The crimes perpetrated by the Nazis during the second world war hold a unique place in the conscience of the world. More than 15 million people were murdered in the Third Reich’s ghettos and camps, six million of them Jews, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. It was an unfathomable evil, but, contrary to most people’s perception, it was not unique in 20th century history. Just next to Europe, in the span of four decades before and after the Second World War, the Bolsheviks murdered around 30 million of their own people as they set about forcing communism on Russia and the other Soviet republics. Unlike the Holocaust, however, the crimes of the communists are poorly understood and rarely debated. How did the world forget?
Surely one explanation for why the Bolsheviks were successful in controlling their public image, whereas the Nazis were not, is to be found in the simple fact that the Germans lost the Second World War. The Nazi regime was defeated and irrelevant, but there were geo-political reasons to avoid antagonising the Soviet Union. And of course, the world was present in real time as the Nazi concentration camps were liberated and as the atrocities were laid bare at the Nuremberg trials, whereas the crimes of communism have only gradually become clear as details have emerged over the decades. The victims of the Bolsheviks’ crimes had few advocates to speak up on their behalf. There were also plenty of “useful idiots” in the west, who actively helped the Soviet regime’s attempts to cover up the truth – take as examples the American Vice President, Henry Wallace, who upon his return from a visit to the Soviet Union in 1944 compared the communist experiment to the American New Deal and spoke in glowing term about the conditions for the Russian peasants; or Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose 1935 book Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, promoted an uncritical view of Stalin’s methods and was later called “the most preposterous book ever written about Russia” by British historian A.J.P. Taylor.
But it is important to establish that, although many of the details only emerged after the fall of the Soviet empire in 1992, there is no debate about whether the world always knew. The Bolshevik leadership were very much aware of the horrors that accompanied the forced collectivisation and the Holodomor, but they tried their best to keep both the word and their own population from knowing what was really happening, by painting a picture of happy peasants who enthusiastically took up work at the new collective farms, where life was easy and full of joy. They may have fooled some of their own people, but western governments and intellectuals have no excuse. Official representatives from all major western countries were present in the Soviet Union throughout the era of Lenin and Stalin, and journalists travelled some of the worst affected areas where, despite the best efforts of Soviet officials, they saw what was happening and reported on it back home. Over the years, first-hand reports also emerged, most famously those of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose magnum opus The Gulag Archipelago was published in 1973.
In the 1980s, as the scale of the crimes became increasingly more difficult to deny, revisionism thrived in intellectual circles, most prominently at American universities. In the vein of their Nazi revisionist counterparts, these ideologically motivated intellectuals attempted to paint a picture of the Soviet Union as a place where events were driven by factors outside the control of the leadership, rather than a centralised totalitarian society, and in their writing of history the collectivization is dismissed as an experiment in agriculture and the systematic terror and its victims are basically an irrelevant detail. It is equivalent to writing the history of the Nazis and treating the Holocaust as a footnote. The truth is that, right from the start, the Bolsheviks wanted to cleanse society of anyone who they saw as an obstacle to their mission. Some western intellectuals have argued that the crimes of the Nazis are more relevant to us in the west because it happened in the heart of Europe, and, in a related strategy, those who emphasize the horrors of communism are accused of “relativizing” the Holocaust, that is, to deny the Jewish genocide perpetrated by the Nazis its place as the worst atrocity of the 20th century. The left has always been vehemently opposed to comparisons between the two dominant totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. When The Black Book of Communism, one of the most influential books on the political repression in communist states, was published in France in 1997, its suggestion of moral equivalency between Nazism and communism was passionately criticised by left-wing intellectuals, and Lionel Jospin, France’s Prime Minister, publicly declared his pride in leading a government supported by the Communists. Nikita Khrushchev was himself a proponent of a specific strain of revisionism when he denounced Stalin in 1956 and proposed an alternate reality where Stalin was a rogue leader who perverted the basically humane Marxist/Leninist project. It is a version of the left’s traditional defence of the brutal reality in countries that dapple with socialism: it wasn’t “real socialism.”
However, despite the desperation that lurks behind these arguments, they have been effective. Most people today see the Nazi ideology as intimately linked with Nazism as a practical system, and as a result, it is totally absent as an ideology from mainstream politics everywhere. But for communism, no such link exists. It is still considered perfectly acceptable to identify as a communist, despite the unspeakable horrors committed in the name of their ideology. It is a victory of revisionism, which has successfully driven a wedge between theoretical Marxism’s predictions of a harmonious, classless society and the reality that has played out when communism has been attempted in practice. It has saved communist leaders from universal condemnation and has meant that we, to this day, celebrate western intellectual apologists for communism like Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht. There has also, in the largely left-leaning educational systems of the west, been a reluctance to confront the crimes of communism, where teachers and intellectuals with an ideological affinity for Marxism have – whether purposefully or neglectfully – failed to give any prominence to the dark side of the history of the communism, and as a result, generations both before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain have been deprived of the knowledge of what really happened, not just in the Soviet Union but also in communist regimes across Asia and Latin America.
The truth is that Marxist theory and its practical implementation are closely connected. Marx saw progress towards communism as an inevitable historical process where the individual is not only unimportant, but dispensable. When they acceded to power in the Soviet Union and beyond, his acolytes treated their populations precisely as that. Those who stood in the way of progress were destroyed. It is a part of history that has been largely ignored, for reasons of historical chance and by a deliberate cover-up. But it is the real history of communism; one that everyone should know.
This is the second of a two part series, the first, How the world forgot the crimes of communism – The crimes, was published on 11 June 2020.