Re: [Marxism] question about 'black book of communism'

["Paul Flewers" <rfls12802@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's my review, from Revolutionary History, Volume 7, no 4.

Paul F

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Stéphane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, Jean Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski,
Karol Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes,
Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp856, £23.50

RIGHT from the start, the revolutionary Socialist movement has seen a steady
stream of deserters leave its ranks, all convinced that they have seen the
light, the blindingly obvious realisation that the cause for which they have
struggled is nothing but a cruel hoax. Although common to all countries, it
does seem to be especially de rigueur for intellectuals in France to be able
to point to a now-disavowed radical past. Indeed, becoming an anti-Communist
seems to be a more or less compulsory career move if one wants to make it in
the French political or literary world. And just as it was once the height
of fashion to wave a red flag, it is now the done thing to pour scorn on all
of this childish nonsense, and to show that Bolshevism, far from showing the
way to a realm of genuine freedom, can only lead to a veritable vale of
tears.

The Black Book of Communism has all the hallmarks of such a shift of
allegiances. So what is our authors? rationale for throwing away their old
convictions; have they discovered some new devastating critique of
Bolshevism that will finally drive a stake through Lenin?s mummified body,
assuming that it hasn?t been buried or otherwise disposed of in the
meantime? Not at all; our intrepid team have adopted lock, stock and barrel
the entire methodology of traditional anti-Communism, cranking out all the
familiar explanations that were doing the rounds no doubt before any of them
was born. Believe it or not, they do not view themselves as born-again
reactionaries, and they even describe themselves as being still ?closely
wedded to the left?. ?Left of what?? might be legitimately asked, as their
book is suitably introduced by the leading conservative Sovietologist Martin
Malia, who believes that any attempt to go beyond capitalism will inevitably
come to grief. 

The Black Book is an oddly-constructed affair. Nicholas Werth?s chapters on
the Soviet Union would make up a sizeable book by itself, whilst some other
parts of the world are covered in short articles that would probably be
rejected by academic journals on the grounds of superficiality. Apart from
Werth?s piece, which does draw to some extent on Russian archival documents
and other primary sources, there is little original research, as most of the
authors rely heavily on other people?s work. 

Basically, and with no attempt on my part at being flippant, this massive
book could be boiled down to the formula ?Leninism = Terror?, and an
end-of-century death score of ?Communism 85 million, Fascism 20 million?.
There is no attempt at constructing a socio-economic analysis of
Soviet-style societies, and the contributors only occasionally venture
beyond superficial observations on the level of politics. But if one starts
with the assumption that the essence of Bolshevism is terror, then
everything from the October Revolution through to Kim Jong-Il?s madhouse in
North Korea and the Pol Pot fan club in the Sendero Luminoso is easy to
understand, and needs no further explanation. From the storming of the
Winter Palace right through to the various hulks of Stalinism still in
evidence here and there, it was thus and could not have been otherwise.
Teleology has never been so easy.

If we look at history in a more objective manner, however, things aren?t
quite so simple. Wearisome as it is to have to run through this whole
business yet again, to look at the real issues, and to drag them out from
the vast heap of anti-Communist outpourings to which Courtois & Co have
added their two-penn?orth, it has to be done. Although Werth tries to
dissociate himself from what he calls the ?liberal? (I?d say ?conservative?)
analysis of Bolshevism as a putschist conspiracy, he nonetheless completely
ignores the evidence produced by various scholars that proves that the
Bolsheviks enjoyed a close relationship with the Russian working class
during 1917 and were steadily winning large majorities in soviets, unions
and factory committees, and he sees the October Revolution as a ?coup
d?état? -- an old cliché if ever there was one. In other words, the
Bolsheviks were not intrinsically linked with the Russian working class, but
constituted some kind of alien force, taking advantage of the mayhem and
chaos in order to impose their party rule. Now that?s the sort of
explanation which has satisfied conservatives and vulgar anarchists ever
since 1917, and the Black Book crowd presumably think that it will suffice
today.

Nowhere do we read in Werth?s essay that the Bolsheviks saw their seizure of
power as the first blow in inopportune circumstances, not least a backward
and impoverished country with a small working class, of the world
revolution. Bolshevism in power was a holding operation, a desperate attempt
to cling onto power in the hopes that revolutions in the advanced capitalist
countries would secure its rule -- and in the knowledge that its collapse
would demoralise militants in other countries. This is the essence of
Trotsky?s theory of Permanent Revolution, which the Bolsheviks effectively
adopted in the spring of 1917. Bolshevism cannot be understood unless this
rationale is accepted. 

Stalinism was by no means the inevitable product of Bolshevism, successful
revolutions in Europe would have done much to rejuvenate the democratic
thrust of Bolshevism that existed in 1917 and which fired State and
Revolution, which -- surprise, surprise -- does not get a mention in this
book. What emerged out of the Civil War and into the period of the New
Economic Policy was a Bolshevik party that was victorious in war, but facing
political defeat; bureaucratised and with no clear vision of where to go or
what to do. It had survived through those difficult early years, but at the
cost of putting its existence as a revolutionary proletarian party deeply in
jeopardy. The rise of Stalinism represented the defeat of Bolshevism, the
end-product of the fiercely difficult conditions of the early Soviet
republic and its isolation in a hostile world, the transformation of many
revolutionaries into state bureaucrats, and the extinction of the Soviet
Communist Party as a revolutionary proletarian force. The democratic thrust
of Bolshevism could now only manifest itself in oppositional trends. Once
broken away from the working class, the general trend of the Soviet
party-state apparatus was towards establishing itself as a ruling élite, a
process that was guaranteed by the isolation of the Soviet republic, and
which was consummated with the final consolidation of Stalinism during the
First Five Year Plan. In short, what most people, including The Black Book?s
contributors, have come to call ?Communism? is in fact the result of the
defeat of Bolshevism. Official Communism -- Stalinism -- was a product of
Bolshevism, but a negative one; the product of its defeat, not of its
victory; the mutation of a Communist force into a form of anti-Communism,
antagonistic to capitalism, but equally opposed to Communism.

If one looks at official Communism, the marks of that defeat are very clear.
Never has official Communism, either as regimes or opposition parties, ever
acted in the tradition of the Bolsheviks of 1917; it has always acted in the
Stalinist tradition. What we had in China from the 1930s was the wreckage of
the Communist Party going up-country as a bureaucratic military leadership
heading a peasant jacquerie, with nothing to do with a proletarian
revolution whatsoever. Other ?Communist? regimes followed suit, or, as in
Eastern Europe, were implantations through territorial expansion. Official
Communism in power was basically a substitute for a weak or even
non-existent bourgeoisie, attempting to implement a programme of
modernisation, including industrialisation, literacy and land reform. The
Stalinist Five Year Plans of the 1930s usually served as a model, and in
Third World countries, sometimes with an imitation of the Chinese experience
thrown in. Each time, however, we had a new generation, it was like
recording from an already badly recorded tape: the quality degenerates down
the line, until we arrived at the mind-boggling irrationality of Pol Pot?s
Cambodia, which, name apart, cannot be wedged into any permutation of
Marxism, even of a degenerated Stalinist variety. Parenthetically, it?s a
wonder that the authors did not extend their net wider to include the nasty
dictatorships that could have been recruited, whatever the dictators?
wishes, into the pantheon of ?Communist? countries on the basis of Ted
Grant?s assertion that Syria and Burma were workers? states, and Gerry
Healy?s lauding of Ba?athist Iraq as a Socialist country -- as this could
have jacked up the final score of ?Communism?.

Our authors employ a sneaky sleight of hand when comparing Communism and
fascism in that Bolshevism and Stalinism are lumped together, with the
latter being the inescapable result of the former, whilst fascism is
completely abstracted from capitalism, as if the authors are trying to
dissociate the Third Reich from the capitalist system. Indeed, The Black
Book manages to overlook the frightful number of deaths that have occurred
under capitalism. What about the many millions of deaths in the slave trade?
What about the First World War, the parts of the Second World War that did
not involve the Soviet Union, the millions of deaths in various Third World
famines and wars, the near-extinction of Australian aborigines and the
extermination of Tasmanian natives, the slaughter of Native Americans and
the deaths in the US Civil War, or the Turkish genocidal attack upon the
Armenians? For all what they have done, North Korea or North Vietnam did not
drop hundreds of thousands of tons of high explosive on the USA, like the
USA did on them, killing several million people. What can one make of people
who can write about the apparent treatment of dissidents in Castro?s Cuba
and the Sandinistas? Nicaragua without mentioning the considerably greater
number of political oppositionists in Latin American bourgeois states who
have met a much nastier end, or write about South-East Asia without
mentioning the slaughter of half-a-million Communist Party members and
sympathisers in Indonesia during the 1960s? If The Black Book?s authors are
really ?closely wedded to the left?, a small nod in that direction might be
expected.

Perhaps the most virulent contributor to The Black Book is Courtois. A
former Maoist, he is using this opportunity to expurgate himself thoroughly
of his old sinful ideas. And in this he is true to himself; Maoists were
notorious for taking seriously every bit of nonsense that emanated from the
?Great Helmsman?, and he has merely junked one dogma for another. It just
will not do to parade all these hoary old anti-Communist clichés, yet
Nechayev?s Catechism is wheeled out yet again, as is What Is To Be Done? and
the notion of Bolshevism as ?a revolutionary party made up of professionals
linked in an underground structure of almost military discipline?, etc, etc.
The most remarkable thing is that he comes out with all this as if he has
rolled away the stone and is revealing some-thing startlingly original.

Having said this, I do not wish to take an uncritical attitude towards
Bolshevism. Whether we like it or not, the spectre of Kronstadt hangs over
the October Revolution, and Marxists, particularly those in and around the
Trotskyist movement, should replace their rather romantic image of the first
few years of the Soviet state with an analysis that attempts to explain how
and why the party-state apparatus constructed by the Bolsheviks came into
conflict with many of the workers who had supported them in 1917. Trotsky?s
analysis of the evolution of the Soviet republic remains a profound
critique, but he failed adequately to explain why the Bolsheviks (and
especially himself) had ended up advocating the militarisation of labour and
accepting the substitution of their party for the working class during the
Civil War. This breakdown between the Bolsheviks and the working class must
be carefully studied; the party-class relationship is something that the
Bolsheviks themselves and the Socialist tradition from which they emerged
did not really comprehend -- it was no accident that State and Revolution
broke off at the point when it was to be discussed. The relationship between
the subjective factor -- the Bolsheviks? understanding of their tasks within
a revolution -- and the objective factors facing them must also be carefully
studied, as it is clear that some of the Bolsheviks? practices that emerged
from the period of the Civil War, whilst by no means in and of themselves
incurable, did help pave the way for the Stalinist degeneration. The
Bolshevik experience provides many lessons for revolutionaries today;
unfortunately some of them show what not to do, and what could happen if you
did repeat them. We cannot successfully counter the anti-Communists? blanket
condemnation of Bolshevism by clinging to an uncritical attitude towards it.

The Black Book caused quite a stir when it was originally published in
France, not only because of its contents, but because the various authors
promptly fell out with each other in an unseemly dogfight. The reaction to
its publication here in Britain has been much more muted. Perhaps it?s
because we already have the works of Richard Pipes, Martin Malia and
Vladimir Brovkin at first hand, and prefer the organ grinder to the monkey.
A genuine accounting for the whole experience of Bolshevism and its mutation
into Stalinism, one that stands on the basis of the liberatory promise of
Bolshevism, has yet to be written. It will subject the days of Lenin to an
objective critique no less than it would of what happened afterwards.
Marxists should have no fear of that, understanding the mistakes the
Bolsheviks made will leave the Socialist movement better placed to attend to
the tasks that face it today and tomorrow. As for The Black Book, all I can
add is that to compile a huge tome on the ?crimes of Communism?, whilst
barely mentioning the crimes of capitalism, and without giving anything but
a time-dishonoured array of clichés about the basis of Bolshevism and the
relationship between it and Stalinism, is an indication of the intellectual
poverty of those who feel obliged to reject the promise of human liberation
for the shabby reality of today.

Paul Flewers





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