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prestige of the Soviet Union, ally of the United States and Britain during
World War II, and the sufferings of its people in those years .
Until very recently there was virtually no photographic documenta–
tion of the crimes of communism. Such visual images may be necessary
to arouse moral indignation that translates into sustained inquiry into
the causes of the horrors portrayed.
At last it may be that the kind of conformity detected in America by
Tocqueville survives and helps to account for these attitudes even
among supposedly iconoclastic academic intellectuals. Once certain
conventions and beliefs become established and upheld by a vocal
minority, few apparently have the stomach to challenge them and risk
becoming unpopular in the circles they move. As the public expression
of anti-communist sentiments became both morally reprehensible and a
matter of poor taste, American intellectuals were not going to probe the
crimes of communism. Even after the collapse of Soviet communism it
remains difficult for many in the academic-intellectual community to
come to terms with the fact that Soviet communism was not merely inef–
ficient but morally wrong, and that its original ideals and goals (derived
from Marxism) were unrealizable and conducive to its "excesses" and
misj udgments.
Why social and cultural conditions in France were different, making
it possible to produce such a volume, is not easy to answer. Apparently,
disenchantment with communism and Marxism among French intellec–
tuals was more powerful and widespread than in the United States,
especially after the publication of the
Gulag Archipelago.
There, for a
long time, Marxists and communists were a legitimate and dominant
cultural and political force, embodied among other things in the huge
French Communist party-their beliefs and loyalties inspired a stronger
reaction. By contrast, in the United States communists and their sup–
porters were a far more marginal and sometimes persecuted minority
(especially in the postwar period), until the Vietnam war and the ques–
tioning of anti-communism it inspired restored them to a quasi-heroic
status within much of the intellectual community.
It would be hard to discuss this volume without addressing two ques–
tions: what was communism, and what were its crimes? Although these
are no great mysteries here, there remains much obfuscation when
"crimes" and "communism" are linked . Some authors would doubtless
argue that we cannot talk about such crimes because there was no uni–
tary political system called "communism," that the whole concept is
fuzzy, perhaps a form of conceptual "red baiting."
