Communism and Terror

Review: Review Article: Communism and Terror
Reviewed Work(s): The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, and Repression by
Stephane Courtois; Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest
Review by: Hiroaki Kuromiya
Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 191-201
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright ? 2001 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol 36(1), 191-201.
[0022-0094(200101)36: 1; 191-201 ;0 1 5550]
Hiroaki Kuromiya
Review Article
Communism and Terror
Stephane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, T

Repression, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press
xx + 856; ISBN 0-674-07608-7
Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, London, John
1999; pp. xv + 317; ISBN 0-7195-6041-1
Only some twenty years ago, in the early to mid-1970s, when capi
in crisis and the communist movement in ascendancy, symbolize
victory of Vietnam over the vastly more powerful USA, few people fo
events of the late 1980s and 1990s: the demise of communist regim
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The significance of an importan
event often evades the attention of contemporaries. For this reason th
tion made by the late Ernest Gellner at a 1990 conference on
Gorbachev's perestroika is particularly farsighted:
The first thing to say about perestroika is to stress its supreme importance. It is
Soviet or Russian event. It does clearly seem to be one of the major events in wo
like the Reformation, like the French Revolution, like the Industrial Revoluti
Scientific Revolution. It alters the terms in which we think about the human
transforms our collective social condition. It has rewritten the great historic text
take us a long time to think out the full implications.'
There are still surviving communist regimes (most notably China, alth
economy can hardly be called communist or socialist). It appears
however, that they will continue to subscribe to the communist i
have understood them historically. Whatever the case, it is little w
one of the first comprehensive attempts to analyse communism as
phenomenon was made in France - a country, where, as in Italy, th
of communism has historically been among the strongest (in the w
Russian Revolution, for example, the French Socialist Party distinguish
among European socialist parties by transforming itself into a c
party), and therefore the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on
tic politics and intellectual life was perhaps the most critical in
1 Catherine Merridale and Chris Ward (eds), Perestroika: The Historical Perspecti
1991), 231.
192 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 36 No I
According to the foreword to the English version of The Black Book, 'this
book is one of the first attempts to study communism with a focus on its
criminal dimensions'. Martin Malia, in his foreword, informs the Anglophone
readers that the authors of the book 'are former Communists or close fellow-
travelers',2 and notes that the authors are divided 'over the assessment of their
common past'. (Two key contributors to the volume, Nicolas Werth for
Russia and Jean-Louis Margolin for Asia, 'publicly dissociated themselves'
from the conclusions drawn in the book by Stephane Courtois, the lead
author.) Malia goes on to examine succinctly the 'foreseeable political storm'
the book's publication raised in France.
There seems to be little controversy, however, over the reasons for the
sudden downfall of communism. Both ex-communists (some of whom have
become arch-conservatives) and die-hard communists would concur no doubt
on the wretchedness of economies run by the communist regimes. Again, as
Gellner aptly remarked, 'Marxism like Nazism was eliminated by a judge of its
own choosing'; 'The squalid, gray, sleazy inefficiency of the productive process
in the Brezhnev era really eroded faith.'3
One may contend that if the communist regimes had been completely iso-
lated from the outside world, they might have survived longer because, even
though poverty and squalor were ubiquitous, sheer famine has been rare or
absent in recent years.4 Many people whom I have interviewed in Russia and
Ukraine over the past two decades or so have testified that they have somehow
scraped by. At the same time, just as many people have said that all their lives
they have lived on the edge of hunger, just procuring basic foodstuffs being a
daily struggle. (Their lives were perhaps not so different from many of the
poor in wealthier societies, neither starving nor satisfied; they are often too
busy with daily struggles to be excited about political life. In the last US presi-
dential election, less than half of the registered voters took part. How many
never even bothered to register is not easy to determine.) Because most citizens
in the former communist countries were not completely isolated from the
outside world, they, like their political leaders, were aware that their living
standards were lower (in fact, much lower) than those of advanced capitalist
countries. Nevertheless, in their first visits to an advanced capitalist country,
they are almost invariably shocked by the fabulous wealth. Until recently,
many westerners returning home after extended visits to communist countries,
experienced a similar shock (or a deep sigh of relief).
One may also contend that what Isaac Deutscher once called the 'great [eco-
2 His foreword to this collection of research essays is in fact a slightly modified version of his
review of the original French edition published in The Times Literary Supplement, 27 March 1998.
3 Ernest Gellner, 'Homeland of the Unrevolution', Daedalus, 122, 3 (Summer 1993), 147. One
may maintain that China's booming economy may contradict this contention, but its economy is
far more capitalist than communist if a communist economy means an anti-capitalist, centrally-
planned economic system.
4 Again, the case of China appears to be an exception. As recently as 1959-61 between 20 and
43 million people are said to have starved to death, 'the greatest famine in history' The Black
Book, 495. However, China was almost completely isolated from the outside world.
Kuromiya: Communism and Terror 193
nomic] contest'5 between capitalism and communism was unfair from the
start: all communist regimes started from a state of relative poverty6 and,
unlike their richer capitalist counterparts, did not possess colonies to exploit.
Some would argue, however, that the Soviet Union, for example, had internal
colonies and exploited Eastern European countries more than it assisted them.
Moreover, it is certainly the case that capitalism has borrowed (some would
say 'stolen') ideas from socialism in the realms of, say, social welfare and eco-
nomic regulation. It is not so long ago that some western social scientists
spoke of the 'convergence' of capitalist and socialist systems. In any case,
many reforms in capitalism were effected in the face of the perceived threat of
socialist influence among workers and the poor.
For all the extenuating circumstances, the results of Deutscher's 'great
contest' are now patently clear: planned economies as practised by communist
regimes have not worked out. There is little division over this matter. Of
course, this does not mean that economic planning in general is bankrupt. Not
long ago, indeed, many (chiefly underdeveloped) countries turned to the Soviet
Union as a model of rapid economic development. Moreover, there is no
doubt that capitalism will continue to use economic planning for its develop-
ment and survival as well.
If there is little disagreement on the economic results of communist regimes,
communist politics is another matter. What if the communist regimes had been
more or less 'successful' economically? Could one justify their politics? In his
Reflections on a Ravaged Century (10-11), Robert Conquest, a long-standing
critic of communism, subjects those western scholars who have dallied with
communism to harsh criticism. The British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm,
is one among them. Conquest cites him as being 'a useful, almost classical
demonstration of the revolutionary mind-warp, the motivation behind accept-
ance of a totalitarian Idea'. (Conquest notes that when Hobsbawm was asked
in a 1994 interview, 'Had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss
of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?', he responded
'Yes'.)
Is human sacrifice justified in the interests of the common or larger good?
This is a formidable moral-philosophical question for academics. I am not
sure, however, whether it is a truly difficult (if agonizing) moral question for
politicians and military commanders. It is certainly a practical question for
them. If, in a combat situation, a commander believes that the sacrifice of a
platoon will ensure victory and save the lives of many others, he will not
waver; should he act otherwise, he would be deemed a poor commander. This
is clearly not the same as the deliberate killing of people committed by com-
munist regimes, described in excruciating detail in The Black Book (whose
5 Isaac Deutscher, The Great Contest: Russia and the West (New York 1960).
6 Malia maintains that because communism's eschatological 'leap from the kingdom of neces-
sity to the kingdom of freedom' has 'the strongest allure for those who have the greatest lag to
overcome, it is hardly surprising that Marxism's line of march turned out to lead ever farther into
the politically and economically backward East', The Black Book, xix.
subtitle is appropriately 'Crimes, Terror, and Repression'.) But what about

capital punishment in a country often said to be the most democratic of all
states, the USA? Capital punishment does not allow for a possible mistake
because it is not reversible and the mistake cannot be corrected; the sentence is
carried out deliberately by political authorities ostensibly to deter crime and
ensure the safety of the citizenry in general and not in revenge by the family or
relatives of the victims of crimes.
Does this kind of consequentialist argument apply to the murders com-
mitted in communist lands? It surely is important to have a sense of pro-
portion here. According to Courtois' introduction to The Black Book, the
scale of communist terror is mind-boggling:
USSR: 20 million deaths
China: 65 million deaths
Vietnam: 1 million deaths
North Korea: 2 million deaths
Cambodia: 2 million deaths
Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths
Latin America: 150,000 deaths
Africa: 1.7 million deaths
Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths
The International Communist Movement and Communist Parties not in
power: about 10,000 deaths.
'The total approaches 100 million people killed' (4). This is indeed a stagger-
ing figure.
Do these numbers matter? Does it matter, for example, whether in the
Soviet Union 20 million people were killed or 'merely', say, two million? If
the proportions of crime do matter and if it is reasonably assumed that all
political regimes, communist or not, commit crimes, then at what point do the
proportions begin to matter? It goes without saying that all political crimes
need to be exposed to the fullest degree.
Yet one should not assume, at least in the case of the Soviet Union, and
probably in other cases, that the figures represent actual executions. In the
case of the Soviet Union, Werth states that the famous Great Terror of
1936-38 resulted in the execution of nearly 700,000 people and that these
numbers represent 'more than 85 percent of all the death sentences handed
down during the entire Stalin period' (202 and 264).7 The 20 million referred
7 In my view, Werth's estimate is not wide of the mark. For data from Soviet archives, see
J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the
Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, CT and London 1999), Appendix One. Getty and Naumov,
however, allow for little margin of error and assume a more or less comprehensive nature of the
Soviet data. I do not think the data are complete. How incomplete is not easy to pinpoint, but it
appears unlikely that the margin of error is more than 10 or 20 per cent. Conquest criticizes the
Getty-Naumov figures, significantly lower than those he and many others have quoted, but his
criticism is not well supported by solid evidence and therefore is not very convincing. See
Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, op. cit., 145.
to above include not only those executed but also those who died in the Gulags
as well as the victims of the famous 1932-33 famine and other casualties of
political, social and economic upheaval. It may also include those unborn who
would have been born under normal circumstances. The famine, for example,
took more than six million lives (as Werth notes 159). The brutal agricultural
policy and the callousness of the Stalin regime were responsible at least in part
for this calamity. Indeed the government, in cold-blooded indifference to life,
let the peasants die in order to save the cities. Yet there is no conclusive
evidence that Moscow deliberately caused the famine in order to punish recal-
citrant peasants, especially in Ukraine, the chief victim of the famine.8 It is not
possible, contrary to Courtois' contention, to show convincingly the 'system-
atic use of famine as a weapon' by the Soviets. That 'in the period after 1918,
only Communist countries experienced such [large-scale] famines' does not in
itself constitute evidence of the use of famine as a political weapon.9 At least in
the Soviet case, the scale of terror presented in The Black Book seems to be
deliberately inflated. 'Indirect' deaths are indiscriminately lumped together
with deliberate political killings.
Courtois' attempt to present communism as a greater evil than nazism by
playing a numbers game is a pity because it threatens to dilute the horror of
actual killings. We need to know as accurately as possible the exact number of
the direct and indirect human toll of communist rule. Yet whether it is 5 or
100 million, it is so big a number as to become almost an abstraction, even
though one wishes intensely to memorialize every single victim. In a country
where nearly every family was affected by terror, however, it is not an
abstraction. In the former Soviet Union, for example, unlike the nazi case, only
recently has it become possible to memorialize the victims of communism.
Great efforts are being made to record all victims by many organizations
for example, the aptly named Memorial. Despite Courtois' apology for the
paucity of photographs in The Black Book owing to the general lack of visual
material on communist terror, some of the Memorial publications contain
the haunting images of numerous victims' 'mug shots', taken before their
executions.10
What is implied in The Black Book is that distinctions between direct and
indirect killings are fine points of no consequence and that the crimes of com-
munism are far graver at least numerically than those of another totalitarian
regime in the twentieth century, nazism, whose casualties were a quarter those
of communism.1' Courtois is irritated by his perception that most western
intellectuals are softer on communism than on nazism and that therefore the
crimes of communism have not been fully exposed. He contends that 'the
8 For this point, see Hiroaki Kuromiya, 'Ukraine and Russia in the 1930s', Harvard Ukrainian
Studies, 18, 3/4 (December 1994).
9 The Black Book, op. cit., 9.
10 See, for example, Rasstrel'nye spiski, vol. 1-2 (Moscow 1993-95).
Communist system, albeit in varying degrees, possessed fundamentally crimi-

nal underpinnings' and puts the blame squarely on the Soviet Union: 'Each
national communism has been linked by an umbilical cord to the Soviet
womb, with its goal of expanding the worldwide movement.'12 What moral
difference can there be between 'class genocide' and 'race genocide'? Courtois
and Martin Malia deplore the fact that, unlike the case of former nazis, the
'status of ex-Communist carries with it no stigma'.'3 Malia, in particular,
examines whether qualitatively as well as quantitatively communism is more
evil than nazism. First, their crimes are equally bad: murder is murder. Second,
he implies that 'mass murder in the name of a noble idea [universal salvation]
is more perverse than it is in the name of a base one [select salvation]' and
longs for a day when 'Communism is accorded its fair share of absolute evil'.14
In the arguments of Courtois and Malia, the scale of terror (mass murder) is
the key. Few people will dispute 'certain fundamental principles', Courtois
holds, 'such as respect for the rules of a representative democracy and, above
all, respect for life and human dignity'.15 Yet because murder is indeed murder,
what difference does it make to innocent victims, whether the perpetrator is a
communist state or a democracy? Even the most democratic countries, in 'this
unjust world' (Malia's phrase), are not free of egregious killings of innocent
citizens. One could argue, following Malia's logic, that 'murder in the name of
a noble cause [democracy and freedom] is more perverse than it is in the name
of a base one [dictatorship and terror]'. Clearly, it is not just murder but mass
murder that matters, but neither Courtois nor Malia identifies the scale of
terror necessary to characterize a particular ideology as absolute evil and its
system a criminal enterprise. Courtois and Malia inflate the numbers of deaths
to 'clinch' their categorical view of communism (which is the antithesis of
'capitalism is absolute evil').
To put the communist experience in perspective, one would need to know
the total number of direct and indirect human casualties of democracy, includ-
ing those who died from poverty through unemployment. (Full employment,
which is lacking in capitalism, has often been cited by communist regimes as
one of the fundamental human rights.) Obviously, one cannot compare
the scale of communist terror to that of injustices in a democracy: for all its
injustice, democracy in the twentieth century has had a superior track record
in the protection of human life.
So, here one returns to the crux of the matter: the proportion and scale of
the crimes committed against humanity do matter. This was not understood,
for example, by the Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-Tung. According to
12 Ibid., 26 and 28. In the conclusion to the book, he similarly states: 'Most of the mechanisms
of terror discussed above originated in the USSR under Lenin and Stalin. Malia also states that
communist regimes 'were criminal enterprises in their very essence' (xvii).
13 Ibid., xiii.
14 Ibid., xv and xx. Courtois contends that the nazis borrowed their terror methods from the
Soviet communists (15).
15 Ibid., 30.
the Soviet communist leader Nikita Khrushchev, Mao said in Moscow in

1957, four years after Stalin's death:
We shouldn't fear war. We shouldn't be afraid of atomic bombs and missiles. No matter
what kind of war breaks out - conventional or thermonuclear - we'll win. As for China, if
the imperialists unleash war on us, we may lose more than three hundred million people. So
what? War is war. The years will pass, and we'll get to work producing more babies than
ever before.
During the Cold War, warmongers in some democratic states may have
secretly entertained similar thoughts, but any politician who implied such
ideas would have lost his job immediately. Khrushchev was astonished by
Mao's recklessness. Even as a characteristically Chinese-scale joke, Mao's
speech was not funny at all to Khrushchev, the first Soviet politician to criti-
cize Stalin's terror, who himself still used terror as a political weapon.
According to Khrushchev, 'the audience was dead silent. No one was prepared
for such a speech.'16
Thus one has to ask again: if the proportion of crimes does matter, at what
stage does it begin to matter? I have to confess that I do not have an answer.
Nor am I clear about how to explore this problem. All murders are wrong.
Still there must be a stage at which the numbers do matter socially and politi-
cally. We experience this almost on a daily basis. If, for example, two people
are killed in, say, a modern ethnic cleansing, it may not stir the passions of the
people in democratic countries. Yet if the number rises to hundreds, thousands
and tens of thousands, it becomes an altogether different matter. Of course, it
depends where such massacres take place; as we know, recent incidents in
Africa and Europe have resulted in different reactions on our part.
Conquest says that 'feeling' (hardly an objective, rational or scholarly
concept) is important to our attitude:
Late in 1997 the Paris Le Monde interviewed me by phone. I was asked did I find the
Holocaust 'worse' than the Stalinist crimes. I answered yes. I did, but when the interviewer
asked why, I could only answer honestly with 'I feel so'. Not a final judgment, let alone to
suggest that the Holocaust was much 'worse' than the Stalinist terrors, or to decry the view
of the great Jewish Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, whose own mother was killed by the
Nazis, that there is almost nothing to choose between the two systems. Still, this primary
'feeling', based indeed on knowledge, has a validity of its own. I would argue, too, that,
whatever view one takes, without feeling the Holocaust one cannot feel, or understand,
Stalinism. The crux is nevertheless that such feelings are only acceptable when based on, or
conjoined with, sound knowledge and careful thought.
In other words, Conquest states that it is a feeling emanating 'less from

prejudice than from postjudice'.17 Malia and Courtois would reject such a
'postjudice' (although Conquest does not explain his postjudice in detail).
16 Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston, MA
1974), 255.
17 Conquest, Reflections, op. cit., xii.
Postjudice is better than prejudice, but contemporary mass murders allow no

time for postjudice. Still, Conquest has a point: it appears futile to argue which
was worse, nazi terror or communist terror; it may be more a matter of feeling
and emotion.
If communism is no match for democracy in protecting human lives, then
how does it compare with religious movements which communism has
repressed but which democracy has protected (if often discriminately)? One
may ask how many lives have been sacrificed to some religion (for example
Christianity). A religion may uphold 'a noble cause'. However, for the sake of
a noble cause (which, more metaphysical than that of communism, often
seems to concern the other world), how many people have been killed in this
world? Is not human history characterized by killings, tortures and executions
committed in the name of faith? One may be accused of blaspheming, and one
could say that religion has a nobler cause than communism. One can also say
that the communist experience is very recent, whereas the crimes of religious
movements (at least in the west) tend to be older. (This is not at all the case in
many other parts of the world.) Thus one may assert that communist crimes
are still so hot that there ought to be a Nuremberg trial, whereas many
religious crimes have passed the statute of limitations. According to this logic,
it may be noble and courageous that, for instance, in 1992, after 359 years of
injustice, the Vatican apologized for the condemnation of Galileo. Never-
theless, I believe that the question of crimes in the name of religion is pertinent.
All the more so, considering the fact that communism, as it is known to us, is
almost dead, whereas religion in general is alive and well. Courtois speaks of
'an institution that for several centuries had systematically justified the murder
of non-Christians, spread the Inquisition, stifled freedom of thought, and
supported dictatorial regimes such as those of General Francisco Franco and
Ant6nio Salazar'.'8 Yet he does not go on to explore this issue seriously.
(Similarly, one can cite, for comparison, imperial wars in which millions of
men were sent to death by politicians and nationalist movements to which
even today human lives are sacrificed.)
The analogy between communism and religion is an interesting and impor-
tant subject that needs to be further examined. Let me just quote a recent essay
by the noted physicist Steven Weinberg on science and religion:
Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even
Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in
antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless
sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can
behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes
religion.19
Weinberg's story about Mark Twain's mother brings out another important

19 Steven Weinberg, 'A Designer Universe?', The New York Review of Books, 21 October
1999, 48.
issue, that of the leader (spiritual or secular) and the led. Actually, religion is
not a necessary condition for good people doing evil: good people are capable
of doing evil under evil leaders. Courtois and Malia appear to assume the
position of collective guilt towards the communists, but it is a dangerous
stance. In teaching Stalin's terror, I often provide the following hypothetical
situation: in New York City, where the super-rich and the super-poor live side
by side, what if the mayor and the police, declaring that the rich were
exploiters of the poor, arrested and executed the rich without any evidence
and exhorted the poor to denounce hidden 'enemies'? What the result would
be who can say? The leadership does matter and its responsibility is great.
Beyond good and bad, a comparison of communism with religion also
brings up the important issue of faith. Gellner has pointed out in discussing
Soviet communism that 'Faith survived random and massive terror, and
indeed found a confirmation in it: the final, total transformation of the human
condition was confirmed in blood. But faith did not survive the squalor in the
economic sphere.'0 Lack of a civil society is common to both Marxist and
Islamic states, but the former ignominiously collapsed while the latter have
survived and even revived in strength. Unlike Islam, Gellner has stressed,
Marxism lacks 'a profane sphere': 'The extension of the sacred into the eco-
nomy leaves society no slack, into which it would retire at times when zeal is
not at its heart.' Like Marxism, Islam 'does make total claims', but 'does not
make it [the economy] the focus of salvation'.21 Whatever the case, Gellner is
right when he asserts that the secular faith of Marxism, like many other
religious faiths, survived bloody terror.
Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), who, as a prominent Old Bolshevik, was
executed by losif Stalin in Moscow in 1938, is an interesting case in point. The
recently-opened former Soviet archives show that two famous accounts of
Bukharin's death at the hands of Iosif Stalin (both emphasizing Bukharin's
commitment to his communist faith) were partially - though only partially -
true.
Shortly after the 1938 trial, Bukharin's political saga was made famo
by Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940). Koestler does not descri
physical torture (widely used under Stalin, though whether on Bukharin or n
is not known) as the means whereby Stalin's secret police brought Bukh
(in the fictional character of Rubashov) and many others to a grand se
humiliation and ultimately to death. Koestler instead depicts Bukha
(Rubashov's) seemingly willing and evidently self-destructive participatio
Stalin's bloody carnival as a capitulation induced by his own ideolo
Bukharin accepted the Stalinist logic of sacrificing communists to the la
cause of the revolution and the survival of the revolutionary regime in the f
of nazism. Bukharin (Rubashov) acknowledges his (and his comrades') er
20 Gellner, op. cit., 146. He noted in another essay that 'Marxism survived Stalinist terr
But Marxism failed to survive Brezhnevite squalor.' Gellner, 'Civil Society in Historical Conte
International Social Science Journal, 43, 3 (1991), 505.
21 Merridale and Ward (eds), Perestroika, op. cit., 232-3.
while fight against the communist (Stalinist) leadership as an unforgivable

('objectively counter-revolutionary') crime against the revolution itself. His
confession of guilt was to be the last service to the revolution. Both Bukharin
(Rubashov) and his interrogators believed, according to Koestler, that after the
final victory of the revolution, their sacrifice would be given its due place in
history. Koestler, an ex-communist, unlike Courtois and others, implied that
communism, for all its bloody nature, was not as evil as nazism and fascism.
Stephen F. Cohen's equally classic (but more scholarly) account of Bukharin
is more hagiographic than Koestler's.22 Bukharin was subjected to psychologi-
cal torture, if not the physical torture to which many others were subjected.
Bukharin, like many others, had a family (a former, sick wife, a young wife,
and an infant son) whose lives as well as his own were in danger. After a bitter
struggle, Bukharin capitulated to Stalin's torture, sacrificing his life to save his
family. According to Cohen, Bukharin never gave up his ideological commit-
ment to Bolshevism and revolution. He compromised and ate humble pie at
the 1938 trial. Even then, however, Bukharin never confessed to certain
accusations (especially that he was a foreign spy), continuing his heroic fight
against Stalin to the end. At the trial he declared that 'the confession of the
accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence' and that 'world history is a
world court of judgment'.
Both Koestler and Cohen are right that Bukharin died a loyal communist;
his faith survived the terror. However, archival documents made available
recently show that while defending his honour as a communist, Bukharin,
unlike Rubashov in Koestler's novel, fought desperately to save his life, using
not the logic of revolution but an 'intensely personal pleading' with Stalin. In
his last letter to Stalin dated 10 December 1937, for example, Bukharin
evoked not merely his political loyalty but also 'personal intimacy' with Stalin
and his wife (who committed suicide in 1932).23 Thus, toward the end of his
long letter, Bukharin wrote:
There is nothing in me toward all of you, toward the party and the cause, but a great and
boundless love.... My conscience is clear before you now, Koba [Stalin's nickname]. I ask
you one final time for your forgiveness (only in your heart, not otherwise).24
These archival documents also show that, unlike the image suggested by
Cohen's biography, Bukharin's fight against Stalin was never resolute after
1929, when he lost the power struggle. Although he may have entertained ill
wishes against him and may have been privy to some secret grumbling against
Stalin among his former supporters, his real defiance was over. The documents
in the archives show that when he capitulated to Stalin's psychological torture,
Bukharin became deeply concerned about the devastating impact his con-
22 Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography,

1888-1938 (New York 1973).
23 Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, op. cit., 564 and 566.
24 Ibid., 560.
fessions of guilt would have on his family. So he asked Stalin to allow him to
see his family and prepare them for the forthcoming trial. Bukharin knew that
he would be shot. Yet he pleaded with Stalin for charity.
I weep as I write.... I entreat you, by all that you hold dear, not to have me shot. Let me
drink poison in my cell instead. (Let me have morphine so that I can fall asleep and never
wake up.).... Have pity on me.25
He even declares that if his life were to be spared, he wished to be sent to the
USA to conduct pro-Stalinist propaganda:
That I be exiled to America for x number of years. My arguments are: I would myself wage
a campaign [in favour] of the trials, I would wage a mortal war against Trotsky, I would win
over large segments of the wavering intelligentsia, I would in effect become Anti-Trotsky and
would carry out this mission in a big way and, indeed, with much zeal. You could send an
expert security officer [checkist] with me, as added insurance, you could detain my wife here
for six months until I have proven that I am really punching Trotsky and Company in the
nose, etc.26
It is not difficult to see why Bukharin never received any response from Koba.
It is painful to read Bukharin's last letter from prison, not only because he
adhered to his revolutionary faith and fell victim to Stalin's terror, but because
his raw human feelings (presumably so uncharacteristic of a hardened pro-
fessional Marxist revolutionary) are patently transparent.
As Gellner notes, we are contemporary witnesses to the significant events of
world history which took place at the end of the twentieth century. Naturally,
a question arises: in two or three hundred years, how will scholars regard
communism? Doubtless, even then, no final judgment will be accorded it, just
as we have no final judgment on the Inquisition or the French Revolution.
While the issue of terror will remain important, it will no doubt be studied
merely as part (if a central part) of a larger episode in world history. In other
words, for good or bad, communism is likely to be studied just like any other
important event and phenomenon in world history. If tomorrow terror and
violence disappear altogether from the face of the earth, communism may be
studied as one of humanity's last 'absolute evils'. Alas, one sees no sign of such
a revolution in the world today.
Hiroaki Kuromiya
is professor of history at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the
author of Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers,
1928-1932 (1988) and Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A
Ukranian and Russian Borderland, 1870s-1990s (1998). He is
currently working on a book about Stalinism.
25 Ibid., 558 and 559.

26 Ibid., 559-60.

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Review: Review Article: Communism and Terror

Stephane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, T

subtitle is appropriately 'Crimes, Terror, and Repression'.) But what about

Communist system, albeit in varying degrees, possessed fundamentally crimi-

the Soviet communist leader Nikita Khrushchev, Mao said in Moscow in

In other words, Conquest states that it is a feeling emanating 'less from

Postjudice is better than prejudice, but contemporary mass murders allow no

18 The Black Book, op. cit., 29.

while fight against the communist (Stalinist) leadership as an unforgivable

22 Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography,

25 Ibid., 558 and 559.

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