these saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries. Consequently, the Soviet Council of People's Commissars decrees that ... {end quote}

During the evening of 7 (20) December Dzerzhinsky presented his project to the SNK {Sovnarkom}. He began his intervention with a speech on the dangers faced by the revolution "from within":

{quote} To address this problem, the cruelest and most dangerous of all the problems we face, we must make use of determined comrades - solid, hard men without pity who are ready to sacrifice everything for the

{p. 58} sake of the revolution. Do not imagine, comrades, that I am simplv looking for a revolutionary form of justice. We have no concern about justice at this hour! We are at war, on the front where the enemv is advancing, and the fight is to the death. What I am proposing, what I am demanding, is the creation of a mechanism that, in a truly revolutionary and suitably Bolshevik fashion, will filter out the counterrevolutionaries once and for all! {end quote}

Dzerzhinsky then launched into the core of his speech, transcribed as it appears in the minutes of the meeting:

{quote} The task of the Commission is as follows: (1) to suppress and liquidate any act or attempted act of counterrevolutionary activity or sabotage, whatever its origin, anywhere on Russian soil; (2) to bring all saboteurs and counterrevolutionaries before a revolutionary court. The Commission will proceed by a preliminary inquiry, wherever this is indispensable to its task. The Commission will be divided into three sections: (l) Information; (2) Organization; (3) Operation. The Commission will attach particular importance to questions regarding the press, sabotage, the KDs [Constitutional Democrats], the right Socialist Revolutionaries, saboteurs, and strikers. The Commission is entitled to take the following repressive measures: to confiscate goods, expel people from their homes, remove ration cards, publish lists of enemies of the people, etc. Resolution: to approve this draft. To name the commission the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat the Counterrevolution, Speculation, and Sabotage. These resolutions are to be made public. {end quote}

This text, which discusses the founding of the Soviet secret police, undoubtedly raises a few questions. How, for example, is the difference between Dzerzhinsky's fierce-sounding speech and the relative modesty of the powers accorded the Cheka to be interpreted? The Bolsheviks were on the point of concluding an agreement with the left Socialist Revolutionaries (six of whose leaders had been admitted to the government on 12 December) to break their political isolation, at the crucial moment when they had to face the question of calling the Constituent Assembly, in which they still held only a minority. Accordingly they decided to keep a low profile, and contrary to the resolution adopted by the government on 7 (20) Deccmber, no decree announcing the creation of thc Cheka and outlining its role was actually published.

As an "extraordinary commission," the Cheka was to prosper and act without the slightest basis in law: Dzerzhinsky, who like Lenin wanted nothing

{p. 59} so much as a free hand, described it in the following astonishing fashion: "It is life itself that shows the Cheka the direction to follow." Life in this instance meant the "revolutionary terror of the masses," thc street violence fervently encouraged by many of the Bolshevik leaders, who had momentarily forgotten their profound distrust of the spontaneous actions of the people.

When Trotsky, a people's commissar during the war, was addressing the delegates of the Central Executive Committee of thc Soviets on 1 (14) December he warned that "in less than a month, this terror is going to take extremelv violent forms, just as it did during the great French Revolution. Not only prison awaits our enemies, but the guillotine, that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which has the capacity to make a man a whole head shorter."

A few weeks later, speaking at a workers' assembly, Lenin again called for terror, describing it as revolutionary class justice:

{quote} The Soviet regime has acted in the way that all revolutionarv proletariats should act; it has made a clean break with bourgeois justice, which is an instrument of the oppressive classes ... Soldiers and workers must understand that no one will help them unless they help themselves. If the masses do not rise up spontaneously, none of this will lead to anything ... For as long as we fail to treat speculators the way they deserve - with a bullet in the head - we will not get anywhere at all. {end quote}

These calls for terror intensified the violence already unleashed in society by the Bolsheviks' rise to power. Since the autumn of 1917 thousands of the great agricultural properties had been attacked by brigades of angry peasants, and hundreds of the major landowners had been massacred. Violence had been omnipresent in Russia in the summer of 1917. The violence itself was nothing new, but the events of the war had allowed several different types of violence, already there in a latent state, to converge: an urban violence reacting against the brutality of capitalist relations at the heart of an industrial society; traditional peasant violence; and the modern violence of World War I, which had reintroduced extraordinary regression and brutality into human relations. The combination of these three forms of violence made for an explosive mix, whose effect was potentially devastating during the Russian Revolution, marked as it was by the failure of normal institutions of order and authority, by a rising sense of resentment and social frustrations accumulated over a long period, and by the political use of popular violence. Mutual suspicion had always been the norm between the townspeople and the peasants. For the peasants, more now than ever, the city was the seat of power and oppression; for the urban elite, and for professional revolutionaries who by a large majority were from the intelligentsia, the peasants were still, in Gorky's words, "a mass of half savage

{p. 60} people" whose "cruel instincts" and "animal individualism" ought to be brought to book by the "organized reason of the city." At the same time, politicians and intellectuals were all perfectly conscious that it was the peasant revolts that had shaken the provisional government, allowing the Bolsheviks, who were really a tiny minority in the country, to seize the initiative in the power vacuum that had resulted.

At the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918, the new regime faced no serious opposition, and one month after the Bolshevik coup d'etat it effectively controlled most of the north and the center of Russia as far as the mid-Volga, as well as some of the bigger cities, such as Baku in the Caucasus and Tashkent in Central Asia. Ukraine and Finland had seceded but were not demonstrating any warlike intentions. The only organized anti-Bolshevik military force was a small army of about 3,000 volunteers, the embryonic form of the future "White Army" that was being formed in southern Russia by General Mikhail Alekseey and General Kornilov. These tsarist generals were placing all their hopes in the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban. The Cossacks were radically different from the other Russian peasants; their main privilege under the old regime had been to receive 30 hectares of land in exchange for military service up to the age of thirty-six. If they had no desire to acquire more land, they were zealous to keep the land they had already acquired. Desiring above all to retain their status and their independence, and worried by the Bolshevik proclamations that had proved so injurious to the kulaks, the Cossacks aligned themselves with the anti-Bolshevik forces in the spring of 1918.

"Civil war" may not be the most appropriate term to describe the first clashes of the winter of 1917 and the spring of 1918 in southern Russia, which involved a few thousand men from the army of volunteers and General Rudolf Sivers' Bolshevik troops, who numbered scarcely 6,000. What is immediately striking is the contrast between the relatively modest number of troops involved in these clashes and the extraordinary repressive violence exercised by the Bolsheviks, not simply against the soldiers they captured but also against civilians. Established in June 1919 by General Anton Denikin, commander in chief of the armed forces in the south of Russia, the Commission to Investigate Bolshevik Crimes tried to record, in the few months of its existence, the atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, the Kuban, the Don region, and the Crimea. The statements gathered by this commission, which constitute the principal source of Sergei Melgunov's 1926 classic, The Red Terror in Russia, 1918-1924, demonstrate that innumerable atrocities were committed from January 1918 onward. In Taganrog units from Sivers' army had thrown fifty Junkers and "White" officers, their hands and feet bound, into a blast furnace. In Evpatoria several hundred officers and "bourgeois" were tied up,

{p. 61} tortured, and thrown into the sea. Similar acts of violence occurred in most of the cities of the Crimea occupied by the Bolsheviks, including Sevastopol, Yalta, Alushta, and Simferopol. Similar atrocities are recorded from April and May 1918 in the big Cossack cities then in revolt. The extremely precise files of the Denikin commission record "corpses with the hands cut off, broken bones, heads ripped off, broken jaws, and genitals removed."

As Melgunoy notes, it is nonetheless difficult to distinguish the systematic practice of organized terror from what might otherwise be considered simply uncontrolled excesses. There is rarely mention of a local Cheka directing such massacres until August and September 1918; until that time the Cheka network as still quite sparse. These massacres, which targeted not only enemy combatants but also civilian "enemies of the people" (for instance, among the 240 people killed in Yalta at the beginning of March 1918, there were some 70 politicians, lawyers, journalists, and teachers, as well as 165 officers), were often carried out by "armed detachments," "Red Guards," and other, unspecified "Bolshevik elements." Exterminating the enemy of the people was simply the logical extension of a revolution that was both political and social. This conception of the world did not suddenly spring into being in the aftermath of October 1917, but the Bolshevik seizure of power, which was quite explicit on the issue, did play a role in its subsequent legitimation.

In March 1917 a young captain wrote a perceptive letter assessing the revolution and its effects on his regiment: "Between the soldiers and ourselves, the gap cannot be bridged. For them, we are, and will always remain, the harini [masters]. To their way of thinking, what has just taken place isn't a political revolution but a social movement, in which they are the winners and we are the losers. They say to us: 'You were the barini before, but now it's our turn!' They think that they will now have their revenge, after all those centuries of servitude."

The Bolshevik leaders encouraged anything that might promote this aspiration to "social revenge" among the masses, seeing it as a moral legitimation of the terror, or what Lenin called "the just civil war." On 15 (28) December 1917 Dzerzhinsky published an appeal in Izvestiya (News) inviting all soviets to organize their own Chekas. The result was a swift flourishing of "commissions "detachments," and other "extraordinary organizations" that the central authorities had great problems in controlling when they decided, a few months later, to end such "mass initiatives" and to organize a centralized, structured netork of Chekas.

Summing up the first six months of the Cheka's existence in July 1918, Dzerzhinsky noted: " This was a period of improvisation and hesitation, during which our organization was not always up to the complexities of the situation." Yet even by that date the Cheka's record as an instrument of repression

{p. 62} was already enormous. And the organization, whose personnel had numbercd no more than 100 in Decembcr 1917, had increased to 12,000 in a mere six months.

Its beginnings had been modest. On 11 (24) January 1918 Dzerzhinsky had sent a note to Lenin: "We find the present situation intolerable, despite the important services we have already rendered. We have no money whatever. We work night and day without bread, sugar, tea, butter, or cheese. Either take measures to authorize decent rations for us or give us the power to make our own requisitions from the bourgeoisie." Dzerzhinsky had recruited approximately 100 men, for the most part old comrades-in-arms, mostly Poles and people from the Baltic states, nearly all of whom had also worked for the PRMC, and who became the future leaders of the GPU of the 1920s and the NKVD of the 1930s: Martin Latsis, Viacheslay Menzhinsky, Stanislay Messing, Grigory Moroz, Jan Peters, Meir Trilisser, Josif Unshlikht, and Genrikh Yagoda.

The first action of the Cheka was to break a strike by state employees in Petrograd. The method was swift and effective - all its leaders were arrested - and the justification simple: "Anyone who no longer wishes to work with the people has no place among them," declared Dzerzhinsky, who also arrested a number of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary deputies elected to the Constituent Assembly. This arbitrary act was immediately condemned by Isaac Steinberg, the people's commissar of justice, who was himself a left Socialist Revolutionary and had been elected to the government a few days previously. This first clash between the Cheka and the judiciary raised the important issue of the legal position of the secret police.

"What is the point of a 'People's Commissariat for Justice'?" Steinberg asked Lenin. "It would be more honest to have a People's Commissariat for Social Extermination. People would understand more clearly."

"Excellent idea," Lenin countered. "That's exactly how I see it. Unfortunately, it wouldn't do to call it that!"

Lenin arbitrated in the conflict between Steinberg, who argued for a strict subordination of the Cheka to the processes of justice, and Dzerzhinsky, who argued against what he called "the nitpicking legalism of the old school of the ancien regime." In Derzhinsky's view, the Cheka should be responsible for its acts only to the government itself.

The sixth (nineteenth) of January marked an important point in the consolidation of the Bolshevik dictatorship. Early in the morning the Constituent Assembly, which had been elected in November-December 1917 and in which the Bolsheviks were a minority (they had only 175 deputies out of 707 seats), was broke up by force, having met for a single day. This arbitrary act scemed to provoke no particular reaction anywhere in the country. A small

{p. 63} demonstration against the dissolution of the assembly was broken up by troops, causing some twenty deaths, a high price to pay for a democratic parliamentary experiment that lasted only a few hours.

In the days and weeks that followed the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the position of the Bolshevik govcrnment in Petrograd became increasingly uncomfortable, at the very moment when Trotsky, Kamenev, Adolf Yoffe, and Karl Radek were negotiating peace conditions with delegations from the Central Powers at Brest Litovsk. On 9 (22) January 1918 the government devoted all business to the question of its transfer to Moscow.

What worried the Bolshevik leaders was not the German threat - the armistice had held good since 15 (28) December - but the possibility of a workers' uprising. Discontent was growing rapidly in working-class areas that just two months before had been solidly behind them. With demobilization and the consequent slump in large-scale orders from the military, businesses had laid off tens of thousands of workers, and increasing difficulties in supply had caused the daily bread ration to fall to a mere quarter of a pound. Unable to do an thing to improve this situation, Lenin merely spoke out against "profiteers" and "speculators," whom he chose as scapegoats. "Every factory, every company must set up its own requisitioning detachments. Everyone must be mobilized in the search for bread, not simply volunteers, but absolutely evervone; anyone who fails to cooperate will have his ration card confiscated immediately" he wrote on 22 January (February) 1918.

Trotsky's nomination, on his return from Brest Litovsk on 31 January 1918, to head the Extraordinary Commission for Food and Transport was a clear sign from the government of the decisive importance it was giving to the "hunt for food," which was the first stage in the "dictatorship of food." Lenin turned to this commission in mid-February with a draft decree that the members of the commission - who besides Trotsky included Aleksandr Tsyurupa, the people's commissar of food - rejected. According to the text prepared by Lenin, all peasants were to be required to hand over any surplus food in exchange for a receipt. Any defaulters who failed to hand in supplies within the required time were to be executed. "When we read this proposal we were at a loss for words," Tsyurupa recalled in his memoirs. "To carry out a project like this ould have led to executions on a massive scale. Lenin's project was simply abandoned."

The episode was nonetheless extremely revealing. Since the beginning of l917 Lenin had found himself trapped in an impasse of his own making, and he was wolried about the catastrophic supply situation of the big industrial centers which were seen as isolated Bolshevik strongholds among the great mass of peasants. He was prepared to do anything to get the grain he needed without altering his policies. Conflict was inevitable here, between a peasantry

{p. 742} They dressed up this situation in ideological terms as the transformation of a "permanent revolution" into "permanent civil war."

The importance of the war can be gauged by the impact it had on the revolutionaries. As Trotsky wrote, "Kautsky sees one of the reasons for the extremely bloody character of the revolution in the war and in its hardening influence on manners." But Trotsky and Kautsky did not come to the same conclusion: The German socialist, faced with the weight of militarism, was ever more open to the question of democracy and the defense of the rights of the individual. For Trotsky, "the development of bourgeois society itself, out of which contemporary democracy grew, in no way represents the process of gradual democratization that figured before the war in the dreams of the greatest socialist illusionist of democracy - Jean Jaures - and now in those of the most learned of pedants, Karl Kautsky."

Generalizing from this, Trotsky went on to speak about the "unpitying civil war that is unfolding the world over." He believed that the world was entering an era in which "political struggle is rapidly turning into civil war" between "two forces: the revolutionary proletariat under the leadership of the Communists, and counterrevolutionary democracy headed by generals and admirals." There was a double error of perspective at work here. On the one hand, subsequent events demonstrated that the desire for representative democracy and its realization was a worldwide phenomenon, reaching even the U.S.S.R. in 1991. On the other hand, Trotsky, like Lenin, had a strong tendency to develop general conclusions based on the Russian experience, which in any case was often exaggerated in his interpretation. The Bolsheviks were convinced that once the civil war had begun in Russia - largely because of their own efforts - it would spread to Europe and the rest of the world. These two major errors would serve as the justification for Soviet terror for decades to come.

Trotsky drew definitive conclusions from these premises:

{quote} It could, and must, be explained that in the civil war we destroyed White Guards so that they would not destroy the workers. Consequently, our problem is not the destruction of human life, but its preservation ... The enemy must be made harmless, and in wartime this means that he must be destroyed. The problem of revolution, as of war, lies in breaking the will of the foe, forcing him to capitulate and to accept the conditions of the conqueror ... The question about who will rule the country - that is, about the life or death of the bourgeoisie - will be decided on either side not by reference to the paragraphs of the constitution, but bv the employment of all forms of violence. {end quote}

{p. 743} Trotsky's rhetoric uses many of the same expressions that are found in Ludendorff's explanation of the concept of total war. The Bolsheviks, who believed themselves to be such great innovators, were in fact very much a product of their time and of the highly militarized atmosphere that surrounded them.

Trotsky's remarks about freedom of the press demonstrate the pervasiveness of a war mentality:

{quote} During war all institutions and organs of the state and of public opinion become, directly or indirectly, weapons of war. This is particularly true of the press. No government waging a serious war will allow publications to exist on its territory that, openlv or indirectly, support the enemy. Still more so in a civil war. The nature of the latter is such that each of the struggling sides has in the rear of its armies considerable circles of the population who support the enemy. In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate into the rear are subject to execution. This is inhumane, but no one ever considered war or, all the more, civil war - to be a school of humanity. {end quote}

The Bolsheviks were not the only group implicated in the civil war that broke out in Russia in the spring and summer of 1918, beginning a four-year-long orgy of killing by all sides, with people crucified, impaled, cut into pieces, and burned alive. But they were the only group to theorize civil war, and to seek it openly. Under the joint influence of their doctrine and the new modes of behavior created by the world war, civil war became for them a permanent form of political struggle. The civil war between Whites and Reds hid a different war of far greater significance: the war of the Reds against the majority of the working population and a large part of the peasantry, who after the summer of 1918 began to rebel against the Bolshevik yoke. The war was not a traditional confrontation between two opposing political groups, but a conflict between the government and the majority of the population. Under Stalin, the war put the Party-state in opposition to society as a whole. This was a new phenomenon, which could exist only because of the ability of the totalitarian system, backed by mass terror, to control all spheres of activity in society.

Recent studies based on the newly opened archives show that the "dirty war" (the expression is taken from Nicolas Werth) of 1918-1921 was the founding moment of the Soviet regime, the crucible in which the people who would develop and continue the revolution were formed. It was an infernal caldron in which the mentality peculiar to Leninism and Stalinism originated, with its unique melange of idealist exaltation, cynicism, and inhuman cruelty. The Bolsheviks hoped that the civil war would spread across the country and throughout the world and would last as long as it took for socialism to conquer

{p. 744} the planet. The war installed cruelty as the normal means by which people were to relate to one another {although Trotsky was brutally murdered, this was in accordance with the methods he helped establish}. It broke down traditional barriers of restraint, replacing them with absolute, fundamental violence.

From the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution, the issues raised by Kautsky were a thorn in the side of the revolutionaries. Isaac Steinberg, a left Socialist Revolutionary allied to the Bolsheviks, who was the people's commissar for justice from December 1917 to May 1918, spoke in 1923 about a "methodical system of state terror" used by the Bolsheviks. He posed the central question about the limits of violence in the revolution:

{quote} The overturning of the old world, and its replacement by a new life in which the same old evils are kept in place, a life that is contaminated by the same old principles, means that socialism is forced to make a crucial choice during the decisive struggle about whether to use the old-fashioned violence of the tsars and the bourgeoisie, or to resort instead to revolutionary violence ... Old-fashioned violence is merely a protection against slavery; while the new violence is the painful path toward emancipation ... That is what should be decisive in our choice: We should take violece into our own hands to be sure that we bring about the end of violence. For there is no other means of fighting against it. Such is the gaping moral wound of the revolution. Therein lies the central paradox, the contradiction that will be the inevitable source of much conflict and suffering. {end quote}

He added: "Like terror, violence (considered both as a means of constraint and as deception) will always contaminate the soul of the conquered first, before affecting the victor and the rest of society."

Steinberg was well aware that this experiment represented a huge risk for "universal morals" and "natural law." Gorky clearly felt the same way when he wrote to the French novelist Romain Rolland on 21 April 1923: "I have not the slightest desire to return to Russia. I would not be able to write a thing if I had to spend the whole time returning to the theme of 'Thou shalt not kill' time and again." The scruples of non-Bolshevik revolutionaries and the last concerns of the Bolsheviks themselves were all swept away by Lenin's and Stalin's enthusiasm. On 2 November 1930 Gorky, who had just aligned himself with the "genius leader" himself, again wrote to Romain Rolland:

{quote} It seems to me, Rolland, that you would judge events inside the Soviet Union more evenhandedly if you admitted one simple fact: that the Soviet regime, together with the avant-garde of the workers, is locked in a civil war, which takes the form of a class war. The enemies they fight - and must fight - are the intelligentsia, who are desperately attempting to bring back the bourgeois regime, and the rich peasants, who are desperate to look after their own interests in the traditional capitalist

{p. 745} manner and are preventing the advance of collecti~ization. They are also using terror, killing collectivists, burning collective goods, and the like. War is all about killing. {end quote}

Russia then entered a third revolutionary phase, which until 1953 was incarnated in Stalin. It was characterized by widespread terror, which found its strongest expression in the Great Purge of 1937 and 1938. Thereafter Stalin found ever more groups to eliminate, targeting not only society as a whole, but also the state and Party apparatus. This terror had no need of the exceptional circumstances of a war to start it rolling; it came about in a time of peace.

Hitler rarely played a personal role in repression, leaving these ignoble tasks to trusted subordinates such as Himmler. By contrast, Stalin always took a strong personal interest in such matters and played a central role in the process. He personally signed lists of thousands of names of people to be shot and forced other members of the Politburo to do the same. During the Great Terror, in fourteen months of 1937 and 1938, 1.8 million people were arrested in forty-two huge, minutely prepared operations. Nearly 690,000 of them were killed. The climate of civil war varied considerably, but it remained a fixture of everyday life. The expression "class war," often used in place of "class struggle," had nothing metaphorical about it. The political enemy was not a named opponent or even an enemy class: it was society as a whole.

It was inevitable that the terror, whose aim was the destruction of society, would ultimately, in a process of contagion, reach the countersociety formed by the Party itself. Although it is true that under Lenin, beginning in 1921, anyone who deviated from the Party line suffered punishment, the main enemies had always been people who were not actually Party members. Under Stalin, Party members themselves became potential enemies. The Kirov assassination provided Stalin with the excuse he needed to begin applying capital punishment inside the Party. In doing so he moved closer to Nechaev, whom Bakunin had addressed at the time of their break with the following warning: "The basis of our activity should be simple ideals like truth, honesty, and trust among revolutionary brothers. Lying, cheating, mystification, and - of necessity - violence should be employed only against the enemy ... Whereas you, my friend - and this is where vou are most gravely mistaken - you have fallen under the spell of the systems of Loyola and Machiavelli ... You are enamored of police tactics and jesuitical methods, and you are using such ideas to run your organization ... so you end up treating your own friends as though they ere enemies."

Under Stalin, the exccutioners eventually became victims. Bukharin, after the execution of his old Party comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev, publicly declared: "I am so happy that they have been shot like dogs." Less than two

{p. 746} years later, Bukharin himself was shot like a dog. This cnaracteristic of Stalinism was to become widespread in Communist states throughout the world.

Before exterminating his enemies, Stalin had them displayed in public in a show-trial. Lenin had introduced this strategy in 1922, with the show -trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Stalin merely improved on the formula and made it a permanent feature of his apparatus of repression, applying it widely in Eastern Europe after 1948.

Annie Kriegel has shown how these trials served as a terrible mechanism of social cleansing and how, in an atheist state, the trials came to replace the hell that religion had traditionally promised. They also served to reinforce class hatred and publicly to stigmatize the enemy. Asian Communism took this procedure to its logical extreme, going so far as to organize "hate days."

Stalin added mystery to the pedagogy of hatred: total secrecy shrouded the arrests, sentences, and fates of the victims. Mystery and secrecy, closely linked to terror, brought terrible anguish to the entire population.

Considering themselves to be at war, the Bolsheviks installed a vocabulary of "the enemy" such as "enemy agents" and "populations lending support to the enemy." In accordance with the war model, politics reverted to simplistic terms. The binary "friend/foe" opposition was applied across the board as part of a relentless "us versus them" mentality and the military term "camp" turned up repeatedly: the revolutionary camp was opposed to the counterrevolutionary camp. Everyone was forced to choose his camp, on pain of death. The Bolsheviks thus returned to an archaic form of politics, destroying fifty years of democracy and bourgeois individualism.

How was the enemy to be defined? Politics was reduced to a civil war in which two opposing forces, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, were in conflict, and the former had to exterminate the latter by any means necessary. The enemy was no longer the ancien regime, the aristocrats, the bourgeoisie, and the military officers, but anyone opposed to Bolshevik policy. Those who expressed opposition were immediately designated "bourgeois" and treated accordingly. To the Bolshevik mind, an "enemy" was anyone, regardless of social category, who presented an obstacle to the Bolsheviks' absolute power. This phenomenon appeared immediately even earlier than terror, in the electoral assemblies of the Soviets. Kautsky foresaw this development when he wrote in 1918 that the only people allowed to elect deputies to the Soviets were to be those

{quote} "who procure their sustenance by useful or productive work." What is "useful and productive work"? This is a very elastic term. No less elastic is the definition of those who are excluded from the franehise. They

{p. 747} include any who employ wage laborers for profit ... One sees how little it takes, according to the Constitution of the Soviet Republic, to be labeled a capitalist, and to lose the vote. The elasticity of the definition of the franchise, which opens the door to the greatest arbitrariness, is due to the subject of this definition, and not to its framers. A juridical definition of the proletariat that is distinct and precise is impossible to formulate.

The word "proletarian" played the same role here that the term "patriot" had for Robespierre. "Enemy" was also a totally elastic category that expanded or contracted to meet the political needs of the moment, becoming a key element in Communist thought and practice. As Tzvetan Todorov put it,

{quote} The enemy is the great justification for terror, and the totalitarian state needs enemies to survive. If it lacks them, it invents them. Once they have been identified, they are treated without mercy. Being an enemy is a hereditary stain that cannot be removed ... As has often been pointed out, Jews are persecuted not for what they have done but for what they are, and Communism is no different. It demands the repression (or in moments of crisis, the elimination) of the bourgeoisie as a class. Belonging to the class is enough: there is no need actually to have done anything at all." {end quote}

One essential question remains: Why should the enemy be exterminated? The traditional role of repression, in Foucault's terminology, is to "discipline and punish." Was the time of discipline and punishment over? Had class enemies become "unredeemable"? Solzhenitsyn provides one response by showing that in the Gulag common criminals were systematically treated better than political prisoners. This was the case not solely for practical reasons - that they helped run the camps - but also for theoretical reasons. One of the aims of the Soviet regime was to build new men, and doing this implied the reeducation of the most hardened criminals. It was also a key propaganda issue in the Soviet Union under Stalin, as well as in China under Mao and in Cuba under Castro.

But why should the enemy be killed? The identification of enemies has always played an important role in politics. Even the gospel savs: "He who is not with me is against me." What was new was Lenin's insistence not only that those not with him were against him, but also that those who were against him were to die. Furthermore, he extended this principle outside the domain of politics into the wider sphere of society as a whole.

Terror involves a double mutation. The adversary is first labeled an enemy, and then declared a criminal, which leads to his exclu-

{p. 748} sion from society. Exclusion suffices to solve the fundamental problem of totalitarianism: the search for a reunified humanity that is purified and no longer antagonistic, conducted through the messianic dimension of the Marxist project to reunify humanity via the proletariat. That ideal is used to prop up a forcible unification - of the Party, of society, of the entire empire - and to weed out anyone who fails to fit into the new world. After a relatively short period, society passes from the logic of political struggle to the process of exclusion, then to the ideology of elimination, and finally to the extermination of impure elements. At the end of the line, there are crimes against humanity.

The attitude of Communists in Asia - in China and Vietnam - was sometimes a little different. Because of the Confucian tradition, greater allowance was made for the possibility of reeducation. The Chinese laogai was run on the expectation that prisoners - described as "students" or "pupils" - would reform their thinking uncler the instruction of their guard-teachers. But in the final analysis such thinking was even more hypocritical than straightforward assassination. Forcing one's enemies to change their ways and submit to the discourse of their executioners might well be worse than simply killing them. The Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, from the outset adopted a radical policy. Believing that the reeducation of an entire section of the population was an impossible task (since these enemies were already too corrupt), they sought to change the people. To this end, they carried out a massive extermination of intellectuals and the urban population, seeking to destroy their enemies psychologically by breaking up their personalities and by imposing on them a constant process of self-criticism, which forced them to suffer acute dishonor while still in all likelihood being subject to the supreme punishment.

The leaders of totalitarian regimes saw themselves as the moral guardians of society and were proud of their right to send anyone they chose to his death. The fundamental justification was always the same: necessity with a scientific basis. Tzvetan Todorov, reflecting on the origins of totalitarianism, writes: "It was scientism and not humanism that helped establish the ideological bases of totalitarianism ... The relation between scientism and totalitarianism is not limited to the justification of acts through so-called scientific necessity (biological or historical): one must already be a practitioner of scientism, even if it is 'wild' scientism, to believe in the perfect transparency of society and thus in the possibility of transforming society by revolutionary means to conform with an ideal."

Trotsky provided a clear illustration of this "scientific" approach in 1919. In his Defense of Terrorism he claimed: "The violent revolution has become a necessity precisely because the imminent requirements of history are unable to find a road through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy." In support of this claim he advanced "proofs":

{p. 749} The proletariat is the historically rising class ... The bourgeoisie [by contrast] today is a falling class. It no longer plays an essential part in production and by its imperialist methods of appropriation is destroying the economic structure of the world and human culture generally. Nevertheless, the historical tenacity of the bourgeoisie is colossal. It holds to power, and does not wish to abandon it. It thereby threatens to drag after it into the abyss the whole of society. We are forced to tear off this class and chop it away. The Red Terror is a weapon used against a class that, despite being doomed to destruction, does not wish to perish. {end quote}

Trotsky thereby made history into a divine force to which everything must be sacrificed, and he displayed the incurable naivete of a revolutionary who imagines that a more just and humane society will emerge out of a dialectical process, despite the criminal nature of the methods employed. Twelve years later, Gorky was considerably more brutal: "Against us is a whole outmoded society that has had its day, and that should allow us to think of ourselves as still being in a civil war. So quite naturally we can conclude that if the enemies do not surrender, it is up to us to exterminate them." That same vear found Aragon writing lines of poetry such as "The blue eyes of the Revolution burn with cruel necessity."

Unlike these writers, Kautsky in 1918 faced the issue squarely, with courage and honesty. Refusing to be taken in bv the revolutionary rhetoric, he wrote: "To be exact, however, our goal is not socialism as such, which is the abolition of every kind of exploitation and oppression, be it directed against a class, a party, a sex, or a race ... Should it be proved to us that ... somehow the emancipation of the proletariat and of humanity could be achieved solely on the basis of private property, we would discard socialism without in any way giving up our objective. On the contrary this would be conducive to our objective." Kautsky, though one of the most eminent advocates of Marxism, put his humanism before his Marxist belief in science.

Putting people to death required a certain amount of study. Relatively few people actively desire the death of their fellow human beings, so a method of facilitating this had to be found. The most effective means was the denial of the victim's humanity through a process of dehumanization. As Alain Brossat notes: "The barbarian ritual of the purge, and the idea of the extermination machine in top gear are closely linked in the discourse and practice of persecution to the animalization of the Other, to the reduction of real or imaginary enemies to a zoological state."

There were manv examples of this process. During the great trials in Moscow, the procurator Andrei Vyshinsky, who was an intellectual with a traditional classical training, threw himself into a veritable frenzy of animalization:

{p. 750} {quote} Shoot these rabid dogs! Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claw, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky ... {end quote}

{p. 752} In Communism there exists a sociopolitieal eugenics, a form of social Darwinism. In the words of Dominic Colas, "As master of the knowledge of the evolution of social species, Lenin decided who should disappear by virtue of having been condemned to the dustbin of history." From the moment that a decision had been made on a "scientific" basis (that is, based in political and historical ideology, as well as in Marxism-Leninism) that the bourgeoisie represented a stage of humanity that had been surpassed, its liquidation as a class and the liquidation of the individuals who actually or supposedly belonged to it could be justified.

Marcel Colin, speaking of Nazism, refers to "classifications, segregation, exelusions, and purely biological criteria that are brought in by this criminal ideology. We are thinking of scientific ideas (heredity, hybridization, racial purity) and the fantastic, millenarian, or apocalyptic aspects that are clearly also the product of a particular historical moment." The application of scientific presuppositions to history and society - such as the idea that the proletariat is the bearer of the meaning of history - is easily traceable to a millenarian cosmological phantasmagoria, and is omnipresent in the Communist experience. It is these presuppositions that lie behind so much of the criminal ideology in which purely ideological categories determine arbitrary separations, like the division of humanity into bourgeoisie and proletariat, and into classifications such as petit - and grand-bourgeois or rich or poor peasant. By reifying these categories, as though they had long existed and were utterly immutable, Marxism-Leninism deified the system itself, so that categories and abstractions were far more important than any human reality. Individuals and groups were seen as the archetypes of some sort of primary, disembodied sociology. This made crime much easier: The informer, the torturer, and the NKVD executioner did not denounce, cause suffering, or kill people; they merely eliminated some sort of abstraction that was not benefieial to the common good.

The doctrine became a criminal ideology by the simple act of denying a fundamental fact: the unity of what Robert Antelme calls the "human species," or what the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights described in 1948 as "the human family." The roots of Marxist-Leninism are perhaps not to be tound in Marx at all, but in a deviant version of Darwinism, applied to social questions with the same catastrophic results that occur when such ideas are applied to racial issues. One thing is certain: Crimes against humanity are the product of an idtology that reduces people not to a universal but to a

{p. 753} particular condition, be it biological, racial, or sociohistorical. By means of propaganda, the Communists sueeeeded in making people believe that their conduct had universal implications, relevant to humanity as a whole. Critics have often tried to make a distinction between Nazism and Communism by arguing that the Nazi project had a particular aim, which was nationalist and racist in the extreme, whereas Lenin's project was universal. This is entirely wrong. In both theory and practice, Lenin and his successors excluded from humanity all capitalists, the bourgeoisie, counterrevolutionaries, and others, turning them into absolute enemies in their sociological and political discourse. Kautsky noted as early as 1918 that these terms were entirely elastic, allowing those in power to exclude whomever they wanted from humanity whenever they so wished. These were the terms that led directly to crimes against humanity.

In discussing biologists such as Henri Atlan, who "recognize that the notion of humanity extends beyond the biological approach, and that biology 'has little to say about the human person,"' Mireille Delmas-Marty concedes: "It is true that it is perfectly possible to consider the human species an animal species like any other, a species that man is learning to make himself, as he already makes other animal and vegetable species." But is this not in fa ct what Communism tried to do? Is the idea of a "new man" not at the heart of the Communist project? Did Communism not have a series of megalomaniacs such as Trofim Lysenko who tried to create not merely new species of tomato or corn but also a new human species?

The scientific mentality of the late nineteenth century, which emerged at the time of the triumph of medicine, inspired the following remarks by Vasily Grossman concerning the Bolshevik leaders: "This sort of person behaves among other people as a surgeon does in the wards of a hospital ... His soul is really in his knife. And the essence of these people lies in their fanatical faith in the surgeon's knife. The surgeon's knife - that is the great theoretician, the archphilosopher of the twentieth century." The idea was taken to its furthest extreme by Pol Pot, who with a terrifying stroke of the knife excised the gangrenous part of the social body - the "New People" - while retaining the "healthy" peasant part. As insane as this idea was, it was not exactly new. Already in the 1870s, Pyotr Tkachev, a Russian revolutionary and worthy heir of Nechaev, proposed the extermination of all Russians over twenty-five years old, whom he considered incapable of carrying out his revolutionary ideal. In a letter to Nechaev, Bakunin objected to this insane idea: "Our people are not a blank sheet of paper on which any secret society can write whatever it wants, like your Communist program, for instance." The International demanded that the slate of the past be wiped clean, and Mao famously compared himself

{p. 754} to a poetic genius writing on a blank sheet of paper, as though he genuinely believed that thousands of years of history could simply be ignored.

{p. 64} determincd to kecp for itself the fruits of its labors and to reject any external interference, and the new regime, which as attempting to place its stamp on the situation, refused to understand how economic supply actually functioned, and desired more than anything to bring under control what it saw as growing social anarchy.

On 21 February 1918, in the face of a huge advance by the German army aftcr thc failure of the talks at Brest I.itovsk, thc government declared the socialist fatherland to bc in danger. Thc call for rcsistance against the invaders was accompanied by a call for mass terror: "All enemy agents, speculators, hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, and German spies will be shot on sight."'h This proclamation effectively installed martial law in all military zones. When peace w as finally agreed at Brest Litovsk on 3 March 1918, it technically lost its legal force, and legally thc death penalty was reestablished again only on 16 June 1918. evertheless, from February 1918 on the Cheka carried out numerous summary executions, cven outside the military zones.

On 10 March 1918 the government left Petrograd for Moscow, the new capital. Thc Cheka headquarters were set up near the Kremlin, in Bolshaya Lubvanka Street, in a building that had previously belonged to an insurance companv. Under a series of names (including the GPU, OGPU, KVD, TD, and KGB) thc Cheka would occupy the building until the fall of the Soviet regime. From a mere 60() in March, the number of Cheka employees working at thc central headquarters had risen to 2,()00 inJuly 1918, excluding the special troops. At this samc date the Peoplc's C.ommissariat of Internal Affairs, whose task was to direct the immense apparatus of local soviets throughout thc country, had a staff of 00.

The Chcka launched its first major operation on the night of 11-12 April 1918, when more than 1,00() men from its special troop detachments stormed somc twenty anarchist strongholds in Mosco: After several hours of hard fighting, 52() anarchists wcre arrested; 25 wcre summarily executed as "ban- dits," a term that from then on would designate workers on strike, deserters fleeing conscription, or peasants resisting the forced requisitioning of grain.'7

After this first success, which was followed by other "pacification" opera- tions in both Mosco- and Petrograd, Dzerzhinsky wrote a letter to thc Central Executivc Committee on 29 .pril 1918 requesting a considerable increase in Cheka resourccs. "At this particular time," hc wrote, "Cheka acti ih- is almost bound to increase exponentiall; in the facc of thc increase in counterrevolu- tionary activity on all sidcs."'X

l he "partic ar time" to hich Dzer7hinsk!- was referring secmcd indeed to be a dccisi-e pcriod f-or the installation of thc political and economic dicta- torship and thc strcngthening of rcpression against a population that appcal ed to regal d the Bolshe iks -ith e er-increasil1g hostilit. Sincc ()ctobcr l) D the Bolshcviks had done nothing to improvc thc cvcryday lot of the avcrage Rus- sian, nor had they safeguarded the fundamental liberties that had accrucd throughout 1917. Formerly regarded as the only political force that would allow peasants to seize the land they had so long dcsired, the Bolshcviks -erc now perceived as Communists, who anted to steal the fruits of the peasants' labors. Could these really be the same people, the peasants wondered, the Bolshcviks -ho had finally given them the land, and thc Communists who seemed to be holding them for ransom, and wanted even the shirts from their backs?

The spring of 1918 was a crucial period, when everything was still up for grabs. The soviets had not yet becn muzzled and transformed into simple tools of the state apparatus; they were still a forum for real political debate bctween Bolsheviks and moderate socialists. Opposition newspapers, though attacked almost daily, continued to exist. Political life flourished as diffcrcnt institutions competed for popular support. And during this period, which was marked by a deterioration in living conditions and the total breakdown of economic rela tions between the town and the country, Socialist Revolutionaries and Men- shcviks scored undeniable political victories. In elections to the new soviets, despite a certain amount of intimidation and vote-rigging, thcy achieved out- right victories in nineteen of the thirty main provincial seats w here voting took place and the results were madc public.79

The government responded by strengthening its dictatorship on both the political and the economic fronts. Networks of economic distribution had fallen apart as a result of the spectacular breakdown in communications, particularly in the railways, and all incentive for farmers seemed to have bcen lost, as the lack of manufacturing products provided no impetus for peasants to sell their goods. The fundamental problem was thus to assure the food supply to the army and to the cities, the seat of power and of thc proletariat. The Bolsheviks had two choices: they could either attempt to resurrect some sort of market economy or use additional constraints. They chose the second option, con- y inced of the need to go ever further in the struggle to destroy the old order.

Speaking before the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets on 29 April 1918, Lenin went straight to the point: "The smallholders, the people who ouned only a parcel of land, fought side by side u-ith the proletariat when the time came to overthrow the capitalists and the major landowners. But now our paths have diverged. Smallholders have alays been afraid of discipline and organization The time has come for us to have no mercy, and to turn against them."-l) A few days later the people's commissar of food told the same assembl!- "I say it quite openly; we are now at war, and it is only with guns that e -ill gct the grain we need." Irotsky himself added: "Our only choicc no,- is civil war. (Ivil -ar is the struggle for bread ... Iong li-c ci v.lr!''ll

A 1)21 text by arl Ra(le, one of thc Bolshcvik leaders, is re-caling ot tale aga L 1 ru,ul

13olshcik policics in thc spring of 1918 sccral months bcfore thc outbreak of the alnled contlict that for to !cars ould find Reds and -hitcs at war

The pcasants had just rccci-ed thc land from the state, the- had just returned home from the front, the- had hept their guns, and their attitude to the state coukl be summed up as "-ho needs it?" The- coukln't hae cared less about it If we had decidcd to come up -ith some sort of food taxl it wouldn't ha-e workcd, tor none of thc statc apparatus remained T he old ordcr had disappeared, and the peasants wouldn't ha c handed o-cr anything without actuall- being forced Our task at the beginning of 1918 was quitc simple wc had to make the peasants understand two quite simple things that the state had some claim on what the- produced, and that it had the means to eercisc those rights 1'

In lIay and ]une 1918 the Bolsheik go-ernmcnt took h o decisi--e mcas- ures that inaugurated thc period of ci-il war, which has come to be known as "War Communism " On 13 IIa!- 1918 a decree granted extraordinary powers to the People's Commissariat of Eood, requiring it to rcquisition all foodstuffs and to establish what was in fact a "food army" ByJuk- nearly 12,0()0 peoplc were inol-ed in these "food dctachmcnts," which at their height in 192() were to numbcr more than 2,()()0 men, o cr half of whom were unemployed worli- ers from Petrograd, attracted by the promise of a decent salary and a propor- tional sharc of the confiscated food The second decisi-e measure was the dccrec of 11 Junc 1918, which established committees of poor peasants, order- ing them to work in close collaboration with the food detachments and also to requisition, in exchangc for a share of the profits, any agricultural surpluses that the better-off peasants might be keeping for themsel-es These committees of poor peasants soon displaced the rural so-iets, which the go-ernment judged to be untrustworth!-, as they were contaminated with Socialist Revolutionary ideology Gi-cn the tasks they wer e ordered to carry out - to sezie by force the results of other people's labor - and the motivations that were used to spur them on (power, a feeling of frustration toward and en-y of the rich, and the promisc of a share in the spoils), one can imagine uhat these first rcpre- sentati-es of Bolshe-ik powcr in thc countrysidc were rcally like As Andrea Graziosi acutely notes "For thcse people, de-otion to the cause - or rather to the new state - and an undeniable operational capacit! went hand in hand ith a rather faltering social and political conscicncc, an interest in self-adance- ment, and traditional modes of beha ior, including brutalit!- to their suboldi- nates, alcoholism, and nepotism hat we ha-c hcre is a good eamplc of thc manner in hich thc 'Spil it' of thc plel ci,ln rcolution pcnctr,ltcd thc ne

l co imc."

Dcspite a tcw initial successcs, the organization of thc ( ommittccs tor thc l'ool toob a long time to get off thc ground [ he ery idea ot using thc poorcst scction of the pcasantr! reflccted the deep mistrust the F3olshc s tclt toard pcasant society In accordance with a rather simplistic larxist schema, thc- imagined it to bc di-ided into warring classes, whereas in fact it prcsented a fairly solid front to the orld, and particularly when faced with strangers from the city When the question arose of handing o-er surpluses, the egalitarian and community-mindcd reflex found in all thc -illagcs took ocr, and instead of persecuting a few rich peasants, b-- far the grcater part of the requisitions wcre simply rcdistributed in thc samc -illage, in accordancc with people's needs This polic-- alienated the large ccntral mass of the peasantry, and discontent was soon widespread, with troubles brcaking out in numerous regions Con- fronted by thc brutality of the food detachments, who wcre often rcinforced by the army or by Cheka units, a real guerrilla force bcgan to takc shape from June 1918 onward InJuly and August 110 peasant insurrections, described by the Bolsheviks as kulak rebellions - which in thcir terminology mcant uprisings involving wholc villages, with insurgents from all classes - broke out in thc zones they controlled All thc trust that thc Bolshcviks had gained by not opposing the seizure of land in 1917 evaporated in a matter of weeks, and for more than thrcc vears the policy of rcquisitioning food as to provoke thou- sands of riots and uprisings, which were to degenerate into real peasant wars that were quelled with terrible violencc

T hc political effccts of thc hardening of the dictatorship in the spring of 1918 included the complcte shutdown of all non-Bolshevik ncwspapers, the forcible dissolution of all non-Bolshevik soviets, the arrest of opposition lead- ers, and thc brutal repression of many strikes In lIay and June 1918, 2() of the opposition socialist newspapers wcre finally closed down Thc mostly lIen- shcvik or Socialist Revolutionary soviets of Kaluga, Ter, Yaroslavl, Ryaan, Kostroma, Kazan, Saratoy, Pcna, Tamboy, /loronezh, Orel, and Vologda werc broken up b! force l Evervwherc the scenario was almost identical a few days after victory by the opposing party and the consequcnt formation of a new soict, the Bolshevik detachment would call for an armed force, usuall a dctachment of the Cheka, which then proclaimed martial law and arrcsted thc Opposition leaders

lzerzhinsk!, who had sent his principal collaborators into tons that had initiall! been -on by the opposing parties, was an unabashcd ad-ocate of the use of forcc, ,ls an bc seen clearl