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government, even if that government no longer exists. I cannot comment
on the legal merits of this defense, except to note that it sidesteps the
intellectually crucial issue of the criminality of the regime, and the cause,
Wolf served.
Victor's justice, Wolf sniffs. Perhaps. Yet things are about to change.
Our entire discussion of communism is about to enter a new phase-a
new historiography, a new history-which is unlikely to deal gently with
arguments such as Wolf's
apologia.
This coming wave may well transform
our entire discussion of revolution and radicalism over the next few years.
It will be international, though its prime energy now is coming from
France. Consider the late Francois Furet's overwhelming
Le
Passe d'une
fllusion;
consider too the massive, relentless, irresistible indictment entitled
Le
Livre Noir du Communisme,
recently produced by a circle of scholars
around the historian Stephane Courtois. These two works, both astonish–
ing best-sellers, are having an impact in post-communist Europe not
unlike the impact
The Gulag Archipelago
had on the age of dissidence. But
Furet and Courtois are Westerners; they have dashed aside the old double
standard that let anti-anti-communists feign sympathy for Russian or
Eastern European dissidents while assailing any Westerner, worst of all any
American,
who dared say similar things. This new history is a new post–
communist assessment of communism's social bankruptcy, its crushing
force for impoverishment, its totalitarian bond to fascism, its long history
of murder and terror. It opens a new phase in the Western critique of
totalitarianism. And it reduces the old-style double-talk of a Markus Wolf
to babQle.
By his own account, Wolf and his agency helped Stalinize Eastern
Europe, suppress the Hungarian Revolution, defend and maintain the
Berlin Wall, and subvert democratic politics across Europe, Africa, and
Latin America while penetrating wi th agents of espionage every liberal
democratic state in the West. His agency organized political murders, and
brought the cruelties of black propaganda to new levels of sadistic effec–
tiveness, including sexual sadism. Wolf was for years unfailingly helpful to
his hero Andropov in his campaign to disgrace and discredit every dissi–
dent from Solzhenitzin to Wolf Biermann
to
Natan Scharansky. Much in
the Soviet-sponsored "wars of nationalliberation"-remember?-and the
wreckage they left strewn across what used to be called the Third World
was inspired, guided, and often outright directed by the East Germans. So
was support and guidance for much in post-1968 international terror, rang–
ing from the PLO to the Baader-Meinhof group, to such free-lance
celebrities of murder as "Carlos the Jackal."
(Such
a tiresome fellow, Wolf
sighs.) Then there was nuclear espionage, and the Stalinizing of the Cuban
revolution. Wolf's agency played a key, if ancillary, role in the Orwellian
