Comments

The scale and nature of Soviet crimes invite these authors to risk comparisons to the Holocaust. In numbers, Stalinism certainly killed more people than the Shoah. Then again, Amis reminds us, Stalin had advantages over Hitler: "the burning cold of the Arctic...darkness...space... And, most crucially...time." In terms of the nature or character of the two episodes, there are obvious parallels, from open-air massacres to cattle cars to camp life. Most pointedly, those who ran camps in both systems deliberately used food and overwork to "manage" life spans, and to schedule many to die. Thus, in both, the "saved" had to live amidst the "drowned": healthier inmates were in the harrowing presence of those starving to death.

Applebaum also insists on a crucial contrast with the Holocaust. The USSR identified its enemies along class and political lines much more mutable than the Nazi's rigid racial ones. This meant that there was no category of people "whose death was absolutely guaranteed," which made possible outcomes that were inconceivable for Jews under Nazism, such as release at the end of one's sentence. It also meant the system contained no extermination camps—although several sites came close when execution quotas were imposed in 1937-38. Robert Conquest does not flinch from describing the famine-terrorized Ukraine as "one vast Belsen."

Two responses are in order. First, while the gulag may not have been designed to mass-produce corpses, nonetheless it produced them prodigiously. Given systematic deprivation, we might even say the system was partly—just not solely—designed to produce corpses. Second, the USSR's more mutable categories for designating "others" had a profoundly dark side. Nazism's rigid boundaries guaranteed death to targeted people, but virtually guaranteed immunity from severe repression to others, most obviously tens of millions of apolitical "Aryans." The USSR had no equivalent rubric for those guaranteed death, but also no equivalent for those guaranteed life. For long stretches under Stalin, as under the Khmer Rouge, virtually no one could live without substantial fear of being declared an enemy of the people. As Amis puts it, "Everyone was terrorized, all the way up: everyone except Stalin," who, like Saddam, ruled even his cabinet through fear.

Leninism/Stalinism does not come close to matching the Holocaust as a conventional image of political crime. This is partly the result of simple ignorance—Amis says that was long the obstacle for him. But the bad news is that education is unlikely to remedy a disparity that is only partly the result of mere ignorance. There is, so to speak, a "sociology of knowledge" aspect to who has, and especially who has not, integrated Stalinism into their moral imagination. Many who downplay Stalinism do so willfully.

Consider one forum. In the past five years, the Weekly Standard, National Review, and The Nation, have each run a similar number of book reviews relating to the Holocaust—it is everyone's genocide. But the left-liberal Nation reviewed noticeably more books than the other two on the crimes of, say, Latin American militaries, while the two center-right magazines each ran roughly three times as many reviews as The Nation of books touching on Communist repression.

Arguably, it is worse when The Nation does review such books. When The Black Book of Communism and François Furet's Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century appeared, The Nation's review angrily dismissed them as polemics deployed by capitalist elites to "exploit a tragedy" and discredit reformism of any kind. You might not think it possible to review a book about "everyday Stalinism" without once using the words arrest, prison, shot, forced labor, gulag, or camp, and referring to famine only in the passive construction. But somehow, The Nation in another review found a way. Their treatment of Applebaum's book does not deny the suffering, but criticizes her for "exploit[ing] the gulag" for political reasons, emphasizing that it "is no easy matter...to separate the innocent from the guilty" (not even Stalin?) and insisting that the gulag cannot be connected to any larger political or moral narrative. Not even the fact that all Communist regimes created gulags and killed far more people than the regimes which came before or after them. This isn't ignorance; it's an agenda.

Nonetheless, might it be considered as part of a legitimate ideological division of labor, in which "progressives" focus on the crimes of "right-wing" regimes and conservatives focus on left-wing ones? The implication of symmetry is grotesque. The problem is not that we should take lightly the 3,000 Chileans commonly said to have been killed by the Pinochet regime (we shouldn't). The problem is that the Soviet regime killed that many people, inside the camps alone, in 1942 alone, on average every three days. Devoting equal time to Pinochet and Stalin is to take Russian lives very lightly indeed. Even the 100,000 killed in Guatemala would be a footnote to historians of Stalin or Mao; 3,000 is a rounding error. Simply put, one of the two sides in this division of labor is focusing on the greatest mass murders in history, while the other is consistently looking away.

By these standards, we are surrounded by what we might call gulag trivializers. As Amis notes, many people who would never deny Stalinism's horrors nonetheless cannot name a single camp, don't know the least detail of the terror-famine, and have no idea what the overall numbers look like. McCarthyism and apartheid come vividly to their minds; the gulag does not. They don't think Communism-themed cafes odd. And so long as they explain themselves carefully, they are willing to attend demonstrations against the Iraq war organized—as many of the main ones in the U.S. were—by A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), a group whose guiding figures defend North Korea's Stalinist regime.

MIKE'S NOTE- ANSWER, THE HEROES OF THE ANTI IRAQ WAR MOVEMENT SUPPORT:

North Korea (1948 et seq.)

Communist regime:
- Rummel estimates that the Communist regime of North Korea committed 1,663,000 democides between 1948 and 1987
  - North Korean victims: 1,293,000
  - South Korean victims: 363,000

...when we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism.
---- Lenin

"How long will you keep killing people?" asked Lady Astor of Stalin in 1931.
Replied Stalin, "the process would continue as long as was necessary" to establish a communist society.

Probably 61,911,000 people, 54,769,000 of them citizens, have been murdered by the Communist Party--the government--of the Soviet Union. This is about 178 people for each letter, comma, period, digit, and other characters in this book.

Old and young, healthy and sick, men and women, and even infants and infirm, were killed in cold-blood. They were not combatants in civil war or rebellions, they were not criminals. Indeed, nearly all were guilty of ... nothing.

Some were from the wrong class--bourgeoisie, land owners, aristocrats, kulaks. Some were from the wrong nation or race-- Ukrainians, Black Sea Greeks, Kalmyks, Volga Germans. Some were from the wrong political faction--Trotskyites, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries. Or some were just their sons and daughters, wives and husbands, or mothers and fathers. And some were those occupied by the Red Army--Balts, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians. Then some were simply in the way of social progress, like the mass of peasants or religious believers. Or some were eliminated because of their potential opposition, such as writers, teachers, churchmen; or the military high command; or even high and low Communist Party members themselves.

In fact, we have witnessed in the Soviet Union a true egalitarian social cleansing and flushing: no group or class escaped, for everyone and anyone could have had counter-revolutionary ancestors, class lineage, counter-revolutionary ideas or thought, or be susceptible to them. And thus, almost anyone was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and after a forced confession of a plot to blow up the Kremlin, or some such, shot or sentenced to the dry guillotine--slow death by exposure, malnutrition, and overwork in a forced labor camp.

Part of this mass killing was genocide, as in the wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of Don Cossacks in 1919,¹ the intentional starving of about 5,000,000 Ukrainian peasants to death in 1932-33,² or the deportation to mass death of 50,000 to 60,000 Estonians in 1949.³ Part was mass murder, as of the wholesale extermination of perhaps 6,500,000 "kulaks" (in effect, the better off peasants and those resisting collectivization) from 1930 to 1937,⁴ the execution of perhaps a million Party members in the Great Terror of 1937-38,⁵ and the massacre of all Trotskyites in the forced labor camps.⁶

And part of the killing was so random and idiosyncratic that journalists and social scientists have no concept for it, as in hundreds of thousands of people being executed according to preset, government, quotas. Says Vladimir Petrov (who in 1954 defected while a spy-chief in Australia and whose credibility and subsequent revelations were verified by a Royal--Australian-- Commission on Espionage⁷) about his work during the years 1936 to 1938:

I handled hundreds of signals to all parts of the Soviet Union which were couched in the following form:

"To N.K.V.D., Frunze. You are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the people. Report results by signal.--Yezhov."

And in due course the reply would come back:

"In reply to yours of such-and-such date, the following enemies of the Soviet people have been shot."⁸

3,284,000 Victims: The Civil War Period 1917 to 1922
2,200,000 Victims: The NEP Period 1923-1928

11,440,000 Victims: The Collectivization Period 1928-1935

4,345,000 Victims: The Great Terror Period 1935-1938

5,104,000 Victims: Pre-World War II Period 1939 to June, 1941

13,053,000 Victims: World War II Period June, 1941 to 1945

15,613,000 Victims: Post-War and Stalin's Twilight Period 1945-1953

6,872,000 Victims: Post-Stalin Period 1954-1987

People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong's regime (1949-1975)

Agence France Press (25 Sept. 1999) citing at length from Courtois, Stephane, Le Livre Noir du Communism:

Rural purges, 1946-49: 2-5M deaths
Urban purges, 1950-57: 1M
Great Leap Forward: 20-43M
Cultural Revolution: 2-7M
Labor Camps: 20M
Tibet: 0.6-1.2M
TOTAL: 44.5 to 72M
Tibet (1950 et seq.)

Chinese occupation. (For the most part, it's already been included in the numbers above.)

The most commonly cited number is 1,200,000 Tibetan deaths at the hands of the Chinese since 1950. This number appears in Our Times, in US House legislation, and at www.freetibet.org.
Courtois: 600,000 - 1,200,000
Walker, Robert: 500,000-1,000,000 (all ethnic minorities)
Rummel: 375,000 democides.
- ... incl 150,000 Tibetans
Porter: 100,000 to 150,000.
Eckhardt:
- 1950-51 War: 2,000 civ.
- 1956-59 Revolt: 60,000 civ. + 40,000 mil. = 100,000
Harff and Gurr: 65,000 Tibetan nationalists, landowners, Buddhists killed, 1959
Small & Singer say that China lost 40,000 soldiers in Tibet between 1956 and '59.
Second Indochina War (1960-75)
South Vietnamese civilians: 250,000 (Olson) or 287,000 (Clodfelter = 247,600 war deaths + 38,954 assassinated by NLF) or 300,000 (Kutler; Summers) or 340,000 (Lewy's estimate, with the possibility that an additional 222,000 counted as VC (above) belong in this category) or 430,000 (The Sen. E. Kennedy Commission, according to Lewy, Olson) or 522,000 (Wallechinsky*) or 1,000,000 (Britannica [in both North and South]; Eckhardt; Grenville*) or 2,000,000 (Tucker*, Official VN* [N&S, 1954-75],) [MEDIAN: ca. 476,000]
Misc. Atrocities:
Lewy:
- 36,725 civilians assassinated by VC/NVA, 1957-72
- 2,800 civilians executed and 3,000 missing after Hue was captured by VC/NVA, 1968
- Cambodian Civil War (1970-75)
HOW DO WE COMPARE IN IRAQ W/ IRAN/ IRAQ WAR?

AVERAGE: The median total is 1M. The mean total is 825,000. The mean and median of Iraqis killed is 300,000. For Iranians, 600,000.

Romania (1948-89)

Communist Regime

Rummel: 435,000 democides, 1948-87

Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (1993): 100,000 forced laborers died building the Danube-Black Sea Canal, 1949-53

George Hodos, Show Trials (1987): 75,000 executed during 1st 4 years of Communism.

AFTER WE LEFT VIET NAM: (try to get the left to admit this)

Vietnam, post-war Communist regime (1975 et seq.)

Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl Jackson ("Vietnam 1975-1982: The Cruel Peace", in The Washington Quarterly, Fall 1985) estimated that there had been around 65,000 executions. This number is repeated in the Sept. 1985 Dept. of State Bulletin article on Vietnam.
Orange County Register (29 April 2001): 1 million sent to camps and 165,000 died.
Northwest Asian Weekly (5 July 1996): 150,000-175,000 camp prisoners unaccounted for.

The 3 Aug. 1979 Washington Post cites the Australian immigration minister's estimate that 200,000 refugees had died at sea since 1975.
- Also: "Some estimates have said that around half of those who set out do not survive."
The 1991 Information Please Almanac cites unspecified "US Officials" that 100,000 boat people died fleeing Vietnam.

Vietnamese democide: 1,040,000 (1975-87)

Executions: 100,000
Camp Deaths: 95,000
Forced Labor: 48,000
Democides in Cambodia: 460,000
Democides in Laos: 87,000
Boat People: 500,000 deaths (50% not blamed on the Vietnamese govt.)

Iraq, Saddam Hussein (1979-2003)

8/9 Dec. 2003 AP: Total murders
- New survey estimates 61,000 residents of Baghdad executed by Saddam.
- US Government estimates a total of 300,000 murders
  - 180,000 Kurds k. in Anfal
  - 60,000 Shiites in 1991
  - 50,000 misc. others executed
- "Human rights officials" est.: 500,000
- Iraqi politicians: over a million
- [These don't include the million or so dead in the Iran-Iraq War.]