BOOKS
Darkness at Noon
THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM: CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION.
By Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej
Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin. Harvard University
Press. $37.50.
WHY
WAS THIS
BOOK
WRITTEN
and published in France and not the
United States? Surely there are greater academic resources available here
than in France including documentary materials, research facilities,
funding, scholars capable of conducting such research, and a potentially
far greater number of readers.
But, as Martin Malia observes in his excellent introduction, social
processes which resulted in such a vast number of victims "never
aroused a scholarly curiosity proportionate to the magnitude of the dis–
aster." Or, as Stephane Courtois asks, "Why such a deafening silence
from the academic world regarding the Communist catastrophe which
touched the lives of about one-third of humanity?"
It
is difficult to discuss the crimes of communism without morally
rejecting communism. This is where the problem begins. Anti-commu–
nism in the United States had been discredited (among intellectuals and
other elites) first by Senator McCarthy and later by the Vietnam war
which the great majority of academic intellectuals have perceived as a
particularly destructive and irrational outcome of anti-communism. In
the wake of Vietnam, the enduring conventional wisdom is that the
Cold War, the arms race, and the (alleged) failure of American society
to pay proper attention to its social problems and injustices can be
blamed on anti-communism.
The idea of superpower equivalence, or moral equivalence-popular
between the late I960s and the collapse of the Soviet Union-provided
further disincentives to looking closely at the crimes of communism.
Fear of nuclear war too had its share in silencing criticism of the Soviet
Union: the peace movement (anxious to combat attitudes conducive to
conflict) preferred to dwell on the similarities rather than the differences
between the superpowers.
The rise of the Third World revolutionary societies-China, Cuba,
Vietnam, and later Nicaragua-promised to restore the good name of
