Lies, to Escape the Boredom and Brutality of Home Life, and to Ease the Burden on Their Parents

Home , Nicolas Werth

450 | AMIR WEINER lies, to escape the boredom and brutality of home life, and to ease the burden on their parents. According to the authors, many of the children are not abandoned; they have voluntarily left their parents for personal independence. They should not be rescued so much as empowered. Fair as this argument is, however, it is hard to see how children sold into prostitution by their parents and held as debt slaves can be regarded as free, and empowered as such, although this may be a limiting case. Finally, Heather Montgomery ªnds another use for the term aban- donment. She argues that we should place less blame on parents for aban- doning their children than on the states and societies that have abandoned families, driven them from the land and deprived them of their traditional means of earning a livelihood, while providing no ade- quate means of support in the shanty towns. In these conditions, parents and children have few options and can hardly be blamed for grasping whatever opportunities they can ªnd to survive. David L. Ransel Indiana University

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. By Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Margolin (trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer) (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999) 858 pp. $37.50 Whenever and wherever it gained power, communism has turned into a bloody affair. Regardless of their noble claims and pretenses, communist regimes in Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, North Korea, postwar Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Africa, and Latin America engaged in systematic mass murder. The authors of this book argue that murder was inherent in communist attempts to mold society, as was their dehumanization of enemies and their refusal to accept the legitimacy of civil society—especially in war-torn nations bereft of dem- ocratic traditions and institutions. The violations of basic human rights practiced by these regimes, the authors maintain, were worse than those committed by the Nazis. This harsh indictment is supported by a de- tailed list of atrocities, ranging from mass executions, deadly deporta- tions, state-induced famines and barbaric torture. Although it adds little data that is new, the list is long, informative, and, for most part, indisputable. Even when the numbers of victims are questionable or obviously inºated, the brutality of communism in power is well established. Moreover, the fact that the atrocities consis- tently commenced with the seizure of power lends support to the argument for intentionality, particularly in the section on the Soviet Union by Werth, the most subtle and best-documented in the book. That said, this thick volume is seriously ºawed, incoherent, and of- ten prone to mere provocation. Although the authors argue that the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219502753364263 by guest on 25 September 2021 REVIEWS | 451 logic of communism entails the above atrocities, they go out of their way to salvage Marxist ideology. Following a blurb on Marx’s and other socialists’ ambivalent view of democracy, Courtois concludes the volume with the assertion that communism owed its destructive nature more to the biological legacy of Darwinism than to the ideology of Karl Marx, both of which arose within the nineteenth-century intellectual milieu. This contention has to be reconciled with Martin Malia’s (the author of the forward to the English-language edition and of the well- known The Soviet Tragedy [New York, 1994]) indictment of the socialist idea itself as accountable for the efforts of zealots to construct exclusionary, violent utopias under the Marxist rubric. The fact that communism in power produced calamities everywhere does not mean that its terror was static and uniªed. It differed and evolved in time and place, as the data presented shows. In the same vein, the authors tend to exempt from examination certain segments of societies in the evolution and application of communist terror, even those with well-documented roles. Evaluation of academic monographs should not have to involve as- sessment of the authors’ political backgrounds and environments. Re- grettably, in the case of the Black Book of Communism, these characteristics are not irrelevant. For American readers in particular, the editor’s claim that the dark side of communism remained elusive until the publication of this book rings hollow; it is also telling about the authors. Outside of France, scholars have long debated, and continue to debate, the sources and consequences of communist terror. No reputa- ble scholar on the left or the right has ever been oblivious to the exist- ence of mass repression and murder. Indeed, it seems a distinct problem of the French left that neither the Soviets’ own revelations after Joseph Stalin’s death nor events in Hungary 1956 or in Czechoslovakia 1968 triggered the kind of response that the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did. New access to the archives fur- nished more information on the functioning of communist regimes; it did not alter basic data and conventional wisdom about the brutal nature of these regimes. The comparison with Nazism is inevitable. It is merited on the grounds of the mutual commitment to social engineering through violent means; the ensuing demographic, psychological, and ethical impli- cations; and, not least, the fact that both systems constantly scrutinized one another. Unfortunately, the authors of the Black Book reduce the comparison to body counting, charging communists with killing nearly 100 million people and the Nazis, 25 million. At best, this approach is ahistorical and demeaning. The Third Reich’s four-year extermination machine, stopped only by military defeat, still overshadows any other calamity, even when numbers of victims are the main concern. Few would disagree with the authors’ assertion that a murder is a murder and that the “child of a Ukrainian kulak deliberately starved by the Stalinist regime is worth no less than a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto starved

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219502753364263 by guest on 25 September 2021 452 | AMIR WEINER to death by the Nazi regime” (9). Yet, even setting aside the heated de- bates of whether the famine of 1932/33 that took as many as 5 million innocent lives mainly in Ukraine was a premeditated genocide by the Stalinist regime or the catastrophic outcome of incompetent, arrogant, and callous authorities, the fact remained that the peasants—as a socio- logical category—were not targeted in toto for extermination as were Jews and other racial-biological categories in the Nazi world. Those who force the Soviet–Nazi comparison ought to acknowledge that even though communist regimes had the capacity to launch genocidal cam- paigns, they did not end up operating death camps. When Stalin’s suc- cessors opened the gates of the Gulag, they allowed 3 million inmates to return home. When the Allies liberated the Nazi death camps, they found thousands of human skeletons barely alive awaiting what they knew to be inevitable execution. The problems with the authors’ ºawed comparison are not merely intellectual. Intentionally or not, their argument opens the door for all kinds of apologetics. This is a sad outcome for a country that until re- cently excelled in avoiding its murky wartime past. Communism de- serves to be buried, but not by those whose writing and methodology so closely resemble its basic tenets. Amir Weiner Stanford University

Romanization in the Time of Augustus. By Ramsay MacMullen (New Ha- ven, Yale University Press, 2000) 222 pp. $25.00 The term Romanization has come under increasing ªre in recent de- cades. Scholars of ancient history are skeptical about notions of a one- directional ºow of cultural productions from conquering center (Rome) to subjected periphery (the provinces). The subject of MacMullen’s book, therefore, is problematic, and it is alarming to read at the book’s inception that “Roman civilization eventually appeared everywhere, as one single thing.” Such a statement arouses suspicions of reductionism. Fortunately, these fears are soon allayed. MacMullen later states that there was “no single homogeneous ‘Roman civilization,’” and that the real evidence for Romanization is “archeological, and of the provinces.” As MacMullen shows throughout the book, his position is no self- contradiction; at different levels of historical analysis, both statements are accurate. The book breaks down into four regional case studies about the Greek East, Africa, Spain, and Gaul; a concluding chapter considers pro- vincial replication of Roman cultural productions. Greece was a special case. There the Romans entered a world that was already highly urban- ized. In cultural terms, Horace’s famous maxim that Rome was in the end conquered by Greece carries historical substance. Although Augus- tus settled some 40,000 to 60,00 veterans in the east within twenty years,

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