The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

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Learn about the workings of the evil communist system and its history in this stunning 500 page book.

The Black Book of

COMMUNISM

CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION

Stephane Courtois
Nicolas Werth
Jean-Louis Panne
Andrzej Paczkowski
Karel Bartosek
Jean-Louis Margolin

Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England 1999

Translated by Jonathan Murphy

and Mark Kramer

Consulting Editor Mark Kramer

Printed in the United States of America

First published in France as Le Ixvre rwirdu Communisme: Crimes, terreur, repression

Cj Editions Robert LafTont, S.A., Paris, 1997

Library of Congress Cutaloging-tn-Publtcarion Data

Livre noir du communisme, English

The black hx>k of communism : crimes, terror, repression / Stephane Courtois ... [et aj.]
translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer; consulting editor, Mark Kramer.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-07608-7 (alk. paper)

1. Communism — History — 20th century. 2. Political persecution.
3. Terrorism. I. Courtois, Stephane, 1947- fl. Kramer Mark

HI. Title.
HX44.L59 1999
320.53'2 — dc21 99-29759

Contents

Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity
Mar I in Malta

Introduction: The Crimes of Communism

Stephane Courtois

Part I A State against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror
in the Soviet Union

Nicolas Werth

1 Paradoxes and Misunderstandings Surrounding the
October Revolution

2 The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

3 The Red Terror

4 The Dirty War

5 From Tambov to the Great Famine

39
53
71
81
108

Contents

VII

6 From the Truce to the Great Turning Point

7 Forced Collectivization and Dekulaki/ation

8 The Great Famine

9 Socially Foreign Elements and the Cycles of Repression

10 The Great Terror (1936-1938)

11 The Empire of the Camps

12 The Other Side of Victory

13 Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System

14 The Last Conspiracy

15 The Exit from Stalinism
Conclusion

Part II Word Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

Stephane Courtois, Jean-Louis Panne, and Remi Kauffer

16 The Comintern in Action

Stephane Courtois and Jean- Louts Pa tine

17 The Shadow of the NKVI) in Spain

Stephane Courtois and Jean-Louts Panne

18 Communism and Terrorism

Retm Kauffer

Part III The Other Europe: Victim of Communism

Andrzej Paczkowski and Karel Bartosek

1 9 Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

Andrzej Paczkowski

20 Central and Southeastern Europe

Karel Bartosek

132
146
159
169
1H4
203
21()

242

2. SO
261

269

271

}.}>

361

394

Part IV Communism in Asia: Between Reeducation and Massacre

Jean-Louis Margolin and Pierre Rigoulot

Introduction

21 China: A Long March into Night

Jean- Louts Margolin

22 Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea

Pierre Rigoulot

23 Vietnam and Laos: The Impasse of War Communism

Jean- Louis Margolin

24 Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes

Jean- Lou is Mar go lin

Conclusion

Select Bibliography for Asia

Part V The Third World

Pascal Fontaine, Yves Santamaria, and Sylvain Boulouque

25 Communism in Latin America

Pascal Fontaine

26 Afrocommunism: Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique

Yves Santamaria

27 Communism in Afghanistan

Sylvain Boulouque

Conclusion: Why?

Stephane Courtois

Notes
Index
About the Authors

457

459
463

547

565

577

636
642

645

647
683
705

727

759
823

857

Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity

Martin Malia

Uommunism has been the great story of the twentieth century.
Bursting into history from the most unlikely corner of Europe amid the
trauma of World War I, in the wake of the cataclysm of 1939-1945 it made a
great leap westward to the middle of Germany and an even greater one east-
ward to the China Seas. With this feat, the apogee of its fortunes, it had come
to rule a third of mankind and seemed poised to advance indefinitely. For seven
decades it haunted world politics, polarizing opinion between those who saw it
as the socialist end of history and those who considered it history's most total
tyranny.

One might therefore expect that a priority of modern historians would be
to explain why Communism's power grew for so long only to collapse like a
house of cards. Yet surprisingly, more than eighty years after 1917, probing
examination of the Big Questions raised by the Marxist-Leninist phenomenon
has hardly begun. Can The Black Book of Communism, recently a sensation in
France and much of Europe, provide the salutary shock that will make a
difference?

Because a serious historiography was precluded in Soviet Russia by the
regime's mandatory ideology, scholarly investigation of Communism has until
recently fallen disproportionately to Westerners. And though these outside
observers could not entirely escape the ideological magnetic field emanating

Foreword

from their subject, in the half-century after World War II they indeed accom-
plished an impressive amount. 1 Even so, a basic problem remains: the concep-
tual poverty of the Western empirical effort,

This poverty flows from the premise that Communism can be understood,
in an aseptic and value-free mode, as the pure product of social process.
Accordingly, researchers have endlessly insisted that the October Revolution
was a workers' revolt and not a Party coup d'etat, when it was obviously the
latter riding piggyback on the former. Besides, the central issue in Communist
history is not the Party's ephemeral worker "base"; it is what the intelligentsia
victors of October later did with their permanent coup d'etat, and so far this
has scarcely been explored.

More exactly, the matter has been obscured by two fantasies holding out
the promise of a better Soviet socialism than the one the Bolsheviks actually
built. The first is the "Bukharin alternative" to Stalin, a thesis that purports to
offer a nonviolent, market road to socialism — that is, Marx's integral socialism,
which necessitates the full suppression of private property, profit, and the
market. 2 The second fantasy purports to find the impetus behind Stalin's
"revolution from above" of 1929-1933 in a "cultural revolution" from below
by Party activists and workers against the "bourgeois" specialists dear to Buk-
harin, a revolution ultimately leading to massive upward mobility from the
factory bench. 1

With such fables now consigned to what Trotsky called "the ash heap of
history," perhaps a moral, rather than a social, approach to the Communist
phenomenon can yield a truer understanding — for the much-investigated So-
viet social process claimed victims on a scale that has never aroused a scholarly-
curiosity at all proportionate to the magnitude of the disaster. The Black Book
offers us the first attempt to determine, overall, the actual magnitude of what
occurred, by systematically detailing Leninism's "crimes, terror, and repres-
sion" from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989.

This factual approach puts Communism in what is, after all, its basic
human perspective. For it was in truth a "tragedy of planetary dimensions" (in
the French publisher's characterization), with a grand total of victims variously
estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 1(H) million.
Either way, the Communist record offers the most colossal case of political
carnage in history. And when this fact began to sink in with the French public,
an apparently dry academic work became a publishing sensation, the focus of
impassioned political and intellectual debate.

The shocking dimensions of the Communist tragedy, however, are hardlv
news to any serious student of twentieth-century history, at least when the
different Leninist regimes are taken individually The real news is that at this
late date the truth should come as such a shock to the public at large. To be
sure, each major episode of the tragedy— Stalin's Gulag, Mao Zedong's Great

Foreword

Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge — had its
moment of notoriety. But these horrors soon faded away into "history"; nor
did anyone trouble to add up the total and set it before the public. The surpris-
ing size of this total, then, partly explains the shock the volume provoked.

The full power of the shock, however, was delivered by the unavoidable
comparison of this sum with that for Nazism, which at an estimated 25 million
turns out to be distinctly less murderous than Communism. And the volume's
editor, Stephane Courtois, rather than let the figures speak for themselves,
spelled out the comparison, thereby making the volume a firebrand. Arguing
from the fact that some Nuremberg jurisprudence has been incorporated into
French law (to accommodate such cases as that of Maurice Papon, a former
minister of Giscard d'Estaing tried in 1997-98 for complicity in deporting Jews
while a local official of Vichy), Courtois explicitly equated the "class genocide"
of Communism with the "race genocide" of Nazism, and categorized both as
"crimes against humanity." What is more, he raised the question of the "com-
plicity" with Communist crime of the legions of Western apologists for Stalin,
Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and indeed Pol Pot who, even when they
"abandoned their idols of yesteryear, did so discreetly and in silence."

These issues have a special resonance in France. Since the 1930s, the left
has been able to come to power only as a popular front of Socialists and
Communists (whether under Leon Blum or Francois Mitterrand), a tandem in
which the democratic partner was always compromised by its ally's allegiance
to totalitarian Moscow. Conversely, since 1940 the right has been tainted by
Vichy's links with Nazism (the subtext of the Papon affair). In such a historical
context, u knowing the truth about the US.S.R." has never been an academic
matter.

Furthermore, it happens that at the time the volume appeared the Socialist
prime minister Lionel Jospin stood in need of Communist votes to assemble a
parliamentary majority Orators of the right, therefore, citing The Black Book,
rose in the National Assembly to attack his government for harboring allies
with an unrepented "criminal past." Jospin countered by recalling the Libera-
tion coalition between Gaullists and Communists (which was fair game), only
the better to conclude that he was "proud" t0 govern with them too (which was
a gaffe, for at the Liberation the Gulag was not yet known). Nor was this just
a hasty choice of words; in the eyes of the left that he leads, the Communists,
despite their past errors, belong to the camp of democratic progress, whereas
the right is open to suspicion of softness toward the National Front of the
"fascist" Jean-Marie Le Pen (after all, the conservatives had once rallied to
Vichy). The incident ended with the non-Gaullist right walking out of the
chamber, while the Gaullists remained awkwardly in place. Thereupon the
debate spread to television and the press.

Indeed, the debate divides the book's own authors. All are research schol-

XII

Foreword

ars associated with the Centre d'Etude d'Histoire et de Sociologie du Commu-
nisme and its review, Communisme. Founded by the pioneer of academic Com-
munist studies, the late Annie Kriegel, its mission is to exploit our new access
to Soviet archives in conjunction with younger Russian historians. Equally to
the point, these researchers are former Communists or close fellow-travelers;
and it is over the assessment of their common past that they divide. Thus, once
The Black Blook raised the foreseeable political storm, Courtois's two key
collaborators — Nicolas Werth for Russia, and Jean-Louis Margolin for
China — publicly dissociated themselves from his bolder conclusions.

So let us begin with the debate, which is hardly specific to France. It breaks out
wherever the question of the moral equivalence of our century's two totalitari-
anisms is raised, indeed whenever the very concept of "totalitarianism" is
invoked. For Nazism's unique status as "absolute evil" is now so entrenched
that any comparison with it easily appears suspect.

Of the several reasons for this assessment of Nazism, the most obvious is
that the Western democracies fought World War II in a kind of global "popular
front" against "fascism." Moreover, whereas the Nazis occupied most of
Europe, the Communists during the Cold War menaced only from afar. Thus,
although the stakes for democracy in the new conflict were as high as in its hot
predecessor, the stress of waging it was significantly lower; and it ended with
the last general secretary of the "evil empire," Mikhail Gorbachev, in the
comradely embrace of the ultimate cold warrior, President Ronald Reagan.
Communism's fall, therefore, brought with it no Nuremberg trial, and hence
no de-Communization to solemnly put Leninism beyond the pale of civiliza-
tion; and of course there still exist Communist regimes in international good
standing.

Another reason for our dual perception is that defeat cut down Nazism in
the prime of its iniquity, thereby eternally fixing its full horror in the world's
memory. By contrast, Communism, at the peak of its iniquity, was rewarded
with an epic victory— and thereby gained a half-century in which to lose its
dynamism, to half-repent of Stalin, and even, in the case of some unsuccessful
leaders (such as Czechoslovakia's Alexander Dubcek in 1968), to attempt giving
the system a "human face." As a result of these contrasting endings of the two
totalitarianisms all Nazism's secrets were bared fifty years ago, whereas we are
only beginning to explore Soviet archives, and those of East Asia and Cuba
remain sealed.

The effect of this unequal access to information was magnified by more
subjective considerations. Nazism seemed all the more monstrous to Western-
ers for having arisen in the heart of civilized Europe, in the homeland of
Luther, Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, and indeed Marx. Communism, by contrast,

Foreword

XIII

appeared as less of a historical aberration in the Russian borderland of
E ur0 p e — almost "Asia" after all — where, despite Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, civi-
lization had never taken deep root.

The ultimate distinguishing characteristic of Nazism, of course, is the
Holocaust, considered as the historically unique crime of seeking the extermi-
nation of an entire people, a crime for which the term "genocide" was coined
around the time of Nuremberg. And therewith the Jewish people acquired the
solemn obligation to keep the memory of its martyrs alive in the conscience of
the world. Even so, general awareness of the Final Solution was slow to emerge,
in fact coming only in the 1970s and 1980s — the very years when Communism
was gradually mellowing. So between these contrasting circumstances, by the
time of Communism's fall the liberal world had had fifty years to settle into a
double standard regarding its two late adversaries.

Accordingly, Hitler and Nazism are now a constant presence in Western
print and on Western television, whereas Stalin and Communism materialize
only sporadically. The status of ex-Communist carries with it no stigma, even
when unaccompanied by any expression of regret; past contact with Nazism,
however, no matter how marginal or remote, confers an indelible stain. Thus
Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man have been enduringly compromised and
the substance of their thought tainted. By contrast, Louis Aragon, for years
under Stalin the editor of the French Communist Party's literary magazine, in
1996 was published among the classics of the Pleiade; the press was lyrical in
praise of his art, while virtually mute about his politics. (The Black Book
reproduces a 1931 poem to the KGB's predecessor, the GPU) Likewise, the
Stalinist poet and Nobel laureate, Pablo Neruda, in the same year was senti-
mentalized, together with his cause, by an acclaimed film, II postino — even
though in 1939 as a Chilean diplomat in Spain he acted as a de facto agent of
the Comintern, and in 1953 mourned Stalin with a fulsome ode. And this list
of unparallel lives could be extended indefinitely.

Even more skewed is the situation in the East. No Gulag camps have been
turned into museums to commemorate their inmates; all were bulldozed into
the ground during Khrushchev's de-Stalinization. The only memorial to
Stalin's victims is a modest stone brought to Moscow from the Arctic camp of
Solovki and placed in Lubyanka Square (though well off to the side), where
the KGB's former headquarters still stands. Nor are there any regular visitors
to this lonely slab (one must cross a stream of traffic to reach it) and no more
than an occasional wilted bouquet. By contrast, Lenin's statue still dominates
most city centers, and his mummy reposes honorably in its Mausoleum.

Throughout the former Communist world, moreover, virtually none of
its responsible officials has been put on trial or punished. Indeed, everywhere
Communist parties, though usually under new names, compete in politics.

XIV

Foreword

Thus, in Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, onetime member of General
Jaruzelski's government, in 1996 won the presidency against the symbol of
resistance to Communism, Lech Wale_sa (admittedly an inept campaigner).
Gulya Horn, the prime minister of Hungary from 1994 to 1998, was a member
of the country's last Communist government, and a member of the militia that
helped suppress the 1956 revolt alongside the Soviet army. In neighboring
Austria, by contrast, former president Kurt Waldheim was ostracized world-
wide once his Nazi past was uncovered. Granted, card-carrying Western literati
and latter-day Eastern apparatchiki never served as executioners for Stalin.
Even so, does the present silence about their past mean that Communism was
all that less bad than Nazism?

The debate around The Black Book can help frame an answer. On the one side,
commentators in the liberal Le Monde argue that it is illegitimate to speak of a
single Communist movement from Phnom Penh to Paris. Rather, the rampage
of the Khmer Rouge is like the ethnic massacres of third-world Rwanda; or the
"rural" Communism of Asia is radically different from the "urban" Commu-
nism of Europe; or Asian Communism is really only anticolonial nationalism.
The subtext of such Eurocentric condescension is that conflating sociologically
diverse movements is merely a stratagem to obtain a higher body count against
Communism, and thus against all the left. In answer, commentators in the
conservative Le Figaro, spurning reductionist sociology as a device to exculpate
Communism, reply that Marxist-Leninist regimes are cast in the same ideo-
logical and organizational mold throughout the world. And this pertinent point
also has its admonitory subtext: that socialists of whatever stripe cannot be
trusted to resist their ever-present demons on the far left (those popular fronts
were no accident after all).

Yet if we let the divided contributors to The Black Book arbitrate the
dispute, we find no disagreement in this matter: the Leninist matrix indeed
served for all the once "fraternal" parties. To be sure, the model was applied
differently in different cultural settings. As Margolin points out, the chief agent
of represssion in Russia was a specially created political police, the Cheka-
GPU-NKVD-KGB, while in China it was the People's Liberation Army, and
in Cambodia it was gun-toting adolescents from the countryside: thus popular
ideological mobilization went deeper in Asia than in Russia. Still, everywhere
the aim was to repress "enemies of the people" — "like noxious insects," as
Lenin said early on, thus inaugurating Commmunism's "animalization" of its
adversaries. Moreover, the line of inheritance from Stalin, to Mao, to Ho, to
Kim II Sung, to Pol Pot was quite clear, with each new leader receiving both
materia] aid and ideological inspiration from his predecessor. And, to come full
circle, Pol Pot first learned his Marxism in Paris in 1952 (when such philoso-

Foreword

phers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were explaining how
terror could be the midwife of "humanism"). 4 So if the debate remains on the
level of the quantitative atrocity, the double standard collapses, and Commu-
nism appears as the more criminal totalitarianism.

But if the debate is shifted to qualitative crime, this outcome is easily reversed.
And here the decisive factor is, again, the Holocaust as the confirmation of
Nazism's uniquely evil nature. Indeed, this standard has become so universal
that other persecuted groups, from Armenians to the native peoples of both
Americas, have appropriated (with varying degrees of plausibility) the term
"genocide" to characterize their own experience. Not surprisingly, many of
these implicit comparisons to the Holocaust have been rejected as illegitimate,
even slanderous. And in fact one overexcited op-ed piece in Le Monde, from a
respected researcher, denounced Courtois's introduction as antisemitic.

Yet there are other, less emotionally charged arguments for assigning a
significant distinctiveness to Nazi terror. The criminal law everywhere distin-
guishes degrees of murder, according to the motivation, the cruelty of the
means employed, and so on. Thus, Raymond Aron long ago, and Francois
Furet recently, though both unequivocal about the evil of Communism, distin-
guished between extermination practiced to achieve a political objective, no
matter how perverse, and extermination as an end in itself. 5 And in this per-
spective, Communism once again comes off as less evil than Nazism.

This plausible distinction, however, can easily be turned on its head. In
particular, Eastern European dissidents have argued that mass murder in the
name of a noble ideal is more perverse than it is in the name of a base one. 6 The
Nazis, after all, never pretended to be virtuous. The Communists, by contrast,
trumpeting their humanism, hoodwinked millions around the globe for dec-
ades, and so got away with murder on the ultimate scale. The Nazis, moreover,
killed off their victims without ideological ceremony; the Communists, by
contrast, usually compelled their prey to confess their "guilt" in signed depo-
sitions therebv acknowledging the Party line's political "correctness." Nazism,
finally, was a unique case (Mussolini's Facism was not really competitive), and
it developed no worldwide clientle. By contrast, Communism's universalism
permitted it to metastasize worldwide.

A final position, forcefully expressed by Alain Besancon, is that murder is
murder whatever the ideological motivation; and this is undeniably true for the
equally dead victims of both Nazism and Communism. 7 Such absolute equiva-
lence is also expressed in Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism: both
systems massacred their victims not for what they did (such as resisting the
regime) but for who they were, whether Jews or kulaks. In this perspective, the
distinction made by some, that the term petit-bourgeois "kulak" is more elastic

XVI

Foreword

and hence less lethal than biological "Jew," is invalidated: the social and the
racial categories are equally psuedoscientific.

Yet none of these qualitative arguments can be "clinched"— unlike an
empirically established victim count. And since there can be no consensus
regarding degrees of political "evil," some researchers would claim that all
value judgments merely express the ideological preferences of their authors.

Such "Positivist" social scientists, therefore, have averred that moral questions
are irrelevant to understanding the past. An example is a recent volume devoted
to political denunciation in modern Europe. 8 The introduction presents some
fascinating facts: in 1939 the Gestapo employed 7,500 people in contrast to the
NKVD's 366,000 (including Gulag personnel); and the Communist Partv
made denunciation an obligation, whereas the Nazi Party did not. But no
conclusions are drawn from these contrasts. Instead we are told that under both
regimes the population was given to denunciation as "an everyday practice,"
and for reasons of self-advancement more than for reasons of ideology. We arc
told further that denunciation was endemic in prerevolutionary rural Russia,
and that it flourished under the French Jacobins and the English Puritans, the
Spanish Inquisition and American McCarthyism. And in fact all the "witch
crazes" enumerated in the introduction did have some traits in common.

The rub is, however, that this perspective reduces politics and ideology
everywhere to anthropology. And with this accomplished, the editors blandly
assure us that, contrary to Hannah Arendt, the "Nazi/Soviet similarities" arc
insufficient to make denunciation "a specifically 'totalitarian' phenomenon. "
What is more, the difference between Nazi/Communist systems and Western
ones is "not qualitative but quantitative." By implication, therefore, singling
out Communist and Nazi terror in order to equate them becomes Cold War
slander — the ideological subtext, as it happens, of twenty-five years of "revi-
sionist," social-reductionist Sovietology.

By the same token, this fact-for-fact's-sake approach suggests that there
is nothing specifically Communist about Communist terror — and, it would
seem, nothing particularly Nazi about Nazi terror either. So the bloody Soviet
experiment is banalized in one great gray anthropological blur; and the Soviet
Union is transmogrified into just another country in just another age, neither
more nor less evil than any other regime going. But this is obviously nonsense.
Hence we are back with the problem of moral judgment, which is inseparable
from any real understanding of the past— indeed, inseparable from being hu-

man,

In the twentieth century, however, morality is not primarily a matter of eternal
verities or transcendental imperatives. It is above all a matter of political alle-
giances. That is, it is a matter of left versus right, roughly defined as the

Foreword

XVII

priority of compassionate egalitarianism for the one, and as the primacy of
prudential order for the other. Yet since neither principle can be applied abso-
lutely without destroying society, the modern world lives in perpetual tension
between the irresistible pressure for equality and the functional necessity of
hierarchy.

It is this syndrome that gives the permanent qualitative advantage to
Communism over Nazism in any evaluation of their quantitative atrocities. For
the Communist project, in origin, claimed commitment to universalistic and
egalitarian goals, whereas the Nazi project offered only unabashed national
egoism. Small matter, then, that their practices were comparable; their moral
auras were antithetical, and it is the latter feature that counts in Western,
domestic politics. And so we arrive at the fulcrum of the debate: A moral man
can have "no enemies to the left," a perspective in which undue insistence on
Communist crime only "plays into the hands of the right" — if, indeed, any
anticommunism is not simply a mask for antiliberalism.

In this spirit, Le Monde's editorialist deemed The Black Book inopportune
because equating Communism with Nazism removed the "last barriers to
legitimating the extreme right," that is, Le Pen. It is true that Le Pen's party
and similar hate-mongering, xenophobic movements elsewhere in Europe rep-
resent an alarming new phenomenon that properly concerns all liberal demo-
crats. But it in no way follows that Communism's criminal past should be
ignored or minimized. Such an argument is only a variant, in new historical
circumstances, of Sartre's celebrated sophism that one should keep silent about
Soviet camps "pour ne pas descsperer Billancout" (in order not to throw the
auto workers of Billancout into despair). To which his onetime colleague,
Albert Camus, long ago replied that the truth is the truth, and denying it mocks
the causes both of humanity and of morality. 9

In fact, the persistence of such sophistry is precisely why The Black Book is so
opportune. What, therefore, do its provocative pages contain? Without preten-
sion to originality, it presents a balance sheet of our current knowledge of
Communism's human costs, archivally based where possible and elsewhere
drawing on the best available secondary evidence, and with due allowance for
the difficulties of quantification. Yet the very sobriety of this inventory is what
gives the book its power; and indeed, as we are led from country to country and
from horror to horror, the cumulative impact is overwhelming.

At the same time, the book quietly advances a number of important
analytical points. The first is that Communist regimes did not just commit
criminal acts (all states do so on occasion); they were criminal enterprises in
their very essence: on principle, so to speak, they all ruled lawlessly, by violence,
and without regard for human life. Werth's section on the Soviet Union is thus

XVII!

Foreword

titled U A State against Its People" and takes us methodically through the
successive cycles of terror, from Great October in 1917 to Stalin's death in
1953. By way of comparison, he notes that between 1825 and 1917 tsarism
carried out 6,321 political executions (most of them during the revolution of
1905-1907), whereas in two months of official "Red Terror" in the fall of 1918
Bolshevism achieved some 15,000. And so on for a third of a century; for
example, 6 million deaths during the collectivization famine of 1932-33,
720,000 executions during the Great Purge, 7 million people entering the Gulag
(where huge numbers died) in the years 1934-1941, and 2,750,000 still there
at Stalin's death. True, these aggregates represent different modes of state
violence, not all of them immediately lethal; but all betoken terror as a routine
means of government.

And the less familiar figures in Margolin's chapter on China's u Long
March into Nightt" are even more staggering: at a minimum, 10 million "direct
victims"; probably 20 million deaths out of the multitudes that passed through
China's "hidden Gulag," the laogai; more than 20 million deaths from the
"political famine" of the Great Leap Forward of 1959-1961, the largest famine
in history. Finally, in Pol Pot's aping of Mao's Great Leap, around one Cam-
bodian in seven perished, the highest proportion of the population in any
Communist country.

The book's second point is that there never was a benign, initial phase of
Communism before some mythical "wrong turn" threw it off track. From the
start Lenin expected, indeed wanted, civil war to crush all "class enemies"; and
this war, principally against the peasants, continued with only short pauses until
1953. So much for the fable of "good Lenin/bad Stalin." (And if anyone doubts
that it is still necessary to make this case, the answer may be found, for example,
in the maudlin article "Lenin" in the current edition of the Encyclopaedia
Bntanmca.) Still another point is of a "technical" nature: the use of famine to
break peasant resistance to regime economic "plans." And ever since Solzhenit-
syn, such "pharaonic" methods have been contrasted with the technologically
advanced Nazi gas chamber.

A more basic point is that Red terror cannot be explained as the prolon-
gation of prerevolutionary political cultures. Communist repression did not
originate from above, in traditional autocracies; nor was it simply an intensifica-
tion of violent folk practices from below — whether the peasant anarchism of
Russia, or the cyclical millenarian revolts of China, or the exacerbated nation-
alism of Cambodia, although all these traditions were exploited by the new
regime. Nor does the source of Communist practices reside in the violence of
the two world wars, important though this brutal conditioning was. Rather, in
each case, mass violence against the population was a deliberate policy of the
new revolutionary order; and its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything
in the national past.

Foreword

XIX

A final point, insisted on by Courtois yet clear also in his colleagues'
accounts, is that Communism's recourse to "permanent civil war" rested on
the "scientific" Marxist belief in class struggle as the "violent midwife of
history," in Marx's famous metaphor. Similarly, Courtois adds, Nazi violence
was founded on a scientistic social Darwinism promising national regeneration
through racial struggle.

This valid emphasis on ideology as the wellspring of Communist mass
murder reaches its apogee in Margolin's depiction of escalating radicalism as
the revolution moved East. Stalin, of course, had already begun the escalation
by presenting himself as the "Lenin of today" and his first Five-Year Plan as
a second October. Then, in 1953, four years after Mao came to power, his heirs
ended mass terror: it had simply become too costly to their now superpuissant
regime. To the Chinese comrades, however, Moscow's moderation amounted
to "betrayal" of the world revolution just as it was taking off^in Asia. Conse-
quentlv, in 1959-1961 Mao was goaded to surpass his Soviet mentors by a
"Great Leap Forward" beyond mere socialism, Moscow style, to full Commu-
nism as Marx had imagined it in the Communist Manifesto and the Critique of
the Gotha Program. And in 1966-1976, by directing the anarchy of the Cultural
Revolution against his own Party, he proceeded to outdo Stalin's Great Purge
of his Party in 1937-1939. But the most demented spinoff of this whole
tradition was Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge of 1975-1979; for this rampage against
urban, "bourgeois" civilization expressed nothing less than an ambition to
propel tiny Cambodia beyond Mao's "achievements" into the front rank of
world revolution.

Yet the long-term inefficiency of such "progress" eventually led Mao's
heirs, in their turn, to "betray" the Marxist-Leninist impetus by halting mass
terror and turning halfway to the market. Thereby, after 1979, Deng Xiaoping
ended worldwide the perverse Prometheanism launched in October 1917. Thus
the Communist trajectory, as The Black Book traces it from Petrograd to the
China Seas, inevitably suggests that ideology, not social process, fueled the
movement's meteoric rise, and that ideology's practical failure produced its
precipitate fall.

This transnational perspective goes far toward answering the great ques-
tion posed by Communist history: namely, why did a doctrine premised on
proletarian revolution in industrial societies come to power only in predomi-
nantly agrarian ones, by Marxist definition those least prepared for "socialism"? ^
But socialist revolution for Marx was not just a matter of economic develop-
ment; it was at bottom an eschatological "leap from the kingdom of necessity
to the kingdom of freedom." Since such quasi-miraculous transformation 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. Only by taking account of this

Foreword

paradoxical eastward escalation through increasingly extravagant "leaps" can
we build a real historiography of the great twentieth-century story that was
Communism.

And this brings us back to the vexed — and vexing — question raised by
Stephane Courtois in The Black Book: What of the moral equivalence of
Communism with Nazism? After fifty years of debate, it is clear that no matter
what the hard facts are, degrees of totalitarian evil will be measured as much in
terms of present politics as in terms of past realities. So we will always encoun-
ter a double standard as long as there exist a left and a right — which will be a
very long time indeed. No matter how thoroughly the Communist failure may
come to be documented (and new research makes it look worse every day), we
will always have reactions such as that of a Moscow correspondent for a major
Western paper, who, after the fall, could still privately salute the Russian people
with: "Thanks for having tried!"; and there will always be kindred spirits to
dismiss The Black Book, a priori, as "right-wing anti-Communist rhetoric."
For more mundane observers, however, it is at last becoming clear that our
current qualitative judgments are scandalously out of line with the century's
real balance sheet of political crime.

And this very absurdity perhaps brings us to a turning point. Ten years
ago, the authors of The Black Book would have refused to believe what they
now write. And exploration of the Soviet archives — and eventually those of
East Asia — will continue to redress the balance. This comes at a time, moreover,
when historical writing is turning increasingly to retrospective affirmative ac-
tion, to fulfilling our "duty of remembrance" to all the oppressed of the
past— indeed, when governments and churches formally apologize for their
historic sins. Surely, then, the Party of humanity can spare a little compassion
for the victims of the inhumanity so long meted out by so many of its own
partisans,

Even so, such an effort at retrospective justice will always encounter one
intractable obstacle. Any realistic accounting of Communist crime would effec-
tively shut the door on Utopia; and too many good souls in this unjust world
cannot abandon hope for an absolute end to inequality (and some less good
souls will always offer them "rational" curative nostrums). And so, all com-
rade-questers after historical truth should gird their loins for a very Long
March indeed before Communism is accorded its fair share of absolute evil.

The Black Book of Communism

Introduction: The Crimes of Communism

Stephane Courtois

Life cannot withstand death, but memory is gaining in its struggle against
nothingness.
Tzvetan Todorov, Les abus de la memoire

It has been written that "history is the science of human misfor-
tune." 1 Our bloodstained century of violence amply confirms this statement. In
previous centuries few people and countries were spared from mass violence.
The major European powers were involved in the African slave trade. The
French Republic practiced colonization, which despite some good was tar-
nished by repugnant episodes that persisted until recently. The United States
remains heavily influenced by a culture of violence deeply rooted in two major
historical tragedies — the enslavement of black Africans and the extermination
of Native Americans.

The fact remains that our century has outdone its predecessors in its
bloodthirstiness. A quick glance at the past leads to one damning conclusion:
ours is the century of human catastrophes — two world wars and Nazism, to
say nothing of more localized tragedies, such as those in Armenia, Biafra, and
Rwanda, The Ottoman Empire was undoubtedly involved in the genocide of
the Armenians, and Germany in the genocide of the Jews and Gypsies. Italy
under Mussolini slaughtered Ethiopians. The Czechs are reluctant to admit
that their behavior toward the Sudeten Germans in 1945 and 1946 was by no
means exemplary. Even Switzerland has recently been embroiled in a scandal
over its role in administering gold stolen by the Nazis from exterminated Jews,
although the country's behavior is not on the same level as genocide.

Introduction

Communism has its place in this historical setting overflowing with trage-
dies. Indeed, it occupies one of the most violent and most significant places of
all. Communism, the defining characteristic of the "short twentieth century"
that began in Sarajevo in 1914 and ended in Moscow in 1991, finds itself at
center stage in the story. Communism predated fascism and Nazism, outlived
both, and left its mark on four continents.

What exactly do we mean by the term "Communism 1 '? We must make a
distinction between the doctrine of communism and its practice. As a political
philosophy, communism has existed for centuries, even millennia. Was it not
Plato who in his Republic introduced the concept of an ideal city, in which
people would not be corrupted by money and power and in which wisdom,
reason, and justice would prevail? And consider the scholar and statesman Sir
Thomas More, chancellor of England in 1530, author of Utopia, and victim of
the executioner's ax by order of Henry VIII, who also described an ideal society.
Utopian philosophy may have its place as a technique for evaluating society. It
draws its sustenance from ideas, the lifeblood of the world's democracies. But
the Communism that concerns us does not exist in the transcendent sphere of
ideas. This Communism is altogether real; it has existed at key moments of
history and in particular countries, brought to life by its famous leaders —
Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Josif Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro,
and, in France, by Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos, and Georges Marchais.

Regardless of the role that theoretical communist doctrines may have
played in the practice of real Communism before 1917— and we shall return
to this later — it was flesh-and-blood Communism that imposed wholesale re-
pression, culminating in a state-sponsored reign of terror. Is the ideology itself
blameless? There will always be some nitpickers who maintain that actual
Communism has nothing in common with theoretical communism. And of
course it would be absurd to claim that doctrines expounded prior to Jesus
Christ, during the Renaissance, or even in the nineteenth century were respon-
sible for the events that took place in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, as
Ignazio Silone has written, "Revolutions, like trees, are recognized by the fruit
they bear." It was not without reason that the Russian Social Democrats, better
known to history as the Bolsheviks, decided in November 1917 to call them-
selves "Communists," They had a reason for erecting at the Kremlin a monu-
ment to those whom they considered to be their predecessors, namely Sir
Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella.

Having gone beyond individual crimes and small-scale ad-hoc massacres,
the Communist regimes, in order to consolidate their grip on power, turned
mass crime into a full-blown system of government. After varying periods,
ranging from a few years in Eastern Europe to several decades in the U.S.S.R.
and China, the terror faded, and the regimes settled into a routine of admin-

The Crimes of Communism

istering repressive measures on a daily basis, as well as censoring all means of
communication, controlling borders, and expelling dissidents. However, the
memory of the terror has continued to preserve the credibility, and thus the
effectiveness, of the threat of repression. None of the Communist regimes
currently in vogue in the West is an exception to this rule — not the China of
the "Great Helmsman, 11 nor the North Korea of Kim II Sung, nor even the
Vietnam of "good old Uncle Ho 11 or the Cuba of the flamboyant Fidel Castro,
flanked by the hard-liner Che Guevara. Nor can we forget Ethiopia under
Mengistu Haile Mariam, Angola under Agostinho Neto, or Afghanistan under
Mohammed Najibullah.

Incredibly, the crimes of Communism have yet to receive a fair and just
assessment from both historical and moral viewpoints. This book is one of the
first attempts to study Communism with a focus on its criminal dimensions, in
both the central regions of Communist rule and the farthest reaches of the
globe. Some will say that most of these crimes were actions conducted in
accordance with a system of law that was enforced by the regimes' official
institutions, which were recognized internationally and whose heads of state
continued to be welcomed with open arms. But was this not the case with
Nazism as well? The crimes we shall expose are to be judged not by the
standards of Communist regimes, but by the unwritten code of the natural laws
of humanity.

The history of Communist regimes and parties, their policies, and their
relations with their own national societies and with the international commu-
nity are of course not purely synonymous with criminal behavior, let alone with
terror and repression. In the U.S.S.R. and in the "people's democracies" after
Stalin's death, as well as in China after Mao, terror became less pronounced,
society began to recover something of its old normalcy, and "peaceful coexis-
tence"— if only as "the pursuit of the class struggle by other means" — had
become an international fact of life. Nevertheless, many archives and witnesses
prove conclusively that terror has always been one of the basic ingredients of
modern Communism. Let us abandon once and for all the idea that the execu-
tion of hostages by firing squads, the slaughter of rebellious workers, and the
forced starvation of the peasantry were only short-term "accidents" peculiar
to a specific country or era. Our approach will encompass all geographic areas
and focus on crime as a defining characteristic of the Communist system
throughout its existence.

Exactly w hat crimes are we going to examine? Communism has committed
a multitude of crimes not only against individual human beings but also against
world civilization and national cultures. Stalin demolished dozens of churches
in Moscow; Nicolae Ceau^escu destroyed the historical heart of Bucharest to
give free rein to his megalomania; Pol Pot dismantled the Phnom Penh cathe-

Introduction

dral stone by stone and allowed the jungle to take over the temples of Angkor
Wat; and during Mao's Cultural Revolution, priceless treasures were smashed
or burned by the Red Guards. Yet however terrible this destruction may ulti-
mately prove for the nations in question and for humanity as a whole, how does
it compare with the mass murder of human beings — of men, women, and
children?

Thus we have delimited crimes against civilians as the essence of the
phenomenon of terror. These crimes tend to fit a recognizable pattern even if
the practices vary to some extent by regime. The pattern includes execution by
various means, such as firing squads, hanging, drowning, battering, and, in
certain cases, gassing, poisoning, or "car accidents"; destruction of the popu-
lation by starvation, through man-made famine, the withholding of food, or
both; deportation, through which death can occur in transit (either through
physical exhaustion or through confinement in an enclosed space), at one's
place of residence, or through forced labor (exhaustion, illness, hunger, cold).
Periods described as times of "civil war" are more complex — it is not always
easy to distinguish between events caused by fighting between rulers and rebels
and events that can properly be described only as a massacre of the civilian
population.

Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere. The following rough approxi-
mation, based on unofficial estimates, gives some sense of the scale and gravity
of these crimes:

U.S.S.R.: 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.

The immense number of deaths conceals some wide disparities according
to context. Unquestionably, if we approach these figures in terms of relative
weight, first place goes to Cambodia, where Pol Pot, in three and a half years,
engaged in the most atrocious slaughter, through torture and widespread fam-
ine, of about one-fourth of the country's total population. However, China's

The Crimes of Communism

experience under Mao is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of people
who lost their lives. As for the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, the blood
turns cold at its venture into planned, logical, and "politically correct" mass
slaughter.

This bare-bones approach inevitably fails to do justice to the numerous issues
involved. A thorough investigation requires a "qualitative" study based on a
meaningful definition of the term "crime." Objective and legal criteria are also
important. The legal ramifications of crimes committed by a specific country
were first confronted in 1945 at the Nuremberg Tribunal, which was organized
by the Allies to consider the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The nature of
these crimes was defined by Article 6 of the Charter of the International
Military Tribunal, which identified three major offenses: crimes against peace,
war crimes, and crimes against humanity. An examination of all the crimes
committed by the Leninist/Stalinist regime, and in the Communist world as a
whole, reveals crimes that fit into each of these three categories.

Crimes against peace, defined by Article 6a, are concerned with the "plan-
ning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or a war in
violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances, or participation
in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the forego-
ing." Unquestionably, Stalin committed such a crime by secretly negotiating
two treaties with Hitler — those of 23 August and 28 September 1939 on the
partition of Poland and on the annexation of the Baltic states, northern Buk-
ovina, and Bessarabia to the U.S.S.R., respectively. By freeing Germany from
the risk of waging war on two fronts, the treaty of 23 August 1939 led directly
to the outbreak of World War II. Stalin perpetrated yet another crime against
peace by attacking Finland on 30 November 1939. The unexpected incursion
into South Korea by North Korea on 25 June 1950 and the massive intervention
in that war by the Chinese army are of comparable magnitude. The methods
of subversion long used by the Moscow-backed Communist parties likewise
deserve categorization as crimes against peace, since they began wars; thus a
Communist coup in Afghanistan led to a massive Soviet military intervention
on 27 December 1979, unleashing a conflict that continues to this day.

War crimes are defined in Article 6b as "violations of the laws or customs
of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, the ill-treat-
ment or deportation of civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labor
camps or for any other purpose, the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of
war or persons on the seas, the killing of hostages, the plunder of public or
private property, the wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, and any
devastation not justified by military necessity." The laws and customs of war
are written down in various conventions, particularly the Hague Convention of

Introduction

1907, which states that in times of war "the inhabitants and the belligerents
remain under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations,
as they result from the usages established among civilized peoples, from laws
of humanity, and the dictates of the public conscience."

Stalin gave the go-ahead for large numbers of war crimes. The liquidation
of almost all the Polish officers taken prisoner in 1939, with 4,500 men butch-
ered at Katyri, is only one such episode, albeit the most spectacular. However,
other crimes on a much larger scale are habitually overlooked, including the
murder or death in the gulag of tens of thousands of German soldiers taken
prisoner from 1943 to 1945. Nor should we forget the rape of countless German
women by Red Army soldiers in occupied Germany, as well as the systematic
plundering of all industrial equipment in the countries occupied by the Red
Army Also covered by Article 6b would be the organized resistance fighters
who openly waged war against Communist rulers and who were executed by
firing squads or deported after being taken prisoner — for example, the soldiers
of the anti-Nazi Polish resistance organizations, members of various Ukrainian
and Baltic armed partisan organizations, and Afghan resistance fighters.

The expression "crime against humanity" first appeared on 19 May 1915
in a joint French, British, and Russian declaration condemning Turkey's mas-
sacre of the Armenians as a "new crime by Turkey against humanity and
civilization." The atrocities committed by the Nazis obliged the Nuremberg
Tribunal to redefine the concept, as stated in Article 6c: "Murder, extermina-
tion, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any
civilian population before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial,
or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the
jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of
the country where perpetrated."

In his arguments at Nuremberg the French prosecutor general, Francois
de Menthon, emphasized the ideological dimension of these crimes:

I propose today to prove to you that all this organized and vast criminal-
ity springs from what I may be allowed to call a crime against the spirit,
I mean a doctrine that, by denying all spiritual, rational, or moral values
by which nations have tried for thousands of years to improve human
conditions, aims to plunge humanity back into barbarism, no longer the
natural and spontaneous barbarism of primitive nations, but into a dia-
bolical barbarism, conscious of itself and using for its ends all material
means put at the disposal of humanity by contemporary science. This
sin against the spirit is the original sin of National Socialism from which
all crimes spring.

This monstrous doctrine is that of racism . . .

Whether we consider a crime against peace or war crimes, we are

The Crimes of Communism

therefore not faced by an accidental or an occasional criminality that
events could explain without justifying it. We are in fact faced by sys-
tematic criminality, which derives directly and of necessity from a mon-
strous doctrine put into practice with deliberate intent by the masters of
Nazi Germany.

Francois de Menthon also noted that deportations were meant to provide
additional labor for the German war machine, and the fact that the Nazis sought
to exterminate their opponents was merely "a natural consequence of the
National Socialist doctrine for which man has no intrinsic value unless he serves
the German race." All statements made to the Nuremberg Tribunal stressed
one of the chief characteristics of crimes against humanity — the fact that the
power of the state is placed in the service of criminal policies and practice.
However, the jurisdiction of the Nuremberg Tribunal was limited to crimes
committed during World War II. Therefore, we must broaden the legal defini-
tion of war crimes to include situations that extend beyond that war. The new
French criminal code, adopted on 23 July 1992, defines war crimes in the
following way: "The deportation, enslavement, or mass-scale and systematic
practice of summary executions, abduction of persons following their disap-
pearance, torture, or inhuman acts inspired by political, philosophical racial, or
religious motives, and organized for the purpose of implementing a concerted
effort against a civilian population group" (emphasis added).

All these definitions, especially the recent French definition, are relevant
to any number of crimes committed by Lenin and above all by Stalin and
subsequently by the leaders of all Communist countries, with the exception (we
hope) of Cuba and the Nicaragua of the Sandinistas, Nevertheless, the main
conclusions are inescapable — Communist regimes have acted "in the name of
a state practicing a policy of ideological hegemony." Thus in the name of an
ideological belief system were tens of millions of innocent victims systemati-
cally butchered, unless of course it is a crime to be middle-class, of noble birth,
a kulak, a Ukrainian, or even a worker or a member of the Communist Party.
Active intolerance was high on the Communists' agenda. It was Mikhail Tom-
sky, the leader of the Soviet trade unions, who in the 13 November 1927 issue
of Trud (Labor) stated: "We allow other parties to exist. However, the funda-
mental principle that distinguishes us from the West is as follows: one party
rules, and all the others are in jail!" 2

The concept of a crime against humanity is a complex one and is directly
relevant to the crimes under consideration here. One of the most specific is
genocide. Following the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, and in order to
clarify Article 6c of the Nuremberg Tribunal, crimes against humanity were
defined by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment

Introduction

of Genocide of 9 December 1948 in the following way: "Genocide means any
of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the
group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c)
deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to
prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group
to another group."

The new French criminal code defines genocide still more broadly: "The
deed of executing a concerted effort that strives to destroy totally or partially a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group, or a group that has been determined on
the basis of any other arbitrary criterion" (emphasis added). This legal definition
is not inconsistent with the philosophical approach of Andre Frossard, who
believes that "it is a crime against humanity when someone is put to death
purely by virtue of his or her birth."- 1 And in his short but magnificent novel
Forever Flowing, Vasily Grossman says of his hero, Ivan Grigorevich, who has
returned from the camps, "he had remained exactly what he had been from his
birth: a human being. 1 ' 4 That, of course, was precisely why he was singled out
in the first place. The French definition helps remind us that genocide comes
in many shapes and sizes — it can be racial (as in the case of the Jews), but it
can also target social groups. In The Red Terror in Russia, published in Berlin
in 1924, the Russian historian and socialist Sergei Melgunov cited Martin
Latsis, one of the first leaders of the Cheka (the Soviet political police), as
giving the following order on 1 November 1918 to his henchmen: "We don't
make war against any people in particular. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie
as a class. In your investigations don't look for documents and pieces of evi-
dence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or
acting against Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what
class he comes from, what are his roots, his education, his training, and his
occupation." 5

Lenin and his comrades initially found themselves embroiled in a merci-
less "class war," in which political and ideological adversaries, as well as the
more recalcitrant members of the general public, were branded as enemies and
marked for destruction. The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal and
physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute
power. This strategy applied not only to groups with opposing political views,
but also to such social groups as the nobility, the middle class, the intelligentsia,
and the clergy, as well as professional groups such as military officers and the
police. Sometimes the Bolsheviks subjected these people to genocide. The
policy of "de-Cossackization" begun in 1920 corresponds largely to our defini-
tion of genocide: a population group firmly established in a particular territory,

The Crimes of Communism

the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women, children,
and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over to new, non-
Cossack occupants. Lenin compared the Cossacks to the Vendee during the
French Revolution and gladly subjected them to a program of what Gracchus
Babeuf, the "inventor" of modern Communism, characterized in 1795 as
"populicide." 6

The "dekulakization" of 1930-1932 repeated the policy of "de-Cossacki-
zation" but on a much grander scale. Its primary objective, in accordance with
the official order issued for this operation (and the regime's propaganda), was
"to exterminate the kulaks as a class." The kulaks who resisted collectivization
were shot, and the others were deported with their wives, children, and elderly
family members. Although not all kulaks were exterminated directly, sentences
of forced labor in wilderness areas of Siberia or the far north left them with
scant chance of survival. Several tens of thousands perished there; the exact
number of victims remains unknown. As for the great famine in Ukraine in
1932-33, which resulted from the rural population's resistance to forced col-
lectivization, 6 million died in a period of several months.

Here, the genocide of a "class" may well be tantamount to the genocide
of a "race" — the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result
of the famine caused by Stalin's regime "is equal to" the starvation of a Jewish
child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime.
Such arguments in no way detract from the unique nature of Auschwitz — the
mobilization of leading-edge technological resources and their use in an "in-
dustrial process" involving the construction of an "extermination factory," the
use of gas, and cremation. However, this argument highlights one particular
feature of many Communist regimes — their systematic use of famine as a
weapon. The regime aimed to control the total available food supply and, with
immense ingenuity, to distribute food purely on the basis of "merits" and
"demerits" earned by individuals. This policy was a recipe for creating famine
on a massive scale. Remember that in the period after 1918, only Communist
countries experienced such famines, which led to the deaths of hundreds of
thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. And again in the 1980s, two
African countries that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist, Ethiopia and Mozam-
bique, were the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines.

A preliminary global accounting of the crimes committed by Communist
regimes shows the following:

The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without
trial, and the murder of hundreds of thousands or rebellious workers
and peasants from 1918 to 1922
The famine of 1922, which caused the deaths of 5 million people

Introduction

■ The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920

• The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to
1930

• The liquidation of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937-38

- The deportation of 2 million kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930-1932

■ The destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means
of an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine in 1932-33

• The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Baits,
Moldovans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944-45

■ The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941

■ The wholesale deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943

• The wholesale deportation of the Chechens in 1944

- The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 1944

■ The deportation and extermination of the urban population in
Cambodia from 1975 to 1978

• The stow destruction of the Tibetans by the Chinese since 1950

No list of the crimes committed in the name of Leninism and Stalinism
would be complete without mentioning the virtually identical crimes commit-
ted by the regimes of Mao Zedong, Kim II Sung, and Pol Pot.

A difficult epistemological question remains: Should the historian employ
the primarily legal categories of "crime against humanity 11 and "genocide"? Are
these concepts not unduly time specific — focusing on the condemnation of
Nazism at Nuremberg — for use in historical research aimed at deriving relevant
medium-term conclusions? On the other hand, are these concepts not some-
what tainted with questionable "values' 1 that distort the objectivity of historical
research?

First and foremost, the history of the twentieth century has shown us that
the Nazis had no monopoly over the use of mass murder by states and party-
states. The recent experiences in Bosnia and Rwanda indicate that this practice
continues as one of the hallmarks of this century.

Second, although it might not be appropriate to revive historical methods
of the nineteenth century, whereby historians performed research more for the
purpose of passing judgment than for understanding the issue in question, the
immense human tragedies directly caused by certain ideologies and political
concepts make it impossible to ignore the humanist ideas implicit in our Judeo-
Christian civilization and democratic traditions — for example, the idea of re-
spect for human life. A number of renowned historians readily use the
expression "crime against humanity" to describe Nazi crimes, including Jean-
Perre Azema in his article "Auschwitz" 7 and Pierre Vidal-Naquet on the trial
of Paul Touvier. 8 Therefore, it does not seem inappropriate to use such terms
and concepts to characterize the crimes committed by Communist regimes.

The Crimes of Communism

In addition to the question of whether the Communists in power were
directly responsible for these crimes, there is also the issue of complicity. Article
7(3.77) of the Canadian criminal code, amended in 1987, states that crimes
against humanity include infractions of attempting, conspiring, counseling,
aiding, and providing encouragement for de facto complicity? This accords with
the definition of crimes against humanity in Article 7(3.76) of the same code:
"attempting or conspiring to commit, counseling any person to commit, aiding
or abetting anv person in the commission of, or being an accessory after the fact
in relation to the act" (emphasis added). Incredibly, from the 1920s to the 1950s,
when hundreds of thousands of people served in the ranks of the Communist
International and local sections of the "world party of the revolution," Com-
munists and fellow-travelers around the world warmly approved Lenin's and
subsequently Stalin's policies. From the 1950s to the 1970s, hundreds of thou-
sands of people sang the praises of the "Great Helmsman" of the Chinese
Revolution and extolled the virtues of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution. Much closer to our time, there was widespread rejoicing when Pol
Pot came to power. 111 Many will say that they "didn't know." Undoubtedly, of
course, it was not always easy to learn the facts or to discover the truth, for
Communist regimes had mastered the art of censorship as their favorite tech-
nique for concealing their true activities. But quite often this ignorance was
merely the result of ideologically motivated self-deception. Starting in the
1940s and 1950s, many facts about these atrocities had become public knowl-
edge and undeniable. And although many of these apologists have cast aside
their gods of vesterdav, they have done so quietly and discreetly. What are we
to make of a profoundly amoral doctrine that seeks to stamp out every last trace
of eivic-mindedness in men's souls, and damn the consequences?

In 1968 one of the pioneers in the study of Communist terror, Robert
Conquest, wrote: "The fact that so many people 'swallowed 1 [the Great Terror!
hook, line, and sinker was probably one of the reasons that the Terror suc-
ceeded so well. In particular, the trials would not be so significant had they not
received the blessing of some 'independent' foreign commentators. These pun-
dits should be held accountable as accomplices in the bloody politics of the
purges or at least blamed for the fact that the political assassinations resumed
when the first show trial, regarding Zinoviev in 1936, was given an ill-deserved
stamp of approval." 11 If the moral and intellectual complicity of a number of
non-Communists is judged by this criterion, what can be said of the complicity
of the Communists 3 Louis Aragon, for one, has publicly expressed regret for
having appealed in a 1931 poem for the creation of a Communist political police
in France. 12

Joseph Berger, a former Comintern official who was "purged" and then
exiled to the camps, quotes a letter received from a former gulag deportee who
remained a Partv member even after her return:

Introduction

My generation of Communists everywhere accepted the Stalinist form
of leadership. We acquiesced in the crimes. That is true not only of
Soviet Communists, but of Communists all over the world. We, espe-
cially the active and leading members of the Party, carry a stain on our
consciences individually and collectively. The only way we can erase it is
to make sure that nothing of the sort ever happens again. How was all
this possible? Did we all go crazy, or have we now become traitors to
Communism? The truth is that all of us, including the leaders directly
under Stalin, saw r these crimes as the opposite of what they were. We
believed that they were important contributions to the victory of social-
ism. We thought everything that promoted the power politics of the
Communist Party in the Soviet Union and in the world was good for
socialism. We never suspected that conflict between Communist politics
and Communist ethics was possible. 11

Berger, however, tries to have it both ways. "On the other hand, I person-
ally feel that there is a difference between criticizing people for having accepted
Stalin's policy, which many Communists did not do, and blaming them for not
having prevented his crimes. To suppose that this could have been done by any
individual, no matter how important he might have been, is to misunderstand
Stalin's byzantine tyranny." 14 Thus Berger has found an excuse for having been
in the US.S.R. and for having been caught up in its infernal machine without
any means of escape. But what self-deception kept Western European Com-
munists, who had not been directly arrested by the People's Commissariat of
Internal Affairs (NKVD, the secret police), blindly babbling away about the
system and its leader? Why could they not hear the wake-up call at the very
start? In his remarkable work on the Russian Revolution, The Soviet Tragedy,
Martin Malia lifts a corner of the curtain when he speaks of "this paradox . . .
that . . . [it] takes a great ideal to produce a great crime." 15 Annie Kriegel,
another major student of Communism, insists that there is a cause-and-effect
relationship between the two faces of Communism, as surely as day follows
night.

Tzvetan Todorov offered the first response to this paradox:

A citizen of a Western democracy fondly imagines that totalitarianism
lies utterly beyond the pale of normal human aspirations. And yet,
totalitarianism could never have survived so long had it not been able to
draw so many people into its fold. There is something else — it is a
formidably efficient machine. Communist ideology offers an idealized
model for society and exhorts us toward it. The desire to change the
world in the name of an ideal is, after all, an essential characteristic of
human identity , . . Furthermore, Communist society strips the individ-
ual of his responsibilities. It is always "somebody else" who makes the

The Crimes of Communism

decisions. Remember, individual responsibility can feel like a crushing
burden . . . The attraction of a totalitarian system, which has had a
powerful allure for many, has its roots in a fear of freedom and responsi-
bility. This explains the popularity of authoritarian regimes (which is
Frieh I'YomnVs thesis in Escape from Freedom). None of this is new;
Boethius had the right idea long ago when he spoke of "voluntary
servitude." 1 "

The complicity of those who rushed into voluntary servitude has not
always been as abstract and theoretical as it may seem. Simple acceptance
and /or dissemination of propaganda designed to conceal the truth is invariably
a svmptom of active complicity. Although it may not always succeed, as is
demonstrated by the tragedy in Rwanda, the glare of the spotlight is the only
effective response to mass crimes that are committed in secret and kept hidden
from prying eyes.

An analysis of terror and dictatorship — the defining characteristics of Com-
munists in power is no easy task. Jean KUenstein has defined Stalinism as a
combination of Greek tragedy and Oriental despotism. This definition is ap-
pealing, but it fails to account for the sheer modernity of the Communist
experience, its totalitarian impact distinct from previously existing forms of
dictatorship. A comparative synopsis may help to put it in context.

First, we should consider the possibility that responsibility for the crimes
of Communism can be traced to a Russian penchant for oppression. However,
the tsarist regime of terror against which the Bolsheviks fought pales in com-
parison with the horrors committed by the Bolsheviks when they took power.
The tsar allowed political prisoners to face a meaningful justice system. The
counsel for the defendant could represent his client up to the time of indict-
ment and even beyond, and he could also appeal to national and international
public opinion, an option unavailable under Communist regimes. Prisoners and
convicts benefited from a set of rules governing the prisons, and the system of
imprisonment and deportation was relatively lenient. Those who were deported
could take their families, read and write as they pleased, go hunting and fishing,
and talk about their "misfortune" with their companions. Lenin and Stalin had
firsthand experience of this. Kven the events described by Fyodor Dostoevsky
in Memoirs from (he House of the Dead, which had such a great impact when it
was published, seem tame by comparison with the horrors of Communism.
True, riots and insurrections were brutally crushed by the ancien regime. How-
ever, from 1 825 to 1917 the total number of people sentenced to death in Russia
for their political beliefs or activities was 6,360, of whom only 3,932 were
executed. This number can be subdivided chronologically into 19 1 for the years
1825-1905 and 3,741 for 1906-1910. These figures were surpassed by the

Introduction

Bolsheviks in March 1 9 18, after they had been in power for only four months.
It follows that tsarist repression was not in the same league as Communist
dictatorship.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Communism set a standard for terror to
which fascist regimes could aspire. A glance at the figures for these regimes
shows that a comparison may not be as straightforward as it would first appear.
Italian Fascism, the first regime of its kind and the first that openly claimed to
be "totalitarian," undoubtedly imprisoned and regularly mistreated its political
opponents. Although incarceration seldom led to death, during the 1930s Irak
had a few hundred political prisoners and several hundred lon/ituiti, placed
under house arrest on the country's coastal islands. In addition, of course, there
were tens of thousands of political exiles.

Before World War II, Na/i terror targeted several groups. Opponents of
the Na/i regime, consisting mostly of Communists, Socialists, anarchists, and
trade union activists, were incarcerated in prisons and invariably interned in
concentration camps, where they were subjected to extreme brutalitv. All told,
from 1933 to 1939 about 20,000 left-wing militants were killed after trial or
without trial in the camps and prisons, These figures do not include the
slaughter of other Nazis to settle old scores, as in "The Night of the Long
Knives" in June 1934. Another category of victims doomed to die were Ger-
mans who did not meet the proper racial criteria of "tall blond Aryans/ 1 such
as those who were old or mentally or physically defective. As a result of the
war, Hitler forged ahead with a euthanasia program — 70,000 Germans were
gassed between the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1941, when churches
began to demand that this program be stopped. The gassing methods devised
for this euthanasia program were applied to the third group of victims, the
Jews.

Before World War II, crackdowns against the Jews were widespread; per-
secution reached its peak during Kristullnacht, with several hundred deaths and
35,000 rounded up for internment in concentration camps. These figures apply
only to the period before the invasion of the Soviet Union. Thereafter the full
terror of the Nazis was unleashed, producing the following body count- 15
million civilians killed in occupied countries, 6 million Jews, 3.3 million Soviet
prisoners of war, 1.1 million deportees who died in the camps, and several
hundred thousand Gypsies. We should add another 8 million who succumbed
to the ravages of forced labor and 1.6 million surviving inmates of the concen-
tration camps.

The Nazi terror captures the imagination for three reasons. First, it
touched the lives of Europeans so closely. Second, because the Nazis were
vanquished and their leaders prosecuted at Nuremberg, their crimes have been
officially exposed and categorized as crimes. And finally, the revelation of the

The Crimes of Communism

genocide carried out against the Jews outraged the conscience of humanity by
its irrationality, racism, and unprecedented bloodthirstiness.

Our purpose here is not to devise some kind of macabre comparative
system for crunching numbers, some kind of grand total that doubles the
horror, some kind of hierarchy of cruelty. But the intransigent facts demon-
strate that Communist regimes have victimized approximately 100 million
people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis. This
clear record should provide at least some basis for assessing the similarity
between the Nazi regime, which since 1945 has been considered the most
viciously criminal regime of this century, and the Communist system, which
as late as 1991 had preserved its international legitimacy unimpaired and which,
even today, is still in power in certain countries and continues to protect its
supporters the world over. And even though many Communist parties have
belatedly acknowledged Stalinism's crimes, most have not abandoned Lxnin's
principles and scarcely question their own involvement in acts ot terrorism.

The methods implemented by Lenin and perfected by Stalin and their
henchmen bring to mind the methods used by the Nazis, but most often this
is because the latter adopted the techniques developed by the former. Rudolf
Hess, charged with organizing the camp at Auschwitz and later appointed its
commandant, is a perfect example: "The Reich Security I lead Office issued to
the commandants a full collection of reports concerning the Russian concen-
tration camps. These described in great detail the conditions in, and organiza-
tion of, the Russian camps, as supplied by former prisoners who had managed
to escape. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Russians, by their
massive employment of forced labor, had destroyed whole peoples." 1 ' However,
the fact that the techniques of mass violence and the intensity of their use
originated with the Communists and that the Nazis were inspired by them does
not imply, in our view, that one can postulate a cause-and-effect relationship
between the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of Nazism.

From the end of the 1920s, the State Political Directorate (GPU, the new
name for the Chcka) introduced a quota method— each region and district had
to arrest, deport, or shoot a certain percentage of people who were members
of several "enemy" social classes. These quotas were centrally defined under
the supervision of the Party. The mania for planning and maintaining statistics
was not confined to the economy: it was also an important weapon in the arsenal
of terror. 1'Yom 1920 on, with the victory of the Red Army over the White
Army in the Crimea, statistical and sociological methods made an appearance,
with victims selected according to precise criteria on the basis of a compulsory
questionnaire. The same "sociological" methods were used by the Soviet Union
to organize mass deportations and liquidations in the Baltic states and occupied
Poland in 1939-1941. As with the Nazis, the transportation of deportees in

Introduction

cattle cars ushered in "aberrations." In ] 943 and 1944, in the middle of the
war, Stalin diverted thousands of trucks and hundreds of thousands of soldiers
serving in the special NKVD troops from the front on a short-term basis in
order to deport, the various peoples living in the Caucasus. This genocidal
impulse, which aims at "the total or partial destruction of a national, ethnic,
racial, or religious group, or a group that has been determined on the basis of
any other arbitrary criterion," was applied by Communist rulers against groups
branded as enemies and to entire segments of society, and was pursued to its
maximum by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

Efforts to draw parallels between Nazism and Communism on the basis
of their respective extermination tactics may give offense to some people.
However, we should recall how in Forever Flowing Vasily Grossman, whose
mother was killed by the Nazis in the Berdychiv ghetto, who authored the first
work on Treblinka, and who was one of the editors of the Black Booh on the
extermination of Soviet Jews, has one of his characters describe the famine in
Ukraine: "writers kept writing . . . Stalin himself, too: the kulaks are parasites;
they are burning grain; they are killing children. And it was openly proclaimed
'that the rage and wrath of the masses must be inflamed against them, they
must be destroyed as a class, because they arc accursed." 1 He adds: "To mas-
sacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings, just
as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Thus did Lenin
and Stalin say: kulaks are not human beings." In conclusion, Grossman says of
the children of the kulaks: "That is exactly how the Nazis put the Jewish
children into the Nazi gas chambers: 'You are not allowed to live vou are all
Jews!'" 1 "

Time and again the focus of the terror was less on targeted individuals
than on groups of people. The purpose of the terror was to exterminate a group
that had been designated as the enemy. Even though it might be only a small
fraction of society, it had to be stamped out to satisfy this genocidal impulse.
Thus, the techniques of segregation and exclusion employed in a "class-based
totalitarianism" closely resemble the techniques of "race-based totalitarian-
ism." The future Nazi society was to be built upon a "pure race," and the future
Communist society was to be built upon a proletarian people purified of the
dregs of the bourgeoisie. The restructuring of these two societies was envi-
sioned in the same way, even if the crackdowns were different. Therefore, it
would be foolish to pretend that Communism is a form of universalism. Com-
munism may have a worldwide purpose, but like Nazism it deems a part of
humanity unworthy of existence. The difference is that the Communist model
is based on the class system, the Nazi model on race and territory Thus the
transgressions of Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and the Khmer Rouge pose a
fresh challenge for humanity, and particularly for legal scholars and historians:

The Crimes of Communism

specifically, how do we describe a crime designed to exterminate not merely
individuals or opposing groups but entire segments of society on a massive
scale for their political and ideological beliefs? A whole new language is needed
for this. Some authors in the English-speaking countries use the term "politi-
cide." Or is the term "Communist crimes," suggested by Czech legal scholars,
preferable?

How arc we to assess Communism's crimes? What lessons are we to learn from
them? Why has it been necessary to wait until the end of the twentieth century
for this subject to show up on the academic radar screen? It is undoubtedly the
case that the study of Stalinist and Communist terror, when compared to the
study of Nazi crimes, has a great deal of catching-up to do (although such
research is gaining popularity in Eastern Europe).

One cannot help noticing the strong contrast between the study of Nazi
and Communist crimes. The victors of 1945 legitimately made Nazi crimes —
and especially the genocide of the Jews — the central focus of their condemna-
tion of Nazism. A number of researchers around the world have been working
on these issues for decades. Thousands of books and dozens of films — most
notably Night arid Fog, Shoah, Sophie's Choice, and Schmdlers List— have been
devoted to the subject. Raul Hilberg, to name but one example, has centered
his major work upon a detailed description of the methods used to put Jews to
death in the Third Reich. lv

Yet scholars have neglected the crimes committed by the Communists.
While names such as Himmler and Eichmann are recognized around the world
as bywords for twentieth-century barbarism, the names of Feliks Dzerzhinsky,
Genrikh Yagoda, and Nikolai Ezhov languish in obscurity. As for Lenin, Mao,
Ho Chi Minn, and even Stalin, they have always enjoyed a surprising reverence.
A French government agency, the National Lottery, was crazy enough to use
Stalin and Mao in one of its advertising campaigns. Would anyone even dare
to come up with the idea of featuring Hitler or Goebbels in commercials?

The extraordinary attention paid to Hitler's crimes is entirely justified. It
respects the wishes of the surviving witnesses, it satisfies the needs of re-
searchers trying to understand these events, and it reflects the desire of moral
and political authorities to strengthen democratic values. But the revelations
concerning Communist crimes cause barely a stir. Why is there such an awk-
ward silence from politicians? Why such a deafening silence from the academic
world regarding the Communist catastrophe, which touched the lives of about
one-third of humanity on four continents during a period spanning eighty
years? Why is there such widespread reluctance to make such a crucial factor
as crime — mass crime, systematic crime, and crime against humanity — a cen-
tral factor in the analysis of Communism? Is this really something that is

Introduction

beyond human understanding? Or are we talking: about a refusal to scrutinize
the subject too closely for fear of learning the truth about it?

The reasons for this reticence are many and various. P'irst, there is the
dictators' understandable urge to erase their crimes and to justify the actions
they cannot hide. Khrushchev's "Secret Speech 11 of 1956 was the first admis-
sion of Communist atrocities by a Communist leader. It was also the statement
of a tyrant seeking to gloss over the crimes he himself committed when he
headed the Ukrainian Communist Party at the height of the terror, crimes that
he cleverly attributed to Stalin by claiming that he and his henchmen were
merely obeying orders. To cover up the vast majority of Communist offenses,
Khrushchev spoke only of victims who were Communists, although thev were
far fewer in number than the other kind. He defined these crimes with a
euphemism, describing them in his conclusion as "abuses committed under
Stalin" in order to justify the continuity of the system that retained the same
principles, the same structure, and the same people.

In his inimitable fashion Khrushchev described the opposition he faced
while preparing his "Secret Speech; 1 especially from one of Stalin's confidants:
"[Lazar] Kaganovich was such a yes-man that he would have cut his own
father's throat if Stalin had winked and said it was in the interests of the
cause — the Stalinist cause, that is . . . He was arguing against me out of a selfish
fear for his own hide. He was motivated entirely by his eagerness to escape am
responsibility for what had happened. If crimes had been committed, Ka-
ganovich wanted to make sure his own tracks were covered." 20 The absolute
denial of access to archives in Communist countries, the total control of the
print and other media as well as of border crossings, the propaganda trumpet-
ing the regime's "successes; 1 and the entire apparatus for keeping information
under lock and key were designed primarily to ensure that the awful truth
would never see the light of day.

Not satisfied with the concealment of their misdeeds, the tyrants system-
atically attacked all who dared to expose their crimes. After World War 11 this
became starkly clear on two occasions in France. From January to April 1949,
the "trial" of Viktor Kravchenko — a former senior official who wrote / Chose
Freedom, in which he described Stalin's dictatorship—was conducted in Pans
in the pages of the Communist magazine Les letlres francaiscs, which was
managed by Louis Aragon and which heaped abuse on Kravchenko. From
November 1950 to January 1951, again in Paris, Les letlres franchises held
another "trial" — of David Rousset, an intellectual and former Trotskvite who
was deported to Germany by the Nazis and who in 1946 received the Renaudot
Prize for his book The World of Concentration Camps. On 12 November 1949
Rousset urged all former Nazi camp deportees to form a commission of inquiry
into the Soviet camp system and was savagely attacked by the Communist press,

The Crimes of Communism

which denied the existence of such camps. Following Rousset's call, Margaret
Buber-Neumann recounted her experience of being twice deported to concen-
tration camps — once to a Nazi camp and once to a Soviet camp— in an article
published on 25 February 1950 in Figaro iitteratre, u An Inquiry on Soviet
Camps: Who Is Worse, Satan or Beelzebub?"

Despite these efforts to enlighten humankind, the tyrants continued to
wheel out heavy artillery to silence all those who stood in their way anywhere
in the world. The Communist assassins set out to incapacitate, discredit, and
intimidate their adversaries. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Al-
eksandr Zinoviev, and Feomd Plyushch were expelled from their own country;
Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky; General Pctro Hryhorenko was thrown
into a psychiatric hospital; and Georgi Markov was assassinated with an um-
brella that fired pellets rilled with poison.

In the face of such incessant intimidation and cover-ups, the victims grew
reluctant to speak out and were effectively prevented from reentering main-
stream society, where their accusers and executioners were ever-present. Vasily
Grossman eloquently describes their despair. 21 In contrast to the Jewish Holo-
caust, which the international Jewish community has actively commemorated,
it has been impossible for victims of Communism and their legal advocates to
keep the memory of the tragedy alive, and any requests for commemoration or
demands for reparation are brushed aside.

When the tyrants could no longer hide the truth—the firing squads, the
concentration camps, the man-made famine— they did their best to justify these
atrocities by glossing them over. After admitting the use of terror, they justified
it as a necessary aspect of revolution through the use of such catchphrases as
"When you cut down a forest, the shavings get blown away" or "You can't make
an omelet without breaking eggs." Vladimir Bukovsky retorted that he had seen
the broken eggs, but no one he knew had ever tasted the omelet! Perhaps the
single greatest evil was the perversion of language. As if by magic, the concen-
tration-Lamp system was turned into a "reeducation system," and the tyrants
became "educators" who transformed the people of the old society into u new
people. 11 The zeks, a term used for Soviet concentration camp prisoners, were
forcibly "invited" to place their trust in a system that enslaved them. In China
the concentration-camp prisoner is called a "student, 11 and he is required to
studv the correct thoughts of the Party and to reform his own faulty thinking.
As is usually the case, a lie is not, strictly speaking, the opposite of the
truth, and a lie will generally contain an element of truth. Perverted words are
situated in a twisted vision that distorts the landscape; one is confronted with
a mvopic social and political philosophy. Attitudes twisted by Communist
propaganda are easy to correct, but it is monumentally difficult to instruct false
prophets in the ways of intellectual tolerance. The first impression is always

Introduction

the one that lingers. Like martial artists, the Communists, thanks to their
incomparable propaganda strength grounded in the subversion of language,
successfully turned the tables on the criticisms leveled against their terrorist
tactics, continually uniting the ranks of their militants and sympathizers by
renewing the Communist act of faith. Thus they held fast to their fundamental
principle of ideological belief, as formulated by Tertullian for his own era: "I
believe, because it is absurd."

Like common prostitutes, intellectuals found themselves inveigled into
counterpropaganda operations. In 1928 Maksim Gorky accepted an invitation
to go on an "excursion" to the Solovetski Islands, an experimental concentra-
tion camp that would '"metastasize" (to use Solzhenitsyn's word) into the Gulag
system. On his return Gorky wrote a book extolling the glories of the Solovetski
camps and the Soviet government. A French writer, Henri Barbusse, recipient
of the 1916 Prix Goncourt, did not hesitate to praise Stalin's regime for a fee.
His 1928 book on "marvelous Georgia" made no mention of the massacre
carried out there in 1921 by Stalin and his henchman Sergo Ordzhonikidze. It
also ignored Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, who was noteworthy for his
Machiavellian sensibility and his sadism. In 1935 Barbusse brought out the first
official biography of Stalin. More recently Maria Antonietta Macciochi spoke
gushingly about Mao Zedong, and Alain Peyrefitte echoed the same sentiments
to a lesser degree, while Danielle Mitterrand chimed in to praise the deeds of
Fidel Castro. Cupidity, spinelessness, vanity, fascination with power, violence,
and revolutionary fervor — whatever the motivation, totalitarian dictatorships
have always found plenty of diehard supporters when they had need of them,
and the same is true of Communist as of other dictatorships.

Confronted with this onslaught of Communist propaganda, the West has
long labored under an extraordinary self-deception, simultaneously fueled bv
naivete in the face of a particularly devious system, by the fear of Soviet power,
and by the cynicism of politicians. There was self-deception at the meeting in
Yalta, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ceded F.astern Europe to
Stalin in return for a solemn undertaking that the latter would hold free
elections at the earliest opportunity. Realism and resignation had a rendezvous
with destiny in Moscow in December 1944, when General Charles de Gaulle
abandoned hapless Poland to the devil in return for guarantees of social and
political peace, duly assured by Maurice Thorez on his return to Paris.

This self-deception was a source of comfort and was given quasi-legiti-
macy by the widespread belief among Communists (and many leftists) in the
West that while these countries were "building socialism," the Communist
"Utopia," a breeding ground for social and political conflicts, would remain
safely distant. Simone Weil epitomized this pro-Communist trendiness when
she said, "revolutionary workers are only too thankful to have a state backing

The Crimes of Communism

them a state that gives an official character, legitimacy, and reality to their

actions as only a state can, and that at the same time is sufficiently far away
from them geographically to avoid seeming oppressive." 22 Communism was
supposedly showing its true colors — it claimed to be an emissary of the En-
lightenment, of a tradition of social and human emancipation, of a dream of
u true equality," and of "happiness for all" as envisioned by Gracchus Babeuf.
And paradoxically, it was this image of "enlightenment" that helped keep the
true nature of its evil almost entirely concealed.

Whether intentional or not, when dealing with this ignorance of the
criminal dimension of Communism, our contemporaries' indifference to their
fellow humans can never be forgotten. It is not that these individuals are
coldhearted. On the contrary, in certain situations they can draw on vast un-
tapped reserves of brotherhood, friendship, affection, even love. However, as
T/.vetan Todorov has pointed out, "remembrance of our own woes prevents us
from perceiving the suffering of others." 21 And at the end of both world wars,
no European or Asian nation was spared the endless grief and sorrow of licking
its own wounds. France s own hesitancy to confront the history of the dark
years of the Occupation is a compelling illustration in and of itself The history,
or rather nonhistory, of the Occupation continues to overshadow the French
conscience. We encounter the same pattern, albeit to a lesser degree, with the
history of the "Nazi" period in Germany, the "Fascist" period in Italy, the
"Franco" era in Spain, the civil war in Greece, and so on. In this century of
blood and iron, everyone has been too preoccupied with his own misfortunes
to worry much about the misfortunes of others.

However, there are three more specific reasons for the cover-up of the
criminal aspects of Communism. The first is the fascination with the whole
notion of revolution itself. In today's world, breast-beating over the idea of
"revolution," as dreamed about in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is
far from over. The icons of revolution— the red flag, the International, and the
raised fist— rccmcrgc with each social movement and on a grand scale. Che
Guevara is back in fashion. Openly revolutionary groups are active and enjoy
everv legal right to state their views, hurling abuse on even the mildest criti-
cisms of crimes committed by their predecessors and only too eager to spout
the eternal verities regarding the "achievements" of Lenin, Trotsky, or Mao.
This revolutionary fervor is not embraced solely by revolutionaries. Many
contributors to this book themselves used to believe in Communist propaganda.
The second reason is the participation of the Soviet Union in the victory
over Nazism, which allowed the Communists to use fervent patriotism as a
mask to conceal their latest plans to take power into their own hands. From
June 1941, Communists in all occupied countries commenced an active and
frequently armed resistance against Nazi or Italian occupation forces. Like

Introduction

resistance fighters everywhere, they paid the price for their efforts, with thou-
sands being executed by firing squad, slaughtered, or deported. And they
"played the martyr 11 in order to sanctify the Communist cause and to silence
all criticism of it. Jn addition to this, during the Resistance many non-
Communists became comrades-in-arms, forged bonds of solidarity, and shed
their blood alongside their Communist fellows. As a result of this past these
non-Communists may have been willing to turn a blind eye to certain things.
In France, the Gaul list attitude was often influenced by this shared memory
and was a factor behind the politics of General dc Gaulle, who tried to play off
the Soviet Union against the Americans. 24

The Communists 1 participation in the war and in the victory over Nazism
institutionalized the whole notion of antifascism as an article of faith for the
left. The Communists, of course, portrayed themselves as the best repre-
sentatives and defenders of this antifascism. For Communism, antifascism
became a brilliantly effective label that could be used to silence one's opponents
quickly. Francois Furet wrote some superb articles on the subject. The defeated
Nazism was labeled the "Supreme Evil" by the Allies, and Communism thus
automatically wound up on the side of Good. This was made crvstal clear
during the Nuremberg trials, where Soviet jurists were among the prosecutors.
Thus a veil was drawn over embarrassing antidemocratic episodes, such as the
German-Soviet pact of 1939 and the massacre at Katyn. Victory over the Nazis
was supposed to demonstrate the superiority of the Communist system. In the
Furope liberated by the British and the Americans (which was spared the
sufferings of occupation) this was done for propaganda purposes to arouse a
keen sense of gratitude to the Red Army and a sense of guilt for the sacrifices
made by the peoples of the US.S.R. The Communists did not hesitate to play
upon the sentiments of Europeans in spreading the Communist message.

By the same token, the ways in which Eastern Europe was "liberated 11 bv
the Red Army remain largely unknown in the West, where historians assimilate
two very different kinds of "liberation, 11 one leading to the restoration of
democracies, the other paving the way for the advent of dictatorships. In
Central and Eastern Furope, the Soviet system succeeded the Thousand Year
Reich, and Witold Gombrowicz neatly captured the tragedy facing these peo-
ples: "The end of the war did not bring liberation to the Poles. In the battle-
grounds of Central Europe, it simply meant swapping one form of evil for
another, Hitler's henchmen for Stalin's. While sycophants cheered and rejoiced
at the 'emancipation of the Polish people from the feudal yoke,' the same lit
cigarette was simply passed from hand to hand in Poland and continued to burn
the skin of people." 25 Therein lay the fault line between two European folk
memories. However, a number of publications have lifted the curtain to show

The Crimes of Communism

how the US.S.R. "liberated" the Poles, Germans, Czechs, and Slovaks from

Nazism. 26

The final reason for the gentle treatment of Communism is subtler and a
little trickier to explain. After 1945 the Jewish genocide became a byword for
modern barbarism, the epitome of twentieth-century mass terror. After initially
disputing the unique nature of the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, the
Communists soon grasped the benefits involved in immortalizing the Holocaust
as a way of rekindling antifascism on a more systematic basis. The specter of
u thc filthy beast whose stomach is fertile again 11 — to use Bertolt Brecht's fa-
mous phrase— was invoked incessantly and constantly. More recently, a single-
minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the
Holocaust as a unique atrocity has also prevented an assessment of other
episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world. After all, it seems
scarcelv plausible that the victors who had helped bring about the destruction
of a genocidal apparatus might themselves have put the very same methods into
practice. When faced with this paradox, people generally preferred to bury their
heads in the sand.

The first turning point in the official recognition of Communist crimes came
on the evening of 24 February 1956, when First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev
took the podium at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, the CPSU The proceedings were conducted behind closed
doors; only delegates to the Congress were present. In absolute silence,
stunned by what they were hearing, the delegates listened as the first secretary
of the Party systematically dismantled the image of the "little father of the
peoples," of the "genius Stalin," who for thirty years had been the hero of
world Communism. This report, immortalized as Khrushchev's "Secret
Speech," was one of the watersheds in the life of contemporary Communism.
For the first time, a high-ranking Communist leader had officially acknowl-
edged, albeit only as a tactical concession, that the regime that assumed power
in 1917 had undergone a criminal "deviation."

Khrushchev's motivations for breaking one of the great taboos of the
Soviet regime were numerous. Khrushchev's primary aim was to attribute the
crimes of Communism only to Stalin, thus circumscribing the evil, and to
eradicate it once and for all in an effort to salvage the Communist regime. A
determination to carry out an attack on Stalin's clique, which stood in the way
of Khrushchev's power and believed in the methods practiced by their former
boss, entered equally into his decision. Beginning in June 1957, these men were
systematically removed from office. However, for the first time since 1934, the
act of "being put to death politically" was not followed by an actual death, and

Introduction

this telling detail itself illustrates that Khrushchev's motives were more com-
plex. Having been the boss of Ukraine for years and, in this capacity, having
carried out and covered up the slaughter of innocent civilians on a massive
scale, he may have grown weary of all this bloodshed. In his memoirs, in which
he was naturally concerned with portraying himself in a flattering light,
Khrushchev recalled his feelings: "The Congress will end, and resolutions will
be passed, all as a matter of form. But then what? The hundreds and thousands
of people who were shot will stay on our consciences," As a result, he severely
reprimanded his colleagues:

What are we going to do about all those who were arrested and elimi-
nated? . . . We now know that the people who suffered during the re-
pressions were innocent. We have indisputable proof that, far from
being enemies of the people, they were honest men and women, devoted
to the Party, dedicated to the Revolution, and committed to the Leninist
cause and to the building of" Socialism and Communism in the Soviet
Union ... I still think it's impossible to cover everything up. Sooner or
later people will be coming out of the prisons and the camps, and they'll
return to the cities. They'll tell their relatives, friends, and comrades,
and everyone back home what happened . . . we're obliged to speak
candidly to the delegates about the conduct of the Party leadership
during the years in question . . . How ean we pretend not to know what
happened 3 We know there was a reign of repression and arbitrarv rule in
the Party, and Me must tell the Congress what we know ... In the life of
anyone who has committed a crime, there comes a moment when a
confession will assure him leniency if not exculpation.- 7

Among some of the men who had had a hand in the crimes perpetrated
under Stalin and who generally owed their promotions to the extermination of
their predecessors in office, a certain kind of remorse took hold — a lukewarm
remorse, a self-interested remorse, the remorse of a politician, but remorse
nonetheless. It was necessary for someone to put a stop to the slaughter.
Khrushchev had the courage to do this even if, in 1956, he sent Soviet tanks
into Budapest.

In 1961, during the Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev
recalled not only the victims who were Communists but all of Stalin's victims
and even proposed that a monument be erected in their memory. At this point
Khrushchev may have overstepped the invisible boundary beyond which the
very raison d'etre of Communism was being challenged — namely, the absolute
monopoly on power reserved for the Communist Party. The monument never
saw the light of day. In 1962 the first secretary authorized the publication of
One Day in the Life of Ivan Dermovkh, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsvn. On 24

The Crimes of Communism

October 1964 Khrushchev was stripped of his powers, but his life was spared,
and he died in obscurity in 1971.

There is a substantial degree of scholarly consensus regarding the impor-
tance of the "Secret Speech," which represented a fundamental break in Com-
munism's twentieth-century trajectory. Francois Furet, on the verge of quitting
the French Communist Party in 1954, wrote these words on the subject:

Now all of a sudden the "Secret Speech" of February 1956 had single-
handedly shattered the Communist idea then prevailing around the
world. The voice that denounced Stalin's crimes did not come from the
West but from Moscow, and from the "holy of holies" in Moscow, the
Kremlin. It was not the voice of a Communist who had been ostracized
but the voice of the leading Communist in the world, the head of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Thus, instead of being tainted
by the suspicion that was invariably leveled at accusations made by
ex-Communists, Khrushchev's remarks gained the luster that reflected
glory upon its leader . . . The extraordinary power of the "Secret
Speech" on the mind stemmed from the fact that it did not have any
opponents. 28

This event was especially paradoxical inasmuch as a number of contem-
poraries had long warned the Bolsheviks about the inherent dangers of this
course of action. From 1917 to 1918 disgruntlement arose even within the
socialist movement itself, including among believers in the "great light from
the East," who were suddenly relentless in their criticism of the Bolsheviks.
Essentially the dispute centered upon the methods used by Lenin: violence,
crime, and terror. From the 1920s to the 1950s, while the dark side of Bolshe-
vism was being exposed by a number of witnesses, victims, and skilled ob-
servers (as well as in countless articles and other publications), people had to
bide their time until the Communist rulers would recognize this themselves.
Alas, the significance of this undoubtedly important development was misin-
terpreted by the growing body of public opinion as a recognition of the errors
of Communism. This was indeed a misinterpretation, since the "Secret
Speech" tackled only the question of Communists as victims; but at least this
was a step in the right direction. It was the first confirmation of the testimony
by witnesses and of previous studies, and it corroborated long-standing suspi-
cions that Communism was responsible for creating a colossal tragedy in

Russia.

The leaders of many "fraternal parties" were initially unconvinced of the
need to jump on Khrushchev's bandwagon. After some delay, a few leaders in
other countries did follow Khrushchev's lead in exposing these atrocities. How-
ever, it was not until 1979 that the Chinese Communist Party divided Mao's

Introduction

policies between "great merits; 1 which lasted until 1957, and "great errors, 11
which came afterward. The Vietnamese contented themselves with oblique
references to the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot. As for Castro, the atrocities
committed under him have been denied.

Before Khrushchev's speech, denunciation of crimes committed by Com-
munists came only from their enemies or from Trotskyite dissidents or anar-
chists; and such denunciations had not been especially effective. The desire to
bear witness was as strong among the survivors of Communist massacres as it
had been among those who survived the Nazi slaughters. However, the survi-
vors were few and far between, especially in France, where tangible experience
of the Soviet concentration-camp system had directly affected only a few
isolated groups, such as a In Spite of Ourselves, 11 from Alsace-Lorraine.- 9 Most
of the time, however, the witness statements and the work carried out by
independent commissions, such as David Roussct's International Commission
on the Concentration Camp System and the Commission to Find the Truth
about Stalin's Crimes, have been buried beneath an avalanche of Communist
propaganda, aided and abetted by a silence born of cowardliness or indiffer-
ence. This silence generally managed to win out over the sporadic moments ol
self-awareness resulting from the appearance of a new analytical work (such as
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago) or an irreproachable eyewitness account
(such as Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales and Pin Yathays Stay Alive, My
Son). M) Regrettably, it was most tenacious in Western societies whenever the
phenomenon of Communism came under the microscope. Until now they have
refused to face the reality that the Communist system, albeit in varying degrees,
possessed fundamentally criminal underpinnings. By refusing to acknowledge
this, they were co-conspirators in "the lie," as perhaps best summed up by
Friedrich Nietzsche: "Men believe in the truth of anything so long as they see
that others strongly believe it is true. 1 '

Despite widespread reluctance to confront the issue, a number ot ob-
servers have risen to the challenge. From the 1920s to the 1950s, lor want of
more reliable data (which were assiduously concealed by the Soviet regime)
researchers were wholly reliant on information provided by defectors. Not only
were these eyewitness accounts subject to the normal skepticism with which
historians treat such testimony; they were also systematically discredited by
sympathizers of the Communist system, who accused the defectors of being
motivated by vengeance or of being the tools of anti-Communist powers. Who
would have thought, in 1959, that a description of the Gulag could be provided
by a high-ranking KGB defector, as in the book by Paul Barton?-" And who
would have thought of consulting Barton himself, an exile from Czechoslovakia
whose real name was Jin Veltrusky, who was one of the organizers of the
anti-Nazi insurrections in Prague in 1945 and who was forced to flee his

The Crimes of Communism

country in 1948? Yet anyone who confronts the information held in recently
opened classified archives will find that the accounts provided in 1959 were
totally accurate.

In the 1960s and 1980s, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and later the
"Red Wheel" cycle on the Russian Revolution produced a quantum shift in
public opinion. Precisely because it was literature, and from a master craftsman,
The Gulag Archipelago captured the true nature of an unspeakable system.
However, even Solzhenitsyn had trouble piercing the veil. In 1975 one journal-
ist from a major French daily compared Solzhenitsyn to Pierre Laval, Jacques
Doriot, and Marcel Deat, "who welcomed the Nazis as liberators." 12 Nonethe-
less, his account was instrumental in exposing the system in much the same
way that Shalamov brought Kolyma to life and Pin Yathay laid bare the atroci-
ties in Cambodia. More recently still, Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the leading
Soviet dissidents under Leonid Brezhnev, cried out in protest in Reckoning with
Moscow, demanding the establishment of a new Nuremberg Tribunal to judge
the criminal activities of the Communist regime. His book enjoyed considerable
success in the West. At the same time, however, publications rehabilitating
Stalin began to appear. 11

At the end of the twentieth century, what motivation impels us to explore an
issue so mired in tragedy, confusion, and controversy? Today, archives confirm
these sporadic accounts of yesteryear, but they also allow us to go a step
further. The internal archives maintained by the repressive apparatuses of the
former Soviet Union, of the former u peoples democracies," and of Cambodia
bring to light the ghastly truth of the massive and systematic nature of the
terror, which all too often resulted in full-scale crimes against humanity. The
time has come to take a scholarly approach to this subject by documenting hard
facts and by illuminating the political and ideological issues that obscure the
matter at hand, the key issue that all these observers have raised: What is the
true significance of crime in the Communist system?

From this perspective, what scholarly support can we count on? In the
first place, our methods reflect our sense of duty to history. A good historian
leaves no stone unturned. No other factors or considerations, be they political,
ideological, or personal, should hinder the historian from engaging in the quest
for knowledge, the unearthing and interpretation of facts, especially when these
facts have been long and deliberately buried in the immense recesses of gov-
ernment archives and the conscience of the people. This history of Communist
terror is one of the major chapters in the history of Europe and is directly
linked to the two goals of the study of historical writing on totalitarianism.
After all, we all know about the Hitlerian brand of totalitarianism; but we must
not forget that there was also a Leninist and Stalinist version. It is no longer

Introduction

good enough to write partial histories that ignore the Communist brand of
totalitarianism. It is untenable to draw a veil over the issue to ensure that the
history of Communism is narrowed to its national, social, and cultural dimen-
sions. The justice of this argument is amply confirmed by the fact that the
phenomenon of totalitarianism was not limited to Europe and the Soviet pe-
riod. The same applies to Maoist China, North Korea, and Pol Pot's Cambodia.
Each national Communism has been linked by an umbilical cord to the Soviet
womb, with its goal of expanding the worldwide movement. The history with
which we are dealing is the history of a phenomenon that has spread through-
out the world and that concerns all of humanity.

The second purpose of this book is to serve as a memorial. There is a
moral obligation to honor the memory of the innocent and anonymous victims
of a juggernaut that has systematically sought to erase even their memory. After
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism's center of power
in Moscow, Europe, the continent that played host to the twentieth century's
many tragedies, has set itself the task of reconstructing popular memory. This
book is our contribution to that effort. The authors of this book carry that
memory within themselves. Two of our contributors have a particular attach-
ment to Central Europe, while the others are connected by firsthand experience
with the theory and practice of revolution in 1968 or more recently.

This book, as both memorial and history, covers very diverse settings. It
touches on countries in which Communism had almost no practical influence,
either on society or on government power — Great Britain, Australia, Belgium,
and others. Elsewhere Communism would show up as a powerful source of
fear — in the United States after 1946 — or as a strong movement (even if it
never actually seized power there), as in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and
Portugal. In still other countries, where it had lost its decades-long grip on
power, Communism is again reasserting itself— in Eastern Europe and Russia.
Finally, its small flame is wavering in countries in which Communism still
formally prevails — China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam.

Others may have different perspectives on the issues of history and mem-
ory. In countries in which Communism had little influence or was merely
dreaded, these issues will require a simple course of study and understanding.
The countries that actually experienced the Communist system will have to
address the issue of national reconciliation and decide whether the former
Communist rulers are to be punished. In this connection, the reunified Ger-
many may represent the most surprising and "miraculous" example — one need
only think of the Yugoslav disaster by way of contrast. However, the former
Czechoslovakia — now the Czech Republic and Slovakia — Poland, and Cambo-
dia alike confront considerable trauma and suffering in their memorv and
history of Communism. In such places a modicum of amnesia, whether con-

The Crimes of Communism

scious or unconscious, may seem indispensable in helping to heal the spiritual,
mental, emotional, personal, and collective wounds inflicted by a half-century
or more of Communism. Where Communism still clings to power, the tyrants
and their successors have either systematically covered up their actions, as in
Cuba and China, or have continued to promote terror as a form of government,
as in North Korea.

The responsibility for preserving history and memory undoubtedly has a
moral dimension. Those whom we condemn may respond, "Who has given you
the authority to say what is Good and what is Bad? 11

According to the criteria proposed here, this issue was addressed well by
the Catholic Church when Pope Pius 1 condemned Nazism and Communism
respectively in the encyclicals Mil Rrennemier Snrg* of 14 March 1937 and
Diniii rciiemptoris of 19 March 1937. The latter proclaimed that God endowed
humanity with certain rights, "the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to the
necessary means of existence; the right to pursue one's ultimate goal in the path
marked out for him by God; the right of association, and the right to possess
and use property.' 1 Even though there is i certain hypocrisy in the church's
pronouncement against the excessive enrichment of one class of people at the
expense of others, the importance of the pope's appeal for the respect of human
dignity is beyond question.

As earh as 1931, Pius I had proclaimed in the encyclical Quadragesima
anno; "Communism teaches and seeks two objectives: unrelenting class warfare
and the complete eradication of private ownership. Not secret I v or hv hidden
methods does it do this, but publicly, openly, and by employing any means
possible, even the most violent. To achieve these objectives there is nothing it
is afraid to do, nothing for which it has respect or reverence. When it comes to
power, it is ferocious in its cruelty and inhumanity. The horrible slaughter and
destruction through which it has laid waste to vast regions of Eastern Europe
and Asia give evidence of this. 1 ' Admittedly, these words originated from an
institution that for several centuries had systematically justified the murder of
non-Christians, spread the Inquisition, stilled freedom of thought, and sup-
ported dictatorial regimes such as those of General Francisco Franco and
Antonio Sala/ar.

However, even if the church was functioning in its capacity as a guardian
of morality, how is a historian to respond when confronted by a "heroic" saga
of Communist partisans or bv a heartbreaking account from their victims? In
his Memoirs Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand wrote: "When in the silence of
abjection, no sound can be heard save that of the chains of the slave and the
voice of the informer; when all tremble before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous
to incur his favor as to merit his displeasure, the historian appears, entrusted
with the vengeance of the people. Nero prospers in vain, for Tacitus has already

Introduction

been born within the Empire." 14 Far be it from us to advocate the cryptic
concept of the "vengeance of the people." Chateaubriand no longer believed
in this idea by the end of his life. However, at some modest level and almost
despite himself, the historian can speak on behalf of those who have had their
voices silenced as a result of terror. The historian is there to produce works of
scholarship, and his first task is to establish the facts and data that will then
become knowledge. Moreover, the historian's relationship to the history of
Communism is an unusual one: Historians are obligated to chronicle the his-
toriography of "the lie." And even if the opening of archives has provided them
with access to essential materials, historians must guard against naivete in the
face of a number of complicated factors that are deviously calculated to stir up
controversy. Nonetheless, this kind of historical knowledge cannot be seen in
isolation from certain fundamental principles, such as respect for the rules of
a representative democracy and, above all, respect for life and human dignity.
This is the yardstick that historians use to "judge" the actors on the stage of
history.

For these general reasons, no work of history or human memory can
remain untouched by personal motives. Some of the contributors to this book
were not always strangers to the fascinations of Communism. Sometimes they
themselves took part (even if only on a modest scale) in the Communist system,
either in the orthodox Leninist-Stalinist school or in its related or dissident
varieties (Trotskyite, Maoist). And if they still remain closely wedded to the
left — or, rather, precisely because they are still wedded to the left—it is neces-
sary to take a closer look at the reasons for their self-deception. This mindset
has led them down a certain intellectual pathway, characterized by the choice
of topics they study, by their scholarly publications, and by the journals (such
as La nouvelle alternative and Commumsme) in which they publish. This book
can do no more than provide an impetus for this particular type of reassess-
ment. If these leftists pursue the task conscientiously, they will show that they
too have a right to be heard on this issue, rather than leaving it to the increas-
ingly influential extreme right wing. The crimes of Communism need to be
judged from the standpoint of democratic values, not from the standpoint of
ultranationalist or fascist philosophies.

This approach calls for cross-country analysis, including comparisons of
China and the US.S.R., Cuba and Vietnam, and others. Alas, the documents
currently available are decidedly mixed in quantity and quality; in some cases
the archives have not yet been opened. However, we felt that we should carry
on regardless, confining ourselves to facts that are crystal-clear and beyond
question. We want this book to be a groundbreaking work that will lay a broad
foundation for further study and thought by others.

This book contains many words but few pictures. The dearth of pictures

The Crimes of Communism

is one of the more delicate issues involved in the cover-up of Communist
crimes. In a media-saturated global society, the photographed or televised
image has become the fount of "truth." Alas, we have only a handful of rare
archival photographs of the Gulag and the iaogai. There are no photographs
of dekulakization or of the famine during the Great Leap Forward. The
victorious powers at Nuremberg could at least photograph and film the thou-
sands of bodies found at Bergen-Belsen. Those investigators also found pho-
tographs that had been taken by the tyrants themselves— for example, the
picture of a Nazi shooting point blank at a woman with an infant in her arms.
No such parallels existed in the darkness of the Communist world, where terror
had been organized in strictest secrecy.

Readers may feel less than satisfied with the few photographic documents
assembled here. They will need time to read, page after page, about the ordeal
to which millions of people were subjected. They will have to make an effort
to imagine the scale of the tragedy and to realize and appreciate how it will
leave its mark on the history of the world for decades to come. Then readers
must ask themselves the essential question, "Why?" Why did Lenin, Trotsky,
Stalin, and others believe it necessary to exterminate all those whom they had
branded as "enemies"? What made them imagine they could violate one of the
basic tenets of civilization, "Thou shall not kill"? We will try, through this book,
to answer that question.

A State against Its People: Violence,
Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union

Nicolas Werth

3 Slftinfi* II 1

a '<

eIi

The Gulag archipelago

'^*.* fc " Major timber/logging routes and railways

Z^ Large canals built by prisoners
O Towns built by prisoners

1X1 Mining

500 km

Paradoxes and Misunderstandings Surrounding
the October Revolution

With the

iall of Communism, the necessity of demonstrating
the 'historically inevitable' character of the Great Socialist October Revolution
faded into the background, and 1917 could at last become a 'normal' historical
event. Unfortunately, historians, like everyone else in our society, seem unwill-
ing to break with the founding myth of Year Zero, of the year when it all
seemed to begin™the happiness or misery of the Russian People."

These words, by a contemporary Russian historian, serve to illustrate an
idea that has become a constant theme, More than eighty years after the event,
the battle for control over the story of 1917 continues to rage.

For one historical school, which includes the proponents of what we might
term the "liberal" version of events, the October Revolution was nothing more
than a putsch imposed on a passive society. For these historians, October was
the result of a clever conspiracy dreamed up by a handful of resourceful and
cynical fanatics who had no real support anywhere else in the country. Today
this is the preferred version of events for almost all Russian historians, as well
as for the cultured elite and the leaders of post-Communist Russia. Deprived
of all social and historical weight, the October Revolution of 1917 is reread as
an accident that changed the course of history, diverting a prosperous, hard-
working prere olutionary Russia, well on its way to democracy, from its natural
course. This view is defended quite loudly and fiercely, and as long as there

A State against Its People

exists a remarkable continuity in the power structure of post-Soviet Russia
(nearly all of whose leaders are former Communist officials), there is a clear
benefit to distancing present Russian society from the "monstrous Soviet pa-
renthesis. 11 All too clearly, it serves to liberate Russian society from any burden
of guilt, and it marks a break with those obvious, public acts of contrition
elicited by the painful rediscovery of Stalinism during the perestroiku years. If
it can be shown that the Bolshevik coup d'etat of 1917 was nothing more than
an accident, it follows that the Russian people were the collective innocent
victims of these events.

Alternatively, Soviet historiography has attempted to demonstrate that the
events of October 1917 were the logical, foreseeable, and inevitable culmination
of a process of liberation undertaken by the masses, who consciously rallied to
Bolshevism. In its various forms, this current of historiography has connected
the story of 1917 to the issue of the legitimacy of the whole Soviet regime. If
the Great Socialist October Revolution was the result of the inexorable march
of history, and if it was an event that conveyed a message of emancipation to
the entire world, then the Soviet political system and the state institutions that
resulted from the revolution, despite the errors of the Stalinist period, were all
necessarily legitimate. The fall of the Soviet regime naturally brought both a
wholesale delegitimarion of the October Revolution and the disappearance of
the traditional Marxist view, which in its turn was consigned, in the famous
Bolshevik formula, to "the dustbin of history." Nonetheless, like the memory
of the Stalinist terror, the memory of the Marxist version of events lives on,
perhaps even more vividly in the West than it does in the former L'.S.S.R.

Rejecting both the liberal view and Marxist dogma, a third historiographic
current has recently attempted to remove ideology from the history of the
Russian Revolution altogether, in order to make clear, in the words of Marc
Ferro, "why the uprising of October 1917 was simultaneously a mass movement
and an event in which so few people actually took part. 11 Among the many
questions arising from the events of 1917, historians who refuse to accept the
dominant oversimplified liberal view of events have identified some key prob-
lems. What role was played by the militarization of the economy and by the
social unrest following from the entry of the Russian empire into World War
I? Did a specific current of violence emerge that paved the way for political
violence exercised against society in general? How did it come about that an
essentially popular and plebeian movement, which was profoundly antiauthori-
tarian and antistate, brought to power the most dictatorial and most statist of
political groups? Finally, what linkage can be established between the undeni-
able radicalization of Russian society throughout the year 1917 and the specific
phenomenon of Bolshevism?

With the passage of time, and as a result of much recent stimulating and

Paradoxes of the October Revolution

lively debate among historians, the October Revolution of 1917 now appears as
the momentary convergence of two movements: on the one hand the carefully
organized seizure of power by a party that differed radically in its practices, its
ideology, and its organization from all other participants in the revolutionary
process; and on the other a vast social revolution, which took many forms. The
social revolution had many facets, including an immensely powerful and deep-
rooted movement of rebellion among the peasantry, a rebellion whose origins
stretched far back into Russian history and which was marked not simply by a
hatred of the landowners, but also by profound distrust of both the city and
the outside world in general—a distrust, in practice, of any form of state
intervention.

The summer and autumn of 1917 thus appear as the culmination of the
great cycle of revolts that began in 1902, and whose first real effects were felt
from 1905 to 1907. The year 1917 was a decisive stage in the great agrarian
revolution, a confrontation between the peasantry and the great landowners
over the ownership of land, and, in the eyes of the peasants, the final longed-for
realization of the "Black-Earth partition," or distribution of land according to
the number of mouths to be fed in each family. But it was also an important
stage in the confrontation between the peasantry and the state, in which the
peasantry rejected all control by the city over the countryside. Seen from this
point of view, 1917 was no more than a stage in the series of confrontations
that continued in 1918-1922 and 1929-1933, and that ended in total defeat for
the countryside as a result of enforced collectivization.

Throughout 1917, at the same time that the peasant revolution was gain-
ing momentum, a process of fundamental decay was taking place in the army,
which was made up of more than 10 million peasant soldiers mobilized to fight
a war whose significance escaped them. Russian generals unanimously deplored
the lack of patriotism among these peasant soldiers, whose civic horizons
seldom extended beyond the boundaries of their own rural communities.

A third basic movement arose within the politically active industrial work-
ing class, highly concentrated in the big cities, which accounted for scarcely
3 percent of the working population. The urban milieu distilled all the social
contradictions arising from a process of economic modernization that had
lasted no more than a single generation. From this environment was born a
movement aimed at the protection of the rights of workers, understood
through a few key political slogans such as "workers 1 power 11 and "power to
the Soviets. 11

The fourth and final movement originated in the rapid emancipation of
the diverse nations under imperial Russian rule. Many of these nations de-
manded first autonomy, then independence.

Each of these movements progressed at its own pace, according to its own

A State against Its People

internal dynamic; and each had its own specific aspirations, aspirations that
clearly were not reducible to Bolshevik slogans or the political activities of that
party. But each of these became a catalyst for the destruction of traditional
institutions and the erosion of all forms of authority. For a brief but decisive
instant in October 1917, the Bolshevik revolt— the action of a political minority
acting in what was effectively a political vacuum — coincided with the aspira-
tions of all these other movements, despite their disparate medium- and long-
term objectives. For a short time the political coup d'etat and social revolution
coincided, or, more precisely, were telescoped together, before they moved apart
again in the ensuing decades of dictatorship.

The social and national movements that exploded in the autumn of 1917
developed out of a particular conjunction of circumstances, including severe
economic crisis, upheavals in social relations, the general failure of the appara-
tus of the state, and, perhaps most important, a total war that contributed to
the general climate of brutality.

Far from reviving the tsarist regime and reinforcing the imperfect cohe-
sion of society, World War 1 ruthlessly revealed the fragility of an autocracy
already shaken by the revolution of 1905-06 and progressively weakened by
political vacillation between insufficient concessions and reversions to stubborn
conservatism. The war also underscored the weaknesses of an incomplete
economic modernization dependent on regular inflows of foreign capital, spe-
cialists, and technology. Finally, the war reinforced the deep divide between
urban Russia, the seat of power and industry, and rural Russia, the locus ol
largely independent and traditional communities.

Like all the other participants in the conflict, the tsarist government had
counted on a quick war. Russia's lack of access to the sea and the economic
blockade brutally revealed the extent of the country's dependence on foreign
suppliers. The loss of its western provinces after the 1915 invasion by Austro-
Hungarian forces deprived Russia of the products of Poland's highly developed
industry. The domestic economy did not long withstand the test of war: a lack
of spare parts plunged the transportation system into chaos as early as 191: v
The almost complete conversion of Russian factories to the war effort squeezed
production for domestic consumption, and within a few months shortages were
common and inflation and poverty rampant. The situation deteriorated rapidly
in the countryside: an abrupt end to agricultural loans and land reallocation, a
large-scale mobilization of men into the army, the requisitioning of livestock
and grain, the scarcity of manufactured goods, and the destruction of networks
of exchange between town and country all brought the process of agrarian
transformation, begun in 1906 by Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (assassinated
in 191 1), to a grinding halt. Three consecutive years of war strengthened the
peasant belief that the state was an alien and hostile force. Daily privations in

Paradoxes of the October Revolution

an army in which soldiers were treated more like serfs than like citizens exac-
erbated the tensions between officers and their men, while a series of defeats
undercut the little prestige remaining to the imperial regime. The deep-seated
tradition of violence in the Russian countryside, expressed in the immense
uprisings of 1902-1906, grew ever stronger.

By the end of 1915 it was clear that the forces of law and order no longer
existed. In the face of the regime's apparent passivity, committees and associa-
tions began to spring up everywhere, taking control of services no longer
provided by the state, such as tending to the sick and bringing food to the cities
and the army. The Russians in effect began to govern themselves; a great
movement took shape whose depth and scope no one could have predicted. But
in order to prevail, this movement would have needed encouragement and help
from the seat of power, whose forces were concurrently dissolving.

Instead of attempting to build bridges between the government and the
most advanced elements of civic society, Nicholas II clung to the image of
himself as a populist monarch, the good paterfamilias of the state and the
peasantry, lie assumed personal command of the armies, a suicidal act for an
autocracy staring national defeat in the face. Isolated in his private train at the
Mogilev headquarters, from the autumn of 1915 onward, Nicholas II ceased to
govern the country, surrendering that task to the Empress Alexandra, whose
German origins made her very unpopular.

In fact the government had been losing its grip on power throughout 1916.
The Duma, Russia's first nationally elected assembly, sat for only a few weeks
a year, and governments and ministers, all equally unpopular and incompetent,
came and went in quick succession. Rumors abounded that the Empress Alex-
andra's coterie, which included Rasputin, had conspired to open the country
to enemy invasion. It became clear that the autocracy was incapable of winning
the war, and b the end of 1916 the country was in effect ungovernable. In an
atmosphere of political crisis, typified by the assassination of Rasputin on 31
December, strikes, which had been extremely rare at the outbreak of the war,
became increasingly common. Unrest spread to the army, and the total chaos
of the transport system broke the munitions distribution network. The days of
February 1917 thus overtook an entirely discredited and weakened regime.

The fall of the tsarist regime, which came after just five days of workers'
demonstrations and the mutiny of a few thousand men in the Petrograd garri-
son, revealed not only the weakness of the regime and the disarray of an army
whose commanders did not even dare try to quell the popular uprising, but also
the unpreparcdness of the profoundly divided opposition, from the liberals of
the Constitutional Democratic Party to the Social Democrats.

At no time did the political forces of the opposition shape or guide this
spontaneous popular revolution, which began in the streets and ended in the

A State against Its People

plush suites of the Tauride Palace, the seat of the Duma. The liberals feared
the mob; the socialists feared military reaction. Protracted negotiations between
the liberals, who were concerned about the spread of the disturbances, and the
socialists, who saw this "bourgeois" revolution as perhaps the first step on the
long path to a socialist revolution, resulted in a vague idea of power-sharing.
The liberal and socialist camps came to be represented in two distinct and
incompatible institutions. The provisional government, concerned with the
liberal objectives of social order and parliamentary democracy, strove to build
a Russia that was modern, capitalist, and resolutely faithful to its French and
British allies. Its archrival was the Petrograd Soviet, created by a handful of
militant socialists in the great tradition of the St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905 to
represent directly the revolutionary will of "the masses." But this soviet was
itself a rapidly evolving phenomenon, at the mercy of its own expanding,
decentralized structure and of the ever-changing public opinion it claimed to
represent.

The three successive provisional governments that ruled Russia from
2 March to 25 October 1917 proved incapable of solving the problems inherited
from the ancien regime: the economic crisis, the failing war effort, working-class
unrest, and the agrarian problem. The new men in power — the liberals of the
Constitutional Democratic Party, the majority in the first two governments, and
the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, the majority in the third — be-
longed to the cultivated urban elite, those advanced elements of civil society
who were torn between a naive, blind trust in the "people" and a (ear of the
incomprehensible u dark masses" who engulfed them. For the most part, at least
for the first few months of a revolution remarkable for its pacific nature, they
gave free rein to the democratic impulse that had emerged with the fall of the
old regime. Idealists like Prince Lvov, the head of the first two provisional
governments, dreamed of making Russia "the freest country in the world."
"The spirit of the Russian people," he wrote in one of his first manifestos, "has
shown itself, of its own accord, to be a universally democratic spirit. It is a spirit
that seeks not only to dissolve into universal democracy, but also to lead the
way proudly down the path first marked out by the French revolution, toward
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity."

Guided by these beliefs, the provisional government extended democratic-
principles to as many as it could, bringing new freedoms and universal suffrage,
outlawing all discrimination on grounds of class, race, or religion, recognizing
the rights of both Poland and Finland to home rule, and promising autonomy
to nationalist minorities. The government imagined that all these efforts would
have far-reaching effects, causing an upsurge in patriotism, consolidating social
cohesion, assuring military victory alongside the Allied forces, and solidly
linking the new regime to other Western democracies. But out of a fimckv

Paradoxes of the October Revolution

solicitude for legality the government refused, in wartime conditions, to adopt
measures that would have secured the future. It held firmly to remaining
"provisional" and deliberately left unresolved the most pressing issues: the
problem of the war and the problem of land. In the few months of its rule the
provisional government proved no more capable than its predecessor of coping
with the economic crisis, closely linked to the waging of the war; problems of
supply, poverty, inflation, the breakdown of economic networks, the closing of
businesses, and the massive upsurge in unemployment all exacerbated the
climate of social tension.

In the face of the government's passivity, society continued to organize
itself independently. Within a few weeks thousands of Soviets, neighborhood
and factor)' committees, armed groups of workers (the Red Guards), and
committees of soldiers, peasants, Cossacks, and housewives sprang into exist-
ence. These were new forms of political expression in Russia, providing pre-
viously unknown forums for public opinion, claims for compensation, new
initiatives, and debates. It was a veritable festival of liberty, which became more
violent dav by dav, as the February revolution had unleashed resentment and
social frustration long held in check. Mitingovunie ("the never-ending meet-
ing") was the opposite of the democratic parliamentary process envisaged by
the politicians of the new regime. The radicalization of social movements
continued throughout 1917.

The workers 1 demands evolved from the economic — an eight-hour day,
an end to fines and other onerous regulations, social insurance, wage in-
creases — to political demands that implied a radical shift in social relations
between workers and employers. Workers organized into factory committees
whose chief objectives were control of the hiring process, the prevention of
factory closings, and even control of the means of production. But to be viable,
worker control required a completely new form of government, "soviet power,"
which alone was capable of radical measures, especially the seizure and
nationalization of business, an aim that had been inconceivable in the spring of
1917.

The role of the peasant-soldiers — a mass of 10 million mobilized men —
was decisive in the revolutions of 1917. The rapid dissolution of the Russian
armv, hastened by desertion and pacifism, propelled the collapse of state insti-
tutions. Basing their authority on the first decree issued by the provisional
government— the famous "Order Number One," abolishing the worst of the
disciplinary rules for soldiers in the imperial army— committees of soldiers
pushed the limits of their power. They elected new officers and even took part
in planning military strategies and tactics. This idea of "soldier power" paved
the wav for what General Aleksei Brusilov, commander in chief of the Russian
armv, termed a "Bolshevism of the trenches." In his description, "The soldiers

A State against Its People

didn't have the faintest idea of what Communism, the proletariat, or the
constitution actually meant. They wanted peace, land, and the freedom to live
without laws, without officers, and without landlords. Their Bolshevism was
nothing more than a longing for an idealized sort of liberty — anarchy, in fact. 11

After the failure of the last Russian offensive in June 1917, the army began
to fall apart; hundreds of officers, accused by the troops of being counterrevo-
lutionaries, were arrested by the soldiers and massacred. The number of de-
sertions soared — by August and September there were tens of thousands every
day. The peasant-soldiers had one goal — to return home as quickly as possible,
so as not to miss out on the distribution of land and livestock previously
belonging to the landowners. From June to October 1917 more than 2 million
soldiers, tired of the fighting and of the appalling deprivations they had lived
through in their garrisons and trenches, deserted the rapidly disintegrating
army. Inevitably their return increased the unrest pervading the countryside.

Until the summer of 1917, the agrarian trouble spots had been relatively
localized, particularly in comparison with the agrarian revolts during the revo-
lution of 1905-06. Once news of the tsar's abdication had spread, a peasant
assembly met and drew up a petition containing their grievances and demands;
the land should be given to whose who worked it, fallow land belonging to the
landowners should be immediately redistributed, and all rents should be dras-
tically reduced. Slowly the peasants became more and more organized, setting
up agricultural committees on local and regional levels headed by leading
members of the rural intelligentsia such as schoolteachers, agronomists, doc-
tors, and Orthodox priests, all of whom sympathized with the aims of the
Socialist Revolutionaries. From May and June onward, many agrarian commit-
tees simply seized agricultural material and livestock belonging to the land-
owners and appropriated woods, pastures, and fallow land. In this battle for
land, the main victims clearly were the great land barons, but the kulaks (the
better-off peasants, who had taken advantage of Stolypin's reforms to set up
small holdings on their own and thus become free of obligations to the com-
munity) also suffered as a group. Even before the October Revolution the
kulaks, who had been the soft targets of Bolshevik rhetoric — which caricatured
them in slogans as "money-grubbing peasants,' 1 "the rural bourgeoisie," and
"blood-sucking kulaks"— were no longer the important force they had been, in
fact by this point many of them had been forced to return most of their
livestock, machinery, and land to the community, which then redistributed it
according to the ancestral egalitarian principle that counted the number of
mouths to be fed.

During the summer the agrarian troubles became more and more violent,
fueled by the return of hundreds of thousands of armed deserters. By the end
of August, disillusioned by the broken promises of a government that seemed
to be delaying agrarian reforms, the peasants mounted assaults on the manor

Paradoxes of the October Revolution

houses, burning and sacking them in the hope of driving out the hated land-
owners once and for all. In Ukraine and in the central provinces of Russia —
Tambov, Penza, Voronezh, Saratov, Orel, Tula, and Ryazan — thousands of
houses were burned and hundreds of landowners killed.

Faced with the expansion of this social revolution, the ruling elite and the
political parties — with the notable exception of the Bolsheviks — all wavered
between the desire to control the movement in some fashion and the temptation
of a simple military putsch. After taking their places in the government in May,
both the Menshcviks, who were popular in working-class areas, and the Social-
ist Revolutionaries, who had a stronger base in the countryside than any other
political group, proved unable to carry out the reforms they had always de-
manded — particularly in the case of the Socialist Revolutionaries, land reform.
For the most part, this failure stemmed from the fact that they were cooperating
with a government concerned primarily with social order and law-abiding-
behavior. Once they had become the managers and leaders of an essentially
bourgeois state, the moderate socialist parties left the more radical calls for
reform to the bolsheviks, without, however, reaping any great benefit from their
participation in a government that was slowly losing its grip on the political
realities in the country.

In the face of this growing anarchy, the captains of industry, the land-
owners, the leaders of the army, and some of the more disillusioned liberals
considered mounting a military coup, an idea proposed by General Lavr
Kornilov. Most of them abandoned the idea, since a military putsch would
inevitably have destroyed the civil power of the elected provisional government
led by Aleksandr Kerensky. The failure of General Kornilov's putsch on 24-27
August did, however, lead to the final crisis of the provisional government.
While the proponents of civil versus military dictatorships engaged in fruitless
arguments, the central institutions of the state— the justice system, the civil
service, the arm) — were disintegrating.

But it would be a mistake to describe the radiealization of the urban and
rural populations as a process of "bolshevization." The shared slogans —
"workers' power 1 ' and "power to the Soviets' 1 — had different meanings for the
militant workers and the Bolshevik leaders. In the army, the "Bolshevism of
the trenches" reflected above all a general aspiration for peace, shared by
combatants from all the countries engaged in the bloodiest and most all-
consuming war that the world had ever seen. The peasant revolution followed
a more or less autonomous course, more sympathetic to the Socialist Revolu-
tionary program, which favored the "Black-Earth partition" of land. The
Bolshevik approach to the agrarian question was in fact antithetical to peasant
wishes, favoring the nationalization of all land and its subsequent exploitation
through enormous collective farms. In the countryside little was known about
the Bolsheviks except for the confused reports brought home by deserters,

A State against Its People

whose message could be summed up in those two magic words 'land" and
"peace." Membership in the Bolshevik movement seems to have numbered no
more than two thousand at the beginning of October 1917. But as a constella-
tion of committees, Soviets, and other small groups rushed to rill the wholesale
institutional vacuum of that autumn, the environment was perfect for a small,
well-organized group to exercise a disproportionate amount of power. And that
is exactly what the Bolshevik Party did.

Since its founding in 1903, the party had remained outside the other
currents of social democracy in both Russia and Europe, chiefly because of its
will to break radically with the existing social and political order and because
of its conception of itself as a highly structured, disciplined, elitist avant-garde
of professional revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks were thus the complete oppo-
site of the Menshevik and other European social-democratic parties, which
allowed large memberships and widely differing points of view.

World War I further distilled Leninist Bolshevism. Rejecting collaboration
with all other currents of social democracy, Lenin became increasingly isolated,
justifying his theoretical position in essays like Imperialism, the Highest Stage
of Capitalism. He began to argue that the revolution was destined to occur not
in countries where capitalism was most advanced, but rather in countries like
Russia that were considerably less developed economically, provided that the
revolutionary movement was led by a disciplined avant-garde of revolutionaries
who were prepared to go to extremes. That meant, in this case, creating a
dictatorship of the proletariat and transforming "the imperialist war 11 into a
civil war.

In a letter of 17 October 1917 to Aleksandr Shlyapnikov, Lenin wrote:

The least bad thing that could happen in the short term would be the
defeat of tsarism in the war . . , The essence of our work (which must be
persistent, systematic, and perhaps extremely long-term) is to aim for
the transformation of the war into a civil war. When that will happen is
another question, as it is not yet clear. We must wait for the moment to
ripen, and systematically force it to ripen . . . We can neither promise
civil war nor decree it, but we must work toward that end for as long as
we have to.

Throughout the war Lenin returned to the idea that the Bolsheviks had to be
ready to encourage civil war by all possible means. "Anyone who believes in
class war," he wrote in September 1916, "must recognize that civil war, in any
class-based society, is the natural continuation, development, and result of
class war."

After the February revolution (which occurred while most of the Bolshe-
viks were in exile or abroad), Lenin — unlike the vast majority of the leaders of

Paradoxes of the October Revolution

his party — predicted the failure of the conciliatory policies pursued by the
provisional government. In his four Letters from Abroad, penned in Zurich on
20-25 March 1917, of which the Bolshevik daily Pravda dared print only the
first (so far were they from the political ideas held at the time by the leaders of
the Petrograd Bolsheviks), he demanded an immediate rupture between the
Petrograd Soviet and the provisional government, as well as active preparations
for the subsequent "proletarian" stage of the revolution. As he saw it, the
appearance of the Soviets was the sign that the revolution had already passed
through its "bourgeois phase." Revolutionary agents should now seize power
by force and put a stop to the imperialist war, even if this meant the beginning
of a civil war.

When he returned to Russia on 3 April 1917, Lenin continued to defend
these extreme positions. In his famous April Theses he reiterated his implacable
hostility to both a parliamentary republic and the democratic process. Met with
blank incomprehension and outright hostility by most of the Bolshevik leaders
in Petrograd, Lenin's ideas nevertheless began to take hold, particularly among
the new recruits to the party, whom Stalin termed praktiki, "practitioners" (as
opposed to the theoreticians). Within a few months plebeian elements, includ-
ing peasant-soldiers, occupied a central place in the party and outnumbered the
urban and intellectual elements. These militants, with their more humble ori-
gins, brought with them the violence of Russian peasant culture exacerbated
bv three vears of war. With little background in politics, they sought to trans-
form the original theoretical and intellectual Bolshevism unhindered by any of
the limitations imposed by Marxist dogma. In particular, they had little interest
in the question of whether a "bourgeois stage" was necessary in the transition
to real socialism. Believing only in direct action and in force, they supported a
strand of Bolshevism in which theoretical debates increasingly gave way to the
far more pressing issue of the seizure of power.

Lenin was caught between two opposing forces: a plebeian mass increas-
ingly impatient for action, made up of the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base
near Petrograd, certain regiments in the capital, and the worker battalions of
Red Guards in Vyborg; and a group of leaders haunted by fear that an overhasty
insurrection would fail. Contrary to commonly held historical opinion,
throughout 1917 the Bolshevik Party was profoundly divided, torn between the
timidity of one group and the overcnthusiasm of the other. At this stage the
famous party discipline was more an act of faith than a concrete reality. In July
1917, as a result of troubles at the naval base and confrontations with the
government forces, the Bolshevik Party was very nearly destroyed altogether.
In the aftermath of the bloody demonstrations in Petrograd from 3 to 5 July,
its leaders were arrested, and some, like Lenin himself, were forced into exile.
But the Bolshevik Party resurfaced at the end of August 1917, in a situ-

A State against Its People

ation quite favorable for an armed seizure of power. The powerlessness of the
government to resolve the great problems it faced had become clear, particularly
in the wake of the decay of traditional institutions and authorities, the growth
of social movements, and the failure of General Kornilov's attempted military
coup.

Again Lenin's personal role, both as theorist and as strategist of the
seizure of power, was decisive. In the weeks preceding the Bolshevik coup d'etat
of 25 October 1917, he personally prepared all the necessary stages for the
military takeover. He was to be deterred neither by an unforeseen uprising of
the masses nor by the "revolutionary legalism" of Bolsheviks such as Grigory
Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who, made cautious by the bitter experience of the
July days, preferred to have the support of a majority of social democrats and
revolutionary socialists of all tendencies. From exile in Finland, Lenin sent a
constant stream of articles and letters to the Central Committee of the Bolshe-
vik Party, calling for the uprising to begin. "By making immediate offers of
peace and giving land to the peasants, the Bolsheviks will establish a power base
that no one will be able to overturn," he wrote. "There is no point in waiting
for a formal majority for the Bolsheviks; revolutions do not wait lor such things.
History will never forgive us if we do not seize power immediately."

Lenin's urgency in the face of an increasingly revolutionary situation left
most of the Bolshevik leaders skeptical and perplexed. It was surely enough,
they believed, to stick behind the masses and incite them to spontaneous acts
of violence, to encourage the disruptive influence of social movements, and to
sit tight until the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, planned for 20
October. It was more than likely that the Bolsheviks would achieve a plurality
at the assembly, since they would be overrepresented by the Soviets from the
great working-class areas and from the army. Lenin, however, greatly feared
the power-sharing that might result if the transfer of power took place as a
result of a vote at the Congress of Soviets. For months he had been clamoring
for power to devolve to the Bolsheviks alone, and he wanted at all costs to ensure
that the Bolsheviks seized power through a military insurrection, before the
opening of the Second Congress. He knew that the other socialist parties would
universally condemn such a move, and thus effectively force themselves into
opposition, leaving all power in the hands of the Bolsheviks.

On 10 October, having returned secretly to Petrograd, Lenin gathered
together twelve of the twenty-one members of the Central Committee of the
Bolshevik Party. After ten hours of negotiations he persuaded a majority to vote
in favor of the most important decision ever made by the party — to undertake
an immediate armed uprising. The decision was approved by ten to two, the
dissenters being Zinoviev and Kamenev, who wished to wait for the Second

Paradoxes of the October Revolution

Congress of Soviets. On 16 October, despite opposition from the moderate
socialists, Trotsky therefore set up the Petrograd Revolutionary Military Com-
mittee (PRMC), a military organization theoretically under the control of the
Petrograd Soviet but in fact run by the Bolsheviks. Its task was to organize the
seizure of power through an armed insurrection — and thus to prevent a popu-
lar anarchist uprising that might have eclipsed the Bolshevik Party.

In accordance with Lenin's wishes, the number of direct participants in
the Great Socialist October Revolution was extremely limited — a few thousand
soldiers, the sailors from Kronstadt, Red Guards who had rallied to the cause
of the PRMC, and a few hundred militant Bolsheviks from factory committees.
Careful preparation and a lack of opposition allowed the whole operation to
proceed smoothly and with very few casualties. Significantly, the seizure of
power was accomplished in the name of the PRMC. Thus the Bolshevik leaders
attributed all their power to a single event that no one outside the party's
Central Committee could link to the Congress of Soviets.

Lenin's strategy worked. Faced with xWuifait accompli, the moderate so-
cialists, alter denouncing "an organized military action deliberately planned
behind the back of the Soviets, 11 simply walked out of the Congress. Only the
small group of left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries remained, and they joined
the Bolsheviks in ratilving the coup, voting in a text drawn up by Lenin that
gave "all power to the Soviets. 1 ' This purely formal resolution allowed the
Bolsheviks to authenticate a fiction that was to deceive credulous generations
for decades to come — that they governed in the name of the people in "the
Soviet state. 1 ' A few hours later, before breaking up, the Congress ratified a new
Bolshevik government — the Soviet Council of People's Commissars (SNK),
presided over by Lenin— and approved two decrees about peace and land.

Very soon misunderstandings and conflicts arose between the new regime
and the social movements, which until then had acted independently to destroy
the old political, social, and economic order. The first conflict of interest
concerned the agrarian revolution. The Bolsheviks, who had always stood for
the nationalization of all land, were now compelled by a combination of unfa-
vorable circumstances to hijack the Socialist Revolutionary program and to
approve the redistribution of land to the peasants, The "Decree on Land 1 '
stated that "all right of property regarding the land is hereby abolished without
indemnitv, and all land is hereby put at the disposal of local agrarian commit-
tees for redistribution" In practice it did little more than legitimate what had
already taken place since the summer of 1917, namely the peasant confiscation
of land from the landlords and the kulaks. Forced to go along with this autono-
mous peasant resolution because it had facilitated their own seizure of power,
the Bolsheviks were to wait a decade before having their way. The enforced

A State against Its People

collectivization of the countryside, which was to be the bitterest confrontation
between the Soviet regime and the peasantry, was the tragic resolution of the
1917 conflict.

The second conflict arose between the Bolshevik Party and all the spon-
taneous new social structures, such as factory committees, unions, socialist
parties, neighborhood organizations, Red Guards, and above all Soviets, which
had helped destroy traditional institutions of power and were now righting for
the extension of their own mandates. In a few weeks these structures found
themselves either subordinated to the Bolshevik Party or suppressed altogether.
By a clever sleight-of-hand, "All power to the Soviets/' probably the single most
popular slogan in the whole of Russia in October 1917, became a cloak hiding
the power of the Bolshevik Party over the Soviets. "Workers 1 control, 1 ' another
major demand of the workers, in whose interest the Bolsheviks claimed to be
acting, was rapidly sidelined in favor of state control in the name of the workers
over businesses and workforces. A mutual incomprehension was born between
the workers, who were obsessed by unemployment, decline in real wages, and
ever-present hunger, and a state whose only concern was economic efficiency.
From as early as December 1917 the new regime was forced to confront
mounting claims from workers and an increasing number of strikes. In a few-
weeks the Bolsheviks lost the greater part of the confidence that thev had
carefully cultivated in the labor force throughout the year.

The third misunderstanding developed between the Bolsheviks and the
satellite nations of the former tsarist empire. The Bolshevik coup d'etat had
accelerated their desire for independence, and they thought that the new regime
would support their cause. In recognizing the equality and sovereignty of the
peoples of the old empire, as well as their right to self-determination and
secession, the Bolsheviks seemed to have invited these peoples to break avvav
from centralized Russian control. In a few months the Finns, Poles, Baltic
nations, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis were claiming
their independence. Overwhelmed, the Bolsheviks soon put their own eco-
nomic needs before the rights of these nations, since Ukrainian wheat, the
petroleum and minerals of the Caucasus, and all the other vital economic
interests of the new state were perceived to be irreplaceable. In terms of the
control it exercised over its territories, the new regime proved itself to be a
more worthy inheritor of the empire than even the provisional government had
been.

These conflicts and misunderstandings were never truly resolved, but
continued to grow, spawning an ever increasing divide between the new Soviet
regime and society as a whole. Faced with new obstacles and the seeming
intransigence of the population, the Bolshevik regime turned to terror and
violence to consolidate its hold on the institutions of power.

The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

he new Bolshevik power structure was quite complicated. Its
public face, "the power of the Soviets," was formally represented by the Cen-
tral Kxeeutive Committee, while the lawmaking apparatus of government was
the Soviet Council of People's Commissars (SNK), which struggled to achieve
some degree of domestic and international legitimacy and recognition. The
government also had its revolutionary organization in the form of the Petro-
grad Revolutionary Military Committee (PRMC), which had been so central in
the actual seizure of power. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, who from the earliest days had
played a decisive role in the PRMC, characterized it as "a light, flexible struc-
ture that could swing into action at a moment's notice, without any bureau-
cratic interference. There were no restrictions when the time came for the iron
fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat to smite its foe."

I low did this "iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat" (an expres-
sion later used to describe the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka) work in
practice 5 Its organization was simple and extremely effective. The PRMC was
made up of some sixty officials, including forty-eight Bolsheviks, a few Socialist
Revolutionaries of the far left, and a handful of anarchists; and it was officially
under the direction of a chairman, the Socialist Revolutionary Aleksandr Laz-
imir, who was assisted in his operations by a group of four that included
Aleksandr Antonov-Ovseenko and Dzerzhinsky. In fact during the fifty-three

A State against Its People

days of the PRMCs existence, more than 6,000 orders were drawn up, most
of them scribbled on old bits of paper, and some twenty different people signed
their name as chairman or secretary.

The same operational simplicity was to be found in the transmission of
directives and the execution of orders: the PRMC acted through the interme-
diary of a network of nearly one thousand "commissars," who operated in
many different fields — in military units, Soviets, neighborhood committees, and
administrations. Responsible only to the PRMC, these commissars often made
decisions independently of the government or of the Bolshevik Central Com-
mittee. Beginning on 26 October (8 November), 1 while the Bolshevik leaders
were off forming the government, a few obscure, anonymous commissars de-
cided to "strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat" by the following meas-
ures: forbidding counterrevolutionary tracts, closing all seven of the capital's
principal newspapers (bourgeois and moderate socialist), taking control of" radio
and telegraph stations, and setting up a project for the requisitioning of apart-
ments and privately owned cars. The closing of the newspapers was legalized
by a government decree a few days later, and within another week, after some
quite acrimonious discussions, it was approved by the Central Executive Com-
mittee of the Soviets. 2

Unsure of their strength, and using the same tactic that had succeeded so
well earlier, the Bolshevik leaders at first encouraged what they called the
"revolutionary spontaneity of the masses." Replying to a delegation of repre-
sentatives from rural Soviets, who had come from the province of Pskov to
inquire what measures should be taken to avoid anarchy, Dzer/hinsky explained
that

the task at hand is to break up the old order. We, the Bolsheviks, are not
numerous enough to accomplish this task alone. We must allow the
revolutionary spontaneity of the masses who are righting for their eman-
cipation to take its course. After that, we Bolsheviks will show the
masses which road to follow. Through the PRMC it is the masses who
speak, and who act against their class enemy, against the enemies of the
people. We are here only to channel and direct the hate and the legiti-
mate desire for revenge of the oppressed against their oppressors.

A few days earlier, at the 29 October (11 November) meeting of the
PRMC, a few unidentified people had mentioned a need to combat the "ene-
mies of the people" more vigorously. This formula would meet with great
success in the months, years, and decades to follow. It was taken up again in
the PRMC proclamation dated 13 November (26 November): "High-ranking
functionaries in state administration, banks, the treasury, the railways, and the
post and telegraph offices are all sabotaging the measures of the Bolshevik

The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

government. Henceforth such individuals are to be described as 'enemies of
the people. 1 Their names will be printed in all newspapers, and lists of the
enemies of the people will be put up in public places." 1 A few days after these
lists were published, a new proclamation was issued: "All individuals suspected
of sabotage, speculation, and opportunism are now liable to be arrested imme-
diately as enemies of the people and transferred to the Kronstadt prisons." 4 In
the space of a few days the PRMC had introduced two new notions that were
to have lasting consequences: the idea of the "enemy of the people" and the
idea of the "suspect."

On 28 November (11 December) the government institutionalized the
notion of "enemy of the people." A decree signed by Lenin stipulated that "all
leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a party filled with enemies of
the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws, and are to be arrested imme-
diately and brought before a revolutionary court." 5 Such courts had just been
set up in accordance with "Order Number One regarding the Courts," which
effectively abolished all laws that "were in contradiction with the worker and
peasant government, or with the political programs of the Social Democratic
or Socialist Revolutionary parties." While waiting for the new penal code to be
drawn up, judges were granted tremendous latitude to assess the validity of
existing legislation "in accordance with revolutionary order and legality," a
notion so vague that it encouraged all sorts of abuses. The courts of the old
regime were immediately suppressed and replaced by people's courts and
revolutionary courts to judge crimes and misdemeanors committed "against the
proletarian state," "sabotage," "espionage," "abuse of one's position," and
other "counterrevolutionary crimes." As Dmitry Kursky, the people's commis-
sar of justice from 1918 to 1928, recognized, the revolutionary courts were not
courts in the normal "bourgeois" sense of the term at all, but courts of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, and weapons in the struggle against the coun-
terrevolution, whose main concern was eradication rather than judgment.' 1
Among the revolutionary courts was a "revolutionary press court," whose role
was to judge all crimes committed by the press and to suspend any publication
found to be "sowing discord in the minds of the people by deliberately pub-
lishing erroneous news."'

While these new and previously unheard-of categories ("suspects," "ene-
mies of the people") were appearing and the new means of dealing with them
emerging, the Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee continued its own
process of restructuring. In a city in which stocks of flour were so low that
rations were less than half a pound of bread per day per adult, the question of
the food supply was naturally of great importance.

On 4 (17) November a Food Commission was established, and its first
proclamation stigmatized "the rich classes who profit from the misery of oth-

A State against Its People

ers," noting that "the time has come to requisition the surpluses of the rich,
and all their goods as well." On 11 (24) November the Food Commission
decided to send special detachments, made up of soldiers, sailors, workers, and
Red Guards, to the provinces where cereals were produced "to procure food
needed in Petrograd and at the front. "* This measure, taken by one of the
PRJV1C commissions, prefigured the forced requisitioning policy that was en-
forced for three years by detachments from the "food army, 1 ' which was to be
the essential factor in the conflicts between the new regime and the peasantry
and was to provoke much violence and terror.

The Military Investigation Commission, established on 10 (23) Novem-
ber, was in charge of the arrest of "counterrevolutionary" officers (who were
usually denounced by their own soldiers), members of "bourgeois" parties,
and functionaries accused of "sabotage." In a very short time this commission
was in charge of a diffuse array of issues. In the troubled climate of a starving
city, where detachments of Red Guards and ad hoc militia groups were con-
stantly requisitioning, commandeering, and pillaging in the name of the revo-
lution, or on the strength of an uncertain mandate signed by some commissar,
hundreds of individuals every day were brought before the commission for a
wide variety of so-called crimes, including looting, "speculation," "hoarding
products of the utmost necessity," "drunkenness," and "belonging to a hostile
class." 9

The Bolshevik appeals to the revolutionary spontaneity of the masses were
in practice a difficult tool to use. Violence and the settling of old scores were
widespread, as were armed robberies and the looting of shops, particularly of
the underground stocks of the Winter Palace and of shops selling alcohol. As
time passed the phenomenon became so widespread that at Dzerzhinsky's
suggestion the PRMC established a commission to combat drunkenness and
civil unrest. On 6 (19) December the commission declared a state of emergency
in Petrograd and imposed a curfew to "put an end to the troubles and the unrest
brought about by unsavory elements masquerading as revolutionaries." 111

More than these sporadic troubles, what the revolutionary government
feared was a widespread strike by state employees, which had started in the
immediate aftermath of the coup d'etat of 25 October (7 November). This
threat was the pretext for the creation on 7 (20) December of the I serossiiskaya
C/zrezvychainaya ATomissiya po bor'be s kontr-revolyutsiei, spekulyatsiei i sabo-
tazhem — the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat the Counter-
revolution, Speculation, and Sabotage — which was to enter history under its
initials as the VChK, abbreviated to the Cheka.

A few days after the creation of the Cheka, the government decided, not
without hesitation, to disband the PRMC. As a provisional operating structure
set up on the eve of the insurrection to direct operations on the ground, it had
accomplished its task: it had facilitated the seizure of power and defended the

The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

new regime until it had time to create its own state apparatus. Henceforth, to
avoid confusion about power structures and the danger of spreading responsi-
bilities too widely, it was to transfer all its prerogatives to the legal government,
the Council of People's Commissars.

At a moment judged to be so critical by their leaders, how could the
Bolsheviks do without this "iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat"? At
a meeting on 6(19) December the government entrusted "Comrade Dzerzhin-
sky to establish a special commission to examine means to combat, with the
most revolutionary energy possible, the general strike of state employees, and
to investigate methods to combat sabotage." What Dzerzhinsky did gave rise
to no discussion, as it seemed so clearly to be the correct response. A few days
earlier, Lenin, always eager to draw parallels between the French Revolution
and the Russian Revolution of 1917, had confided in his secretary Vladimir
Bonch-Bruevich an urgent need to find "our own Fouquier-Tinville, to combat
the counterrevolutionary rabble." 11 On 6 December Lenin's choice of a "solid
proletarian Jacobin" resulted in the unanimous election of Dzerzhinsky, who
in a few weeks, thanks to his energetic actions as part of the PRMC, had become
the great specialist on questions of security. Besides, as Lenin explained to
Bonch-Bruevich, "of all of us, it's Fcliks who spent the most time behind bars
of the tsarist prisons, and who had the most contact with the Okhrana [the
tsarist political police]. He knows what he's doing!"

Before the government meeting of 7 (20) December Lenin sent a note to
Dzerzhinsky:

With reference to your report of today, would it not be possible to write
a decree with a preamble such as the following: The bourgeoisie are still
persistently committing the most abominable crimes and recruiting the
very dregs of society to organize riots. The accomplices of the bourgeoi-
sie, notably high-ranking functionaries and bank cadres, are also in-
volved in sabotage and organizing strikes to undermine the measures the
government is taking with a view to the socialist transformation of
society. The bourgeoisie is even going so far as to sabotage the food
supply, thus condemning millions to death by starvation. Exceptional
measures will have to be taken to combat these saboteurs and counter-
revolutionaries. Consequently, the Soviet Council of People's Commis-
sars decrees that . . , 12

During the evening of 7 (20) December Dzerzhinsky presented his project
to the SNK. He began his intervention with a speech on the dangers faced by
the revolution "from within":

To address this problem, the crudest and most dangerous of all the
problems we face, we must make use of determined comrades— solid,
hard men without pity— who are ready to sacrifice everything for the

A State against Its People

sake of the revolution. Do not imagine, comrades, that I am simply
looking for a revolutionary form of justice. We have no concern about
justice at this hour! We are at war, on the front where the enemy is
advancing, and the fight is to the death. What 1 am proposing, what 1 am
demanding, is the creation of a mechanism that, in a truly revolutionary
and suitably Bolshevik fashion, will filter out the counterrevolutionaries
once and for all!

Dzerzhinsky then launched into the core of his speech, transcribed as it
appears in the minutes of the meeting:

The task of the Commission is as follows: (I) to suppress and liquidate
any act or attempted act of counterrevolutionary activity or sabotage,
whatever its origin, anywhere on Russian soil; (2) to bring all saboteurs
and counterrevolutionaries before a revolutionary court.

The Commission will proceed by a preliminary inquiry, wherever
this is indispensable to its task.

The Commission will be divided into three sections: (1) Informa-
tion; (2) Organization; (3) Operation.

The Commission will attach particular importance to questions
regarding the press, sabotage, the KDs [Constitutional Democrats], the
right Socialist Revolutionaries, saboteurs, and strikers.

The Commission is entitled to take the following repressive meas-
ures: to confiscate goods, expel people from their homes, remove ration
cards, publish lists of enemies of the people, etc.

Resolution: to approve this draft. To name the commission the
All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat the Counterrevolu-
tion, Speculation, and Sabotage.

These resolutions are to be made public. '■'

This text, which discusses the founding of the Soviet secret police, un-
doubtedly raises a few questions. How, for example, is the difference between
Dzerzhinsky's fiery-sounding speech and the relative modesty of the powers
accorded the Cheka to be interpreted? The Bolsheviks were on the point of
concluding an agreement with the left Socialist Revolutionaries (six of whose
leaders had been admitted to the government on 12 December) to break their
political isolation, at the crucial moment when they had to face the question of
calling the Constituent Assembly, in which they still held only a minority.
Accordingly they decided to keep a low profile, and contrary to the resolution
adopted by the government on 7 (20) December, no decree announcing the
creation of the Cheka and outlining its role was actually published.

As an "extraordinary commission," the Cheka was to prosper and act
without the slightest basis in law. Dzerzhinsky, who like Lenin wanted nothing

The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

so much as a free hand, described it in the following astonishing fashion: "It is
life itself that shows the Cheka the direction to follow." Life in this instance
meant the "revolutionary terror of the masses," the street violence fervently
encouraged by many of the Bolshevik leaders, who had momentarily forgotten
their profound distrust of the spontaneous actions of the people.

When Trotsky, a people's commissar during the war, was addressing the
delegates of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets on 1 (14) Decem-
ber, he warned that "in less than a month, this terror is going to take extremely
violent forms, just as it did during the great French Revolution. Not only prison
awaits our enemies, but the guillotine, that remarkable invention of the French
Revolution which has the capacity to make a man a whole head shorter." 14

A few weeks later, speaking at a workers 1 assembly, Lenin again called for
terror, describing it as revolutionary class justice:

The Soviet regime has acted in the way that all revolutionary proletari-
ats should act; it has made a clean break with bourgeois justice, which is
an instrument of the oppressive classes . . . Soldiers and workers must
understand that no one will help them unless they help themselves. If
the masses do not rise up spontaneously, none of this will lead to any-
thing . . . For as long as we fail to treat speculators the way they de-
serve — with a bullet in the head — we will not get anywhere at all. 15

These calls for terror intensified the violence already unleashed in society
by the Bolsheviks' rise to power. Since the autumn of 1917 thousands of the
great agricultural properties had been attacked by brigades of angry peasants,
and hundreds of the major landowners had been massacred. Violence had been
omnipresent in Russia in the summer of 1917. The violence itself was nothing
new, but the events of the year had allowed several different types of violence,
already there in a latent state, to converge: an urban violence reacting against
the brutality of capitalist relations at the heart of an industrial society; tradi-
tional peasant violence; and the modern violence of World War I, which had
reintroduced extraordinary regression and brutality into human relations. The
combination of these three forms of violence made for an explosive mix, whose
effect was potentially devastating during the Russian Revolution, marked as it
was by the failure of normal institutions of order and authority, by a rising
sense of resentment and social frustrations accumulated over a long period, and
bv the political use of popular violence. Mutual suspicion had always been the
norm between the townspeople and the peasants. For the peasants, more now
than ever, the city was the seat of power and oppression; for the urban elite,
and for professional revolutionaries who by a large majority were from the
intelligentsia, the peasants were still, in Gorky's words, "a mass of half-savage

60 A State against Its People

people 1 ' whose a cruel instincts" and "animal individualism 1 ' ought to be
brought to book by the "organized reason of the city." At the same time,
politicians and intellectuals were all perfectly conscious that it was the peasant
revolts that had shaken the provisional government, allowing the Bolsheviks,
who were really a tiny minority in the country, to seize the initiative in the
power vacuum that had resulted.

At the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918, the new regime faced no serious
opposition, and one month after the Bolshevik coup d'etat it effectively con-
trolled most of the north and the center of Russia as far as the mid-Volga, as
well as some of the bigger cities, such as Baku in the Caucasus and Tashkent in
Central Asia. Ukraine and Finland had seceded but were not demonstrating
any warlike intentions. The only organized anti-Bolshevik military force was a
small army of about 3,000 volunteers, the embryonic form of the future
"White Army' 1 that was being formed in southern Russia by General Mikhail
Alekseev and General Kornilov These tsarist generals were placing all their
hopes in the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban. The Cossacks were radically
different from the other Russian peasants; their main privilege under the old
regime had been to receive 30 hectares of land in exchange for military service
up to the age of thirty-six. If they had no desire to acquire more land, they
were zealous to keep the land they had already acquired. Desiring above all to
retain their status and their independence, and worried by the Bolshevik proc-
lamations that had proved so injurious to the kulaks, the Cossacks aligned
themselves with the anti-Bolshevik forces in the spring of 1918.

"Civil war 1 ' may not be the most appropriate term to describe the first
clashes of the winter of 1917 and the spring of 1918 in southern Russia, which
involved a few thousand men from the army of volunteers and General Rudolf"
Sivers' Bolshevik troops, who numbered scarcely 6,000. What is immediately
striking is the contrast between the relatively modest number of troops involved
in these clashes and the extraordinary repressive violence exercised by the
Bolsheviks, not simply against the soldiers they captured but also against
civilians. Established in June 1919 by General Anton Denikin, commander in
chief of the armed forces in the south of Russia, the Commission to Investigate
Bolshevik Crimes tried to record, in the few months of its existence, the
atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, the Kuban, the Don region,
and the Crimea. The statements gathered by this commission, which constitute
the principal source of Sergei Melgunov's 1926 classic, The Red Terror in
Russia, 1918-1924, demonstrate that innumerable atrocities were committed
from January 1918 onward. In Taganrog units from Sivers' army had thrown
fifty Junkers and "White" officers, their hands and feet bound, into a blast
furnace. In Evpatoria several hundred officers and "bourgeois" were tied up,

The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

tortured, and thrown into the sea. Similar acts of violence occurred in most of
the cities of the Crimea occupied by the Bolsheviks, including Sevastopol,
Yalta, Alushta, and Simferopol. Similar atrocities are recorded from April and
May 1918 in the big Cossack cities then in revolt. The extremely precise files
of the Denikin commission record "corpses with the hands cut off, broken
bones, heads ripped off, broken jaws, and genitals removed." 16

As Melgunov notes, it is nonetheless difficult to distinguish the systematic
practice of organized terror from what might otherwise be considered simply
uncontrolled excesses. There is rarely mention of a local Cheka directing such
massacres until August and September 1918; until that time the Cheka network
was still quite sparse. These massacres, which targeted not only enemy com-
batants but also civilian "enemies of the people" (for instance, among the 240
people killed in Yalta at the beginning of March 1918, there were some 70
politicians, lawyers, journalists, and teachers, as well as 165 officers), were often
carried out by "armed detachments," "Red Guards," and other, unspecified
"Bolshevik elements." Exterminating the enemy of the people was simply the
logical extension of a revolution that was both political and social. This con-
ception of the world did not suddenly spring into being in the aftermath of
October 1917, but the Bolshevik seizure of power, which was quite explicit on
the issue, did play a role in its subsequent legitimation.

In March 1917 a young captain wrote a perceptive letter assessing the
revolution and its effects on his regiment: "Between the soldiers and ourselves,
the gap cannot be bridged. For them, we are, and will always remain, the barini
| masters |. To their way of thinking, what has just taken place isn't a political
revolution but a social movement, in which they are the winners and we are the
losers. They say to us: 'You were the barini before, but now it's our turn!' They
think that they will now have their revenge, after all those centuries of servi-
tude." 17

The Bolshevik leaders encouraged anything that might promote this as-
piration to "social revenge" among the masses, seeing it as a moral legitimation
of the terror, or what Lenin called "the just civil war." On 15 (28) December
1917 D/erzhinsky published an appeal in Izvestiya (News) inviting all Soviets
to organize their own Chekas. The result was a swift flourishing of "commis-
sions," "detachments," and other "extraordinary organizations" that the cen-
tral authorities had great problems in controlling when they decided, a few
months later, to end such "mass initiatives" and to organize a centralized,
structured network of Chekas. lx

Summing up the first six months of the Cheka's existence in July 1918,
Dzerzhinsky wrote: "This was a period of improvisation and hesitation, during
which our organization was not always up to the complexities of the situ-
ation." 14 Yet even bv that date the Cheka's record as an instrument of repression

A State against Its People

was already enormous. And the organization, whose personnel had numbered
no more than 100 in December 1917, had increased to 12,000 in a mere six
months.

Its beginnings had been modest. On 11 (24) January 1918 Dzerzhinsky
had sent a note to Lenin: u We find the present situation intolerable, despite the
important services we have already rendered. We have no money whatever. We
work night and day without bread, sugar, tea, butter, or cheese. Either take
measures to authorize decent rations for us or give us the power to make our
own requisitions from the bourgeoisie." 20 Dzerzhinsky had recruited approxi-
mately 100 men, for the most part old comrades-in-arms, mostly Poles and
people from the Baltic states, nearly all of whom had also worked for the
PRMC, and who became the future leaders of the GPU of the 1920s and the
NKVD of the 1930s: Martin Latsis, Viacheslav Menzhinsky, Stanislav Mess-
ing, Grigory Moroz, Jan Peters, Meir Trilisser, Josif Unshlikht, and Genrikh
Yagoda.

The first action of the Cheka was to break a strike by state employees in
Petrograd. The method was swift and effective — all its leaders were arrested —
and the justification simple: "Anyone who no longer wishes to work with the
people has no place among them," declared Dzerzhinsky, who also arrested a
number of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary deputies elected to the
Constituent Assembly. This arbitrary act was immediately condemned by Isaac
Steinberg, the people's commissar of justice, who was himself a left Socialist
Revolutionary and had been elected to the government a few days previously.
This first clash between the Cheka and the judiciary raised the important issue
of the legal position of the secret police.

"What is the point of a 'People's Commissariat for Justice'?" Steinberg
asked Lenin. "It would be more honest to have a People's Commissariat for
Social Extermination. People would understand more clearly."

"Excellent idea," Lenin countered. "That's exactly how I see it. Unfortu-
nately, it wouldn't do to call it that!" 21

Lenin arbitrated in the conflict between Steinberg, who argued for a strict
subordination of the Cheka to the processes of justice, and Dzerzhinsky, who
argued against what he called "the nitpicking legalism of the old school of the
ancien regime" In Dzerzhinsky 's view, the Cheka should be responsible for its
acts only to the government itself.

The sixth (nineteenth) of January marked an important point in the
consolidation of the Bolshevik dictatorship. Early in the morning the Constitu-
ent Assembly, which had been elected in November-December 1917 and in
which the Bolsheviks were a minority (they had only 175 deputies out of 707
seats), was broken up by force, having met for a single day. This arbitrary act
seemed to provoke no particular reaction anywhere in the country. A small

The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

demonstration against the dissolution of the assembly was broken up by troops,
causing some twenty deaths, a high price to pay for a democratic parliamentary
experiment that lasted only a few hours. 22

In the days and weeks that followed the dissolution of the Constituent
Assembly, the position of the Bolshevik government in Petrograd became
increasingly uncomfortable, at the very moment when Trotsky, Kamenev, Adolf
Yoffe, and Karl Radek were negotiating peace conditions with delegations from
the Central Powers at Brest Litovsk. On 9 (22) January 1918 the government
devoted all business to the question of its transfer to Moscow. 21

What worried the Bolshevik leaders was not the German threat — the
armistice had held good since 15 (28) December — but the possibility of a
workers 1 uprising. Discontent was growing rapidly in working-class areas that
just two months before had been solidly behind them. With demobilization and
the consequent slump in large-scale orders from the military, businesses had
laid off tens of thousands of workers, and increasing difficulties in supply had
caused the daily bread ration to fall to a mere quarter of a pound. Unable to
do anything to improve this situation, Lenin merely spoke out against
"profiteers" and "speculators," whom he chose as scapegoats. "Every factory,
every company must set up its own requisitioning detachments. Everyone must
be mobilized in the search for bread, not simply volunteers, but absolutely
everyone; anyone who fails to cooperate will have his ration card confiscated
immediately" he wrote on 22 January (4 February) 1918. IA

Trotsky's nomination, on his return from Brest Litovsk on .11 January
1918, to head the Extraordinary Commission for Food and Transport was a
clear sign from the government of the decisive importance it was giving to the
"hunt for food," which was the first stage in the "dictatorship of food," Lenin
turned to this commission in mid-February with a draft decree that the mem-
bers of the commission — who besides Trotsky included Aleksandr Tsyurupa,
the people's commissar of food — rejected. According to the text prepared by
Lenin, all peasants were to be required to hand over any surplus food in
exchange for a receipt. Any defaulters who failed to hand in supplies within the
required time were to be executed. "When we read this proposal we were at a
loss for words," Tsyurupa recalled in his memoirs. "To carry out a project like
this would have led to executions on a massive scale. Lenin's project was simply
abandoned." 2 '

The episode was nonetheless extremely revealing. Since the beginning of
1918, Lenin had found himself trapped in an impasse of" his own making, and
he was worried about the catastrophic supply situation of the big industrial
centers, which were seen as isolated Bolshevik strongholds among the great
mass of peasants. 1 le was prepared to do anything to get the grain he needed
without altering his policies. Conflict was inevitable here, between a peasantry

A State against Its People

determined to keep for itself the fruits of its labors and to reject any external
interference, and the new regime, which was attempting to place its stamp on
the situation, refused to understand how economic supply actually functioned,
and desired more than anything to bring under control what it saw as growing
social anarchy.

On 21 February 1918, in the face of a huge advance by the German army
after the failure of the talks at Brest Litovsk, the government declared the
socialist fatherland to be in danger. The call for resistance against the invaders
was accompanied by a call for mass terror: "All enemy agents, speculators,
hooligans, counterrevolutionary agitators, and German spies will be shot on
sight." 26 This proclamation effectively installed martial law in all military /ones.
When peace was finally agreed at Brest Litovsk on 3 March 1918, it technically
lost its legal force, and legally the death penalty was reestablished again only
on 16 June 1918. Nevertheless, from February 1918 on the Cheka carried out
numerous summary executions, even outside the military /ones.

On 10 March 1918 the government left Petrograd for Moscow, the new
capital. The Cheka headquarters were set up near the Kremlin, in Bolshaya
Lubyanka Street, in a building that had previously belonged to an insurance
company. Under a series of names (including the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, M 1 X
and KGB) the Cheka would occupy the building until the fall of the Soviet
regime. From a mere 600 in March, the number of Cheka employees working
at the central headquarters had risen to 2,000 in July 1918, excluding the special
troops. At this same date the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, whose
task was to direct the immense apparatus of local Soviets throughout the
country, had a staff of 400.

The Cheka launched its first major operation on the night of 1 1-12 April
1918, when more than 1,000 men from its special troop detachments stormed
some twenty anarchist strongholds in Moscow. After several hours of hard
fighting, 520 anarchists were arrested; 25 were summarily executed as "ban-
dits," a term that from then on would designate workers on strike, deserters
fleeing conscription, or peasants resisting the forced requisitioning of grain.-'
After this first success, which was followed by other Opacification" opera-
tions in both Moscow and Petrograd, Dzcrzhinsky wrote a letter to the Central
Executive Committee on 29 April 1918 requesting a considerable increase in
Cheka resources. u At this particular time," he wrote, u Cheka activity is almost
bound to increase exponentially, in the face of the increase in counterrevolu-
tionary activity on all sides." 2 *

The "particular time" to which Dzerzhinsky was referring seemed indeed
to be a decisive period for the installation of the political and economic dicta-
torship and the strengthening of repression against a population that appeared
to regard the Bolsheviks with ever-increasing hostility. Since October 1917 the

The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Bolsheviks had done nothing to improve the everyday lot of the average Rus-
sian, nor had they safeguarded the fundamental liberties that had accrued
throughout 1917. Formerly regarded as the only political force that would allow
peasants to seize the land they had so long desired, the Bolsheviks were now
perceived as Communists, who wanted to steal the fruits of the peasants' labors.
Could these really be the same people, the peasants wondered, the Bolsheviks
who had finally given them the land, and the Communists who seemed to be
holding them for ransom, and wanted even the shirts from their backs?

The spring of 1918 was a crucial period, when everything was still up for
grabs. The Soviets had not yet been muzzled and transformed into simple tools
of the state apparatus; they were still a forum for real political debate between
Bolsheviks and moderate socialists. Opposition newspapers, though attacked
almost daily, continued to exist. Political life flourished as different institutions
competed for popular support. And during this period, which was marked by
a deterioration in living conditions and the total breakdown of economic rela-
tions between the town and the country, Socialist Revolutionaries and Men-
sheviks scored undeniable political victories. In elections to the new Soviets,
despite a certain amount of intimidation and vote-rigging, they achieved out-
right victories in nineteen of the thirty main provincial seats where voting took
place and the results were made public. 29

The government responded by strengthening its dictatorship on both the
political and the economic fronts. Networks of economic distribution had fallen
apart as a result of the spectacular breakdown in communications, particularly
in the railways, and all incentive for farmers seemed to have been lost, as the
lack of manufacturing products provided no impetus for peasants to sell their
goods. The fundamental problem was thus to assure the food supply to the
army and to the cities, the seat of power and of the proletariat. The Bolsheviks
had two choices: they could cither attempt to resurrect some sort of market
economy or use additional constraints. They chose the second option, con-
vinced of the need to go ever further in the struggle to destroy the old order.

Speaking before the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets on 29
April 1918, Lenin went straight to the point: "The smallholders, the people
who owned only a parcel of land, fought side by side with the proletariat when
the time came to overthrow the capitalists and the major landowners. But now
our paths have diverged. Smallholders have always been afraid of discipline
and organization. The time has come for us to have no mercy, and to turn
against them." m A few days later the people's commissar of food told the same
assembly: u [ say it quite openly; we are now at war, and it is only with guns
that we will get the grain we need." Trotsky himself added: "Our only choice
now is civil war. Civil war is the struggle for bread . . . Long live civil war!" 31

A 1921 text bv Karl Radek, one of the Bolshevik leaders, is revealing of

A State against Its People

Bolshevik policies in the spring of 1918, several months before the outbreak of
the armed conflict that for two years would find Reds and Whites at war:

The peasants had just received the land from the state, they had just
returned home from the front, they had kept their guns, and their
attitude to the state could be summed up as "Who needs it?" They
couldn't have cared less about it. If we had decided to come up with
some sort of food tax, it wouldn't have worked, for none of the state
apparatus remained. The old order had disappeared, and the peasants
wouldn't have handed over anything without actually being forced. Our
task at the beginning of 1918 was quite simple: we had to make the
peasants understand two quite simple things: that the state had some
claim on what they produced, and that it had the means to exercise those
rights.- 12

In May and June 1918 the Bolshevik government took two decisive meas-
ures that inaugurated the period of civil war, which has come to be known as
"War Communism." On 13 May 1918 a decree granted extraordinary powers
to the People's Commissariat of Food, requiring it to requisition all foodstuffs
and to establish what was in fact a "food army." By July nearly 12,000 people
were involved in these "food detachments, 1 ' which at their height in 1920 were
to number more than 24,000 men, over half of whom were unemployed work-
ers from Petrograd, attracted by the promise of a decent salary and a propor-
tional share of the confiscated food. The second decisive measure was the
decree of 1 1 June 1918, which established committees of poor peasants, order-
ing them to work in close collaboration with the food detachments and also to
requisition, in exchange for a share of the profits, any agricultural surpluses
that the better-off peasants might be keeping for themselves. These committees
of poor peasants soon displaced the rural Soviets, which the government judged
to be untrustworthy, as they were contaminated with Socialist Revolutionary
ideology. Given the tasks they were ordered to carry out — to seize by force the
results of other people's labor— and the motivations that were used to spur
them on (power, a feeling of frustration toward and envy of the rich, and the
promise of a share in the spoils), one can imagine what these first repre-
sentatives of Bolshevik power in the countryside were really like. As Andrea
Graziosi acutely notes: "For these people, devotion to the cause — or rather to
the new state — and an undeniable operational capacity went hand in hand with
a rather faltering social and political conscience, an interest in self-advance-
ment, and traditional modes of behavior, including brutality to their subordi-
nates, alcoholism, and nepotism . . . What we have here is a good example of
the manner in which the 'spirit' of the plebeian revolution penetrated the new

regime

".13

The Iron Fist of tha Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Despite a few initial successes, the organization of the Committees for the
Poor took a long time to get off the ground. The very idea of using the poorest
section of the peasantry reflected the deep mistrust the Bolsheviks felt toward
peasant society. In accordance with a rather simplistic Marxist schema, they
imagined ir to be divided into warring classes, whereas in fact it presented a
fairly solid front to the world, and particularly when faced with strangers from
the city. When the question arose of handing over surpluses, the egalitarian and
community-minded reflex found in all the villages took over, and instead of
persecuting a few rich peasants, by far the greater part of the requisitions were
simply redistributed in the same village, in accordance with people's needs.
This policy alienated the large central mass of the peasantry, and discontent
was soon widespread, with troubles breaking out in numerous regions. Con-
fronted by the brutality of the food detachments, who were often reinforced by
the army or by Cheka units, a real guerrilla force began to take shape from June
1918 onward. In July and August 110 peasant insurrections, described by the
Bolsheviks as kulak rebellions — which in their terminology meant uprisings
involving whole villages, with insurgents from all classes -broke out in the
zones they controlled. All the trust that the Bolsheviks had gained by not
opposing the seizure of land in 1917 evaporated in a matter of weeks, and for
more than three years the policy of requisitioning food was to provoke thou-
sands of riots and uprisings, which were to degenerate into real peasant wars
that were quelled with terrible violence.

The political effects of the hardening of the dictatorship in the spring of
1918 included the complete shutdown of all non-Bolshevik newspapers, the
forcible dissolution of all non-Bolshevik Soviets, the arrest of opposition lead-
ers, and the brutal repression of manv strikes. In May and June 1918, 205 of
the opposition socialist newspapers were finally closed down. The mostly Men-
shevik or Socialist Revolutionary Soviets of Kaluga, Tver, Yaroslavl, Ryazan,
Kostroma, Kazan, Saratov, Penza, Tambov, Voronezh, Orel, and Vologda were
broken up by force. 14 F cry where the scenario was almost identical: a few days
after victory bv the opposing party and the consequent formation of a new
soviet, the Bolshevik detachment would call for an armed force, usually a
detachment of the Cheka, which then proclaimed martial law and arrested the
opposition leaders.

Dzer/hinsky, who had sent his principal collaborators into towns that had
initially been won by the opposing parties, was an unabashed advocate of the
use of force, as can be seen clearly from the directive he sent on 31 May 1918
to A. V. Fiduk, his plenipotentiary on a mission to Tver:

The workers, under the influence of the Mcnsheviks, the Socialist Revo-
lutionaries, and other counterrevolutionary bastards, have all gone on

A State against Its People

strike, and demonstrated in favor of a government made up of all the
different socialist parties. Put big posters up all over the town saying
that the Cheka will execute on the spot any bandit, thief, speculator, or
counterrevolutionary found to be conspiring against the soviet. Levy an
extraordinary tax on all bourgeois residents of the town, and make a list
of them, as that will be very useful if things start happening. You ask
how to form the local Cheka: just round up all the most resolute people
you can, who understand that there is nothing more effective than a
bullet in the head to shut people up. Experience has shown me that you
only need a small number of people like that to turn a whole situation
around. b

The dissolution of the Soviets held by the opposition, and the expulsion
on 14 June 1918 of all Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries from the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, provoked protests and
strikes in many working-class towns, where, to make matters worse, the food
situation was still steadily deteriorating. In Kolpino, near Petrograd, the leader
of a Cheka detachment ordered his troops to open fire on a hunger march
organized by workers whose monthly ration of bread had fallen to two pounds.
There were ten deaths. On the same day, in the Berezovsky factory, near
Ekaterinburg, fifteen people were killed by a detachment of Red Guards at a
meeting called to protest against Bolshevik commissars who were accused of
confiscating the most impressive properties in the town and of keeping for
themselves the 150-ruble tax they had levied on the bourgeoisie. The next day
the local authorities declared a state of martial law, and fourteen people were
immediately executed by the local Cheka, who refrained from mentioning this
detail to headquarters in Moscow. 36

In the latter half of May and in June 1918, numerous working-class
demonstrations were put down bloodily in Sormovo, Yaroslavl, and Tula, as
well as in the industrial cities of Uralsk, Nizhni-Tagil, Beloretsk, Zlatoust, and
Ekaterinburg. The ever-increasing involvement of the local Chekas in these
repressions is attested by the growing frequency in working-class environments
of slogans directed against the "New Okhrana" (the tsarist secret police) who
worked for what they termed the "commissarocracy." 17

From 8 to 11 June 1918 Dzerzhinsky presided over the first All-Russian
Conference of Chekas, attended by 100 delegates from forty-three local sec-
tions, which already employed more than 12,000 men. That figure would rise
to 40,000 by the end of 1918, and to more than 280,000 by the beginning of
1921. Claiming to be above the Soviets and, according to certain Bolsheviks,
even above the Party, the conference declared its intention to u take full respon-
sibility for the struggle against the counterrevolution throughout the republic,
in its role as supreme enforcer of administrative power in Soviet Russia. 11 The

The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

role that it proclaimed for itself at the end of the conference revealed the extent
of the huge field of activity in which the political police was already operating,
before the great wave of counterrevolutionary actions that would mark the
summer. Modeled on the organization of the Lubyanka headquarters, each
provincial Cheka was to establish the following departments and offices:

1. Information Department. Offices: Red Army, monarchists, cadets, right
Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, anarchists, bourgeoisie and
church people, unions and workers' committees, and foreigners. The ap-
propriate offices were to draw up lists of suspects corresponding to all
the above categories.

2. Department for the Struggle against the Counterrevolution. Offices:
Red Army, monarchists, cadets, right Socialist Revolutionaries and
Mensheviks, anarchists, unionists, national minorities, foreigners, alco-
holism, pogroms and public order, and press affairs.

3. Department for the Struggle against Speculation and Abuses of
Authority.

4. Department of Transport, Communication, and Ports.

5. Operational Department, including special Cheka units.™

Two days after the All-Russian Conference of Chekas, the government
reinstated the death penalty, which had been abolished after the revolution of
February 1917. Though formally reinstated by Kerensky in July 1917, it had
been applied only at the front, in areas under military control. One of the first
measures taken by the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 October (8 Novem-
ber) 1917 had been to abolish capital punishment, a decision that elicited a
furious reaction from Lenin: "It's an error, an unforgivable weakness, a pacifist
delusion!"™ I .enin and Dzerzhinsky had been constantly trying to reinstate the
penalty while knowing very well that in practice it could already be used
whenever necessary, without any "nitpicking legalism, 11 by organizations like
the Cheka, which operated outside the law. The first legal death sentence was
pronounced by a revolutionary court on 21 June 1918; Admiral A. Shchastnyi
was the first "counterrevolutionary" to be shot "legally."

On 20 June V. Volodarsky, a Bolshevik leader in Petrograd, was shot down
by a militant Socialist Revolutionary. This event occurred at a time of extreme
tension in the old capital. In the preceding weeks, relations between Bolsheviks
and workers had gone from bad to worse, and in May and June the Petrograd
Cheka recorded seventy "incidents 11 — strikes, anti-Bolshevik meetings, demon-
strations — led principally by metalworkers from labor strongholds, who had
been the most ardent supporters of the Bolsheviks in the period leading up to
the events of 1917. The authorities responded to strikes with lockouts at the
large state-owned factories, a practice that became more and more widespread

A State against Its People

in the following months to break the workers' resistance. Volodarsky's assassi-
nation was followed by an unprecedented wave of arrests in the working-class
areas of Petrograd. The Assembly of Workers' Representatives, a mainly Men-
shevik group that organized working-class opposition and was in fact a real
opposition power to the Petrograd soviet, was dissolved. More than 800 leaders
were arrested in two days. The workers' response to this huge wave of arrests
was to call a general strike for 21 July 1918. w

From Moscow Lenin sent a letter to Grigori Zinoviev, president of the
Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party. The document is extremely
revealing, both of Lenin's conception of terror and of an extraordinary political
delusion. Lenin was in fact committing a huge political mistake when he
claimed that the workers were protesting Volodarsky's death.

Comrade Zinoviev! We have just learned that the workers of Petrograd
wish to respond to Comrade Volodarsky's murder with mass terror, and
that you (not you personally, but the members of the Party Committee
in Petrograd) are trying to stop them: I want to protest most vehemently
against this. We are eompromising ourselves; we are calling for mass
terror in the resolutions passed by the Soviet, but when the time comes
for action, we obstruct the natural reactions of the masses. This cannot
be! The terrorists will start to think we are being halfhearted. This is the
hour of truth: It is of supreme importance that we encourage and make
use of the energy of mass terror directed against the counterrevolution-
aries, especially those of Petrograd, whose example is decisive. Regards.
Lenin. 41

The Red Terror

I he Bolsheviks are saying openly that their days are numbered,"
Karl Helfferich, the German ambassador to Moscow, told his government on
3 August 1918. "A veritable panic has overtaken Moscow . . . The craziest
rumors imaginable are rife, about so-called 'traitors' who are supposed to be in
hiding around the city."

The Bolsheviks certainly never felt as much under threat as they did in
1918. The territory they controlled amounted to little more than the traditional
province of Muscovy, which now faced anti-Bolshevik opposition on three
solidly established fronts: the first in the region of the Don, occupied by the
Cossack troops of Ataman Krasnov and by General Denikin's White Army;
the second in Ukraine, which was in the hands of the Germans and of the
Rada, the national Ukrainian government; and a third front all along the
Trans-Siberian Railway, where most of the big cities had fallen to the Czech
Legion, whose offensive had been supported by the Socialist Revolutionary
government in Samara.

In the regions that were more or less under Bolshevik control, nearly 140
major revolts and insurrections broke out in the summer of 1918; most involved
peasant communities resisting the enforced commandeering of food supplies,
which was being carried out with such brutality by the food army; protests
against the limitations on trade and exchange; or protests against the new

A State against Its People

compulsory conscription for the Red Army. 1 Typically the angry peasants
would flock en masse to the nearest town, besiege the soviet, and sometimes
even attempt to set fire to it. The incidents usually degenerated into violence,
and either local militias or, more and more often, detachments from the local
Cheka opened fire on the protesters. In these confrontations, which became
more frequent as time passed, the Bolshevik leaders saw a vast counterrevolu-
tionary conspiracy directed against their regime by "kulaks disguised as White

Guards,"

"It is quite clear that preparations are being made for a White Guard
uprising in Nizhni Novgorod/ 1 wrote Lenin in a telegram on 9 August 1918 to
the president of the Executive Committee of the Nizhni Novgorod soviet, in
response to a report about peasant protests against requisitioning. "Your first
response must be to establish a dictatorial troika (i.e., you, Markin, and one
other person) and introduce mass terror, shooting or deporting the hundreds
of prostitutes who are causing all the soldiers to drink, all the ex-officers, etc.
There is not a moment to lose; you must act resolutely, with massive reprisals.
Immediate execution for anyone caught in possession of a firearm. Massive
deportations of Mensheviks and other suspect elements." 2 The next day Lenin
sent a similar telegram to the Central Executive Committee of the Penza soviet:

Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed
without pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand such ac-
tions, for the final struggle with the kulaks has now begun. You must
make an example of these people. (I) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so
that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known blood-
suckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out
the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so
that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell
themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that vc will
continue to do so. Reply saving you have received and carried out these
instructions. Yours, Lenin.

PS. Find tougher people.'

In fact a close reading of Cheka reports on the revolts of the summer of
1918, reveals that the only uprisings planned in advance were those in Yaroslavl,
Rybinsk, and Murom, which were organized by the Union for the Defense of
the Fatherland, led by the Socialist Revolutionary Boris Savinkov; and that of
workers in the arms factory of Evsk, at the instigation of Mensheviks and local
Socialist Revolutionaries. All the other insurrections were a spontaneous, direct
result of incidents involving local peasantry faced with requisitions or con-
scription. They were put down in a few days with great ferocity by trusted units
from the Red Army or the Cheka. Only Yaroslavl, where Savinkov's detach-

The Red Terror

ments had ousted the local Bolsheviks from power, managed to hold out for a
few weeks. After the town fell, Dzerzhinsky sent a "special investigative com-
mission," which in five days, from 24 to 28 July 1918, executed 428 people. 4

In August 1918, before the official beginning of the period of Red Terror
on 3 September, the Bolshevik leaders, and in particular Lenin and Dzerzhin-
sky, sent a great number of telegrams to local Cheka and Party leaders, instruct-
ing them to take "prophylactic measures" to prevent any attempted
insurrection. Among these measures, explained Dzerzhinsky, "the most effec-
tive are the taking of hostages among the bourgeoisie, on the basis of the lists
that you have drawn up for exceptional taxes levied on the bourgeoisie . . . the
arrest and the incarceration of all hostages and suspects in concentration
camps. "■** On 8 August Lenin asked Tsyurupa, the people's commissar of food,
to draw up a decree stipulating that "in all grain-producing areas, twenty-five
designated hostages drawn from the best-off of the local inhabitants will answer
with their lives for any failure in the requisitioning plan." As Tsyurupa turned
a deaf ear to this, on the pretext that it was too difficult to organize the taking
of hostages, Lenin sent him a second, more explicit note: "I am not suggesting
that these hostages actually be taken, but that they are to be named explicitly
in all the relevant areas. The purpose of this is that the rich, just as they are
responsible for their own contribution, will also have to answer with their lives
for the immediate realization of the requisitioning plan in their whole district "^

In addition to this new system for taking hostages, the Bolshevik leaders
experimented in August 1918 with a tool of oppression that had made its first
appearance in Russia during the war: the concentration camp. On 9 August
Lenin sent a telegram to the Executive Committee of the province of Penza
instructing them to intern "kulaks, priests, White Guards, and other doubtful
elements in a concentration camp." 7

A few days earlier both Dzerzhinsky and Trotsky had also called for the
confinement of hostages in concentration camps. These concentration camps
were simple internment camps in which, as a simple interim administrative
measure and independently of any judicial process, "doubtful elements" were
to be kept. As in every other country at this time, numerous camps for prisoners
of war already existed in Russia.

First and foremost among the "doubtful elements" to be arrested were the
leaders of opposition parties who were still at liberty. On 1 5 August 1918 Lenin
and Dzerzhinsky jointly signed an order for the arrest of Yuri Martov, Fedor
Dan, Aleksandr Potresov, and Mikhail Goldman, the principal leaders of the
Menshevik Party, whose press had long been silenced and whose repre-
sentatives had been hounded out of the Soviets. 8

For the Bolshevik leaders, distinctions among types of opponents no
longer existed, because, as they explained, civil wars have their own laws. "Civil

A State against Its People

war has no written laws," wrote Martin Latsis, one of Dzerzhinsky's principal
collaborators, in Izvestiya on 23 August 1918.

Capitalist wars have a written constitution, but civil war has its own laws
... One must not only destroy the active forces of the enemy, but also
demonstrate that anyone who raises a hand in protest against class war
will die by the sword. These are the laws that the bourgeoisie itself drew
up in the civil wars to oppress the proletariat ... We have yet to assimi-
late these rules sufficiently. Our own people are being killed by the
hundreds of thousands, yet we carry out executions one by one after
lengthy deliberations in commissions and courts. In a civil war, there
should be no courts for the enemy. It is a fight to the death. If you don't
kill, you will die. So kill, if you don't want to be killed! 9

Two assassination attempts on 30 August— one against M. S. Uritsky, the
head of the Petrograd Cheka, the other against Lenin— seemed to confirm the
Bolshevik leaders' theory that a real conspiracy was threatening their existence.
In fact it now appears that there was no link between the two events. The first
was carried out in the well-established tradition of populist revolutionary ter-
ror, by a young student who wanted to avenge the death of an officer friend
killed a few days earlier by the Petrograd Cheka. The second incident was long
attributed to Fanny Kaplan, a militant socialist with anarchist and Socialist
Revolutionary leanings. She was arrested immediately and shot three days later
without trial, but it now appears that there may have been a larger conspiracy
against Lenin, which escaped detection at the time, in the Cheka itself. 10 The
Bolshevik government immediately blamed both assassination attempts on
"right Socialist Revolutionaries, the servants of French and English imperial-
ism." The response was immediate: the next day, articles in the press and
official declarations called for more terror. "Workers," said an article in Pravda
(Truth) on 31 August, "the time has come for us to crush the bourgeoisie or
be crushed by it. The corruption of the bourgeoisie must be cleansed from our
towns immediately. Files will now be kept on all men concerned, and those who
represent a danger to the revolutionary cause will be executed . . . The anthem
of the working class will be a song of hatred and revenge!"

On the same day Dzerzhinsky and his assistant Jan Peters drafted an
"Appeal to the Working Classes" in a similar vein: 'The working classes must
crush the hydra of the counterrevolution with massive terror! We must let the
enemies of the working classes know that anyone caught in illegal possession
of a firearm will be immediately executed, and that anyone who dares to spread
the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and
sent to a concentration camp!" Printed in Izvestiya on 3 September, this appeal
was followed the next day by the publication of instructions sent by
N. Petrovsky, the people's commissar of internal affairs, to all the Soviets.

The Red Terror

Petrovsky complained that despite the "massive repressions" organized by
enemies of the state against the working masses, the "Red Terror" was too slow
in its effects:

The time has come to put a stop to all this weakness and sentimentality.
All the right Socialist Revolutionaries must be arrested immediately. A
great number of hostages must be taken among the officers and the
bourgeoisie. The slightest resistance must be greeted with widespread
executions. Provincial Executive Committees must lead the way here.
The Chekas and the other organized militia must seek out and arrest
suspects and immediately execute all those found to be involved with
counterrevolutionary practices . . . Leaders of the Executive Commit-
tees must immediately report any weakness or indecision on the part of
the local Soviets to the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. No
weakness or indecision can be tolerated during this period of mass
terror. 11

This telegram, which marked the official start of full-scale Red Terror,
gives the lie to Dzerzhinsky 's and Peters 1 later claims that the Red Terror "was
a general and spontaneous reaction of indignation by the masses to the at-
tempted assassinations of 30 August 1918, and began without any initiative
from the central organizations." The truth was that the Red Terror was the
natural outlet for the almost abstract hatred that most of the Bolshevik leaders
felt toward their "oppressors," whom they wished to liquidate not on an indi-
vidual basis, but as a class. In his memoirs the Menshevik leader Rafael Abra-
movich recalled a revealing conversation that he had in August 1917 with
Dzerzhinsky, the future leader of the Cheka:

"Abramovich, do you remember Lasalle's speech about the essence of a
Constitution?"

"Of course.' 1

"He said that any Constitution is always determined by the relation
between the social forces at work in a given country at the time in
question. 1 wonder how this correlation between the political and the
social might be changed?"

"Well, bv the various processes of change that are at work in the
fields of politics and economics at any time, by the emergence of new
forms of economic growth, the rise of different social classes, all those
things that you know perfectly well already, Feliks . . ."

"Yes, but couldn't one change things much more radically than
that 5 By forcing certain classes into submission, or by exterminating
them altogether? ,,|J

This cold, calculating, and cynical cruelty, the logical result of an implac-
able class war pushed to its extreme, was shared by many Bolsheviks. Grigory
Zinoviev, one of the main leaders, declared in September 1918: "To dispose of

76 A State against Its People

our enemies, we will have to create our own socialist terror. For this we will
have to train 90 million of the 100 million Russians and have them all on our
side. We have nothing to say to the other 10 million; we'll have to get rid of
them." 13

On 5 September the Soviet government legalized terror with the famous
decree "On Red Terror": "At this moment it is absolutely vital that the Chekas
be reinforced ... to protect the Soviet Republic from its class enemies, who
must all be locked up in concentration camps. Anyone found to have had any
dealings with the White Guard organizations, plots, insurrections, or riots will
be summarily executed, and the names of all these people, together with the
reasons for their execution, will be announced publicly." 1 "* As Dzcrzhinsky was
later to acknowledge, "The texts of 3 and 5 September finally gave us a legal
right that even Party comrades had been campaigning against until then- -the
right immediately to dispose of the counterrevolutionary rabble, without hav-
ing to defer to anyone else's authority at all."

In an internal circular dated 17 September, Dzerzhinksy, invited all local
Chekas to "accelerate procedures and terminate, that is, liquidate, any pending
business." 15 In fact the "liquidations" had started as early as 31 August. On 3
September Izvesttya reported that in the previous few days more than 500
hostages had been executed by the local Cheka in Petrograd. According to
Cheka sources, more than 800 people were executed in September in Petrograd
alone. The actual figure must be considerably higher than that. An eyewitness
relates the following details: "For Petrograd, even a conservative estimate must
be 1,300 executions . . . The Bolsheviks didn't count, in their 'statistics, 1 the
hundreds of officers and civilians who were executed on the orders of the local
authorities in Kronstadt. In Kronstadt alone, in one night, more than 400
people were shot. Three massive trenches were dug in the middle of the
courtyard, 400 people were lined up in front of them and executed one after
the other." 16 In an interview given to the newspaper Utro Moshvy (Moscow
morning) on 3 November 1918, Peters admitted that "those rather oversensitive
[sic Cheka members in Petrograd lost their heads and went a little too far.
Before Uritsky's assassination, no one was executed at all — and believe me,
despite anything that people might tell you, I am not as bloodthirsty as they
say — but since then there have been too many killed, often quite indiscrimi-
nately. But then again, Moscow's only response to the attempt on Lenin's life
was the execution of a few tsarist ministers." 17 According to Izvestiya again, a
"mere" 29 hostages from the concentration camp were shot in Moscow on 3
and 4 September. Among the dead were two former ministers from the regime
of Tsar Nicholas II, N. Khvostov (internal affairs) and I. Shchcglovitov (jus-
tice). Nonetheless, numerous eyewitness reports concur that hundreds of hos-
tages were executed during the "September massacres" in the prisons of
Moscow.

The Red Terror

In these times of Red Terror, Dzerzhinsky founded a new newspaper,
Ezhenedetnik VChK (Cheka weekly), which was openly intended to vaunt the
merits of the secret police and to encourage "the just desire of the masses for
revenge. 1 ' For the six weeks of its existence (it was closed down by an order
from the Central Committee after the raison d'etre of the Cheka was called into
question by a number of Bolshevik leaders), the paper candidly and unasham-
edly described the taking of hostages, their internment in concentration camps,
and their execution. It thus constituted an official basic minimum of informa-
tion of the Red Terror for September and October 1918. For instance, the
newspaper reported that in the medium-sized city of Nizhni Novgorod the
Cheka, who were particularly zealous under the leadership of Nikolai Bulganin
(later the head of the Soviet state from 1954 to 1957), executed 141 hostages
after 31 August, and once took more than 700 hostages in a mere three days.
In Vyatka the Cheka for the Ural region reported the execution of 23 "ex-
policemen," 154 "counterrevolutionaries," 8 "monarchists," 28 "members of
the Constitutional Democratic party," 186 "officers," and 10 "Mensheviks and
right Socialist Revolutionaries," all in the space of a week. The Ivanovo Vozne-
sensk Cheka reported taking 181 hostages, executing 25 "counterrevolutionar-
ies," and setting up a concentration camp with space for 1,000 people. The
Cheka of the small town of Sebezhsk reported shooting u 17 kulaks and one
priest, who had celebrated a mass for the bloody tyrant Nicholas II"; the Tver
Cheka reported 130 hostages and 39 executions; the Perm Cheka reported 50
executions. This macabre catalogue could be extended considerably; these are
merely a few extracts from the six issues of the Cheka Weekly}*

Other provincial journals also reported thousands of arrests and execu-
tions in the autumn of 1918. To take but two examples, the single published
issue of Izvestiya Isanlsymkot Gubcheha (News of the Tsaritsyn Province
Cheka) reported the execution of 103 people for the week of 3-10 September.
From 1 to 8 November 371 people appeared in the local Cheka court; 50 were
condemned to death, the rest "to a concentration camp as a measure of hy-
giene, as hostages, until the complete liquidation of all counterrevolutionary
insurrections." The only issue of Izvestiya Penzenskm Gubcheka (News of the
Penza Province Cheka) reported, without commentary, that "in response to
the assassination of Comrade Fgorov, a Petrograd worker on a mission in one
of the detachments of the Food Army, 150 White Guards have been exe-
cuted by the Cheka. In the future, other, more rigorous measures will be taken
against anyone who raises a hand in protest against the iron fist of the prole-
tariat."

The svodki, or confidential reports that the local Chekas sent to Moscow,
which have only recently become public, also confirm the brutality of responses
to the slightest incidents between the peasant community and the local authori-
ties. These incidents almost invariably concerned a refusal to accept the requi-

A State against Its People

sitioning process or conscription, and they were systematically catalogued in
the files as "counterrevolutionary kulak riots" and suppressed without mercy.

It is impossible to come up with an exact figure for the number of people
who fell victim to this first great wave of the Red Terror. Latsis, who was one
of the main leaders of the Cheka, claimed that in the second half of 1918 the
Cheka executed 4,500 people, adding with some cynicism: "If the Cheka can
be accused of anything, it isn't of being overzealous in its executions, but rather
of failure in the need to apply the supreme punishment. An iron hand will
always mean a smaller number of victims in the long term." 19 At the end of
October 1918 the Menshevik leader Yuri Martov estimated the number of
direct victims of the Cheka since the start of September to be "in excess of
H^OOO." 20

Whatever the exact number of victims may have been that autumn — and
the total reported in the official press alone suggests that at the very least it
must be between 10,000 and 15,000 — the Red Terror marked the definitive
beginning of the Bolshevik practice of treating any form of real or potential
opposition as an act of civil war, which, as Latsis put it, had "its own laws."
When workers went on strike to protest the Bolshevik practice of rationing
"according to social origin" and abuses of power by the local Cheka, as at the
armaments factory at Motovilikha, the authorities declared the whole factory
to be "in a state of insurrection.' 1 The Cheka did not negotiate with the strikers,
but enforced a lockout and fired the workers. The leaders were arrested, and
all the "Menshevik counterrevolutionaries," who were suspected of having
incited the strike, were hunted down. 21 Such practices were normal in the
summer of 1918. By autumn the local Chekas, now better organized and more
motivated by calls from Moscow for bloodier repressions, went considerably
further and executed more than 100 of the strikers without any trial.

The size of these numbers alone — between 10,000 and 15,000 summary
executions in two months — marked a radical break with the practices of the
tsarist regime. For the whole period 1825-1917 the number of death sentences
passed by the tsarist courts (including courts-martial) "relating to political
matters" came to only 6,323, with the highest figure of 1,310 recorded in 1906,
the year of the reaction against the 1905 revolution. Moreover, not all death
sentences were carried out; a good number were converted to forced labor. 22 In
the space of a few weeks the Cheka alone had executed two to three times the
total number of people condemned to death by the tsarist regime over ninety-
two years.

The change of scale went well beyond the figures. The introduction of
new categories such as "suspect," "enemy of the people," "hostage," "concen-
tration camp," and "revolutionary court," and of previously unknown practices
such as "prophylactic measures, " summary execution without judicial process

The Red Terror

of hundreds and thousands of people, and arrest by a new kind of political
police who were above the law, might all be said to have constituted a sort of
Copernican revolution.

The change was so powerful that it took even some of the Bolshevik
leaders by surprise, as can be judged from the arguments that broke out within
the Party hierarchy from October to December 1918 regarding the role of the
Cheka. On 25 October in the absence of Dzerzhinsky — who had been sent away
incognito for a month to rebuild his mental and physical health in Switzer-
land — the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party discussed a new status
for the Cheka. Criticizing the "full powers given to an organization that seems
to be acting above the Soviets and above even the party itself," Nikolai Bukharin,
Aleksandr Olminsky, who was one of the oldest members of the Party, and
Petrovsky, the people's commissar of internal affairs, demanded that measures
be taken to curb the "excessive zeal of an organization filled with criminals,
sadists, and degenerate elements from the lumpenproletariat." A commission
for political control was established. Lev Kamenev, who was part of it, went so
far as to propose the abolition of the Cheka. 2 '

But the diehard proponents of the Cheka soon regained the upper hand.
Among their number, besides Dzerzhinsky, were the major names in the Party:
Yakov Sverdlov, Stalin, Trotsky, and of course Lenin himself Me resolutely
came to the defense of an institution "unjustly accused of excesses by a few
unrealistic intellectuals . . . incapable of considering the problem of terror in a
wider perspective." 24 On 19 December 1918, at Lenin's instigation, the Central
Committee adopted a resolution forbidding the Bolshevik press to publish
"defamatory articles about institutions, notably the Cheka, which goes about
its business under particularly difficult circumstances." And that was the end
of the debate. The "iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat" was thus
accorded its infallibility. In Lenin's words, "A good Communist is also a good
Chekist."

At the beginning of 1919 Dzerzhinsky received authorization from the
Central Committee to establish the Cheka special departments, which thereaf-
ter were to be responsible for military security. On 16 March he was made
people's commissar of internal affairs and set about a reorganization, under the
aegis of the Cheka, of all militias, troops, detachments, and auxiliary units,
which until then had been attached to different administrations. In May all
these units — railway militias, food detachments, frontier guards, and Cheka
battalions — were combined into a single body, the Troops for the Internal
Defense of the Republic, which by 1921 numbered 200,000. These troops'
various duties included policing the camps, stations, and other points of stra-
tegic importance; controlling requisitioning operations; and, most important,
putting down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red

A State against Its People

Army. The Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic represented a
formidable force for control and oppression. It was a loyal army within the
larger Red Army, which was constantly plagued by desertions and which never
managed, despite a theoretical enrollment of between 3 million and 5 million,
to muster a fighting force in excess of 500,000 well-equipped soldiers. 2 '

One of the first decrees of the new people's commissar of internal affairs
concerned the organization of the camps that had existed since the summer of

1918 without any legal basis or systematic organization. The decree of 15 April

1919 drew a distinction between "coercive work camps,' 1 where, in principle,
all the prisoners had been condemned by a court, and "concentration camps, 11
where people were held, often as hostages, as a result of administrative meas-
ures. That this distinction was somewhat artificial in practice is evidenced in
the complementary instruction of 17 May 1919, which directed the creation of
"at least one camp in each province, with room for a minimum of 300 people 11
and listed the sixteen categories of prisoners to be interned. The categories
were as diverse as "hostages from the haute bourgeoisie"; "functionaries from
the ancien regime, up to the rank of college assessor, procurator, and their
assistants, mayors and assistant mayors of cities, including district capitals 11 ;
"people condemned, under the Soviet regime, for any crime of parasitism,
prostitution, or procuring"; and "ordinary deserters (not repeat offenders) and
soldiers who are prisoners in the civil war." 26

The number of people imprisoned in work camps and concentration
camps increased steadily from around 16,000 in May 1919 to more than 70,000
in September 1921 P These figures do not include several camps that had been
established in regions that were in revolt against Soviet power. In Tambov
Province, for example, in the summer of 1921 there were at least 50,000
"bandits" and "members of the families of bandits taken as hostages 11 in the
seven concentration camps opened by the authorities as part of the measures
to put down the peasant revolt. 28

The Dirty War

I he civil war in Russia has generally been analyzed as a conflict
between the Red Bolsheviks and the White monarchists; but in fact the events
that took place behind the lines of military confrontation are considerably
more important. This was the interior front of the civil war. It was charac-
terized above all by multifarious forms of repression carried out by each side —
the Red repressions being much more general and systematic — against militant
politicians of opposing parties or opposition groups, against workers striking
for any grievance, against deserters fleeing either their units or the conscription
process, or quite simply against citizens who happened to belong to a "suspect"
or "hostile" social class, whose only crime often was simply to have been living
in a town that fell to the enemy. The struggle on the interior front of the civil
war included all acts of resistance carried out by millions of peasants, rebels,
and deserters, and the group that both the Reds and the Whites called the
Greens often played a decisive role in the advance or retreat of one or other
side.

In 1919, for instance, massive peasant revolts against the Bolshevik powers
in the mid-Volga region and in Ukraine allowed Admiral Kolchak and General
Denikin to advance hundreds of miles behind Bolshevik lines. Similarly, several
months later, the uprising of Siberian peasants who were incensed at the
reestablishmcnt of the ancient rights of the landowners precipitated the retreat
of Kolchak's White Army before the advancing Reds.

A State against Its People

Although large-scale military operations between the Whites and Reds
lasted little more than a year, from the end of 1918 to the beginning of 1920,
the greater part of what is normally termed the civil war was actually a dirty
war, an attempt by all the different authorities, Red and White, civil and
military, to stamp out all real or potential opponents in the zones that often
changed hands several times. In regions held by the Bolsheviks it was the "class
struggle 11 against the "aristocrats, 11 the bourgeoisie, and socially undesirable
elements, the hunt for all non-Bolshevik militants from opposing parties, and
the putting down of workers 1 strikes, of mutinies in the less secure elements
of the Red Army, and of peasant revolts. In the zones held by the Whites, it
was open season on anyone suspected of having possible "Judeo-Bolshcvik' 1
sympathies.

The Bolsheviks certainly did not have a monopoly on terror. There was
also a White Terror, whose worst moment was the terrible wave of pogroms
carried out in Ukraine in the summer and autumn of 1919 by Simon Petlyura's
detachments from Denikin's armies, which accounted for more than 150,000
victims. But as most historians of the Red Terror and White Terror have
already pointed out, the two types of terror were not on the same plane. The
Bolshevik policy of terror was more systematic, better organized, and targeted
at whole social classes. Moreover, it had been thought out and put into practice
before the outbreak of the civil war. The White Terror was never systematized
in such a fashion. It was almost invariably the work of detachments that were
out of control, taking measures not officially authorized by the military com-
mand that was attempting, without much success, to act as a government. If
one discounts the pogroms, which Denikin himself condemned, the White
Terror most often was a series of reprisals by the police acting as a sort of
military counterespionage force. The Cheka and the Troops for the Internal
Defense of the Republic were a structured and powerful instrument of repres-
sion of a completely different order, which had support at the highest level
from the Bolshevik regime.

As in all civil wars, it is extremely difficult to derive a complete picture of
all the forms of terror employed by the two warring parties. The Bolshevik
Terror, with its clear methodology, its specificity, and its carefully chosen aims,
easily predated the civil war, which developed into a full-scale conflict only at
the end of the summer of 1918. The following list indicates in chronological
order the evolution of different types of terror and its different targets from
the early months of the regime;

Non-Bolshevik political militants, from anarchists to monarchists,
Workers fighting for the most basic rights, including bread, work, and a
minimum of liberty and dignity.

The Dirty War

Peasants — often deserters — implicated in any of the innumerable peas-
ant revolts or Red Army mutinies.

Cossacks, who were deported en masse as a social and ethnic group sup-
posedly hostile to the Soviet regime. "De-Cossackization" prefigured
the massive deportations of the 1930s called "dekulakization" (another
example of the deportation of ethnic groups) and underlines the funda-
mental continuity between the Leninist and Stalinist policies of political
repression.

"Socially undesirable elements" and other "enemies of the people, 11
"suspects, 11 and "hostages' 1 liquidated "as a preventive measure, 11 par-
ticularly when the Bolsheviks were enforcing the evacuation of villages
or when they took back territory or towns that had been in the hands of
the Whites.

The best-known repressions are those that concerned political militants from
the various parries opposed to the Bolsheviks. Numerous statements were
made bv the main leaders of the opposition parties, who were often imprisoned
and exiled, but whose lives were generally spared, unlike militant workers and
peasants, who were shot without trial or massacred during punitive Cheka
operations.

One of the first acts of terror was the attack launched on 11 April 1918
against the Moscow anarchists, dozens of whom were immediately executed.
The struggle against the anarchists intensified over the following years, al-
though a certain number did transfer their allegiance to the Bolshevik Party,
even becoming high-ranking Cheka officials, such as Aleksandr Goldberg,
Mikhail Brener, and Timofei Samsonov. The dilemma faced by most anarchists
in their opposition to both the new Bolshevik dictatorship and the return of
the old regime is well illustrated by the U-turns of the great peasant anarchist
leader Nestor Makhno, who for a while allied himself with the Red Army in
the struggle against the Whites, then turned against the Bolsheviks after the
White threat had been eliminated. Thousands of anonymous militant anar-
chists were executed as bandits as part of the repression against the peasant
army of Makhno and his partisans. It would appear that these peasants consti-
tuted the immense majority of anarchist victims, at least according to the
figures presented by the Russian anarchists in exile in Berlin in 1922. These
incomplete figures note 138 militant anarchists executed in the years 1919-
1921, 281 sent into exile, and 608 still in prison as of 1 January 1922. '

The left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were allies of the Bolsheviks until
the summer of 1918, were treated with relative leniency until February 1919.
As late as December 19)8 their most famous leader, Maria Spiridonova, pre-
sided over a party congress that was tolerated by the Bolsheviks. However, on

A State against Its People

10 February 1919, after she condemned the terror that was being carried out
on a daily basis by the Cheka, she was arrested with 210 other militants and
sentenced by a revolutionary court to "detention in a sanatorium on account
of her hysterical state." This action seems to be the first example under the
Soviet regime of the sentencing of a political opponent to detention in a
psychiatric hospital. Spiridonova managed to escape and continued secretly to
lead the left Socialist Revolutionary Party, which by then had been banned by
the Soviet government. According to Cheka sources, fifty-eight left Socialist
Revolutionary organizations were disbanded in 1919, and another forty-five in
1920. In these two years 1,875 militants were imprisoned as hostages, in re-
sponse to Dzerzhinsky's instructions. He had declared, on 18 March 1919:
"Henceforth the Cheka is to make no distinction between White Guards of the
Krasnov variety and White Guards from the socialist camp . . . The Socialist
Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks arrested are to be considered as hostages,
and their fate will depend on the subsequent behavior of the parties they belong
to." 2

To the Bolsheviks, the right Socialist Revolutionaries had always seemed
the most dangerous political rivals. No one had forgotten that they had regis-
tered a large majority in the free and democratic elections of November and
December 1917. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, in which
they held a clear majority of seats, the Socialist Revolutionaries had continued
to serve in the Soviets and on the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets,
from which they were then expelled together with the Mensheviks in June 1918.
Some Socialist Revolutionaries, together with Mensheviks and Constitutional
Democrats, then established temporary and short-lived governments in Samara
and Omsk, which were soon overturned by the White Admiral Kolchak.
Caught between the Bolsheviks and the Whites, the Socialist Revolutionaries
and the Mensheviks encountered considerable difficulties in defining a coherent
set of policies with which to oppose the Bolshevik regime. The Bolsheviks, in
turn, were extremely able politicians who used measures of appeasement,
infiltration, and outright oppression to second-guess the more moderate social-
ist opposition.

After authorizing the reappearance of the Socialist Revolutionary news-
paper Deio naroda (The people's cause) from 20 to 30 March, when Admiral
Kolchak's offensive was at its height, the Cheka rounded up all the Socialist
Revolutionaries and Mensheviks that it could on 31 March 1919, at a time when
there was no legal restriction on membership of either of the two parties. More
than 1,900 militants were arrested in Moscow, Tula, Smolensk, Voronezh,
Penza, Samara, and Kostroma. 3 No one can say how many were summarily
executed in the putting down of strikes and peasant revolts organized by
Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. Very few statistics are available, and

The Dirty War

even if we know approximately the number of victims in particular incidents,
we have no idea of the proportion of political activists who were caught up in
the massacres.

A second wave of arrests followed an article published by Lenin in Pravda
on 28 August 1919, in which he again berated the Socialist Revolutionaries and
the Mensheviks, accusing them of being ''accomplices and footservants of the
Whites, the landlords, and the capitalists. 11 According to the Cheka records,
2,380 Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were arrested in the last four
months of 1919. * The repressions against socialist activists intensified after a
meeting of a typography union, called in honor of a visiting delegation of
Knglish workers on 23 May 1920. At that meeting, under an assumed name
and in disguise, the Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov, who had
been president of the Constituent Assembly for the single day of its existence
and was in hiding from the secret police, publicly ridiculed the Cheka and the
government, The whole of Chernov's family were taken as hostages, and all
the Socialist Revolutionary leaders still at liberty were thrown into prison. 5 In
the summer of 1920 more than 2,000 Socialist Revolutionary and Menshevik
activists were registered, arrested, and kept as hostages. A Cheka internal memo
dated 1 July 1919 laid out with extraordinary cynicism the outlines of the plan
to deal with the opposing socialists:

Instead of merely outlawing these parties, which would simply force
them underground and make them even more difficult to control, it
seems preferable to grant them a son of semilegal status. In this way we
can have them at hand, and whenever wc need to wc can simply pluck
out troublemakers, renegades, or the informers that we need ... As far
as these anti-Soviet parties are concerned, we must make use of the
present war situation to blame crimes on their members, such as "coun-
terrevolutionary activities," "high treason," "illegal action behind the
lines," "spying for interventionist foreign powers,' 1 etc. h

Of all the repressive episodes, the one most carefully hidden by the new regime
was the violence used against workers, in whose name the Bolsheviks had first
come to power. Beginning in 1918, the repressions increased over the following
two years, culminating in 1921 with the well-known episode in Kronstadt.
l'Yom early 1918 the workers of Petrograd had shown their defiance of the
Bolsheviks. After the collapse of the general strike on 2 July 1918, trouble
broke out again among the workers in the former capital in March 1919, after
the Bolsheviks had arrested a number of Socialist Revolutionary leaders, in-
cluding Maria Spiridonova, who had just carried out a memorable tour of the
Petrograd factories, where she had been greeted with tremendous popular
acclaim. The moment was already one of extreme delicacy because of dire

A State against Its People

shortages of food, and these arrests led to strikes and a vast protest movement.
On 10 March the general assembly of workers of the Putilov factories, at a
meeting of more than ten thousand members, adopted a resolution that sol-
emnly condemned the Bolshevik actions: u This government is nothing less
than the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, kept
in place thanks to the Cheka and the revolutionary courts." 7

The proclamation called for power to be handed over to the Soviets, free
elections for the Soviets and for the factory committees, an end to limitations
on the quantity of food that workers could bring into the city from the coun-
tryside (1.5 pudy, or about 55 pounds), the release of political prisoners from
the ''authentic revolutionary parties," and above all the release of Maria Spiri-
donova. To try to put a brake on this movement, which seemed to get more
powerful by the day, Lenin came to Petrograd in person on 12 and 13 March
1919. But when he tried to address the workers who were striking in the
factories, he was booed off the stage, along with Zinoviev, to cries of 'Down
with Jews and commissars!" 8 Deep-rooted popular antiscmitism, which was
never far below the surface, had been quick to associate Bolsheviks and Jews,
so that the Bolsheviks quickly lost much of the credibility they had been
accorded in the aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917. The fact that
several of the best-known Bolshevik leaders (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alek-
sei Rykov, Karl Radek) were Jewish served to justify, in the mind of the masses,
this amalgamation of the labels "Jew" and "Bolshevik."

On 16 March 1919 Cheka detachments stormed the Putilov factor), which
was defended by armed workers. Approximately 900 workers were arrested. In
the next few days more than 200 strikers were executed without trial in the
Schlusselburg fortress, about thirty-rive miles from Petrograd. A new working
practice was set in place whereby all the strikers were fired and were rehired
only after they had signed a declaration stating that they had been deceived and
"led into crime" by counterrevolutionary leaders. 9 Henceforth all workers were
to be kept under close surveillance. After the spring of 1919, in several work-
ing-class centers a secret Cheka department set up a network of spies and
informers who were to submit regular reports about the u state of mind 11 in the
factory in question. The working classes were clearly considered to be dan-
gerous.

The spring of 1919 was marked by numerous strikes, which were savagely
put down, in some of the great working-class centers in Russia, such as Tula,
Sormovo, Orel, Bryansk, Tver, Ivanovo Voznesensk, and Astrakhan. 10 The
workers' grievances were identical almost everywhere. Reduced to starvation
by minuscule salaries that barely covered the price of a ration card for a
half-pound of bread a day, the strikers sought first to obtain rations matching
those of soldiers in the Red Army. But the more urgent demands were all

The Dirty War

political: the elimination of special privileges for Communists, the release of
political prisoners, free elections for Soviets and factory committees, the end of
conscription into the Red Army, freedom of association, freedom of expression,
freedom of the press, and so forth.

What made these movements even more dangerous in the eyes of the
Bolshevik authorities was their frequent success in rallying to their cause the
military units stationed in the town in question. In Orel, Bryansk, Gomel, and
Astrakhan mutinying soldiers joined forces with the strikers, shouting "Death
to Jews! Down with the Bolshevik commissars!," taking over and looting parts
of the city, which were retaken by Cheka detachments and troops faithful to
the regime only after several days of fighting." The repressions in response to
such strikes and mutinies ranged from massive lockouts of whole factories and
the confiscation of ration cards — the threat of hunger was one of the most
useful weapons the Bolsheviks had — to the execution of strikers and rebel
soldiers by the hundreds.

Among the most significant of the repressions were those in Tula and
Astrakhan in March and April 1919. Dzer/hinsky came to Tula, the historical
capital of the Russian army, on 3 April 1919 to put down a strike by workers
in the munitions factories. In the winter of 1918-19 these factories had already
been the scene of strikes and industrial action, and they were vital to the Red
Army, turning out more than 80 percent of all the rifles made in Russia.
Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were very much in the majority
among the political activists in the highly skilled workforce there. The arrest,
in early March 1919, of hundreds of socialist activists provoked a wave of
protests that culminated on 27 March in a huge "March for Freedom and
against Hunger," which brought together thousands of industrial and railway
workers. On 4 April Dzer/hinsky had another 800 "leaders" arrested and
forcibly emptied the factories, which had been occupied for several weeks by
the strikers. All the workers were fired. Their resistance was broken by hunger;
for several weeks their ration cards had not been honored. To receive replace-
ment cards, giving the right to a half-pound of bread and the right to work
again after the general lockout, workers had to sign a job application form
stipulating, in particular, that any stoppage in the future would be considered
an act of desertion and would thus be punishable by death. Production resumed
on 10 April. The night before that, 26 "leaders" had been executed. 12

The town of Astrakhan, near the mouth of the Volga, had major strategic
importance in the spring of 1919, as it was the last Bolshevik stronghold
preventing Admiral Kolchak's troops in the northwest from joining up with
those of General Denikin in the southwest. This circumstance alone probably
explains the extraordinary violence with which the workers' strike in the town
was suppressed in March. Having begun for both economic reasons (the paltry

A State against Its People

rations) and political reasons (the arrest of socialist activists), the strike inten-
sified on 10 March when the 45th Infantry Regiment refused to open fire on
workers marching through the city. Joining forces with the strikers, the soldiers
stormed the Bolshevik Party headquarters and killed several members of the
staff. Sergei Kirov, the president of the regional Revolutionary Military Com-
mittee, immediately ordered "the merciless extermination of these White
Guard lice by any means possible." Troops who had remained faithful to the
regime and to the Cheka blocked all entrances to the town and methodically set
about retaking it. When the prisons were full, the soldiers and strikers were
loaded onto barges and then thrown by the hundreds into the Volga with stones
around their necks. From 12 to 14 March between 2,000 and 4,000 strikers were
shot or drowned. After 15 March the repressions were concentrated on the
bourgeoisie of the town, on the pretext that they had been behind this "White
Guard conspiracy" for which the workers and soldiers were merely cannon
fodder. For two days all the merchants' houses were systematically looted and
their owners arrested and shot. Estimates of the number of bourgeois victims
of the massacres in Astrakhan range from 600 to 1,000. In one week between
3,000 and 5,000 people were either shot or drowned. By contrast, the number
of Communists buried with great pomp and circumstance on 18 March — the
anniversary of the Paris Commune, as the authorities were at pains to point
out — was a mere 47. Long remembered as a small incident in the war between
the Whites and the Reds, the true scale of the killing in Astrakhan is now
known, thanks to recently published archival documents. 1 - 1 These documents
reveal that it was the largest massacre of workers by Bolsheviks before the
events at Kronstadt.

At the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920 relations between the
Bolsheviks and the workers deteriorated even further, following the militariza-
tion of more than 2,000 businesses. As the principal architect of the militari-
zation of the workplace, Trotsky laid out his ideas on the issue at the Ninth
Party Congress in March 1920. Trotsky explained that humans are naturally
lazy. Under capitalism, people were forced to search for work to survive. The
capitalist market acted as a stimulus to man, but under socialism "the utilization
of work resources replaces the market." It was thus the job of the state to direct,
assign, and place the workers, who were to obey the state as soldiers obey orders
in the army, because the state was working in the interests of the proletariat.
Such was the basis of the militarization of the workplace, which was vigorously
criticized by a minority of syndicalists, union leaders, and Bolshevik directors.
In practice this meant the outlawing of strikes, which were compared to deser-
tion in times of war; an increase in the disciplinary powers of employers; the
total subordination of all unions and factory committees, whose role henceforth
was to be simply one of support for the producers' policies; a ban on workers'

The Dirty War

leaving their posts; and punishments for absenteeism and lateness, both of
which were exceedingly widespread because workers were often out searching
for food.

The general discontent in the workplace brought about by militarization
was compounded by the difficulties of everyday life. As was noted in a report
submitted by the Cheka to the government on 16 December 1919:

Of late the food crisis has gone from bad to worse, and the working
masses arc starving. They no longer have the physical strength necessary
to continue working, and more and more often they are absent simply as
a result of the combined effects of cold and hunger. In many of the
metallurgical companies in Moscow, the workers are desperate and
ready to take to take any measures necessary — strikes, riots, insurrec-
tions—unless some sort of solution to these problems is found immedi-
ately. 14

At the beginning of 1920 the monthly salary for a worker in Petrograd
was between 7,000 and 12,000 rubles. On the free market a pound of butter
cost 5,000 rubles, a pound of meat cost 3,000, and a pint of milk 500. Each
worker was also entitled to a certain number of products according to the
category in which he was classed. In Petrograd at the end of 1919, a worker in
heavy industry was entitled to a half-pound of bread a day, a pound of sugar a
month, half a pound of fat, and four pounds of sour herring.

In theory citizens were divided into five categories of "stomach," from the
workers in heavy industry and Red Army soldiers to the "sedentary" — a par-
ticularly harsh classification that included any intellectual — and were given
rations accordingly. Because the "sedentary" — the intellectuals and aristo-
crats — were served last, they often received nothing at all, since often there was
nothing left. The "workers" were divided into an array of categories that
favored the sectors vital to the survival of the regime. In Petrograd in the winter
of 1919-20 there were thirty-three categories of ration cards, which were never
valid for more than one month. In the centralized food distribution system that
the Bolsheviks had put in place, the food weapon played a major role in
rewarding or punishing different categories of citizens. "The bread ration
should be reduced for anyone who doesn't work in the transport sector, as it is
now of such capital importance, and it should be increased for people who do
work in this sector," wrote Lenin to Trotsky on 1 February 1920. 'if it must
be so, then let thousands die as a result, but the country must be saved." 15

When this policy came into force, all those who had links with the country,
and that meant a considerable number of people, tried desperately to go back
to their villages as often as possible to bring back some food.

The militarization measures, designed to "restore order" in the factories,

A State against Its People

had the opposite effect, and led to numerous stoppages, strikes, and riots, all
of which were ruthlessly crushed. u The best place for strikers, those noxious
yellow parasites," said Pravda on 12 February 1920, u is the concentration
camp!" According to the records kept at the People's Commissariat of Labor,
77 percent of all large and medium-sized companies in Russia were affected by
strikes in the first half of 1920. Significantly, the areas worst affected — metal-
lurgy, the mines, and the transport sector — were also the areas in which mili-
tarization was most advanced. Reports from the secret Cheka department
addressed to the Bolshevik leaders throw a harsh and revealing light on the
repression used against factories and workers who resisted the militarization
process. Once arrested, they were usually sentenced by revolutionary courts for
crimes of "sabotage 11 and "desertion. 1 ' At Simbirsk (formerly Ulyanovsk), to
take but one example, twelve workers from the armaments factory were sent to
camps in April 1920 for having "carried out acts of sabotage by striking in the
Italian manner . . . spreading anti-Soviet propaganda, playing on the religious
superstitions and the weak political convictions of the masses . , . and spreading
erroneous information about Soviet policies regarding salaries." ,h Behind this
obfuscatory language lay the likelihood that the accused had done little more
than take breaks that were not authorized by their bosses, protested against
having to work on Sundays, criticized the Communists, and complained about
their own miserable salaries.

The top leaders of the Party, including Lenin, called for an example to be
made of the strikers. On 29 January 1920, worried by the tense situation
regarding workers in the Ural region, Lenin sent a telegram to Vladimir
Smirnov, head of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Fifth Army: "P.
has informed me that the railway workers are clearly involved in acts of sabo-
tage ... I am told that workers from Izhevsk are also involved in this. 1 am
surprised that you are taking the matter so lightly, and are not immediately
executing large numbers of strikers for the crime of sabotage." 17 Many strikes
started up in 1920 as a direct result of militarization: in Ekaterinburg in March
1920, 80 workers were arrested and sent to camps; on the Ryazan-Ural Railway
in April 1920, 100 railway workers were given the same punishment; on the
Moscow-Kursk line in May 1920, 160 workers met the same fate, as did 152
workers in a metallurgy factory in Bryansk in June 1920. Many other strikes
protesting militarization were suppressed in a similarly brutal fashion. 1 "

One of the most remarkable strikes took place in the Tula arms factory, a
crucial center of protest against the Bolshevik regime, which had already been
severely punished for its actions in April 1919. On Sunday, 6 June 1920, a
number of metallurgy workers refused to work the extra hours that the bosses
demanded. Female workers then refused to work on that Sunday and on
Sundays thereafter in general, explaining that Sunday was the only day they

The Dirty War

could go out looking for food in the surrounding countryside. In response to a
call from the factory bosses, a large detachment from the Cheka arrived to arrest
the strikers. Martial law was decreed, and a troika made up of Party repre-
sentatives and representatives of the Cheka was instructed to denounce a
"counterrevolutionary conspiracy fomented by Polish spies and the Black Hun-
dreds to weaken the combat strength of the Red Army."

While the strike spread and arrests of the "leaders" multiplied, a new
development changed the usual course of developments; in hundreds, and then
in thousands, female workers and simple housewives presented themselves to
the Cheka asking to be arrested too. The movement spread, and the men
demanded to be arrested en masse as well in order to make the idea of a Polish
conspiracy appear even more ridiculous. In four days more than 10,000 people
were detained in a huge open-air space guarded by the Cheka. Temporarily
overwhelmed by the numbers, and at a loss about how to present the informa-
tion to Moscow, the local Party organizations and the Cheka finally persuaded
the central authorities that there was indeed an enormous conspiracy afoot. A
Committee for the Liquidation of the Tula Conspiracy interrogated thousands
of prisoners in the hope of finding a few guilty conspirators. To be set free,
hired again, and given a new ration book, all the workers who had been arrested
had to sign the following statement: "I, the undersigned, a filthy criminal dog,
repent before the revolutionary court and the Red Army, confess my sins, and
promise to work conscientiously in the future."

In contrast to other protest strikes, the Tula confrontation in the summer
of 1920 was treated with comparative leniency: only 28 people were sentenced
to camps, and 200 were sent into exile. V) At a time when a highly skilled
workforce was comparatively rare, the Bolsheviks could hardly do without the
best armaments workers in the country. Terror, like food, had to take into
account the importance of the sector in question and the higher interests of
the regime.

lowever important the workers 1 front was strategically and symbolically, it was
only one of the man) internal fronts of the civil war. The struggle against the
Greens, the peasants who were resisting requisitioning and conscription, was
often far more important. Reports now available for the first time from the
special departments of the Cheka and from the Troops for the Internal De-
fense of the Republic, whose task was to deal with deserters and to put down
mutinies and peasant riots, reveal the full horror of the extraordinary violence
of this "dirtv war," which went on beyond the more obvious conflicts between
the Reds and the Whites. It was in this crucial struggle between Bolshevik
power and the peasantry that the policy of terror, based on an extremely
pessimistic view of the masses, was really forged: "They are so ignorant,"

A State against Its People

wrote Dzerzhinsky, "that they have no idea what is really in their own inter-
est." The brute masses, it was felt, could be tamed only by force, by the "iron
broom" that Trotsky mentioned in a characteristic image when describing the
repressions he had used "to clean" Ukraine and "sweep away" the u bandit
hordes" led by Nestor Makhno and other peasant chiefs. 20

The peasant revolts had started in the summer of 1918. They became
much more widespread in 1919 and 1920 and culminated in 1920-21, when
they momentarily obliged the Bolshevik forces to retreat slightly.

There were two obvious reasons for these peasant revolts: the constant
requisitioning of goods and the enforced conscription into the Red Army. In
January 1919 the rather disorganized foraging for agricultural surpluses that
had characterized the first operations of the summer of 1918 was replaced by
a centralized and more carefully planned requisitioning system. Every prov-
ince, district, canton (volost), and village community had to hand over to the
state a quota that was fixed in advance in accordance with estimates about the
size of the harvest. In addition to grains, the quotas included some twenty-odd
products such as potatoes, honey, eggs, butter, cooking oil, meat, cream, and
milk. Each community was responsible for the collection itself. Only when the
whole village had filled its quota did the authorities distribute receipts allowing
people to buy manufactured goods, and even then only about 15 percent of the
people's needs in that department were actually met. Payment for the agricul-
tural harvest was more or less symbolic by this stage. By the end of 1920 the
ruble had lost 96 percent of its previous value relative to the prewar gold-
standard ruble. From 1918 to 1920 agricultural requisitioning increased three-
fold, and peasant revolts, though difficult to calculate exactly, seem to have
increased at approximately the same rate. 21

Opposition to conscription, after three years in the trenches in "the im-
perialist war, 1 ' was the second most frequent reason for the peasant revolts,
often led by the Greens. It also accounted for the groups of deserters hiding in
the woods. It is now believed that in 1919 and 1920 there were more than
3 million deserters. In 1919 around 500,000 deserters were arrested by various
departments of the Cheka and the special divisions created to combat desertion;
in the following year the figure rose to between 700,000 and 800,000. Even so,
somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million deserters, most of them peasants who
knew the territory extremely well, managed to elude the authorities. 22

Faced with the scale of the problem, the government took ever more
repressive measures. Not only were thousands of deserters shot, but the fami-
lies of deserters were often treated as hostages. After the summer of 1918 the
hostage principle was applied in more and more ordinary situations. For exam-
ple, a government decree of 15 February 1919 signed by Lenin encouraged
local Chekas to take hostages from among the peasants in regions where the

The Dirty War

railway lines had not yet been cleared of snow to a satisfactory standard: "And
if the lines aren't sw r ept properly, the hostages are to be shot." 2:i On 12 May
1920 Lenin sent the following instructions to all the provincial commissions
and detachments responsible for tracing deserters: "After the expiration of the
seven-day deadline for deserters to turn themselves in, punishments must be
increased for these incorrigible traitors to the cause of the people. Families and
anyone found to be assisting them in any way whatsoever are to be considered
as hostages and treated accordingly." 24 In practice this decree did nothing more
than legally sanction what was already common practice. The tidal wave of
desertions nonetheless rolled on. In 1920 and 1921, as in 1919, deserters
accounted for most of the Green partisans, against whom, for three years (or
in some regions four or even five), the Bolsheviks waged a relentless war of
unimaginable cruelty.

Besides their resistance to requisitioning and conscription, the peasants
generally rejected any intervention by what they considered to be a foreign
power, in this case the Communists from the cities. As far as many of the
peasants were concerned, the Communists responsible for the requisitioning
were simply not the same people as the Bolsheviks who had encouraged the
agricultural revolution in 1917. In the regions that were constantly changing
hands between the Reds and the Whites, confusion and violence were at their
height.

The reports from different departments of the Cheka responsible for
suppressing the insurrections are an exceptionally good source of information,
and allow us to see many different sides of this guerrilla war. They often draw
a distinction between two types of peasant movement: the bunt, a spontaneous
revolt and brief flare-up of violence with a relatively limited number of par-
ticipants, typically between a few dozen to a hundred or so rebels; and the
vosstatiie, a large-scale insurrection involving thousands or even tens of thou-
sands of peasants, organized into veritable armies capable of storming towns
and cities, and held together by a coherent political program, usually with
anarchist or Socialist Revolutionary tendencies. Excerpts from these reports
give some idea of what went on:

30 April 1919. Tambov Province. At the beginning of April, in the
Lebyadinsky district, a riot broke out among kulaks and deserters pro-
testing the mobilization of men and horses and the requisitioning of
grain. With cries of "Down with the Communists! Down with the
Soviets!" the rebels stormed and burned several of the Executive Com-
mittees in the canton and killed seven Communists in a barbaric fashion,
sawing them in half while they were still alive. Summoned by members
of the requisitioning detachment, the 212th Battalion of the Cheka
arrived and put down the kulak revolt. Sixty people were arrested, and

94 A State against Its People

fifty were executed immediately; the village where the rebellion started
was razed.

Voronezh Province, 11 June 1919, 16:15. Telegram. The situation is
improving. The revolt in the Novokhopersk region is nearly over. Our
planes bombed and set fire to the town of Tretyaki, one of the principal
bandit strongholds. Mopping-up operations are continuing.

Yaroslavl Province, 23 June 1919. The uprising of the deserters in the
Petropavlovskaya volost has been put down. The families of the desert-
ers have been taken as hostages. When we started to shoot one person
from each family, the Greens began to come out of the woods and
surrender. Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example. 2 '

Thousands of simitar reports bear witness to the great violence of this
war between the authorities and peasant guerrillas, often caused by desertion
but described in the reports as kulak revolts or bandit uprisings. 2f> The three
excerpts above demonstrate the varieties of repression used most often by the
authorities: the arrest and execution of hostages taken from the families of
deserters or "bandits," and the bombing and burning of villages. These blind
and disproportionate reprisals were based on the idea of the collective respon-
sibility of the whole village community. The authorities generally laid down a
deadline for the return of deserters, and once the deadline had expired, the
deserters were considered to be "forest bandits" who were liable to be shot on
sight. Moreover, it was made clear in the tracts of both the civil and the military
authorities that "if the inhabitants of a village help the bandits in the forests
in any way whatever, the whole village will be burned down."

Some of the more general Cheka reports give a clearer idea of the scale
of this war in the countryside. In the period 15 October-30 November 1918,
in twelve provinces of Russia alone, there were 44 bunt riots, in which 2,320
people were arrested, 620 were killed in the fighting, and 982 subsequently
executed. During these disorders 480 Soviet functionaries were killed, as were
112 men from the food detachments, the Red Army, and the Cheka. In Sep-
tember 1919, for the ten Russian provinces for which reports are available,
48,735 deserters and 7,325 "bandits" were arrested, 1,826 were killed, 2,230
were executed, and there were 430 victims among the functionaries and the
Soviet military. These very fragmentary reports do not include the much
greater losses during the larger-scale peasant uprisings.

The uprisings can be grouped around several periods of greater intensity:
March and April 1919 for the regions of the mid-Volga and Ukraine; Febru-
ary-August 1920 for the provinces of Samara, Ufa, Kazan, Tambov, and again
Ukraine, which was retaken from the Whites by the Bolsheviks but whose
heartlands were still controlled by the guerrilla peasants. From late 1920

The Dirty War

through the first half of 1921 the peasant movement, very much on the defen-
sive in Ukraine, the Don, and the Kuban, culminated in huge resistance in the
central provinces of Tambov, Penza, Samara, Saratov, Simbirsk, and Tsarit-
syn. 27 The only factor that diminished the intensity of the peasant war here was
the arrival of one of the worst famines of the twentieth century.

It was in the rich provinces of Samara and Simbirsk, which in 1919 were
required to provide more than one-fifth of the grain requisitions for the whole
of Russia, that spontaneous peasant riots were transformed for the first time in
March 1919 into a genuine insurrection. Do/ens of towns were taken by the
insurrectionist peasant army, which by then numbered more than 30,000 armed
soldiers. The Bolshevik central powers lost all control of Samara for more than
a month. The rebellion facilitated the advance Toward the Volga of units from
Admiral Kolchak's White Army, as the Bolsheviks were forced to send tens of
thousands of men to deal with this extremely well-organized peasant army with
a clear political program calling lor free trade, free elections to the Soviets, and
an end to requisitioning and the "Bolshevik comrmssaroeracy." Summing up
the situation in April 1919, after the end of the uprising, the head of the Cheka
in Samara noted that 4,240 of the rebels had been killed in the fighting, 625
had been subsequently shot, and 6,210 deserters and "bandits" had been ar-
rested,

Just when the fire seemed to have been damped in Samara, it flared up
again with unparalleled intensity in Ukraine. After the Germans and the Aus-
tro-Hunganans had left at the end of 1918, the Bolshevik government had
decided to recapture Ukraine. The breadbasket of the old tsarist empire,
Ukraine was now to ctx the proletariat of Moscow and Petrograd. Requisi-
tioning quotas were higher there than anywhere else in the Soviet empire. To
meet them would have been to condemn thousands of villages, already badly
damaged by the German and Austro-1 lungarian occupations, to certain star-
vation, [n addition, unlike the policy in Russia at the end of 1917 for the sharing
of land among the peasant communities, the Bolshevik intention for Ukraine
was a straightforward nationalization of all the great properties, which were the
most modern in the old empire. This policy, which aimed to transform the great
sugar- and grain-producing areas into huge collective farms with the peasants
as nothing more than agricultural laborers, was bound to provoke resistance.
The peasants hail become militarized in the fight against the German and
Austm-I lungarian occupying forces. By 1919 there existed real armies of tens
of thousands of peasants, commanded by military chiefs and Ukrainian politi-
cians such as Simon Pctlvura, Nestor Makhno, Mykola Hrvhorviv, and Zeleny.
J he peasant armies were determined to implement their version of an agrarian
revolution: land for the peasants, free trade, and free elections to the Soviets,
"without Muscovites or Jews; 1 For many of the Ukrainian peasants, who had

A State against Its People

been born into a long tradition of antagonism between the countryside and the
mostly Russian and Jewish towns, it was temptingly simple to make the equa-
tion Muscovites = Bolsheviks = Jews. They were all to be expelled from
Ukraine.

These particularities of Ukraine explain the brutality and the length of
the confrontations between the Bolsheviks and a large part of the Ukrainian
peasantry. The presence of another party, the Whites, who were under assault
at once by the Bolsheviks and by various peasant Ukrainian armies who op-
posed the return of the great landowners, rendered the political and military
situation even more complex; some cities, such as Kyiv, were to change hands
fourteen times in the space of two years.

The first great revolts against the Bolsheviks and their food-requisitioning
detachments took place in April 1919. In that month alone, 93 peasant revolts
took place in the provinces of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Poltava, and Odessa. For the
first twenty days of July 1919 the Cheka's own statistics note 210 revolts,
involving more than 100,000 armed combatants and several hundred thousand
peasants. The peasant armies of Hryhoryiv, numbering more than 20,000,
including several mutinying units from the Red Army, with 50 cannon and
more than 700 heavy machine guns, took a whole series of towns in southern
Ukraine in April and May 1919, including Cherkassy, Kherson, Nikolaev, and
Odessa. They set up an independent interim government whose slogans stated
their intentions quite clearly: "All power to the Soviets of the Ukrainian peo-
ple," "Ukraine for the Ukrainians, down with the Bolsheviks and the Jews," 1
"Share out the land," "Free enterprise, free trade." 2 * Zeleny's partisans, nearly
20,000 armed men, held the entire province of Kyiv except for a few big cities.
Under the slogan "Long live Soviet power, down with the Bolsheviks and the
Jews!" they organized dozens of bloody pogroms against the Jewish commu-
nities in the towns and villages of Kyiv and Chernihiv. The best known, thanks
to numerous studies, are the actions of Nestor Makhno. At the head of a
peasant army numbering tens of thousands, he espoused a simultaneously
nationalist and social anarchist program that had been elaborated in several
peasant congresses, including the Congress of Delegate Peasants, Workers, and
Rebels of Gulyai-Pole, held in April 1919 in the midst of the Makhno uprising.
The Makhnovists voiced their rejection of all interference by the state in
peasant affairs and a desire for peasant self-government on the basis of freelv
elected Soviets. Along with these basic demands came another series of claims,
shared by other peasant movements, such as calls for the end of requisitioning,
the elimination of taxes, freedom for socialist and anarchist parties, the redis-
tribution of land, the end of the "Bolshevik eommissarocracy," and the expul-
sion of the special troops and the Cheka. 2 ''

The hundreds of peasant uprisings in the spring and summer of 1919

The Dirty War

behind the lines of the Red Army played a key role in the short-lived victories
by General Denikin's troops. Moving out of southern Ukraine on 19 May 1919,
the White Army advanced rapidly while the Red Army was busy putting down
the peasant rebellions. Denikin's troops took Kharkiv on 12 June, Kyiv on 28
August, and Voronezh on 30 September. The retreat of the Bolsheviks, who
had established a power base only in the big cities and left the countryside in
the hands of the peasants, was greeted by large-scale executions of prisoners
and hostages. In a hasty retreat through the countryside held by the peasant
guerrillas, the Red Army detachments and the Cheka gave no quarter. They
burned villages by the hundreds and carried out massive executions of bandits,
deserters, and hostages. The retreat and the subsequent reconquest of Ukraine
at the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920 were the settings for scenes of
extraordinary violence against the civilian population, as recounted in Isaac
Babel's masterpiece, The Red Cavalry. M)

By early 1920 the White armies, with the exception of a few straggling
units that had taken refuge in the Crimea under the command of Baron Pyotr
Wrangel, Dcnikin's successor, had been defeated. The Bolshevik forces and the
peasants were thus left face to face. From then until 1922, the conflict with the
Bolshevik authorities precipitated extremely bloody repression. In February
and March 1920 a huge new uprising, known as the "Pitchfork Rebellion,"
stretched from the Volga to the Urals, in the provinces of Kazan, Simbirsk,
and Ufa. Populated by Russians, but also by Tatars and Bashkirs, the regions
in question had been subject to particularly heavy requisitioning. Within weeks
the rebellion had taken root in almost a dozen districts. The peasant army
known as "The Black Eagle" counted more than 50,000 soldiers at its height.
Armed with cannons and heavy machine guns, the Troops for the Internal
Defense of the Republic overwhelmed the rebels, who were armed with only
pitchforks and axes. In a few days thousands of rebels were massacred and
hundreds of villages burned. 31

Despite the rapid crushing of the Pitchfork Rebellion, the peasant revolts
continued to spread, flaring up next in the provinces of the mid-Volga region,
in Tambov, Penza, Samara, Saratov, and Tsaritsyn, all of which had suffered
heavily from requisitioning. The Bolshevik leader Antonov-Ovseenko, who led
the repressions against the rebel peasants in Tambov, later acknowledged that
the requisitioning plans of 1920 and 1921, if carried out as instructed, would
have meant the certain death of the peasants. On average, they were left with
1 pud (35 pounds) of grain and 1.5 pudy (about 55 pounds) of potatoes per
person each year — approximately one-tenth of the minimum requirements for
life. These peasants in the provinces were thus engaged in a straightforward
fight for survival in the summer of 1920. It was to continue for two years, until
the rebels were finally defeated by hunger.

A State against Its People

The third great center of conflict between peasants and Bolsheviks in 1920
was Ukraine itself, most of which had been reconquered from the White armies
between December 1919 and February 1920; but the countryside had remained
under the control of hundreds of detachments of free Greens of various
allegiances, many of them affiliated with Makhno's command. Unlike the Black
Eagles, the Ukrainian detachments were well armed, since they were made up
largely of deserters. In the summer of 1920 Makhno's army numbered 15,000
men, 2,500 cavalry, approximately 100 heavy machine guns, twenty artillery
pieces, and two armored vehicles. Hundreds of smaller groups, numbering
from a dozen to several hundred, also put up stout resistance against the
Bolshevik incursions. To fight these peasant guerrillas, the government in May
1920 called on the services of Feliks D/er/hinsky, naming him "Commander
in Chief of the Rear Front of the Southwest.' 1 Dzerzhinsky remained in
Kharkiv for more than two months, setting up twenty-four special units of the
Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic, elite units with special cavalry
detachments trained to pursue retreating rebels, as well as airplanes to bomb
bandit strongholds. 12 Their task was to eradicate all peasant guerrillas within
three months. In fact the operation took more than two years, lasting from
the summer of 1920 until the autumn of 1922, and cost tens of thousands of

Among the episodes in the struggle between peasants and the Bolshevik
authorities, "de-Cossackization" — the systematic elimination of the Cossacks
of the Don and the Kuban as social groups — occupies a special place. For the
first time, on the principle of collective responsibility, a new regime took a
series of measures specially designed to eliminate, exterminate, and deport the
population of a whole territory, which Soviet leaders had taken to calling the
"Soviet Vendee."-" These operations were plainly not the result of military
excesses in the heat of battle, but were carefully planned in advance in response
to decrees from the highest levels of state authority, directly implicating nu-
merous top-ranking politicians, including Lenin, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Sergei
Syrtsov, Grigory Sokolnikov, and Isaac Reingold. Momentarily halted in the
spring of 1919 because of military setbacks, the process of dc-Cossackization
resumed with even greater cruelty in 1920, after Bolshevik victories in the Don
and the Kuban.

The Cossacks, who since December 1917 had been deprived of the status
they had enjoyed under the old regime, were classified by the Bolsheviks as
"kulaks" and "class enemies"; and as a result they joined forces with the White
armies that had united in southern Russia in the spring of 1918 under the
banner of Ataman Krasnov. In February 1919, after the general advance of the
Bolsheviks into Ukraine and southern Russia, the first detachment of the Red

The Dirty War

Army penetrated the Cossack territories along the Don. At the outset the
Bolsheviks took measures to destroy everything that made the Cossacks a
separate group: their land was confiscated and redistributed among Russian
colonizers or local peasants who did not have Cossack status; they were ordered,
on pain of death, to surrender all their arms (historically, as the traditional
frontier soldiers of the Russian empire, all Cossacks had a right to bear arms);
and all Cossack administrative assemblies were immediately dissolved.

All these measures were part of the preestablished de-Cossackization plan
approved in a secret resolution of the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee on
24 January 1919: "In view of the experiences of the civil war against the
Cossacks, we must recognize as the only politically correct measure massive
terror and a merciless fight against the rich Cossacks, who must be extermi-
nated and physically disposed of, down to the last man."- 14

In practice, as acknowledged by Reingold, the president of the Revolu-
tionary Committee of the Don, who was entrusted with imposing Bolshevik
rule in the Cossack territories, "what was carried out instead against the
Cossacks was an indiscriminate policy of massive extermination. "^ From mid-
February to mid-March 1919, Bolshevik detachments executed more than
8,000 Cossacks.-*' 1 In each stamina (Cossack village) revolutionary courts passed
summary judgments in a matter of minutes, and whole lists of suspects were
condemned to death, generally for "counterrevolutionary behavior." In the face
of this relentless destruction, the Cossacks had no choice but to revolt.

The revolt began in the district of Veshenskaya on 11 March 1919. The
well-organized rebels decreed the general mobilization of all males aged sixteen
to fifty-five and sent out telegrams urging the whole population to rise up
against the Bolsheviks throughout the Don region and as far as the remote
province of Voronezh.

"We, the Cossacks," they explained, "are not anti-Soviet. We are in favor
of free elections. We are against the Communists, collective farming, and the
Jews. We are against requisitioning, theft, and the endless round of executions
practiced by the Chekas." 17 At the beginning of April the Cossack rebels
represented a well-armed force of nearly 30,000 men, all hardened by battle.
Operating behind the lines of the Red Army, which, farther south, was fighting
Denikin's troops together with the Kuban Cossacks, these rebels of the Don,
like their Ukrainian counterparts, contributed in no small measure to the huge
advance of the White Army in May and June 1919. At the beginning of June
the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban joined up with the greater part of the
White armies. The whole of the "Cossack Vendee" was freed from the dreaded
power of the "Muscovites, Jews, and Bolsheviks."

But the Bolsheviks were back in February 1920. The second military
occupation of the Cossack lands was even more murderous than the first. The

100

A State against Its People

whole Don region was forced to make a grain contribution of 36 million pudy,
a quantity that easily surpassed the total annual production of the area; and the
whole local population was robbed not only of its meager food and grain
reserves but also of all its goods, including "shoes, clothes, bedding, and samo-
vars," according to a Cheka report. 18 Every man who was still fit to fight
responded to this institutionalized pillaging by joining groups of rebel Greens,
which by July 1920 numbered at least 35,000 in the Kuban and Don regions.
Trapped in the Crimea since February, General Wrangel decided in a last
desperate attempt to free himself from the Bolsheviks 1 grip on the region by
joining forces with the Cossacks and the Greens of Kuban. On 17 August 1 920,
5,000 men landed near Novorossiisk. Faced with the combined forces of the
Whites, Cossacks, and Greens, the Bolsheviks were forced to abandon Ekater-
inodar, the main city of the Kuban region, and then to retreat from the region
altogether. Although Wrangel made progress in the south of Ukraine, the
Whites' successes were short-lived. Overcome by the numerically superior
Bolshevik forces, Wrangel's troops, hampered by the large number of civilians
that accompanied them, retreated in total disarray toward the Crimea at the
end of October. The retaking of the Crimea by the Bolsheviks, the last con-
frontation between the Red and White forces, was the occasion of one of rhe
largest massacres in the civil war. At least 50,000 civilians were killed by the
Bolsheviks in November and December 1920.- 19

Finding themselves again on the losing side, the Cossacks were again
devastated by the Red Terror. One of the principal leaders of the Cheka, the
Latvian Karl Lander, was named ''Plenipotentiary of the Northern Caucasus
and the Don" One of his first actions was to establish troiki, special commis-
sions in charge of de-Cossackization. In October 1920 alone these troiki con-
demned more than 6,000 people to death, all of whom were executed
immediately. 40 The families, and sometimes even the neighbors, of Green par-
tisans or of Cossacks who had taken up arms against the regime and had
escaped capture, were systematically arrested as hostages and thrown into
concentration camps, which Martin Latsis, the head of the Ukrainian Cheka,
acknowledged in a report as being genuine death camps: "Gathered together
in a camp near Maikop, the hostages, women, children, and old men survive in
the most appalling conditions, in the cold and the mud of October . . . They
are dying like flies. The women will do anything to escape death. The soldiers
guarding the camp take advantage of this and treat them as prostitutes.' 141

All resistance was mercilessly punished. When its chief fell into an am-
bush, the Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a "day of Red Terror" that went well
beyond instructions from Lander, who had recommended that "this act of
terrorism should be turned to our advantage to take important hostages with a
view to executing them, and as a reason to speed up the executions of White

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101

spies and counterrevolutionaries in general. 1 " In Lander's words, "The Pya-
tigorsk Cheka decided straight out to execute 300 people in one day. They
divided up the town into various boroughs and took a quota of people from
each, and ordered the Party to draw up execution lists . . . This rather unsat-
isfactory method led to a great deal of private settling of old scores ... In
Kislovodsk, for lack of a better idea, it was decided to kill people who were in
the hospital. 1142

One of the most effective means of de-Cossackization was the destruction
of Cossack towns and the deportation of all survivors. The files of Sergo
Ordzhonikidze, who was president of the Revolutionary Committee of the
Northern Caucasus at the time, contain documents detailing one such opera-
tion in late October and early November 1920. On 23 October Ordzhonikidze
ordered:

1. The town of Kalinovskaya to be burned

2. The inhabitants of Ermolovskaya, Romanovskaya, Samachin-
skava, and Mikhailovskaya to be driven out of their homes, and
the houses and land redistributed among the poor peasants, par-
ticularly among the Chechens, who have always shown great re-
spect for Soviet power

3. All males aged eighteen to fifty from the above-mentioned
towns to be gathered into convoys and deported under armed es-
cort to the north, where they will be forced into heavy labor

4. Women, children, and old people to be driven from their homes,
although they are to be allowed to resettle farther north

5. All the cattle and goods of the above-mentioned towns to be
seized 4 '

Three weeks later Ordzhonikidze received a report outlining how the operation
had progressed:

Kalinovskaya: town razed and the whole population (4,220) deported or

expelled
Ermolovskaya: emptied of all inhabitants (3,218)
Romanovskaya: 1,600 deported, 1,661 awaiting deportation
Samaehinskaya: 1,018 deported, 1,900 awaiting deportation
Mikhailovskaya: 600 deported, 2,200 awaiting deportation

In addition, 1 54 carriages of foodstuffs have been sent to Grozny. In the
three towns where the process of deportation is not yet complete, the
first people to be deported were the families of Whites and Greens and
anyone who participated in the last uprising. Among those still awaiting
deportation are the known supporters of the Soviet regime and the
families of Red Army soldiers, Soviet officials, and Communists. The

102

A State agatnst Its People

delay is to be explained by the Jack of railway carriages. On average, only
one convoy per day can be devoted to these operations. To finish the
operation as soon as possible, we urgently request 306 extra railway
carriages. 44

How did such "operations" come to an end? Unfortunately, there are no
documents to provide an answer. It is clear that they continued for a consider-
able time, and that they almost always ended with deportations not to the great
northern regions, as was to be the case for many years to come, but instead to
the mines of Donetsk, which were closer. Given the state of the railways in
1920, the operation must have been fairly chaotic. Nonetheless, in their general
shape and intention the de-Cossackization operations of 1920 prefigure the
larger-scale dekulakization operations of ten years later. They share the same
idea of collective responsibility, the same process of deportation in convoys,
the same organizational problems, the same unpreparedness of the destinations
for the arrival of prisoners, and the same principle of forcing deportees into
heavy labor. The Cossack regions of the Don and the Kuban paid a heavy price
for their opposition to the Bolsheviks. According to the most reliable estimates,
between 300,000 and 500,000 people were killed or deported in 1919 and 1920,
out of a population of no more than 3 million.

Among the atrocities whose scale is the most difficult to gauge are the
massacres of prisoners and hostages who were taken simply on the basis of
their "belonging to an enemy class" or being "socially undesirable." These
massacres were part of the logic of the Red Terror in the second half of 1918,
but on an even larger scale. The massacres on the basis of class were constantly
justified with the claim that a new world was coming into being, and that
everything was permitted to assist the difficult birth, as an editorial explained
in the first issue of Krasnyt mech (The Red sword), the newspaper of the kyiv
Cheka:

We reject the old systems of morality and "humanity" invented by the
bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the "lower classes." Our morality has
no precedent, and our humanity is absolute because it rests on a new
ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To us,
everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to
oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from
its shackles . . . Blood? Let blood flow like water! Let blood stain forever
the black pirate's flag flown by the bourgeoisie, and let our flag be
blood-red forever! For only through the death of the old world can we
liberate ourselves forever from the return of those jackals! 4 '

Such murderous calls found many ready to respond, and the ranks of the
Cheka were filled with social elements anxious for revenge, recruited as they

The Dirty War

103

often were, as the Bolshevik leaders themselves acknowledged and even recom-
mended, from the ranks of u the criminals and the socially degenerate." In a
letter of 22 March to Lenin, the Bolshevik leader Serafina Gopner described
the activities of the Ekaterinoslavl Cheka: "This organization is rotten to the
core: the canker of criminality, violence, and totally arbitrary decisions abounds,
and it is filled with common criminals and the dregs of society, men armed to
the teeth who simply execute anyone they don't like. They steal, loot, rape, and
throw anyone into prison, forge documents, practice extortion and blackmail,
and will let anyone go in exchange for huge sums of money." 46

The files of the Central Committee, like those of Feliks Dzerzhinsky,
contain innumerable reports from Party leaders or inspectors from the secret
police detailing the "degenerate acts" of local Chekas "driven mad by blood
and violence." The absence of any juridical or moral norm often resulted in
complete autonomy for local Chekas. No longer answerable for their actions to
any higher authority, they became bloodthirsty and tyrannical regimes, uncon-
trolled and uncontrollable. Three extracts from dozens of almost identical
Cheka reports illustrate the slide into almost total anarchy.

First, a report from Smirnov, a Cheka training instructor in Syzran, in
Tambov Province, to Dzerzhinsky, on 22 March 1919:

I have checked up on the events surrounding the kulak uprising in the
Novo-Matryonskaya volost. The interrogations were carried out in a
totally chaotic manner. Seventy-five people were tortured, hut it is im-
possible to make head or tail of any of the written reports . . . Five
people were shot on 16 February, and thirteen the following day. The
report on the death sentences and the executions is dated 28 February.
When I asked the local Cheka leader to explain himself, he answered,
"We didn't have time to write the reports at the time. What does it
matter anyway, when we are trying to wipe out the bourgeoisie and the
kulaks as a class?" 4 '

Next, a report from the secretary of the regional organization of the
Bolshevik Party in Yaroslavl on 26 September 1919: "The Cheka are looting
and arresting everyone indiscriminately. Safe in the knowledge that they cannot
be punished, they have transformed the Cheka headquarters into a huge brothel
where they take all the bourgeois women. Drunkenness is rife. Cocaine is being
used quite widely among the supervisors, " 4S

Finally, a report from N. Roscntal, inspector of the leadership of special
departments, dated 16 October 1919:

Atarbekov, chief of the special departments of the Eleventh Army, is
now refusing to recognize the authority of headquarters. On 30 July,
when Comrade [Andrei | Zakovsky, who was sent from Moscow to ex-

104

A State against Its People

amine the work of special departments, came to see [Georgy] Atarbekov,
the latter answered openly, u Tell Dzerzhinsky I am refusing his con-
trol." No administrative norm is being respected by these people, who
for the most part are highly dubious, if not plainly criminal in their
behavior. The Operations Department keeps almost no records what-
ever. For death sentences and the execution of such sentences, I found
no individual judgments, just lists, for the most part incomplete, of
people killed, with the mention "Shot at the behest of Comrade Atar-
bekov." As for the events of March, it is impossible to get any clear idea
of who was shot or why . . . Orgies and drunkenness are daily occur-
rences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users.
They say that this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a
daily basis. Drunk with blood and violence, the Cheka is doing its duty,
but it is made up of uncontrollable elements that will require close
surveillance. 49

The internal reports of the Party and the Cheka confirm the numerous
statements collected in 1919 and 1920 by the enemies of the Bolsheviks, and
particularly by the Commission of Special Inquiry into Bolshevik Crimes,
established by General Denikin, whose archives, after being transferred from
Prague to Moscow in 1945, were long inaccessible but are now open to public
scrutiny. In 1926 the Russian Socialist Revolutionary historian Sergei Mel-
gunov, in his book The Red Terror in Russia, had tried to catalogue the main
massacres of prisoners, hostages, and civilians who were killed en masse by the
Bolsheviks, usually on the basis of class. Though incomplete, the list of the
principal episodes mentioned in that pioneering work is fully confirmed by a
whole variety of documentary sources coming from the two different camps in
question. Because of the organizational chaos that reigned in the Chekas, there
are still gaps in this information regarding the exact number of people who
died in the massacres, although we can be fairly certain of the number of
massacres that took place. Using these various sources, one can attempt at least
to list them in order of size.

The massacres of "suspects," "hostages," and other "enemies of the peo-
ple" who were locked up as a preventive measure or for simple administrative
reasons in prisons or concentration camps started in September 1918, in the
first wave of Red Terror. Once the categories of "suspects," "hostages," and
"enemies of the people" had been established, and the concentration camps
were in place, the machinery of repression could simply swing into action. The
trigger for this war, in which territory so often changed hands and each month
brought some sort of turnaround in military fortunes, was usually nothing
more than the taking of a village that until then had been occupied by the
enemy.

The Dirty War

105

The imposition of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in cities that had
been captured or retaken always went through the same stages: the dissolution
of previously elected assemblies, a ban on all trade— which invariably meant
immediate price rises for food, and subsequent shortages— the nationalization
of all businesses, and the levying of a huge tax on the bourgeoisie— 600 million
rubles in Kharkiv in February 1919, 500 million in Odessa in April 1919. To
ensure that this contribution was paid, hundreds of bourgeois would be taken
as hostages and locked up in the concentration camps. In fact this contribution
meant a sort of institutionalized pillaging, expropriation, and intimidation, the
first step in the destruction of the "bourgeoisie as a social class."

"In accordance with the resolutions of the Workers 1 Soviet, 13 May has
been declared the day of expropriation of the property of the bourgeoisie,"
announced the lzvestiya of the Council of Workers' Delegates of Odessa on
13 May 1919. "The property-owning classes will be required to fill in a ques-
tionnaire detailing foodstuffs, shoes, clothes, jewels, bicycles, bedding, sheets,
silverware, crockery, and other articles indispensable to the working population
... It is the duty of all to assist the expropriation commissions in this sacred
task. Anyone failing to assist the expropriation commissions will be arrested
immediately. Anyone resisting will be executed without further delay."

As Latsis, chief of the Cheka in Ukraine, acknowledged in a circular to
local Chekas, the fruits of these expropriations went straight into the pockets
of the Cheka or remained in the hands of the chiefs of the innumerable
expropriation and requisitioning detachments or Red Guards.

The second stage of the expropriations was the confiscation of bourgeois
apartments. In this "class war," humiliation of the enemy was extremely im-
portant. "We must treat them the way they deserve: the bourgeoisie respect
only authority that punishes and kills," said the report of 26 April 1919 in the
Odessa newspaper mentioned above. "If we execute a few dozen of these
bloodsucking idiots, if we reduce them to the status of street sweepers and force
their women to clean the Red Army barracks (and that would be an honor for
them), they will understand that our power is here to stay, and that no one,
neither the Knglish nor the Hottentots, is going to come and help them/' 50

A recurring theme in numerous articles in Bolshevik newspapers in
Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kkaterinoslav, as well as in Perm, Ural, and Nizhni
Novgorod, was the "humiliation" of bourgeois women, who were forced to
clean toilets or the barracks of the Cheka or Red Guards. But this was merely
the toned-down and politically presentable face of the much more brutal reality
of rape, which according to innumerable statements took on gigantic propor-
tions, particularly in the second reconquest of Ukraine and the Cossack regions
of the Crimea in 1920.

The logical culmination of the "extermination of the bourgeoisie as a

106

A State against Its People

class," the execution of prisoners, suspects, and hostages imprisoned simply
on the basis of their belonging to the "possessing classes," is recorded in many
of the cities taken by the Bolsheviks. In Kharkiv there were between 2,000 and
3,000 executions in February-June 1919, and another 1,000-2,000 when the
town was taken again in December of that year; in Rostov-on-Don, approxi-
mately 1,000 in January 1920; in Odessa, 2,200 in May-August 1919, then
1,500^3,000 between February 1920 and February 1921; in Kyiv, at least 3,000
in February-August 1919; in Ekaterinodar, at least 3,000 between August 1920
and February 1921; in Armavir, a small town in Kuban, between 2,000 and
3,000 in August-October 1920. The list could go on and on.

In fact many other executions took place elsewhere, but were not subject
to close examination very soon afterward. Hence those that occurred in Ukraine
or southern Russia are much better known than those of the Caucasus, Central
Asia, and the Urals. The pace of executions was often stepped up as the enemy
approached, or when the Bolsheviks were abandoning their position and "emp-
tying" the prisons. In Kharkiv, in the days leading up to the arrival of the
Whites, on 8 and 9 June 1919, hundreds of hostages were executed. In Kyiv
more than 1,800 people were executed on 22-28 August, before the town was
retaken by the Whites on 30 August. The same scenario played out at Ekater-
inodar, where, in the face of the advancing Cossack troops, Atarbekov, head of
the local Cheka, disposed of 1,600 bourgeois on 17-19 August, in a small
provincial town whose population before the war numbered a mere 30,000
inhabitants. 51

Documents from the inquiry commissions of the White Army, which
sometimes arrived a few days or even a few hours after the executions, contain
a mass of statements, testimonies, autopsy reports, and photographs of the
massacres and information about the identity of the victims. Although those
who were executed at the last minute, generally with a bullet in the back of the
head, showed few traces of torture, this was not always the case for the bodies
that were dug out of the mass graves. The use of the most dreadful types of
torture is evident from autopsy reports, circumstantial evidence, and eyewitness
reports. Detailed descriptions of the torture are to be found both in Sergei
Melgunov's Red Terror in Russia and in the report by the Central Committee
of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Cheka, published in Berlin in 1922. S2

It was in the Crimea, when the last units of WrangePs White forces and
the civilians who had fled before the Bolshevik advance were moving out, that
these massacres were most intensive. From mid-November to the end of De-
cember 1920, more than 50,000 people were shot or hanged.' 1 A large number
of the executions happened immediately after the departure of WrangePs
troops. In Sevastopol several hundred dock workers were shot on 26 November
for having assisted in the White evacuation. On 28 and 30 November the

The Dirty War

107

Izvestiya of the Revolutionary Committee of Sevastopol published two lists of
victims; the first contained 1,634 names, the second 1,202. In early December,
when the first wave of executions had somewhat abated, the authorities began
to draw up as complete a list as possible of the population of the main towns
of the Crimea, where, they believed, tens or hundreds of thousands of bour-
geois were hiding. On 6 December Lenin told an assembly in Moscow that
300,000 bourgeois were hiding out in the Crimea. He gave an assurance that in
the very near future these "elements," which constituted "a reservoir of spies
and secret agents ready to leap to the defense of capitalism," would all be
"punished." 54

The military cordon that was closing off the Perekop isthmus, the only
escape route by land, was reinforced; and once the trap was laid, the authorities
ordered all inhabitants to present themselves to the local Cheka to fill in a
questionnaire containing some fifty questions about their social origins, past
actions, income, and other matters, especially their whereabouts in November
1920 and their opinions about Poland, Wrangel, and the Bolsheviks. On the
basis of these inquiries, the population was divided into three groups: those to
be shot, those to be sent to concentration camps, and those to be saved.
Statements from the few survivors, published in emigre newspapers the follow-
ing year, describe Sevastopol, one of the towns that suffered most heavily under
the repressions, as "the city of the hanged." "From Nakhimovsky, all one could
see was the hanging bodies of officers, soldiers, and civilians arrested in the
streets. The town was dead, and the only people left alive were hiding in lofts
or basements. All the walls, shop fronts, and telegraph poles were covered with
posters calling for 'Death to the traitors. 1 They were hanging people for fun." 55
The last episode in the conflict between Whites and Reds was not to be
the end of the terror. The military front of the civil war no longer existed, but
the war to eradicate the enemy was to continue for another two years.

From Tambov to the Great Famine

X the end of 1920 the Bolshevik regime seemed poised to tri-
umph. The remnants of the White armies had been defeated, the Cossacks had
been beaten, and Makhno's detachments were in retreat. But although the war
against the Whites was effectively over, the conflict between the new regime
and large sections of the population was intensifying. The war against the
peasants reached its height in the early months of 1921, when whole provinces
were effectively beyond the control of the Bolsheviks. In the province of
Tambov, one of the Volga provinces (which also included Samara, Saratov,
Tsaritsyn, and Simbirsk) in western Siberia, the Bolsheviks held only the city
of Tambov itself. The countryside was either in the hands of one of hundreds
of groups of Greens or under the control of one of the peasant armies. Muti-
nies broke out daily in the local Red Army garrisons. Strikes, riots, and work-
ers' protest movements multiplied in the few areas of the countrv where
industry still functioned— Moscow, Petrograd, Ivanovo Voznesensk, and Tula.
At the end of February 1921, sailors from the Kronstadt naval base near
Petrograd mutinied. The situation was becoming explosive, and the countrv
was becoming ungovernable. In the face of a huge wave of social unrest that
threatened to sweep away the regime, the Bolshevik leaders were forced to
retreat and take the only step that could momentarily calm the massive, dan-
gerous, and widespread discontent: they promised an end to requisitioning,

From Tambov to the Great Famine

which was to be replaced by taxes in kind. In March 1921, against this back-
drop of conflict between society and the regime, the New Economic Policy
(NEP) came into being.

The dominant version of events has exaggerated for too long the extent
to which March 1921 marked a break with the past. Hastily adopted on the last
day of the Bolsheviks 1 Tenth Party Congress, the substitution of taxes in kind
for requisitioning brought neither the end of the workers' strikes nor an abate-
ment in terror. The archives that can now be consulted show that peace did not
immediately result from this new regulation in the spring of 1921. In fact
tensions remained extremely high until at least the summer of 1922 and in some
regions until considerably later. Requisitioning detachments continued to scour
the countryside, strikes were still put down brutally, and the last militant
socialists were arrested. The "eradication of the bandits from the forests" was
still pursued by any means possible, including large-scale executions of hos-
tages and the bombing of villages with poison gas. In the final analysis, the
rebellious countryside was beaten by the great famine of 1921-22: the areas
that had suffered most heavily from requisitioning were the areas of rebellion
and also the areas that suffered worst during the famine. As an "objective" ally
of the regime, hunger was the most powerful weapon imaginable, and it also
served as a pretext for the Bolsheviks to strike a heavy blow against both
the Orthodox Church and the intelligentsia who had risen up against the

regime.

Of all the revolts that had broken out since the introduction of requisi-
tioning in the summer of 1918, the revolt of the peasants in Tambov was the
largest, the most organized, and therefore the longest-lasting. Located less than
300 miles southeast of Moscow, Tambov Province had been one of the bastions
of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since the turn of the century. From 1918
to 1920, despite heavy sanctions, the Party still had numerous militant activists.
Tambov Province was also the largest wheat-producing area near Moscow, and
since the autumn of 1918 more than 100 requisitioning detachments had been
scouring this densely populated agricultural region. In 1919 a number of bunty
(short-lived riots) had been put down as soon as they had flared up. In 1920
the requisitioning requirements were increased, from 18 million to 27 million
pudy while the peasants had considerably reduced the amount they sowed,
knowing that anything they did not consume themselves would be immediately
requisitioned. 1 To fill the quotas was thus to force the peasants into death by
starvation On 19 August 1920 routine incidents involving the food detach-
ments abruptly degenerated in the town of Khitrovo. As the local authorities
themselves acknowledged, "the detachments committed a series of abuses.
They looted everything in their path, even pillows and kitchen utensils, shared
out the booty, and beat up old men of seventy in full view of the public. The

109

108

110

A State against Its People

old men were being punished for the absence of their sons, who were deserters
hiding in the woods. The peasants were also angry that the confiscated grain,
which had been taken to the nearest station by the cartload, was being left to
rot in the open air." 2

From Khitrovo the revolt spread rapidly. By the end of August 1920 more
than 14,000 men, mostly deserters, armed with rifles, pitchforks, and scythes,
had chased out or massacred all representatives of the Soviet regime from the
three districts of Tambov Province. In the space of a few weeks, this peasant
revolt, which at first could not be distinguished from the hundreds of others
that had broken out all over Russia and Ukraine over the previous two years,
was transformed into a well-organized uprising under the inspirational leader-
ship of a first-class warlord, Aleksandr Stepanovich Antonov.

A Socialist Revolutionary activist since 1906, Antonov had spent the years
after 1908 as a political exile in Siberia, returning only in October 1917. Like
many left Socialist Revolutionaries, he had rallied to the Bolshevik cause for a
time, and had been the head of the local militia in Kirsanov, his native region.
In August 1918 he had broken with the Bolsheviks and assumed leadership of
one of the many bands of deserters that roamed the countryside, righting in
guerrilla style against the requisitioning detachments and attacking the few-
Soviet officials who dared go out into the remote villages. When the peasant
revolt took hold in Kirsanov in August 1920, Antonov organized both a highly
effective peasant militia and a remarkable information network that infiltrated
even the Tambov Cheka. He also organized a propaganda service that distrib-
uted tracts and proclamations denouncing the "Bolshevik commissarocracv"
and mobilized the peasants around key popular demands such as free trade, the
end of requisitioning, free elections, the elimination of Bolshevik commissari-
ats, and the disbanding of the Cheka. *

In parallel, the underground Socialist Revolutionary Party organization
established the Union of Working Peasants, a clandestine network of militant
peasants from the surrounding area. Despite serious tensions between Antonov
and the leaders of the Union of Working Peasants, the peasant movement in
the Tambov region basically had a military organization, an information net-
work, and a political program that lent it strength and unity, things that no
other peasant movement (with the possible exception of the Makhnovist move-
ment) had possessed.

In October 1920 the Bolsheviks controlled no more than the city of
Tambov and a few provincial urban centers. Deserters flocked by the thousands
to join Antonov's peasant army, which at its peak numbered more than 50,000.
On 19 October, realizing at last the gravity of the situation, Lenin wrote to
Dzerzhinsky: "It is vital that this movement be crushed as swiftly as possible
in the most exemplary fashion: we must be more energetic than this!' H

From Tambov to the Great Famine

111

At the beginning of November the Bolsheviks in the area numbered no
more than 5,000 Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic. After the
defeat of Wrangel in the Crimea, the number of troops deployed to Tambov
Province quickly reached 100,000, including some detachments from the Red
Army, who were nonetheless kept to a minimum when it came to suppressing
popular revolts.

After 1 January the peasant revolts spread to several other regions, includ-
ing the whole of the lower Volga (the provinces of Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn,
and Astrakhan), as well as western Siberia. The situation became explosive as
famine threatened these rich, fertile regions that had been overtaxed for several
years. In Samara Province the commander of the Volga Military District re-
ported on 12 February 1921 that "crowds of thousands of starving peasants
are besieging the barns where the food detachments have stored the grain that
has been requisitioned for urban areas and the army. The situation has dete-
riorated several times, and the army has been forced to open fire repeatedly on
the enraged crowd." From Saratov the local Bolshevik leaders sent the follow-
ing telegram to Moscow: "Banditry has overwhelmed the whole province. The
peasants have seized all the stocks — 3 million pudy — from the state grain stores.
They are heavily armed, thanks to all the rifles from the deserters. Whole units
of the Red Army have simply vanished. "

At the same time, about 600 miles eastward, a new trouble spot was
emerging. Having extracted all the resources that it could from the prosperous
agricultural regions of southern Russia and Ukraine, the Bolshevik government
in the autumn of 1919 had turned to western Siberia, where the quotas were
fixed arbitrarily on the basis of wheat export figures dating from 1913. Evi-
dently no attempt was made to consider the difference between the old harvest,
which had been destined for export and had been paid for with gold-standard
rubles, and the pitifully meager reserves that the peasants had set aside for
requisitioning. As in other regions, the Siberian peasants responded with an
uprising to protect the results of their labors and to assure their own survival.
From January to March 1921 the Bolsheviks lost control of the provinces of
Tyumen, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, and Ekaterinburg — a territory larger than
France. The Trans-Siberian Railway, the only link between western Russia and
Siberia, was also cut off. On 21 February a Russian peasant army seized the
city of Tobolsk, which Red Army units did not manage to retake until 30
March. 5

At the other end of the country, in both Petrograd, the old capital, and
Moscow, the new one, the situation at the beginning of 1921 was almost as
explosive. The economy had nearly stopped, and the transport system had
ground to a halt. Most of the factories were closed or working at half-speed
because of lack of fuel, and food supplies to the cities were in danger of ceasing

112

A State against Its People

altogether. All the workers were in the streets, in the surrounding villages
scavenging for food, or standing around and talking in the freezing, half-empty
factories, many of which had been stripped for items to exchange for food.

"Discontent is widespread," said a Cheka Information Department report
on 16 January. "The workers arc predicting the imminent demise of the regime.
No one works any more because they are all too hungry. Strikes on a huge scale
are bound to start any day now. The garrisons in Moscow are less and less
trustworthy and could become uncontrollable at any moment. Preventive meas-
ures are required."*

On 21 January a government decree ordered a 30 percent reduction in
bread rations for Moscow; Petrograd, Ivanovo Vozncsensk, and Kronstadt.
Coming at a time when the last White armies had been defeated and the
government could no longer claim that the counterrevolutionaries were to
blame, this measure was enough to light the powderkeg of rebellion. From the
end of January to mid-March 1921, strikes, protest meetings, hunger marches,
demonstrations, and factory sit-ins occurred daily, reaching their height in
Moscow and Petrograd at the end of February and the beginning of March.
In Moscow from 22 to 24 March there were serious confrontations between
Cheka detachments and groups of demonstrators who were attempting to force
their way into the barracks to join forces with the soldiers. Man)- of the workers
were shot, and hundreds were arrested. 7

In Petrograd the troubles became more widespread after 22 February,
when workers from several of the main factories voted in a new "Plenipoten-
tiary Workers' Assembly" that was strongly Menshevik and Socialist Revolu-
tionary in character. In its first decree the assembly demanded the elimination
of the Bolshevik dictatorship, free elections to the soviet, freedom of speech,
assembly, and the press, and the release of all political prisoners. To achieve
these ends the assembly called for a general strike. The military command failed
to stop several regiments from holding meetings that passed motions of support
for the strikers. On 24 February Cheka detachments opened fire on a workers 1
demonstration, killing twelve men. That same day, more than 1,000 workers
and militant socialists were arrested. 8 Yet the ranks of the strikers continued to
swell, with thousands of soldiers leaving their units to join forces with the
workers. Four years after the February days that had overturned the tsarist
regime, history seemed to be repeating itself as militant workers and mutinying
soldiers joined forces. On 26 February at 9:00 p.m. Grigory Zinoviev, the head
of the Bolshevik Party in Petrograd, sent a telegram to Lenin in panic: "The
workers have joined up with the soldiers in the barracks . . . We are still waiting
for the reinforcements we demanded from Novgorod. If they don't arrive in
the next few hours, we are going to be overrun."

Two days later came the event that the Bolshevik leaders had been fearing

From Tambov to the Great Famine

113

above all else: a mutiny of the sailors aboard the two warships in the Kronstadt
base near Petrograd. Zinoviev sent another telegram to Lenin on 28 February
at 11:00 p.m.: "Kronstadt: the two main ships, the Sevastopol and the
Petropavlovsk, have adopted Socialist Revolutionary and Black Hundred reso-
lutions and given us an ultimatum to which we have twenty-four hours to
respond. The situation among the workers is very unstable. All the main
factories are on strike. We think that the Socialist Revolutionaries are going to
step up protests." 9

The demands that Zinoviev labeled "Socialist Revolutionary and Black
Hundred" were the same things that the immense majority of citizens were
demanding after three years of Bolshevik dictatorship: free and secret elections,
freedom of speech, and freedom of the press — at least for "workers, peasants,
anarchists, and left-wing socialist parties." They also demanded equal rations
for all, the freeing of all political prisoners, the convocation of a special com-
mission to reexamine the cases of those imprisoned in concentration camps, an
end to requisitioning, the abolition of special Cheka detachments, and freedom
for the peasants "to do whatever they want with their land, and to raise their
own livestock, provided they do it using their own resources " 10

At Kronstadt events were gathering momentum. On 1 March a huge
meeting gathered together more than 1 5,000 people, a quarter of the entire civil
and military population of the naval base. Mikhail Kalinin, president of the
Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, arrived in person to try to defuse
the situation; but he failed to make himself heard over the boos of the crowd.
The following day the rebels, joined by at least 2,000 Bolsheviks from Kron-
stadt, formed a provisional revolutionary committee that attempted to link up
with the strikers and soldiers from Petrograd.

The daily Cheka reports on the situation in Petrograd in the first week of
March 1921 leave no doubt about the widespread popular support for the
mutiny at Kronstadt: "The Kronstadt revolutionary committee clearly expects
a general uprising in Petrograd any day now. They have made contact with the
mutineers and with a number of the factories. Today, at a meeting in the Arsenal
factory, workers voted for a resolution to join the general insurrection. A
delegation of three people — including an anarchist, a Menshevik, and a Social-
ist Revolutionary — has been elected to keep in contact with Kronstadt." 11

On 7 March the Petrograd Cheka received the order to "undertake deci-
sive action against the workers." Within forty-eight hours more than 2,000
workers, all known socialist or anarchist sympathizers or activists, were ar-
rested. Unlike the mutineers, the workers were unarmed and could put up little
resistance to the Cheka detachments. Having thus broken the support for the
insurrection, the Bolsheviks carefully prepared the assault on Kronstadt itself
The task of liquidating the rebellion was entrusted to General Mikhail Tuk-

114

A State against Its People

hachevsky. In opening fire on the crowd, the victor from the Polish campaign
of 1920 used young recruits from the military school, who had no tradition of
revolution, and special detachments from the Cheka. The operation began on
8 March. Ten days later Kronstadt fell after thousands of people had lost their
lives. Several hundred rebels who had been taken prisoner were shot over the
next few days. The records of the event, recently published for the first time,
show that from April to June 1921, 2,103 were sentenced to death and 6,459
were sent to prison or to the camps. 12 Just before the fall of Kronstadt nearly
8,000 people managed to escape across the ice to Finland, where they were
interned in transit camps in Terioki, Vyborg, and Ino. Deceived by the promise
of an amnesty, a number of them returned to Russia in 1922, where they were
immediately arrested and sent to camps on the Solovetski Islands and to Khol-
mogory, one of the worst concentration camps, near Arkhangelsk. 1 * According
to one anarchist source, of the 5,000 Kronstadt prisoners who were sent to
Kholmogory, fewer than 1,500 were stilt alive in the spring of 1922. u

The Kholmogory camp, on the great river Dvina, was sadly famous for
the swift manner in which it dispatched a great number of its prisoners. They
were often loaded onto barges, stones were tied around their necks, their arms
and legs were tied, and they were thrown overboard into the river. Mikhail
Kedrov, one of the main leaders of the Cheka, had started these massive
drownings in June 1920. Several eyewitness reports concur that a large number
of the mutineers from Kronstadt, together with Cossacks and peasants from
Tambov Province who had also been deported to Kholmogory, were drowned
in the Dvina in this fashion in 1922. That same year, a special evacuation
committee deported to Siberia some 2,514 civilians from Kronstadt, merely on
the grounds that they had stayed in the town through the events. 1 '

Once the Kronstadt rebellion had been crushed, the regime concentrated its
energies on hunting down socialist activists, fighting strikes and ''workers'
complacency," quelling the peasant uprisings that continued despite the official
ending of requisitioning, and taking measures to repress the church.

On 28 February 1921 Dzerzhinsky had ordered all the provincial Chekas
"(1) to carry out immediate arrests of all anarchist, Menshcvik, and Socialist
Revolutionary intelligentsia, in particular the officials working in the People's
Commissariats of Agriculture and Food; and (2) to arrest all Mensheviks,
anarchists, and Socialist Revolutionaries working in factories and liable to call
for strikes or demonstrations." 16

Rather than marking the beginning of a relaxation in the repressive poli-
cies, the introduction of the NEP was accompanied by a resurgence in the
repressions against the moderate socialist activists. The repressions were mo-
tivated not by the danger of their perceived opposition to the New Economic

From Tambov to the Great Famine

115

Policy, but by the fact that they had been campaigning for it for so long, and
might thus use it to justify their own approach to politics. "The only place for
Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, whether they hide their allegiances
or are open about them," wrote Lenin in 1921, u is prison."

A few months later, judging that the socialists were still making too much
trouble, he wrote: "If the Mensheviks or Socialist Revolutionaries so much as
peek out again, they must all be shot without pity." Between March and June
1921 more than 2,000 moderate socialist activists and sympathizers were again
arrested. By now all the members of the Central Committee of the Menshevik
Party were in prison; when threatened with expulsion to Siberia in January
1921 they began a hunger strike, and twelve of the leaders, including Fedor
Dan and Boris Nikolaevsky, were expelled abroad and arrived in Berlin in
February 1922.

One of the main priorities of the regime in the spring of 192 1 was to revive
industrial production, which had fallen to 10 percent of what it had been in
1911 Rather than relaxing the pressure on workers, the Bolsheviks maintained
and even increased the militarization begun over the preceding years. The
policies pursued in 1921 after the adoption of the NEP in the great industrial
and mining region of the Donbass, which produced more than 80 percent of
the country's coal and steel, seem particularly revealing of the sort of dictatorial
methods used by the Bolsheviks to get the workers back to work. At the end
of 1920 Gcorgy Pyatakov, one of the main leaders who was close to Trotsky,
had been appointed head of the Central Directory of the Coal Industry. Within
a year he increased coal production fivefold by means of a policy of unremitting
exploitation and intimidation. Pyatokov imposed excruciating discipline on his
120,000 workers: any absenteeism was equated with an act of sabotage and
punished with expulsion to a camp or even a death sentence. In 1921 18 miners
were executed for "persistent parasitism." Work hours were increased, particu-
larly on Sundays, and Pyatokov effectively blackmailed the workers into in-
creasing productivity by threatening the confiscation of ration cards. These
measures were taken at a time when the workers received between one-third
and one-half of the bread ration they needed to survive; often at the end of the
day they had to lend their boots to comrades who were taking over the next
shift. The directory acknowledged that absenteeism among the workforce was
due in part to epidemics, "permanent hunger," and "a total absence of clothes,
trousers, and shoes." To reduce the number of mouths to feed when the threat
of famine was at its height, Pyatokov on 24 June 1921 ordered the expulsion
from the mining villages of everyone who did not work in the mines. Ration
cards were confiscated from family members of miners. Rationing was also
calculated strictly in accordance with the production of individual miners, thus
introducing a rudimentary form of productivity-related pay. 17

116

A State against Its People

Such practices went directly against the ideas of equality of treatment that
many workers, deceived by Bolshevik rhetoric, still cherished. In a remarkable
way these measures prefigured those taken against the working classes in the
1930s. The working masses were nothing more than the rabsila — the work-
force — which had to be exploited in the most effective manner possible. Doing
so involved overturning legislation and the appeals of the unions, which were
totally hamstrung and were ordered to support the directives of management
at all costs. Militarization of the workforce seemed to be the most effective
means of forcing the hungry, stubborn, and unproductive workers to cooperate.
The similarities between this exploitation of the theoretically free workforce
and the forced labor of the great penal colonies created in the early 1930s seem
inescapable. Like so many other episodes in the formative years of Bolshevism,
none of which can be explained through the context of the civil war, the events
in the Donbass in 1921 prefigured a series of practices that were later to be
found at the heart of Stalinism.

Among the other top-priority operations for the Bolshevik regime in the
spring of 1921 was the "pacification" of all the regions that were in the hands
of the peasants. On 27 April 1921 the Politburo appointed General Tuk-
hachevsky to lead "operations to liquidate the Antonov elements in Tambov
Province." With nearly 100,000 men at his disposal, including many special
Cheka detachments, and equipped with airplanes and heavy artillery, Tuk-
hachevsky waged war on the Antonov units with extraordinary violence. To-
gether with Antonov-Ovseenko, president of the Plenipotentiary Commission
of the Central Executive Committee established to constitute an occupying
force in the region, he took hostages on an enormous scale, carried out execu-
tions, set up death camps where prisoners were gassed, and deported entire
villages suspected of assisting or collaborating with the so-called bandits. 1 *

Order No. 171, dated 11 June 1921 and signed by Antonov-Ovseenko and
Tukhachevsky, shows clearly the sorts of methods used to "pacify" Tambov
Province. The order stipulated:

1 . Shoot on sight any citizens who refuse to give their names.

2. District and Regional Political Commissions are hereby autho-
rized to pronounce sentence on any village where arms are be-
ing hidden, and to arrest hostages and shoot them if the
whereabouts of the arms are not revealed.

3. Wherever arms are found, execute immediately the eldest son in
the family.

4. Any family that has harbored a bandit is to be arrested and de-
ported from the province, their possessions are to be seized, and
the eldest son is to be executed immediately.

5. Any families sheltering other families who have harbored ban-

From Tambov to the Great Famine

117

dits are to be punished in the same manner, and their eldest son
is to be shot.

6. In the event that bandit families have fled, their possessions are
to be redistributed among peasants who are loyal to the Soviet
regime, and their houses are to be burned or demolished.

7. These orders are to be carried out rigorously and without

The day after Order No. 171 was sent out, Tukhachevsky ordered all
rebels to be gassed. "The remnants of the defeated rebel gangs and a few
isolated bandits are still hiding in the forests . . . The forests where the bandits
are hiding are to be cleared by the use of poison gas. This must be carefully
calculated, so that the layer of gas penetrates the forests and kills everyone
hiding there. The artillery inspector is to provide the necessary amounts of gas
immediately, and find staff qualified to carry out this sort of operation." 20

On 10 Julv 1921 the head of a five-member commission on the measures
taken against the "bandits" in Tambov Province reported:

Mopping-up operations in the Kudryukovskaya volost began on 27 June
in the village of Ossinovki, which in the past has been a known hideout
for bandits. The attitude of peasants toward our detachments is perhaps
best described as one of mistrust. They refused to name the bandits in
the forests, and when asked questions they replied that they knew noth-
ing.

We took some forty hostages, declared the village to be under a
state of siege, and gave the villagers two hours to hand over the bandits
and their arms. The villagers then called a meeting, where it was appar-
ent that they were undecided as to how to respond; but they resolved not
to provide active help in the hunt for the bandits. Undoubtedly they had
not taken seriously our threat to shoot the hostages. When the deadline
had passed, we executed twenty-one of the hostages before the village
assembly. These public executions, in accordance with the usual proce-
dure, were carried out one by one in the presence of all five members of
the Plenipotentiary Commission, and had a considerable effect on the
peasants.

Regarding the village of kareevka, which was a bandit stronghold
because of its geographical situation, the commission decided to strike it
from the map. The whole population was deported and their possessions
confiscated, with the exception of the families of soldiers serving in the
Red Army, who were transferred to the town of Kurdyuki and relocated
in houses previously occupied by the families of bandits. After objects
of value had been removed — window frames, glass, wooden objects, and
other such items — all the houses in the village were set on fire.

On 3 July we began operations in the town of Bogoslovka. We have

118

A State against Its People

rarely come across peasants so stubborn or well organized. No matter
wbom we spoke to, of whatever age, they invariably replied with an air
of surprise, "Bandits? In these parts? Not at all. We might have seen one
or two people go by, but we couldn't say whether they were bandits or
not. We live quietly here, minding our own business. We don't know
anything."

We took the same measures as in Ossinovki: we took 58 hostages.
On 4 July we publicly executed a first group of 21, another 15 the next
day, and removed the families of about 60 bandits, about 200 people in
all. We finally achieved our objectives, and the peasants were obliged to
go out looking for the bandits and the weapons caches.

The mopping-up operations in the above-mentioned towns and
villages came to an end on 6 July. The operation was a great success, and
its impact was felt even further afield than the neighboring cantons. The
bandit elements are still surrendering.

President of the Plenipotentiary Commission of Five Members,
[M.V.] Uskonin. 21

On 19 July, as a result of much high-level opposition to this extreme form of
"eradication," Order No. 171 was annulled.

By July 1921 the military authorities and the Cheka had set up seven
concentration camps. According to information that even now is incomplete,
at least 50,000 people were interned in the camps, for the most part women,
children, and the elderly, as well as hostages and members of the families of
deserters. The conditions in these camps were intolerable: typhus and cholera
were endemic, and the half-naked prisoners lacked even basic requirements. A
famine began in the summer of 1921, and by the autumn the mortality rate had
climbed to 15-20 percent a month. The peasant movement, which in February
had numbered some 40,000, was reduced to 1 ,000 by the beginning of Septem-
ber. From November onward, long after the "pacification" of the countryside,
several thousand of the strongest prisoners were deported to the concentration
camps in northern Russia, to Arkhangelsk and Kholmogory. 22

As is evident from the weekly Cheka reports to the Bolshevik leaders, the
"pacification' 1 of the countryside continued at least into the second half of 1922
in many regions of Ukraine, western Siberia, the Volga provinces, and the
Caucasus. The habits of earlier years died hard, and although requisitioning
had officially been abolished in March 1921, taxes in kind also were levied with
extreme brutality. Given the catastrophic agricultural situation of 1921, the
quotas were extremely high, and this meant a constant state of tension in the
countryside, where many of the peasants were still armed.

Describing his impressions of a trip to the provinces of Tula, Orel, and
Voronezh in May 1921, Nikolai Osinsky, the people's commissar of agriculture,
reported that local officials were convinced that requisitioning would be

From Tambov to the Great Famine

119

brought back in the autumn. Moreover, local authorities ''seemed incapable of
considering the peasants to be anything other than born saboteurs." 23

To facilitate the collection of taxes in Siberia, the region expected to
provide most of the wheat after famine began ravaging the provinces of the
Volga, Feliks Dzerzhinsky was sent there in December 1921 as extraordinary
plenipotentiary. He established "flying revolutionary courts" whose mission
was to travel through the villages and pass sentence immediately on peasants
who had not paid their taxes, handing out prison sentences or sending them
off to camps. 24 Like the requisitioning detachments, these courts, bolstered by
"fiscal detachments," were responsible for so many abuses that the President
of the Supreme Court himself, Nikolai Krylenko, was forced to open an inquiry.
From Omsk on 14 February 1922 one inspector wrote:

Abuses of position by the requisitioning detachments, frankly speaking,
have now reached unbelievable levels. Systematically, the peasants who
are arrested are all locked up in big unhealed barns; they are then
whipped and threatened with execution. Those who have not filled the
whole of their quota are bound and forced to run naked all along the
main street of the village and then locked up in another unheated han-
gar. A great number of women have been beaten until they are uncon-
scious and then thrown naked into holes dug in the snow . . .

The situation remained extremely tense in all the provinces.

A great deal can also be derived from these excerpts from the secret
police reports for October 1922, a year and half after the NEP had come
into force:

In Pskov Province the quotas fixed for the taxes in kind represent two-
thirds of the harvest. Four districts have taken up arms ... In the
province of Novgorod the quotas will not be filled, despite the 25 per-
cent reduction that was recently approved because of the exceptionally
poor harvest. In the provinces of Ryazan and Tver a 100 percent realiza-
tion of the targets would condemn the peasants to death by starva-
tion ... In the province of Novonikolaevsk [Novosibirsk] the famine is
threatening and the peasants are already reduced to trying to eat grass
and roots ... But this information seems mild compared with the re-
ports we are receiving from Kyiv, where the suicide rate has never been
so high. Peasants are killing themselves en masse because they can nei-
ther pay their taxes nor rebel, since all their arms have been confiscated.
Famine has been hanging over the regions for more than a year now, and
the peasants are extremely pessimistic about the future. 2 '

After the autumn of 1922 the worst seemed over. Following two years of
famine, the survivors managed to store enough of a harvest to get them through
the winter, provided that taxes were not levied in their entirety. 'This year the

120

A State against Its People

grain harvest will be lower than the average for the last decade": these were the
laconic terms in which Pravda, in a short article on the back page on 2 July
1921, had first mentioned the existence of a "feeding problem on the agricul-
tural front." In an "Appeal to All the Citizens of Soviet Russia" published in
Pravda on 12 July 1921, Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Central Executive
Committee of Soviets, admitted that "in numerous districts, the drought this
year has destroyed the harvest."

"This calamity is not solely a result of the drought," explained a resolution
of the Central Committee dated 21 July.

It is the result of all our past history, of the backwardness of our
agriculture, of the lack of organization, of the low level of our knowl-
edge of agronomy, of the lack of materials, and of outdated methods of
crop rotation. The situation has been exacerbated by the war and by the
economic blockade, by the rearguard action fought by the landowners,
capitalists, and their servants, and by the constant actions of bandits
carrying out the orders of organizations hostile to Soviet Russia and its
working population. 26

In a long enumeration of the causes of this ''calamity," whose real nature
no one yet dared mention, one major factor was lacking: the requisitioning
policy that for years had been such a drain on the resources of the already
fragile agricultural system. All the leaders of the provinces where the famine
was beginning to be felt, summoned to Moscow in June 1921, emphasized the
government's responsibility and pointed out in particular the causal role of the
all-powerful People's Commissariat of Food. I. N. Vavilin, the representative
for the Samara region, explained that the provincial food committee, since the
first introduction of requisitioning, had constantly inflated the estimates for the
harvest.

Despite the bad harvest of 1920, 10 million pudy had been requisitioned
that year. All grain stocks, even the seed for the future harvest, had been seized.
Numerous peasants had had virtually nothing to eat since January 1921. The
mortality rate had immediately increased in February. In the space of two to
three months, riots and revolts against the regime had effectively stopped in
the province of Samara. "Today," Vavilin explained, "there are no more revolts.
We see new phenomena instead: crowds of thousands of starving people gather
around the Executive Committee or the Party headquarters of the soviet to
wait, for days and days, for the miraculous appearance of the food they need.
It is impossible to chase this crowd away, and every day more of them die. They
are dropping like flies ... I think there must be at least 900,000 starving people
in this province." 27

The Cheka reports and the military bulletins make it clear that famine had

From Tambov to the Great Famine

121

been threatening the region since at least 19 19. The situation had deteriorated
considerably throughout 1920. In their internal reports that summer the Cheka,
the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, and the People's Commissariat of
Food, fully aware of the gravity of the situation, drew up lists of districts and
provinces judged to be starving or threatened by imminent famine. In January
1921 one report claimed that among the causes of the famine in Tambov was
the u orgy" of requisitioning of 1920. It was quite obvious to the common
people, as conversations reported by the political police made clear, that the
"soviet regime is trying to starve out all the peasants who dare resist it."
Though perfectly well informed of the inevitable consequences of the requisi-
tioning policy, the government took no steps to combat these predicted effects.
On 30 July 1921, while famine gripped a growing number of regions, Lenin
and Molotov sent a telegram to all leaders of regional and provincial Party
committees asking them to "bolster the mechanisms for food collection . . . step
up the propaganda for the rural population, explaining the economic and
political importance of the prompt paying of taxes ... put at the disposal of
the agencies for the collection of taxes in kind all the authority of the Party,
and allow them to use all the disciplinary measures that the state itself would

"28

use.

Faced with this attitude of the authorities, who seemed to be pursuing a
policy of starving out the peasantry at all cost, the more enlightened intelli-
gentsia began to react. In June 1921 the agronomists, economists, and univer-
sity lecturers who belonged to the Moscow Agricultural Society established a
Social Committee for the Fight against Famine. Among the first members were
the eminent economists Nikolai Kondratyev and Sergei Prokopovich, who had
been a minister of food in the provisional government; the journalist Ekatenna
Kuskova, a close friend of Maksim Gorky; and various writers, doctors, and
agronomists. In mid-July, with the help of Gorky, who was highly influential
among Party leaders, a delegation from the committee obtained an audience
with Lev Kamenev after Lenin had refused to see them. Following the inter-
view Lenin, still distrusting what he described as the overly emotional reactions
of certain other Bolshevik leaders, sent the following note to his colleagues in
the Politburo: "This Kuskova woman must not cause any damage ... We will
use her name and her signature, and a carriage or two from the people who
sympathize with her and her kind. Nothing more than that." 29

Finally the committee members convinced some Party leaders of their
usefulness. As internationally prominent scientists and writers, they were well
known abroad, and many of them had taken an active part in aid for the victims
of the famine of 1891. Moreover, they had numerous contacts with other
intellectuals the world over, and seemed to be guarantors that the food would
reach its intended destination, in the event that the appeal was successful. They

122

A State against Its People

were prepared to allow their names to be used, provided that some sort of
official status was granted to the Committee for Aid to the Hungry.

On 21 July 1921 the Bolshevik government reluctantly legalized the com-
mittee, naming it the All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Starving. It was
immediately given the emblem of the Red Cross and was permitted to collect
food, medicine, and animal feed both in Russia and abroad and to share it out
among the needy. It was allowed to use whatever means of transport necessary
to distribute the food, to set up soup kitchens and local and regional commit-
tees, "to communicate freely with designated organizations abroad," and even
"to discuss measures taken by local or central authorities that in its opinion are
relevant to the question of the struggle against the famine. 1 ' 10 At no other
moment in the history of the Soviet regime was any other organization granted
such privileges. The government's concessions were a measure of the scale of
the catastrophe facing the country, four months after the official (and somewhat
muted) introduction of the NEP.

One of the committee's first actions was to establish contact with the
Patriarch Tikhon, head of the Orthodox Church, who immediately set up an
All-Russian Ecclesiastical Committee for Aid to the Hungry. On 7 July 1921
the patriarch had a letter read out in all the churches: "Rotten meat would be
gladly eaten by the starving population, but even that is now impossible to find.
Cries and moans are all that one hears wherever one goes. People's minds turn
even to thoughts of cannibalism . . . Lend a helping hand to your brothers and
sisters! With the consent of your brethren, you may use church treasures that
have no sacramental value, such as rings, chains, bracelets, decorations that
adorn icons, and other items to help the hungry."

Having obtained the assistance of the church, the All-Russian Committee
for Aid to the Starving contacted various international organizations, including
the Red Cross, the Quakers, and the American Relief Association (ARA),
presided over by Herbert Hoover; all responded positively. Even so, coopera-
tion between the committee and the regime lasted only five weeks; on 27 August
1921 the committee was dissolved, six days after the government had signed
an agreement with a representative of the ARA. For Lenin, now that the
Americans were sending the first cargoes of food, the committee had served its
purpose: "The name and the signature of Kuskova" had played the required
role, and that was enough. In announcing this decision, Lenin wrote:

I propose to dissolve the Committee immediately . . . Prokopovich is to
be arrested for seditious behavior and kept in prison for three
months . . . The other Committee members are to be exiled from Mos-
cow immediately, sent to the chief cities of different regions, cut off if
possible from all means of communication, including railways, and kept

From Tambov to the Great Famine

123

under close surveillance. Tomorrow we will release a brief governmental
communique saying that the Committee has been dissolved because it
refused to work. Instruct all newspapers to begin insulting these people,
and heap opprobrium upon them, accusing them of being closet White
Guard supporters and bourgeois do-gooders who are much keener to
travel abroad than to help at home. In general, make them look ridicu-
lous and mock them at least once a week for the next two months. 31

Following these instructions to the letter, the press unleashed a ferocious
attack against the sixty famous intellectuals who had served on the committee.
The titles alone of the articles demonstrate the eloquence of this campaign of
defamation: "You shouldn't play with hunger" (Pravda, 30 August 1921);
"Hunger Speculators" (Kommunistuheskii trucl, 31 August 1921); u Committee
for Aid ... to the Counterrevolution" (Izvestiya, 30 August 1921). When
someone tried to intercede in favor of the committee members who had been
arrested and deported, Josif Unshlikht, one of Dzerzhinsky's assistants at the
Cheka, declared: "You say the Committee has done nothing wrong. It's possi-
ble. But it has become a rallying point in society, and that we cannot allow.
When you put a seed in water, it soon starts to sprout roots, and the Committee
was beginning to spread its roots throughout society, undermining collectivity
. . . we had no choice but to pull it up by the roots and to crush it." 12

In place of the committee the government set up a Central Commission
for Help for the Hungry, a slow-moving and bureaucratic organization made
up of civil servants from various People's Commissariats, which was charac-
terized by inefficiency and corruption. When the famine was at its worst in the
summer of 1922 and nearly 30 million people were starving, the Central Com-
mission was assuring an irregular supply to about 3 million people, whereas the
Red Cross, the Quakers, and the ARA supplied about 11 million people per
dav. Despite the massive international relief effort, at least 5 million of the 29
million Russians affected died of hunger in 1921 and 1922.-"

The last great famine that Russia had known, in 1891, had affected most
of the same regions (mid-Russia, the lower Volga, and part of Kazakhstan) and
had been responsible for the deaths of between 400,000 and 500,000 people.
Both the state and society in general had fought extremely hard to save lives.
A young lawyer called Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov was then living in Samara, the
regional capital of one of the areas worst affected by the famine. He was the
only member of the local intelligentsia who not only refused to participate in
the aid for the hungry, but publicly opposed it. As one of his friends later
recalled, "Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov had the courage to come out and say openly
that famine would have numerous positive results, particularly in the appear-
ance of a new industrial proletariat, which would take over from the bourgeoi-
sie .. . Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy,

124

A State against Its People

would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism, the stage
that necessarily followed capitalism. Famine would also destroy faith not only
in the tsar, but in God too." 14

Thirty years later, when the young lawyer had become the head of the
Bolshevik government, his ideas remained unchanged: famine could and should
"strike a mortal blow against the enemy." The enemy in question was the
Orthodox Church. "Electricity will replace God. The peasants should pray to
it; in any case they will feel its effects long before they feel any effect from on
high/' said Lenin in 1918 when discussing the electrification of Russia with
Leonid Krasin. As soon as the Bolshevik regime had come to power, relations
with the Orthodox Church had deteriorated. On 5 February 1918 the govern-
ment had declared the separation of church and state and of the church and
schools, proclaimed freedom of conscience and worship, and announced the
nationalization of all church property. Patriarch Tikhon had vigorously pro-
tested this attack on the traditional role of the church in four pastoral letters
to the faithful. The behavior of the Bolsheviks became more and more provoca-
tive. They ordered all church relics to be "valued," organized antireligious
carnivals to coincide with traditional feast days, and demanded that the great
monastery of the Trinity and St. Sergius near Moscow, where the relics of St.
Sergius of Radonezh were kept, be turned into a museum of atheism. Numer-
ous priests and bishops had already been arrested for protesting the intimida-
tory measures of the state when the Bolshevik leaders, on Lenin's orders, used
the famine as a pretext to launch a large-scale campaign against the church.

On 26 February 1922 a government decree was published in the press
ordering "the immediate confiscation from churches of all precious objects of
gold or silver and of all precious stones that do not have a religious importance.
These objects will be sent to the People's Commissariat of Finance and will
then be transferred to the Central Committee for Help for the Hungry." The
confiscations began in early March and were accompanied by many confronta-
tions between the detachments responsible for impounding the church treas-
ures and the church faithful. The most serious incidents took place on 15
March 1922 in Cbuya, a small industrial town in Ivanovo Province, where
troops opened fire on the crowd and killed a dozen of the faithful. Lenin used
this massacre as a pretext to step up the antireligious campaign.

In a letter addressed to the Politburo on 19 March 1922, he explained,
with characteristic cynicism, how the famine could be turned to the Bolsheviks'
advantage and exploited to strike the enemy a mortal blow:

Regarding the events at Chuya, which the Politburo will be discussing, I
think a firm decision should be adopted immediately as part of the
general campaign on this front ... If we bear in mind what the newspa-

From Tambov to the Great Famine

125

pers are saying about the attitude of the clergy toward the confiscation
of church goods, and the subversive attitude that is being adopted by the
Patriarch Tikhon, it becomes apparent that the Black Hundred clergy
are putting into action a plan that has been developed to strike a decisive
blow against us ... I think our enemies are committing a monumental
strategic error. In fact the present moment favors us far more than it
does them. We are almost 99 percent sure that we can strike a mortal
blow against them and consolidate the central position that we are going
to need to occupy for several decades to come. With the help of all those
starving people who are starting to eat each other, who are dying by the
millions, and whose bodies litter the roadside all over the country, it is
now and only now that we can — and therefore must — confiscate all
church property with all the ruthless energy we can still muster. This is
precisely the moment when the masses will support us most fervently,
and rise up against the reactionary machinations of the petit-bourgeois
and Black Hundred religious conspirators ... we must therefore amass a
treasure of hundreds of millions of gold rubles (think how rich some of
those monasteries are!). Without treasure on that scale, no state projects,
no economic projects, and no shoring up of our present position will be
conceivable. No matter what the cost, we must have those hundreds of
millions (or even billions) of rubles. This can be carried out only at the
present moment. All evidence suggests that we could not do this at any
other moment, because our only hope is the despair engendered in the
masses by the famine, which will cause them to look at us in a favorable
light or, at the very least, with indifference. I thus can affirm categori-
cally that this is the moment to crush the Black Hundred clergy in the
most decisive manner possible, and to act without any mercy at all, with
the sort of brutality that they will remember for decades. I propose to
implement our plan in the following manner: Only Comrade Kalinin
will act openly. Whatever happens, Comrade Trotsky will not appear in
the press or in public . . . One of the most intelligent and energetic
members of the Central Executive Committee must be sent to Chuya,
with oral instructions from one of the members of the Politburo. These
instructions will stipulate that his mission in Chuya is to arrest a large
number of members of the clergy, of bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie,
several dozen at least, who will all be accused of direct or indirect
participation in violent resistance against the decree regarding the
confiscation of church goods. Once back from this mission, the envoy
will make a full report to the entire Politburo or to a meeting of two or
three members. On the basis of this report, the Politburo, again orally,
will issue precise instructions to the judicial authorities, to the effect that
the trial of the Chuya rebels is to be expedited as rapidly as possible.
The result of the trial is to be the execution, by public shooting, of a
large number of the Chuya Black Hundreds as well as the shooting of as

126

A State against Its People

many as possible from Moscow and other important religious cen-
ters . . . The more representatives from the reactionary clergy and the
recalcitrant bourgeoisie we shoot, the better it will be for us. We must
teach these people a lesson as quickly as possible, so that the thought of
protesting again doesn't occur to them for decades to come.""

As the weekly reports from the secret police indicate, the campaign to
confiscate church goods was at its height in March, April, and May 1922, when
it led to 1,414 incidents and the arrest of thousands of priests, nuns, and monks.
According to church records, 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks, and 3,447 nuns were
killed that year. 16 The government organized several large show -trials for mem-
bers of the clergy in Moscow, Ivanovo, Chuya, Smolensk, and Pctrograd. A
week after the incidents in Chuya, in accordance with Lenin's instructions, the
Politburo proposed a series of measures: u Arrest the synod and the patriarch,
not immediately, but between a fortnight and a month from now. Make public
the circumstances surrounding the business in Chuya. Bring to trial all the
priests and lay members of Chuya in one week's time. Shoot all the rebel
leaders."" In a note to the Politburo, Dzerzhinsky indicated that

the patriarch and his followers ... are openly resisting the confiscation
of church goods ... We already have enough evidence to arrest Tikhon
and the more reactionary members of the synod. In the view of the
GPU: (1) the time is right for the arrest of the patriarch and the synod;

(2) permission should not be granted for the formation of a new synod;

(3) all priests resisting the confiscation of church goods should be desig-
nated enemies of the people and exiled to one of the Volga regions most
affected by the famine. 38

In Petrograd 77 priests were sent to camps; 4 were sentenced to death,
including the metropolitan of Petrograd, Benjamin, who had been elected in
1917 and enjoyed a wide popular following. Ironically, he was among those who
had spoken strongly in favor of the separation of church and state. In Moscow
148 priests and lay brethren were sent to the camps, and 6 received death
sentences that were immediately carried out. Patriarch Tikhon was placed
under close surveillance in the Donskoi monastery in Moscow.

On 6 June 1922, a few weeks after these legal travesties in Moscow, a large
public trial began, announced in the press since the end of February: thirty-
four Socialist Revolutionaries were accused of "counterrevolutionary and ter-
rorist activities against the Soviet government," including most notably the
attempt to assassinate Lenin on 31 August 1918 and participation in the Tam-
bov peasant revolt. In a scenario that was replayed over and over in the 1930s,
the accused included authentic political leaders, such as the twelve members of

From Tambov to the Great Famine

127

the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, led by Avraham
Gots and Dmitry Donskoi, and agents provocateurs instructed to testify against
the others and to "confess their crimes." As Helene Carrere d'Encausse has
pointed out, this trial permitted the authorities to "test out the 'Russian doll'
method of accusation, whereby one solid accusation — the fact that since 1918
the Socialist Revolutionaries had been opposed to Bolshevik rule — was cited to
'prove' that any opposition to the Bolsheviks' policies was, in the final analysis,
an act of cooperation with the international bourgeoisie."^

At the conclusion of this parody of justice, after the authorities had
orchestrated political demonstrations calling for the death penalty for the "ter-
rorists," eleven of the accused leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party were
condemned to death. Faced with protests from the international community,
organized largely by exiled Russian socialists, and with the more serious threat
of uprisings in the pro-Socialist Revolutionary countryside, the sentences were
suspended on the condition that "the Socialist Revolutionary Party ends all
conspiratorial, insurrectionary, and terrorist activities." In January 1924 the
death sentences were reduced to five years' internment in the camps. Needless
to say the prisoners were never set free, and were in fact executed in the 1930s,
when international opinion and the danger of peasant uprisings no longer
posed a threat to the Bolshevik leadership.

The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries was one of the first opportunities
to test the new penal code, which had come into force on 1 June 1922. Lenin
had followed its elaboration quite closely. One of the code's functions was to
permit the use of all necessary violence against political enemies even though
the civil war was over and "expeditious elimination" could no longer be
justified. The first drafts of the code, shown to Lenin on 15 May 1922, pro-
voked the following reply to Kursky, the people's commissar of justice: "It is
my view that the leeway for applying the death penalty should be considerably
enlarged, and should include all the activities of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolu-
tionaries, and others. Create a new punishment involving banishment abroad.
And find some formulation that will link all these activities to the international
bourgeoisie. 1140 Two days later Lenin wrote again:

Comrade Kursky, I want you to add this draft of a complementary
paragraph to the penal code ... It is quite clear for the most part. We
must openly — and not simply in narrow juridical terms — espouse a
politically just principle that is the essence and motivation for terror,
showing its necessity and its limits. The courts must not end the terror
or suppress it in any way. To do so would be deception. They must give
it a solid basis, and clearly legalize all its principles without any form of
deception or deceit. It must be formulated as openly as possible: what

128

A State against Its People

we need to encourage is a revolutionary legal consciousness that will
allow it to be applied wherever it is needed. 4 '

In accordance with Lenin's instructions, the penal code defined counter-
revolutionary activity as any action "aiming to attack or destabilize the power
given to Soviet workers and peasants by the revolutionary proletariat,' 1 as well
as "any action in favor of the international bourgeoisie that fails to recognize
the validity of the Communist system and the fair distribution of property as
a natural successor to the capitalist system, and any action that tries to reverse
the situation by force, military intervention, economic blockade, espionage,
illegal financing of the press, or other such means."

Anything that was classified as a counterrevolutionary action, including
rebellion, rioting, sabotage, and espionage, was immediately punishable by
death, as was participation in or support for any organization "that might
provide support for the international bourgeoisie." Even "propaganda that
might be of use to the international bourgeoisie" was considered a counter-
revolutionary crime, punishable by incarceration for not less than three years
or by lifelong exile.

Along with the legalization of political violence, discussed in early 1922,
came nominal changes within the secret police. On 6 February 1922 the Chcka
was abolished by decree, to be immediately replaced by the State Political
Directorate Administration (Gosudastvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie; GPU),
which was responsible to the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Al-
though the name had changed, the staff and the administrative structure re-
mained the same, ensuring a high degree of continuity within the institution.
The change in title emphasized that whereas the Cheka had been an extraor-
dinary agency, which in principle was only transitory, the GPU was permanent.
The state thus gained a ubiquitous mechanism for political repression and
control. Lying behind the name change were the legalization and the institu-
tionalization of terror as a means of resolving all conflict between the people
and the state.

One of the new punishments instituted in the new penal code was lifelong
banishment, with the understanding that any return to the US.S.R. would be
greeted with immediate execution. It was put into practice from as early as 1922
as part of a long expulsion operation that affected nearly 200 well-known
intellectuals suspected of opposing Bolshevism. Among them were many of the
prominent figures who had participated in the Social Committee for the Fight
against Famine, which had been dissolved on 27 July of that year.

In a long letter to Dzerzhinsky dated 20 May 1922, Lenin laid out a vast
plan for the "banishment abroad of all writers and teachers who have assisted
the counterrevolution . . . This operation must be planned with great care. A

From Tambov to the Great Famine

special commission must be set up. All members of the Politburo must spend
two to three hours each week carefully examining books and newspapers
Information must be gathered systematically on the political past, the work,
and the literary activity of teachers and writers."
Lenin led the way with an example:

As far as the journal Ekonomist is concerned, for example, it is clearly a
center for White Guard activity. On the cover of the third issue (N.B.: as
early as that!) all the collaborators are listed. I think they are all legiti-
mate candidates for expulsion. They are all known counterrevolutionar-
ies and accomplices of the Entente, and they make up a network of its
servants, spies, and corrupters of youth. Things must be set in motion
such that they are hunted down and imprisoned in a systematic and
organized fashion and banished abroad. 42

On 22 May the Politburo established a special commission, including
notably Kamenev, Kursky, Unshlikht, and Vasily Mantsev (the last two being
Dzerzhinksy's two assistants), to collect information on intellectuals to be
arrested and expelled. The first two people expelled in this fashion were the
two main leaders of the Social Committee for the Fight against Famine, Sergei
Prokopovich and Ekaterina Kuskova. A first group of 160 well-known intellec-
tuals, philosophers, writers, historians, and university professors, who were
arrested on 1 6 and 1 7 August, were deported in September. Some of the names
on the list were already famous internationally or would soon become so:
Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Scmyon Frank, Nikolai Loski, Lev Kar-
savin, Fyodor Stepun, Sergei Trubetskoi, Alcksandr Isgoev, Mikhail Ossorgin,
Aleksandr Kiesewetter. Each was forced to sign a document stating that he
understood that if he ever returned to the US.S.R., he would immediately be
shot. Each was allowed to take one winter coat and one summer coat, one suit
and change of clothes, two shirts, two nightshirts, two pairs of socks, two sets
of underwear, and twenty dollars in foreign currency.

Parallel to these expulsions, the secret police proceeded with its policy of
gathering information about all second-tier intellectuals who were under sus-
picion and were destined either for administrative deportation to remote areas
of the country, codified in law by a decree on 10 August 1922, or for the
concentration camps. On 5 September Dzerzhinsky wrote to his assistant
Unshlikht:

Comrade Unshlikht! Regarding the files kept on the intelligentsia, the
system is not nearly sophisticated enough. Since [Yakov] Agronov left,
we seem to have no one capable of organizing this properly, Zaraysky is
still too young. It seems to me that if we are going to make any progress
at all, Menzhinsky is going to have to take things in hand ... It is

129

130

A State against Its People

essential to devise a clear plan that can be regularly completed and
updated. The intelligentsia must be classed into groups and subgroups:

1. Writers

2. Journalists and politicians

3. Economists: subgroups are very important here: (a) financiers,
(b) workers in the energy sector, (c) transport specialists, (d)
tradesmen, (e) people with experience in cooperatives, etc.

4. Technical specialists: here too subgroups are necessary: (a) engi-
neers, (b) agronomists, (c) doctors, etc.

5. University lecturers and their assistants, etc.

Information on all such people must go to specific departments and
be synthesized by the Main Department on the Intelligentsia. Every
intellectual must have his own file . . . It must be clear in our minds that
the objective of the department is not simply to expel or arrest individu-
als, but to contribute to general political matters and policies concerning
intellectuals. They must be controlled, closely watched and divided up,
and those who are ready to support the Soviet regime and demonstrate
this by their actions and their words should be considered for promo-
tion. 43

A few days later Lenin sent a long memorandum to Stalin in which he
returned over and over, in almost maniacal detail, to the question of a "defini-
tive purging" of all socialists, intellectuals, and liberals in Russia:

Regarding the question of the expulsion of Mensheviks, populist social-
ists, cadets, etc., I would like to raise a few questions here. This issue
came up in my absence and has not yet been dealt with fully Mas the
decision been made yet to root out all the popular socialists? [Andrei]
Pechekhonov, [Aleksandr] Myakotin, [A.G.] Gornfeld, [N.] Petrishchcv,
and the like? I think the time has come for them to be exiled. They are
more dangerous than the Socialist Revolutionaries because they arc
more cunning. We could say the same of [Aleksandr] Potresov, [Alek-
sandr] Isgoev, and the rest of the staff at the journal Ekonomist, such as
Ozerov and several others. The same applies to the Mensheviks such as
[Vasily] Rozanov (a doctor, not to be trusted), Vigdorshik (Migulo or
something like that), Lyubov Nikolaevna Radchenko and her young
daughter (who seem to be two of the worst enemies of Bolshevism), and
N. A. Rozhkov (he must be exiled, he really is incorrigible) . . . The
Mantsev-Messing commission must draw up lists, and hundreds of
these people should be expelled immediately. It is our duty to clean up
Russia once and for all . . . All the authors at the House of Writers and
Thinkers in Petrograd, too, must go. Kharkiv must be searched from top
to bottom. We currently have absolutely no idea what is happening

From Tambov to the Great Famine

131

there; it might as well be in a foreign country. The city needs a radical
cleansing as soon as possible, right after the trial of all the Socialist
Revolutionaries. Do something about all those authors and writers in
Petrograd (you can find all their addresses in New Russian Thought, no.
4, 1922, p. 37) and all the editors of small publishing houses too (their
names and addresses are on page 29). This is all of supreme impor-
tance. 44

From the Truce to the Great Turning Point

lor slightly less than five years, from early 1923 until the end of
1927, there was a pause in the confrontation between society and the new
regime. Lenin had died on 24 January 1924, already politically sidelined since
his third stroke in March 1923, and the in-fighting surrounding his succession
accounted for much of the political activity of the other Bolshevik leaders.
Meanwhile society licked its wounds.

During this long truce the peasantry, who made up more than 85 percent
of the population, tried to get agriculture moving again, to negotiate a price
for their product, and to live, in the words of historian Michael Confino, "as
though the peasant Utopia actually worked." This "peasant Utopia, 11 which the
Bolsheviks called eserovshchina (a term whose closest translation would be
something like "Socialist Revolutionary mentality"), was based on four princi-
ples that had been at the heart of all the peasant programs for decades: first,
the destruction of the traditional large estates, with the land distributed by
household in accordance with the number of mouths to be fed; second, the
freedom to dispose of the fruits of their labor however they wished, with all
the benefits of free trade; third, peasant self-government, represented by a
traditional village community; and finally, the Bolshevik state reduced to its
simplest possible expression, one rural soviet for several villages, and a Com-
munist Party cell for every hundred villages.

From the Truce to the Great Turning Point

Market mechanisms, which had not been operational from 1914 to 1922,
were partly reinstated by the Bolshevik authorities and were temporarily toler-
ated in recognition of the backwardness of the peasantry. Seasonal migration
into the towns, which had been such a feature of the old regime, immediately
started up again. Because the state-run industrial sector had neglected the
production of consumer goods, rural industries began to take off again. Fam-
ines became more and more rare, and the peasants once again could eat as much
as they needed.

The apparent calm of these years should not conceal the persistence of
deep-seated tensions between the regime and a society that had not forgotten
the years of violence. The peasants still had many reasons for discontent. 1
Agricultural prices were very low, manufactured goods were both rare and
extremely expensive, and taxes were extremely high. Peasants sensed that they
were second-class citizens by comparison with city dwellers and in particular
the working class. Above all, the peasants complained about the innumerable
abuses of power committed by the local representatives of the Soviet regime,
who had grown up in the tradition of "War Communism." They were often
subject to the arbitrary decisions of absolute local authority, which still prac-
ticed many of the recent methods of the Red Terror. "The justice system, the
government administration, and the police are all totally corrupted by wide-
spread alcoholism. Bribery is commonplace, and everything is characterized by
excessive bureaucracy and a general distaste for the peasant masses," according
to a long report from the secret police at the end of 1925 on "The Position of
the Socialist Legal System in the Countryside." 2

Although the Bolshevik leaders condemned the most obvious abuses by
Soviet officials, they still considered the countryside to be a vast and dangerous
terra incognita "crawling with kulaks, Socialist Revolutionaries, religious lead-
ers, and old-fashioned landowners who have not yet been eliminated," accord-
ing to a report from the chief of the secret police in Tula Province.-'

Numerous documents from the Information Department of the GPU
reveal that ordinary workers were also still under close surveillance. As a social
group that was still rebuilding after years of war, revolution, and civil war,
workers were always suspected of maintaining links with the hostile world of
the countryside. Informers, placed in every enterprise, reported suspicious
conversations, unusual actions, and "peasant attitudes" that the workers, re-
turning from working in the countryside during their days off, were suspected
of importing back into the cities. Police reports divided the workers into
"hostile elements," "those obviously under the influence of counterrevolution-
ary cells," "politically backward groups" that generally originated in the coun-
tryside, and the few elements judged to be worthy of the label "politically
aware." Any strike or work stoppage, both of which were now quite rare in

133

13?

134

A State against Its People

these years of high unemployment and slowly improving standards of living,
was analyzed in great detail, and its instigators arrested.

Internal documents from the secret police demonstrate that after several
years of extremely rapid growth, police institutions actually began to decline,
precisely because of the Bolsheviks' waning desire to transform society. From
1924 to 1926 Dzerzhinsky had to fight quite hard against Party leaders who
considered the GPU much too big for the job it was required to do. As a result,
for the only time since its creation until 1953, the secret police experienced a
considerable decrease in the number of its employees. In 1921 the Cheka
employed approximately 105,000 civilians and nearly 180,000 troops of differ-
ent types, including frontier guards, railway police, and camp officials. By 1925
the numbers had shrunk to about 26,000 civilians and 63,000 troops. To these
figures should be added 30,000 informers; their number in 1921 cannot yet be
gauged from the available documentation. 4 In December 1924 Nikolai Bukharin
wrote to Feliks Dzerzhinsky: "It is my belief that we should now progress to
a more liberal form of Soviet power: less repression, more legality, more open
discussions, more responsibility at local levels (under the leadership of the
Party naturaliter), etc." 5

A few months later, on 1 May 1925, the president of the Revolutionary
Court, Nikolai Krylenko, who had presided over the farcical trial of the Social-
ist Revolutionaries, wrote a long note to the Politburo in which he criticized
the excesses of the GPU Several decrees that had been promulgated in 1922
and 1923 had limited the role of the GPU to matters of espionage, banditry,
counterfeiting, and counterrevolutionary activities. For crimes that fell into any
of those categories, the GPU was the sole judge, and its special court was
entitled to pronounce sentences of deportation and house arrest for up to three
years, deportation to concentration camps, and even the death penalty. Of the
62,000 dossiers that the GPU opened in 1924, more than 52,000 were trans-
ferred to ordinary courts. The GPU special units themselves had investigated
more than 9,000 cases, a high number given the relatively stable political
situation. Krylenko concluded: u The conditions suffered by people who are
deported and forced to live penniless in some forgotten corner of Siberia are
dreadful. The people sent there are often seventeen or eighteen years old, often
from student backgrounds, or old men of seventy, members of the clergy, and
old women belonging to 'socially dangerous classes. 1 "

Krylenko proposed that the term "counterrevolutionary'' be reserved for
people known to be members of "political parties representing the interests of
the bourgeoisie." This limitation, he argued, would avoid "wrongful interpre-
tations of the term by the services of the GPU." 6

Dzerzhinsky and his aides reacted swiftly to such criticism by supplying
the high-ranking members of the Party, and Stalin in particular, with alarmist

From the Truce to the Great Turning Point

135

reports about the persistence of serious internal problems, including supposed
diversionary tactics orchestrated by Poland, the Baltic states, Great Britain,
France, and Japan. According to the GPU's annual report for 1924, the secret
police had

• arrested 1 1,453 bandits, 1,853 of whom were immediately executed

• apprehended 926 foreigners (357 of whom were deported) and 1,542
spies

• prevented a White Guard uprising in the Crimea (132 people were exe-
cuted during this operation)

■ carried out 81 operations against anarchist groups, which resulted in
266 arrests

liquidated 14 Menshevik organizations (540 arrests), 6 right Socialist
Revolutionary organizations (152 arrests), 7 left Socialist Revolutionary
organizations (52 arrests), 117 "diverse intellectual organizations" (1,360
arrests), 24 monarchist movements (1,245 arrests), 85 clerical and sectar-
ian organizations (1,765 arrests), and 675 "kulak groups" (1,148 arrests)
exiled, in two large-scale operations in February and July 1924, approxi-
mately 4,500 "thieves, persistent offenders and nepmen" (entrepreneurs
and small businessmen) from Moscow and Leningrad

■ placed under house arrest 18,200 "socially dangerous" individuals

■ read 5,078,174 letters and diverse pieces of correspondence 7

One may well wonder how trustworthy these figures are, in their appar-
ently scrupulous bureaucratic exactitude. The figures were included in the
projected budget for the GPU for 1925, and their function may well have been
to demonstrate that the secret police were not lowering their guard in the face
of threats from abroad and should thus be considered for an increase in fund-
ing. Nonetheless the figures are invaluable for historians because they reveal
the permanence of the methods used, the same obsessions with potential ene-
mies, and the extent of a network that was momentarily less active but remained
very much operational.

Despite the cuts in the budget and the criticism from low-ranking Bol-
shevik officials, the activities of the GPU began to increase again, thanks to
increasingly hard-line penal legislation. In practice the Fundamental Principles
of the Penal Legislation of the U.S.S.R., adopted on 31 October 1924, as well
as the code adopted in 1926, significantly broadened the definition of what was
considered a counterrevolutionary crime, and also codified the notion of a
"socially dangerous person." Among counterrevolutionary crimes, the law in-
cluded any activity that, without directly aiming to overthrow or weaken the
Soviet regime, was in itself "an attack on the political or economic achievements

136

A State against Its People

of the revolutionary proletariat. " The law thus not only punished intentional
transgressions but also proscribed possible or unintentional acts.

A "socially dangerous person" was defined as "any person who has com-
mitted an act dangerous to society, who has maintained relations with criminal
circles, or whose past actions might be considered a danger to society. 1 ' Anyone
who fell within the scope of these extremely elastic categories could be sen-
tenced, even in a case of total absence of guilt: "the court may use these
measures of social protection to deal with anyone classified as a danger to
society, either for a specific crime that has been committed or when, even if
exonerated of a particular crime, the person is still reckoned to pose a threat
to society." The measures that came into force in 1926, including the famous
Article 58 of the penal code, with its fourteen definitions of counterrevolution-
ary activity, reinforced the legal foundation of the terror. 8 On 4 May 1926
Dzerzhinsky sent his aide Genrikh Yagoda a letter in which he laid out a vast
program for "the fight against speculation." The letter is revealing about the
limits of the NEP and the permanence of the "spirit of civil war" among
high-ranking Bolshevik officials:

The fight against "speculation" is now of exceptional importance . . .
Moscow must be cleansed of these parasitic speculators. 1 have asked
Pauker to assemble all available documentation from the files of the
inhabitants of Moscow regarding this problem. As yet I have received
nothing from him. Do you not think that the GPU should set up a
special penal colony unit, which could be financed with a speciaj fund
from the money confiscated? We could resettle all of these parasites in
our most distant and inhospitable regions, in accordance with a prees-
tablished governmental plan. Otherwise the parasites will be our undo-
ing. Because of them there are no more goods for the peasants, and
through their machinations the prices are constantly rising and the value
of the ruble falling. The GPU must tackle this problem directly as soon
as possible/' 1

Among other peculiarities of the Soviet penal system was the existence of
two quite separate systems for prosecution in criminal matters, one judicial and
the other administrative, and of two systems of detention, one run by the
Ministry of Internal Affairs and the other by the GPU. In addition to the
regular prisons that housed those who were sentenced through the normal legal
channels, a whole network of camps was run by the GPU, reserved for anyone
sentenced for crimes under its special jurisdiction. Such crimes included any
form of counterrevolutionary activity, banditry, counterfeiting, and crimes
committed by the political police themselves.

In 1922 the government proposed that the GPU set up a huge camp on
^ie islands in the Solovetski archipelago, in the White Sea near Arkhangelsk,

From the Truce to the Great Turning Point

137

the main island of which was home to one of the largest Russian Orthodox
monasteries. The GPU expelled the monks and established a chain of camps
with the common name Special Camps of Solovetski (SLON). The first in-
ternees, from the Kholmogory and Pertaminsk camps, arrived in early July
1923. By the end of that year there were more than 4,000 prisoners, by 1927
there were 15,000, and by the end of 1928 there were nearly 38,000.

One of the peculiarities of the Solovetski camps was their relative auton-
omy. Apart from the director and a handful of support staff, all posts in the
camps were filled by the prisoners themselves. Most of these were people who
had collaborated with the secret police but had been sentenced for particularly
serious abuses of their position. In the hands of such people, autonomy was
bound to give rise to anarchy.

Under the NEP, the GPU administration recognized three categories of
prisoners. The first included all those involved in politics, that is, people who
were members of the old Menshevik, Socialist Revolutionary, or anarchist
parties. In 1921 they had convinced Dzerzhinsky, who himself had spent nearly
ten years as a political prisoner under the tsarist regime, that they deserved a
less stringent fate. As a result they received a slightly larger food ration, known
as the political ration, were allowed to keep more of their personal belongings,
and were permitted to receive newspapers and journals. They lived in commu-
nities, and above all they were spared any forced labor. This privileged status
was to last until the end of the decade.

The second group, numerically by far the largest, contained all the coun-
terrevolutionaries: members of nonsocialist or new anarchist political parties,
members of the clergy, veteran officers from the tsarist armies, civil servants
from the old regime, Cossacks, participants in the Kronstadt and Tambov
revolts, and anyone else who had been sentenced under Article 58 of the penal
code.

The third category grouped together all common criminals sentenced by
the GPU (bandits, counterfeiters) and former members of the Cheka who had
been prosecuted for any number of offenses. The counterrevolutionaries, hav-
ing been imprisoned with the common criminals who made all the laws in the
camp, thus underwent endless privations and suffered starvation, the extreme
cold of the winters, and the summer mosquitoes; one of the commonest tor-
tures was to tie up prisoners naked in the woods, at the mercy of the mosqui-
toes, which were particularly voracious in these northern islands. The writer
Varlam Shalamov, one of the most famous of the Solovetski prisoners, recalled
that prisoners would deliberately ask to have their hands tied behind their
backs, a procedure that was in fact enshrined in the regulations. "This was the
only means of defense that the prisoners had against the laconic formula 'killed
while attempting to escape.' 1110

138

A State against Its People

It was the Solovetski camps that, after the years of improvisation during
the civil war, perfected the system of enforced labor that would see such a
tremendous expansion after 1929. Until 1925 prisoners were kept occupied in
a relatively unproductive manner inside the camps; but beginning in 1926 the
camp administrators decided to set up production contracts with a number of
state organizations. This arrangement meant the use of forced labor as a source
of profit rather than as a tool for reeducation — the original ideology of the
corrective work camps of 1919 and 1920. Reorganized under the name Direc-
torate for Special Camps in the Northern Region (USLON), the Solovetski
camps expanded in the surrounding area, initially on the shores of the White
Sea. In 1926 and 1927 new camps were established near the mouth of the
Pechora River, at Kern, and at other inhospitable nearby sites with densely
wooded hinterlands. The prisoners carried out a precise program of produc-
tion, chiefly involving the felling and cutting of timber. The exponential growth
of the production programs soon required an even greater number of prisoners
and eventually led, in June 1929, to a major restructuring of the detention
system. Prisoners who were sentenced to more than three years were sent to
work camps. This measure implied a veritable explosion in the work-camp
system. As the experimental laboratory for forced labor, the "special camps" of
the Solovetski archipelago were the testing ground for another archipelago that
was coming into being, the immense Gulag archipelago.

The everyday activities of the GPU, including the sentencing of thousands of
people to house arrest or to the camps, did not deter the secret police from
involvement in specific operations of repression on a totally different scale. In
the apparently calm years of the NEP, from 1923 to 1927, the peripheral
republics of Russia — Transcaucasia and Central Asia — saw the bloodiest and
most massive repressions. Most of these nations had fiercely resisted Russian
expansionism in the nineteenth century and had only recently been recon-
quered by the Bolsheviks: Azerbaijan in April 1920, Armenia in December
1920, Georgia in February 1921, Dagestan at the end of 1921, and Turkestan,
including Bukhara, in the autumn of 1920. They were still putting up strong
resistance to the process of Sovietization. "We still control only the main cities,
or rather the main city centers," wrote Jan Peters, the Cheka plenipotentiary
envoy, in January 1923. From 1918 until the end of the 1920s, and in some
regions until 1935-36, the greater part of Central Asia, with the exception of
the towns, was still in the hands of the basmachis. The term basmachis ("brig-
ands" in Uzbek) was applied by the Russians to all the partisans, both seden-
tary and nomadic, such as Uzbeks, Turkmenians, and Kirgiz, who were acting
independently of one another in the various regions.

The main crucible of revolt was in the Fergana valley. After Bukhara fell

From the Truce to the Great Turning Point

139

to the Red Army in September 1 920, the uprising spread to the western and
southern regions of the old emirate of Bukhara and to the western region of
the Turkmcnian steppes. In early 192 1 Red Army headquarters estimated the
number of armed basmachis at about 30,000. The leadership of the movement
was extremely heterogeneous, made up as it was of local chiefs from villages or
tribes, traditional religious leaders, and Muslim nationalist leaders from abroad,
such as Enver Pasha, the former Turkish minister of defense, who was killed
in a battle with Cheka detachments in 1922.

The basmachi movement was a spontaneous uprising against the "infidel"
and the "Russian oppressor," the old enemy who had returned in a new guise
and who this time not only wanted land and cattle but also was attempting to
profane the Muslim spiritual world. This essentially colonial war of "pacifica-
tion," waged for more than ten years, required a large part of the Russian armed
forces and the special troops of the secret police, one of whose principal
sections became the Oriental Department. It is still impossible even to guess at
the number of victims in this war. 11

The second major sector of the GPU's Oriental Department was Tran-
scaucasia. In the first half of the 1920s Dagestan, Georgia, and Chechnya were
severely affected by the repressions. Dagestan resisted the Soviet invasion until
1921. Under the direction of Sheikh Uzun Hadji, the Muslim brotherhood of
the Nakshbandis led a major rebellion among the people of the mountains, and
the struggle against the Russian invaders took on the character of a holy war.
It lasted for more than a year, and some regions were "pacified" only by heavy
bombing and huge massacres of civilians, which persisted into 1924. n

After three years of independence under a Menshevik government, Geor-
gia was occupied by the Red Army in February 1921, and it remained, in the
words of Aleksandr Myasnikov, secretary of the Bolshevik Party Committee in
Transcaucasia, "a distinctly arduous affair." The local Party was skeletal, having
recruited scarcely 10,000 members over three years, and it faced opposition in
the form of a highly educated and noble class of about 100,000 and a vigorous
Menshevik resistance group (the Menshevik Party in 1920 had numbered some
60,000 local members). The terror in Georgia was carried out by the all-pow-
erful Georgian Cheka, largely independent of Moscow and led by Lavrenti
Beria, a twenty-five-year-old policeman who would soon rise rapidly in the
Cheka. Despite this, at the end of 1922, the exiled Menshevik leaders managed
to organize all the anti-Bolshevik parties into a secret committee for Georgian
independence that prepared for an uprising. The revolt, which began in the
small town of Chiatura, consisted mainly of peasants from the Gurev region
and spread within a few days to five of the twenty-five Georgian regions.
However, faced with the superior forces of a Russian army equipped with heavy
artillery and air power, the insurrection was crushed within a week. Sergo

140

A State against Its People

Ordzhonikidze, the first secretary of the Bolshevik Party Committee in Tran-
scaucasia, and Lavrenti Beria used this uprising as the pretext to "finish off the
Mensheviks and the Georgian nobility once and for all." According to recently
published data, 12,578 people were shot between 29 August and 5 September
1924. Repressions were so widespread that even the Politburo reacted. The
Party leadership sent a message to Ordzhonikidze instructing him not to exe-
cute a disproportionate number of people or to dispose of political enemies in
such fashion without express authorization from the Central Committee. Nev-
ertheless, summary executions continued for some months. Before a meeting
of the Central Committee in Moscow in October 1924, Ordzhonikidze admit-
ted that "perhaps we did go a little far, but we couldn't help ourselves." 1 -*

A year after the Georgian uprising had been crushed, the regime launched
a massive "pacification" campaign in Chechnya, where people still went about
their business as though Soviet power did not exist. From 27 August to 15
September 1925 more than 10,000 regular troops from the Red Army under
the leadership of General Ierome Uborevich, backed by special units from the
GPU, began an enormous operation to try to disarm the Chechen partisans
who still held the countryside. Tens of thousands of arms were seized and
nearly 1,000 "bandits" arrested. So fierce was the resistance that the GPU
leader Unshlikht reported that "the troops were forced to resort to heavy
artillery to bombard the rebel strongholds." At the end of this new "pacifica-
tion" operation, carried out during what might be called the GPU's finest hour,
Unshlikht concluded his report thus: "As was demonstrated by the experience
of our struggle against the basmachis in Turkestan, and against the bandits in
Ukraine, military repression is effective only when it is followed by an intensive
process of Sovietization in the core of the country." 14

After the death of Dzerzhinsky at the end of 1926, the GPU came under
the leadership of Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky, who had been its foun-
der's righthand man (and who was also of Polish extraction). By now the GPU
was called upon more frequently by Stalin, who was preparing his political
offensive against both Trotsky and Bukharin. In January 1927 the GPU re-
ceived an order instructing it to accelerate the classification of "anti-Soviet and
socially dangerous elements" in the countryside. In a single year the number
of people thus classified rose from 30,000 to about 72,000. In September 1927
the GPU launched campaigns in several provinces to arrest kulaks and other
"socially dangerous elements." With hindsight, these operations seem to have
been preparatory operations for the great "dekulakization" programs of the
winter of 1929-30.

In 1926 and 1927 the GPU showed itself also to be extremely active in the
hunt for Communists of opposing tendencies, who were classified as either
"Zinovievites" or "Trotskyites." The practice of classifying and following

From the Truce to the Great Turning Point

141

Communists of different tendencies had first appeared in 1921. In September
1923 Dzerzhinsky had proposed "to tighten the ideological unity of the Party"
by insisting that Communists agree to inform the secret police about the
existence of splits or disagreements within the Party. The proposal had met
with considerable hostility from several leaders, including Trotsky himself.
Nonetheless, the practice of placing opponents under surveillance became
increasingly widespread in the years that followed. The GPU was very closely
involved with the purge of the Communist organization in Leningrad, carried
out under Zinoviev in January and February 1927. Opponents were not simply
expelled from the Party; several hundred were exiled to distant towns in the
countryside, where their position was very precarious, since no one dared to
offer them any work. In 1927 the hunt for Trotskyites — who numbered several
thousand around the country — intensified considerably, and for a month it
involved a number of units from the GPU. AH opponents were classified, and
hundreds of militant Trotskyites were arrested and then exiled as a simple
administrative measure. In November 1927 all the main leaders of the so-called
Left Opposition, including Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and Rakovsky,
were expelled from the Party and arrested. Anyone who failed to make a public
confession was exiled. On 19 January 1928 Pravda announced the departure of
Trotsky and a group of thirty Opposition leaders from Moscow to exile in
Alma-Ata. A year later Trotsky was banned from the U.S.S.R. altogether. With
the transformation of one of the main architects of the Bolshevik terror into a
"counterrevolutionary," it was clear that a new era had dawned, and that a new
Party strongman had emerged — Josif Stalin,

In early 1928, when the Trotskyite opposition had been eliminated, the
Stalinist majority in the Politburo decided to end the truce with society, which
seemed to be straying increasingly from the original path set by the Bolsheviks.
The main enemy now, as ten years previously, was the peasantry, which was
still perceived as a hostile, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable mass. This second
stage of the war against the peasantry, as the historian Andrea Graziosi notes,
"was markedly different from the first. The initiative was taken very much by
the state this time, and all the peasantry could do was react, with ever decreasing
strength, to the attacks carried out against it," 15

Although the state of agriculture had improved since the catastrophic
events of 1918-1922, the end of the decade saw the "peasant enemy" still
weaker, and the state considerably stronger, than at the beginning. The authori-
ties, for example, had considerably more information at their disposal about
what actually went on in the villages. Thanks to its files on "socially dangerous
elements," the GPU could carry out the first dekulakization raids, stamp out
more and more "banditry," disarm the peasants, increase the proportion of
villagers recruited as soldiers, and expand Soviet education. As the correspon-

142

A State against Its People

dence of Party leaders and the records of high-level discussions within the
Party demonstrate, the Stalinist leadership, like its opponents Bukharin, Rykov,
and Kamenev, was perfectly aware of what was at stake in this new assault on
the peasantry. "There will be a peasant war, as in 1918-19," warned Bukharin.
But Stalin was ready, since he knew that, whatever the cost, the regime would
emerge the victor. 16

The harvest crisis at the end of 1927 provided Stalin with the pretext he
needed. November was marked by a spectacular decline in deliveries of agri-
cultural products to the state collection centers, and by December this was
beginning to take on catastrophic proportions. In January 1928 the facts had to
be faced: despite a good harvest, the peasants had delivered only 4.8 million
tons, down from 6.8 million the previous year. The new crisis had many causes,
including the decline in the prices offered by the state, the cost and the scarcity
of manufactured products, the disorganization of the collection agencies, the
rumors of war, and, in general, the peasants' discontent with the regime,
Nonetheless, Stalin was quick to label this a "kulak strike. 11

The Stalinist faction quickly used the reduced deliveries as a pretext to
return to requisitioning and to the repressive measures used during the period
of War Communism. Stalin visited Siberia in person. Other leaders, including
Andrei Andreev, Anastas Mikoyan, Pavel Postyshev, and Stanislas Kossior, also
left for the grain-producing centers in the Black Earth territories (fertile re-
gions in southern Russia), Ukraine, and the Northern Caucasus. On 14 January
1928 the Politburo sent a circular to local authorities ordering them to "arrest
speculators, kulaks, and anyone else interfering in the markets or in pricing
policies." "Plenipotentiaries" (the term itself was a throwback to the requisi-
tioning policies of 1918-1921) and detachments of militant Communists were
sent into the countryside to remove local authorities judged to be too compla-
cent toward the kulaks. They also sought out hidden grain surpluses, if neces-
sary with the help of poor peasants, who were promised a quarter of all
confiscated grain as compensation for their assistance.

To punish peasants who were unwilling to hand over their agricultural
products at prices that were a mere third or even a quarter of the going market
rate, the Soviet authorities doubled, tripled, or even quintupled the original
amount to be collected. Article 107 of the penal code, which set a prison term
of three years for anyone acting in a manner liable to increase prices, was also
widely used. Taxes on the kulaks were increased tenfold in two years. The
markets themselves were closed, a move that affected wealthier and poorer
peasants alike. Within a few weeks all these measures clearly vitiated the uneasy
truce existing between the regime and the peasantry since 1922-23. The req-
uisitioning and repressive measures merely worsened the agricultural situation.
In the short term, the use of force had allowed the authorities to obtain a harvest

From the Truce to the Great Turning Point

143

approximately the same size as that from the preceding year. In the long term,
however, the consequences were similar to those during War Communism:
peasants reacted by sowing considerably less the following year.' 7

The harvest crisis of the winter of 1927-28 played a crucial role in the
events that followed. In particular, Stalin drew a whole series of conclusions
from this crisis. He decided to to create "fortresses of socialism" in the coun-
tryside—giant sovkhozy, pilot farms run by the state, and kolkhozy, or collective
farms— and to get rid of the kulaks once and for all by "liquidating them as a
class."

In 1928 the regime also broke its truce with another social group, the
spetsy, the "bourgeois specialists" left over from the intelligentsia of the ancien
regime, who at the end of the 1920s still filled most of the managerial positions
in industrial and government departments. At a meeting of the Central Com-
mittee in April 1928, it was announced that an industrial sabotage plan had
been discovered in the Shakhty region, one of the mining areas of the Donbass,
among the workers of the Donugol Company, which was known to employ
"bourgeois specialists" and to have relations with finance companies in the
West. A few weeks later, 53 of the accused, most of them engineers and
middle-management workers, were tried in public in the first open political trial
since that of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1922; 1 1 were condemned to death,
and 5 were executed. This show-trial, which was reported extensively in the
press, serves as an illustration of the obsessive hunt for "saboteurs in the pay
of foreign powers," a term used as a rallying call for activists and informers in
the pay of the GPU "Saboteurs" were blamed for all economic failures, and
they became the excuse for using thousands of white-collar workers to build
the new special offices of the GPU, known as the sharashki. Thousands of
engineers and technicians who had been convicted of sabotage were punished
by being sent to construction sites and high-profile civil engineering projects.
In the months following the Shakhty trial the Economic Department of the
GPU fabricated dozens of similar affairs, notably in Ukraine. In the Yugostal
metallurgy complex in Dnepropetrovsk, 1 1 2 white-collar workers were arrested
in May 1928, 1X

Not only white-collar industrial workers were targeted in the vast anti-
specialist operations begun in 1928. Numerous university professors and stu-
dents of "socially unacceptable" background were excluded from higher
education in a series of purges of the universities designed to advance the
careers of the new Red "proletarian" intelligentsia.

The new repressive measures and the economic difficulties of the later
years of the NEP, which were marked by growing unemployment and upsurges
in criminal activity, resulted in a huge increase in the number of criminal
convictions: 578,000 in 1926, 709,000 in 1927, 909,000 in 1928, and 1,778,000

144

A State against Its People

in 1929. I9 To curtail the rapid growth of the prison population, which in 1928
was supposed to be no higher than 150,000, the government made two impor-
tant decisions. The first, a decree of 26 March 1928, was a proposal to replace
all short-term prison sentences for minor offenses with corrective work, to be
carried out without remuneration "in industry, on construction projects, or in
forestry work." The second measure was a decree of 27 June 1929, which had
enormous consequences. It recommended the transfer of all prisoners who
were sentenced to more than three years to work camps whose aim was to be
"the development of the natural resources of the northern and eastern regions
of the country," an idea that had been in the air for a few years. The GPU was
already involved in a vast enterprise of wood production for the export market,
and had repeatedly asked for additional workers from the organizations at the
Ministry of Internal Affairs responsible for incarcerations. The GPU's own
prisoners in the special Solovetski camps, who numbered 38,000 in 1928, were
not sufficient to meet the desired production targets. 20

The drawing-up of the first Five-Year Plan highlighted questions about
the division of the labor force and the exploitation of the inhospitable regions
that were so rich in natural resources. In that respect the penal workforce,
heretofore an untapped source of manpower, was considered a potentially
extremely valuable asset — a major source of revenue, influence, and power. The
leaders of the GPU, and in particular Menzhinsky and his aide Yagoda, both
of whom had Stalin's backing, were well aware of the potential importance of
the prisoners. In the summer of 1929 they put together an ambitious plan to
colonize the Narym region, which covered 225,000 square miles of marshy pine
forest in western Siberia. This plan was implemented in a decree of 27 June
1929. It was in this context that the idea of dekulakization began to take shape.
The idea was to deport kulaks, defined as the better-off peasants, whom the
official circles considered necessarily opposed to collectivization. 21

Nonetheless, it took an entire year for Stalin and his followers to persuade
other Party leaders to accept the policies of enforced collectivization, dekulaki-
zation, and accelerated industrialization— the three key aspects of a coherent
program for the brutal transformation of the economy and society. The pro-
gram called for the simultaneous dissolution of the traditional market economy,
expropriation of all peasant land, and development of the natural resources of
the inhospitable regions of the country using the forced labor of "kulaks" and
other groups that were the targets of this "second revolution."

The "right-wing" opposition to these ideas, led notably by Rykov and
Bukharin, thought that collectivization would result only in a new feudal ex-
ploitation of the peasantry, leading to civil war, increased terror, chaos, and new
famines. This obstacle was finally eliminated in April 1929. Throughout the
summer of 1929 the "rightists" were attacked in the Soviet press with unprece-

From the Truce to the Great Turning Point

145

dented venom, accused of collaborating with capitalist elements and colluding
with Trotskyites. Totally discredited, these opponents were forced to make
public confessions at the Plenary Session of the Central Committee in Novem-
ber 1929.

During these episodes in the struggle between proponents and opponents
of the NEP, the country sank further and further into economic crisis. The
agricultural figures for 1928-29 were disastrous. Despite systematic recourse
to a whole arsenal of coercive measures directed against the peasantry, includ-
ing steep fines and prison sentences for anyone who refused to sell produce to
the state, the amount gathered by the state in the winter of 1928-29 was
considerably smaller than the preceding year, which understandably created a
situation of extreme tension in the countryside. From January 1928 to Decem-
ber 1929 — that is, even before enforced collectivization— the GPU recorded
more than 1,300 riots and mass demonstrations in the countryside, which led
to the arrest of tens of thousands of peasants. One other statistic is also a good
indicator of the climate in the countryside at that time: in 1929 more than 3,200
Soviet civil servants were victims of terrorist attacks. In February ration cards
appeared for the first time since the introduction of the NEP. Poverty again
became widespread after the authorities closed down most small companies and
peasant workshops, labeling them capitalist throwbacks.

In Stalin's view, the crisis in agriculture was the work of kulaks and other
hostile forces who were attempting to undermine the Soviet regime. The stakes
were set: the choice was to be made between rural capitalism and the kolkhozy.
In June 1929 the government announced the beginning of a new phase, that of
"mass collectivization." The targets of the first Five- Year Plan, ratified in April
by the Sixteenth Party Congress, were retroactively rounded upward. The plan
had originally foreseen the collectivization of around 5 million (or approxi-
mately 20 percent) of all farms before the end of the Five- Year Plan. In June
it was announced that the objective was now 8 million farms for 1930 alone; by
September the projected figure had risen to 13 million. Throughout the sum-
mer the authorities mobilized tens of thousands of Communists, trade union-
ists, members of the Communist youth organizations (the Komsomols),
laborers, and students and sent them into rural villages together with local Party
leaders and GPU officials. The pressure on the peasants intensified as local
Party organizations strove to outdo each other to beat the collectivization
records. On 31 October 1929 Pravda called for "total collectivization." A week
later, on the twelfth anniversary of the Revolution, Stalin published his famous
article "The Great Turning Point," which was based on the fundamentally
erroneous idea that "the average peasant has welcomed the arrival of the
kolkhoz'" The NEP was definitively over.

Forced Collectivization and Dekulakization

lecent research in the newly accessible archives has confirmed
that the forced collectivization of the countryside was in effect a war declared
by the Soviet state on a nation of smallholders. More than 2 million peasants
were deported (1.8 million in 1930-31 alone), 6 million died of hunger, and
hundreds of thousands died as a direct result of deportation. Such figures,
however, only hint at the size of this human tragedy. Far from being confined
to the winter of 1929-30, the war dragged on until the mid- 1930s and was at its
peak in 1932 and 1933, which were marked by a terrible famine deliberately
provoked by the authorities to break the resistance of the peasants. The vio-
lence used against the peasants allowed the authorities to experiment with
methods that would later be used against other social groups. In that respect it
marked a decisive step in the development of Stalinist terror.

In a report to a Central Committee plenum in November 1929, Vyacheslav
Molotov declared: 'The speed of collectivization is not really at issue in the
plan ... We still have November, December, January, February, and March,
four and a half months in which, if the imperialists do not attack us head-on,
we can make a decisive breakthrough in the economy and in collectivization. 1 '
The committee endorsed the decision to speed up the pace of collectivization.
A commission drew up a new timetable that was optimistically revised several
times before being officially published on 5 January 1930. The Northern Cau-

Forced Collectivization and Dekulakization

casus and the lower and middle regions of the Volga were to be fully collectiv-
ized by the autumn of 1930, and the other grain-producing regions a year later. 1

On 27 December 1929 Stalin demanded "the eradication of all kulak
tendencies and the elimination of the kulaks as a class." A commission from
the Politburo, presided over by Molotov, was charged with pursuing all meas-
ures needed to achieve this goal. The commission defined three categories of
kulaks: those engaged in "counterrevolutionary activities" were to be arrested
and transferred to GPU work camps or executed if they put up any sign of
resistance. Their families were to be deported and all their property confiscated.
Kulaks of the second category, who were defined as "showing less active oppo-
sition, but nonetheless archexploiters with an innate tendency to destabilize the
regime,' 1 were to be arrested and deported with their families to distant regions
of the country. Those in the third category, classified as loyal to the regime,
were to be officially transferred to the peripheral regions of the districts in
which they lived, "outside the collectivized zones, on land requiring improve-
ment. 1 ' The decree also stipulated that "the number of kulak farms to be
liquidated within the next four months . . . should be between 3 percent and
5 percent of the total number of farms," a figure intended as a general guideline
for the size of dekulakization operations. 2

Coordinated in each district by a troika composed of the first secretary of
the local Party Committee, the president of the local Soviet Executive Com-
mittee, and the chief of the local GPU, operations were carried out on the
ground by special dekulakization commissions and brigades. The list of kulaks
in the first category, which, according to the Politburo's guidelines, was to
comprise some 60,000 heads of household, was to be drawn up by the secret
police themselves. Lists of kulaks in the other two categories were made in situ
at the recommendation of local village activists. Sergo Ordzhonkidze, one of
Stalin's closest advisers, explained who these "activists 11 really were: "Because
there are almost no Party activists in the villages, we generally install a young
Communist in the village and force two or three poor peasants to join him, and
it is this aktiv [activist cell] that personally carries out all the village business
of collectivization and dekulakization. "■* Their instructions were quite clear:
they were to collectivize as many farms as possible, and to arrest and label as a
kulak anyone who put up resistance.

These practices naturally opened the way to all sorts of abuses and the
settling of old scores, and difficult questions were raised regarding the catego-
ries of kulaks. In January and February 1930 the criteria established by the
Party after considering innumerable reports from committees of economists
and ideologues were scarcely applicable, since the ever-increasing taxes had
impoverished all previously wealthy peasants. In the absence of external signs
of wealth, the commissions had to resort to outdated and often incomplete tax

147

146

148

A State against Its People

returns kept by the rural soviet, information provided by the GPU, and denun-
ciations by neighbors tempted by the possibility of gain. In practice, instead of
the precise and detailed inventory that they were instructed to draw up before
expropriating goods for the kolkhoz, the dekulakization brigades seemed to
follow the motto "Eat, drink, and be merry, for it all belongs to us. 1 ' According
to a GPU report from Smolensk, "the brigades took from the wealthy peasants
their winter clothes, their warm underclothes, and above all their shoes. They
left the kulaks standing in their underwear and took everything, even old rubber
socks, women's clothes, tea worth no more than fifty kopeks, water pitchers,
and pokers . . . The brigades confiscated everything, even the pillows from
under the heads of babies, and stew from the family pot, which they smeared
on the icons they had smashed."** Dekulakized properties were often simply
looted or sold at auction by the dekulakization brigades for absurd prices:
wooden houses were bought for sixty kopeks, cows for fifteen.

In such conditions it is not surprising that in certain districts between 80
and 90 percent of those victimized by the dekulakization process were
serednyakt, or middle-income peasants. The brigades had to meet the required
quotas and, if possible, surpass them. Peasants were arrested and deported for
having sold grain on the market or for having had an employee to help with
harvest back in 1925 or 1926, for possessing two samovars, for having killed a
pig in September 1 929 "with the intention of consuming it themselves and thus
keeping it from socialist appropriation." Peasants were arrested on the pretext
that they had "taken part in commerce," when all they had done was sell
something of their own making. One peasant was deported on the pretext that
his uncle had been a tsarist officer; another was labeled a kulak on account of
his "excessive visits to the church." But most often people were classed as
kulaks simply on the grounds that they had resisted collectivization. At times
confusion reigned in the dekulakization brigades to an almost comic extreme:
in one city in Ukraine, for example, a serednyak who was a member of a
dekulakization brigade was himself arrested by a member of another brigade
that was operating on the other side of the town.

After a first phase that allowed some to settle old scores or quite simply
to engage in looting, village communities began to harden their attitudes to
both dekulakization and collectivization. The GPU recorded 402 revolts and
mass peasant demonstrations against dekulakization and collectivization in
January 1930, 1,048 in February, and 6,528 in March. 5

This massive and quite unexpected resistance caused the government
briefly to alter its plans. On 2 March 1930 all Soviet newspapers carried Stalin's
famous article "Dizzy with Success," which condemned "the numerous abuses
of the principle of voluntary collectivization" and blamed the excesses of

Forced Collectivization and Dekulakization

149

collectivization and dekulakization on local bosses who were "drunk on suc-
cess." The impact of the article was immediate: in March alone more than 5
million peasants left the kolkhozy Trouble and unrest, linked to the often
violent reappropriation of tools and cattle by their original owners, immediately
flared up. Throughout March the central authorities received daily reports
from the GPU of massive uprisings in western Ukraine, in the central Black
Earth region, in the Northern Caucasus, and in Kazakhstan. The GPU counted
more than 6,500 mass demonstrations during that critical month, more than
800 of which had to be put down by force. During these events more than 1 ,500
civil servants were killed, wounded, or badly beaten. The number of victims
among the rebels is not known but must easily have totaled several thousand. 6

By early April the authorities were forced into further concessions. Several
circulars were sent to local authorities calling for a slowdown in collectivization,
acknowledging that there was a genuine danger of "a veritable tidal wave of
peasant wars" and of u thc death of at least half of all local Soviet civil servants."
That month the number of uprisings and peasant demonstrations began to
decline, though it remained exceedingly high. The GPU reported 1,992 pro-
tests for April. The decrease became more apparent as the summer wore on.
In June there were 886 revolts, 618 in July, and 256 in August. In all of 1930
nearly 2.5 million peasants took part in approximately 14,000 revolts, riots, and
mass demonstrations against the regime. The regions most affected were the
Black Earth region, the Northern Caucasus, and Ukraine, particularly the
western parts, where whole districts, and notably the areas that bordered on
Poland and Romania, temporarily slipped out of the control of the Soviet
regime. 7

One of the peculiarities of these movements was the key role played by
women peasants, who were sometimes sent to the front lines in the hope that
they would not suffer as severe a fate as the men who were captured. H Although
the demonstrations by women often focused on the closure of churches or the
collectivization of dairy farming, there were also bloody confrontations between
GPU detachments and groups of peasants armed with axes and pitchforks.
Hundreds of Soviet officials were attacked, and for a few hours or a few days
the peasants would try to reclaim the administration of village affairs, demand-
ing the return of confiscated tools and cattle, the dissolution of the kolkhoz,
the ^introduction of free trade, the reopening of the churches, the restitution
of all goods to the kulaks, the return of the peasants who had been deported,
the abolition of Bolshevik power, and, in Ukraine at least, national inde-
pendence. 9

The peasants managed to postpone collectivization only through March
and April. Their actions did not lead to the creation of a central movement of

150

A State against Its People

resistance, with leaders and regional organizations. Weapons, too, were in short
supply, having been steadily seized by the authorities over the preceding decade.
Even so, the revolts were difficult to put down.

The repressions were horrifying. By the end of March 1930, "mopping-
up operations against counterrevolutionary elements" on the borders of west-
ern Ukraine led to the arrest of more than 15,000 people. In about forty days,
from 1 February to 1 5 March, the Ukrainian GPU arrested 26,000 people, of
whom 650 were immediately executed. According to the GPU's own records,
20,200 people received death sentences that year through the courts alone. 10

While carrying out this repression of "counterrevolutionary elements,"
the GPU began to apply Yagoda's Directive No. 44/21, which called for the
arrest of 60,000 kulaks of the first category. To judge by the daily reports that
were sent to him, the operation was carried out exactly as planned. The first
report, dated 6 February, noted 15,985 arrests; by 9 February the GPU noted
that 25,245 kulaks had been "taken out of circulation." A secret report
(spetssvodka) dated 15 February gave the following details: "The total number
of liquidations, including both individuals taken out of circulation and larger-
scale operations, has now reached 64,589. Of these, 52,166 are first category,
arrested during preparatory operations, and 12,423 were arrested in larger-scale
operations." In just a few days the target figure of 60,000 first-category kulaks
had already been met."

In reality the kulaks represented only one group of people "taken out of
circulation." Local GPU agents everywhere had taken the opportunity to clear
their district of "socially dangerous elements," among whom were "police
officers from the old regime," "White officers," "priests," "nuns," "rural arti-
sans," former "shopkeepers," "members of the rural intelligentsia," and "oth-
ers." At the bottom of the report dated 15 February 1930, which detailed the
categories of individuals arrested as part of the liquidation of kulaks of the first
class, Yagoda wrote: "The regions of the northeast and of Leningrad have not
understood the orders, or at least are pretending not to have understood them.
They must be forced to understand. We are not trying to clear the territory of
religious leaders, shopkeepers, and 'others.' If they write 'others, 1 that means
they don't even know who it is they are arresting. There will be plenty of time
to dispose of shopkeepers and religious leaders. What we are trying to do now
is to strike at the heart of the problem by weeding out the kulaks and kulak
counterrevolutionaries " 12 Even today it is impossible to say how many of the
"kulaks of the first category" who were "liquidated" were actually executed,
since there are no figures available.

Undoubtedly "kulaks of the first category" were a major part of the first
groups of prisoners who were transferred to the labor camps. By the summer
of 1930 the GPU had already established a vast network of such camps. The

Forced Collectivization and Dekulakization

151

oldest group of prisons, on the Solovetski Islands, continued its expansion on
the shores of the White Sea, from Karelia to Arkhangelsk. More than 40,000
prisoners built the Kem-Ukhta road, and thus facilitated most of the wood
production that was exported from Arkhangelsk. The group of camps in the
north, where nearly 40,000 other prisoners were detained, set about the con-
struction of a 200-mile railway line between Ust, Sysolk, and Pinyug, and a
road of the same length between Ust, Sysolk, and Ukhta. The 1 5,000 prisoners
in the camps in the east were the sole source of labor for the Boguchachinsk
Railway. The fourth group of camps, in Vichera, where some 20,000 prisoners
were detained, provided the labor force for the construction of the great chemi-
cal plant of Berezniki in the Urals. Finally, the camps in Siberia, where 80,000
people were kept, provided the labor for the Tomsk-Eniseisk Railway and the
Kuznetsk metallurgy complex.' 1

In a year and half, from the end of 1928 to the summer of 1930, forced
labor in the GPU camps had more than tripled, from 40,000 to approximately
140,000. The successful use of forced labor encouraged the government to
tackle more projects on a similar scale. In June 1930 the government decided
to construct a canal more than 150 miles long, most of it through granite,
linking the Baltic to the White Sea. In the absence of the necessary technology
and machinery, it was calculated that a labor force of 125,000 would be required
to carry out the task, using nothing but pickaxes, buckets, and wheelbarrows.
Such a labor force was unprecedented; but in the summer of 1930, when
dekulakization was at its height, the authorities had precisely that sort of spare
labor capacity at their disposal.

In fact the number of people deported as kulaks was so great — more than
700,000 people by the end of 1930, more than 1.8 million by the end of
1931 M — that the framework designed to cope with the process could not pos-
sibly keep up. Most of the kulaks in the second or third category were deported
in improvised operations of almost total chaos, which often resulted in an
unprecedented phenomenon of "abandonment in deportation." This provided
no economic benefit for the authorities, although the plan had been to utilize
this forced labor to its maximum capacity to develop the regions of the country
that were inhospitable but rich in natural resources. 15

Deportation of kulaks of the second category began in the first week of
February 1930. According to a plan approved by the Politburo, 60,000 families
were to be deported as part of a first phase that was to last until the end of
April. The northern region was to receive 45,000 families, and the Urals 1 5,000.
However, as early as 16 February, Stalin sent a telegram to Robert Eikhe, first
secretary of the Party's regional committee in western Siberia: "It is inexcus-
able that Siberia and Kazakhstan are claiming not to be ready to receive deport-
ees! It is imperative that Siberia receive 15,000 families between now and the

152

A State against Its People

end of April." In reply, Eikhe sent Moscow an estimate of the installation costs
for the planned contingent of deportees, which he calculated to be 40 million
rubles — a sum that he never, of course, received. 16

The deportation operations were thus characterized by a complete lack of
coordination between the place of departure and the destination. Peasants who
had been arrested were thus sometimes kept for weeks in improvised prisons —
barracks, administrative buildings, and railway stations — from which a great
number managed to escape. The GPU had allocated 240 convoys of 53 car-
riages for the first phase. Each convoy, according to GPU regulations, consisted
of 44 cattle trucks with 40 deportees apiece; 8 carriages to carry the tools, food,
and personal belongings of the deportees (limited to 480 kilos per family), and
1 carriage to transport the guards. As the rather acerbic correspondence be-
tween the GPU and the People's Commissariat of Transport demonstrates, the
formation of the convoys was invariably a painfully slow process. In the great
depots, such as Vologda, Kotlas, Rostov, Sverdlovsk, and Omsk, convoys would
remain for weeks, filled with their human cargo. These masses of women,
children, and old men rarely passed unnoticed by the local population; many
group letters, signed by the "Workers' and Employees' Collective of Vologda"
or the "Railway Workers of Kotlas," were sent to Moscow complaining about
"massacres of the innocent." 17

Few detailed records were kept of the mortality rates for the convoys of
1930 and 1931, but the appalling conditions, the cold, the lack of food, and the
rapid spread of disease must have cost a large number of lives.

When the railway convoys finally arrived at a station, the men were often
separated from their families, kept provisionally in flimsy cabins, and then
escorted to the new colonies, which, in accordance with official instructions,
were "some way distant from any means of communication." The interminable
journey thus sometimes continued for several hundred more kilometers, with
or without the family, sometimes on convoys of sledges in the winter, in carts
in the summer, or even on foot. From a practical point of view, the last stage
in the journey of kulaks of the second category was often indistinguishable
from the deportation of kulaks of the third category, who were being relocated
to lands requiring improvement in the peripheral regions — regions that in
Siberia or the Urals covered hundreds of thousands of square miles. As the
authorities in the district of Tomsk, in western Siberia, reported on 7 March
1930,

The first convoys of third-category kulaks arrived on foot, since we have
no horses, sleighs, or harnesses ... In general the horses that are as-
signed to the convoys are totally unsuited to journeys that are often of

Forced Collectivization and Dekulakization

153

more than 200 miles, for when the convoys are being made up, any of
the good horses belonging to the deportees are quickly replaced with old
nags ... In view of the present situation, it is impossible to transport the
two months' supplies that the kulaks are entitled to bring with them. It
is also very hard to deal with the children and old men who usually make
up some 50 percent of the contingent. ,s

In a similar report the Central Executive Committee of western Siberia
demonstrated the impossibility of carrying out the instructions of the GPU
regarding the deportation of 4,902 kulaks of the third category to two districts
in the province of Novosibirsk: u The transportation, along 225 miles of road
in appalling disrepair, of the 8,560 tons of grain and animal feed to which the
deportees are theoretically entitled Tor their journey and their settling in,'
would require the use of 28,909 horses and 7,227 horsemen (1 horseman for
4 horses)." The report concluded that "carrying out an operation of this scale
would seriously compromise the spring sowing program, because the horses
would be exhausted as a result, and would require several weeks of rest ... It
is thus of capital importance that the volume of provisions that the deportees
are allowed to bring with them be decreased considerably." 19

It was thus without provisions or tools, and often without any shelter, that
the prisoners had to begin their new lives. One report from the province of
Arkhangelsk in September 1930 admitted that of the planned 1,641 living
quarters for the deportees, only 7 had been built. The deportees often "settled"
on the bare earth, on the open steppes, or in the middle of the marshy pine
forests. The fortunate ones who had been able to bring some tools with them
could construct some sort of rudimentary shelter, often the traditional zemly-
anka, a simple hole in the ground covered with branches. In some cases, when
the deportees were to reside by the thousands near a large building or industrial
complex that was under construction, they were lodged in primitive military
camps, where they slept in three-tier bunk beds, with several hundred people
per shack.

In all, 1,803,392 people were officially deported as part of the dekulakiza-
tion program in 1930 and 1931. One might well wonder how many died of cold
and hunger in the first few months of their "new life." The archives in Novosi-
birsk contain one startling document in the form of a report sent to Stalin in
May 1933 by an instructor of the Party committee in Narym in western Siberia,
concerning the fate met by two convoys of more than 6,000 people deported
from Moscow and Leningrad. Although it concerns a later period and deals
with a different category of deportee — not peasants but "outdated elements"
thrown out of a new socialist town at the end of 1932 — the document describes
the fairly common phenomenon of "abandonment in deportation."

154

A State against Its People

On 29 and 30 April 1933 two convoys of "outdated dements" were sent
to us by train from Moscow and Leningrad. On their arrival in Tomsk
they were transferred to barges and unloaded, on 18 May and 26 May,
onto the island of Nazino, which is situated at the juncture of the Ob
and Nazina rivers. The first convoy contained 5,070 people, and the
second 1,044: 6,114 in all. The transport conditions were appalling: the
little food that was available was inedible, and the deportees were
cramped into nearly airtight spaces . . . The result was a daily mortality
rate of 35 — 40 people. These living conditions, however, proved to be
luxurious in comparison to what awaited the deportees on the island of
Nazino (from which they were supposed to be sent on in groups to their
final destination, the new sectors that are being colonized farther up the
Nazina River). The island of Nazino is a totally uninhabited place,
devoid of any settlements . . . There were no tools, no grain, and no
food. That is how their new life began. The day after the arrival of the
first convoy, on 19 May, snow began to fall again, and the wind picked
up. Starving, emaciated from months of insufficient food, without shel-
ter, and without tools, . . . they were trapped. They weren't even able to
light fires to ward off the cold. More and more of them began to die . . .
On the first day, 295 people were buried. It was only on the fourth or
fifth day after the convoy's arrival on the island that the authorities sent
a bit of flour by boat, really no more than a few pounds per person. Qnce
they had received their meager ration, people ran to the edge of the
water and tried to mix some of the flour with water in their hats, their
trousers, or their jackets. Most of them just tried to eat it straight off,
and some of them even choked to death. These tiny amounts of flour
were the only food that the deportees received during the entire period
of their stay on the island. The more resourceful among them tried to
make some rudimentary sort of pancakes, but they had nothing to mix
or cook them in ... It was not long before the first cases of cannibalism
occurred,

At the end of June the deportees began to be transported to the so-called
village colonies. These places were nearly 150 miles farther up the river, deep
in forests. They were not villages, but untamed wilderness. Some of the de-
portees somehow managed to build a primitive oven, so that they could bake
bread. But for the rest there was little change from life as it had been on the
island: the same feeling of purposelessness, the same fires, the same nakedness.
The only difference was the bread ration, which came around every few days.
The mortality rate was still appalling; for example, of the seventy-eight people
who embarked from the island to the fifth colonial village, twelve were still alive
when the boat arrived. Soon the authorities realized that these regions were

Forced Collectivization and Dekulakization

155

simply not habitable, and the whole contingent was sent down the river once
again. Escape attempts became more and more common.

At the new location the surviving deportees were at last given some
tools, and in the second half of July they began to build shelters that
were half sunk into the ground . . . Cases of cannibalism were still being
recorded. Slowly, however, life began to take a more normal course, and
people began to work again, but they were so worn out from the events
of the preceding months that even with rations of 1.5 to 2 pounds of
bread a day they still fell ill and died, and ate moss, grass, leaves, etc.
The result of all this was that of the 6,100 people sent from Tomsk (to
whom another 500-700 were subsequently added from the surrounding
regions), only 2,200 were still alive by 20 August. 20

It is impossible to gauge how many similar cases of the abandonment of
deportees there were, but some of the official figures give an indication of the
losses. From February 1930 to December 1931 more than 1.8 million kulaks
were deported; but on 1 January 1932, when the authorities carried out a
general census, only 1,317,022 kulak deportees were recorded. Losses were thus
close to half a million people, or nearly 30 percent of all deportees. 21 Undoubt-
edly, a not insignificant proportion of those had managed to escape. 22 In 1932
the fate of these "contingents" was for the first time made an object of system-
atic study by the GPU After the summer of 1931 the GPU itself was respon-
sible for all deportations of what were termed "specially displaced," from the
initial deportation itself to the creation and management of the new village
colonies. According to that initial study, there had been more than 210,000
escapes and approximately 90,000 deaths. In 1933, the year of the great famine,
the authorities recorded the deaths of 151,601 of the 1,142,022 "specially
displaced" who had been included in the census of 1 January 1933. The annual
death rate was thus in the vicinity of 6.8 percent in 1932 and 13.3 percent in
1933. For 1930 and 1931 the data are incomplete but nonetheless eloquent: in
1931 the mortality rate was 1.3 percent per month among the deportees to
Kazakhstan, and 0.8 percent per month for those to western Siberia. Infant
mortality hovered around 8 percent and 12 percent per month and peaked at
15 percent per month for Magnitogorsk. From 1 June 1931 to June 1932 the
mortality rate among the deportees in the region of Narym, in western Siberia,
reached 1 1 .7 percent for the year. On the whole, it is unlikely that the mortality
rate for this period was lower than that of 1932, and was thus very likely in the
same vicinity of 10 percent. One can thus estimate that approximately 300,000
deportees died during the process of deportation. 2 ^

For the central authorities, who were eager to make as much profit as

156

A State against Its People

possible from the labors of those they termed "special deportees, 11 and after
1932 the labor of prisoners in "work colonies," the abandonment of deportees
was a last resort, which could be blamed, as noted by N. Puzitsky, one of the
GPU officials in charge of work-colony prisoners, on "the criminal negligence
and political shortsightedness of local leaders, who haven't yet got used to the
idea of colonization by ex-kulaks. 1 ' 2 " 1

In March 1931 a special commission was established to try to halt "the
dreadful mess of the deportation of manpower. 11 The commission was directly
attached to the Politburo and presided over by V. Andreev, with Yagoda playing
a key role. The first objective was the "rational and effective management of
the work colonies.' 1 Preliminary inquiries by the commission had revealed that
the productivity of the deported workforce was almost zero. Of the 300, 000
workers in the colonies of the Urals, for example, in April 1 93 1 a mere 8 percent
were detailed to "wood chopping and other productive activities. 11 All other
able-bodied adults were "building their own living quarters . . . and generally
just trying to survive. 11 Another document calculated that the massive program
of dekulakization had actually lost the state money. The average value of goods
confiscated from kulaks in 1930 was 564 rubles per farm, a derisory sum
(equivalent to fifteen months 1 wages for an average laborer). This figure dem-
onstrates clearly how minimal the supposed riches of the kulaks actually were.
The cost of deporting a kulak family, by contrast, was often more than 1,000
rubles. 25

For the Andreev commission, rationalization of the management of "work
colonies 11 entailed first and foremost an administrative reorganization of all the
mechanisms dealing with the deportees. In the summer of 1931 the GPU had
been given sole control of the administrative management of all population
displacements, which previously had been under the control of the local
authorities. A whole network of komandatury (commands) had been put into
place; these became in effect a rival government administration that allowed
the GPU to place huge areas under its control, where the specially displaced
made up the greater part of the local population. The colonies were subject to
extremely tight controls. Forced to reside in designated areas, workers were
transferred by the administration either into state-run companies, into "agri-
cultural or artisanal co-operative[s] of special status under the supervision of
the local GPU commander," or into construction work, road-mending, or
land-clearing. They were expected to produce 30-50 percent more than the free
workers, and their pay (when they were paid at all) was cut by 15 percent or
25 percent. The rest was taken for the local GPU administration.

As documents from the Andreev commission confirm, the GPU was
extremely proud that the resettlement cost of workers in the colonies was nine

Forced Collectivization and Dekulakization

157

times less than that of camp prisoners. In June 1933 the 203,000 "specially
displaced" in western Siberia, divided among 93 komandatury, were directed
by a skeletal staff of 97 1. 26 It was the goal of the GPU to provide, in exchange
for a commission (derived from a percentage of the wages earned plus an initial
fixed sum), its own workforce for a number of industrial enterprises. These
enterprises — such as Urallesprom (forestry), Uralugol, Vostugol (coal mining),
Vostokstal (steel), Tsvetmetzoloto (nonferrous minerals), and Kuznetstroi
(metallurgy) — exploited the various natural resources in the northern and east-
ern regions. In principle the companies were to provide living quarters for their
workers, schools for the children, and a regular supply of food for all. In reality
the managers usually treated these workers, whose status was comparable to
that of prisoners, as a free source of labor. Workers in the colonies often
received no salary, since whatever money they earned was generally less than
the amount the administration kept for the construction of buildings, tools,
obligatory contributions to unions, state loans, and other functions.

As the lowest category in the rationing hierarchy, these people were treated
as pariahs, were often kept in conditions of near starvation, and were subject
to all sorts of abuses and intimidatory practices. Among the most flagrant
abuses cited in the reports were totally unrealistic work targets, nonpayment of
wages, beatings, and confinement in unheated prison cells in the dead of winter.
Women prisoners were traded with GPU officers in exchange for food or
were sent as maids "for all services" to the local chiefs. The following remark
by the director of one of the forestry companies in the Urals was quoted and
often criticized in GPU reports of the summer of 1933, and summed up
very well the attitude of many such directors toward their highly expendable
human resources: "If we wanted to, we could liquidate all of you. If we were
to do so, the GPU would promptly send us another hundred thousand just like
you."

Gradually the use of forced labor began to take on a more rational char-
acter, if only because of the need for higher industrial productivity. During
1932 the idea of colonizing the most inhospitable regions with deportees was
abandoned, and increasing numbers were sent to civil engineering projects and
to industrial and mining areas. In certain sectors the proportion of deportees
working and even living alongside free workers was extremely high, and in some
places deportees were in the majority. In the Kuzbass mines at the end of 1933,
more than 41,000 forced laborers accounted for 47 percent of the miners. In
Magnitogorsk the 42,462 deportees recorded in the census of September 1932
constituted two-thirds of the local population. 27 Living in specially designated
areas between one and four miles from the construction site, they worked in
teams alongside free workers, and inevitably the differences between them

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A State against Its People

gradually eroded. By force of circumstance — that is, through economic neces-
sity — those who had suffered from dekulakization and were promoted to the
status of forced laborers were slowly reintegrated into a society in which all
levels of society were marked by a general fear of repression, and no one knew
which class would be the next to suffer exclusion.

The Great Famine

I he great famine of 1932-33 has always been recognized as one of
the darkest periods in Soviet history. According to the irrefutable evidence that
is now available, more than 6 million people died as a result of it. 1 However, the
catastrophe was not simply another in the series of famines that Russia had
suffered at irregular intervals under the tsars. It was a direct result of the new
system that Nikolai Bukharin, the Bolshevik leader who opposed Stalin on this
issue, termed the "military and feudal exploitation'' of the peasantry. Famine
was a tragic illustration of the formidable social regression that accompanied
the assault on the countryside through forced collectivization at the end of the
1920s.

Unlike the famine of 1921-22, which the Soviet authorities acknowledged
and even sought to redress with help from the international community, the
famine of 1932-33 was always denied by the regime. The few voices abroad
that attempted to draw attention to the tragedy were silenced by Soviet propa-
ganda. The Soviet authorities were assisted by statements such as that made
by Edouard Herriot, the French senator and leader of the Radical Party, who
traveled through Ukraine in 1933. Upon his return he told the world that
Ukraine was full of "admirably irrigated and cultivated fields and collective
farms" resulting in "magnificent harvests." He concluded: "I have crossed the
whole of Ukraine, and I can assure you that the entire country is like a garden

159

160

A State against Its People

in full bloom." 2 Such blindness was the result of a marvelous show put on for
foreign guests by the GPU, with an itinerary that included nothing but kolkhozy
and model children's gardens. The blindness was perhaps also reinforced by
political considerations, notably the desire of French leaders not to jeopardize
the meeting of minds with the Soviet Union regarding Germany, which had
become a threat with Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

Nonetheless a number of high-ranking politicians in Germany and Italy
had remarkably precise information about the scale of the catastrophe facing
the Soviet Union. Reports from Italian diplomats posted in Kharkiv, Odessa,
and Novorossiisk, recently discovered and published by the Italian historian
Andrea Graziosi, show that Mussolini read such texts extremely carefully and
was fully aware of the situation but did not use it in his anti-Communist
propaganda. 3 On the contrary, the summer of 1933 was marked by the signing
of an important Italian-Soviet trade agreement and a pact of friendship and
nonaggression. Denied, or sacrificed on the altar of "reasons of state," the truth
about the great famine, long known only through small-circulation pamphlets
published by Ukrainian emigre organizations, was not widely comprehended
until the latter half of the 1980s, following the publication of a series of works
by Western historians and by a number of researchers in the former Soviet
Union.

To come to grips with the famine of 1932-33, it is vital to understand the
context of the relations existing between the Soviet state and the peasantry as
a result of the forced collectivization of the countryside. In the newiv collec-
tivized areas, the role of the kolkhoz was a strategic one. Part of its role was to
ensure the delivery of a fixed supply of agricultural products to the state bv
taking an ever-larger share of the collective harvest. Every autumn the govern-
ment collection campaign became a sort of trial of strength between the state
and the peasants, who desperately tried to keep back enough of the harvest to
supply their own needs. Quite simply, the requisitioning was a threat to the
peasants 1 survival. The more fertile a region, the bigger a share the state
demanded. In 1930 the state took 30 percent of the agricultural production of
Ukraine, 38 percent in the rich plains of the Kuban in the Northern Caucasus,
33 percent of the harvest in Kazakhstan. In 1931, when the harvest was con-
siderably smaller, the percentages for the same areas were 41.5, 47, and 39.5
percent, respectively. Removing produce on such a scale created total chaos in
the cycle of production. Under the NEP, peasants sold between 15 and 20
percent of their total production, keeping 12-1 5 percent back for sowing, 25-39
percent for their cattle, and the rest for their own consumption. Conflict was
inevitable between the peasants, who had decided to use every possible means
to keep a part of the harvest, and the local authorities, who were obliged to
carry out at all costs a plan that looked ever more unrealistic, particularly so in

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161

1932, when the government collection target was 32 percent higher than it had
been the previous year. 4

The collection campaign in 1932 got off to a very slow start. As soon as
the threshing began, the collective farmers tried to hide or steal part of the
harvest every night. A movement of passive resistance took shape, strengthened
by the tacit agreement of almost all concerned, including collective farm work-
ers, brigadiers, accountants, farm managers (many of whom had themselves
been peasant workers until their recent promotion), and even local secretaries
of the Party. To collect the grain they wanted, the central authorities had to
send out new shock troops, recruited in the towns from among the Communists
and Komsomols.

The following report, from an instructor of the Central Executive Com-
mittee to his superiors regarding his mission in a grain-producing region in the
lower Volga, gives an idea of the warlike climate in the countryside at this time:

The arrests and searches are being carried out by almost anyone: by
members of the rural soviet, anyone sent from the towns, the shock
troops, and any Komsomol that has the time and energy. This year, 12
percent of all the farmers have been tried already, and that doesn't
include the deported kulaks, peasants who were fined, etc. According to
the calculations of the previous district procurator, over the course of
the last year 15 percent of the whole adult population has been the
victim of some sort of repression or other. If one adds the fact that over
the last month about 800 farmers have been thrown out of the kolkhozy,
you get an idea of the scale of this government repression ... If we
discount the cases in which large-scale repressions are really justified,
we must admit that the effectiveness of repressive measures is bound to
diminish whenever they pass a certain threshold, since it becomes liter-
ally impossible to carry them out . . . The prisons are all full to bursting
point. Balachevo prison contains more than five times as many people as
it was originally designed to hold, and there are 610 people crammed
into the tiny district prison in Elan. Over the last month, Balachevo
prison has sent 78 prisoners back to Elan, and 48 of them were less than
ten years old. Twenty-one were immediately released. To show how
insane this method is — I mean coercion, the only method they use — I
will say a few words about the individual peasants here, who are just
trying to be good farmers.

One example of how the peasants are being victimized: In Mortsy
one peasant, who had actually fulfilled his quota, came to see Comrade
Fomichev, the president of the District Executive Committee, and asked
to be deported to the north, because, as he explained, "No one can live
under these conditions." I know of another similar instance in which
sixteen peasants from the rural soviet of Aleksandrov all signed a peti-

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A State against Its People

tion also asking to be deported out of their region ... In short, violence
seems to be the only way of thinking now, and we always "attack 1 '
everything. We "start the onslaught 1 ' on the harvest, on the loans, etc.
Everything is an assault; we "attack" the night from nine or ten in the
evening till dawn. Everyone gets attacked: the shock troops call in every-
one who has not met his obligations and "convince" him, using all the
means you can imagine. They assault everyone on their list, and so it
goes, night after night. 5

Among the whole range of repressive laws, one famous decree, promulgated on
7 August 1932, played a decisive role when the war between the peasantry and
the regime was at its height. It provided for the execution or sentencing to ten
years in a camp for "any theft or damage of socialist property." It came to be
known among the people as "the ear law," for people condemned under it had
often done nothing more than take a few ears of corn or rye from the fields of
the kolkhoz. From August 1932 to December 1933 more than 125,000 people-
were sentenced under this terrible law, and 5,400 received death sentences/'

Despite these draconian measures, the amount collected was still in-
sufficient. In mid-October 1932 the government collection plan for the main
grain-producing areas of the country had achieved only 15-20 percent ol its
target. On 22 October the Politburo sent two extraordinary commissions to
Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus, one led by Vyacheslav Molotov, the other
by Lazar Kaganovich, in an attempt to speed up the collection process/ On 2
November KaganovicrTs commission, which included Gcnrikh Yagoda, arrived
in Rostov-on-Don. They immediately called a meeting of all the Party district
secretaries for the Northern Caucasus region, who adopted the following reso-
lution: "Following the particularly shameful failure of the grain collection plan,
all local Party organizations are to be obliged to break up the sabotage networks
of kulaks and counterrevolutionaries, and to crush the resistance of the rural
Communists and kolkhoz presidents who have taken the lead in this sabotage. "
For certain districts that had been blacklisted (according to the official termi-
nology), the following measures were adopted: the immediate removal of all
products from shops, a total ban on trade, the immediate repayment of all loans,
sudden extraordinary taxes, and the swift arrest of all "saboteurs, 1 ' "foreign
elements," and "counterrevolutionaries" with the help of the GPU Where
sabotage was suspected, the population was deported on a massive scale.

In November 1932, the first month of the fight against sabotage, 5,000
rural Communists who were judged to have been "criminally complacent"
regarding sabotage of the collection campaign and 15,000 collective farm work-
ers were arrested in the region of the Northern Caucasus, which was highly
strategic from the standpoint of agricultural production. In December the
massive deportation of whole villages began, including the Cossack stunitsy that

The Great Famine

163

had already suffered similar measures in 1920.* The number of special work
colonizers deported began to climb rapidly again. Records from the gulags note
the arrival of 71,236 deportees in 1932; the following year the number of new
"specially displaced" soared to 268,09 1. 9

In Ukraine the Molotov commission took similar measures. The commis-
sion blacklisted all districts in which the required collection targets had not
been met, with the same consequences described above: a purge of local Party
administrations, the massive arrest not simply of workers on the collective
farms, but also of managers suspected of "minimizing production." Soon the
same measures were being applied in other grain-producing regions as well.

Could these repressive measures employed by the state have won the war
against the peasants? Definitely not, according to one lucid report from the
Italian consul in Novorossiisk:

The Soviet state is powerful, and armed to the teeth, but it cannot fight
this sort of battle. There is no enemy against which to take up a battle
formation on the steppes. The enemy is everywhere and must be fought
on innumerable fronts in tiny operations: here a field needs hoeing, there
a few hundredweight of corn are stashed; a tractor is broken here,
another sabotaged there; a third has gone astray ... A depot has been
raided, the books have been cooked, the directors of kolkhozy, through
incompetence or dishonesty, never tell the truth about the harvest . . .
and so on, infinitely, everywhere in this enormous country . . . The
enemy is in every house, in village after village. One might as well try to
carry water in a sieve. 10

To defeat the enemy, only one solution was possible: he would have to be
starved out.

The first reports on the risk of a "critical food situation" for the winter
of 1932-33 reached Moscow in the summer of 1932. In August Molotov
reported to the Politburo that there was "a real risk of famine even in areas
where the harvest has been exceptionally good." But his intention was still to
carry out the projected collection plan, regardless of the cost. That same
month, Pyotr Isaev, the president of the Council of People's Commissars of
Kazakhstan, informed Stalin of the scale of the famine in that republic, where
collectivization and enforced settlement programs had totally destabilized the
traditional nomadic economy. Even hard-line Stalinists such as Stanislas Kos-
sior, first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and Mikhail
Khataevich, first Party secretary in the region of Dnepropetrovsk, asked Stalin
to revise the collection plan downward. "If only so that in the future production
can increase in accordance with the needs of the proletarian state," wrote
Khataevich to Molotov in November 1932, "we must take into consideration

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A State against Its People

the minimum needs of the collective farmers, or there will be no one left to sow
next year's harvest."

"Your position is profoundly mistaken, and not at all Bolshevik," Molotov
replied. "We Bolsheviks cannot afford to put the needs of the state — needs that
have been carefully defined by Party resolutions — in second place, let alone
discount them as priorities at all." 11 A few days later the Politburo sent local
authorities a letter ordering new raids on all collective farms that had not met
the required targets; this time they were to be emptied of all the grain they
contained — including the reserves kept back for sowing the next year's harvest.

Forced by threats and sometimes torture to hand over all their meager
reserves, and lacking the means or even the possibility of buying any food,
millions of peasants from these rich agricultural regions had no option but to
leave for the cities. On 27 December, however, in an attempt to curtail the rural
exodus, "liquidate social parasitism," and combat "kulak infiltration of the
towns," the government introduced new identity papers and obligatory regis-
tration for all citizens. In the face of the peasants' flight for survival, on 22
January 1933 it effectively decreed the death of millions who were starving. An
order signed by Molotov and Stalin instructed local authorities and above all
the GPU to ban "by all means necessary the large-scale departure of peasants
from Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus for the towns. Once these counter-
revolutionary elements have been arrested, they are to be escorted back to their
original place of residence." The circular explained the situation as follows:
"The Central Committee and the government are in possession of definite
proof that this massive exodus of the peasants has been organized by the
enemies of the Soviet regime, by counterrevolutionaries, and by Polish agents
as a propaganda coup against the process of collectivization in particular and
the Soviet government in general." 12

In all regions affected by the famine, the sale of railway tickets was
immediately suspended, and special barricades were set up by the GPU to
prevent peasants from leaving their district. At the beginning of March 1933 a
report from the secret police noted that in one month 219,460 people had been
intercepted as part of the operation to limit the exodus of starving peasants to
the cities, that 186,588 had been escorted back to their place of origin, and that
others had been arrested and sentenced. No mention was made of the fate of
the people expelled from the towns.

On that point the following testimony from the Italian consul in Kharkiv,
one of the regions worst affected by the famine, is more revealing:

A week ago, a special service was set up to try to protect children who
have been abandoned. Along with the peasants who flock to the towns
because there is no hope of survival in the countryside, there are also

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165

children who are simply brought here and abandoned by their parents,
who then return to their village to die. Their hope is that someone in the
town will be able to look after their children ... So for a week now, the
town has been patrolled by dvorniki, attendants in white uniforms, who
collect the children and take them to the nearest police station . . .
Around midnight they arc all transported in trucks to the freight station
at Severodonetsk. That's where all the children who are found in sta-
tions and on trains, the peasant families, the old people, and all the
peasants who have been picked up during the day are gathered to-
gether ... A medical team does a sort of selection process . . . Anyone
who is not yet swollen up and still has a chance of survival is directed to
the Kholodnaya Gora buildings, where a constant population of about
8,000 lies dying on straw beds in the big hangars. Most of them are
children. People who are already starting to swell up are moved out in
goods trains and abandoned about forty miles out of town so that they
can die out of sight. When they arrive at the destination, huge ditches
are dug, and the dead are carried out of the wagons. u

In the countryside the death rate was at its highest in the summer of 1933.
As though hunger were not enough, typhus was soon common, and in towns
with populations of several thousand there were sometimes fewer than two
do/en survivors. Cases of cannibalism are recorded both in GPU reports and
in Italian diplomatic bulletins from Kharkiv: "Every night the bodies of more
than 250 people who have died from hunger or typhus are collected. Many of
these bodies have had the liver removed, through a large slit in the abdomen.
The police finally picked up some of these mysterious 'amputators 1 who con-
fessed that they were using the meat as a filling for the meat pies that they were
selling in the market." 14

In April 1933 the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, who was passing through the
city of Kuban, wrote two letters to Stalin detailing the manner in which the
local authorities had tortured all the workers on the collective farm to force
them ro hand over all their remaining supplies. He demanded that the first
secretary send some sort of food aid. Here are excerpts from his letter of
4 April.

The Vechenski district, along with many other districts in the Northern
Caucasus, failed to fulfill its grain quota this year not on account of
some u kulak sabotage," but because of bad leadership at the local Party
headquarters . . .

Last December the Party regional committee, with a view to accel-
erating the government's collection campaign, sent the plenipotentiary
Ovchinnikov. He took the following measures: (1) he requisitioned all
available grain, including the advance given by the kolkhoz leaders to all
the collective farmers for sowing this year's harvest; and (2) he divided

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A State against Its People

by family the entire quota that was due to the state from the collective
farmers. The immediate result of these measures was that when the
requisitioning began, the peasants hid and buried the grain. The grand
total found came to 5,930 hundredweight . . . And here are some of the
methods that were used to recover these 593 tons, some of which had
been buried since 1918:

The u cold" method: the worker is stripped bare and left out in the
cold, stark naked in a hangar. Sometimes whole brigades of collective
workers are treated in this fashion.

The "hot" method: the feet and the bottom of the skirt of female
workers are doused with gasoline and then set alight. The flames are put
out, and the process is repeated . . .

In the Napolovski kolkhoz a certain Plotkin, plenipotentiary for the
district committee, forced the collective workers to stretch out on stoves
heated till they were white hot; then he cooled them off by leaving them
naked in a hangar . . .

In the Lebyazhenski kolkhoz the workers were all lined up against a
wall and an execution was simulated.

I could give a multitude of similar examples. These are not
"abuses" of the system; this is the present system for collecting grain.

If it seems to you that this letter is worthy of the attention of the
Central Committee, then please send us some real Communists, who
could unmask the people here who have struck a mortal blow against the
collective farming system. You are our only hope. 15

In his reply on 6 May, Stalin made no attempt to feign compassion:

Dear Comrade Sholokhov,

I have received both of your letters and have granted the things
that you request. I have sent Comrade Shkiryatov to sort out the matters
to which you referred. I would ask you to assist him. But, Comrade, that
is not all I wish to say. Your two letters paint a picture that is far from
objective, and I would like to say a few words about that.

I have already thanked you for these letters, which pick up on one
of the minor inconveniences of our system, in which, while we try to do
good and to disarm our enemies, some of our Party officials attack our
friends, and sometimes can be quite sadistic about this. But do not allow
these remarks to fool you into thinking that I agree with everything you
say. You see one aspect of things and describe it quite forcefully, but it is
still only one aspect of things. To avoid being mistaken in politics — and
your letters, in this instance, are not literature, they are pure politics-
one must see another aspect of reality too. And the other aspect in this
instance is that the workers in your district— not just in your district,
but in many districts — went on strike, carried out acts of sabotage, and
were prepared to leave workers from the Red Army without bread! The

The Great Famine

167

fact that this sabotage was silent and appeared to be quite peaceful (there
was no bloodshed) changes nothing — these people deliberately tried to
undermine the Soviet state. It is a fight to the death, Comrade Sholo-
khov!

Of course this cannot justify all the abuses carried out by our staff.
The guilty few will be forced to answer for their actions. But it is as clear
as day that our respected workers are far from being the innocent lambs
that one might imagine from reading your letters.

I hope you stay well, and I offer a warm handshake. Yours,
J. Stalin 16

In 1933, while these millions were dying of hunger, the Soviet government
continued to export grain, shipping 18 million hundredweight of grain abroad
u in the interests of industrialization."

Using the demographic archives and the censuses of 1937 and 1939, which
were kept secret until very recently, it is possible to evaluate the scale of the
famine in 1 933. Geographically, the hunger zone covered the whole of Ukraine,
part of the Black Earth territories, the fertile plains of the Don, the Kuban,
and the Northern Caucasus, and much of Kazakhstan. Nearly 40 million people
were affected by famine or scarcity. In the regions worst affected, such as the
rural zones surrounding Kharkiv, the mortality rate from January to June 1933
was ten times higher than normal: 100,000 deaths in June 1933 as opposed to
9,000 deaths in June 1932. Many deaths went unrecorded. The mortality rates
were higher in the countryside than in the cities, but the cities were scarcely
spared: Kharkiv lost 120,000 inhabitants in a year, Krasnodar 40,000, and
Stavropol 20,000.

Outside the immediate hunger zone, demographic losses attributable to
the scarcity of food were far from negligible. In the rural zones around Moscow,
mortality rates climbed by 50 percent from January to June 1933; in the town
of Ivanovo, for instance, which had been a center for hunger riots in 1932,
mortality rose by 35 percent in the first half of the year. In total, for the year
1933 and for the whole of the country, there were 6 million more deaths than
usual. As the immense majority of those deaths can be attributed directly to
hunger, the death toll for the whole tragedy must therefore be nearly 6 million.
The peasants of Ukraine suffered worst of all, with 4 million lives lost. There
were a million deaths in Kazakhstan, most of them among the nomadic tribes
who had been deprived of their cattle by collectivization and forced to settle in
one place. The Northern Caucasus and the Black F.arth region accounted for
a million more. 17

Five years before the Great Terror that was to strike the intelligentsia,
industrial administrators, and the Party itself, the Great Famine of 1932-33
appeared as the decisive episode in the creation of a system of repression that

168

A State against Its People

was to consume class after class and social group after social group. Through
the violence, torture, and killing of entire populations, the great famine was a
huge step backward both politically and socially. Tyrants and local despots
proliferated, ready to take any step necessary to force peasants to abandon their
goods and their last provisions, and barbarism took over. Extortion became an
everyday practice, children were abandoned, cannibalism reappeared, epidem-
ics and banditry were rampant, new death camps were set up, and peasants were
forced to face a new form of slavery, the iron rule of the Party-state. As Sergo
Ordzhonikidze lucidly remarked to Sergei Kirov in January 1934, "Our mem-
bers who saw the situation of 1932-33 and who stood up to it are now tempered
like steel. I think that with people like that, we can build a state such as history
has never seen."

Should one see this famine as "a genocide of the Ukrainian people," as a
number of Ukrainian historians and researchers do today? 18 It is undeniable
that the Ukrainian peasantry were the principal victims in the famine of 1932-
33, and that this "assault" was preceded in 1929 by several offensives against
the Ukrainian intelligentsia, who were accused of "nationalist deviations," and
then against some of the Ukrainian Communists after 1932. It is equally
undeniable that, as Andrei Sakharov noted, Stalin suffered from "Ukrainopho-
bia." But proportionally the famine was just as severe in the Cossack territories
of the Kuban and the Don and in Kazakhstan. In this last republic, from 1930
onward, the enforced collectivization and settling of the indigenous nomadic
peoples had disastrous consequences, with 80 percent of all livestock killed in
two years. Dispossessed of their goods and reduced to a state of famine,
2 million Kazakhs emigrated; nearly half a million went to Central Asia, and
approximately 1.5 million went to China.

In many regions, including Ukraine, the Cossack areas, and certain dis-
tricts of the Black Earth territories, the famine was the last episode in the
confrontation between the Bolshevik state and the peasantry that had begun in
1918-1922. There is a remarkable coincidence between the areas that mounted
stiff resistance to requisitioning in 1918-1921 and to collectivization in 1929-
30, and the zones that were worst affected by the famine. Of the 14,000 riots
and peasant revolts recorded by the GPU in 1930, more than 85 percent took
place in regions "punished" by the famine of 1932-33. The richest and most
dynamic agricultural regions, which had the most to offer the state and the
most to lose in the extortionate system of enforced collectivization, were pre-
cisely the regions worst affected by the great famine of 1932-33.

Socially Foreign Elements and Cycles of Repression

Ithough the peasantry as a whole paid the heaviest price in the
Stalinist transformation of society, other social groups, classified as "socially
alien elements" in the "new socialist society," were also stigmatized, deprived
of their civil rights, thrown out of their jobs and their homes, pushed further
down the social scale, and sent into exile. "Bourgeois specialists," "aristocrats,"
members of the clergy and of the liberal professions, entrepreneurs, shopkeep-
ers, and craftsmen were all victims of the anticapitalist revolution that was
launched in the early 1930s. Other townspeople who simply failed to fit into the
category of "proletarian worker and builder of socialism" also suffered various
repressive measures.

The infamous Shakhty trial clearly marked the end of the truce that had begun
in 1921 between the regime and the "specialists." Coming as it did just before
the launching of the first Five- Year Plan, the political lesson of the trial was
clear: skepticism, indecision, and indifference regarding the aims of the Party
would automatically be labeled "sabotage." To doubt was to betray. Spetseed-
stvo — harassment of the specialist — was deeply rooted in the Bolshevik men-
tality, and the political signal given by the Shakhty trial was received loud and
clear at a grass-roots level. The spetsy were to become the scapegoats for
economic failure and for the frustrations engendered by the sharp decline in

169

170

A State against Its People

living standards. By the end of 1928, thousands of managers and hourgeois
engineers had been fired and deprived of both ration cards and the right to
medical attention; sometimes they were even driven out of their homes. In
1929 thousands of civil servants in the State Planning Administration (Gos-
plan), the Supreme National Council for the Economy, and the People's Com-
missariats of Finance, Commerce, and Agriculture were purged because of
their "right-wing deviations," "sabotage," or "membership in a socially alien
class." It was notable that 80 percent of the more senior civil servants at the
People's Commissariat of Finance had served under the old regime. 1

The purge of certain sectors of the administration intensified after the
summer of 1930, when Stalin decided to dispose of all "right-wingers 11 such
as Aleksei Rykov, claiming that they were secretly conspiring with "specialist
saboteurs." In August and September 1930 the GPU stepped up its campaign
and arrested all well-known specialists working for Gosplan, the State Bank,
and the People's Commissariats of Finance, Commerce, and Agriculture.
Those arrested included Professor Nikolai Kondratyev, the inventor of the
famous "Kondratyev cycle," former deputy minister in charge of food supplies
for the provisional government of 1917, and then the director of an Institute
for Economic Studies at the Finance Ministry. Others arrested included Pro-
fessors Nikolai Makarov and Aleksandr Chayanov, who occupied important
posts in the Agriculture Ministry; Professor Andrei Sadyrin, a member of the
board of directors at the State Bank; and Professor Vladimir Groman, one of
the best-known economic statisticians at Gosplan. 2

In all these cases Stalin personally instructed the GPU, since he was
careful to follow all matters pertaining to the "bourgeois specialists." The GPU
prepared dossiers demonstrating the existence of a network of anti-Soviet
organizations, linked together by a "Peasant Workers' Party," supposedly
headed by Kondratyev, and an "Industrial Party" headed by Aleksandr Ramzin.
The investigators extracted a number of confessions from some of those ar-
rested. Many admitted their connection with "right-wingers" such as Rykov,
Bukharin, and Sergei Syrtsov; many others confirmed their participation in
totally fictitious plots to eliminate Stalin and overthrow the Soviet regime with
the assistance of emigre anti-Soviet and secret service organizations abroad.
Pursuing the matter further, the GPU extracted confessions from two instruc-
tors at the military academy concerning preparations for a plot to be led by the
chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, Mikhail Tukhachevsky. In a letter
to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Stalin made it clear that he could not risk arresting
Tukhachevsky himself but was content with the destruction of smaller targets,
other "specialist saboteurs." 1 Thus the techniques for fabricating evidence to
implicate as "terrorists" any who opposed the Stalinist party line were already
perfectly honed by 1930. For the time being, however, Stalin was content to

Foreign Elements and Cycles of Repression

171

use relatively moderate tactics designed to discourage the little opposition that
remained, and to frighten into submission those who were as yet undecided.

On 22 September 1930 Pravda published the "confessions" of forty-eight
civil servants from the People's Commissariats of Finance and Commerce, all
of whom took responsibility for "the difficulties currently being experienced
in the supply of food, and for the sudden disappearance of silver coins." A few
days previously, in a letter addressed to Molotov, Stalin had given strict instruc-
tions: "It is imperative to: (1) carry out a radical purge of the whole of the
People's Commissariat of Finance and the State Bank, regardless of any objec-
tions from doubtful Communists like Pyatakov and [Aleksandr] Bryukhanov;
(2) shoot at least twenty or thirty of the saboteurs who have managed to
infiltrate these organizations . . . (3) step up GPU operations all over the coun-
try to try to recover all the silver coins that are still in circulation." On 25
September 1930 all forty-eight civil servants were executed. 4

In the months that followed there were several identical show-trials. Some
were held in camera, including the trials of specialists from the Supreme
Council of the National Economy and from the "Peasant Workers' Party."
Others were held in public, such as the trial of specialists from the "Industrial
Party, 11 eight of whom "confessed" to having established a vast network of
2,000 specialists dedicated to organizing economic subversion at the instigation
of foreign embassies. All these trials ic< the myth of sabotage, which, like the
myth of the conspiracy, was soon at the center of Stalinist ideology.

In four years, from 1928 to 1931, 138,000 civil servants were removed from
office, and 23,000 of these were classed as "enemies of Soviet power" and
stripped of their civil rights.' The specialist witch-hunt became even more
widespread in industry, where the great pressure to increase productivity led
to an increase in the number of accidents, a considerable decline in quality of
production, and more frequent breakdowns. Between January 1930 and June
1931, 48 percent of all engineers in the Donbass region were dismissed or
arrested, and 4,500 "specialist saboteurs" were "unmasked" in the first half of
1931 in the transport sector alone. The hunt for these specialists, new and
totally unattainable industrial targets set by the authorities, and growing indis-
cipline in the workplace caused considerable long-term damage to Soviet in-
dustry.

Realizing the scale of the problem, Party leaders were forced to adopt a
series of corrective measures. On 10 July 1931 the Politburo took steps to try
to limit the number of victims among the spetsy. The Politburo immediately
released several thousand engineers and technicians, "above all those working
in metallurgy and the coal industry," ended the entry restrictions to higher
education for the children of "specialists," and banned the GPU from arresting
"specialists" without prior permission from the relevant ministry. The mere

172

A State against Its People

fact that these measures were announced demonstrates how widespread dis-
crimination and oppression had become. After the Shakhty trial, tens of thou-
sands of engineers, agronomists, technicians, and administrators had been
victims of this form of terror. 5

Among the other social categories proscribed in the "new socialist society/'
members of the clergy fared especially badly. The years 1929 and 1930 were
marked by a second great offensive by the Soviet state against the church,
following up on the attacks of 1918-1922. At the end of the 1920s, a number of
prelates opposed the pledge of allegiance to the Soviet regime announced by
Metropolitan Sergei, who had succeeded Tikhon as head of the church. Even
so, the Orthodox Church remained an important force in Soviet society. Of the
54,692 churches that had been active in 1914, around 39,000 were still holding
services at the beginning of 1929. 7 Emelyan Yaroslavsky, president of the
"League of the Militant Godless," founded in 1925, admitted that fewer than
10 million people, out of a total population of 130 million, had actual I v broken
with religion.

The antireligious offensive of 1929-30 occurred in two stages. The first
began in the spring and summer of 1929 and was marked by a reintroduction
and reinforcement of the antireligious legislation of 1918-1922. On 8 April
1929 an important decree was promulgated to increase the local authorities'
control over parish life, imposing new restrictions on the activity of religious
societies. Henceforth any activity "going beyond the limits of the simple satis-
faction of religious aspirations" fell under the law. Notably, section 10 of the
much-feared Article 58 of the penal code stipulated that "any use of the
religious prejudices of the masses . . . for destabilizing the state' 1 was punish-
able "by anything from a minimum three-year sentence up to and including the
death penalty." On 26 August 1929 the government instituted the new rive-dav
work week — five days of work, and one day of rest — which made it impossible
to observe Sunday as a day of rest. This measure was deliberatelv introduced
"to facilitate the struggle to eliminate religion." 8

These decrees were no more than a prelude to a second, much larger phase
of the antireligious campaign. In October 1929 the seizure of all church bells
was ordered because "the sound of bells disturbs the right to peace of the vast
majority of atheists in the towns and the countryside." Anyone closely associ-
ated with the church was treated like a kulak and forced to pay special taxes.
The taxes paid by religious leaders increased tenfold from 1928 to 1930, and
the leaders were stripped of their civil rights, which meant that they lost their
ration cards and their right to medical care. Many were arrested, exiled, or
deported. According to the incomplete records, more than 13,000 priests were
"dekulakized" in 1930. In many villages and towns, collectivization be^an

Foreign Elements and Cycles of Repression

173

symbolically with the closure of the church, and dekulakization began with the
removal of the local religious leaders. Significantly, nearly 14 percent of riots
and peasant uprisings in 1930 were sparked by the closure of a church or the
removal of its bells. 9 The antireligious campaign reached its height in the winter
of 1929-30; by 1 March 1930, 6,715 churches had been closed or destroyed.
In the aftermath of Stalin's famous article "Dizzy with Success" on 2 March
1930, a resolution from the Central Committee cynically condemned "inadmis-
sible deviations in the struggle against religious prejudices, particularly the
administrative closure of churches without the consent of the local inhabi-
tants." This formal condemnation had no effect on the fate of people deported
on religious grounds.

Over the next few years these great offensives against the church were
replaced by daily administrative harassment of priests and religious organiza-
tions. Freely interpreting the sixty-eight articles of the government decree of
8 April 1929, and going considerably beyond their mandate when it came to
the closure of churches, local authorities continued their guerrilla war with a
series of justifications: "unsanitary condition or extreme age" of the buildings
in question, "unpaid insurance," and nonpayment of taxes or other of the
innumerable contributions imposed on the members of religious communities.
Stripped of their civil rights and their right to teach, and without the possibility
of taking up other paid employment — a status that left them arbitrarily clas-
sified as "parasitic elements living on unearned wages" — a number of priests
had no option but to become peripatetic and to lead a secret life on the edges
of society. Hence, despite Metropolitan Sergei's pledge of allegiance to the
Soviet regime, schisms developed within the church, particularly in the prov-
inces of Voronezh and Tambov.

The followers of Aleksei Bui, a bishop of Voronezh who had been arrested
in 1929 for his unflagging hostility to any compromise between the church and
the regime, set up their own autonomous church, the "True Orthodox
Church," which had its own clergy of wandering priests who had been expelled
from the church headed by the patriarch. This u Desert Church" had no build-
ings of its own; the faithful would meet to pray in any number of places, such
as private homes, hermitages, or even caves. 10 These u True Orthodox Chris-
tians," as they called themselves, were persecuted with particular severity;
several thousand of them were arrested and deported as "specially displaced"
or simply sent to camps. The Orthodox Church itself, in the face of this
constant pressure from the authorities, saw a clear decline in the numbers of
its followers, even if, as the census of 1937 was to demonstrate, 70 percent of
adults continued to think of themselves as having religious beliefs. On 1 April
1936 only 15,835 Orthodox churches remained in service in the US.S.R. (28
percent of the prerevolutionary total), 4,830 mosques (32 percent of the pre-

174

A State against Its People

revolutionary figure), and a few dozen Catholic and Protestant churches. The
number of registered priests was a mere 17,857, in contrast to 112,629 in 1914
and 70,000 in 1928. The clergy, in the official terminology, had become "the
debris of a dying class." 11

The kulaks, spetsy, and members of the clergy were not the only victims of the
terror of the early 1930s. In January 1930 the authorities launched a vast
campaign to "evict all entrepreneurs." The operation was aimed in particular
at shopkeepers, craftsmen, and members of the liberal professions — all of the
nearly 1.5 million people who had worked in the minuscule private sector
under the NEP. These small entrepreneurs, whose average working capital did
not exceed 1,000 rubles, and 98 percent of whom did not have a single em-
ployee, were rapidly evicted by a tenfold increase in their taxes and the confis-
cation of their goods. As "socially undesirable elements," "socially
unnecessary," or "alien elements," they were stripped of their rights in the
same way as the disparate collection of "aristocrats" and "members of the
possessing classes and of the apparatus of the old tsarist state." A decree of 12
December 1930 noted more than 30 different categories of itshentsy, citizens
who had been deprived of their civil rights, including "ex-landowners," "ex-
shopkeepers," "ex-nobles," "ex-policemen," "ex-tsarist civil servants," "ex-
kulaks," "ex- employees or owners of private companies," "ex-White officers,"
ex-priests, ex-monks, ex-nuns, and "ex-members of political parties." The
discrimination carried out against the lishentsy, who in 1932 together with their
families totaled some 7 million people, entailed the elimination of their voting
rights and their rights to housing, health care, and ration cards. In 1933 and
1934 the measures became even stricter with the inception of "passportization"
to clear the towns of "socially undesirable elements." 12

By destroying social structures and traditional rural ways of life, the forced
collectivization of the countryside and the accelerated program of industriali-
zation spurred the migration of an enormous number of peasants to the towns.
Peasant Russia became filled with vagabonds, the Rusbrodyashchaya. From late
1928 until late 1932, Soviet cities were flooded by an influx of peasants — 12
million by official estimates — fleeing collectivization and dekulakization. The
regions surrounding Moscow and Leningrad alone were swollen by more than
3.5 million migrants. Among these were a number of enterprising peasants
who had preferred to flee their villages, even at the price of being classified as
kulaks, rather than enter a kolkhoz. In 1930-31 the huge public works pro-
grams absorbed these peasants without too many difficulties. But in 1932 the
authorities began to worry about the massive and uncontrolled movements of a
vagabond population that threatened to destabilize the urban areas. Their

Foreign Elements and Cycles of Repression

175

presence also threatened to jeopardize the rationing system that had been
carefully structured since 1929; the claimants for ration cards increased from
26 million in 1929 to nearly 40 million in late 1932. Migrants often forced the
authorities to transform factories into huge refugee camps. Gradually the mi-
grants were considered responsible for an increasing range of negative phe-
nomena, such as absenteeism, lapses in discipline at work, hooliganism, poor
quality of work, alcoholism, and criminality, all of which had a long-term
destabilizing effect on industrial production. 11

To combat this stikhia—z blanket term used to describe natural disasters,
anarchy, or any sort of disorder — the authorities enacted a series of repressive
measures in October 1932, ranging from harsh new employment laws to purges
of "socially foreign elements." The law of 15 November 1932 severely punished
absenteeism at work by immediate dismissal, confiscation of cards, and even
eviction. Its affirmed intention was to unmask "pseudoworkers." The decree
of 4 December 1932, which gave employers responsibility for issuing ration
cards, aimed chiefly at the removal of all "dead souls" and "parasites" who were
wrongfully included on some of the less tightly controlled municipal rationing
lists.

The keystone of the new legislation was the introduction of the internal
passport on 27 December 1932. The "passportization" of the population ad-
dressed several carefully defined objectives, as the preamble to the decree
explained: it was intended "to eliminate all social parasitism," to prevent "infil-
tration" by kulaks into city centers and markets, to limit the rural exodus, and
to safeguard the social purity of the towns. All adult townspeople over age
sixteen who had not yet been deprived of their rights, such as railway workers,
permanent workers on construction sites, and agricultural workers on state
farms, automatically received a passport from the police. The passport was
valid only after it received an official stamp (propiska) showing the legal resi-
dence of the citizen in question. The status of the individual depended on his
or her propiska and could determine whether an individual received a ration
card, a social security card, or the right to a home. All towns were categorized
as either "open" or "closed." The closed cities — initially Moscow, Leningrad,
Kyiv, Odessa, Minsk, Kharkiv, Rostov-on-Don, and Vladivostok — were those
that had been awarded a privileged status and were better supplied. Right of
residence in a closed city was obtainable only through family ties, marriage, or
a specific job that officially entitled the worker to a propiska. In the open cities,
a propiska was much easier to obtain.

The passportization operations lasted a whole year, and by the end of
1933, 27 million passports had been issued. The first effect was to allow the
authorities to purge the cities of undesirable elements. Begun in Moscow on
5 January 1933, within the first week passportization "discovered" 3,450 "ex-

176

A State against Its People

White Guards, ex-kulaks, and other criminal elements. 11 Nearly 385,000 people
were refused passports in the closed cities and forced to vacate their homes
within ten days. Moreover, they were prohibited from residing in any other city,
even an open one. The chief of the passport department of the K 1) noted
in his report of 13 August 1934 that "to that figure should be added all those
who preferred to leave the towns of their own accord when passporti/arion was
first announced, knowing that they would in any case be refused a passport. In
Magnitogorsk for example, nearly 35,000 immediately left the town . . . fn
Moscow, during the first two months of the operation, the population fell bv
60,000. In Leningrad, in a single month, 54,000 people vanished back into the
countryside." Some 420,000 people were expelled from the open cities. 14

Police raids and spot-checks for papers resulted in the exile of hundreds
of thousands of people. In December 1933 Genrikh Yagoda ordered his men
to "clean up" the railway stations and the markets in the closed cities even
week. In the first eight months of 1934 more than 630,000 people in the closed
cities were stopped for violations of the passport laws. Of these, 65,661 were
imprisoned and then usually deported as socially undesirable elements with the
status of "special displaced." Some 3,596 were tried in court, and 175,627 were
sent into exile without any status; the others escaped with a fine. 1 '

The most spectacular operations took place in 1933. From 28 )une to
3 July, 5,470 Gypsies from Moscow were arrested and deported to Siberian
"work villages"; 16 from 8 to 12 July, 4,750 "socially undesirable elements 11 were
arrested and deported from Kyiv; in April, June, and July, three waves of police
activity in Moscow and Leningrad resulted in the deportation of 18,000 peo-
ple. 17 The first of those contingents was sent to the island of Na/ino, with the
results described earlier. More than two-thirds of the deportees died within a
month.

A Party instructor in Narym, in the report quoted earlier, commented on
the identity of "socially undesirable elements" who had been deported as the
result of a simple police raid:

There are many such examples of totally unjustified deportations. Un-
fortunately, all these people, many of whom were Party members or
workers, are now dead. They were precisely the people who were least
adapted to the situation. For example, Vladimir Novo/hilov from Mos-
cow was a driver in the steamroller factory in Moscow who had been
decorated three times and was married with a child. I Ie tried to go to the
cinema with his wife, and while she was getting ready he went out
without his papers to buy cigarettes. He was then stopped by the police
in the street and picked up. Another example was [K.J Vinogradov, a
collective farm worker. She was going to visit her brother, the chief of
police in the eighth sector in Moscow, when she got picked up bv the

Foreign Elements and Cycles of Repression

177

police after getting off the train at the wrong station. She was deported.
Or Nikolai Vasilievich Voikin, who had been a member of the Komso-
mol since 1929, and was a worker in the Serpukhov Red Textile factory,
having been decorated three times. He was on his way to a soccer game
one Sunday and had forgotten his papers. He was arrested and deported.
Or I. M. Matveev, a builder on the construction site of the new No. 9
bakery. He had a seasonal worker's passport, valid until December 1933,
and was picked up with that passport. He reported that no one had even
wanted to look at his papers. '*

In 1933 the purge in the towns was accompanied by numerous similar
operations in industry and government. In the railways, a strategic sector ruled
by Andreev and then by Kaganovich, 8 percent of all personnel (nearly 20,000
people) were removed in the spring of 1933. The following extract from a
report by the chief of the Transport Department of the GPU on "The Elimi-
nation of Anti-Soviet and Counterrevolutionary Elements from the Railways"
describes how such operations were normally carried out:

The purge operations carried out by the Transport Department of the
GPU of the Eighth Region had the following results: In the penultimate
purge operation, 700 people were arrested and tried. The numbers were
as follows: there were 325 parcel pilferers, 221 smalltime hooligans and
criminals, 27 bandits, and 127 counterrevolutionaries. Some 73 of the
people pilfering parcels were clearly part of an organized network and
were consequently executed. In the last purge operation, around 200
people were arrested. For the most part these were kulaks. More than
300 suspect employees have also been dismissed by the administration.
This means that in the last four months, the total number of people who
have been expelled from the network for one reason or another is 1,270.
The purge continues. 1 *'

In the spring of 1934 the government took a series of repressive measures
aimed at curbing the number of young vagabonds and juvenile delinquents,
the products of dekulakization, the famine, and the general breakdown in social
relations whose influence was beginning to be felt more and more in the cities.
On 7 April 1935 the Politburo promulgated a decree aimed at "bringing to
justice, and punishing with the full force of the law, any adolescent older than
twelve years who is convicted of burglary, acts of violence, grievous bodily
harm, mutilation, or murder." A few days later the government sent out secret
instructions to the courts confirming that the penal sanctions regarding adoles-
cents "did indeed include society's last line of defense" — the death penalty.
The previous portions of the penal code that forbade the sentencing of minors
to death were thereby abrogated. 20 The NKVD was also instructed to reorgan-

178

A State against Its People

ize the detention centers for underage criminals, which until then had been run
under the auspices of the Legal Department of the People's Commissariat of
Preliminary Investigations, and to set up a network of "work colonics" for
minors instead. However, in the face of growing juvenile delinquency and
homelessness, the measures had little discernible effect. A report on "The
Elimination of Underage Vagabondage during the Period from 1 Julv 1935 to
1 October 1937" concluded:

Despite the reorganization of the services, the situation has barely im-
proved . . . After February 1937 there was a large influx of vagabonds
from the country and the rural areas, particularly from the areas affected
by the poor harvest of 1936 . . . The large-scale departure of children
from the countryside because of temporary material difficulties affect-
ing their families can be explained not only by the bad organization of
the "poor funds" in the ko/khozy, but also by the criminal practices of
many kolkhoz directors, who, in an attempt to get rid of young beggars
and vagabonds, give them a "certificate of vagabondage and mendi-
cancy" and send them off to the railway station for the nearest town
The problem is compounded by the railway administration and the
transport police, who, instead of arresting these underage vagabonds
and sending them to the special NKVD centers built for that purpose,
simply put them all on special trains "to clean up their sector" and pack
them off to the big cities. 21

A few figures provide an idea of the magnitude of the problem. In 1936
alone more than 125,000 underage vagabonds passed through the special
NKVD centers. From 1935 to 1939 more than 155,000 minors were sent to the
NKVD work colonies, and 92,000 children aged twelve to sixteen appeared in
court from 1936 to 1939. On I April 1939 it was calculated that more than
10,000 children were incarcerated in the gulags. 22

In the first half of the 1930s, the repression carried out by the Party and state
against society varied in its intensity. Moments of violent confrontation, with
terrorist measures and massive purges, alternated with moments of quiet,
when a certain equilibrium was found and a brake was put on the chaos.

The spring of 1933 marked the apogee of the first great cycle of terror
launched in 1929 with the dekulakization program. The authorities were con-
fronted by several previously unknown problems. How, for example, could a
harvest be assured the following year in areas that had been almost emptied by
famine? "Unless we take into consideration the basic needs of these collective
farmers," warned a high-ranking regional Party official in the autumn of 1932,
"there will be no one left to sow, Jet alone reap, the harvest."

Similarly, what was to be done with the hundreds of thousands who then

Foreign Elements and Cycles of Repression

179

filled the prisons, but whose labor the camp system was not yet ready to exploit?
"What possible effect can these super-repressive laws have on the population,"
wondered another local Party official in March 1933, "when they know that at
the judiciary's suggestion, hundreds of collective farmers, who last month were
condemned to two years' imprisonment for sabotaging the harvest, have already
been released?"

In the summer of 1933 the authorities came up with answers revelatory
of the two diverse directions that social policy was to take in the years leading
up to the Great Terror in the autumn of 1936. The first question, how to ensure
a reasonable harvest in areas ravaged by famine, was answered with cold logic:
large numbers of the urban population were rounded up and sent out to the
fields in an extremely militarized fashion. On 20 July 1933 the Italian consul
in Kharkiv described this phenomenon: "The enforced conscription of people
from the city is assuming enormous proportions. This week alone, at least
20,000 people are being sent out to the countryside every day . . . The day
before yesterday, the market was surrounded, and every able-bodied person-
men, women, young boys and girls— was rounded up, escorted to the railway
station by the GPU, and sent off to the fields." 21

The large-scale arrival of city-dwellers in the starving countryside created
its own tensions. On several occasions peasants set fire to the living quarters
reserved for the "conscripts," who had been warned by the authorities not to
venture out into the villages, which were "filled with cannibals." Despite this
hostility the harvest for 1932-33, collected in October, was respectable. That
development was attributable to several factors, including exceptionally good
weather, the mobilization of every available spare worker, and the will to survive
of those who were trapped in their own villages.

The second question, how to deal with the tremendous increase in the
prison population, was also answered in a pragmatic manner — with the release
of several hundred thousand people. A confidential circular from the Central
Committee on 8 May 1933 acknowledged the necessity of "regulating arrests
. . . presently made by just about anyone, 11 "curbing the overcrowding of
prisons," and "reducing the population of the prisons, over the next two
months, from 800,000 to 400,000, not including the camps." 24 The operation
in fact took over a year and finally resulted in the release of 320,000 prisoners.

The year 1934 was marked by a certain relaxation of political repression.
The number of convictions handed down by the GPU declined from 240,000
in 1932 to 79,000 in 1933. 2S The secret police were reorganized. As a result of
a government decree on 10 July 1934, the GPU became a department of the
new People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, whose authority extended
throughout the U.S.S.R. Henceforth it had the same name as the People's
Commissariat of Internal Affairs itself — Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh

180

A State against Its People

del, or NKVD — and it lost some of its previous judicial powers. In the new
scheme of things, after initial questioning all files had to be sent u to the relevant
judicial departments." Moreover, the police no longer had the power to pass
death sentences on prisoners without first consulting the central political
authorities. An appeals procedure was also set up, and all death sentences were
now to be approved by a special commission of the Politburo.

These changes, proudly depicted as measures to "reinforce the legal
mechanism of socialism," had very limited effects in practice. The new legal
regulations to control the number of arrests had almost no impact, since Andrei
Vyshinsky, the procurator general, gave a free hand to all the repressive organi-
zations. Moreover, as early as September 1934 the Politburo broke its own rules
regarding the need to confirm all death sentences, authorizing local leaders in
a number of different areas to pass death sentences without first consulting
Moscow. The calm was therefore short-lived.

After Sergei Kirov, a member of the Politburo and first secretary of the
Party organization in Leningrad, was shot on 1 December 1934 by Leonid
Nikolaev, a young Communist who had managed to find his way into the
Leningrad Party headquarters with a gun, a new cycle of terror began.

For several decades it was widely believed that Stalin had played an
important role in the assassination of Kirov, who was his chief political rival.
This belief stemmed from the "revelations" made by Nikita Khrushchev in the
secret report he presented on the night of 24-25 February 1956 to the Soviet
delegates at the Twentieth Party Congress. The theory has recently been called
into question, particularly in the work of Alia Kirilina, who draws on pre-
viously unavailable archival sources. 26 In any case it is indisputable that Stalin
used the assassination for his own political ends to crystallize the idea of
conspiracy, which was always a central motif in Stalinist rhetoric. It allowed
him to maintain the atmosphere of crisis and tension by "proving" the existence
of a huge conspiracy against the country, its leaders, and socialism itself It even
became a convenient explanation for the failures of the system: when every-
thing went badly and life was no longer "happy and merry;' in Stalin's famous
expression, then it was "all the fault of Kirov's assassins."

A few hours after the assassination was announced, Stalin drafted the
decree that came to be known as the "Law of 1 December." This extraordinary
measure, authorized by the Politburo two days later, ordered that the period of
questioning for suspected terrorists be reduced to ten days, allowed suspects to
be tried without legal representation, and permitted executions to be carried
out immediately. The law marked a radical break with the relaxation of terror
only a few months earlier, and it became the ideal instrument for the launching
of the Great Terror. 27

In the following weeks a number of Stalin's opponents within the Party

Foreign Elements and Cycles of Repression

181

were accused of terrorist activities. The press announced that the "odious
crime" had been the work of a secret terrorist group directed from its "Center
in Leningrad," and that it included, besides Nikolaev himself, thirteen former
Zinovievites. All members of the group were tried in camera on 28 and 29
December, condemned to death, and immediately executed. On 9 January 1935
the infamous trial of the "Leningrad Zinovievite Counterrevolutionary Cen-
ter" began, and 77 people, including many famous Party militants who had
opposed Stalin at some point, received prison sentences. The unmasking of the
"Leningrad Center" led to the subsequent discovery of a "Moscow Center,"
whose 19 supposed members included Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves.
Members of the "Moscow Center" were accused of "ideological complicity 11
with Kirov's assassins and went to trial on 16 January 1935. Zinoviev and
Kamenev admitted that their "previous activity in opposing the Party line,
when looked at objectively, could not fail to have acted as a catalyst and pro-
voked the worst instincts of these criminals." This extraordinary public admis-
sion of "ideological complicity," coming after so many disavowals and public
denials, led to five- and ten-year sentences respectively. From December 1934
to February 1935, 6,500 people were sentenced under the new procedures to
combat terrorism. 2 *

The dav after Zinoviev and Kamenev were convicted, the Central Com-
mittee sent a secret circular to all Party organizations, titled "Lessons to Be
Drawn from the Cowardly Murder of Comrade Kirov." The text affirmed the
existence of a plot that had been led by "two Zinovievite cells . . . which were
fronts for White Guard organizations 1 ' and reminded all members of the per-
manent struggle against "anti-Party groups" such as Trotskyites, Democratic
Centralists, and right- and left-wing splinter groups. Anyone who had pre-
viously opposed Stalin on any matter became a suspect. The hunt for enemies
intensified, and in January 1935, 988 former Zinoviev supporters were exiled
from Leningrad to Siberia and Yakutsk. The Central Committee ordered all
local Party organizations to draw up lists of Communists who had been banned
in 1926-1928 for belonging to the "Trotskyite and Zinoviev-Trotskyite bloc,"
and arrests were later carried out solely on the basis of these lists. In May 1935
Stalin sent out another letter to all Party organizations ordering careful checks
to be carried out on the Party membership card of every Communist.

The official version of Kirov's assassination, which claimed that it had
been carried out by someone who had entered Smolny using a fake Party
membership card, served to demonstrate the "immense political importance"
of the campaign to check all membership cards. The operation went on for
more than six months and was carried out with the full assistance of the secret
police. The NKVD supplied all the files required on "suspicious Communists,"
and the Party organizations in turn informed the NKVD about people barred

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A State against Its People

from the Party as a result of the campaign. The whole operation resulted in
the exclusion of 9 percent of Party members, or approximately 250,000 peo-
ple. 29 At a Central Committee meeting in late December 1935 Nikolai Ezhov,
the head of the Main Department in charge of the operation, produced incom-
plete data suggesting that 15,218 of the "enemies" who had been expelled from
the Party had also been arrested during the campaign. Nevertheless Ezhov
believed that the purge had not been a great success because it had taken three
times longer than originally planned, on account of the "ill will and sabotage"
of several "bureaucratic elements who were still working in the directorate."
Although one of the Party's main concerns had been to root out Trotskyites
and Zinovievites, only 3 percent of those who had been excluded actually
belonged to either of those categories. Local Party leaders had often been
reluctant u to contact the NKVD and hand over lists of people to be exiled
immediately by means of an administrative decision." In short, in Ezhov's
opinion, the card-check campaign had revealed the extent to which local Party
offices were inclined to present a united front of passive resistance against the
authorities. 30 This was an important lesson that Stalin would always remember.
The wave of terror that struck immediately after the assassination of
Kirov did not affect just the previous opponents of Stalin within the Party. On
the pretext that "White Guard terrorist elements have penetrated the country
from the West," the Politburo on 27 December 1934 ordered the deportation
of 2,000 "anti-Soviet" families from the frontier districts of Ukraine. On 15
March 1935 similar measures were taken to deport "all doubtful elements from
the frontier districts of the Leningrad region and the autonomous republic of
Karelia ... to Kazakhstan and western Siberia." The principal victims were
nearly 10,000 Finns, the first of many ethnic groups to suffer deportations that
would reach their peak during World War II. In the spring of 1936 a second
mass deportation of 15,000 families took place, involving nearly 50,000 people,
most of them Poles and Germans from Ukraine, who were deported to the
Karaganda region in Kazakhstan and settled there on the collective farms. 11

The cycle of repression intensified over the next two years, with the NKVD
handing down 267,000 sentences in 1935 and 274,000 in 1936. At the same
time a few measures were taken to appease the population. The category of
lishentsy was abolished, sentences of less than five years of imprisonment for
collective farm workers were annulled, 37,000 people who had been sentenced
under the law of 27 August 1932 were released early, the civil rights of the
"specially displaced" were reinstated, and discriminatory practices were ended
that had forbidden the children of deportees from gaining access to higher
education. Such measures often had contradictory results. Deported kulaks,
for example, who had their civil rights reinstated five years after their deporta-

Foreign Elements and Cycles of Repression

183

tion, were ultimately forbidden to leave the area in which they had been reset-
tled. As soon as their rights had been returned, they had begun to go back to
their villages, which had resulted in a multitude of insoluble problems: Were
they to be allowed to join the collective farms? Where were they to live now
that their houses and goods had been confiscated? The logic of repression
allowed for only slight pauses in the process: there was no going back.

Tension between society and the regime increased still further when the
government decided to endorse the Stakhanovite movement, named after An-
drei Stakhanov, who, thanks to an extraordinary process of teamwork and
reorganization, had managed to increase coal production fourteenfold. A huge
productivity campaign began, and two months later, in November 1935, a
"Conference of Avant-Garde Workers" was held in Moscow. Stalin himself
emphasized the "profoundly revolutionary nature of a movement that has
managed to free itself of the habitual conservatism of engineers, technicians,
and managers." In fact, given the nature of Soviet industry at the time, the
introduction of Stakhanovite days, weeks, and even decades had a profoundly
negative effect on production: equipment wore out more quickly, accidents in
the workplace soared, and increases in production were almost inevitably fol-
lowed by a period of decline. Returning to the spetseedstvo theme of the late
1920s, the authorities again took to blaming economic difficulties on so-called
saboteurs who had infiltrated the management, especially the engineers and
specialists. Once again any doubt expressed about the Stakhanovites, any break
in the rhythm of production, or any technical breakdown came to be regarded
as counterrevolutionary action. In the first six months of 1936 more than 14,000
managers in industry were arrested for sabotage. Stalin used the Stakhanovite
campaign to unleash a new wave of terror, to be remembered forever as the
Great Terror.

The Great Terror (1936-1938)

uch has been written about the Great Terror, which was also
known in the Soviet Union as the Ezhovshchina, "The Reign of Ezhov." It is
undoubtedly true to say that when Nikolai Ezhov was in charge of the NKVD
(from September 1936 to November 1938), the effects of repression were felt
at every level of Soviet society, from the Politburo all the way down to simple
citizens arrested in the street. For decades the tragedy of the Great Terror was
passed over in silence. The West saw only the three spectacular public trials in
Moscow in August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938, when Lenin's most
illustrious companions (among them Zinoviev, Kamenev, Nikolai Krestinsky,
Rykov, Pyatokov, Radek, and Bukharin) admitted to organizing terrorist cen-
ters with Trotskyite and Zinovievite or right-wing Trotskyite tendencies, plot-
ting to overthrow the Soviet government or to assassinate its leaders, plotting
to reinstate capitalism, carrying out acts of sabotage, undermining the military
might of the U.S.S.R., and conniving to break up the Soviet Union and help
foreign powers by facilitating the independence of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia,
Armenia, and the Soviet Far East . . .

As huge, stage-managed events, the trials in Moscow were also a highly
effective tactic to deflect the attention of fascinated foreign observers from
events that were going on elsewhere, especially the massive repressions against
all social categories. For these observers, who had already kept silent about

184

The Great Terror

185

dekulakization, the famine, and the development of the camp system, the events
of 1936-1938 were no more than the last act in the political fight that for more
than ten years had seen Stalin pitted against his principal rivals. This was the
end of the power struggle between the Stalinist "Thermidor" bureaucracy and
the Leninist old guard, which had always remained faithful to its revolutionary
promises.

Picking up on the main ideas of Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed, published
in 1936, the author of a leading article in the French daily Le temps had the
following to say on 27 July 1936: "The Russian revolution has now entered its
Thermidor period. Stalin has understood the impracticality of pure Marxist
ideology and the myth of the universal revolution. As a good socialist, but above
all as a true patriot, he is aware of the dangers posed to the country by both
ideology and myth. His dream is probably a sort of enlightened dictatorship, a
paternalism very far from capitalism, but equally distant from the chimera of
Communism."

Lecho tie Pans expressed much the same sentiment, in slightly more
colorful and disrespectful terms, on 30 January 1937: "That Georgian lowbrow
has unwittingly joined the ranks of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and
Catherine II. The people he is eliminating are the revolutionaries who have
remained faithful to their diabolical cause, madmen filled with a permanent will
to destroy." 1

It was only on 25 February 1956, in Khrushchev's "Secret Report to the
Twentieth Congress of the CPSU," that the veil was finally lifted on the
"numerous illegal acts against leaders and Party members from 1936 to 1938."
In the years that followed, a number of leaders, especially from the military,
were rehabilitated. But silence persisted about the ordinary victims. At the
Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, Khrushchev publicly admit-
ted that "mass repressions . . . had also struck simple and honest Soviet citi-
zens," but the scale of the repressions, in which he and many other leaders of
his generation had personally been involved, was passed over in silence.

Toward the end of the 1960s, on the basis of eyewitness statements from
Soviet citizens who had come to the West and the evidence in both emigre
publications and Soviet publications in the years of the Khrushchev thaw, the
historian Robert Conquest first drew up the general outlines of the Great
Terror. Some of his extrapolations about the power structures and the number
of victims involved have subsequently been disproved. 2

Conquest's work began an enormous debate about the extent to which the
terror was a centralized phenomenon, about the respective roles of Ezhov and
Stalin, and about the number of victims involved. Certain American historians
of the revisionist school contested the idea that Stalin had carefully planned
the events of 1936-1938. Stressing instead the increasing tension between the

186

A State Against Its People

central authorities and ever-more-powerful local authorities, as well as isolated
instances of excessive zeal, they attempted to explain the exceptional scale of
the repressions of 1936-1938 by the notion that local authorities had found
innumerable scapegoats on which to carry out the terror, so that they could
deflect the terror that was actually being directed at them. In this way local
officials tried to demonstrate to the central authorities their vigilance and
intransigence in the struggle against the common enemy. 1

Another disagreement arose about the number of victims. For Conquest
and his followers, the Great Terror Jed to at least 6 million arrests, 3 million
executions, and 2 million deaths in the camps. Revisionist historians regard
these figures as somewhat inflated.

Even the partial opening of the Soviet archives has allowed historians to
see the Great Terror in a new light. Other studies have already retraced the
extraordinarily complex and tragic story of the two bloodiest years of the Soviet
regime. Our intention here is to address some of the questions raised bv the
debate, notably the extent to which the terror was a centralized phenomenon,
and the categories and numbers of the victims.

On the question of the centralization of the terror, documents from the
Politburo that are now accessible confirm that the mass repressions were indeed
the result of initiatives taken at the very top level of the Party, in the Politburo,
and by Stalin in particular. 4 The organization and implementation of one of
the bloodiest repressions, the operation to "liquidate ex-kulaks, criminals, and
other anti-Soviet elements," which took place from August 1937 to Mav 1938,
are quite revealing about the respective roles of central and local agencies.-'

Beginning in 1935-36, the ultimate fate of the deported ex-kulaks had
been a burning issue. Despite the often-repeated ban on their leaving the places
to which they had been assigned, more and more of the "specially displaced"
were gradually becoming indistinguishable from the mass of free workers. In a
report dated August 1936, Rudolf Berman, chief of the Gulag Administration,
wrote that "taking advantage of the fairly lax manner in which they are guarded,
numerous 'specially displaced,' who for some time have been working in the
same teams as free workers, have now left their place of residence. They are
becoming more and more difficult to pick out. In fact they often have special
skills that make them valuable as managers, and many of them have been able
to get passports. Many also have married free workers and now own houses.""
Although many of the "specially displaced" who had been assigned to
reside on the industrial sites were beginning to blend in with the local working
classes, others fled farther afield. Many of these so-called runaways who had
no papers and were homeless joined the gangs of socially marginal elements
and petty criminals that were increasingly to be found on the outskirts of most
of the big cities. Inspections carried out in the autumn of 1936 in certain

The Great Terror

187

komandatury revealed situations that were intolerable in the eyes of the authori-
ties. In the region of Arkhangelsk, for example, of the 89,700 colonizers who
had been assigned residency there, a mere 37,000 remained.

The obsession with the ideas of the kulak saboteur who had managed to
infiltrate a business and of the kulak bandit who roamed the streets goes some
way toward explaining how this "category" became the centerpiece in the great
repressive operation that Stalin concocted in early July 1937.

On 2 July 1937 the Politburo sent local authorities a telegram ordering
that "all kulaks and criminals must be immediately arrested . . . and after trial
before a troika [a commission consisting of the regional Party first secretary,
the procurator, and the regional NKVD chief] the most hostile are to be shot,
and the less active but still hostile elements deported ... It is the Central
Committee's wish that the composition of the troiki be presented to it within
five days, together with the numbers of those shot and deported."

In the following weeks the central authorities received "indicative figures"
sent in by the local authorities, on the basis of which Ezhov prepared Opera-
tional Order No. 00447, dated 30 July 1937, which he submitted to the Polit-
buro for ratification the same day. During this particular operation 259,450
people were arrested and 72,950 shot. 7 These numbers were inexact, since many
regions had not yet sent their calculations to the central authorities. As in the
days of the dckulakization operations, all regions received quotas for each of
the two categories: those to be shot and those to be deported.

It is notable that the victims of this operation belonged to a mysterious
sociopolitical group that was much larger than the categories initially enumer-
ated. Besides the "ex-kulaks" and the "criminal elements," those to be found
now included "socially dangerous elements," "members of anti-Soviet parties,"
"former tsarist civil servants," and "White Guards" These designations were
applied quite freely to any suspect, regardless of whether he was a Party
member, a member of the intelligentsia, or an ordinary worker. The relevant
offices of the GPU and the NKVD had had many years to draw up the
necessary lists of suspects, and plenty of time to keep them up to date.

The operational order of 30 July 1937 also gave local leaders the right to
ask Moscow for further lists of suspects to be eliminated. The families of
people condemned to the camps or to death could also be arrested to swell the
quotas.

By the end of August the Politburo was assailed with numerous requests
for the quotas to be raised. From 28 August to 15 December 1937 it ratified
various proposals for increases so that an additional 22,500 individuals were
executed and another 16,800 were condemned to camps. On 31 January 1938,
at the instigation of the NKVD, a further increase of 57,200 was accepted,
48,000 of whom were to be executed. All operations were to have been finished

188

A State Against Its People

on 15 March 1938, but once again the local authorities, who had been purged
several times in the preceding years and whose new staff were eager to show
their zeal, demanded another increase in the numbers. From 1 February to 29
August 1938 the Politburo ratified the requests, thus sanctioning the elimina-
tion of a further 90,000 suspects.

In this fashion, an operation that was originally planned for four months
went on for over a year, and affected at least 200,000 more people than those
originally planned for in the quotas. 8 Any individual suspected of the wrong
social origins was a potential victim. People living in the frontier zones were
also particularly vulnerable, as was anyone who had any contacts outside the
country, no matter how far removed. Such people, including anyone who owned
a radio transmitter, collected stamps, or spoke Esperanto, stood a very good
chance of being accused of espionage. From 6 August to 21 December 1937,
at least ten operations similar to the one begun by Operational Order No. 00447
were launched by the Politburo and the NKVD to liquidate groups of sus-
pected spies or "subversives 11 nationality by nationality: Germans, Poles, Japa-
nese, Romanians, Finns, Lithuanians, Latvians, Greeks, and Turks. Over a
fifteen-month period, from August 1937 to November 1938, several hundred
thousand people were arrested in these antiespionage operations.

Among the operations about which some information is available (al-
though it is still fragmentary; the ex-KGB and Russian Presidential archives,
where the most sensitive documents are kept, are still secret and closed to
researchers) are the following:

• The operation to "liquidate the German contingent working in all
offices linked to National Defense" on 20 July 1937

• The operation to "liquidate all terrorist activity, subversion, and espio-
nage by the network of Japanese repatriated from Kharbin, 1 ' launched
on 19 September 1937

• The operation to "liquidate the right-wing military and Japanese
Cossack organization," launched on 4 August 1937, in which more than
19,000 people died from September to December 1937

• The operation to "repress the families of enemies of the people, 1 ' set in
motion by NKVD Order No. 00486 on 15 August 1937

This very incomplete list of one small part of the operations decreed by
the Politburo and carried out by the NKVD suffices to underscore the central-
ized nature of the mass repressions of 1937 and 1938. These actions, like all
the actions decided by the center but implemented by local authorities — in-
cluding dekulakization, the purging of the towns, and the hunt for specialists—
were often carried out with tragic excesses in the local communities. After the
Great Terror, a single commission was sent to make inquiries in Turkmenistan

The Great Terror

189

about excesses committed under the Ezhovshchma. In this small republic of 1.3
million inhabitants (0.7 percent of the Soviet population), 13,259 had been
sentenced by the NKVD troiki in the period August 1937-September 1938 as
part of the operation to "liquidate ex-kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet
elements." Of these, 4,037 had been shot. The quotas fixed by Moscow had
been respectively 6,227 (the total number of sentences) and 3,225 (the total
number of executions). 9 One can easily imagine that similar excesses were
common in all other regions of the country. They were a natural result of the
quota scheme. Planned orders from the center and bureaucratic reflexes, which
had been well assimilated and drummed into civil servants for many years,
naturally spurred local officials to try to anticipate and surpass the desires of
superiors further up the hierarchy and the directives that arrived from Moscow.

Another series of documents also highlights the centralized nature of the
mass slaughter ordered by Stalin and ratified by the Politburo. These are the
lists of people to be sentenced that were drawn up by the Commission for
Judicial Affairs of the Politburo. The sentences for people who were summoned
before the military collegium of the Supreme Court, the military courts, or the
Special Board of the NKVD were all predetermined by the Commission for
Judicial Affairs of the Politburo. This commission, of which Ezhov himself
was a member, submitted at least 383 lists to be signed by Stalin and the
Politburo. These lists contained some 44,000 names of Party leaders or mem-
bers, as well as the names of prominent figures from industry and the army. At
least 39,000 of them were condemned to death. Stalin's own signature appears
at the bottom of 362 lists, with Molotov's signature on 373, Kliment Voroshi-
lov's on 195, Kaganovich's on 191, Andrei Zhdanov's on 177, and Mikoyan's
on 62. m

All these leaders arrived in person to carry out purges of local Party
organizations after the summer of 1937. Kaganovich was sent to purge the
Donbass regions of Chelyabinsk, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo, and Smolensk; Zhdanov,
after purging his own region of Leningrad, went to Orenburg, Bashkiria, and
Tatarstan; Andreev went to the Northern Caucasus, Uzbekistan, and Tajikis-
tan; Mikoyan went to Armenia; and Khrushchev went to Ukraine.

While most instructions about mass repressions, like all other resolutions
adopted by the Politburo, were ratified by Stalin as a matter of course, it now
appears, in the light of archival material that has recently become available, that
Stalin was also the author and initiator of most of the repressive measures. For
example, when on 27 August 1937 at 5:00 p.m. the Secretariat of the Central
Committee received a communication from Mikhail Koroshenko, first secretary
of the regional Party committee in western Siberia, regarding the proceedings
of a trial of some agronomists who had been accused of sabotage, Stalin himself
sent a telegram back ten minutes later, saying: "1 advise the sentencing to death

190

A State Against Its People

of all saboteurs in Andreev's district, and the public proclamation of their
execution in the local papers." 11

All documents that are now available (protocols from the Politburo,
Stalin's diary, and the list of visitors he received at the Kremlin) demonstrate
that Stalin meticulously controlled and directed Ezhov's every move. He cor-
rected instructions to the NKVD, masterminded all the big public trials, and
even wrote the scripts for them. During preparations for the trial of Marshal
Tukhachevsky and other Red Army leaders for their participation in a "military
conspiracy," Stalin saw Ezhov every day 12 At each stage of Ezhovshchina, Stalin
retained political control of events. It was he who decided the nomination of
Ezhov to the post of people's commissar of internal affairs, sending the famous
telegram from Sochi to the Politburo on 25 September 1936: "It is absolutely
necessary and extremely urgent that Comrade Ezhov be nominated to the post
of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. Yagoda is plainly not up to the task
of unmasking the Trotskyite and Zinovievite coalition. The GPU is now four
years behind in this business " It was also Stalin who decided to put a stop to
the "excesses of the NKVD." On 17 November 1938 a decree from the Central
Committee put a (provisional) stop to the organization of "large-scale arrest
and deportation procedures." One week later, Ezhov was dismissed from the
post of People's Commissar and replaced by Beria. The Great Terror thus
ended as it had begun, on Stalin's orders.

In seeking to tally the number and categories of the victims of the
Ezhovshchina, we now have at our disposal a few extremely confidential docu-
ments drawn up for Nikita Khrushchev and the main leaders of the Party
during de-Stalinization. Foremost among these is a long study of "repressions
carried out during the era of the personality cult," conducted by a commission
established at the Twenty-second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and
led by Nikolai Shvernik. 11 Researchers can thus compare these figures with
other sources of statistics about the Gulag Administration, the People's Com-
missariat of Justice, and legal records that are now also available. 14

It appears that during 1937 and 1938, 1,575,000 people were arrested by
the NKVD; of these, 1,345,000 (85.4 percent) received some sort of sentence
and 681,692 (51 percent of those who were sentenced) were executed.

People arrested were sentenced in different ways. Cases involving white-
collar workers, politicians, military leaders, economists, and members of the
intelligentsia— the highest-profile category — were judged by military tribunals
and the Special Board of the NKVD. Given the scale of these operations, the
government in late August 1937 set up troiki at regional levels made up of the
local procurator, the chief of the local police, and the head of the local branch
of the NKVD. These trniki meted out an extremely perfunctory form of justice,
since their main aim was to comply with resolutions and quotas sent out in

The Great Terror

191

advance by the central offices. Often they did little more than pick up suspects
who had been under surveillance for some time, "reactivating" old lists. The
trial was as simple as possible; the troiki would often see hundreds of files in a
single day, as is evident from the recent publication of the Leningrad List of
Martyrs, a directory showing month by month the names of inhabitants of the
city who were condemned to death as a result of Article 58 of the penal code,
beginning in August 1937. The usual interval between the arrest and the death
sentence was a few weeks. The sentence, against which there was no appeal,
was then carried out in a few days. The probability of being arrested merely to
fill a quota for a specific operation depended on a series of coincidences in all
the large-scale repressive operations carried out around that time, including the
liquidation of the kulaks launched on 30 July 1937, the operation to liquidate
criminal elements begun on 1 2 September 1 937, and the "repression of families
of enemies of the people." If the list of names on file was not long enough, the
local authorities would use any means necessary to find the extra names to
"comply with the established norms " To give but one example, in order to fill
the category of "saboteurs," the NKVD in Turkmenia used the pretext of an
industrial fire to arrest everyone who was on the site and forced them all to
name their "accomplices." 15 Communist cadres were only a tiny share of the
681,692 people executed. Programmed from on high and arbitrarily inventing
categories of political enemies, the terror, by its very nature, generated side
effects that were always highly indicative of the culture of violence endemic at
the lowest levels of the hierarchy.

These figures are far from exhaustive. They do not include any of the
deportations carried out during these years, such as those from the Soviet Far
East between May and October 1937, when 172,000 Koreans were moved to
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Nor do they include the number of people who
died from torture during imprisonment or on the way to the camps (an un-
known number), or the number of prisoners who died in the camps during
these years (approximately 25,000 in 1937, more than 90,000 in 1938).' 6 Even
when rounded down in relation to extrapolating from the eyewitness reports
of survivors, the figures are still a shocking reminder of the size of these mass
killings, carried out by the hundreds of thousands against a whole society.

It is now possible to analyze further the categories of victims of these mass
slaughters. We now have some statistics, to be discussed at length in the next
chapter, on the number of prisoners in the gulags at the end of the 1930s. This
information covers all groups of prisoners, not simply those arrested during
the Great Terror, without specifying the categories of victims condemned to
the camps during the Ezhovshchina. Nevertheless, some patterns are discern-
ible, notably a sharp increase in the number of victims who had had some form
of higher education (over 70 percent in 1936-1939), confirming that the terror

192

A State Against Its People

at the end of the decade was aimed particularly at the educated elite, whether
they were Party members or not.

Because the purge of Party cadres was the first event of the Stalin era to
be publicly denounced (at the Twentieth Party Congress), it is one of the
best-known aspects of the Great Terror. In his "Secret Speech' 1 at the Con-
gress, Khrushchev covered this phenomenon at some length. It had affected
five members of the Politburo who were faithful Stalinists (Postyshev, Jan
Rudzutak, Eikhe, Kossior, Anatoly Chubar), 98 of the 139 members of the
Central Committee, and 1,108 of the 1,996 delegates to the Seventeenth Party
Congress in 1934. It had equally affected the leaders of the Komsomol: 72 of
the 93 members of the Central Committee were arrested, as well as 319 of the
385 regional secretaries and 2,210 of the 2,750 district secretaries. Generally
speaking, the local and regional headquarters of the Party and the Komsomol
were entirely restaffed. All were suspected of sabotaging the decisions handed
down by Moscow and of opposing central control of local affairs. In 1 .eningrad,
where the Party had been led by Zinoviev and where Kirov had been assassi-
nated, Zhdanov and Zakovsky (the chief of the regional NKVD) arrested more
than 90 percent of the Party cadres. These numbers represent only a tiny share
of the people from Leningrad who were victims of repression from 1936 to
1939. 17 To ensure that the purges were carried out with maximum efficiency,
representatives from the central authorities together with troops from the
NKVD were sent out in the provinces on a mission described in Pravdu as an
attempt u to smoke out and destroy the bugs 1 nests of the Trotskyite-fascists."
Some regions seemed to suffer more than others, especially Ukraine. In
1938 alone, after the nomination of Khrushchev as head of the Ukrainian
Communist Party, more than 106,000 people were arrested in Ukraine, and the
majority of these were executed. Of the 200 members of the Central Commit-
tee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, 3 survived. The same scenario was
repeated in all local and regional Party headquarters, where do/ens of public
trials were organized for previous Communist leaders.

Unlike the trials in camera or the secret sessions of the troiki, in which the
fate of the accused was dispatched in a few minutes, the public trials of leaders
were strongly populist in nature and fulfilled an important propaganda role. As
Stalin said in a speech of 3 March 1937, the intention was to denounce these
local leaders, "those new lords, who are so smug and filled with overconhdence
. . . and who through their inhuman attitudes inevitably create suffering and
discontent, and end up encouraging the formation of an army of Trotskyites."
It was thought that this would strengthen the alliance between "the ordinary
people, the simple militants who believed in justice," and the Leader himself
Imitating the great trials in Moscow, but this time on a local and district scale,
these public trials were generally reported in detail in the relevant local press

The Great Terror

193

and became the extraordinary focus of ideological, popular, and populist mo-
bilization. Because of the manner in which these public trails unmasked con-
spiracies, the central preoccupation with Communist ideology, and the carnival
atmosphere that reigned when those who had been rich and powerful were cast
down and the poor people exalted, the trials, in Annie Kriegel's words, became
u a formidable mechanism for social cleansing."

The repression directed at local Party leaders was, of course, only the tip
of the iceberg. One example is a detailed report from the regional department
of the NKVD in Orenburg "on operational measures for the liquidation of
clandestine groups of Trotskyites and Bukharinites, as well as other counter-
revolutionary groups, carried out from 1 April to 18 September 1937" (that is,
before Zhdanov visited the province to accelerate the purge). ,H In this province
the following Party members were arrested:

420 "Trotskyites," all of whom were politicians or economists of the

first rank
120 "right-wingers," all of whom were local leaders of some importance

These 540 Party cadres represented 45 percent of the local officials. After
Zhdanov's mission to Oranienburg, 598 more cadres were arrested and exe-
cuted. Before the autumn of 1937 almost all Party leaders in the province and
every economist of note were eliminated. They were replaced by a new genera-
tion, who were rapidly promoted to the front line, the generation of Brezhnev,
Kosygin, Dmitry Ustinov, and Gromyko — in short, the generation that was to
make up the Politburo of the 1970s.

In addition to the thousands of Party cadres who were arrested, there were
a number of ordinary Party members and ex-Communists, who were particu-
larly vulnerable. These simple citizens, who had been in the NKVD's files for
years, in fact made up the greater part of the victims who suffered in the Great
Terror. To return to the Orenburg NKVD report:

Slightly more than 2,000 members of a right-wing military Japa-
nese Cossack organization [of whom approximately 1,500 were
executed]

More than 1,500 officers and tsarist civil servants exiled to Orani-
enburg from Leningrad in 1935 [these were "socially alien ele-
ments" exiled to various regions after the assassination of
Kirov]

250 people arrested as part of the Polish affair

95 people arrested ... as part of the affair concerning elements
originating from Kharbin

194

A State Against Its People

3,290 people arrested as part of the operation to liquidate all ex-
kulaks

1,399 people arrested during the operation to liquidate all criminal
elements

If one also includes the 30-odd people from the Komsomol and 50 cadets
from the local military training academy, it becomes apparent that the NKVD
arrested more than 7,500 people in this province in five months. Again, this
was before the intensification of the repression under Andrei Zhdanov. As
spectacular as this proportion might appear, the arrest of 90 percent of the local
nomenklatura represented only a negligible proportion of the victims of the
repression, most of whom fell into other categories specifically defined by the
Politburo and approved by Stalin himself.

Certain categories of officials were particularly singled out: for example,
diplomats and all the personnel at the People's Commissariat of Foreign Af-
fairs, who naturally were accused of espionage; or factory directors and per-
sonnel from the ministries for economic affairs, who were often suspected of
sabotage. Among high-ranking diplomats arrested and, for the most part, exe-
cuted were Krestinsky, Grigory Sokolnikov, Aleksandr Bogomolov, Konstantin
Yurenev, Nikolai Ostrovsky, and Antonov-Ovsccnko, who were posted respec-
tively in Berlin, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Bucharest, and Madrid. 19

Whole ministries fell victim to the repressions. In the relatively obscure
People's Commissariat of Machine Tools, an entire directorate was replaced;
and all but two of the managers of factories dependent on this ministry were
arrested, together with almost all engineers and technicians. The same was true
for several other industrial sectors, notably aeronautical industry, naval con-
struction, metallurgy, and transport, for which only fragmentary information
is available. After the end of the Great Terror, at the Seventeenth Congress in
March 1939, Kaganovich noted that "in 1937 and 1938 the leading personnel
in all heavy industry was entirely replaced, and thousands of new men were
appointed to the posts of those who had been unmasked as saboteurs. In some
branches of industry, there had been several layers of saboteurs and spies . . .
Now we have in their place cadres who will accept any task assigned to them
by Comrade Stalin."

Among the party cadres hit hardest by the Ezhovshschinu were the leaders
of foreign Communist parties and leaders of the Communist International,
w r ho were staying in Moscow at the Hotel Lux. 2(1 German Communist Part)
leaders who were arrested included Heinz Neumann, Hermann Remmel, Fritz
Schulte, and Hermann Schubert, all of whom had been members of the Pol-
itburo; Leo Flieg, a secretary of the Central Committee; Heinrich Susskind and
Werner Hirsch, the editors of the newspaper Rote Fahne; and Hugo Eberlein,

The Great Terror

195

who had been the German Party delegate at the founding conference of the
Communist International. In February 1940, several months after the signing
of the German-Soviet pact, 570 German Communists who had been locked up
in Moscow prisons were handed over to the Gestapo on the frontier bridge at
Brest Litovsk.

The purges were equally savage in the Hungarian Workers' (Communist)
Party Bcla Kun, the instigator of the Hungarian revolution in 1919, was
arrested and executed, together with twelve other people's commissars from
the ephemeral Communist government in Budapest who had taken refuge in
Moscow. Nearly 200 Italian Communists were also arrested (including Paolo
Robotti, the brother-in-law of Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist Party
leader), as well as approximately 100 Yugoslav Communists (including Milan
Gorkic, the Party secretary general; Vladimir topic, secretary and director of
the Organization of the International Brigades; and three-quarters of the mem-
bers of the Central Committee).

The vast majority of the victims of the Great Terror were anonymous.
The following is an excerpt from an ''ordinary" file of 1938, dossier no. 24260: 2 '

1. Name: Sidorov

2. First name; Vasily Klcmentovich

3. Place and date of birth: Sechevo, Moscow region, 1893

4. Address: Sechevo, Rolomcnskii district, Moscow region

5. Profession: co-operative employee

6. Union membership: co-operative employees' union

7. Possessions at time of arrest (detailed description): 1 wooden
house, 8 meters by 8, covered in sheet metal, with partially cov-
ered courtyard 20 meters by 7; 1 cow, 4 sheep, 2 pigs, chickens

8. Property in 1929: identical, plus 1 horse

9. Property in 1917: 1 wooden house, 8 meters by 8, 1 partially
covered courtyard 30 meters by 20, 2 barns, 2 hangars, 2
horses, 2 cows, 7 sheep

10. Social situation at moment of arrest: employed

1 1. Service in tsarist army: 1915 16 foot-soldier, second class, 6th
Infantry Regiment of Turkestan

1 2. Military service in the White Army: none

13. Military service in the Red Army: none

14. Social origin: I consider myself the son of an ordinary peasant

15. Political history: no party memberships

16. Nationality and citizenship: Russian, US.S.R. citizen

17. Communist Party membership: no

18. Education: basic

19. Present military situation: reservist

20. Criminal record: no

196

A State Against Its People

21. State of health: hernia

22. Family situation: married. Wife: Anastasia Fedorovna, 43
years old, kolkhoz worker; daughter: Nina, 24 years old

Arrested 13 February 1938 on the orders of the leaders of the
district NKVD.

An excerpt from the interrogation protocol:

Question: Explain your social origins, your social situation, and your
situation before 1917.

Reply: I come originally from a family of small merchants. Until
about 1904 my father had a little shop in Moscow, on Zolotorozhskaya
Street, where, according to what he told me, he did business but had no
employees. After 1904 he was forced to close the shop, for he couldn't
compete with the bigger shops. He came back to the country, to
Sechevo, and rented six hectares of arable land and two hectares of
meadow. He had one employee, a man called Goryachev, who worked
with him for many years, until 1916. After 1917 we kept the farm, but
we lost the horses. I worked with my father until 1925; then, after he
died, my brother and I shared out the land between us.

I don't think I am guilty of anything at all.

An excerpt from the charges drawn up:

Sidorov, hostile to the Soviet regime in general and to the Party in
particular, was given to systematically spreading anti-Soviet propa-
ganda, saying, "Stalin and his gang won't give up power. Stalin has
killed a whole mass of people, but he doesn't want to go. The Bolsheviks
will hold on to power and go on arresting honest people, and you can't
even talk about that, or you'll end up in a camp for 25 years."

The accused pleaded not guilty but was unmasked by several wit-
nesses. The affair has been passed on to the troika for judgment.

Signed: S. Salakayev, Second Lieutenant in the Kolomenskaya dis-
trict police.

Agreed: Galkin, Lieutenant in the State Security, Chief of the
State Security detachment in the Kolomenskaya district.

An excerpt from the protocol of the troika's decision, 16 July 1938:

V. K. Sidorov affair. Ex-shopkeeper, previously kept a shop with his
father. Accused of spreading counterrevolutionary ideas among kolkhoz
workers, characterized by defeatist statements together with threats
against Communists, criticism of Party policies and of the government.
Verdict: SHOOT Sidorov Vassily Klementovich; confiscate all his
goods.

The Great Terror

197

Sentence carried out on 3 August 1938.
Posthumously rehabilitated on 24 January 1989.

The heaviest price of all was paid by the Polish Communist Party. The
situation of Polish Communists was somewhat unusual, in that their Party
emerged out of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdoms of Poland and
Lithuania, which in 1906 was admitted, on an autonomous basis, to the Social
Democratic Workers' Party in Russia. The links between the Russian Party and
the Polish Party had always been very close. Many Social Democratic Poles—
Dzer/hinsky, Men/hinsky, Unshlikht (all of whom had been directors of the
GPU), and Radek, to name but a few — had gone on to make a career in the
Bolshevik Party,

In 1937-38 the Polish Communist Party was completely liquidated. The
twelve Polish members of the Central Committee living in Russia were exe-
cuted, as were all Polish representatives of the various offices of the Communist
International. On 28 November 1937 Stalin signed a document proposing a
"purge" of the Polish Communist Party. Generally, after a party had been
purged Stalin chose new personnel to lead it from one of the rival factions of
the liquidated group. In the case of the Polish Communist Party, all the factions
were equally accused of "following the orders of counterrevolutionary Polish
secret services." On 16 August 1938 the Executive Committee of the Interna-
tional voted for the dissolution of the Polish Communist Party. As Dmitry
Manuilsky explained, "Polish fascist agents have infiltrated the party and taken
up all the key positions.' 1

On the grounds that they had been "caught out" and found 'lacking in
vigilance, 11 Soviet officials in the Communist International were naturally the
next victims of the purges. Almost all the Soviet cadres in the International
(including Wilhclm Knorin, a member of the Central Executive Committee;
V. A. Mirov-Abramov, chief of the Department of Foreign Ties; and Gevork
Alikhanov, the head of the Department of Cadres), a total of several hundred
people, were removed. The only survivors of the International purge were a
few leaders such as Manuilsky and Otto Kuusincn, who were completely in
Stalin's power.

The military was another sector hit hard in 1937 and 1938, as carefully kept
records testify. 22 On 11 June 1937 the press announced that a military court
sitting in camera had condemned Marshal Tukhachevsky to death for treason
and espionage. Tukhachevsky was deputy commissar of defense and the prin-
cipal architect of the modernization of the Red Army. Recurring differences
had led to his growing opposition to Stalin and Voroshilov after the Polish

198

A State Against Its People

campaign of 1920. Also condemned were seven army generals: Jonas Yakir, the
military commander of the Kyiv region; Uborevich, commander of the Belarus
region; and Robert Eideman, Avgust Kork, Vitvot Putna, Fred Feldman, and
Vital y Primakov. Over the next ten days 980 high-ranking officers were ar-
rested, including twenty-one army corps generals and thirty-seven division
generals. The "military conspiracy" affair, implicating Tukhachevski and his
accomplices, had been several months in the planning. The accused were ar-
rested in May 1937. Subject to brutal interrogation led by Ezhov himself
(when Tukhachevsky was rehabilitated twenty years later, it was revealed that
several pages of the deposition were stained with blood), all were forced into
confessions before judgment was passed. Stalin personally supervised the
whole affair. Around 15 May he had received via the Soviet ambassador in
Prague falsified files compiled by the Nazi secret services containing fake let-
ters that had supposedly passed between Tukhachevsky and members of the
German high command. In fact the German secret service had been manipu-
lated by the NKVD.

In two years the purge of the Red Army eliminated:

3 out of 5 marshals (Tukhachevsky, Aleksandr Egorov, and Vasili

Blucher, the last two executed in February and October 1937, respec-
tively)

13 out of 15 army generals

8 out of 9 admirals

50 out of 57 army corps generals

154 out of 186 division generals

16 out of 16 army commissars

25 out of 28 army corps commissars

From May 1937 to September 1938, 35,020 officers were arrested or
expelled from the army. It is still unclear how many were executed. Around
1 1,000 (including Generals Konstantin Rokossovsky and Aleksandr Gorbatov)
were recalled in 1939-1941. But a new wave of purges began after September
1938, so that according to the most serious estimates, the total number of
arrests in the army during the Great Terror was about 30,000 cadres out of a
possible 178,000. 2y Though proportionally less significant than has generally
been believed, the purge of the Red Army, notably at the higher levels, had
serious effects on the Russo-Finnish conflict of 1939^0 and the initial phase
of the war with Germany, when it constituted one of the heaviest handicaps
for Soviet military effectiveness.

Stalin took the menace of Nazi Germany much less seriously than did
other Bolshevik leaders, especially Bukharin and Maksim Litvinov, who was

The Great Terror

199

people's commissar of foreign affairs until April 1939. Stalin did not hesitate
to sacrifice the majority of the best officers in the Red Army and replace them
with entirely untried substitutes. Stalin wished his army to be staffed with those
who had no memory of the controversial episodes in which he had participated
as military chief in the civil war, and who would not be tempted to argue, as
Field Marshal Tukhachevsky might have, with the military and political deci-
sions that Stalin took at the end of the 1930s, especially the rapprochement
with Nazi Germany.

The intelligentsia were another social group who fell victim to the Great
Terror, and about whom relatively abundant information is available. 24 A rec-
ognized social group since the mid-nineteenth century, most of the Russian
intelligentsia had been a center of resistance against tyranny and intellectual
constraint. This fact had accounted for their victimization in the previous
purges of 1922 and 1928-1931. Now, in March and April 1937, a virulent press
campaign railed against "deviationism" in economics, history, and literature.
All branches of learning and creativity were targeted, and political and doc-
trinal pretexts often served to cover personal ambition or rivalry. In the field of
history, for example, all the followers of Mikhail Pokrovsky, who had died in
1932, were arrested. Teachers and professors were especially vulnerable, since
their lectures were readily accessible to zealous informers. Universities, insti-
tutes, and academicians were all decimated, notably in Belorussia (where 87 of
the 105 academics were arrested as u Polish spies") and in Ukraine. In the latter
republic a first purge of "bourgeois nationalists 11 had taken place in 1933, when
several thousand Ukrainian intellectuals were arrested for "having transformed
the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the Shevchenko Institute, the Agricul-
tural Academy, the Ukrainian Marxist-Leninist Institute, and the People's
Commissariats of Kducation, Agriculture, and Justice into havens for bour-
geois nationalists and counterrevolutionaries' 1 (a speech by Pavel Postyshev, 22
June 1933). The Great Purge of 1937-38 thus finished off an operation that
had actually begun four years earlier.

All scholarly fields with the slightest connection to politics, ideology,
economics, or defense were also affected. The main figures in the aeronautics
industry, notably Andrei Tupolev (the renowned aeronautical engineer) and
Sergei Korolev (one of the founders of the first Soviet space program), were
arrested and sent to NKVD research centers similar to the those described by
Solzhenitsyn in First Circle. Of the twenty-nine astronomers at the great Pulk-
ovo observatory, twenty-seven were arrested. Nearly all the statisticians from
the national economic headquarters were arrested after completing the January
1937 census, which was annulled for u gross violations of elementary procedures
of the science of statistics, and for contravening governmental orders. 11 Arrests

200

A State Against Its People

were made of numerous linguists opposed to the theories of the Marxist
linguist Nikolai Marr, who was officially supported by Stalin; and of several
hundred biologists who opposed the charlatanism of the "official" biologist
Trofim Lysenko. Other victims included Professor Solomon Levit, the director
of the medical genetics institute; Nikolai Tulaikov, the director of the Institute
of Cereals; the botanist A. Yanata; and the academician Nikolai Vavilov, presi-
dent of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science, who was arrested on
6 August 1940 and died in prison on 26 January 1943.

Accused of defending hostile and foreign points of view and of straying
beyond the boundaries of Socialist Realism, writers, publishers, theater direc-
tors, and journalists all paid a heavy price during the Ezhovshchina. Approxi-
mately 2,000 members of the writers' union were arrested, deported to camps,
or executed. Among the most famous victims were Isaac Babei, author of The
Red Cavalry and Odessa Tales, who was shot on 27 January 1940; the writers
Boris Pilnyak, Yury Oiesha, Panteleimon Romanov; and the poets Nikolai
Klyuev, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Osip Mandelstam (who died in a Siberian transit
camp on 26 December 1938), Gurgen Maari, and Titsian Tabidze. Many
musicians were also arrested, including the composer Andrei Zhelyaev and the
conductor E. Mikoladze, as were famous figures from the theater, such as the
great director Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose theater was closed early in 1938 on
the ground that it was "foreign to Soviet art." Having refused to make a public
act of contrition, Meyerhold was arrested in June 1939, tortured, and executed
on 2 February 1940.

During these years the authorities sought the "complete liquidation" (to
use their own expression) of the last remaining members of the clergy. The
census of January 1937 revealed that approximately 70 percent of the popula-
tion, despite the pressures placed on them, still replied in the affirmative when
asked "Are you a believer?" Hence Soviet leaders embarked on a third and
decisive offensive against the church. In April 1937 Malenkov sent a note to
Stalin suggesting that legislation concerning religious organizations was out-
dated, and he proposed the abrogation of the decree of 8 April 1929. "This
decree," he noted, "gave a legal basis for the most active sections of the
churches and cults to create a whole organized network of individuals hostile
to the Soviet regime." He concluded: "The time has come to finish once and
for al I with all clerical organizations and ecclesiastical hierarchies." 25 Thousands
of priests and nearly all the bishops were sent to camps, and this time the vast
majority were executed. Of the 20,000 churches and mosques that were still
active in 1936, fewer than 1,000 were still open for services at the beginning of
1941. In early 1941 the number of officially registered clerics of all religions
had fallen to 5,665 (more than half of whom came from the Baltic territories,

The Great Terror

201

Poland, Moldavia, and western Ukraine, all of which had been incorporated in
1939-1941), from over 24,000 in 1936. 26

From this information it is possible to conclude that the Great Terror was a
political operation initiated and led by people at the highest levels in the party
under the supreme direction of Stalin.

Moreover, the Great Terror achieved two of its main objectives. The first
was to establish a civil and military bureaucracy made up of young cadres
brought up in the strict Stalinist spirit of the 1930s. These were officials who,
as Kaganovich said at the Seventeenth Party Congress, "would accept without
question any task assigned to them by Comrade Stalin." Before the late 1930s,
various government administrations were a heterogeneous mixture of "bour-
geois specialists" trained under the old regime and Bolshevik cadres, many of
whom had been trained on the job during the civil war and were quite incom-
petent. Each institution had tried to preserve some sort of professionalism and
administrative logic, as well as a degree of autonomy from the ideological
voluntarism and orders that came from the center. This was particularly dem-
onstrated in the campaign to verify all Party identity cards in 1935, when local
Communist leaders had put up passive resistance. It was also obvious in the
refusal of statisticians to "brighten up" the figures from the January 1937
census and bring them into line with Stalin's wishes. Stalin realized that a
significant proportion of the cadres, whether Communist or not, were not
prepared to follow blindly orders that came from the center. His goal was to
replace these officials with people more obedient to his wishes.

The second objective of the Great Terror was to complete the elimination
of "socially dangerous elements," a group whose members continued to grow.
As the penal code indicated, any individual "who had committed an act hostile
or dangerous to society, or who had relations with a criminal milieu or a criminal
record" was liable to be classed as a socially dangerous element. Hence, anyone
whose social group contained the prefix "ex-" was socially dangerous: ex-
kulaks, ex-criminals, ex-tsarist civil servants, ex-members of the Menshcvik
Party, ex-Socialist Revolutionaries, and so on. All these categories had to be
eliminated during the Great Terror because, as Stalin stated at the plenum of
the Central Committee in February-March 1937, "the nearer we come to
socialism, the more the remnants of the moribund social classes fight back."

In this speech Stalin had emphasized the idea that the US.S.R. — the only
country that had built socialism — was surrounded by hostile enemy powers.
According to Stalin, the countries bordering the US.S.R. —Finland, the Baltic
states, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Japan, and others, assisted by France and
Great Britain — were sending "armies of spies and subversives" on a mission

202

A State Ay<!inst Its Peoplu

to sabotage ihe socialist project. As a unique and sacred stale, the I .S.S.R. had
inviolable frontiers that were the front lines in a struggle against an ever present-
enemy. In this context, the hunt for spies (that is, amonc who had simpK made
eoniact with the outside world, no nutter how tenuous it might liave been) took
on great importance. The elimination of potential and muhical "hYrh eoluni
nisrs" was at the heart of the Great Terror.

fhe huge categories of victims listed above cadres and specialists, so
cially dangerous and alien elements, and spies all demonstrate the logic of t he
massive killings of the (ircat 'I error, which was responsible for neark 700,001)
deaths in two ears.

Moslow, I'r^h. Si all 1 1 is -»ui rounded (tnnii let! lo right) b V K hrnsluhev, u hu disliiiMiiislied himself in
ihe repressions in I kr.iiiu : . Vulano, .111 ideolu;>ual olluia! who launehed the post \ ar eampaign
auainst "i.'oMiitipolii.inisin"; I. ka'.'.aiun ieh, the radu a eoninns',ai'; K. nrnshilm, eonunissar ot defense;
V lnloio, Stalin's rhn.1 assisiani, who died in 198ft; 1. kalinm; and Marshal VI. Tukluelmski, who
was liquidated in 1 ( >.>7. Simiul row ; < ). Malenkm (2nd I'rmu let! ), Y biih'.aniu (5th), and Kiss Stassuva
|Sih), u ho endorsed Stahn' - pohiu •■ inside tlir ( innintern. 1 nh nis-,cs tk phntnjMaphir., krasnosiursk

Vchks I )/ershirisk, founder ot the ( aheka and
lu ad dI' the GPi (sccrci police) until he died m
1^26, leaui;,' a permanent mark un the regime.
■ 13. it;

I .. tieria niiu; in an imitation ot deiuneraee s
the suen^sor in V len/lnnsk, ( r. ^.ij'.ml.i, and
V I- /hoc llena eontrolled thr SCCFC1 police .ind
the FbreCS lif repression until be was artesied in
Jfumc W'53 1> his rivals Kdirushehec Malenknc
and Mi)lnin. 1 1 ,.ipi iplkl

\ hrii itu Uulsln' ikh m.u U'll ilu
t 'i il « .i!' iln. unh a- hi d .t rt .i e

(if Ink'lH V nil .1 ■-« ,ll( tin' V. HI 1(1

luul r.nvK m l'Q 1 k'fv in i )r,ha

III ]'lh .1 I'nllsll nllh il i
Ii.UI'.'l'i.I and nnpalrd bft *i iklk'P--
ut llu Rt'«h i r^atttl lol i niv
1 'illu.!! .iiinii Viiiiu

A terrible (amine devastated rise Volua
region .is a result of the cjs i! war and
li(iMu'ik policies in the eountryjfhtc.

In 1 >1 ami WU ihr tamine led lo
tlie- death ul ainuiul 15 million people;
ilk' lirsl ietinis were almost imari
ahh rlnkh'en i liisniriiMuiiT inn
UlUpoiMllH- lii )l( .

Kyiv, 1**18, ller [he retreat (it' llu- Ret) nm, the HfHli^S ut' ieiinv. M t lu I luk.i sutv
exhumrd ill "i Saiknaa Slice! , \!n-iv (he "uistrumrni ul Hnlsheul. T t ■ i « >r " (dS I he
( !heka diserihed iiselt') inaintami-d one oi iis l.ieiliiie--. MiiMX d'tii*Hi|£f t . . ■ ■ r-L ■ i ■ | ^ .r .itiif
liMK

Lenin was tint Til m aeeepl aid

trom alunat.!, aiul liain-. tilled

with munitions, rami' in tmm

the Kill t inss, the Xanseil

(. nmniittee, ami ihe ineriean

Relief dminr-traUnn Russian

mnl kit luiIs u lii) helped ar

range tin.- aid were subsequently

arrested aiul svntviicvil Ul di'aik

on I .riun's orders. \ hen

K Naiisen lunr-rlt mu-rwued,

thr wrrr banished Irom Russia

instead. I lnvr M'lllslnirr
k ul]Uin|ii)i,iiiH lii )K,

1930-SV. 1'casanrs resisting cnllcciii/a[ion confronted the Kul Ouai'ds who came to seize the luncst
and then look refuuv in the forests. C i PL troops often sci fire to the lives 10 tone the peasants to ctttcfee
* 1). K.

To collect it ia 1 1 it land in .i "■_!]'( at ass;iuli on ihe peasant r," Sialin used sianaiinn as a weapon,
particular!) auainst ihe I krauuans The- polio resulted in ihe death of I'ouv.hK 6 million people,
ineliuliii'. 1 , 4 inillion in I krauie I fete in k li,irki in lTv the peasants became indifferent lo the dailv
jiheiioinenon pi death. Cannibalism was su w idespread that the vownnnent printed posters lhat said:
" I-.at in 1 .. 1 our children k an an of barbarism." i Dk.

The construction site of the BIJK, or Bclomnrkanal, the canal hetween (he \ hue Sea and the
mtlt This pharaonic project resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of prisoners in
! ( M2 TV The canal was opened amid pm pomp by Stalin and his aeobtes but proud m be
useless. I Coll. Tonus/ Ki/n A u

S&62H&

The Belnmnrkana! urchesti a. C .uiistruetinn of Mu' ean.il, an absurd enterprise, was intruded to he p.tn tjj

I he "avducariorT of rhe detainees. ■ ] ). R

1 be hacks n! propaganda photographs wvw often used In detainees to draw attention i,» their pli-.dn ai
to ponra life and death in the Snwei eaffijSL This drauim: b Kwosina kcrneskaa purine urrival in
"reeducation work camp" m Siberia in Apia I 1943, i I tesxtti <k Kcfsmv&un

purgt: ■-.(.'■■..■aiin ui thfc

...,['.. Initially used as a

means ol ](.lmh.".' iti]

Ltmtrol nvcr militant

Parl workers, the

kisihi (purge) becarrHJ a

nl l l li I that rould lead to
In: drmim aalion nl ,ui

oik'. Sell criticism fics

sions resulted more and

more often in arrests a

feu da « or weeks later.

1 koKci lolks

"Innocent Russia writhed
if) pain lieiicath the

blnoih boots .' and the
| dark w luv Is of I he lilack
Marias," wrote the poet
inia khmato a in her

well knou n **ftt<juli?m. M

1 ler <a n son was impris
oncd and killed. These
U an ks, kia i\ n In MusCO
He as "bhu k n'uu"
Innk prisoners trnm the
I nibwnka to I .einrdwo
s ami Hut rka prisons, Tin'
truck-, were sometimes
disguised as bakers' dcli
en ans. i fcger ioIU-i

The I .iihani,a, Vlo.S
cow, about ]'»„'.*. In
thi' basement oi the

( il'l h wtHiusr ttrf*

well' special room:-, in

u h it. I i enemies nt l he

revmn wiir r ■-ciiiied

« ith a built I in ihe

invk. I fee huiidiuu

eainr in s mhoh/e llu

arbitraiw i rueh nf

the regime, i I ). K.

Mitr lihi in.i mil aiii ii|t£? 4

MiliiiH$pUttuttH£ili : |
"^i! Ill I It

! he Shakhn (rial in 1 >onbass in <)>H maugufatd a new caie^nn of enemies of the ,n ; „„r lIu 'WU
isrs, who *e« accused of sabotage w hen Stalin launched the first Fivv ,ar Mian. The intention wa- »
impose Snlm'S priod^ of the ^second nMuttato" «m cadres in nulustn. Mandm,. n,ht: p.ocurah,
N. Kryk-nko, who was himself liquidated in WM t fe™ Violld

U.A f

( )ue ot ilk- mam ceru
lion orders sinned dail
b Stalin elu.rJTTg i lu-
( heal lerroi. This dual
ment sealed tin talc i>j
h,nl)() people more lhan

all the political tfpjftHtenfc

euruied dunm.> the cenlun
precctiing the liolsheik cqujp
i" PM7. I Coll . l&jufcttvslri

Valk, I, stoma, l 4 M 1 '. When the I ><>lslie iks attempted to sei/c power, ihe executed hostages taken from
the ranks ot' the elite. \ hen lhc withdrew, ihe left behind hundreds of death The extermination of
polilieal .tdwrsarie-, and tjf enure soeial groups was considered nccessan tor victors in the eiil war.
I hese massacres prefigured the lar.-c scale deportations ol l.stomans, Lat Kins, and I aruanians in l l M()~
41 and 9M ti • I) K

(iermam, Pentecost { H~. national iiurliiu* of the Role I'Vont (Red I'Voni), a paramilitary or/ani/aium
;.icnerall considered lo haw been an cmbrwiiik' Red Annv The Rvd front bad Us origins m die culture
of ciul war celebrated In Louis vras'.on; "Proletariat, know our siren:.!,!!)/ know our s[reii"ih and nn
leash il.< . . . Open lire on those on those know il all Social 1 Vmocrats ( )pen lire, open hre . ( )pcu

fne, I tell ou / I mlcr the guidance ot'thc ( .onmninist Part . . ." (from Ac jrmti ftiugi . *$M) '■ IU,

S C L"* *-*C - !"*

Spain, 1437. 1 loping to exploit the Spanish ci il war to his adanta. .-, Siahn sem a number u1 einissar
ics and agents. The NKV'J) (the successor lo the (i|H ) uas msiniehJ in liquidate aftvom who
obstructed its international slrntcp, incliutint; anarchists, TmisUiies. and nnhi.mi fft>tt1 il»r LntM
Workers' Unification Parry. The leader of thai parts, Andreu m, was kidnaped in |,nk- [<fc*y .mil
tortured before being killed b agents workmu under Krno C iem, the future li .id- t\ [Jw I lun^jrun
Communist Party. Meanwhile an international campaign was earned oui in ih. i tmiitHJntii] press,
accusing the antifascists of being agents working for Franco. 'MR

On 20 August <>M Ramon Mercadcr, an agent from the Special Ta.k, !) qi ,r„HM «j fe XK|.
attacked I .eon I rotsky (right) with an ,ce pfcfc Trotskv died ,hc neM fry. Stalin I ,d pfcmmdK ,-nkred
the chid erf the department, Pavel Sudoplatov (left, rn , pim.iv iron, & >,. mdimm^ ft*fc who

at the time was the head of the lamrth International. . UR. ,/,/,,-, | Kl , L , r ll)Mt ,

K.iKii, Kw>sia, pfi 1*H v kin- ( rennatis discovered here the bodies of 4.500 Polish officers buried in
nu>s .i.e. e>. Ked < rov-, eominrsion concl uded lhallhe hail been killed b So iel troops in the spring
rn ]«» Ul. w hen around J'vOUII people disappeared, kalui came to be a smbo) of' mass murder and official
h<-. I mil P'V tin ( .omnium .1 .',oi! nment in Poland and ( '.uiumunists throughout the world attributed
the massacre n > the ( rerraiafts. ! M It.

.iuriM, 1 kiame, bun- 1943. Here livnche-. datirm from l l >.>7 3.8 were opened and hundreds ot bodies
^xliumcd. I'ln- auihoriii.-, bad huili a park and a summer theater on the site. Similar trenches were
disalvyrtrti m /lniuniw, Kamenets Podolski, and uther areas. Sueh macabre disco erics continue een
ItxlM In t*»7, 1,1 IH) budie, were exhumed m St. Petersburg, and another u ,000 were found in a mass
fcrSVC m ibe fofCStN of Karelia, i I ) R

Witold Pileeki, a Polish re$ig
ranee riiduer, deliberate!) had
himself captured b C jltdkui

forces (above) so that he coutd
set up a resistance network in
Auschwitz. 1 le subsei|ucnti
escaped and continued to tiLrhr

I he Nazis. 1 le was arrested in
Ma 1947 by the Communist

secret police (below), tortured,
sentenced to death, and exe-
cuted. I [e was rehabilitated in

HftO. I i). R.

A monument erected in War-
saw in PJ% in homage to Jew-
ish and ( '.atholic Poles who
were deported to rhe far north,
Siberia. Kazakhstan, ami other
distant regions in |$3& ] L M1
and 1944 43. < A. Tabor

PAMIEC

rwoocoW B'i.

ENRYKAERIIC

18$
ViKTOR-A

I'he Jewish cemeten, Warsaw. mnminu-nl
erected in secret in I9H7 In the rueinop. ui ik
tor ltcr and I lennk Krhch. Leader-. o( ih<
Jewish Socialist Worker/ Pan, the weir In t
sentenced tnr siippusedh h.i ir ■ tics with tin
Nazi Parte The] were M.'iiluhi d lit death , -,ei
ond tune and kept m soliun cnuiineineni i ■
li'Ch han-ed himself in Ins c< 11 on is la I'M.!;

Alter was shut on t ) |-'el>niar> IMiik-v, Aa S
alter (he ictor at Stalimu ad. I I). K

k'.ast Merlin, 1/ June 1'LT Protesting \a;.'e cuts, workers went on strike on 16 June and dcntmislraud ui
(be fleets. So lei Kinks then look up position (hereon the I .eip/ie.erstrasse), Sixteen demonstrators were
killed, lumdrrds weif wounded, anil thousands ol people received Ion;.' prison sentences. The Last (icr
man upusim> was die lust eicat crack to appear in a "people's democracy" * 1 1 U

Budapest, l Vtoher PJsh. The rir.t antitotaliiarian revolution mobili/ed the entire population
avauist the secret peilicc and ihr ( '.ommunisi Paris, I'hc resistance h:.>.htcrs managed t f * Jclav.
Soviet intervention, i nlnr I'huiir.

Budapest, November m& Soviet tanks look lu the streets; iIk" population resisted with ,,ins. The
Hun^ri^iU.H-kcrsMC^nnnunisilf^n^^hca.Liiun'sonlv p:im , was reestablished in pmerai the est
ol l|»ttl 3JH» lues. More ihim 25,0(10 people were hnprttimd Tens of thousands irf I lumumns lied
into exile, i I ). R.

I'o/nam Poland, 2* June p$. Workers ,n a raikax iacmn wo, „„ sinL, and demuiistrat.uns l«,|
lowed, with sliouis of -bread and l.bemT Dozens rffal ,n the ensuing repressions. I >cmunMra„n-. here
are waving- a blood -stained Polish flag in from of the 1'iat taclorv. I I . s. 1. fey ,, | mi ~, T k,,,w

(ulansk, I Krember I'J'/O. Sirikin; 1 , workers in the Baltic ports demonstrated against sharp increases in
food prices. 1 lundreds o| demonstrators were killed and wounded. ( )ne ot the ictinis was carried on a
door (below) and immortalized in a ballad: "A ho from (irabowek / A bo from C.hvlonia / Tuda the
police opened tire • and Janek Wismewski tell." The son; 1 , was reied in uiuist !0S0, when the tree
SohdariK irade onion was born. ( \ R.

»trf ^

f |^ S^iiff ? •

Nikolai Pctkov, a democrat who

fought in the resistance against

rhe fascists, was deput prime

minister in the conlirion g*$v

eminent afrer the liberation

oi Imiguria. Having resigned in protest

against the terror, he was arrested and condemned m

death after a show-trial on 16 August l ( H7. He was

handed on IS September. £ I"). R.

In the State ( inuri in Prague
Mikida ] lorako a (secoru
from left) was condemned k
death on N June l l >5() wird
three other defendants. Tlie
were handed on 27 June t'V.SO.
i !). K.

Prague Gym Up. During ,hc Suva, invasion «hc inhabitants of rh, ci,v *#■ qll ick ,o dfc* I eomnan
son «,* ,hc Nm mam «rf lf» ) km rimy pet <f* Soviet rrnops w,,h moek Nazi sakms. I ,, R

The Empire of the Camps

fie 1930s, marked by repression against society on a hitherto
unknown scale, also saw a huge expansion of the coneenrration-eamp system.
The C iiilag Administration archives now available allow a close examination oi'
the evolution of these institutions, revealing changes in organizational struc-
ture, periods of great activity, the number of" prisoners, their economic status,
the sort of crimes for which they had been condemned, and their division by
age, sex, nationality, and educational background. 1 Hut many gra areas re-
main. In particular, although the Chilag bureaucracy kept efficient records of
the numbers of inmates, little is known about the fate of those who failed lo
arrie at their destination; and this despite numerous individual testimonies.

By mid 1930 approximately 140,000 prisoners were already working in
the camps run by the (iPl . The huge project to dig a canal connecting the
White Sea and the Baltic, which alone required more than 120,000 men, re
suited in the transfer of tens of thousands from prison to camp. The number
of people receiving some sort of custodial sentence continued to rise: more than
50,000 were sentenced b rhe G PI: in 1929, and 208,000 in 1930 (this compared
with 1,178,000 cases prosecuted by bodies other than the GPU in 1929, and
1,238,000 in 1931).- One can therefore calculate that in early 1932 more than
300,000 prisoners were laboring on the GPl' projects, where the annual mop

203

204

A State against Its People

tality rate often reached 10 percent, as was the case for the Baltic-White Sea
canal.

When the GPU was reorganized and renamed the NKVD in July 1934,
the Gulag absorbed 780 small penal colonies and some 212,000 prisoners from
camps that had been judged inefficient or badly run under the People's Com-
missariat of Justice. To increase productivity, and to match the image they were
trying to create for the rest of the country, camps became bigger and more
specialized. Huge penal complexes, each holding tens of thousands of prison-
ers, were to be a major factor in the economy of Stalin's U.S.S.R. On 1 January
1935 the newly unified Gulag system contained more than 965,000 prisoners—
725,000 in work camps and 240,000 in work colonies, smaller units where less
socially dangerous elements were sent, usually for a period of less than three
years. 3

In this fashion, the map of the gulags for the next two decades was drawn.
The penal colonies of the Solovetski Islands, which contained some 45,000
prisoners, spawned "flying camps" that were moved to places where wood was
to be cut: in Karelia, along the shores of the White Sea, and in the Vologda
region. The large Svirlag group of camps, which held around 43,000 prisoners,
had the task of keeping the Leningrad area supplied with wood for heating,
while the Temnikovo camps fulfilled the same role for the Moscow area.

From the strategic crossroads at Kotlas, a railway was laid down along the
"Northern Route" to West Vym, Ukhta, Pechora, and Vorkuta, with woodcut-
ting operations and mines along the way. In the far north, the Ukhtpechlag
used its 51,000 prisoners to build roads, mine coal, and extract petroleum.
Another branch snaked out toward the Urals and the chemical centers at
Solikamsk and Berezniki, while to the southeast all the camps in western Siberia
and their 63,000 prisoners provided free manpower for the great mining com-
plex at Kuzbassugol.

Farther south, in the Karaganda region in Kazakhstan, the "agricultural
camps" of the Steplag, containing some 30,000 prisoners, pioneered a project
to cultivate the steppes. Apparently the regime there was less harsh than at the
huge Dmitlag complex, which in the mid-1930s contained some 196,000 pris-
oners. After the completion of the Baltic-White Sea canal in 1933 it was
detailed to construct the second great Stalinist canal, from Moscow to the
Volga.

Another huge construction project was the BAM, the Baikal-Amur-
Magistral, the railway that was to run parallel to the Trans-Siberian line be-
tween Baikal and Amur. In early 1935 about 150,000 prisoners from the group
of concentration camps at Bamlag, organized into some thirty divisions,
worked on the first section of the railway. In 1939 the Bamlag with its 260,000
prisoners was the biggest Soviet concentration camp of all.

The Empire of the Camps

205

Finally, after 1932 the Sevvostlag, a group of camps in the northeast,
provided manpower for a center of great strategic importance, the Dalstroi. Its
task was the production of gold to finance purchases from the West of equip-
ment for industrialization. All the gold seams were situated in a particularly
inhospitable region — in Kolyma. Accessible only by sea, Kolyma was to become
the region most symbolic of the gulags. Magadan, the capital and the port
where all new arrivals disembarked, had been built by the prisoners themselves.
Its single road, a vital artery that had also been built by the prisoners, served
only to link these camps. The living conditions were particularly inhumane and
are well described in the works of Varlam Shalamov. Between 1932 and 1939,
the gold extracted by the Kolyma prisoners — who numbered 138,000 in 1939 —
rose from 276 kilos to 48 metric tons, which accounted for 35 percent of all
Soviet gold produced that year. 4

In June 1935 the government launched a new huge project that could be
carried out only with penal labor- the construction of a large nickel production
center in Norilsk, north of the Arctic Circle. At the height of the Gulag years,
in the 1950s, the prisoners in the concentration camps in Norilsk would number
70,000. The productive function of this camp, known as a "corrective work
camp," clearly reflected the internal structure of the Gulag. Its central organi-
zation was neither geographical nor functional, but entirely economic, with
centers for hydroelectric production, for railway construction, for bridge and
road building, and so on. For both the administration of the penal centers and
the government ministries of industry, prisoners and work colonizers were just
so much merchandise to be parceled out by contract. 5

In the second half of the 1930s the Gulag population doubled, from
965,000 prisoners in early 1935 to 1,930,000 in early 1941. In 1937 alone it grew
by 700,000. h The massive influx of new prisoners so destabilized production
that it fell by 13 percent from the previous year's. It continued to stagnate in
1938 until the new people's commissar of internal affairs, Lavrenti Beria, took
vigorous measures to rationalize the work carried out by prisoners. In a note
addressed to the Politburo on 10 April 1939, Beria laid out his program for the
reorganization of the gulags. He argued that his predecessor, Nikolai Ezhov,
had placed a much higher priority on hunting down class enemies than he had
on healthy economic management. The normal food allowance for the prison-
ers, set at 1,400 calories per day; had been calculated for people who did nothing
but sit around a prison cell all day. 7 As a result, the number of prisoners capable
of working had shrunk considerably over the previous years: some 250,000
prisoners were unable to work on 1 March 1939, and 8 percent of all prisoners
had died in the previous year. To meet the production targets set by the NKVD,
Beria called for an increase in food rations. In addition, he called for a halt to
the early release of prisoners and to exemplary punishments of malingerers or

206

A State against Its People

"production disorganizes." He recommended the extension of the working
day to eleven hours, with three rest days allowed per month, "to exploit, as
much as possible, all the physical capacities of all the prisoners."

Contrary to popular belief, the Gulag archives demonstrate that the turn-
over of prisoners was quite high; 20-35 percent were released each year. This
rotation can be explained by the relatively high number of sentences of less
than he years, nearly 57 percent of all sentences in early 1 940. But the arbitrary
nature of the camp administration and the justice system, particularly where
the political prisoners of 1937-38 were concerned, often meant that sentences
were mysteriously extended. Release often did not mean freedom, but subjec-
tion to a whole series of measures such as exile or house arrest.

Also contrary to popular belief, the Gulag camps were not filled only with
political prisoners— sentenced for "counterrevolutionary activities" according
to the fourteen definitions of the infamous Article 58 of the penal code. The
political contingent oscillated between one-quarter and one-third of all prison-
ers in the gulags each year. The other prisoners were not necessarily common
criminals. Many were sentenced to camps for having committed crimes spe-
cially created by the Party, ranging from "destruction of Soviet property" to
"breaking the passport law," "hooliganism," "speculation," "leaving one's work
post," "sabotage," or even "nonfulfillment of the minimum number of working
days" in the koikhozy. Most prisoners in the gulags were simply ordinary
citizens who were victims of particularly harsh laws in the workplace and a
growing number of regulations regarding social behavior. They were the result
of a decade of repressive measures taken by the Party-state against ever-larger
sections of society. 8

A provisional balance sheet of statistics on the terror might run as follows:

6 million dead as a result of the famine of 1932-33, a catastrophe that
can be blamed largely on the policy of enforced collectivization and the
predatory tactics of the central government in seizing the harvests of the
koikhozy.

720,000 executions, 680,000 of which were carried out in 1937-38, usu-
ally after some sort of travesty of justice by a special GPU or NKVD
court.

300,000 known deaths in the camps from 1934 to 1940. By extrapolating
these figures back to 1930-1933 (years for which very few records are
available), we can estimate that some 400,000 died during the decade,
not counting the incalculable number of those who died between the mo-
ment of their arrest and their registration as prisoners in one of the
camps.

The Empire of the Camps

207

600,000 registered deaths among the deportees, refugees, and "specially
displaced."

Approximately 2,200,000 deported, forcibly moved, or exiled as "spe-
cially displaced people."

A cumulative figure of 7 million people who entered the camps and Gu-
lag colonies from 1934 to 1941 (information for the years 1930-1933 re-
mains imprecise).

On 1 January 1940 some 1,670,000 prisoners were being held in the 53
groups of corrective work camps and the 425 corrective work colonies. One
year later the figure had risen to 1,930,000. In addition, prisons held 200,000
people awaiting trial or a transfer to camp. Finally, the NKVD komandatury
were in charge of approximately 1 .2 million "specially displaced people." 9 Even
if these figures are heavily rounded down to bring them into line with estimates
made by previous historians and eyewitnesses, which often confused the num-
bers of those entering the gulags with the numbers already present at a certain
date, the data still give a good idea of the scale of the repressive measures
against the Soviet people in the 1930s.

From the end of 1939 to the summer of 1941 the camps, colonies, and special
Gulag settlements saw the arrival of yet another wave of prisoners. This was
partly the result of the Sovietization of the new territories, and partly the
result of the unprecedented criminalization of various sorts of behavior, nota-
bly in the workplace.

On 24 August 1939 the world was stunned to learn that a mutual pact of
nonaggression had been signed the previous day between Stalin's US.S.R. and
Hitler's Germany. The announcement of the pact sent shock waves through
much of the world, where public opinion was totally unprepared for what
appeared to be a volte-face in international relations. At the time, few people
had realized what could link two regimes that apparently professed such op-
posed ideologies.

On 21 August 1939 the Soviet government adjourned negotiations with
the Franco-British mission that had arrived in Moscow on 11 August. The
mission had hoped to conclude a pact that would reciprocally engage all three
of the parties in the event of a hostile action by Germany against any one of
them. Since early that year, Soviet diplomats, led by Vyacheslav Molotov, had
progressively distanced themselves from the idea of an agreement with France
and Britain, which Moscow suspected were prepared to sign another Munich
treaty to sacrifice Poland, leaving the Germans a free hand in the east, While
negotiations between the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the French and

208

A State against Its People

British on the other, became bogged down in insoluble problems, especially the
question of permission for Soviet troops to cross Polish territory, contacts
between Soviet and German representatives at various levels took a new turn.
On 14 August von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, offered to come
to Moscow to conclude a momentous political agreement with the Soviet
Union. The following day, Stalin accepted the offer.

On 19 August, after a series of negotiations begun in late 1938, the
German and Soviet delegations signed a commercial treaty that looked ex-
tremely promising for the U.S.S.R. That same evening, the Soviet Union
accepted von Ribbentrop's offer to visit Moscow to sign the pact of nonaggres-
sion already worked out in Moscow and sent ahead to Berlin. The German
minister, who had been given extraordinary powers for the occasion, arrived in
Moscow on the afternoon of 23 August. The nonaggression treaty was signed
during the night and made public the following day. Meant to last for ten years,
it was to come into effect immediately. The most important part of the agree-
ment, outlining spheres of influence and annexations in Eastern Europe, obvi-
ously remained secret. The Soviet Union denied the existence of the secret
protocol until 1989. According to the secret agreement, Lithuania fell under
German control, and Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and Bessarabia would be given
to Soviet control. The maintenance of some sort of sovereign Polish state was
left unresolved, but it was clear that after German and Soviet military inter-
vention in Poland, the U.S.S.R. was to recover the Ukrainian and Belorussian
territories it had lost under the Riga treaty in 1920, together with part of rhe
"historically and ethnically Polish" territories in the provinces of Lublin and
Warsaw.

Eight days after the signing of the pact, Nazi troops marched into Poland.
One week later, after all Polish resistance had been crushed, and at the insis-
tence of the Germans, the Soviet government proclaimed its intention to
occupy the territories to which it was entitled under the secret protocol of 23
August. On 17 September the Red Army entered Poland, on the pretext that
it was coming to the aid of its "Ukrainian and Belorussian blood brothers,"
who were in danger because of "the disintegration of the Polish state." Soviet
intervention met with little resistance, since the Polish army had been almost
completely destroyed. The Soviet Union took 230,000 prisoners of war, includ-
ing 15,000 officers. 10

The idea of installing some sort of Polish puppet government was rapid I v
abandoned, and negotiations were opened on the fixing of the border between
Germany and the U.S.S.R. On 22 September it was drawn along the Vistula in
Warsaw, but after von Ribbentrop's visit to Moscow on 28 September it was
pushed farther east, to the Bug. In exchange for this concession, Germany
agreed to include Lithuania in the sphere of Soviet control. The partitioning

The Empire of the Camps

209

of Poland allowed the U.S.S.R. to annex vast territories of 180,000 square
kilometers, with a population of 12 million Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Poles.
On 1 and 2 November, after a farcical referendum, these territories were
attached to the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belorussia.

By this time the NKVD "cleansing" of the regions was already under way.
The first targets were the Poles, who were arrested and deported en masse as
"hostile elements." Those most at risk were landowners, industrialists, shop-
keepers, civil servants, policemen, and "military colonists" (osadnicy wojskowe)
who had received a parcel of land from the Polish government in recognition
of their service in the Soviet-Polish war of 1920. According to records kept in
the Special Colonies Department of the Gulag, 381,000 Polish civilians from
the territories taken over by the U.S.S.R. in September 1939 were deported
between February 1940 and June 1941 as "specially displaced people" to Sibe-
ria, the Arkhangelsk region, Kazakhstan, and other far-flung corners of the
U.S.S.R. 11 The figures given by Polish historians are much higher, arguing for
approximately 1 million deportees. 12 There are no precise figures for the arrest
and deportation of civilians carried out between September 1939 and January
1940.

For later periods, archival documents contain evidence for three great
waves of arrests and deportations, on 9 and 10 February, 12 and 13 April, and
28 and 29 June 1940. 11 The return trip for the convoys between the Polish
border and Siberia, Kazakhstan, or the Arctic regions took two months. As for
the Polish prisoners of war, only 82,000 out of 230,000 were still alive in the
summer of 1941. Losses among the Polish deportees were also extremely high.
In August 1941, after reaching an agreement with the Polish government-in-
exile, the Soviet government granted an amnesty to all Poles who had been
deported since November 1939, but to only 243,100 of the 381,000 "specially
displaced. " In total more than 388,000 Polish prisoners of war, interned refu-
gees, and deported civilians benefited from this amnesty. Several hundred
thousand had died in the previous two years. A great number had been executed
on the pretext that they were "unrepentant and determined enemies of Soviet
power."

Among the latter were the 25,700 officers and Polish civilians whom Beria,
in a top-secret letter to Stalin on 5 March 1940, had proposed to shoot.

A Urge number of ex-officers from the Polish army, ex-officials from the
Polish police and information departments, members of nationalist
counterrevolutionary parties, members of opposition counterrevolu-
tionary organizations that have rightly been unmasked, renegades, and
many others, all sworn enemies of the Soviet system, are at present
being detained in prisoner-of-war camps run by the NKVD in the

210

A State against Its People

U.S.S.R. and in the prisons situated in the western regions of Ukraine
and Belorussia.

The army officers and policemen who are being held prisoner are
still attempting to pursue their counterrevolutionary activities and are
fomenting anti-Soviet actions. They are all eagerly awaiting their libera-
tion so that once more they may enter actively into the struggle against
the Soviet regime.

NKVD organizations in the western regions of Ukraine and in
Belorussia have uncovered a number of rebel counterrevolutionary or-
ganizations. The Polish ex-army officers and policemen have all been
playing an active role at the head of these organizations.

Among the renegades and those who have violated state borders are
numerous people who have been identified as belonging to counterrevo-
lutionary espionage and resistance movements.

14,736 ex-officers, officials, landowners, policemen, prison guards,
border settlers (osadmki), and information agents (more than 97 percent
of whom are Polish) are at present being detained in prisoner of war
camps. Neither private soldiers nor noncommissioned officers are in-
cluded in this number. Among them are:

295 generals, colonels, and lieutenant colonels

2,080 commanders and captains

6,049 lieutenants, second lieutenants, and officers in training

1,030 officers and police NCOs, border guards, and gendarmes

5,138 policemen, gendarmes, prison guards, and information

officers
144 officials, landowners, priests, and border settlers

In addition to the above, 18,632 men are detained in prisons in the
western regions of Ukraine and Belorussia (10,685 of whom are Polish).
They include:

1,207 ex-officers

5,141 ex-information officers, police, and gendarmes
347 spies and saboteurs

465 ex-landowners, factory managers, and officials
5,345 members of various counterrevolutionary resistance move-
ments and diverse other elements
6,127 renegades

Insofar as all the above individuals are sworn and incorrigible ene-
mies of the Soviet regime, the U.S.S.R. NKVD believes it necessary to:

The Empire of the Camps

211

1. Order the U.S.S.R. NKVD to pass judgment before special
courts on:

a. the 14,700 ex-officers, officials, landowners, police officers,
information officers, gendarmes, special border guards, and
prison guards detained in prisoner-of-war camps

b. the 1 1,000 members of the diverse counterrevolutionary es-
pionage and sabotage organizations, ex-landowners, factory
managers, ex-officers of the Polish army, officials, and rene-
gades who have been arrested and are being held in the pris-
ons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belorussia, so that
THE SUPREME PENALTY BE APPLIED, DEATH BY
FIRING SQUAD

2. Order that individual files be studied in the absence of the ac-
cused, and without particular charges being lodged. The conclu-
sions of the inquiries and the final sentence should be presented
as follows:

a. a certificate produced by the Directorate for Prisoner of War
Affairs of the NKVD of the U.S.S.R. for all individuals de-
tained in prisoner-of-war camps

b. a certificate produced by the Ukrainian branch of the
NKVD and the Belorussian NKVD for all other people ar-
rested.

3. Files should be examined and sentences passed by a tribunal
made up of three people— Comrades [Vsevolod] Merkulov,
[Bogdanl Kobulov, and flvan L.] Bashtakov.

Some of the mass graves containing the bodies of those executed were
discovered by the Germans in April 1943 in the Katyn forest. Several huge
graves were found to contain the remains of 4,000 Polish officers. The Soviet
authorities tried to blame this massacre on the Germans; only in 1992, on the
occasion of a visit by Boris Yeltsin to Warsaw, did the Russian government
acknowledge the Soviet Politburo's sole responsibility for the massacre of the
Polish officers in 1940.

As soon as the Polish territories were annexed, the Soviet government
summoned the heads of the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian governments
to Moscow and imposed "mutual assistance treaties 11 on them, according to
which they "invited" the U.S.S.R. to set up military bases on their territory.
Immediately, 25,000 Soviet soldiers marched into Estonia, 30,000 into Latvia,
and 20,000 into Lithuania. These troops far outnumbered the standing armies
in each of the theoretically independent countries. The entry of Soviet troops
in October 1939 marked the real end of the independence of the Baltic states.
On 1 1 October Beria gave the order to "stamp out anti-Soviet and antisociahst

212

A State against Its People

elements" in these countries. The Soviet military police then began arresting
officers, civil servants, and intellectuals considered untrustworthy.

In June 1940, shortly after the successful German offensive in France, the
Soviet government acted on the clauses contained in the secret protocol of 23
August 1939. On 14 June, on the pretext that there had been "acts of provoca-
tion carried out against the Soviet garrisons," it sent an ultimatum to the Baltic
leaders, ordering them to form "governments prepared to guarantee the honest
application of a treaty of mutual assistance, and to take steps to punish all
opponents of such a treaty." In the days that followed, several hundred thou-
sand more Soviet troops marched into the Baltic states. Stalin sent repre-
sentatives to the capital cities: Vyshinsky to Riga, Zhdanov to Tallinn, and
Vladimir Dekanozov, the chief of the secret police and deputy minister of
foreign affairs in the U.S.S.R., to Kaunas. Their mission was to carry out the
Sovietization of the three republics. Parliaments and all local institutions were
dissolved and most of the members arrested. Only the Communist Party was
authorized to present candidates for the elections on 14 and 15 July 1940.

In the weeks following the farcical elections, the NKVD, under the lead-
ership of Genera] Ivan Serov, arrested between 15,000 and 20,000 "hostile
elements." In Latvia alone, 1,480 people were summarily executed at the be-
ginning of July. The newly "elected" parliaments requested that their countries
be admitted into the U.S.S.R., a request that was granted in early August by
the Supreme Soviet, which then proclaimed the birth of three new Soviet
Socialist Republics. While Pravda wrote that "the sun of the great Stalinist
constitution will henceforth be shining its gratifying rays on new territories and
new peoples," what was actually beginning for the Baltic states was a long
period of arrests, deportations, and executions.

Soviet archives also contain the details of a large deportation operation
carried out under the orders of General Serov during the night of 13-14 May,
when "socially hostile" elements from the Baltic region, Moldavia, Belorussia,
and western Ukraine were rounded up. The operation had been planned a few
weeks previously, and on 16 May 1941 Beria wrote to Stalin regarding the latest
project to "clean up regions recently integrated into the U.S.S.R. and remove
all criminal, socially alien, and anti-Soviet elements." In total, 85,716 people
were deported in June 1941, including 25,711 from the Baltic states. Vsevolod
Merkulov, the second in command at the NKVD, in a report dated 17 July
1941, tabulated the results of the operation in the Baltics. During the night of
13-14 June, 11,038 members of "bourgeois nationalist" families, 3,240 mem-
bers of the families of former policemen, 7,124 members of families of land-
owners, industrialists, and civil servants, 1,649 members of the families of
former officers, and 2,907 "others" were deported. The document makes clear

The Empire of the Camps

213

that the heads of these families had been arrested, and in all probability had
already been executed. The operation carried out on 13 June was aimed exclu-
sively at the remaining family members of those who had been deemed "socially

alien." H

Each deported family was allowed 100 kilograms of baggage, which was
supposed to include enough food for one month. The NKVD itself accepted
no responsibility for providing food during the whole deportation process. The
convoys arrived at their destination at the end of July 1941, most of them going
to Novosibirsk and Kazakhstan. Some of them did not reach their destination
in the Altai region until mid-September. No information is available on the
number of deportees who died in transit, but one can imagine that the numbers
were high. The journey took from six to twelve weeks, and the deportees were
fifty to a wagon in the cattle trucks used to transport them, kept together with
all their food and baggage in the same place. Beria planned a similar large-scale
operation for the night of 27-28 June 1941. The choice of this date can be
taken as further confirmation that the Soviet high command was not prepared
for the German attack planned for 22 June. Operation Barbarossa delayed for
several years the NKVD "cleansing" of the Baltic states.

A few days after the occupation of the Baltic states, the Soviet government
sent an ultimatum to Romania demanding the immediate return of Bessarabia
and Northern Bukovina to the U.S.S.R.— another provision of the secret Ger-
man-Soviet protocol of 23 August 1939. Abandoned by the Germans, the
Romanians immediately gave in. Bukovina and part of Bessarabia were incor-
porated into Ukraine, and the remaining part of Bessarabia became the Soviet
Socialist Republic of Moldavia, proclaimed on 2 August 1940. Kobulov, Beria's
assistant, signed a deportation order that same day for 31,699 "anti-Soviet
elements" who lived in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia, and for
another 12,191 in the Romanian regions that had been incorporated into
Ukraine. Within a few months all these "elements" had been classified and filed
in what was by then the tried and tested manner. The previous evening, on
1 August 1940, Molotov had given a triumphant speech to the Supreme Soviet
regarding the German-Soviet pact, which had given the U.S.S.R. 23 million
new inhabitants.

The year 1940 was also remarkable for one other statistic. It was the year when
the number of prisoners in gulags and Soviet prisons reached their height. On
1 January 1941 the gulags contained more than 1,930,000 people, 270,000 more
than the previous year. More than 500,000 people in the new "Sovietized"
territories had been deported, in addition to the 1.2 million "specially dis-
placed people" who had been counted at the end of 1939. Soviet prisons, which

214

A State against Its People

had a theoretical limit of 234,000 inmates, held 462,000 people;' 5 and the total
number of sentences passed that year saw a huge rise, climbing in one year
from 700,000 to 2,300,000. l( >

This spectacular increase was the result of an unprecedented effort to
criminalize different types of social behavior. In the workplace the date of 26
June 1940 remained imprinted on the minds of many because of the decree
"on the adoption of the eight-hour working day, the seven-day working week,
and the ban on leaving work of one's own accord." Any unjustified absence,
including any lateness of more than twenty minutes, was henceforth treated as
a criminal offense. Lawbreakers were liable to six months 1 uninterrupted "cor-
rective work," the loss of 25 percent of their salary, and the possibility of a
prison sentence of between two and four months.

On 10 August another decree increased the punishments for any act of
"hooliganism," shoddy work, or petty theft in the workplace to as much as three
years of imprisonment in the camps. In the conditions that then prevailed in
Soviet industry, almost any worker could be prosecuted under this severe new
law.

These decrees, which would remain on the statute books until 1956,
marked a new stage in the criminalization of the labor laws. In the first six
months after they came into effect, more than 1.5 million people received
sentences; the fact that 400,000 of these were custodial sentences partly ex-
plains the huge increase in prison numbers after the summer of 1941. The
number of "hooligans" sentenced to the camps rose from 108,000 in 19S9 to
200,000 in 1940. I7

The end of the Great Terror was thus marked by a new offensive against
the ordinary citizens of the country, those who refused to bend to accommodate
the new factory or kolkhoz laws. In response to the severe laws of the summer
of 1940, a number of workers, if one is to judge by the reports of NKVD
informers, fell into what were termed "unhealthy states of mind," particularly
during the first few weeks of the Nazi invasion. They openly called for "the
elimination of all Jews and Communists" and began to spread what the NKVD
termed "provocative rumors." For example, one Moscow worker claimed that
"when Hitler takes our towns, he will put up posters saying, i won't put
workers on trial, like your government does, just because they are twenty-one
minutes late for work. 1 " 18 Any such comment was treated with extreme severity,
as is indicated by the report of the military procurator general on "crimes and
misdemeanors committed on the railways between 22 June and 1 September
1941." This report recorded 2,254 sentences against individuals, including 204
death sentences; 412 people were sentenced for "the spreading of counterrevo-
lutionary rumors," and 110 railway workers were condemned to death for this

crime

, 19

The Empire of the Camps

215

A collection of documents recently published details the mood of the
Moscow population during the first few months of the war. What emerges most
clearly is the total confusion felt by people during the German advances in the
summer of 1941. 2() Muscovites seemed to fall into one of three categories:
patriots, a large group of ambivalent individuals who latched on to rumors, and
the defeatists, who wished for a swift German victory to get rid of the "Jews
and Bolsheviks" perceived to have ruined the country. In October 1941, when
factories were dismantled and moved farther east in the country, an "anti-Soviet
disorder" broke out in the textile industry in the Ivanovo district. 21 The defeat-
ist slogans of the workers were quite revealing of the despair felt by much of
the workforce, which since 1940 had labored under ever-harsher conditions.

The barbarism of the Nazis created some reconciliation between the
Soviet government and the people, in that Germany classed Russians as sub-
humans destined for extermination or slavery. After the German invasion there
was a swift upturn in patriotism. Stalin very cleverly began to reaffirm tradi-
tional patriotic Russian values. In a famous radio address to the nation on 3 July
1941, he again used the language and imagery that had unified Russians for
more than a century: "Brothers and sisters, a grave danger is threatening our
land." References to the Great Russian Nation of Plekhanov, Lenin, Pushkin,
Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Lermontov, Suvorov, and Kutuzov were used to call for
a holy war, the "Great Patriotic War." On 7 November 1941, while reviewing
battalions of volunteers who were leaving for the front, Stalin called on them
to fight according to "the glorious examples of our ancestors Aleksandr Nevsky
and Dmitry Donskoi." The former had saved Russia from the Teutonic
Knights in the thirteenth century, and the second, a century later, had finally
shaken off the Tatar yoke.

The Other Side of Victory

Tor a long time, one of the best-kept secrets of Soviet history was
the deportation of whole ethnic groups during the Great Patriotic War—na-
tions that were collectively accused of "subversive tactics, espionage, and col-
laboration with the occupying Nazi forces." Only at the end of the 1950s did
the authorities finally admit that "excesses and generalizations" had taken
place. In the 1960s the legal existence of a number of autonomous republics,
which had been struck off the map for collaboration with the enemy, was
finally reestablished. But it was only in 1972 that the remainder of the living
deportees were finally given a "free choice of their place of abode." And it was
only in 1989 that the Crimean Tatars were fully rehabilitated. Until the mid-
1960s, the progressive removal of the sanctions against these peoples was still
top secret, and the decrees issued before 1964 were never made public. Only
with the "Declaration of the Supreme Soviet" of 14 November 1989 did the
Soviet state finally acknowledge "the criminal illegality of the barbarous acts
committed by the Stalinist regime against the peoples deported en masse."

The Germans were the first ethnic group to be collectively deported, a
few weeks after the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. According to the 1939
census, there were then 1,427,000 Germans living in the Soviet Union, most
of them descendants of the German colonists invited by Catherine II to settle
the vast empty spaces of southern Russia. In 1924 the Soviet government had

216

The Other Side of Victory

217

created the autonomous Volga German Republic. Numbering around 370,000,
the Volga Germans accounted for only a quarter of the population of German
immigrants located throughout Russia (chiefly in the regions of Saratov, Stal-
ingrad, Voronezh, Moscow, and Leningrad), Ukraine (where there were
390,000), the Northern Caucasus (chiefly in the regions of Krasnodar,
Ordzhonikidze, and Stavropol), and even in the Crimea and Georgia. On 28
August 1941 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree stipulating
that all Germans in the autonomous Volga Republic, the Saratov region, and
Stalingrad were to be deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia. The decree por-
trayed this move as a humanitarian measure.

At a time when the Red Army was retreating on all fronts and losing tens
of thousands every day as soldiers were killed or taken prisoner, Beria diverted
more than 14,000 men from the NKVD for this operation, which was led by
the people's commissar of internal affairs, General Ivan Serov, who had already
shown his efficiency in this sort of exercise during the ethnic cleansing of the
Baltic states. Even if one takes account of the extraordinary circumstances and
the unforeseen defeat of the Red Army, the cruelty with which the operation
was carried out is astounding. From 3 to 5 September 1941, 446,480 Germans
were deported in 230 convoys, which on average contained 50 trucks. This
meant that there were nearly 2,000 people per convoy, or 40 per truck. Travel-
ing at only a few kilometers per hour, these convoys took between four and
eight weeks to reach their destinations in Omsk, Novosibirsk, Barnaul in south-
ern Siberia, and the Krasnoyarsk region of eastern Siberia. As in the case of
the previous deportations from the Baltic states, the displaced persons, accord-
ing to the official instructions, had a a certain time to gather enough food for a
minimum period of one month."

The following are excerpts from the decree of 28 August 1941.

According to reliable information received by the military authorities,
the German population living in the Volga region is harboring tens of
thousands of saboteurs and spies who, at the first hint of a signal from
Germany, will immediately organize disruptive activities in the regions
they inhabit. The Soviet authorities had not previously been aware of
the presence or the numbers of these saboteurs and spies. The German
population of the Volga is nurturing in its bosom enemies of the people
and of Soviet power . . .

If acts of sabotage are indeed carried out on Germany's orders by
German saboteurs and spies in the autonomous Volga Republic or in
neighboring areas, then blood will flow, and the Soviet government, as is
only appropriate in times of war, will be obliged to take punitive meas-
ures against the German population of the Volga. To avoid this eventu-
ality and to save much bloodletting, the Presidium of the Supreme

218

A State against Its People

Soviet of the U.S.S.R. has approved a decision to transfer the whole
German population of the Volga district elsewhere, providing them
with land and help from the state so that they can resettle in other
regions.

Districts where abundant land is available have been put aside to
this end in Novosibirsk and Omsk, Altai, Kazakhstan, and other areas
contiguous with these territories.

While the main deportation was under way, secondary operations were
carried out as military fortunes rose and fell. On 29 August 1941 Molotov,
Malenkov, and Zhdanov proposed to Stalin that they should cleanse the city
and region of Leningrad of the 96,000 people of German and Finnish origin
living there. The following day, German troops reached the Neva, cutting the
railway line that linked Leningrad with the rest of the country. The risk of
encirclement became more and more serious by the day, and the relevant
authorities had taken no measures to evacuate the civilian population of the city
or to prepare any foodstocks in the event of a siege. Nonetheless, on that same
day, 30 August, Beria sent out a circular ordering the deportation of 132,000
people from the Leningrad region: 96,000 by train and 36,000 by river. As it
turned out, the NKVD had time to arrest and deport only 11,000 Soviet
citizens of German origin before the arrival of German army units forced a
suspension of the deportations.

Over the next several weeks similar operations were begun in the Moscow
region, where 9,640 Germans were deported on 15 September; in Tula, where
2,700 were deported on 21 September; in Gorky (formerly Nizhni Novgorod),
where 3,162 were deported on 14 September; in Rostov, where 38,288 were
deported between 10 and 20 September; in Zaporizhzhia (31,320 between 25
September and 10 October); in Krasnodar (38,136 on 15 September); and in
Ordzhonikidze (77,570 on 20 September), In October 1941 there was a further
deportation of 100,000 Germans living in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the
Northern Caucasus, and the Crimea. As of 25 December 1941, 894,600 Ger-
mans had been deported, most of them to Kazakhstan and Siberia. If the
Germans deported in 1942 are taken into account, in all roughly 1 ,209,430 were
deported in less than a year— very close to the 1,427,000 Germans reported in
the 1939 census.

More than 82 percent of the German population in Soviet territory were
thus deported, at a moment when all police and military forces should have
been concentrating on the armed struggle against the invading enemy rather
than the deportation of hundreds of thousands of innocent Soviet citizens. In
fact the proportion of Soviet citizens of German origin who were deported was
even higher than these figures suggest, if one also includes the tens of thou-
sands of soldiers and officers of German origin who were expelled from Red

The Other Side of Victory

219

Army units and sent off in disciplinary battalions of the "work army" to
Vorkuta, Kotlas, Kemerovo, and Chelyabinsk. In this last city alone, more than
25,000 Germans were soon working in the metallurgy plant. Working condi-
tions and the chances of survival were little better in the work camps than they
were in the gulags.

Because information about the convoys is so piecemeal, it is impossible
today to calculate how many of these Germans died in the transfer to the new
settlements. It is also unclear how many convoys actually reached their desti-
nation in the chaos engulfing Russia in the autumn of 1941. At the end of
November, according to the plan, 29,600 German deportees were to arrive in
the region of Karaganda. But on 1 January 1942 only 8,304 had actually
arrived. The intention was for 130,998 individuals to settle in the area, but in
fact no more than 1 16,612 made it. What happened to the others? Did they die
en route, or were they transferred elsewhere? The Altai region was slated to
receive 11,000 deportees, but actually received 94,799. Worse still are the
NKVD reports on the arrival of the deportees, which leave no doubt that the
regions were totally unprepared for them.

In the prevailing environment of secrecy, local authorities were informed
only at the last minute about the arrival of tens of thousands of deportees. No
living quarters were ready, so the deportees were kept in stables, barracks, or
outside, exposed to the elements, even though winter was coming on fast.
Nonetheless, over the preceding ten years the authorities had acquired consid-
erable experience in such matters, and the "economic implantation" of the new
arrivals was carried out far more efficiently than the arrival of the kulaks back
in the early 1930s, when they had often been abandoned in the forests. After a
few months most of the deportees were living as "specially displaced,' 1 which
is to say that they were living under extremely harsh conditions. They lived
under the control of NKVD komandalury on collective farms, experimental
farms, or industrial complexes, where food was poor and work was hard. 1

The deportation of the Germans was followed by a second great wave of
deportations, from November 1943 to June 1944, when six peoples — the
Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars, the Karachai, the Balkars, and the
Kalmyks — were deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kirgizstan
on the pretext that they had "collaborated massively with the Nazi occupier. 1 '
This main wave of deportations was followed by other operations from July to
December 1944, which were intended to cleanse the Crimea and the Caucasus
of several other nationalities judged to be untrustworthy: the Greeks, the
Bulgars, the Armenians from the Crimea, the Meskhetian Turks, the Kurds,
and the Khemshins of the Caucasus. 2

Recently available archival documents have shed no new light on the

220

A State against Its People

supposed collaboration of the mountain peoples of the Caucasus, the Kalmyks,
or the Crimean Tatars with the Nazis. Some facts point to a small number of
collaborators in the Crimea, in Kalmykia, in the Karachai lands, and in
Kabardino-Balkaria, but no evidence exists of general policies of collaboration
in these regions. It was after the loss by the Red Army at Rostov-on-Don in
July 1942, and during the German occupation of the Caucasus from the sum-
mer of 1942 to the spring of 1943, that the most controversial collaborationist
episodes took place. In the power vacuum between the Soviet army's departure
and the arrival of the Germans, local leaders set up "National Committees" in
Mikoyan-Shakhar, in the autonomous region of Karachaevo-Cherkess; in Nal-
chik, in the autonomous republic of Kabardino-Balkaria; and in Elista, in the
autonomous republic of Kalmykia. The German army recognized the authority
of these local committees, which for a few months enjoyed religious, economic,
and political autonomy. Once this experiment in the Caucasus had reinforced
the "Muslim Myth 11 (the notion that Islamic regions of the US.S.R. could be
exploited) in Berlin, the Crimean Tatars were also permitted to set up their
own "Central Muslim Committee," based in Simferopol.

Nevertheless, because the Nazis feared that there might be a resurgence
of the Pan-Turkic movement, which had been crushed by the Red Army in the
mid-1920s, they never gave the Crimean Tatars the autonomy the Kalmyks,
Karachai, and Balkars enjoyed for a few months. In exchange for the small
measure of autonomy they were accorded, these local authorities contributed a
few troops to break the resistance of the nearly negligible forces that had
remained loyal to the Soviet regime. In all, these units amounted to no more
than a few thousand men: six Tatar battalions in the Crimea, and one body of
Kalmyk cavalry.

The autonomous republic of Chechnya-Ingushetia was only partially oc-
cupied by Nazi detachments for approximately ten weeks, from early Septem-
ber to mid-November 1942. There was not the slightest evidence of
collaboration. The Chechens, however, had always been a rebellious people.
The Soviet authorities had launched several punitive expeditions in 1925 to
confiscate some of the arms held by the population, and again in 1930-1932 to
try to break the resistance of the Chechens and Ingush against collectivization.
In March and April 1930, and again in April and May 1932, in a struggle
against the "bandits," the special troops of the NKVD had called in artillery
and air support. This provoked a strong groundswell of resistance to central-
ized power and a desire for independence among people who had always
struggled against the influence of Moscow.

The five big deportation movements between November 1943 and May
1944 were carried out in accordance with the usual methods, but unlike the
earlier deportations of the kulaks, the operations were marked by "remarkable

The Other Side of Victory

221

organizational efficiency" (in Beria's words). The logistical preparation was
carefully organized for several weeks and was overseen personally by Beria and
his assistants Ivan Serov and Bogdan Kobulov, all of whom traveled in their
special armored train. The operation involved a huge number of convoys: 46
convoys of 60 trucks for the deportation of 93,139 Kalmyks on 27-30 Decem-
ber 1943, and 194 convoys of 64 trucks for the deportation on 23-28 February
1944 of 521,247 Chechens and Ingush. For these exceptional operations when
the war was at its height, the NKVD used 119,000 troops.

The operations, which were planned down to the last minute, began with
the arrest of "potentially dangerous elements," between 1 and 2 percent of the
population, most of whom were women, children, and old people. The vast
majority of adult men were fighting under the Russian flag. If one is to believe
the reports sent to Moscow, the operations were carried out extremely swiftly.
The Crimean Tatars had been rounded up on 18—20 May 1944. On the evening
of the first day, Kobulov and Serov, who were in charge of the operation, sent
a telegram to Beria: "At 8:00 p.m. today, 90,000 people were moved to the
station. Seventeen convoys have already taken 48,400 people to their destina-
tion. Twenty-five convoys are being loaded up. The operation is running ex-
tremely smoothly. It continues." On 19 May, Beria informed Stalin that on the
second day 165,515 people had been assembled in the stations, and that 136,412
of these had been loaded into convoys. On 20 May, Serov and Kobulov sent
Beria a telegram announcing that the operation had finished at 4:30 that after-
noon, with a total of 173,287 people in transit. The last four convoys carrying
the 6,727 who remained were to leave that evening.*

From the reports of the NKVD bureaucracy it would appear that these
deportation operations, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, were a pure
formality, each operation more "successful," "effective," or "economical" than
the last. After the deportation of the Chechens, Ingush, and Balkars, Solomon
Milstein, a civil servant in the NKVD, drew up a long report on the "savings
of trucks, planks, buckets, and shovels during these last deportations in com-
parison with earlier ones."

Experience gained from transporting Karachai and Kalmyks has made it
possible for us to take certain measures that have allowed us to pare back
what is needed for convoys and hence ultimately to diminish the number
of journeys that need to be made. We now put 45 people into each cattle
truck as opposed to the previous 40. By placing the people together with
their possessions, we also cut down on the number of trucks required,
thus saving 37,548 meters of planks, 1 1,834 buckets, and 3,400 stoves. 4

What dreadful reality lay beyond this bureaucratic dream of an NKVD
operation carried out with terrifying efficiency? The experiences of some of

222

A State against Its People

the survivors were collected at the end of the 1970s. One recalled: 'The journey
to the destination of Zerabulak, in the Samarkand region, took twenty-four
days. From there we were taken to the Pravda kolkhoz, where our job was to
repair horse carts ... We worked hard, and we were always hungry. Many of
us could barely stand. They had deported thirty families from our village.
There were one or two survivors from five families. Everyone else died of
hunger or disease." Another survivor recounted that

in the tightly shut wagons, people died like flies because of hunger and
lack of oxygen, and no one gave us anything to eat or drink. In the
villages through which we passed, the people had all been turned against
us, and they had been told that we were all traitors, so there was a
constant rain of stones against the sides and doors of the wagons. When
they did open the doors in the middle of the steppes in Kazakhstan, we
were given military rations to eat but nothing to drink, and we were told
to throw all the dead out beside the railway line without burying them.
We then set off again/

Once they had arrived at their destinations in Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan,
Uzbekistan, or Siberia, the deportees were assigned to holhhozy or to local
industry. Problems with housing, work, and survival were their everyday lot, as
is clear from the local NKVD reports that were sent to Moscow and kept in
the extensive files of the ''special peoples" section of the Gulag, One report
from Kirgizstan in September 1944 mentions that of the 31,000 families re-
cently deported there, only 5,000 had been housed. And "housed" itself seems
to have been quite a flexible term. The text reveals that in the district of
Kameninsky the local authorities had housed 900 families in eighteen apart-
ments in one sovkhoz (state farm); in other words, there were 50 families in
each apartment. These families, many of whom had a large number of children,
must have taken turns sleeping in the apartment, and the rest of the time were
forced to sleep outside as the harsh winter approached.

In a letter to Mikoyan in November 1944, more than a year after the
deportation of the Kalmyks, Beria himself acknowledged that "they had been
placed in exceptionally difficult living conditions with extremely poor sanita-
tion. Many of them had no underwear, no shoes, and very few clothes." Two
years later two NKVD leaders reported that a 30 percent of the Kalmyks who
are fit to work are unable to work because they have no shoes. The fact that
they are totally unadapted to the severe climate and to the unusual conditions,
and that they have no knowledge of the local language, also implies another
whole series of difficulties." 6 Uprooted from their homes, hungry, and working
on collective farms so poorly managed that they could barely manage to ktd
themselves, or in factories for which they had received no training, many

The Other Side of Victory

223

deportees were very poor workers. a The situation of the Kalmyks deported to
Siberia is tragic," D. P. Pyurveev, the former president of the Autonomous
Republic of Kalmykia, wrote to Stalin.

They have lost all their cattle. They arrived in Siberia having nothing at
all . . . They are very poorly adapted to the new living conditions in the
region to which they have been sent . . . The Kalmyks working on the
collective farms receive almost nothing at all, since even the original
workers on the farms cannot feed themselves. Those who have been sent
to factories instead are finding it extremely hard to adjust to this new
existence, and also to the fact that they are unable to buy a normal food
ration because they are not paid properly 7

Condemned to spending their lives standing in front of machinery, the
Kalmyks, who were a nomadic agricultural people, often saw all of their tiny
salary taken away in fines.

A few figures give an idea of the scale of death among the deportees. In
January 1946 the Administration for Special Resettlements calculated that there
were 70,360 Kalmyks remaining of the 92,000 who had been deported two
years previously. On 1 July 1944, 35,750 Tatar families representing 151,424
people had arrived in Uzbekistan; six months later there were 818 more families
but 16,000 fewer people. Of the 608,749 people deported from the Caucasus,
146,892, or nearly 1 in 4, had died by 1 October 1948, and a mere 28,120 had
been born in the meantime. Of the 228,392 people deported from the Crimea,
44,887 had died after four years, and there had been only 6,564 births. 8 The
extremely high mortality rate becomes even more apparent when one also takes
into account the fact that between 40 percent and 50 percent of the deportees
were under sixteen years of age. "Death from natural causes" was thus only a
tiny part of these statistics. The children who did survive had little future: of
the 89,000 children deported to Kazakhstan, fewer than 12,000 had been given
places in schools four years later. Moreover, official instructions insisted that
all school lessons for children of "specially displaced peoples" were to be
carried out exclusively in Russian.

These were not the only official deportations carried out during the war. On 29
May 1944, a few days after the end of the operation to deport the Tatars from
the Crimea, Beria wrote to Stalin: "The NKVD also thinks it reasonable to
expel from the Crimea all the Bulgars, Greeks, and Armenians." The Bulgars
were accused of "having actively assisted the Germans in making bread and
other foodstuffs for the German army" and of "having collaborated with the
German military authorities in searching for soldiers from the Red Army and
for partisans." The Greeks were accused of "having set up small industries

224

A State against Its People

after the arrival of the invading forces, the German authorities also helped the
Greeks do business, organize transport etc." The Armenians, in their turn,
were accused of having set up a collaborationist center in Simferopol called the
Dromedar, presided over by E. Dro, the Armenian army general. Their pur-
poses supposedly were "not only religious and political, but also to develop
small industries and private businesses." In Beria's opinion, the organization
u had collected funds both for the military needs of the Germans and with a
view to setting up an Armenian legion." 9

Four days later, on 2 June 1944, Stalin signed a decree from the State
Committee for Defense ordering that "the expulsion of the Crimean Tatars
should be accompanied by the expulsion of 37,000 Bulgars, Greeks, and Ar-
menians, accomplices of the Germans," As had been the case for the other
contingents of deportees, the decree arbitrarily fixed the quotas for each "wel-
come region": 7,000 for the Gurev region, in Kazakhstan; 10,000 for Sverd-
lovsk Province; 10,000 for Molotov Province, in the Urals; 6,000 for Kemerovo
Province; and 4,000 for Bashkiria. As was always the claim, "the operation was
successfully carried out" on 27 and 28 June 1944. Over those two days, 41,854
people were deported, that is, "111 percent of the planned number," as the
report emphasized.

Once the Crimea had been purged of Germans, Tatars, Bulgars, Greeks,
and Armenians, the NKVD decided to cleanse the Caucasus regions. Based on
the same underlying preoccupation with the cleansing of national boundaries,
these large-scale operations were in many ways the natural continuation of the
antiespionage operations of 1937-38 in a more systematic form. On 21 July
1944 a new decree from the State Committee for Defense signed by Stalin
ordered the deportation of 86,000 Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins
from the border regions of Georgia. Given the mountainous nature of the
territory and the nomadic lifestyles of many of these peoples, who until recently
had been part of the Ottoman Empire and had always passed freely between
the Soviet and Turkish lands, the preparations for the deportations were par-
ticularly long. The operation lasted from 15 to 25 November 1944 and was
carried out by 14,000 special troops from the NKVD. Nine hundred Stude-
baker trucks, provided by the Americans as part of the lend-lease arrangement
that supplied large quantities of munitions for the Allies in the anti-German
war effort, were diverted to help carry out the deportations. 10

In a report to Stalin on 28 November, Beria claimed to have transferred
91,095 people in ten days "under particularly difficult conditions." In Beria's
opinion, all of these were Turkish spies, even though more than 49 percent
were under sixteen. "The majority of the population of this region have family
ties with the inhabitants of the border districts of Turkey. They are for the
most part smugglers, show a strong inclination to emigrate, and provide many

The Other Side of Victory

225

recruits for the Turkish intelligence services and for the gangs of bandits that
operate all along the border." According to the statistics from the "people
movements" section of the Gulag, nearly 94,955 people were deported to
Kazakhstan and Kirgizstan. Between November 1944 and July 1948, 19,540
Meskhetians, Kurds, and Khemshins, approximately 21 percent of all the
people moved, died as a result of deportation. This mortality rate of 20-25
percent in four years was almost identical for all such peoples punished by the
regime. 11

The deportation of hundreds of thousands of people on ethnic criteria
during the war increased the number of "specially displaced" from approxi-
mately 1.2 million to more than 2.5 million. The victims of dekulakization
operations before the war had made up the greater part of the "specially
displaced," but their number fell from approximately 936,000 at the outbreak
of war to 622,000 in May 1945. In fact tens of thousands of adult males
formerly classed as kulaks, with the exception of heads of families, were con-
scripted into the army during the war. Their wives and children then recovered
their previous status as free citizens and were no longer classed as "specially
displaced." But with conditions as they were during the war, the newly freed
were in practice rarely able to leave their designated residences, particularly
because all their goods and even their houses had been confiscated. 12

Conditions for survival in the gulags were most difficult in the years
1941-1944. Famine, epidemics, overcrowding, and inhuman exploitation were
added to the continual suffering of the zeks, who were also subject to unusually
harsh conditions at work and were constantly monitored by an army of inform-
ers whose task was to expose the "counterrevolutionary organizations of pris-
oners. 1 ' Summary executions occurred every day.

The rapid German advance in the first months of the war forced the
NKVD to evacuate several prisons, labor colonies, and camps that would
otherwise have fallen into enemy hands. Between July and December 1941, 210
colonies, 135 prisons, and 27 camps, containing nearly 750,000 prisoners, were
transferred to the east. Summarizing "gulag activity in the Great Patriotic
War," the Gulag chief, Ivan Nasedkin, claimed that "on the whole, the evacu-
ation of the camps was quite well organized." He went on to add, however, that
"because of the shortage of transport, most of the prisoners were evacuated on
foot, over distances that sometimes exceeded 600 miles." 13 One can well imagine
the condition in which the prisoners arrived at their destinations. When there
was not enough time for a camp to be evacuated, as was often the case in the
opening weeks of the war, the prisoners were simply executed. This was
particularly the case in western Ukraine, where at the end of June 1941 the
NKVD massacred 10,000 prisoners in Lviv, 1,200 in the prison at Lutsk, 1,500
in Stanislwow, and 500 in Dubno. When the Germans arrived, they discovered

226

A State against Its People

dozens of mass graves in the regions of Lviv, Zhytomyr, and Vynnytsa. Using
these "Judeo-Bolshevik atrocities" as a pretext, the Nazi Sander kommundm in
their turn immediately massacred tens of thousands of Jews.

All administration reports from the gulags for the years 1941-1944 em-
phasize the horrendous deterioration of living conditions in the camps during
the war. 14 In the overcrowded camps, the living space of each prisoner fell from
1.5 square meters to 0.7; prisoners must have taken turns sleeping on boards,
since beds were then a luxury reserved for workers with special status. Average
daily caloric intake fell by 65 percent from prewar levels. Famine became
widespread, and in 1942 typhus and cholera began to appear in the camps.
According to official figures, nearly 19,000 prisoners died of these diseases each
year. In 1941 there were nearly 101,000 deaths in the labor camps alone, not
including the forced-labor colonies. Thus the annual death rate was approach-
ing 8 percent. In 1942 the Gulag Administration registered 249,000 deaths (a
death rate of 18 percent), and in 1943, 167,000 deaths (a death rate of 17
percent). 15 If one also includes the executions of prisoners and deaths in the
prisons and in the forced-labor colonies, one can roughly calculate that there
were some 600,000 deaths in the gulags in 1941^0 alone. The survivors were
also in a pitiful state. According to the administration's own figures, only 19
percent of all prisoners by the end of 1942 were capable of heavy physical labor,
17 percent were capable of medium physical labor, and 64 percent were able to
perform "light work" — which meant that they were sick.

Here are excerpts from a report, dated 2 November 1941, from the assis-
tant chief of the Operational Department of the Gulag Administration on the
situation in the Siblag camps.

According to information received from the operational department of
the Novosibirsk NKVD, there has been a sharp increase in mortality
among the prisoners in the Akhlursk, Kuznetsk, and Novosibirsk de-
partments of Siblag , . .

The causes of this increase, as well as of the huge rise in the
number of recorded instances of disease, is undoubtedly widespread
undernourishment resulting from the constant lack of food and the
harsh working conditions, which place great strain on the heart.

The lack of medical attention given to prisoners, the difficulty of
the work they carry out, the long working day, and the lack of sufficient
nourishment all contribute to the sharp increase in the death rate . . .

Numerous deaths from malnutrition, undernourishment, and
widespread epidemics have also been recorded among the prisoners sent
from different sorting centers to the camps. On 8 October 1941 more
than 30 percent of the 539 prisoners sent from the Novosibirsk sorting
center in the Marinskoe division were extremely underweight and cov-

The Other Side of Victory

227

ered with lice. Six corpses also arrived with the prisoners. 16 On the night
of 8-9 October another five died. In another convoy that arrived from
the same sorting center in the Marinskoe division on 20 September, all
the prisoners were covered in lice, and a considerable portion of them
had no underwear . , .

Recently, in the Siblag camps, there were numerous acts of sabo-
tage by the medical staff made up of prisoners. One assistant from the
A/her camp, in the department of Taiginsk, sentenced under section 10
of Article 58, ,7 organized a group of prisoners to sabotage production. 18
Members of the group were caught sending sick workers to the hardest
physical labor sites, rather than curing them, in the hope that this would
slow down camp production and prevent the targets from being met.

Assistant Chief of the Operational Department of the Gulag Ad-
ministration, Captain of the Security Forces, Kogenman.

These u severe health problems encountered by prisoners," to use the Gulag
euphemism, did not prevent the authorities from exerting even greater pres-
sure on the prisoners, often until they dropped. "From 1941 to 1944," the
chief of the Gulag wrote in his report, "the average worth of a day's work rose
from 9.5 to 21 rubles." Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were drafted into
the armaments factories to replace the manpower that had been conscripted
into the army. The Gulag's role in the war economy came to be extremely
prominent. According to estimates by the penal administration, prisoner man-
power was responsible for nearly a quarter of all production in certain key
sectors of the armaments industry, notably in metallurgy and mining. 19

Despite the "solid patriotic attitude" of the prisoners, 95 percent of whom
"were strongly committed to the socialist cause," the oppression, notably
against political prisoners, was as intense as ever. As a result of a decree issued
by the Central Committee on 22 June 1941, not a single "58" (a prisoner
sentenced as a result of Article 58 of the penal code) was to be released before
the end of the war, even if he had served his time. Prisoners sentenced for
political crimes (such as belonging to a counterrevolutionary party or to a
right-wing or Trotskyite organization) or for espionage, treason, or terrorism
were isolated in heavily guarded special camps in areas where the climate was
most severe, such as the Kolyma region and the Arctic. In such camps the
annual death rate regularly reached 30 percent. After a decree of 22 April 1943,
specially reinforced punishment camps were opened up, which in effect became
death camps, since the prisoners were exploited in a manner that made survival
extremely unlikely. A twelve-hour working day under poisonous conditions in
the gold, coal, lead, and radium mines, most of which were situated in the
Kolyma and Vorkuta regions, was tantamount to a death sentence. 20

From July 1941 to July 1944 special courts in the camps sentenced 148,000

228

A State against Its People

prisoners to new punishments and executed 10,858 of these: 208 were executed
for espionage, 4,307 for subversive and terrorist activities, and 6,016 for having
organized an uprising or riot in the camps. According to NKVD figures, 603
"prisoner organizations' 1 in the gulags were eliminated during the war. 21 Al-
though it is possible that these figures were meant to show the continued
vigilance of the system despite considerable restructuring— many of the special
troops who had guarded the camps had been assigned to other tasks, notably
to deportation activities — there is no doubt that during the war the camps faced
their first mass escapes and their first large-scale revolts.

In fact the population of the camps changed considerably during the war.
Following the decree of 12 July 1941 more than 577,000 prisoners who, as the
authorities themselves acknowledged, had been sentenced for "insignificant
crimes such as unjustified absenteeism at work or petty theft' 1 were set free and
immediately integrated into the Red Army. During the war more than
1,068,000 prisoners went directly from the gulags to the front, if one includes
those who served out their sentences in full. 22 The weakest prisoners and those
least adapted to the harsh conditions that prevailed in the camps were among
the approximately 600,000 who died in the gulags in 1941-1943. While the
camps and colonies were being emptied of so many who had been sentenced
for minor offenses, the toughest and most recalcitrant stayed behind and sur-
vived, whether they were political prisoners or common criminals. The share
of those sentenced to long terms of imprisonment (eight years or more) as a
result of Article 58 increased from 27 to 43 percent of all prisoners. This
change in the complexion of the prison population was to become all the more
marked in 1944 and 1945, when the gulags grew immensely, increasing their
population by more than 45 percent between January 1944 and January 1945.

The U.S.S.R. in 1945 is best remembered as a country devastated but trium-
phant. As Francois Furet once wrote: "In 1945, as a great glorious state, the
U.S.S.R. joined tremendous material might to a messianic new vision of man.""
No one remembers, or at least no one seems willing to recall, the other — well
hidden — side of the story. As the Gulag archives demonstrate, the year of
victory was also the apogee of the Soviet concentration-camp system. When
peace was made with the rest of the world, the struggles within continued
unabated; there was no let-up in state control over a society bruised from four
years of war. On the contrary, 1945 was a year when regions were reoccupied
by the Soviet Union as the Red Army advanced west, and when millions of
Soviet citizens who had managed to escape the system were also finally forced
to submit.

The territories annexed in 1939^K) — the Baltic states, western Belorussia,

The Other Side of Victory

229

Moldavia, and western Ukraine — which had been free of Soviet control during
most of the war, were forced to undergo a second process of Sovietization.
Nationalist opposition movements had sprung up in protest against the Soviet
Union, beginning a cycle of armed struggle, persecution, and repression. Re-
sistance to annexation was particularly fierce in western Ukraine and the Baltic
states.

The first occupation of western Ukraine, from September 1939 to June
1941, had brought about the formation of a fairly powerful armed resistance
movement, the OUN, or Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Members of
this organization subsequently enlisted as special troops in SS units to fight
Communists and Jews. In July 1944, when the Red Army arrived, the OUN
set up a Supreme Council for the Liberation of Ukraine. Roman Shukhovich,
the head of the OU N, became commander of the UPA, the Ukrainian insurgent
army. According to Ukrainian sources, the UPA had more than 20,000 mem-
bers by the autumn of 1944. On 31 March 1944, Beria signed an order stipu-
lating that all family members of soldiers in the OUN and UPA were to be
arrested and deported to the region of Krasnoyarsk. From February to October
1944, 100,300 civilians (mainly women, children, and old people) were de-
ported under Beria's order. As for the 37,000 soldiers who were taken prisoner
during this time, all were sent to the gulags. In November 1944, after the death
of Monsignor Andrei Shcheptytsky, metropolitan of the Uniate Church of
Ukraine, the Soviet authorities forced that religious body to merge with the
Orthodox Church.

To root out all opposition to Sovietization, NKVD agents targeted the
schools. After leafing through the schoolbooks of children who had attended
school when western Ukraine had still been a part of "bourgeois" Poland, they
drew up lists of people to be arrested as a preventive measure. At the top of
these lists were the names of the most able pupils, whom they judged to be
"potentially hostile to the Soviet system." According to a report by Kobulov,
one of Beria's assistants, more than 100,000 "deserters" and "collaborators"
were arrested between September 1944 and March 1945 in western Belorussia,
another region considered "full of elements hostile to the Soviet regime." The
few statistics available for Lithuania in the period 1 January-15 March 1945
note 2,257 ethnic-cleansing operations.

These operations were also notable for the death of more than 6,000
"bandits" and for the arrest of more than 75,000 "bandits, deserters, and
members of nationalist groups." In 1945 more than 38,000 "members of the
families of socially alien elements, bandits, and nationalists" were deported
from Lithuania. In 1944—1946 the proportion of people from these regions
imprisoned in the gulags increased 140 percent for Ukrainians and 420 percent

230

A State against Its People

for people from the Baltic states. By the end of 1946, Ukrainians became 23
percent and Baltic nationals 6 percent of the population in the camps, and thus
were more highly represented than the rest of the Soviet population.

The growth of the gulags in 1945 can also be explained by the transfer of
thousands of prisoners from "control and filtration camps." These were camps
that had been set up after 1941 in parallel to the Gulag labor camps. They were
intended to contain Soviet prisoners of war who had been set free or had
managed to escape from enemy prisoner-of-war camps; all were suspected of
being potential spies or at least of having been contaminated by their stay
outside the Soviet system. The camps imprisoned men of draft age from
territories formerly occupied by the enemy, as well as the senior officials
(starostt) and any others who had occupied a position of authority — no matter
how minor — during the occupation. From January 1942 to October 1944 more
than 421,000 people, according to official figures, passed through the control
and filtration camps. 21

After the advance of the Red Army in the west and the retaking of
territories that had been under the control of the Germans for two to three
years, the liberation of Soviet prisoners of war and those held in labor camps
and the repatriation of both military and civilian Soviet citizens became an
urgent matter. In October 1944 the Soviet government established a Repatria-
tion Affairs Department, headed by General Filip Golikov. In an interview
published in the press on 11 November 1944, the general stressed that "the
Soviet regime is most concerned about the fate of its children who were
dragged into Nazi slavery. They will be respectfully received back home like
honest children of the fatherland. The Soviet government believes that even
Soviet citizens who under the threat of Nazi terror committed acts that went
against the interests of the U.S.S.R. will not be held responsible for those
actions, provided that these people are prepared to carry out their normal duties
as Soviet citizens upon their return. " This declaration, which was widely
circulated, managed to deceive the Allies. How else can one explain the zeal
with which they carried out the clauses of the Yalta agreement concerning the
repatriation of all Soviet citizens "present outside the borders of the home
country"? While the agreement stipulated quite clearly that only people who
had worn German uniforms or actively collaborated with the enemy would be
forcibly repatriated, any Soviet citizen found outside the national boundaries
was, in practice, handed over to NKVD agents in charge of their return.

Three days after the cessation of hostilities, on 11 May 1945, the Soviet
government ordered the creation of 100 new control and filtration camps, each
containing space for 10,000 people. Repatriated Soviet prisoners of war were
under the jurisdiction of SMERSH (Death to Spies), the counterespionage
organization, while civilians were filtered on an ad-hoc basis through the

The Other Side of Victory

231

NKVD. Between May 1945 and February 1946 more than 4.2 million Soviet
citizens were repatriated, including 1,545,000 surviving prisoners of war out
of the 5 million captured by the Germans and 2,655,000 civilians, work deport-
ees, or people who had fled to the West when the fighting had broken out. After
their obligatory stay in the filtration and control camps, 57.8 percent of those
repatriated, mostly women and children, were allowed to return to their homes;
19.1 percent were drafted back into the army, often into disciplinary battalions;
14.5 percent were sent, generally for at least two years, into "reconstruction
battalions"; and S.6 percent, or about 360,000 people, were either sentenced to
between ten and twenty years in the gulags, most of them for "treason against
the fatherland," or sent to an NKVD komandatura with the status of "specially
displaced person." 24

A singular fate was reserved for the Vlasovtsy, the Soviet soldiers who had
fought under the Soviet general Andrei Vlasov. Vlasov was the commander of
the Second Army who had been taken prisoner by the Germans in July 1942.
On the basis of his anti-Stalinist convictions, General Vlasov agreed to collabo-
rate with the Nazis to free his country from the tyranny of the Bolsheviks. With
the support of the German authorities, Vlasov formed a Russian National
Committee and trained two divisions of an "Army for the Liberation of Rus-
sia." After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Allies handed over General Vlasov
and his officers to the Soviet Union, and they were promptly executed. The
soldiers trom Vlasov's army, following an amnesty decree of November 1945,
were deported for six years to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the far north. In early
1946, 148,079 I'lasovtsy, most of them noncommissioned officers, were accused
of treason and sent to the gulags. 25

The "special resettlements," the gulags, the forced-labor colonies, the
control and filtration camps, and the Soviet prisons had never held as many
prisoners as they did in the year of victory: a grand total of nearly 5.5 million
people. This figure was eclipsed by the festivities of victory and the "Stalingrad
effect." The end of World War II began a new period in Soviet history, destined
to last nearly a decade, when the Soviet model was to elicit a fascination shared
by tens of millions of citizens from countries the world over. The fact that the
U.S.S.R. had paid the heaviest human toll for its victory over Nazism — a toll
greatly magnified by Stalin's own mistakes and misjudgments — served to mask
the character of the Stalinist dictatorship and cleared the regime of all suspi-
cions formerly aroused in the era of the Moscow trials and the Nazi-Soviet
pact.

Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System

I he last years of Stalinism were marked neither by a new Great
Terror nor by more public show-trials. But the heavy and oppressive climate
continued in postwar Russia, and the criminalization of different types of
social behavior reached its height. The hope that the regime might relax its
grip after the long and murderous war proved vain. u The people have suffered
too much, and it is inconceivable that the past should repeat itself," wrote Uya
Ehrenburg in his memoirs on 9 May 1945; but he immediately added: "Yet I
am filled with perplexity and anguish." This foreboding was all too prophetic.
u The population is torn between despair in the face of an extremely
difficult material situation, and the hope that something is going to change,"
So read several inspection reports sent to Moscow in September and October
1945 by instructors from the Soviet Central Committee who were touring
different provinces. The reports claimed that many parts of the country were
still in chaos. Production was delayed by an immense and spontaneous migra-
tion of workers who had been sent east during the evacuations of 1941 and
1942. A wave of strikes of unprecedented size were rocking the metallurgy
industry in the Urals. Famine and terrible living conditions were becoming the
norm. The country had 25 million people without homes, and bread rations
were less than one pound per day for manual laborers. At the end of October
1945 the situation was so bad in Novosibirsk that the heads of the regional

Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System

Party committee went so far as to suggest that the workers not participate in
the parade to mark the occasion of the October Revolution, because so many
of the population lacked clothes and shoes. In the face of such misery, rumors
spread quickly, particularly concerning the imminent abandonment of collec-
tive farming practices, since it had been demonstrated yet again that the kolk-
hozy were incapable of feeding the peasants and providing them with a few
pudy of wheat in exchange for a whole season's work. 1

It was on the agricultural front that the situation was most perilous. The
countryside was devastated by war and a severe drought; and with both ma-
chinery and manpower in critically short supply, the harvest of the autumn of
1946 was catastrophic. Once again the government was forced to continue
rationing, despite Stalin's promise in a speech on 9 February 1946 that ration-
ing would end. Refusing to look into the reasons for this agricultural disaster,
and blaming the failure on the greed of a few private farmers, the government
decided to "eliminate all violations of the status of the kolkhozy" and to go after
"hostile and foreign elements sabotaging the collection process, thieves, and
anyone caught pilfering the harvest." On 19 September 1946 a Commission for
Kolkhoz Affairs was established, chaired by Andrei Andreev; its task was to
confiscate all the land that had been "illegally appropriated" by kolkhoz workers
during the war. In two years the administration managed to recover nearly 10
million hectares that peasants had whittled away, trying to gather more land in
an attempt to survive.

On 25 October 1946 a government decree titled "The Defense of State
Cereals 11 ordered the Ministry of Justice to dispatch all cases of theft within
ten days, and to apply once again the full force of the law of 7 August 1932,
which by then had fallen into disuse. In November and December 1946 sen-
tences were handed down against more than 53,300 people, most of them
collective farm workers, who were sent to the camps for the theft of grain or
bread. Thousands of kolkhoz chiefs were arrested for "sabotaging the country-
side collection campaign." Initially collections typically met 33 percent of their
targets, but in these two months the share rose to 77 percent. 2 This increase
came at a price: Behind the euphemism "delay in the collection in the country-
side" lurked the bitter realities of another famine.

The famine of the autumn and winter of 1946-47 struck the regions most
severely affected by the drought of the summer of 1946, that is, the provinces
of Kursk, Tambov, Voronezh, Orel, and Rostov. There were at least 500,000
victims. As in 1932, the famine of 1946-47 was passed over in total silence. The
refusal to lower the obligatory collection targets when the harvest in some areas
reached scarcely 250 kilos per hectare meant that shortage evolved into famine.
The starving workers often had no choice but to steal a few reserves simply to
survive. In one year, recorded thefts rose by 44 percent. 1

233

232

234

A State against Its People

On 5 June 1947 two decrees issued by the government the previous day
were published, both of which were very close to the spirit and letter of the
famous law of 7 August 1932. These stipulated that any "attack on state or
kolkhoz property" was punishable by a camp sentence of between five and
twenty-five years, depending on whether it was an individual or collective
crime, and whether it was a first or repeat offense. Anyone who knew of
preparations for a theft, or was a witness and failed to inform the police,
received a sentence of one to three years. A confidential circular reminded
courts that petty thefts in the workplace, which until then had carried a maxi-
mum penalty of the loss of civil rights for one year, henceforth fell within the
remit of these new laws of 4 June 1947.

In the second half of that year more than 380,000 people, including 2 1 ,000
under age sixteen, were sentenced as a result of this new, draconian law. For
the theft of no more than a few kilos of rye, one could be sentenced to eight to
ten years in the camps. An example is the following verdict of the People's
Court in the Suzdal district, in Vladimir Province, dated 10 October 1947:
''While on duty guarding the kolkhoz horses at night, N. A. and B. S., two
minors of fifteen and sixteen, were caught in the act of stealing three cucumbers
from the kolkhoz vegetable patch . . . N. A. and B. S. have thus been sentenced
to eight years custody in an ordinary labor colony." 4 Over a period of six years,
as a result of the decrees of 4 June, 1.3 million people were sentenced, 75
percent to more than five years. In 1951 they accounted for 5^ percent of all
common criminals in the gulags, and nearly 40 percent of all prisoners.' At the
end of the 1940s, strict enforcement of the decrees of 4 June considerably
increased the average length of sentences passed by ordinary courts; the share
of sentences exceeding five years rose from 2 percent in 1940 to 29 percent in
1949. At this high point of Stalinism, "ordinary" repressive punishments, of
the sort meted out by people's courts, took the place of the extrajudicial NKYD
terror that had been more the norm in the 1930s. 6

Among people sentenced for theft were numerous women, war widows,
and mothers with young children who had been reduced to begging and stealing
to survive. At the end of 1948 the gulags contained more than 500,000 prisoners
(twice as many as in 1945). Some 22,815 children under age four were kept in
the "infant houses" located in the women's camps. By early 1953 this figure
rose to more than 35,000. 7 To prevent the gulags from turning into vast nurs-
eries, the government was forced to decree a partial amnesty in April 1949, so
that nearly 84,200 mothers and children were set free. Even so, the permanent
influx of hundreds of thousands of people charged with petty thefts meant that
until 1953 there was still a relatively high number of women in the gulags, who
generally accounted for 25-30 percent of all prisoners.

In 1947 and 1948 the armory of repressive laws was augmented by several

Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System

235

more decrees that were quite revealing of the climate at the time: a decree
forbidding marriages between Soviet citizens and foreigners on 15 February

1947 and another decree on "penalties for divulging state secrets or losing
documents containing state secrets" on 9 June 1947. The best known is the
decree of 21 February 1948, according to which "all spies, Trotskyites, sabo-
teurs, right-wingers, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists, nation-
alists, Whites, and other anti-Soviet groups, on completion of their camp
sentences, will be exiled to the Kolyma regions, the provinces of Novosibirsk
and Krasnoyarsk . . . and to certain distant regions of Kazakhstan." In reality,
prison administrations preferred to keep these "anti-Soviet elements" (mostly
the Article 58 political prisoners sentenced in 1937 and 1938) under close
guard, and arbitrarily extended their sentences by another ten years.

On the same day, 21 February 1948, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet
adopted another decree ordering the deportation from the Ukrainian S.S.R. of
"all individuals refusing to comply with the minimum number of work days in
the kolkhozy and living like parasites." On 2 June the measure was extended to
the rest of the country. The dilapidated collective farms were in no position to
guarantee the slightest remuneration to workers, and so numerous workers
regularly had failed to comply with the minimum number of work days im-
posed by the administration. Millions were thus suddenly under threat from
this new law. Understanding that the strict application of this new decree on
"parasitism" would disrupt production even further, local authorities were
generally lax in applying the law. Nonetheless, in 1948 alone more than 38,000
"parasites" were deported and assigned a residence in an NKVD komandatura.
These repressive measures totally eclipsed the symbolic (and short-lived) abo-
lition of the death penalty on 26 May 1947. On 12 January 1950 capital
punishment was reinstated to permit the execution of the accused in the
"Leningrad Affair" of that year.*

In the 1930s the "right to return" of deportees and the "specially dis-
placed" had led to some contradictory and incoherent government policies. At
the end of the 1940s the question was resolved in a fairly radical manner: it was
decided that all people who had been deported in 1941-1945 had in fact been
deported "in perpetuity." The problem posed by the fate of the children of
deportees who had reached the age of majority thus disappeared immediately.
They and their children, too, were always to remain "specially displaced."

In the period 1948-1953 the number of "specially displaced" continued
to grow, from 2,342,000 in early 1948 to 2,753,000 in January 1953. This
increase was the result of several new waves of deportation. On 22 and 23 May

1948 the NKVD launched a huge roundup named "Operation Spring" in
Lithuania, a nation still resisting enforced collectivization. Within forty-eight
hours 36,932 men, women, and children were arrested and deported in thirty-

236

A State against Its People

two convoys. All were categorized as "bandits, nationalists, and family members
of these two categories.' 1 After a journey lasting between four and five weeks,
they were divided up among the various komandatury in eastern Siberia and
set to work in the harsh conditions of the different logging centers. One NKVD
note observed that

the Lithuanian families sent as a workforce to the Igara forestry center
(in the Krasnoyarsk territory) are presently living in conditions that are
quite inappropriate for the local climate: the roofs leak, there is no glass
in the windows, no furniture, and no beds. The deportees sleep on the
floor, on beds of moss or straw. This overcrowding, and the constant
breaking of the sanitary regulations, have led to cases of typhus and
dysentery, which are sometimes fatal, among the specially displaced.

In 1948 alone nearly 50,000 Lithuanians were deported as "specially dis-
placed," and 30,000 were sent to the gulags. In addition, according to figures
from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 21,259 Lithuanians were killed in
"pacification operations" in that republic. At the end of 1948, despite ever-
more-vigorous pressure from the authorities, less than 4 percent of the land
had undergone collectivization in the Baltic states. g

Early in 1949 the Soviet government decided to accelerate the process of
Sovietization in the Baltic countries and to "eradicate banditry and nationalism
once and for all" in these newly annexed republics. On 12 January the Council
of Ministers issued a decree "on the expulsion and deportation from the
Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian S.S.R.s of all kulaks and their families, the
families of bandits and nationalists whose present situation is illegal, the fami-
lies of bandits killed in armed confrontations, any bandits arrested or freed who
are still carrying out hostile operations, and the families of any bandit's accom-
plices." From March to May 1949 nearly 95,000 people were deported from
the Baltic republics to Siberia. According to the report addressed to Stalin by
Sergei Kruglov on 1 8 May 1949, these "elements who are hostile and dangerous
to the Soviet regime" included 27,084 under the age of sixteen, 1,785 young
children who had no family left, 146 disabled people, and 2,850 infirm elderly. 10
In September 1951 a new series of sweeps resulted in the deportation of
another 17,000 so-called Baltic kulaks. For the years 1940-1953 the number of
deportees from the Baltic is estimated at 200,000, including about 120,000
Lithuanians, 50,000 Latvians, and just over 30,000 Estonians." To these figures
one should add the number of people from the Baltic imprisoned in the
gulags— a total of 75,000 in 1953, including 44,000 in special camps that were
reserved for hard-line political prisoners. In the special camps, 20 percent of
the inmates were of Baltic origin. In total, 10 percent of the entire adult Baltic
population was either deported or in a camp.

The Moldavians, another nationality occupied by the U.S.S.R., also

Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System

237

strongly resisted Sovietization and collectivization. At the end of 1949 the
authorities carried out a huge deportation sweep among "socially alien and
hostile elements." The operation was overseen by the first secretary of the
Communist Party in Moldavia, Leonid Ilych Brezhnev, later to become general
secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. A report from Kruglov to
Stalin dated 17 February 1950 revealed that 94,792 Moldavians had been
deported "in perpetuity" as "specially displaced." If the same death rate during
transport applied to the Moldavian operation as in other deportations, this
would mean that approximately 120,000 people, nearly 7 percent of the popu-
lation, were taken from Moldavia. In June 1949, 57,680 Greeks, Armenians,
and Turks from the shores of the Black Sea were deported to Kazakhstan and
Altai. 12

Throughout the second half of the 1940s the OUN and UPA partisans
captured in Ukraine accounted for a large share of the "specially displaced."
From July 1944 to December 1949 the Soviet authorities made seven appeals
to the insurgents to give up their weapons, promising amnesty, but with no
tangible results. In 1945-1947 the countryside of western Ukraine was still
largely in the hands of the rebels, who were supported by a peasantry hostile
to any form of collectivization. The rebel forces operated on the borders of
Poland and Czechoslovakia, fleeing over the border when pursued. One can
gain some idea of the size of the rebel movement in the agreement that the
Soviet government signed with Poland and Czechoslovakia to coordinate the
struggle against the Ukrainian gangs. As a result of the agreement, the Polish
government moved the whole of its Ukrainian population to the northwest of
Poland to deprive the rebellion in Ukraine of its base. 11

The famine of 1946—47 forced tens of thousands of peasants from eastern
Ukraine to flee to the less affected west, and it also swelled the number of rebels.
To judge from the last amnesty proposal, signed by the Ukrainian minister of
interna] affairs on 30 December 1949, the rebel gangs were not made up solely
of peasants. The text also mentions, among the various categories of bandits,
"young people who have fled the factories, the Donetsk mines, and the indus-
trial schools." Western Ukraine was finally "pacified" at the end of 1950, after
forced collectivization of the land, the displacement of whole villages, and the
arrest and deportation of more than 300,000 people. According to statistics
from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, nearly 172,000 members of the OUN
and the UPA were deported as "specially displaced" to Kazakhstan and Siberia
in 1944—1952, often together with their families. 14

Deportation operations for what the Ministry of Internal Affairs de-
scribed as "diverse contingents" continued right up until Stalin's death. In 1951
and 1952, as a result of various small-scale operations, the following were
deported: 11,685 Mingrelians and 4,707 Iranians from Georgia, 4,365 Jeho-
vah's Witnesses, 4,431 "kulaks" from western Belorussia, 1,445 "kulaks" from

238

A State against Its People

western Ukraine, 1,415 "kulaks" from the Pskov region, 995 people from the
sect that called itself u True Orthodox Christians," 2,795 basmachis from Tajik-
istan, and 591 "vagabonds." These deportees received slightly lesser sentences
of between ten and twenty years.

As the recently opened Gulag archives demonstrate, the early 1950s were the
most intense period of operation; never had so many people been detained in
the camps, forced-labor colonies, and penal settlements. This was also a period
of unprecedented crisis in the system.

In the first months of 1953 the gulags contained 2,750,000 prisoners, who
were grouped into three categories:

• Those incarcerated in the approximately 500 labor colonies, found in all
regions, containing between 1,000 and 3,000 prisoners on average, most
of whom were common criminals serving sentences of less than (\c
years

■ Those incarcerated in some 60 large penal complexes, or labor camps,
which were mainly in the northern and eastern regions of the countrv,
each holding tens of thousands of prisoners, common criminals, and po-
litical prisoners all serving sentences of more than ten years

• Those imprisoned in the approximately 15 special-regime camps, which
had been established following secret instructions from the Ministry of
Internal Affairs on 7 February 1948 to house only political prisoners
considered particularly dangerous, totaling approximately 200,000
people 15

This huge concentration-camp universe thus contained 2,750,000 prisoners;
another 2,750,000 "specially displaced people" were controlled by a different
part of the Gulag Administration. These numbers made for serious problems
in administration and control, as well as in economic profitability. In 1951
General Kruglov, the minister of internal affairs, was worried about the con-
stant decline in productivity among penal workers. He began a vast inspection
campaign to assess the state of the gulags. When the commissions reported
back, they revealed an extremely tense situation.

First of all, in the special-regime camps where "political" prisoners
(Ukrainian and Baltic "nationalists" from defeated guerrilla organizations,
"foreign elements" from newly incorporated regions, real or supposed "col-
laborators," and other "traitors to the fatherland") had been arriving since
1945, the detainees were far more determined than the "enemies of the people"
of the 1930s, who had been former Party cadres convinced that their impris-
onment had been the result of a terrible misunderstanding. These new people,
by contrast, condemned to twenty or twenty-five years with no hope of an early
release, felt they had nothing left to lose. Moreover, their isolation in the

Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System

239

special-regime camps had removed them from the influence of common crimi-
nals. As Aleksandr Solzhcnitsyn pointed out, the one thing that prevented an
atmosphere of solidarity from developing among prisoners was precisely the
presence of common criminals. Once this obstacle had been removed, the
special camps quickly became hotbeds of resistance and revolt against the
Soviet regime. Ukrainian and Baltic prisoners were particularly active in re-
volting against the system. Strikes, hunger strikes, mass escapes, and riots all
became increasingly common. Research so far reveals sixteen large-scale riots
and revolts in 1950-1952, each involving hundreds of prisoners. 16

The Kruglov inspections of 1951 also revealed that the system was dete-
riorating in ordinary camps, where "a general laxity in discipline" was to be
discerned. In 1951 a million work days were lost to protests and strikes by
prisoners. There was also a rising crime rate in the camps, an increasing number
of violent confrontations between prisoners and guards, and a decline in the
productivity of the penal workforce. According to the authorities, the situation
was largely the result of conflicts between rival gangs of prisoners, with one
group that refused to work and despised the other groups that did work,
labeling them collaborators. In-fighting among factions and fights among pris-
oners had a corrosive effect on discipline and generally created disorder. Deaths
from stabbing were more common than deaths from hunger or disease. A
conference of gulag commanders held in Moscow in January 1952 acknowl-
edged that "the authorities, who until now have been able to gain a certain
advantage from the hostilities between various groups of prisoners, [are] be-
ginning to lose their grip on the situation ... In some places, certain factions
are even beginning to run the camp along their own lines. 11 To break up groups
and factions, it was decided that prisoners should be moved between camps
more frequently, and that at the biggest penitentiaries, which often held be-
tween 40,000 and 60,000 people, there should be a permanent reorganization
into separate sections.' '

In addition to noting the considerable problems generated by the different
factions, many inspection reports from 1951 and 1952 acknowledged a need
both for a complete reorganization of the prisons and their systems of produc-
tion, and for a considerable scaling down of the entire operation.

In January 1952 Colonel Nikolai Zverev, the commander of the concen-
tration camps in Norilsk, where 69,000 prisoners were kept, sent a report to
General Ivan Dolgikh, the commander in chief of the gulags, with the following
recommendations:

1. Isolate the factions. u But," Zverev noted, "given the great number of
prisoners who belong to one or other of the rival factions, we would be
lucky if we could even simply isolate the leaders."

2. Abandon the huge production zones, where tens of thousands of pris-

240

A State against Its People

oners belonging to one faction or another are currently working without
supervision.

3. Establish smaller production units to ensure better surveillance of the
prisoners.

4. Increase the number of guards. "But," Zverev added, "it is currently
impossible to organize the guards in the desired fashion, since almost
double the number of guards is required."

5. Separate free workers from prisoners at all production sites. "But the
technical links between the different companies that make up the
Norilsk complex, and the requirement that production be continuous,
coupled with the serious housing shortage, all mean that it is currently
impossible to segregate the prisoners and the free workers in a satisfac-
tory manner . . . Generally speaking, the problem of productivity and
of uninterrupted production could be resolved only by the early release
of 15,000 prisoners, who in any case would be forced to remain at the
same site. 1 ' 18

Zverev's last proposal was far from incongruous, given the climate of
opinion at the time. In January 1951 Kruglov had asked Beria for the early
release of 6,000 prisoners, who were then to be sent as free workers to an
enormous construction site for the hydroelectric power station in Stalingrad,
where 25,000 prisoners were then toiling away in what was perceived to be an
extremely ineffectual manner. The practice of early release, particularly for
prisoners who had some qualifications, was fairly frequent in the early 1950s.
It also called into question the economic value of an outdated system of
concentration camps.

Faced with this huge increase in prisoners who were far less docile than
those in the past, and with a whole series of logistical and surveillance problems
(Gulag personnel now numbered approximately 208,000), the enormous ad-
ministrative machine found it more and more difficult to produce its /«//«— the
false accounts of its success. To resolve this enduring problem, the authorities
had a choice of two solutions: either to exploit all manpower to the maximum,
without regard for human losses, or to ensure the Gulag's survival by treating
the manpower with greater consideration. Until 1948 the first solution was
preferred; but at the end of the 1940s it dawned on Party leaders that with the
country bled dry by the war and manpower scarce in every sector of the
economy, it was far more logical to use the prisoner workforce in a more
economical fashion. To try to stimulate production, bonuses and salaries were
introduced, and food rations were increased for prisoners who met their quotas.
As a result, the death rate fell immediately by 2-3 percent. But the reforms
quickly came up against the harsh realities of life in the concentration camps.

Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System

241

By the beginning of the 1950s, the production infrastructure in general
was more than twenty years old and had had no benefit of any recent invest-
ment. The huge penitentiaries, which held tens of thousands of prisoners and
which had been built to use the extensive workforce in the big projects of the
time, were extremely difficult to reorganize, despite the numerous attempts
from 1949 to 1952 to break them up into smaller production units. The tiny
salaries given to prisoners, generally a few hundred rubles per year (fifteen to
twenty times less than the pay of a free worker), were an inadequate stimulus
to increased productivity. More and more prisoners were downing tools, refus-
ing to work, and forming organized groups that required ever-closer surveil-
lance. Regardless of whether they were better paid or guarded more closely, all
prisoners, both those who cooperated with the authorities and those who pre-
ferred to show solidarity with the other strikers, began to cost more and more
in economic terms,

All the information available from the inspection reports of 1951 and 1952
points in the same direction: The gulags had become a much harder mechanism
to control. All the large-scale Stalinist projects that were being built with largely
penal manpower, including the hydroelectric power stations in Kuibyshev and
Stalingrad, the Turkmenistan canal, and the Volga-Don canal, fell considerably
behind schedule. To speed up work, the authorities were forced to bring in a
large number of additional free workers, and to grant early release to a number
of prisoners in an attempt to motivate the others. 19

The Gulag crisis sheds new light on the amnesty of 1.2 million prisoners
decreed by Beria scarcely three weeks after Stalin's death, on 27 March 1953.
Certainly, political reasons alone could not have motivated Stalin's potential
successors to unite in proclaiming a partial amnesty. All were aware of the
immense difficulty of managing the overcrowded and unprofitable gulags. Yet
at the very moment when all the penal authorities were asking for a reduction
in the number of prisoners, Stalin, who was suffering increasingly from para-
noia in his old age, was preparing a second Great Terror. Such contradictions
abounded in the last, most troubled period of the Stalinist regime.

The Last Conspiracy

n 13 January 1953, Pravda announced the purported discovery
of a plot by a "terrorist group of doctors" consisting of first nine and then
fifteen famous physicians, more than half of whom were Jewish. They were
accused of having abused their high positions in the Kremlin to shorten the
lives of Andrei Zhdanov (a member of the Politburo who had died in 1948) and
Aleksandr Shcherbakov (who had died in 1950) and of having attempted to
assassinate several Soviet military officers at the behest of American intelli-
gence services and a Jewish charitable organization, the American Joint Distri-
bution Committee. While the woman who denounced the plot, Dr. Lydia
Timashuk, was solemnly awarded the Order of Lenin, the accused were inter-
rogated and forced to "confess." As in 1936-1938, thousands of meetings were
held to call for the punishment of the guilty and to demand further inquiries
and a return to old-fashioned Bolshevik vigilance. In the weeks following the
announced discovery of the "Doctors' Plot," a huge press campaign reestab-
lished the climate that had prevailed during the Great Terror, with demands
that "criminal negligence within the Party ranks be definitively stamped out,
and all saboteurs punished." The idea of a huge conspiracy among intellectu-
als, Jews, soldiers, industrial managers, senior Party officials, and leading rep-
resentatives from the non-Russian republics began to take hold, recalling the
worst years of the Ezhovshchina.

The Last Conspiracy

Documents relating to this affair, which are now available for the first time,
confirm that the Doctors' Plot was a decisive moment in the history of postwar
Stalinism. 1 It marked both the peak of the "anticosmopolitan" (that is, an-
tisemitic) campaign that had begun in 1949 (and whose first stirrings can be
traced back to 1946-47) and the beginning of a new general purge, a new Great
Terror that was halted only by Stalin's death, a few weeks after the story of the
conspiracy broke. A third factor of some importance was the power struggle
among factions in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of State
Security, which had been separated in 1946 and subjected to constant reorgani-
zations ever since. 2 Splits within the secret police were a reflection of struggles
at the very top of the hierarchy, where Stalin's potential heirs were constantly
jockeying for position. One final troubling aspect of the affair was that eight
years after public revelation of the horrors of the Nazi death camps, it allowed
the deep-seated tsarist antisemitism, which the Bolsheviks had previously es-
chewed, to resurface, thus demonstrating the confusion of the last years of
Stalinism.

The complexities of this affair, or rather of these several converging
affairs, are not our concern here; it is enough to recall the major outlines of the
plot. In 1942 the Soviet government, with a view to putting pressure on
American Jews to force the US. government to open a second front against
Germany as soon as possible, set up a Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,
chaired by Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the famous Yiddish theater in
Moscow. Hundreds of Jewish intellectuals were soon active in the movement,
including the novelist llya Ehrenburg, the poets Samuel Marchak and Peretz
Markish, the pianist Emil Guilds, the writer Vasily Grossman, and the physi-
cist Pyotr Kapitza, the father of the Soviet nuclear bomb. The committee soon
outgrew its original purpose as an official propaganda machine and became
instead a genuine center for Jewish solidarity, and also a representative body for
Soviet Jewry. In February 1944 the leaders of the committee— Mikhoels, Isaac
Fefer, and Grigory Epstein— sent Stalin a letter proposing the creation of an
autonomous Jewish republic in the Crimea to replace the largely unsuccessful
national Jewish state of Birobidzhan established in the 1930s. During the
previous decade fewer than 40,000 Jews had moved to this distant, forgotten
region of deserts and marshes in extreme eastern Siberia, on the borders of
China. 1

The committee also dedicated itself to collecting statements about Nazi
massacres of Jews and any "abnormal events concerning Jews," a euphemism
for any antisemitic behavior noted in the population. There were a considerable
number of such "events." Antisemitic traditions were still strong in Ukraine
and in certain western regions of Russia, notably in the ancient "pale of
settlements" of the Russian empire, where Jews had been authorized to live by

243

242

244

A State against Its People

the tsarist authorities. The first defeats of the Red Army revealed how wide-
spread antisemitism actually was among the population. NKVD reports about
attitudes of the population revealed that many people had responded positively
to Nazi propaganda claiming that the Germans were fighting only Communists
and Jews. In regions that had been occupied by the Germans, and particularly
in Ukraine, the open massacre of Jews met with little resistance from the local
population. The Germans recruited more than 80,000 troops in Ukraine, and
some of these definitely participated in the massacre of Jews. To counter Nazi
propaganda and to mobilize the whole of the country around the theme of the
struggle for survival of the whole Soviet people, Bolshevik ideology was initially
quite resistant to the specific nature of the Holocaust. It was against this
backdrop that first anti-Zionism and then official antisemitism began to flour-
ish. Antisemitism was particularly virulent in the Agitprop (Agitation and
Propaganda) Department of the Central Committee. As early as August 1942
that body sent out an internal memorandum regarding "the dominant role
played by Jews in artistic, literary, and journalistic milieus."

The activism of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was soon a cause of
concern to the authorities. In early 1945 the Jewish poet Peretz Markish was
forbidden to publish. The appearance of the Black Book about Nazi atrocities
against Jews was canceled on the pretext that "the central argument of the
whole book is the idea that the Germans made war on the US.S.R. only as an
attempt to wipe out the Jews." On 12 October 1946, Viktor Abakumov, the
minister of state security, sent a note to the Central Committee about "the
nationalist tendencies of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee." 4 Because Stalin
sought to follow a foreign policy favorable to the establishment of the state of
Israel, he did not react immediately. Only after the US.S.R. had voted at the
United Nations to partition Palestine, on 29 November 1947, was Abakumov
given a free hand to liquidate the committee.

On 19 December 1947 several of the committee's members were arrested.
On 13 January 1948 Solomon Mikhoels was found murdered in Minsk; accord-
ing to the official version of events, he had been in an auto accident. On
21 November 1948 the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was broken up on the
pretext that it had become a "center for anti-Soviet propaganda," and its
various publications, including the notable Yiddish journal Einikait, were
banned.'' In the following weeks the remaining members of the committee were
arrested, and in February 1949 the vast "anticosmopolitan" campaign began in
the press. Jewish theater critics were denounced for their inability to under-
stand the Russian national character: "What vision can a [Abram] Gurvich
or a Qosif] Yuzovsky possibly have of the national character of Russian So-
viet men?" asked Pravda on 2 February 1949. Hundreds of Jewish intellectuals

The Last Conspiracy

245

were arrested, notably in Moscow and Leningrad, in the first few months of
1949.

A revealing document from this period, a decree from the Judicial Colle-
gium of the Leningrad Court, dated 7 July 1949 and recently published in Neva
magazine, condemned Achille Grigorevich Leniton, Ilya Zeilkovich Serman,
and Rulf Alexandrovna Zevina to ten years in the camps for several alleged
crimes, most significantly for "having criticized in an anti-Soviet manner the
resolution of the Central Committee regarding the magazines Zvezda and
Leningrad . . . for interpreting Marx's opinions on international affairs in a
counterrevolutionary manner, for praising cosmopolitan writers . . . and for
spreading lies about Soviet government policy regarding the question of na-
tionality." After an appeal the sentence was increased to twenty-five years by
the Judicial Collegium of the Supreme Court, which justified its verdict as
follows: "The sentence passed by the Leningrad Court failed to take account
of the gravity of the offenses committed . . . The accused had been involved
in counterrevolutionary activities, using nationalist prejudices to proclaim the
superiority of one nation over the other nations of the Soviet Union "^

Thereafter Jews were systematically removed from all positions of author-
ity in the arts and the media, in journalism and publishing, and in medicine
and many other professions. Arrests became more and more common, striking
all sorts of milieus, A group of "engineer saboteurs" in the metallurgy complex
in Stalino, almost all of whom were Jewish, were sentenced to death and
executed on 12 August 1952. Paulina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov's Jewish wife,
who was a top manager in the textile industry, was arrested on 21 January 1949
for "losing documents containing state secrets" and was sent to a camp for five
years. The wife of Stalin's personal secretary Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, who was
also Jewish, was accused of espionage and shot in July 1952. 7 Both Molotov
and Poskrebyshev continued to serve Stalin as though nothing had happened.
Despite this widespread antisemitism, preparations for the trial of the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee dragged on for a long time. The trial did not
begin, in camera, until May 1952, more than two and a half years after the arrest
of the accused. The incomplete documentary evidence now available suggests
two possible reasons for the exceptionally long period of preparation. One is
that Stalin was then orchestrating in great secrecy the "Leningrad Affair," an
important case that together with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee matter
was to form one of the cornerstones of the great final purge. The other is that
Stalin was concurrently involved in completely reorganizing the security serv-
ices. Abakumov's arrest in July 1951 proved to be the central episode in this
reorganization. This action was directed against the powerful Lavrenti Beria,
the longtime head of the secret police and a member of the Politburo. Thus

246

A State against Its People

the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair was at the heart of a power struggle,
and was also to form a keystone in the series of arguments that were to result
in the Doctors' Plot and lead to a second Great Terror.

Of all these purported activities, the Leningrad Affair, which led to the secret
executions of the main leaders of the Soviet Communist Party's second-most-
important branch organization, is still by far the most mysterious. Stalin had
always been suspicious of the city. On 15 February 1949 the Politburo adopted
a resolution "on the anti-Party activities of [Nikolai] Kuznetsov, [M. [.]
Rodionov, and [Pyotr] Popkov," three high-ranking Party officials. The three
were immediately forced to resign, as were Ivan Voznesensky, the president of
Gosplan, the state planning department, and most of the members of Lenin-
grad's Party apparatus. In August-September 1949 all these officials were
arrested and accused of having attempted to establish an "anti-Party" group
with the help of American intelligence services. Abakumov then launched a
witch-hunt for anyone who had once been a member of the Party in Leningrad
but had since moved to another city or republic. Hundreds of Communists in
Leningrad were arrested, and about 2,000 were hounded out of the Party and
deprived of their jobs. The repression had some strange twists, striking the city
itself as a historical entity. In August 1949 the authorities decided to close the
Museum of the Defense of Leningrad, which was a reminder of the heroism
of the city during the siege of the Great Patriotic War. A few months later
Mikhail Suslov, a high-ranking CPSU official responsible for ideological af-
fairs, was instructed by the Central Committee to form a commission for the
liquidation of the museum. This commission functioned until the end of
February 1953. 8

The accused in the Leningrad Affair— Kuznetsov, Rodionov, Popkov,
Voznesensky, Ya. F. Kapustin, and P. G. Lazutin— were judged in camera on
30 September 1950 and executed the following day, one hour after the verdict
was announced. The entire business was shrouded in secrecy; nobody was
informed of it, not even the daughter of one of the principal suspects, who was
the daughter-in-law of Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet trade minister and a mem-
ber of the CPSU Politburo. In October 1950 other travesties of justice con-
demned to death dozens of Party leaders who had belonged to the Leningrad
organization: K. Soloviev, first secretary of the Crimean regional committee;
Aleksei Badaev, second secretary of the Leningrad regional committee; Verbit-
sky, second secretary of the Murmansk regional committee; M. V. Basov, first
deputy chairman of the Russian Council of Ministers; and many others. 4

It is not yet clear whether this purge of the Leningrad Party organization
was a simple settling of scores between factions of the Party apparatus or
another link in a whole chain of affairs, stretching from the liquidation of the

The Last Conspiracy

247

Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to the Doctors 1 Plot, and including the arrest
of Abakumov and the Mingrelian nationalist plot. This second hypothesis is
perhaps the more probable. The Leningrad Affair was without doubt a sig-
nificant stage in the preparation of a great purge, for which the public signal
was given on 13 January 1953. In quite significant fashion, the crimes of which
the fallen Leningrad leaders were accused were strongly reminiscent of the
dark years of 1936-1938. At the first plenary meeting of Leningrad Party
cadres in October 1949, Andrei Andrianov, the new first secretary, announced
to the startled audience that the previous leaders had been found to have
published Trotskyite and Zinovievite literature: "In documents published by
these people, they were surreptitiously passing on the opinions of some of the
worst enemies of the people, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, and others." Beyond
the grotesqueness of the accusation, the message was clear for Party cadres. A
new 1937 was indeed beginning. 10

After the execution of the principal suspects in the Leningrad Affair in
October 1950, there was much maneuvering and countermaneuvcring within
the security services and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Having become
suspicious of Beria himself, Stalin invented a fictitious Mingrelian nationalist
plot whose aim was supposedly to join Mingrelia, the region in Georgia where
Beria got his start, to Turkey. Beria was thus forced to lead a purge within the
Georgian Communist Party 11 In October 1951 Stalin dealt Beria another blow
by having a group of elderly Jewish cadres in the security forces and the
judiciary arrested, including Lt. Colonel Naum Eitingon, who under Beria's
orders had organized Trotsky's assassination; General Leonid Raikhman, who
had taken part in setting up the Moscow trials; Colonel Lev Shvartzman, the
torturer of Babel and Meyerhold; and Lev Sheinin, the examining magistrate
who had been Vyshinskys righthand man during the Moscow show-trials of
1936-1938. All were accused of organizing a huge Jewish nationalist plot, led
by Abakumov, the minister of state security and Beria's principal assistant.

Abakumov had been secretly arrested a few months earlier, on 12 July
1951. He was first accused of having deliberately killed Jacob Etinger, a well-
known Jewish doctor who had been arrested in November 1950 and had died
in custody shortly afterward. It was claimed that by "eliminating" Etinger, who
in his long career had looked after Sergei Kirov, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Marshal
Tukhachevsky, Palmiro Togliatti, Tito, and Georgi Dimitrov, Abakumov had
ensured that "a criminal group of nationalist Jews who had infiltrated the
highest levels of the Ministry of State Security would not be unmasked." A
few months later it was claimed that Abakumov himself was the brains behind
the whole nationalist Jewish plot. Abakumov's arrest in July 1951 thus consti-
tuted a vital link in the formulation of a vast "Judeo-Zionist plot," and provided
the transition between the still-secret liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist

248

A State against Its People

Committee and the Doctors' Plot, which was to be the public signal for the
beginning of a new purge. One can therefore conclude that it was during the
summer of 1951, and not at the end of 1952, that the scenario began to take
shape. 12

The secret trial of the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
lasted from 1 1 to 15 July 1952. Thirteen of the accused were sentenced to death
and executed on 12 August 1952 along with ten other Engineer saboteurs," all
Jewish, from the Stalin automobile factory. In all, the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee affair led to 125 sentences, including 25 death sentences, which
were carried out immediately, and 100 camp sentences of between ten and
twenty-five years. 11

By September 1952 the scenario for the Judeo-Zionist conspiracy was
ready, but it was not put into action until after the Nineteenth Party Congress,
in October (thirteen and a half years after the Eighteenth Congress). As soon
as the Congress adjourned, most of the Jewish doctors who were to be accused
in the Doctors' Plot were arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. These arrests,
which were kept secret for some time, coincided with the trial of Rudolf
Slansky, the former general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party,
and of thirteen other Czechoslovak Communist leaders, which began in Prague
on 22 November 1952. Eleven of them were condemned to death and hanged.
One of the peculiarities of that travesty, which was organized in its entirety by-
Soviet advisers from the secret police, was its openly antisemitic character
Eleven of the fourteen accused were Jewish, and the charge was that they had
set up a "Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist terrorist group." Preparations for the trials
included a witch-hunt for Jews in all the Eastern European Communist parties.

The day after the execution of eleven of the accused in the Slansky trial,
Stalin forced the Presidium of the CPSU Centra] Committee to vote for a
resolution titled "On the Present Situation at the Ministry of State Security,"
which ordered a "tightening of discipline within the state security organs." The
ministry itself was brought under the spotlight: supposedly it had been too lax,
shown a lack of vigilance, and allowed "saboteur doctors" to operate with
impunity. A further step had thus been taken. Stalin's intention, clearly, was to
use the Doctors' Plot against both the Security Ministry and Beria himself
And Beria, who was himself a specialist in such affairs, must have been well
aware of the implications of what he could see.

What exactly happened in the weeks leading up to Stalin's death is still
largely unknown. Preparations for the interrogation and trial of the doctors
who had been arrested continued behind the scenes as an official campaign
gathered momentum for a "reinforcement of Bolshevik vigilance," a "struggle
against all forms of complacency," and exemplary punishments for the "cos-

The Last Conspiracy

249

mopolitan assassins." Each day more arrests widened the scope of the "con-
spiracy"

On 19 February 1953 Ivan Maisky, a deputy minister of foreign affairs
and one of Molotov's chief aides, who had previously been Soviet ambassador
in London, was arrested. After relentless interrogation he "confessed" that he
had been recruited as a British spy by Winston Churchill, together with Alek-
sandra Kollontai, a grand figure in the history of Bolshevism, who had been
one of the leaders of the Workers' Opposition in 1921 and who until the end
of World War II had been the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm. 14

Despite the sensational progress that was made in "uncovering" the con-
spiracy from its beginning on 13 January to Stalin's death on 5 March, it is
noteworthy that unlike during the years 1936-1938, none of the other leaders
of the regime came forward in public and openly endorsed the investigation of
the affair. According to testimony from Nikolai Bulganin in 1970, Stalin was
the main inspiration and orchestrator of the Doctors' Plot, and only four of
the other top leaders actually knew what was going on: Georgy Malenkov,
Mikhail Suslov, Martemyam Ryumin, and Sergei Ignatiev. Accordingly, every-
one else must have felt under threat. Bulganin also claimed that the trial of the
Jewish doctors was to have opened in mid-March, and was to have been
concluded with the massive deportation of Soviet Jews to Birobidzhan. 15 Given
the current state of knowledge and the continued lack of access to the Russian
Presidential Archive, where the most secret and sensitive files are kept, it is
impossible to know with certainty whether plans were really afoot for a large-
scale deportation of Jews in early 1953. One thing alone is certain: Stalin's
death finally put an end to the list of the millions of victims who suffered under
his dictatorship.

The Exit from Stalinism

Otalin's death, coming in the middle of the Soviet Union's seven
decades of existence, marked a decisive stage. Although it was not the end of
the system, it was at least the end of an era. As Francois Furet wrote, the death
of the Supreme Leader revealed "the paradox of a system that was supposedly
part of the laws of social development, but in which everything actuallv de-
pended on one man, so much so that when he died, it seemed that the system
had lost something essential to its continued existence." One of the major
components of this "something essential" was the high level of inhuman re-
pression by the state against the people in a number of different forms.

For Stalin's main collaborators, including Malenkov, Molotov, Voroshilov,
Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Beria, the political problem
posed by Stalin's death was extremely complex. They had at once to assure the
continuity of the system, divide up responsibilities, and find some sort of
equilibrium between individual dominance — however attenuated — by any one
of their number and collective rule, which would take account of all their
ambitions and skills. They also promptly had to introduce a number of major
changes, about which there was considerable agreement.

The difficulty of combining these diverse objectives accounts for the
extremely slow and tortuous process that started with Stalin's death and cul-

The Exit from Stalinism

minated in the elimination of the threat posed by Beria, who was arrested on
26 June 1953.

The shorthand reports that are now available of the plenary sessions of
the Central Committee on 5 March 1953 (the day of Stalin's death) and again
from 2 to 7 July 1953 (after the elimination of Beria) help explain why the
Soviet leaders began this "exit from Stalinism" that Nikita Khrushchev was to
transform into "de-Stalinization." 1 The process would have its high points at
the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956 and
the Twenty-second Congress in October 1961.

One impetus for the move away from Stalinism was quite simply a defense
mechanism, an instinct for survival. During the last few months of Stalin's
reign, almost all the top leaders had become aware of how vulnerable they
actually were. No one had been safe — not Voroshilov, who had been accused of
being an agent for foreign intelligence services; nor Molotov and Mikoyan, who
had been removed from the Presidium of the Central Committee, nor Beria,
who had been under threat from intrigues at the heart of the security services
orchestrated by Stalin himself. Further down the hierarchy, the bureaucratic
elites that had been regrouping since the war also feared and ultimately rejected
the Terrorist aspects of the regime. The omnipotence of the secret police was
the last obstacle to their enjoying a stable career. What had to be dismantled,
as Martin Malia has phrased it, was "the mechanism set up by Stalin for his
own private use" to ensure that no single figure would be able to advance further
than his colleagues and political rivals. Rather than differences of opinion about
the reforms that had to be undertaken, what really mobilized Stalin's heirs to
turn against Beria was the fear of seeing another dictator come to power. Beria
appeared to be the most powerful figure because he had the whole state security
apparatus and the Ministry of Internal Affairs at his disposal. The lesson was
quite obvious to all concerned: the apparatus of repression should never again
"escape the control of the Party" and be allowed to become the weapon of a
single individual and thus threaten the political oligarchy.

The second and more profound reason for the change was the realization
shared by all the main leaders, from Khrushchev to Malenkov, that economic
and social reform was now of prime necessity. The exclusively repressive
management of the economy, based on the authoritarian control of almost all
agricultural production, the criminalization of various forms of behavior, and
the atrophying Gulag system, had resulted in a serious economic crisis and
social stagnation that rendered impossible any increase in labor productivity.
The economic model put into place in the 1930s against the will of the vast
majority of the people had brought the results described above and was now
perceived to be outdated.

251

250

252

A State against Its People

The third reason for change was the struggle for power itself, which led
to a constant raising of the stakes among the politicians. It was Nikita Khrush-
chev, who for reasons that will not be detailed here (suffice it to say that he was
able to confront his own Stalinist past, seemed to feel genuine remorse, was a
skillful politician and a great populist with a real belief in a better future, and
had the will to return to what he considered to be a legitimately socialist
position), went further than his colleagues in aiming for a slow and gradual
process of de-Stalinization, not only in the political arena but also in the
day-to-day lives of the people.

What were the principal steps of this movement in dismantling the re-
pressive machinery? In the space of a few years the Soviet Union changed from
a country with an extremely high level of legal and extralegal repression into
an authoritarian police state, where for more than a generation the memory of
the terror was one of the most effective guarantees of post-Stalinist order.

Less than two weeks after Stalin's death, the gulag system was completely
reorganized and brought under the authority of the Ministry of Justice. Its
economic infrastructure was immediately transferred to the relevant industrial
ministries. Even more spectacular than these administrative changes, which
demonstrated clearly that the Ministry of Internal Affairs was losing its place
as the most powerful ministry, was the announcement, in Pravda on 28 March
1953, of a large amnesty. By virtue of a decree promulgated by the Presidium
of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. the previous day and signed by its
president, Voroshilov, the following were granted amnesty:

Anyone sentenced to less than five years

Anyone sentenced for lying, economic crimes, and abuses of power
Pregnant women and mothers with children under age ten, minors, men
over fifty-five, and women over fifty

In addition, the amnesty provided for the halving of all other sentences except
those handed out for counterrevolutionary activities, grand theft, banditry, and
premeditated murder.

In a few weeks about 1.2 million prisoners — nearly half the population of
the camps and penal colonies — were released from the gulags. Many of them
were small-time criminals sentenced for petty theft; still more were simple
citizens who had been convicted under one of the innumerable repressive laws
that governed every sphere of activity, from "leaving the workplace" to "break-
ing the law regarding internal passports." This partial amnesty, which notably
excluded political prisoners and special deportees, reflected in its very ambigu-
ity the still ill-defined changes that were afoot. The spring of 1953, a time of
tortuous reasoning, was also a time of intense power struggles when even

The Exit from Stalinism

253

Lavrenti Beria, the first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and
minister of internal affairs, seemed to be turning into a great reformer.

What considerations dictated such a large amnesty? According to Amy
Knight, the biographer of Beria, the amnesty of 27 March 1953, which was
adopted at the behest of the minister of internal affairs himself, was part of a
series of political measures indicating a new, liberal direction in the thinking
of Beria, who, like the others, was involved in the power struggle after Stalin's
death and was thus also caught up in the spiral of rising political stakes. To
justify the amnesty, Beria had sent a note to the Presidium of the Central
Committee on 24 March in which he explained that of the 2,526,402 prisoners
in the gulags, only 221,435 were "particularly dangerous criminals," and that
most of those were kept in special camps. In an astonishing admission, he noted
that an overwhelming share of prisoners posed no threat to the state. A large
amnesty was therefore desirable to free up a penal system that was both over-
crowded and intrinsically unwieldy. 2

The issue of the increasing difficulty of managing the gulags was regularly
raised in the early 1950s. The crisis in the camps, which was widely acknowl-
edged before Stalin's death, puts the amnesty of 27 March in a new light.
Economic as well as political reasons induced the potential successors of Stalin
to proclaim a large but partial amnesty. They were aware that the gulags were
overcrowded and totally inefficient.

Here, as elsewhere, no radical measures could be taken so long as Stalin
was still alive. As the historian Moshe Lewin once noted so aptly, everything
was "mummified" in the last years of the dictatorship.

Even after Stalin's death, of course, not everything was possible. The
principal victims of the system's arbitrary nature — the political prisoners con-
demned for counterrevolutionary activities — failed to benefit from the amnesty.
The exclusion of political prisoners from the amnesty sparked a number of
riots and revolts among prisoners in the special gulag camps and in the Rechlag
and Steplag. 1

On 4 April it was announced in Pravda that the conspirators of the
Doctors' Plot had themselves been the victims of a miscarriage of justice, and
that their confessions had been extracted "by illegitimate means of interroga-
tion," which everyone understood to mean torture. The importance of this
acknowledgment was amplified further by a resolution adopted by the Central
Committee a few days later u on legal violations by the state security forces." It
emerged clearly that the Doctors' Plot had not been an isolated incident, and
that for some years the security forces had been abusing their powers and had
been involved in illegal activities. The Party claimed that it was now rejecting
these methods and clamping down on the excessive powers of the police. The
hope engendered by these statements immediately elicited an enormous re-

254

A State against Its People

sponse, and the courts were swamped by hundreds of thousands of demands
for rehabilitation. Prisoners, particularly those in the special camps, were ex-
asperated by the limited and selective nature of the amnesty of 27 March. They
were well aware of the turmoil among the guards and the systemwide crisis,
and they simply turned on the guards and commanders, refusing to work or to
obey orders. On 14 May 1953 more than 14,000 prisoners from different
sections of the Norilsk penitentiary organized a strike and formed committees
composed of delegates elected from various national groups, in which Ukraini-
ans and people from the Baltic states played key roles. The main demands of
the prisoners were a reduction of the working day to nine hours, the elimination
of labels on their clothes, an end to restrictions on communication with their
families, the removal of all informers, and an extension of the amnesty to
include political prisoners.

The official announcement on 10 July 1953 of the arrest of Beria, who
was accused of being an English spy and an avowed enemy of the people,
confirmed the prisoners' impression that something had indeed changed in
Moscow and made them even more forceful in their demands. The strike
became increasingly widespread; on 14 July more than 12,000 prisoners from
the Vorkuta prison complex also went on strike. One sure sign that things had
changed was that the authorities began to negotiate with the prisoners, repeat-
edly postponing an attack.

Unrest was endemic in the special camps from the summer of 1953 until
the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. The largest and most sus-
tained revolt broke out in May 1954, in the third section of the Steplag prison
complex in Kengir, near Karaganda in Kazakhstan. It went on for forty days
and was put down only after special troops from the Internal Affairs Ministry
had surrounded the camp with tanks. About 400 prisoners were arrested and
resentenced, and the six surviving members of the commission that had led the
resistance were executed.

Another sign that things had genuinely changed with the death of Stalin
was the fact that some of the demands made by the striking prisoners in 1953
and 1954 were actually met; the working day was indeed reduced to nine hours,
and other significant improvements in the quality of life for prisoners were
introduced.

In 1954-55 the government took a series of measures that significant!)
altered the enormous power of the state security forces, which had been totally
reorganized in the aftermath of Beria's arrest. The troiki — the special courts
that judged all cases handled by the secret police — were abolished altogether.
The secret police were reorganized into an autonomous entity, renamed the
Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (the Committee for State Security, or
KGB), purged of one-fifth of all personnel who had worked there before

The Exit from Stalinism

255

Stalin's death, and placed under the authority of General Ivan Serov, whose
achievements included oversight of the deportation of various ethnic groups
during the war. An associate of Nikita Khrushchev, Serov embodied many of
the ambiguities of a transitional period in which previous leaders were still in
positions of authority. The government decreed more partial amnesties, the
most important of which, in September 1955, freed everyone who had been
sentenced in 1945 for "collaborating with the enemy," as well as the remaining
German prisoners of war. Finally, several measures benefited the "specially
displaced," who were henceforth allowed to move around more freely, and no
longer required to register quite so regularly at the local komandatury. Follow-
ing high-level German-Soviet negotiations, German deportees, who repre-
sented 40 percent of those held in special colonies (more than 1,000,000 out of
approximately 2,750,000), were the first to benefit in September 1955 from the
easing of restrictions. However, the wording of the new laws made it clear that
the lifting of judicial restrictions and the changes in professional status and
residency requirements would not lead to "the return of confiscated goods or
a right to return to the place from which the 'specially displaced' had origi-
nated.^

These restrictions were a significant part of the partial and gradual process
that came to be known as de-Stalinization. Carried out under the direction of
a Stalinist, Nikita Khrushchev (who, like all the other leaders of his generation,
had played a major role in the worst acts of repression, such as dekulakization,
purges, deportations, and executions), de-Stalinization could afford to con-
demn only certain excesses of the "cult of personality." In his "Secret Speech"
to the Soviet delegates at the Twentieth Party Congress on 24 February 1956,
Khrushchev was extremely selective in his condemnation of Stalinism and did
not call into question any of the major decisions taken by the Party since 1917.
This selectivity was also apparent in the chronology of the Stalinist "devia-
tion " Because this deviation supposedly began in 1934, it excluded the crimes
of collectivization and the famine of 1932-33. The selectivity was also apparent
in the choice of victims, who were all Communists and had generally followed
the Stalinist line; they were never ordinary citizens. By restricting the list of
victims of oppression to Communists who had suffered at Stalin's hand, and
by focusing solely on historical episodes that happened after the assassination
of Kirov, the Secret Speech evaded the central question of the collective
responsibility of the Party toward society since 1917.

The Secret Speech was followed by a series of concrete measures to
complete the limited steps that had already been taken. In March and April
1956 decrees were issued in regard to "specially displaced" persons from ethnic
groups that had been punished for supposedly collaborating with Nazi Ger-
many and deported in 1943-1945. These people, according to the decrees, were

256 A State against Its People

"no longer to be subject to administrative surveillance by the Internal Affairs
Ministry." There was, however, no restoration of their confiscated goods, nor
were they allowed to return home. These half-measures were met with consid^
erable anger; many deportees refused to sign statements requiring them to
abandon all claims for compensation, the restoration of their goods, and the
right to return home. Faced with a remarkable shift in the political climate and
the popular mood, the Soviet government made new concessions. On 9 January
1957 the government once again recognized the republics and autonomous
regions of the deported peoples, which had been abolished in the immediate
aftermath of the war. Only the autonomous republic of the Tatars in the
Crimea was not reinstated.

For more than three decades the Crimean Tatars struggled for their right
to return home. From 1957 on, the Karachai, Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens, and
Ingush slowly began to return by the tens of thousands. Nothing was made
easy for them by the authorities. Numerous disputes broke out between deport-
ees trying to move back into their former homes and the Russian colonists who
had been brought there from neighboring regions in 1945. Having no proptski- -
licenses from the local police granting the right to live in a given place — the
returning deportees were again forced to live in shantytowns, encampments,
and other temporary housing, under the permanent threat of arrest for failing
to comply with passport laws (an offense that brought two years' imprison-
ment). In July 1958 the Chechen capital, Grozny, was the scene of bloody
confrontations between Russians and Chechens. An uneasy peace was estab-
lished only after the authorities freed up funds to build accommodations for
the former deportees. 5

Officially, the category of "specially displaced' 1 existed until January I960.
The last deportees to be freed from this pariah status were Ukrainians and
people from the Baltic states. Faced with the prospect of more administrative
obstacles to their return, more than half of the Ukrainians and Baltic peoples
settled in the places to which they had been deported.

In 1954—55 90,000 "counterrevolutionaries" were released from the gu-
lags; in 1956-57, after the Twentieth Congress, nearly 310,000 were freed. On
1 January 1959 only 11,000 political prisoners remained in the camps.'' To
expedite the release of prisoners, more than 200 special review commissions
were sent into the camps, and several amnesties were decreed. Liberation,
however, was not synonymous with rehabilitation. In 1956 and 1957 fewer than
60,000 people received any sort of pardon. The vast majority had to wait for
years, and sometimes decades, before obtaining a certificate of rehabilitation.
Nevertheless, the year 1956 remained engraved in popular memory as the year
of the return, admirably described by Vasily Grossman in his novel All Things
Pass. This great return, which took place in almost total silence as far as official

The Exit from Stalinism

257

pronouncements were concerned, together with the realization that for millions
no return would ever be possible, threw many people into deep confusion and
began a vast social and moral trauma, a tragic confrontation in a divided society.
As Lidia Chukovskaya wrote, "two Russias looked each other in the eye: the
one who had imprisoned, and the one who had been imprisoned." Faced with
such a situation, the initial response of the authorities was not to accede to the
demands of any individual or group regarding the prosecution of officials who
had broken socialist law or used any illegal methods of investigation during the
"cult of personality. 11 The only means of appeal were the Party control com-
missions. The political authorities sent instructions to the courts regarding
pardons, making it clear that the first priorities were Party members and
soldiers. There were no purges.

After the release of political prisoners, the post-Stalin gulags saw the
number of inmates dwindle, before stabilizing in the late 1950s and early 1960s
at around 900,000 prisoners: a core of 300,000 common criminals and repeat
offenders serving long sentences and 600,000 petty criminals who had been
sentenced in accordance with laws requiring prison terms quite out of propor-
tion to the offense committed. The pioneering role played by the gulags in
colonization and in exploitation of the natural and mineral wealth of the far
north and east began to fade, and the huge Stalinist prisons were slowly broken
up into smaller units. The geography of the gulags changed, too. Most camps
were again established in the European part of the U.S.S.R. Confinement in
the post-Stalin era took on the more conventional purpose that it has in other
societies, although it retained features that distinguished it from the normal
legal system. Various groups were sporadically added to the common criminals
in accordance with whatever crackdown was in force at the time — on alcohol-
ism, vandalism, "parasitism" — and a few (several hundred each year) were
sentenced under Articles 70 and 190 of the new penal code, adopted in 1960.

These commutations and amnesties were completed by some major
changes in penal legislation. Among the first reforms was the law of 25 April
1956, which abolished the 1940 law forbidding workers to leave the workplace.
This first step in the decriminalization of the labor laws was followed by several
other partial measures, which were systematized with the adoption of new
"Foundations of Penal Law 11 on 25 December 1958. The new laws did away
with several key terms from earlier penal codes, including "enemy of the
people" and "counterrevolutionary crimes." The age of legal responsibility was
raised from fourteen to sixteen; the use of violence and torture to extract
confessions was outlawed; people accused of crimes were to be present at all
stages of the inquiry and were entitled to a lawyer who was aware of the details
of the case; and, with few exceptions, all trials were to be public. The penal
code of 1960 did, however, retain several articles allowing for the punishment

258

A State against Its People

of any form of political or ideological deviancy. Under Article 70, anyone
a caught spreading anti-Soviet propaganda ... in the form of mendacious
assertions denigrating the state" could be given a sentence of six months to
seven years in the camps, followed by exile for two to five years. Article 190
required a sentence of three years in the camps or in community-service work
for any failure to denounce anti-Soviet behavior. During the 1960s and 1970s
these two articles were widely used to punish political or ideological "deviancy."
Ninety percent of the several hundred people sentenced each year for u anti-
Sovietism" were found guilty under these two articles.

During the political thaw, when the quality of life was clearly rising
although memories of the oppression remained strong, active forms of debate
or dissent remained rare. KGB reports noted 1 ,300 "opponents" in 1961 , 2,500
in 1962, 4,500 in 1964, and 1,300 in 1965. 7 In the 1960s and 1970s three
categories of citizens were the object of particularly close surveillance by the
KGB: religious minorities (such as Catholics, Baptists, members of the Pente-
costal Church, and Seventh-Day Adventists); national minorities who had been
hardest hit by the Stalinist repressions (notably people from the Baltic states,
Tatars from the Crimea, ethnic Germans, and Ukrainians from western
Ukraine, where anti-Soviet resistance had been particularly strong); and the
creative intelligentsia belonging to the dissident movement that grew up in the
1960s."

After a last anticlerical campaign, launched in 1957, which limited itself
to closing several churches that had reopened since the war, the confrontation
between the Orthodox Church and the state subsided into uneasy cohabitation.
The attention of the KGB's special services was directed more toward religious
minorities, who were often suspected of receiving assistance and support from
abroad. A few numbers demonstrate that this was indeed a marginal concern:
from 1973 to 1975, 1 16 Baptists were arrested; in 1984, 200 Baptists were either
in prison or serving a sentence in a camp, and the average sentence was only
one year.

In western Ukraine, one of the regions most resistant to Sovieti/ation, a
dozen or so nationalist groups in the OUN tradition were broken up in Tcr-
nopil, Zaporizhzhia, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Lviv between 1961 and 1973. Sen-
tences passed on the members of these groups generally amounted to five to
ten years in prison. In Lithuania, another region that had been brutally brought
to heel in the 1940s, local sources reveal that there were comparatively few
arrests in the 1960s and 1970s. The murder of three Catholic priests under
suspicious circumstances in 1981, in which it was almost certain that the KGB
was involved, was, however, felt to be an act of intolerable provocation.

Until the breakup of the U.S.S.R., the Crimean Tatars, who had been
deported in 1944 and whose autonomous republic was never reinstated, re-

The Exit from Stalinism

259

mained a burdensome legacy of the Stalinist era. At the end of the 1950s the
Crimean Tatars, most of whom had been settled in Central Asia, began a
campaign (yet another sign that times really had changed) petitioning for their
collective rehabilitation and for authorization to return to their homeland. In
1966 a petition of 130,000 signatures was delivered by a Tatar delegation to the
Twenty-third Party Congress. In September 1967 a decree from the Presidium
of the Supreme Soviet annulled the charge of "collective treason." Three
months later a new decree authorized the Tatars to settle in a location of their
choice, provided they respected the passport laws, which required a legal
document to work in any given place. Between 1967 and 1978 fewer than 15,000
people — about 2 percent of the Tatar population — managed to comply with
the passport law and return home. The Crimean Tatar movement was assisted
by General Petro Grigorenko, who was arrested in May 1967 and sent to a
psychiatric hospital, a form of imprisonment used for several dozen people
each year in the 1970s.

Most historians date the beginning of the dissident movement from the
first big public trial of political prisoners in the post-Stalin era. In February
1966 two writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel, were given sentences of
seven and hc years respectively in a prison camp. On 5 December 1965, shortly
after the arrest of the writers, a demonstration of about fifty people supporting
them took place in Pushkin Square in Moscow. The dissidents, who in the
1960s numbered a few hundred intellectuals, and who at the height of the
movement a decade later numbered between 1,000 and 2,000, began a radically-
different means of protest. Instead of arguing against the legality of the regime,
they demanded a strict respect for Soviet laws, for the constitution, and for
international agreements signed by the U.S.S.R. Dissident action followed the
same line. They refused to be treated as an underground group, they were quite
open about their structure and movements, and they made great use of pub-
licity to advertise their actions by cooperating as often as possible with the
international media.

In the disproportionate struggle between a few hundred dissidents and
the might of the Soviet state, the weight of international opinion was extremely
important, particularly following the publication in the West in 1973 of Alek-
sandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (which was quickly followed by his
expulsion from the Soviet Union). In the space of a few years, because of the
actions of a tiny minority, the issue of human rights in the U.S.S.R. became a
major international concern and the central subject of the Conference on
Security and Cooperation in Europe, which culminated in the Helsinki Accords
of 1975. The final document produced by the conference, which was signed by
the U.S.S.R., strengthened the position of the dissidents. They organized
committees to ensure that the Helsinki agreement was upheld in the cities in

260

A State against Its People

which they lived (Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, Vilnius, and so on) and to forward
any information about human-rights violations. This information-gathering
had already started under more difficult conditions in 1968, with the appear-
ance every few months of an underground bulletin called the Chronicle of
Current Events, which listed any violations of liberty or human rights. In this
new context, human-rights violations in the U.S.S.R. swiftly came under inter-
national scrutiny, and the secret police in particular were held in check. As
opponents of the regime became recognized figures, their arrest could no longer
pass unnoticed, and information about their fate could spread rapidly abroad.
Significantly, patterns of police behavior were soon linked to the state of
detente; arrests were more numerous in 1968-1972 and in 1979-1982 than in
1973-1976. It is still impossible to calculate the number of people arrested for
political reasons in the years 1960-1985. Dissident sources listed hundreds of
arrests in the worst years; in 1970 the Chronicle of Current Events reported 106
sentences, including 21 forcible incarcerations in psychiatric hospitals u as a
security measure." In 1971 the figures in the Chronicle were 85 and 24, respec-
tively. In 1979-1981, years of international confrontation, almost 500 people
were arrested on similar charges.

The phenomenon of dissidence was an expression of radical opposition
reflecting a totally different conception of politics, one that counterposed indi-
viduality to collectivity. But in a country in which the government had always
been opposed to freedom of speech, and particularly to the free expression of
opinions contrary to its own, such a phenomenon w r as unlikely to have a huge
effect on society in general. The real change was elsewhere, in the many
different spheres of cultural and social autonomy that developed in the 1960s
and 1970s, and even more so in the 1980s, with the gradual realization by one
part of the political elite that changes as radical as those of the 1950s were once
again of prime importance.

Conclusion

he preceding chapters do not pretend to offer any new revelations
about the use of state violence in the U.S.S.R., or about the forms of oppres-
sion exercised by the government during the first half of the Soviet regime's
existence. Such things have been explored for some time now by historians who
did not have to wait for the opening of the archives to see the development or
scale of the terror. On the other hand, the opening of the archives does allow
an account of the terror's chronological development and of its scale and
various forms. Accordingly, the outline presented in the preceding pages con-
stitutes a first step in compiling an inventory of questions that must be asked
about the use of violence, its constant recurrence, and its meaning in different
contexts.

As such, this research is part of a larger movement that has been under
way for a decade now both in the West and in Russia. Since the first partial
opening of the archives, historians have been trying to reconcile one brand of
historiography, born in unusual circumstances, with the newly available data.
For several years now, a number of historians, particularly in Russia, have been
publishing material that has formed the basis of many other studies and uni-
versity courses. Some fields of investigation have been better covered than
others, particularly the concentration camps, the confrontation between the

261

262

A State against Its People

government and the peasantry, and decision making at high levels of govern-
ment. Historians such as V. N. Zemskov and N. Bugai have tried to calculate
the number of deportations that took place in the Stalinist era. V. P. Danilov
in Russia and A. Graziosi in Italy have highlighted the continuity in the clashes
between the peasantry and the new regime. Looking at the archives of the
Central Committee, O. Khlcvnyuk has shed important light on the functioning
of the Kremlin "First Circle. 11

Using such research as a basis for my own, I have attempted to demonstrate
how, in the years following 1917, cycles of violence became the norm in the
U.S.S.R. These cycles of violence lie at the heart of the social history of the
Soviet Union, a history that is still waiting to be written. Building upon earlier
efforts to explore the most tragic aspects of this history, I have drawn upon
sources that most clearly expose the different forms of violence and repression,
the practices involved, and the groups victimized. These sources also reveal the
contradictions and inconsistencies, such as the extreme violence of the Lenin-
ist discourse regarding Menshevik opponents, who were "all to be shot 11 but
who were usually imprisoned instead; the extraordinary violence of the requi-
sitioning detachments, which at the end of 1922 were still terrorizing the
countryside at a time when the NEP had technically already been in place for
more than a year; and the contradictory alternation in the 1930s between
spectacular waves of mass arrests and huge amnesties to "empty the prisons. 11
The multiplicity of cases yields an inventory of the forms of violence and
oppression used, broadening the scope of the investigation into the practices,
the scale, and the meaning of mass terror.

The persistence of such practices until Stalin's death and their determin-
ing influence in the social history of the U.S.S.R. seem to justify the relegation
of political history to second place, at least in the early stages of such an
investigation. In this reconstruction I have tried to synthesize long-acknowl-
edged facts with recently released documentary evidence, which constantly
raises new questions. Many of these documents are reports from the grass-roots
level, such as the correspondence of civil servants relating to the famine, local
Cheka reports on the strikes at Tula, and administrative reports on the state of
prisoners in the concentration camps — all of which reveal the concrete reality
of that extremely violent world.

Before addressing the major questions at the heart of this study, it is
necessary to recall the different cycles of violence and repression.

The first cycle, from the end of 1917 to the end of 1922, began with
Lenin's seizure of power, which he saw as a necessary part of civil war. After
a brief phase in which spontaneous social violence was channeled into more

Conclusion

263

official structures, which then acted as catalysts in breaking up the old order, a
deliberate offensive against the peasantry took shape in the spring of 1918. This
offensive, even more than the military confrontations between the Reds and the
Whites, was to provide the model for several decades of terror. It destroyed
people's faith in the machinery of politics. What is striking is the constant
refusal to negotiate despite the high stakes involved, the regime's tenuous hold
on power, and its frequent deviations from proclaimed goals, particularly evi-
dent in the repressive measures taken against the working classes — the group
one would have imagined to be the natural ally of the Bolsheviks. In this respect
the Kronstadt revolt was a clear sign of things to come. The first cycle did not
end with the defeat of the Whites or with the NEP, but was prolonged by the
very people it created. It came to an end only with the famine of 1922, which
broke the last peasant resistance.

What can one make of the short pause, from 1923 to 1927, between the
two cycles of violence? There were some indications that once the civil war was
over and the manpower of the secret police was scaled back, a truce of sorts
would be established with the peasantry, and a reform of the legal system could
be carried out. Despite these palliatives, the secret police not only remained in
existence but also preserved their main functions and continued their control,
eavesdropping, and surveillance operations. The pause was notable for its
brevity.

Whereas the first cycle of repressions was marked by direct and gen-
eralized confrontation, the second began with an offensive by the Stalinist
group against the peasantry in the context of political in-fighting at the top.
The second cycle of violence was perceived as a new beginning by all par-
ties concerned. Politicians again used methods that had been tried and tested
over previous years. Violence had become such an everyday occurrence, so
much a way of life, that the new terror went on for another quarter of a
century. The second war against the peasantry was decisive in institutionaliz-
ing terror as a means of government. This was manifested in several differ-
ent ways. Collectivization made use of preexisting social tensions, reawak-
ening the archaic violence that was lurking beneath the surface in society;
it began the system of mass deportations; and it became the proving
ground for up-and-coming politicians. Furthermore, by setting up a predatory
system that disrupted the cycle of production — in Bukharin's words, "the
military and feudal exploitation of the peasantry" — a new form of slavery-
was invented. This opened the way for the most extreme experiments
of Stalinism and the famine of 1933, which in the grand total of deaths
under Stalin accounts for the highest number. After that limit had been
reached — when there were no peasants left to sow the next harvest, and the

264

A State against Its People

prisons were full — another brief, two-year truce was established, and for
the first time there was an amnesty. But such rare moments of relaxation did
little more than generate new tensions. For example, the children of deported
kulaks had their civil rights restored, but they were not permitted to return
home.

After the war against the peasants, the terror began to manifest differ-
ently during the 1930s and 1940s, changing in intensity and form. The time of
the Great Terror, from late 1936 to 1938, brought more than 85 percent of all
the death sentences handed down during the entire Stalinist period. During
these years the social origins of the victims were often extremely mixed. Al-
though many cadres were arrested and executed, the terror claimed victims
from all social backgrounds, many of whom were chosen arbitrarily when
quotas had to be filled. This blind and barbarous repression, when the terror
was at its height, seems to indicate that some obstacles were simply insur-
mountable, and that liquidation was the only course the state could find to
impose its will.

Another way of investigating the sequence of repressions is to look at the
social groups that were affected. Insofar as different areas of social interaction
became increasingly subject to legislation throughout the decades, several dis-
crete offensives can be discerned. The last one in particular was aimed at the
ordinary people of the country, with the increase in legislation in 1938 focused
almost exclusively on the working classes.

After 1940, in the context of the Sovietization of the new territories
that had been annexed and the u Great Patriotic War," a series of repres-
sions resumed. This time there were new groups of victims — the "national-
ists" and u enemy peoples" who subsequently underwent systematic-
deportation. The early stages of this new r wave were already visible in 1936 and
1937, notably in the deportation of Koreans, when the frontiers were being
tightened.

The annexation of eastern Poland and then of the Baltic states in 1939-
1941 led to the elimination of the "nationalist bourgeoisie" and to the depor-
tation of specific minority groups, for example the Poles from eastern Galicia.
This last practice intensified during the war despite the more pressing need to
defend a country facing possible annihilation. The successive deportation of
whole groups — such as Germans, Chechens, Tatars, Kalmyks — also revealed
the expertise that had been developed in these operations in the 1930s. The
practices, however, were not confined to the war years. They continued in other
forms throughout the 1940s as part of the long process of pacification and
Sovietization in the newly annexed regions of the Soviet empire. At the same
time the influx of huge nationalist contingents into the Soviet gulags had an

Conclusion

265

important influence on the structure and composition of the concentration
camp world. Representatives of the "punished peoples" and nationalist resis-
tance fighters soon outnumbered the Soviet prisoners.

In parallel to that growth, the years immediately following the war saw yet
another hardening of government policy toward various forms of civil behavior,
resulting in a steady increase in the gulag population. The same period marked
the numerical apogee of that population and the beginning of the crisis of the
gulags, which were outdated, paralyzed by multiple internal tensions, and beset
by ever-greater problems of economic inefficiency.

The last years of the Stalinist period, still largely shrouded in uncertainty,
show a series of relapses: a resurgence of latent antisemitism; a return of the
idea of the conspiracy, rivalry, and in-fighting among ill-defined factions; and
the elitist and clique-ridden nature of the secret police and the regional Party
organizations. Historians are led to wonder whether plans were being laid for
a last campaign, a new Great Terror, whose principal victims might have been
the Soviet Jews.

This brief overview of the first thirty-five years of Soviet history under-
scores the continuity of extreme violence as a means of political control of the
society.

The classic question, often raised in this context, concerns the continuity
between the first Leninist cycle and the second Stalinist cycle: to what extent
did the former prefigure the latter? The historical configuration in both cases
is really quite incomparable. The "Red Terror" grew out of the widespread
confrontations of the autumn of 1918. The extreme nature of the repressions
was in part a reaction to the radical character of the times. But the restarting
of the war against the peasantry, which was at the root of the second wave of
terror, occurred during what was basically a time of peace, and was part of a
long-lasting offensive against the majority of society. Besides these important
differences in context, the use of terror as a key instrument in the Leninist
political project had been foreseen before the outbreak of the civil war, and was
intended to be of limited duration. From that point of view, the short truce
ushered in by the NEP and the complex debates among Bolshevik leaders about
possible ways forward seem to indicate the possibility of normalized relations
between the Bolsheviks and society and the abandonment of terror as a means
of government. In practice, however, during this period the rural world lived
in retreat, and the relationship between the government and society was char-
acterized largely by mutual ignorance.

The war against the peasants is the nexus linking these two cycles of
violence. The practices that emerged in 1918-1922 continued. In both periods,
requisitioning campaigns were used, social tensions within the peasantry were

266 A State against Its People

encouraged, and archaic forms of brutality became commonplace. Both execu-
tioners and victims had the conviction that they were reliving a previous
scenario.

Even if the Stalinist era represents a specific social context in the use
of terror as a means of government and social management, questions re-
main about links with other periods in Soviet history. In that respect the
policy of deportation, for example, might have an important antecedent in
the de-Cossackization operations of 1919-20. At the moment when Cossack
territories were being seized, the government began a deportation operation
that affected the entire indigenous population. That operation followed
one that had targeted the better-off Cossacks, ending in "large-scale physical
extermination" thanks to the overzealousness of local agents. These events
could be said to foreshadow the practices of a decade later, albeit on a totally
different scale. Both involved the stigmatization of an entire social group, an
overreaction at the local level, and an attempt at eradication through deporta-
tion. In all of these aspects there are troubling similarities to the practices of
dekulakization.

If one examines in a wider sense the phenomenon of exclusion and
isolation of enemy groups, and the consequent creation of a camp system
during the civil war, one is forced to acknowledge that there are indeed impor-
tant differences between the two cycles of repression. The camps that were
developed and used during the civil war in the 1920s bore little resemblance to
those of the 1930s. The great reforms of 1929 not only led to the abandonment
of normal systems of detention, but also laid the foundation for a new system
characterized above all by the idea of forced labor. The appearance and devel-
opment of the gulag system point to the existence of a grand plan for the
exclusion of a certain segment of the population, and the use of that segment
in a project to transform the economy and society as a whole. Several elements
point clearly to the existence of such a grand design, and have been the object
of important studies. First, there is the extent to which the terror was a
well-planned and well-orchestrated phenomenon. The use of quotas stretched
from dekulakization to the Great Terror, a fact that can be interpreted as being
part of such a plan. The archives confirm an obsession with numbers and
statistics that permeated administrative organs from top to bottom. Regular,
perfectly balanced statistics evince an obsessive preoccupation with the
mathematical dimensions of the repression process. While such figures can
never be entirely trusted, they do allow historians to reconstruct periods of
intensity in the phenomenon. The chronology of the various waves of oppres-
sion is better understood today, and supports the theory of an ordered scries
of operations.

Conclusion

267

To a significant degree, however, reconstruction of the entire series of
repressive procedures, of the chain of command, and of the methods of im-
plementation counteracts the theory of a well-conceived, long-term plan.
Looking at the planning of repressions, one can see that chance played a huge
role and that cracks appeared at all stages of the operations. The deportation
of the kulaks is a case in point. They were often deported with no destination
in mind, and their "abandonment in deportation 1 ' is a clear indicator of the
prevailing chaos. Likewise, the "campaigns of emptying" the camps suggest a
lack of planning. In the transmission and execution of orders, troops often went
too far too soon and were guilty of "excessive zeal" or "deviation from the path"
at a grass-roots level.

The role of the gulags is also extremely complex and seems to become
more so as research progresses. In contrast to the vision of a Stalinist order in
which gulags were the hidden but entirely representative face of the regime,
documents now available suggest contradictory interpretations. The successive
arrival of repressed groups often promoted disorganization rather than
efficiency in the system. Despite an extremely elaborate system of classification
of the detainees, boundaries between different categories were fragile and often
illusory. Moreover, the question of the system's economic profitability remains
unanswered.

To contend with these contradictions, improvisations, and illogicalities,
several hypotheses have been put forward to explain the frequent recourse to
mass repression and the way in which violence and terror seemed to create their
own logic.

Historians have stressed the role played by improvisation and the gen-
eral lack of focus in directing "the Great Moment" of modernization and
the unleashing of the Stalinist cycles of repression. Often the authorities
would step up the intensity of terror so that they could persuade them-
selve that they were in control of volatile situations. They were quickly
caught up in an extreme spiral of violence that almost immediately became
self-perpetuating. The scale of this phenomenon escaped contemporary histo-
rians and is only now beginning to be understood. The process of repression
itself, seemingly the only possible response to the conflicts and obstacles con-
fronted by the authorities, generated uncontrollable movements that fueled the
terror.

The central place of terror in the political and social history of the
U.S.S.R. poses increasingly complex questions today. Current research
seems to negate many of the conclusions previously drawn by Sovietolo-
gists. While historians still seek a general and definitive explanation of the
whole phenomenon, it is extremely resistant to understanding. More progress

268

A State against Its People

is being made in understanding the mechanisms and dynamics of the violence
itself.

Many gray areas remain, particularly regarding the everyday behavior of
people reacting to the violence. If one wishes to find out who the executioners
actually were, then it is the whole of society that must be questioned — all those
who took part in the events, not just the victims.

World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

Stephane Courtois, Jean-Louis Panne, and Remi Kauffer

The Comintern in Action

Stephane Courtois and Jean-Louis Pann6

from early on, Lenin was determined to foment socialist revolution
throughout Europe and the rest of the world. This goal was partly the logical
fulfillment of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, with its famous slogan "Work-
ers of the world, unite!" In 1917 the spread of Bolshevism initially seemed to
be an urgent matter, since the revolution in Russia, it was thought, would be
endangered without revolutions in more advanced countries. In this respect
Lenin looked above all to Germany, with its enormous, well-organized prole-
tariat and its formidable industrial capacity. What had first been simply a need
of the moment was transformed into a full-fledged political project: world
socialist revolution.

At first the progress of events seemed to prove the Soviet leader right.
The breakup of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires following their
defeat in World War I brought about a series of political upheavals in Europe,
many of which had a strongly revolutionary character. Even though the Bol-
sheviks could not take any immediate action themselves, and had to rely solely
on their propaganda to give them influence abroad, revolution seemed to be
breaking out spontaneously in the wake of the German and Austro-Hungarian
defeat.

271

272

World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

The Revolution in Europe

Germany was the first country to feel the effects of revolutionary upheaval.
Even before its surrender, it faced a general mutiny of its naval tleet. The
defeat of the Reich and the emergence of a republic led by Social Democrats
resulted in some fairly violent reactions in the army and the police force, as well
as among ultranationalist and revolutionary groups that admired the actions of
the Bolsheviks in Russia.

In Berlin in December 1918 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht pub-
lished the program of the Spartakus group, breaking away from the Inde-
pendent Social Democratic party a few days later to set up the German
Communist Party (KPD) through a merger with a few other groups. In early
January 1919 the Spartakists, led by Liebknecht — who was more of a radical
revolutionary than Luxemburg and, like Lenin, opposed the idea of a Constitu-
ent Assembly — tried to start an insurrection in Berlin. 1 The revolt was quickly
crushed by the military on orders of the Social Democratic government. The
two leaders of the revolt were arrested and shot on IS January. This pattern
recurred in Bavaria, where on 13 April 1919 Eugcn Levine, a KPD leader,
assumed leadership of a Republican Council, which nationalized the banks and
started to form a Red Army. The Munich Commune was crushed by the
military on 30 April, and Levine was arrested on 13 May, court-martialed,
condemned to death, and shot on 5 June.

The most famous example of these revolutionary movements was in Hun-
gary. In defeat, Hungary had found the forced loss of Transylvania, decreed
by the victors of the w r ar, a hard pill to swallow. 2 It became the first genuine
instance of the Bolsheviks' exporting their revolution. Beginning in early 1918
the Bolshevik Party collected all non-Russian Communist sympathizers into a
group called the Federation of Foreign Communist Groups. As a result, there
existed a Hungarian group in Moscow made up, for the most part, of former
prisoners of war. In October 1918 this group sent some 20 members back to
Hungary. On 4 November the Hungarian Workers' (Communist) Party (HCP)
was established in Budapest under the leadership of Bela Kun. Kun had been
a prisoner of war and had quickly rallied to the Bolshevik revolution, becoming
president of the Federation of Foreign Communist Groups in April 1918. He
arrived in Hungary in November, accompanied by 80 activists, and was imme-
diately elected Party leader. It has been estimated that in late 1918 and early
1919 another 250 to 300 "agitators" and revolutionaries arrived in Hungary.
With financial support provided by the Bolsheviks, the Hungarian Communists
set about spreading propaganda, and their influence soon began to grow.

The official newspaper of the Social Democrats, the Nepszava (The voice
of the people), which was firmly opposed to the Bolsheviks, was attacked on

The Comintern in Action

273

18 February 1919 by a group of soldiers and unemployed workers who had
been mobilized by the Communists. Their aim was either to take control of the
printing press or to destroy it. The police intervened, and in the ensuing
conflict 8 people died and 100 were injured. The same night, Bela Kun and his
collaborators were arrested. At the police headquarters many of the prisoners
were beaten by the police in revenge for their colleagues who had died in the
attempt to break up the attack on the Nepszava. Hungary's president, Mihaly
Karolyi, sent his secretary to inquire after the health of the Communist leader,
who was subsequently granted extremely liberal custodial restrictions and al-
lowed to pursue his activities, and was soon able to reverse the setback despite
his detention. On 21 March, while still in prison, he achieved a major success
by bringing about the merger of the HCP and the Social Democratic Party. At
the same time, President Karolyi's resignation opened the way for the estab-
lishment of a ''republic of Soviets," the freeing of all imprisoned Communists,
and the organization on the Bolshevik model of a Revolutionary Council of
State modeled on the Soviet People's Commissars. This republic lasted 133
days, from 21 March until 1 August 1919.

At their first meeting the commissars decided to establish revolutionary
courts with judges chosen from among the people. Lenin, whom Bela Kun had
hailed as the leader of the world proletariat, was in regular contact by telegram
with Budapest after 22 March (218 messages were exchanged), and he advised
shooting the Social Democrats and "petits-bourgeois." In his message to the
Hungarian workers on 27 May 1919, he justified this recourse to terror: a The
dictatorship of the proletariat requires the use of swift, implacable, and resolute
violence to crush the resistance of exploiters, capitalists, great landowners, and
their minions. Anyone who does not understand this is not a revolutionary."
Soon the commissars of commerce, Matyas Rakosi, and of economic affairs,
Eugen Varga, and the head of the new courts had alienated all businessmen,
industrial employees, and lawyers. One proclamation posted on the walls
summed up the mood of the moment: "In the proletarian state, only the
workers are allowed to live!" Work became obligatory, and all businesses em-
ploying more than twenty workers were immediately nationalized, followed by
businesses employing more than ten, and soon the rest as well.

The army and the police force were dissolved, and a new army was
created, composed exclusively of revolutionary volunteers. Soon a Terror
Group of the Revolutionary Council of the Government was formed and
quickly became known as "Lenin's Boys." The Terror Group murdered about
ten people, including a young naval ensign, Ladislas Dobsa; a former first
secretary of state and his son, who was the chief of the railways; and three
police officers. "Lenin's Boys" answered to a retired sailor named Jozsef
Czerny, who recruited them from among the most radical Communists, par-

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ticularly former prisoners of war who had taken part in the Russian Revolution.
Czerny was politically closer to Tibor Szamuely, the most radical of the Com-
munist leaders, than he was to Bela Kun, who at one point proposed dissolving
"Lenin's Boys." In response Szamuely gathered together his troops and
marched on the House of Soviets. Kun received the support of the Social
Democrat Jozsef Haubrich, joint people's commissar of war. Finally negotia-
tions began, and Czerny's men agreed to join forces with the People's Com-
missariat of the Interior or to enlist in the army, which in fact most of them
did.

With some twenty of "Lenin's Boys, 11 Szamuely then went to S/olnok,
the first city to be taken by the Hungarian Red Army, where he executed several
locals accused of collaborating with the Romanians, who were considered na-
tional enemies because of their takeover of Transylvania and political enemies
because of their regime's opposition to the Bolsheviks. One Jewish schoolboy
who tried to plead for his father's life was killed for calling Szamuely a "wild
beast." The chief of the Red Army tried in vain to put a brake on Szamuely's
appetite for terror. Szamuely had requisitioned a train, and was traveling
around the country hanging any peasants opposed to collectivization measures.
Accused of having killed more than 150 people, his assistant Jozsef Kerekes
admitted to having shot 5 and having hanged 13 others with his own hands.
Although the exact number of people killed has never been established, Arthur
Koestler claimed that there were perhaps slightly fewer than 500, but went on
to note: "I have no doubt that Communism in Hungary would have followed
the same path as its Russian model, and soon degenerated into a totalitarian
police state. But that certitude, which came only much later, does nothing to
dim the glorious days of hope of the early days of the revolution." 1 Historians
attribute some 80 of the 129 recorded deaths to "Lenin's Boys," but it is likely
that the real number was at least several hundred,

Faced with mounting opposition and a worsening of the threat posed by
the Romanian troops, the revolutionary government drew upon popular an-
tisemitism. One poster denounced Jews who refused to fight at the front:
"Exterminate them, if they won't give their lives to the sacred cause of the
dictatorship of the proletariat!" Bela Kun ordered the arrest of 5,000 Polish
Jews who had come looking for food; he then confiscated their goods and had
them expelled. The HCP radicals demanded that Szamuely take charge of the
situation, and called for a "Red St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre," thinking for
whatever reason that this was the only means of halting the decline of the
Republic of Councils. Czerny tried to reorganize "Lenin's Boys," and in mid-
July an appeal appeared in Nepszava: "All previous members of the Terror
Group, who were demobilized when the group was broken up, are requested
to turn up at Jozsef Czerny's office to reenlist." The following day an official

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275

denial was published: "Notice is hereby given that no reestablishment of the
'Lenin's Boys' group can possibly be envisaged. Such great atrocities against
the honor of the proletariat were committed by the group as to preclude any
future role played by them in the service of the Republic of Councils."

The last weeks of the Budapest Commune were chaotic. Bela Kun faced
an attempted coup against his leadership, possibly led by Szamuely. On
1 August 1919 he left Budapest under the protection of the Italian military. In
the summer of 1920 he took refuge in the U.S.S.R. and was immediately named
a political commissar of the Red Army on the southern front. There he distin-
guished himself by executing officers from Wrangel's army who had agreed to
surrender if their lives would be spared. Szamuely attempted to flee to Austria
but was arrested on 2 August and committed suicide soon afterward. 4

The Comintern and Civil War

At the very moment when Bela Kun and his companions were attempting to
set up a second Soviet state, Lenin decided to establish an international organi-
zation whose aim was to spread the revolution throughout the world. The
Communist International- -also known as Comintern or the Third Interna-
tional — was created in Moscow in March 1919 and immediately began to
compete fiercely with the International of Socialist Workers (the Second Inter-
national, which had been established in 1889), The Comintern Congress of
1919 had no real organizational capacity, and in practice did little more than
answer the urgent need for Communist propaganda to capture the attention of
the spontaneous revolutionary movements that were then shaking Europe. The
real foundation of the Comintern should instead be dated from its Second
Congress, in the summer of 1920, when twenty-one conditions of admission
were laid down that had to be met by all socialists who wished to be associated
with the organization. Thereafter, as the "headquarters of world revolution,"
the organization was extremely centralized and totally controlled by the Bol-
shevik Party, which lent it prestige, experience, and real political power in
financial, military, and diplomatic terms.

From the outset Lenin regarded the Comintern as one of several instru-
ments for international subversion — others included the Red Army, diplomacy,
and espionage — and its political agenda closely followed the Bolsheviks' key
idea that the time had come to stop talking and to take up armed struggle. The
manifesto adopted at the Second Congress proudly announced: "The Commu-
nist International is the international party for insurrection and proletarian
dictatorship." Consequently, the third of the twenty-one conditions stipulated
that "in almost all the countries of Europe and America, the class struggle is
moving into the period of civil war. Under such conditions Communists can

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no longer trust bourgeois law. It is the duty to set up everywhere, in parallel to
the legal organization, an underground movement capable of decisive action in
the service of the revolution at the moment of truth.' 1 These euphemisms were
transparent: The "moment of truth" was the moment of revolutionary insur-
rection, and "decisive action" was participation in civil war. The policy was
applied to all countries regardless of political regime, including democracies,
republics, and constitutional monarchies.

The twelfth condition outlined the organizational necessities occasioned
by the preparations for civil war: "At the present moment of hard-fought civil
war, the Communist Party will be able to fulfill its role only if it is organized
in a totally centralized fashion, if its iron discipline is as rigorous as that of any
army, and if its central organization has sweeping powers, is allowed to exert
uncontested authority, and enjoys the unanimous confidence of its members."
The thirteenth condition also prescribed the action to be taken in the event of
dissent among the militants: "Communist parties . . . must proceed with peri-
odic purges of their organizations to eliminate all members who are petits-
bourgeois or have ulterior motives."

At the Third Congress, which took place in Moscow in June 1921 with
the participation of many recently established Communist parties, the direc-
tions were made even clearer. The "Thesis on Tactics" indicated that "the
Communist Party must educate large sections of the proletariat, with both
words and deeds, and inculcate the idea that any economic or political struggle,
when the circumstances are favorable, can be transformed into civil war, in the
course of which it is the duty of the proletariat to seize power." In addition,
the "Theses on the Structure, Methods, and Action of Communist Parties"
elaborated at length on "openly revolutionary uprisings" and "the organization
of combat" that it was the duty of each Communist Party to foment. The theses
made it clear that preparatory work was indispensable as long as "it is momen-
tarily impossible to form a regular Red Army."

The step from theory to practice was taken in March 1921 in Germany,
where the Comintern envisaged large-scale revolutionary action under the
leadership of Bela Kun, who in the meantime had been elected a member of
the Comintern Presidium. Launched at the moment when the Bolsheviks were
putting down the Kronstadt rebellion, the "March Action" in Saxony was a
genuine attempt at insurrection that met with failure despite the violent means
involved, including an attempt to dynamite the express train from Halle to
Leipzig. This failure immediately resulted in the first purge of the Comintern's
internal ranks. Paul Levi, one of the founders and the president of the KPD,
was sidelined because of his criticism of what he termed "adventurism." Al-
ready under the influence of the Bolshevik model, the Communist parties,
which from an institutional point of view were merely the national sections of

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277

the International, rapidly became more and more subordinate, before surren-
dering completely to the Comintern. This subordination was both political and
organizational, as the Comintern came to make all major decisions for these
parties and ultimately decided all questions of policy. The "insurrectionist
tendency" owed much to Grigory Zinoviev but was criticized by Lenin himself.
Although Lenin was fundamentally in agreement with Paul Levi, he handed
control of the KPD over to Levi's opponents in order to strengthen his own
control over the Comintern.

In January 1923 French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr to exact
the reparations from Germany that had been mandated by the Treaty of
Versailles. This move brought about a rapprochement between nationalists and
Communists over their common opposition to "French imperialism." In con-
crete terms the military occupation prompted a movement of passive resistance
by the population, a movement that was backed by the government. The
already unstable economic situation deteriorated rapidly, the value of the cur-
rency plunged, and by August one dollar was worth 13 million marks. Strikes,
demonstrations, and riots were widespread, and on 13 August, with revolution
in the air, the government of Wilhclm Cuno fell.

In Moscow the Comintern leaders thought that a new October Revolution
was still possible. Once the differences among Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Stalin
over who would take the lead in a new revolution were settled, the Comintern
set about the serious business of armed insurrection. Emissaries (August Gu-
ralsky and Matyas Rakosi) were sent to Germany, accompanied by civil war
specialists such as General Aleksander Sklobewski, alias Gorev. The plan was
to rely on a government of workers made up of left-wing Social Democrats
and Communists and to use it to procure arms for the masses. In Saxony, Rakosi
planned to blow up a railway bridge that linked the province to Czechoslovakia
in order to provoke Czechoslovak involvement and thus sow further confusion.

The actions were to start on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Excitement mounted in Moscow, where it was believed that victory was certain.
The Red Army was mobilized on the western frontier, ready to come to the aid
of the insurrection. In mid-October, Communist leaders joined the govern-
ments of Saxony and Thuringia with orders to reinforce the several hundred
proletarian militias, made up of 25 percent Social Democratic workers and 50
percent Communists. But on 13 October the government of Gustav Strese-
mann declared a state of emergency in Saxony, taking direct control of the
province, with the Reichswehr ready to intervene. Despite this turn of events,
Moscow called the workers to arms, and Heinrich Brandler, having just re-
turned from Moscow, called for a general strike at a workers' conference in
Chemnitz on 21 October. This move failed when the Social Democrats refused
to follow the Communist lead. The Communists then canceled the strike, but

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because of faulty communications this message never arrived in Hamburg,
where on the morning of 23 October Communist Combat Groups of 200-300
attacked the various police stations. Despite the element of surprise, they failed
to attain their objectives. The police counterattacked together with the Reichs-
wehr, and after thirty-one hours of righting, the Hamburg Communists were
totally isolated and forced to surrender. The hoped-for "second October" failed
to materialize. Nevertheless, the "M-Apparat" (Military Apparatus) remained
an important part of the KPD until the 1930s, and has been described in detail
by one of its leaders, Jan Valtin, whose real name was Richard Krebs. 5

The next scene for an attempted insurrection was the Republic of Estonia.
This was the second attack by Communists against the small country. On 27
October 1917 a Council of Soviets had seized power in Tallinn, dissolved the
assembly, and annulled election results that had been unfavorable to the Com-
munists. However, the Communists retreated en masse before the German
Expeditionary Force. On 24 February 1918, just before the arrival of the
Germans, the Estonians proclaimed independence. The German occupation
lasted until November 1918. Following the defeat of the kaiser the German
troops were forced to retreat, and the Communists again took the initiative, On
18 November a Communist government for Estonia was set up in Petrograd,
and two divisions of the Red Army invaded. The aim of this offensive was
clearly explained in the newspaper Severnaya Kommuna (The Northern
Commune): "It is our duty to build a bridge connecting the Russian Soviets to
the proletariat of Germany and Austria . . . Our victory will link the revolu-
tionary forces of Western Europe to those of Russia. It will lend irresistible
force to the universal social revolution." 6 In January 1919 the Soviet troops
were stopped by an Estonian counterattack within twenty miles of the capital.
Thus this second offensive also failed. On 2 February 1920 the Russian Com-
munists recognized Estonian independence with the Tartu peace accord. By
this time the Bolsheviks had already carried out a number of massacres in the
areas they had taken over. On 14 January 1920, the day before their retreat,
they killed 250 people in Tartu and more than 1,000 in the Rakvere district.
When Wesenburg was liberated on 17 January, three mass graves were discov-
ered, containing 86 bodies. In Tartu hostages were shot on 26 December 1919
after their arms and legs had been broken and in some cases their eyes cut out.
On 14 January the Bolsheviks had time to kill only 20 people, including Arch-
bishop Plato, of the 200 they were holding prisoner in Tartu. Because the
victims had been clubbed to death with axes and rifle butts — one officer was
found with his insignia nailed to his body— they were extremely difficult to
identify.

Despite this defeat, the Soviet Union had not given up hope of estab-

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279

lishing a satellite state on its borders. In April 1924, during secret negotiations
in Moscow with Zinoviev, the Estonian Communists prepared for an armed
uprising. They created combat teams structured in companies, and by the
autumn had organized more than 1,000 men. They then set about demoralizing
the army. The initial plan was to start the uprising and then to reinforce it with
a general strike. The Estonian Communist Party, which had nearly 3,000 mem-
bers and had suffered severe repression, tried to seize power in Tallinn on
1 December 1924, seeking to proclaim a Soviet Republic that would immedi-
ately demand affiliation with the Russian Soviet Republic, thus justifying the
arrival of the Red Army. The coup failed within a single day. "The working
masses ... did not actively assist the insurgents in the struggle against the
counterrevolutionaries. Most of the working classes of Revel [Tallinn] re-
mained disinterested spectators. 1 ' Jan Anvelt, who had directed operations, fled
to the U.S.S.R., where he worked as a functionary in the Comintern for many
years before dying in one of the purges. 7

After Estonia the action moved to Bulgaria. In 1923 the country faced grave
difficulties. Aleksandr Stamboliski, the leader of the coalition formed by the
Communists and his own Agrarian Party, was assassinated in June and replaced
as head of the government by Aleksandr Tsankov, who had the support of both
the police and the army. In September the Communists launched an insurrec-
tion that lasted a week before being harshly repressed. After April 1924 they
changed tactics, using assassinations and direct action. On 8 February 1925 an
attack on the Godech police station led to four deaths. On 1 1 February in Sofia
the parliamentary deputy Nikolas Milev, who was the head of the journal
Slovet and president of the Union of Bulgarian Journalists, was assassinated.
On 24 March a manifesto of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP) prema-
turely announced the inevitable fall of Tsankov, revealing the link between the
terrorist actions and the Communists' political objectives. In early April an
attack on King Alexander I very nearly succeeded, and on 15 April General
Kosta Georgiev, one of his advisers, was killed.

What followed was one of the most devastating episodes of these years of
political violence in Bulgaria. On 17 April, at Georgtev's funeral in the Cathe-
dral of the Seven Saints in Sofia, a terrible explosion caused the dome to fall
in. Among the 140 dead were 14 generals, 16 commanding officers, and 3
parliamentary deputies. According to Viktor Serge, the attack was organized
by the military section of the Communist Party. The presumed perpetrators of
the attack, Kosta Yankov and Ivan Minkov, two of the leaders of the organiza-
tion, were later shot in a gunfight while resisting arrest.

This terrorist act was exploited to justify fierce reprisals, with 3,000
Communists arrested and 3 hanged publicly. Some members of the Comintern

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later claimed that the head of the Bulgarian Communists, Georgi Dimitrov,
who led the Party in secret from Vienna, was responsible for this action. In
December 1948, at the Fifth Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party,
Dimitrov accepted responsibility on behalf of both himself and the military
organization. According to other sources, the man behind the dynamiting of
the cathedral was Meir Trilisser, head of the Foreign Section of the Cheka and
later deputy head of the GPU, who was decorated in 1927 with the Order of
the Red Flag for services rendered. 8 In the 1930s Trilisser was one of the ten
secretaries of the Comintern assured permanent control of the organization by
the NKVD.

After this series of failures in Europe the Comintern, at Stalin's instigation,
turned its attention to China. In a state of anarchy, torn apart by internal wars
and social conflicts, but at the same time experiencing a huge wave of national-
ism, China seemed ripe for an "anti-imperialist revolution." One sign of the
times was that in the autumn of 1925 the Chinese students at the Communist
University of the Workers of the East (KUTV), which had been established in
April 1921, were reorganized into the new Sun Yat-sen University.

Duly influenced by leaders from the Comintern and the Soviet govern-
ment, the Chinese Communist Party, which was not yet under the leadership
of Mao Zedong, was pushed in 1925-26 into a close alliance with the Nation-
alist Party, the Kuomintang, led by the young Chiang Kai-shek. The tactic
chosen by the Communist Party was to place all hope in the Kuomintang, using
it as a sort of Trojan horse to smuggle in the revolution. The Comintern
emissary, Mikhail Borodin, arrived as an adviser to the Kuomintang. In 1925
the left wing of the Nationalist Party, which favored collaboration with the
Soviet Union, took control of the party. The Communists then stepped up their
propaganda, encouraging social unrest and increasing their influence until they
gained control over the Kuomintang's Second Congress. But an obstacle soon
appeared in the person of Chiang Kai-shek, who was worried by the continuing
expansion of Communist influence. He feared, quite correctly, that the Com-
munists were attempting to sideline him. Seizing the initiative, he proclaimed
martial law on 12 March 1926, arresting all Communists in the Kuomintang
and the Soviet military advisers (although they were released a few days later),
silencing the leader of the party's left wing, and imposing an eight-point plan
whose purpose was to limit the prerogatives and activities of Communists in
the party. Chiang thus became the undisputed leader of the Nationalist army.
Borodin accepted the new situation.

On 7 July 1926 Chiang Kai-shek, with considerable military backup from
the Soviets, launched a Nationalist attack on the north of the country, which
was still under the control of the warlords. On 29 July he proclaimed martial

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281

law in Canton. The countryside in Hunan and Hubei was undergoing an
agrarian revolution whose dynamics called into question the alliance between
the Communists and the Nationalists. In the great industrial metropolis of
Shanghai, the unions began a general strike as the army approached. The
Communists, who included Zhou Enlai, called for an insurrection, counting on
the immediate entry of the army into the town. But no such event took place.
The uprising of 22-24 February 1927 failed, and the strikers were ferociously
punished by General Li Baozhang.

On 21 March a new, larger general strike took place, and the uprising
swept away the authorities in power. One division of the Nationalist army,
whose general had been convinced to take part, entered Shanghai and was soon
joined by Chiang Kai-shek, who was determined to take control of the situ-
ation. His success was made easier by the fact that Stalin, deceived by the
"anti-imperialist" dimension of the policies of Chiang and his armies, gave the
order to make peace with the Kuomintang and to stand beside them. On 12
April 1927 Chiang repeated in Canton the operation that he had carried out in
Shanghai, ordering the Communists to be hunted down and beaten up.

But Stalin changed course at the worst possible moment. In August, to
avoid losing face with his critics in the opposition, he sent two personal emis-
saries, Vissarion Lominadze and Heinz Neumann, to relaunch the insurrec-
tional movement after breaking the alliance with the Kuomintang/ 7 Despite the
failure of the u autumn harvest revolt" orchestrated by his two envoys, they
continued trying to foment revolution in Canton "to be able to bring news of
victory to their chief (as Boris Suvarin put it) at the Fifteenth Bolshevik Party-
Congress. This maneuver indicated the extent of the Bolsheviks' disdain for
human life, including now even the lives of their supporters. The senselessness
of the Canton Commune attests to that disregard for loss of life as much as the
terrorist actions in Bulgaria had a few years earlier.

In Canton several thousand insurgents were caught in a confrontation for
forty-eight hours with troops that outnumbered them by five or six to one. The
commune had been badly prepared; insufficiently armed, it also pursued poli-
cies not favored by the Cantonese workers. On the night of 10 December 1927
loyal Communist troops took up positions in the assembly areas that were
usually used by the Red Guards. As in Hamburg, the rebels initially benefited
from the element of surprise, but the advantage was soon lost. The proclama-
tion of a "soviet republic," on the morning of 12 December evoked no response
from the local population. The Nationalist forces counterattacked in the after-
noon, and the following day the red flag that had flown over the police head-
quarters was removed by the victorious troops. The reprisals were savage, and
thousands died.

The Comintern should have drawn lessons from this experience, but it

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was not in a position to study the major underlying questions. Once again the
use of violence was justified against all targets, in terms that demonstrated
clearly how much the culture of civil war had taken root among the Communist
cadres. The Armed Uprising, published by the Comintern in 1931 and soon
translated into several languages, offers the following terrifying bit of self-
criticism, with its transparent conclusions; "We should have got rid of the
counterrevolutionaries more carefully. In all the time that Canton was in the
hands of the revolutionaries, we killed only 100 people. The prisoners were killed
only after a normal trial before the commission for the fight against the reac-
tionaries. In combat, in the middle of a revolution, this procedure was too
lenient"™ This lesson would be remembered.

Following this disaster the Communists withdrew from the towns and
regrouped in the distant countryside. After 1931 they established free zones
protected by the Red Army in Hunan and Kiangsi. It was thus very early on
that the idea took root among the Communists in China that the revolution was
above all a military affair. This belief institutionalized the political function of
the military, which naturally resulted in ideas like Mao's famous formula,
"Power comes out of the barrel of a gun." What followed demonstrated all too
clearly that this was indeed the essence of the Communist vision of how power
was to be seized and kept.

Despite the Chinese disaster and the European failures of the early 1920s, the
Comintern was convinced that it was on the right track. All Communist par-
ties, including the legally constituted ones in democratic republics, possessed a
secret military wing that made occasional public appearances. The model most
often followed was that of the KPD in Germany, which was controlled bv
Soviet military cadres and which possessed a large M-Apparat, whose task was
to liquidate opponents (particularly those who belonged to the right wing) and
informers who might have infiltrated the Party, but which also played a larger
paramilitary role thanks to the famous Rote Front (Red Front), which had
several thousand members. There was nothing unusual about political violence
in the Weimar Republic, but the Communists did not concentrate their atten-
tion only on extreme right-wing movements such as the newly formed Nazi
Party. They also broke up socialist meetings held by people they termed u so-
ciotraitors" or u sociofascists." M Nor did they hesitate to attack the police,
whom they saw as the representatives of a reactionary or even fascist state. The
events of 1933 and what followed of course demonstrated that the real fascist
enemy was the National Socialist Party, and that it would have been more
sensible to form an alliance against the Nazis with the other socialist parties
who sought to defend "bourgeois democracy." But the Communists altogether
rejected the idea of democracy.

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283

In France, where the political climate was much calmer, the French Com-
munist Party (PCF) also had its own armed section. It was led by Albert Treint,
one of the Party secretaries, who had served as a captain during the war and
thus had military experience. Their first public appearance was on 11 January
1924, at a Communist meeting where a group of anarchists were objecting
vociferously: Treint gave the order, and ten men armed with revolvers rose up
and opened fire on the anarchists from point-blank range, killing two of them
outright and wounding several others. Because of lack of proof, none of the
assassins was ever prosecuted. A year later, on 25 April 1925, a few weeks before
the municipal elections, the PCF security services were involved in another
violent incident at an electoral meeting of a right-wing organization called the
Patriotic Youth Group, in the rue Damremont in Paris. Some of the militants
were armed and did not hesitate to make use of their weapons. Three of the
Patriotic Youth Group were killed instantly; another died a few days later. Jean
Taittinger, the leader of the Patriotic Youth Group, was arrested, and the police
made several raids on the houses of the Communist militants.

Nevertheless, the Party continued to act in the same vein. In 1926 Jacques
Duclos, who as a newly elected parliamentary deputy enjoyed full parliamen-
tary immunity, was placed in charge of the Anti-Fascist Defense Groups,
consisting of former servicemen from World War I, and the Young Anti-Fascist
Guards, recruited from among the Communist Youth groups. These paramili-
tary groups, closely modeled on the German Rote Front, paraded in uniform
on 1 1 November 1926. At the same time Duclos was in charge of antimilitarist
propaganda, publishing a review called Le combattanl rouge, which taught the
art of civil war, describing and analyzing historic street combats and the like.

The Armed Uprising, which described various insurrections since 1920,
was republished in France in early 1934. 12 The political misfortunes of the
French Popular Front in the summer and autumn of 1934 caused the book to
wane in popularity, but that decline had little effect on the fundamental role of
violence in Communist practice. The justification of violence, the day-to-day
practice of class hatred, and the theory of civil war and terror were used again
in 1936 in Spain, where the Comintern sent a number of its cadres who
distinguished themselves in the Communist repressions.

The selection and training of cadres to join future armed uprisings oc-
curred in close liaison with the Soviet secret services, and with one service in
particular, the GRU (Glavnoe razvedyvateFnoe upravlenie, or Main Intelli-
gence Directorate). Created by Trotsky as the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army,
the GRU never abandoned this educational role even when circumstances
changed and it was scaled down considerably. Even in the early 1970s some of
the young cadres in the French Communist Party underwent training in the
U.S.S.R. (learning how to shoot, strip, and assemble various firearms, make

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bombs and radio transmitters, and use sabotage techniques) with the Spetsnaz,
the special Soviet troops who were used to train the security forces. The GRU
also had a number of military advisers who could be sent to friendly parties
whenever necessary, Manfred Stern for instance, the Austro-Hungarian who
was lent to the KPD M-Apparat for the Hamburg uprising in 1923, was
subsequently also sent to China and Manchuria before becoming better known
as "General Kleber" in the International Brigades in Spain.

Many of these underground military organizations were run by unsavory
characters. The members were often simply the local bandits, who occasionally
formed gangs in their own right. The "Red Guards" or "Red squadrons" of
the Chinese Communist Party in the second half of the 1920s provide one of
the most striking examples. Their sphere of activity was Shanghai, which was
then the epicenter of Party operations. Led by Gu Shunzhang, a former gang-
ster affiliated with the secret Green Band society, the more powerful of the two
Shanghai mafia families, they were in daily conflict with their Nationalist
opponents, particularly with the Blue Shirts, who modeled themselves on the
Fascists. These two adversaries engaged in a series of conflicts in which terror
was traded for terror, ambushes were a daily occurrence, and revenge killings
w ; ere commonplace. All these activities had the full support of the Soviet consul
in Shanghai, who had his own military specialists such as V. Gorbatyuk, as well
as manpower at his disposal.

In 1928 Gu Shunzhang's men liquidated two suspects who had been freed
by the police: He Jiaxing and He Jihua were riddled with bullets while they
slept. Outside, other conspirators set off some fireworks to cover the sound of
the gunfire. Similarly efficacious methods were adopted to settle differences of
opinion within the Party itself. Sometimes a simple accusation was considered
sufficient evidence. On 17 January 1931 , furious at having been outmaneuvered
by Pavel Mif, the Comintern delegate, and by the other leaders acting under
orders from Moscow, He Mengxiong and some twenty comrades from the
workers' faction met at the Oriental Hotel in Shanghai. As soon as they began
their discussion, armed policemen and agents of the Diaocha Tongzhi (the
centra] investigative bureau of the Kuomintang) burst into the room and ar-
rested everyone. The Nationalists had received an anonymous tip-off about the
meeting.

After the defection of Gu Shunzhang in April 1931, his immediate return
to the fold of the Green Band (he had earlier switched sides to the Blue Shirts),
and his submission to the Kuomintang, a special committee of five Communist
cadres — Kang Sheng, Guang Huian, Pan Hannian, Chen Yun, and Ke Qing-
shi — took charge of operations in Shanghai. In 1934, the year when the urban
apparatus of the CCP almost fell apart for good, Ding Mocun and Li Shiqun,
the last two leaders of armed groups of Communists in the city, fell into the

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hands of the Kuomintang. They went on to work for the Japanese before
coming to a sorry end: Ding Mocun was shot by the Nationalists for treason
in 1947, and Li Shiqun was poisoned by a Japanese officer. Kang Sheng became
the head of Mao's secret police from 1949 until his death in 1975, and was thus
one of the main butchers of the people of China under the Communist re-
gime. 13

Sometimes members of foreign Communist groups were used in covert
police operations inside the U.S.S.R. This seems to have been the case in the
Kutepov affair. In 1924 General Aleksandr Kutepov was called to Paris by
Grand Duke Nicholas to become the head of the General Military Union
(ROVS). In 1928 the GPU decided to break up this organization. The general
disappeared on 26 January, and rumors began to fly, some of them undoubtedly
started by the Soviet Union itself After two independent inquiries it became
clear who was responsible for the kidnapping. The first inquiry was conducted
by Vladimir Burtsev, who was famous for having unmasked Evno Azev, the
Okhrana (tsarist secret police) agent who had infiltrated the Socialist Revolu-
tionary organization; the other was led by Jean Delage, a journalist at the Echo
de Pans. Delage proved that the general had been taken to Houlgate and put
on a Soviet ship, the Spartak, which left Le Havre on 19 February. The general
was never seen alive again. On 22 September 1965 Soviet general N. Shimanov
claimed responsibility for the operation in the Soviet army's main newspaper,
Red Star, and revealed the name of the perpetrator of the incident: "Sergei
Puzitsky . . . not only took part in the capture of the bandit Savinkov . . . but
also led the operation to arrest General Kutepov and other White Guard chiefs
in exemplary fashion." 14 Today the circumstances of the kidnapping are better
known. The general's emigre organization had been infiltrated by the GPU. In
1929 a former minister from the White government of Admiral Kolchak, Sergei
Nikolaevich Tretyakov, had secretly switched to the Soviet side and was hand-
ing on information under the code name Ivanov No. UJ1. Thanks to the
detailed information he passed to his contact Vechinkin, Moscow knew almost
all there was to know about the general's movements. A commando group
posing as policemen seized Kutepov's car on the street, while a Frenchman,
Charles Honel, who was a mechanic in a garage in the suburbs of Paris, asked
Kutepov to follow him. Honel's brother Maurice, who was also involved in the
operation because of his contacts with the Soviet secret services, would be
elected a Communist member of Parlement in 1936. Kutepov refused to coop-
erate, and he was stabbed to death and his body buried in the basement of
HonePs garage. 15

Kutepov's successor, General E. K. Miller, had as his second in command
Nikolai Skoblin, who was in fact a Soviet agent. With his wife, the singer Nadya
Plevitskaya, Skoblin organized the abduction of General Miller. On 22 Sep-

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tember 1937 Miller disappeared, and on 23 September the Soviet ship Maria
Ulyanovna left Le Havre. Subsequently General Skoblin also disappeared, and
suspicions focused increasingly on the ship. General Miller was of course on
board, but the French government decided not to detain the ship. Once in
Moscow Miller was interrogated and tortured." 1

Dictatorship, Criminalization of Opponents, and Repression within the
Comintern

At Moscow's instigation, the Comintern installed an armed group within each
Communist Party to prepare for revolution and civil war against the reigning
powers. It also introduced its brethren to the same police tactics and terror that
were used in the U.S.S.R. At the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, which
took place from 8 to 16 March 1921, the same time as the Kronstadt rebellion,
the bases for a dictatorial regime for the Party itself were laid down. During
preparations for the congress no fewer than eighteen different platforms were
proposed and discussed. These debates were the last vestiges of the democracy
that had struggled to establish itself in Russia. It was only within the Party that
this supposed freedom of speech prevailed, and even there it was short-lived.
Lenin set the rone on the second day: "We do not need opposition, comrades;
this is not the moment for that. Be here, or in Kronstadt with a rifle: but do not
join the opposition. Do not hold it against me, this is just the way it is. It is time
to end opposition. In my opinion, the Congress should vote for an end to all
opposition, and pull a veil over it; we have had enough of it already." 17 His
targets were the people who, without constituting a group in the normal sense
of the word, and without publishing anything, nonetheless united around two
opposition platforms. The first was known as the Workers' Opposition and
included Aleksandr Shlyapnikov, Aleksandra Kollontai, and Yuri Lutovinov.
Members of the second group were known as Democratic Centralists and
included Timofei Sapronov and Gavriil Myasnikov.

The congress was nearly over when Lenin presented two resolutions, the
first concerning Party unity and the second "unionist and anarchist deviation
within the Party," which was in effect an attack on the Workers' Opposition.
The first text demanded the immediate dissolution of all groups centered upon
a particular platform and their expulsion from the Party. One unpublished
article of this resolution, which remained secret until October 1923, gave the
Central Committee the power of enforcement. Feliks Dzer/hinsky's police thus
had a new field of operations: any opposition group within the Part)' itself
became subject to surveillance, and if necessary was punished by expulsion
from the Party, which for true militants was a form of political death.

Even though their call for the end of freedom of speech contradicted Party

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287

statutes, both motions were carried. Radek gave an almost prescient justifica-
tion for the first one: "I am sure that it could be used against us, and yet I am
voting for it ... In times of danger, the Central Committee must take severe
measures that it considers necessary against even the best comrades . . . Even
the Central Committee itself might make mistakes, but that is preferable to the
general chaos we are witnessing at the moment." This choice, which was the
result of a particular set of circumstances but was entirely in keeping with the
Bolsheviks' most profound instincts, was an extremely important one for the
future of the Soviet Party, and accordingly for the Comintern as well.

The Tenth Party Congress also reorganized the Party Control Committee,
whose role it defined as "the consolidation of unity and authority within the
Party." From that time on, the commission assembled personal dossiers on all
Party activists. These dossiers could be used if necessary as the basis for
accusations, giving details of attitudes toward the political police, participation
in opposition groups, and so on. As soon as the congress ended, harassment
and intimidation of members of the Workers' Opposition began. Later Shlyap-
nikov explained that "the struggle was not carried out on ideological grounds,
but was more a simple question of removing the people in question from their
posts, moving them from one district to another, or even excluding them from
the Party."

A new series of checks began in August and went on for several months.
Nearly one-fourth of all Party activists were thrown out. Periodic recourse to
the chislka (purge) became an integral component of Party life. Aino Kuusinen
described this cyclical practice:

Chistka meetings took the following form: the name of the accused was
read out, and he was ordered to take the stand. Then members of the
Purification Committee would ask questions. Some managed to explain
themselves with relative ease; others had to undergo this severe test for
some time. If anyone had personal enemies, that could give a decisive
turn to events: in any case, expulsion from the Party could be pro-
nounced only by the Control Commission. If the accused was not found
guilty of anything that would have led to expulsion from the Party, the
procedure was closed without a vote's being cast. But if the opposite was
the case, no one ever intervened in favor of the accused. The President
simply asked, "Kto protiv?" [Who is opposed?] and because no one
dared to object, the case was deemed to have been decided unani-
mously. 18

The effects of the Tenth Congress were felt quickly: in February 1922
Gavriil Myasnikov was suspended for one year for having defended freedom
of the press against Lenin's orders. Finding no support within the Party, the
Workers' Opposition appealed to the Comintern ("Declaration of the 22").

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Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and Zinoviev then called for the expulsion of Aleksandr
Shlyapnikov, Ateksandra Kollontai, and G. Medvedev, but this expulsion was
rejected by the Eleventh Congress. Ever more in thrall to Soviet power, the
Comintern was soon forced to adopt the same internal regime as the Bolshevik
Party. This was the logical consequence of the preceding events and in itself
quite unsurprising.

In 1923 Dzerzhinsky demanded an official resolution from the Politburo
that would oblige all Party members to denounce to the GPU any opposition
activity they encountered. Dzerzhinsky's proposal led to a new crisis within the
Bolshevik Party. On 8 October Trotsky sent a letter to the Central Committee,
followed on 15 October by the "Declaration of the 46." The ensuing debate
centered on the "new direction 11 of the Russian Party and was hotly contested
in all sections of the Comintern. ltJ

Simultaneously, at the end of 1923, it was decreed that all Comintern
sections should undergo a process of "Bolshevization," reorganizing their
structures more tightly and reinforcing their allegiance to Moscow. Resistance
to these measures led to a considerable increase in the power of the Interna-
tional's "holy missionaries," against a background of debates concerning the
evolution of power in Soviet Russia.

Boris Suvarin (sometimes spelled Souvarine), one of the leaders of the
French Communist Party, took a stand against the new line, denouncing the
low tactics being used by Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin against their opponent
Trotsky. On 12 June 1924 Suvarin was summoned to the Thirteenth Congress
of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and asked to explain himself The
meeting became acrimonious, in the manner of meetings where full confessions
were expected. A commission was hastily put together to examine the "Suvarin
case," and he was suspended from the Party. The reaction of the other French
Party leaders was a clear indication of the prevailing mood. On 19 July an
anonymous author wrote in L'humanite: "In our Party [the PCF], which the
revolutionary battle has not yet completely purified of its social-democratic
remnants, individual personalities still play too big a role . . . Only after petit-
bourgeois individualism has been destroyed once and for all will the anonymous
iron cohorts of the French Bolsheviks take shape. If we wish to be worthy of
the Communist International to which we belong and to follow in the steps of
the glorious Russian Party, we must mercilessly punish all those in our ranks
who fail to comply with our rules!" This line was to govern the PCF for many
decades. The unionist Pierre Monatte summed up the change in a single word:
the "corporali/ation" (turning everyone into little corporals) of the Communist
Party.

During the K i f t h Congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1924,
Zinoviev threatened to "break the bones" of his opponents, demonstrating

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289

clearly the sort of behavior that was becoming the norm in Communist circles.
Unfortunately, it was to rebound on him: it was his bones that were broken by
Stalin when he was removed from the post of Comintern President in 1925.
Zinoviev was replaced by Bukharin, who soon suffered the same fate. On 11
July 1928, just before the Sixth Congress of the Comintern (17 July— 1 Sep-
tember), Kamenev had a secret meeting with Bukharin at which he took notes.
Bukharin explained that he was a victim of the police regime, that his phone
was being tapped, and that he was being followed by the GPU His fear was
quite real as he said, "He'll strangle us ... we can't bring division into the
Party, because he'd strangle us." The "he" in question was Stalin.

The first person whom Stalin tried to "strangle" was Leon Trotsky. The
onslaught against Trotskyism, launched in 1927, was an extension of the ear-
lier campaign against Trotsky himself. Hints of this had come during a Bolshe-
vik Party conference in October 1926, when Yuri Larin, writing in Pravda, had
demanded that "either the Opposition must be expelled and legally destroyed,
or we must solve the problem with guns in the streets, as we did with the left
Socialist Revolutionaries in July 1918 in Moscow." The Left Opposition, as it
was officially called, was isolated and getting weaker all the time. The GPU
initiated a campaign of intimidation against it, claiming that the group had a
secret press, directed by a former officer from Wrangel's army (who in fact was
a GPU agent), where Opposition documents were being printed. On the tenth
anniversary of October 1917, the Opposition decided to disseminate its own
agenda. Brutal police tactics prevented this from happening, and on 14 No-
vember 1927 both Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Bolshevik
Party. The next step was to exile the best-known opposition activists to far-
flung regions of the Soviet Union. Christian Rakovsky, the former Soviet
ambassador to France, was exiled to Astrakhan, on the Volga, then to Barnaul,
in Siberia. Viktor Serge was sent to Oranienburg in the Urals, in 1933. Others
were expelled from the Soviet Union altogether. Trotsky was first taken by
force to Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan; a year later he was expelled to Turkey and
thus avoided the prison sentence that awaited most of his followers. These
followers were becoming more and more numerous, and like the activists of
what had been the Workers' Opposition and the Democratic Centralist Group
they were being arrested and sent to special prisons known as "political deten-
tion centers."

From this time on, foreign Communists who either were members of the
Comintern abroad or were living in Russia were arrested and interned in the
same fashion as activists in the Russian Party. It was claimed that they should
be treated as Russians since any foreign Communist who stayed in Russia for
any length of time was required to join the Bolshevik Party and thus was subject

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World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

to its discipline. One well-known case was that of the Yugoslav Communist
Ante Ciliga, a member of the Yugoslav Politburo who was sent to Moscow in
1926 as a Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP) member of the Comintern. He
made contact with Trotsky's opposition group and increasingly distanced him-
self from the Comintern, where there was never any real debate about ideas,
and whose leaders never hesitated to use intimidatory methods to counter
opposition of any kind. Ciliga termed this the "servility system" of the inter-
national Communist movement. In February 1929, at a General Assembly of
Yugoslav Communists in Moscow, a resolution was adopted condemning the
policies of the YCP. This resolution was tantamount to a condemnation from
the Comintern itself. An illegal group — according to the rules that were then
in place — was then organized by those who opposed the Soviets' official line.
A commission began an inquiry into Ciliga, who was suspended for one year.
Ciliga refused to abandon his "illegal" activities and settled in Leningrad. On
1 May 1930 he returned to Moscow to meet with other members of his
Russo- Yugoslav group, which had become extremely critical of the way indus-
trialization was being carried out and sought to form a new party. On 21 May
he and his companions were arrested and sent to the "political detention center"
in Verkhne-Uralsk on the basis of Article 59 of the penal code. For more than
three years he demanded the right to leave Russia, constantly writing letters of
protest and conducting a series of hunger strikes while being moved from
prison to prison. During one moment of freedom he attempted suicide. The
GPU attempted to persuade him to give up his Italian citizenship. After a
further exile in Siberia, he was finally expelled on 3 December 1935, and that
in itself was an exceptional event. 20

Thanks to Ciliga, we have a good idea of what life was like in the political
detention centers. "Comrades would send us newspapers that appeared in the
prisons. What a range of opinion, what freedom of thought there was in those
articles! What passion and openness in the discussion of questions that were
not simply abstract and theoretical, but were also the burning issues of the day!
And our freedom did not stop there either. During our daily walk, we would
pass through a series of rooms, and the inmates would gather in the corners
and conduct proper meetings, with a president, a secretary, and speakers who
took the floor in turns." He also described the physical conditions:

Our diet was that of the traditional muzhik [peasant]: bread and soup
day and night, all year long . . . For lunch there was a soup made from
bad fish or rotten meat. For dinner we had the same soup without the
fish or meat . . - The daily bread ration was 700 grams, the monthly
sugar ration was one kilo, and we also had a tobacco ration, some ciga-
rettes, tea, and soap. The diet was monotonous, and there was never

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enough food. We constantly had to fight against reductions in our ra-
tions: 1 could not begin to describe how we fought for our right to the
tiniest little scraps. But if we compare how we lived to the regimes in
force in the normal prisons, where hundreds of thousands of detainees
were all crammed in together, and certainly to the gulags, where millions
of people were crushed, our regime was privileged by comparison. 21

Such privileges of course were all relative. In Verkhne-Uralsk the prison-
ers went on hunger strike three times, in April and then again in the summer
of 1931, and again in December 1933, to fight for their rights and above all to
protest the lengthening of their sentences. After 1934 the special treatment of
such political prisoners was largely ended, although it remained in place in
Verkhne-Uralsk until 1937, and conditions rapidly worsened. Some detainees
died after being beaten, others were shot, and others simply disappeared alto-
gether, as Vladimir Smirnov did in Suzdal in 1933,

The criminalization of real or imaginary opponents within the various Com-
munist Parties was soon extended to high-ranking members. Jose Bullejos, the
leader of the Spanish Communist Party, and several of his colleagues were
called to Moscow in the autumn of 1932 and their policies severely criticized.
When they refused to submit to the dictates of the Comintern, they were
expelled from the Party en masse on 1 November and found themselves under
house arrest in the Hotel Lux, where the members of the Comintern were
based. The Frenchman Jacques Duclos, the former Comintern delegate in
Spain, brought them the news of their expulsion and explained to them that
any attempt to resist would be met with "the full force of Soviet law." 22 Bullejos
and his companions had an extremely difficult time trying to leave the
U.S.S.R.; it took two months of tense negotiations before their passports were
returned to them.

The same year saw *he epilogue to an extraordinary series of events
concerning the French Communist Party. Early in 1931 the Comintern had
sent a representative and several instructors to the PCF with orders to bring
the situation there under control. In July the head of the Comintern, Dmitry
Manuilsky, came secretly to Paris and revealed to an amazed local Politburo
that a group in their midst was attempting to sow disorder in the Party ranks.
In fact the mission itself was an attempt to sow discord in the Party and hence
to weaken the grip of French Party leaders and increase their dependence on
Moscow. Among the heads of this mythical group was Pierre Celor, one of the
main leaders of the Party since 1928, who was called to Moscow on the pretext
that he was to be elected to the post of PCF representative at the Comintern.
As soon as he arrived he was treated as an agent provocateur and a social outcast.

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Having no money, Celor managed to get through the winter thanks to the ration
card of his wife, who had accompanied him to Moscow and who still had a post
in the Comintern. On 8 March 1932 he was called to a meeting with several
secret-police investigators, who during a twelve-hour interrogation tried to
make him admit that he was a "police agent who had infiltrated the Party."
Celor refused to admit any such thing, and after several more months of
harassment he returned to France on 8 October 1932, only to be publicly
denounced as a police spy.

In 1931 French Communist Louis Aragon wrote the following poem,
titled "Prelude to the Cherry Season":

I sing the GPU which is taking shape

In the France of today

I sing the GPU we need in France

I sing the GPUs of nowhere and everywhere

I call for the GPU to prepare the end of the world

Call for the GPU to prepare the end of the world

To defend the betrayed

To defend those always betrayed

Ask for a GPU, you whom they bend and whom they kill

Ask for a GPU

You need the GPU

Long live the GPU the dialectical figure of heroism

Real heroes not imbecile idiot pilots

Who people think are heroes just because they

Fly in the face of the earth

Long live the GPU, true image of materialist splendor

Long live the GPU; down with Chiappe and the Marseillaise

Long live the GPU; down with the pope and the bugs

Long live the GPU; down with money and banks

Long live the GPU; down with the cheating East

Long live the GPU; down with the family

Long live the GPU; down with infernal laws

Long live the GPU; down with socialist assassins like

Caballero Boncour MacDonald Zoergibel

Long live the GPU; down with the enemies of the proletariat

LONG LIVE THE GPU 21

In 1932 cadre sections on the model of the Bolshevik Party were estab-
lished in many Communist Parties. These sections were dependent on the
Central Section of the Comintern cadres. Their task was to keep complete
records on all Party activists and to gather biographical and autobiographical
questionnaires on all the leaders. More than 5,000 such dossiers from the
French Party alone were sent to Moscow before the war. The biographical

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293

questionnaire contained more than seventy questions and was divided into five
broad sections: origins and current social situation, role in the Party, education
and intellectual activities, participation in social life, and any legal records that
might be relevant. This material was catalogued in Moscow, where the records
were kept by Anton Krajewski, Moisei Chernomordik, and Gevork Alikhanov,
the successive heads of the Comintern cadre section, which was also linked to
the foreign section of the NKVD. In 1935 Meir Trilisser, one of the NKVD's
highest-ranking agents, was appointed secretary of the Central Executive Com-
mittee of the Comintern and placed in charge of the cadre section. Under the
pseudonym Mikhail Moskvin he collected information and denunciations and
decided who was to be disgraced, which was the first step on the way to
liquidation. 24 It was the job of all cadre sections to draw up blacklists of enemies
of the U.S.S.R. and of Communism.

In rapid order, various sections of the Comintern began to recruit intel-
ligence agents for the U.S.S.R. In some cases the people who agreed to under-
take this illegal and clandestine work were genuinely unaware that they were
working for the Soviet secret services, including the GRU, the Foreign Section
(Inostrannyi otdeP; INO) of the Cheka-GPU, and the NKVD. Relations among
these organizations were formidably complicated. Moreover, they fought
among themselves to recruit new agents, often attempting to entice agents from
rival services. Elizaveta Poretskaya gives many examples of such practices in
her memoirs. 2 *

In 1932, when the cadres began to be controlled by emissaries from the Comin-
tern, the PCF itself started keeping records on all people it considered suspect
or dangerous. The official function of the cadre sections was to recruit the best
activists; another function was to compile lists of people who had been found
wanting in some way. From 1932 to June 1939 the PCF drew up twelve
documents with titles such as "Blacklist of provocateurs, traitors, and police
informers thrown out of French revolutionary organizations" and "Blacklist of
provocateurs, thieves, crooks, Trotskyites, and traitors thrown out of workers'
organizations in France." To justify such lists, which by the start of World War
II contained more than 1,000 names, the PCF used a simple political argument:
"The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the working classes and revolutionary
organizations in our country is becoming ever more intense."

Activists were required to submit information about the appearance of
suspects (List no. 10, from August 1938, specified "size and build, hair, eye-
brows, forehead, nose, mouth, chin, shape of face, complexion, distinguishing
marks") and "any information that might help locate" them, such as their
address and place of work. Alt activists were thus required to some extent to
behave like Cheka members.

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Some suspects undoubtedly were genuine crooks; others were simply
opposed to the Party line, irrespective of whether they belonged to the Party.
The first targets in the 1930s were the Trotskyites and the followers of Jacques
Doriot in Saint-Denis. The French Communists simply repeated the argu-
ments of their Soviet counterparts: the Trotskyites had become "a gang of
criminals and unscrupulous saboteurs, subversive agents, and assassins follow-
ing the orders of foreign espionage services." 25

The war, the banning of the PCF because of its support for the German-
Soviet pact, and the German occupation induced the Party to intensify its
secret-police activities. All PCF members who refused to accept the German-
Soviet pact were denounced, including those who joined the resistance. Among
these were Adrien Langumier, an editor at Jean Luchaire's Temps rwuveaux;
and Rene Nicod, a former Communist deputy from Oyonnax, whose ties with
his former comrades remained close. Jules Fourier was another Communist
whom the Party police tried unsuccessfully to liquidate: Fourier, after voting
in favor of full powers for Petain, set up a resistance network in 1941 and was
subsequently deported to Buchenwald and Mauthausen.

Other targets included those who in 1941 participated in the French
Workers' and Peasants' Party (POPF); one of its leaders, Marcel Gitton, a
former PCF Party secretary, was shot in September by militant Communists.
The PCF declared this group "traitors to the Party and to France." Sometimes
their accusatory statements were followed by the note "punished accordingly."
There were also cases of militants such as Georges Dezire, who were suspected
of treason and assassinated, only to be rehabilitated after the war.

In the midst of the persecution of Jews, the Communist Party used
strange methods to denounce its enemies: "C . . . Renee, also known as Tania,
or Therese, of the 14th arrondtssement, Bessarabian Jew"; u De B . . . Foreign
Jew, a rebel who insults the CP and the U.S.S.R." Immigrant Manpower (the
MOI), an organization that grouped all foreign militant Communists, had used
similar language: U R. Jew (not his real name). Works with a group of enemy
Jews." The hatred for Trotskyites also remained strong: "D . . . Yvonne.
1, Place du General Beuret, Paris 8 ... A Trotskyite, has had liaisons with the
POUM. Insults the U.S.S.R." It is quite probable that in the course of arrests
such lists fell into the hands of the Vichy police or the Gestapo. What then
happened to the people on the lists?

In 1945 the PCF released another series of blacklists of political enemies,
some of whom had already survived several assassination attempts. The insti-
tutionalization of the blacklist quite obviously echoes the lists of potential
criminals drawn up by Soviet security services such as the Cheka, the GPU,
and the NKVD. It was a universal practice among Communists, which began

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295

in the early days of the civil war in Russia. In Poland, at the moment the war
ended, such lists contained forty-eight categories of people to be watched.

In-fighting among the various services was ended by a simple change that
united the Comintern and the secret services under the control of the head of
the CPSU, making them directly accountable to Stalin himself for their ac-
tions. In 1932 Mikhail Ryutin, who had been zealous and relentless in carrying
out repression against his own friends, suddenly found himself in opposition to
Stalin. He drew up a statement saying that "Stalin today has the infallible
status of a pope at the Comintern. He controls, by direct and indirect means,
all the leading cadres of the Comintern, not simply in Moscow but everywhere,
and this is the decisive argument that confirms his invincibility in political
questions." 27 By the end of the 1920s the Comintern, which was also financially
dependent on the Soviet state, had lost all semblance of independence. It was
not long before this material dependence, which went hand in hand with
political dependence, accompanied an even more sinister dependence on the
secret police.

The inevitable result of the ever-increasing police pressure on Comintern
members was fear and mistrust. As soon as the threat of denunciation became
widespread, a general lack of confidence became apparent in all quarters.
Denunciation came in two forms: either a voluntary declaration, or a statement
taken from people as a result of mental or physical torture. Sometimes fear was
enough. And there were other militants who were proud to denounce their
colleagues. The case of the French Communist Andre Marty is characteristic
of the paranoia that was so widespread at the time, and the senseless rush to
appear to be the most vigilant Communist of them all. In a letter marked
"strictly confidential" addressed to the General Secretary of the Comintern,
Georgi Dimitrov, and dated 23 June 1927, he wrote a lengthy denunciation of
Eugen Fried, the representative of the International in France, pretending to
be amazed that Fried had not yet been arrested by the French police, and
expressing extreme suspicion of this fact. 2 *

The phenomena of terror and the public trials inevitably met with differ-
ent responses abroad. In Paris Boris Suvarin made the following remarks in Le
Figaro litteraire on 1 July 1937:

It is a great exaggeration to claim that the Moscow trials are an exclu-
sively Russian phenomenon. While there are of course national charac-
teristics involved, one can also discern many other more general truths.
First, one should abandon the idea that what can be understood by
Russians cannot possibly be understood by the French. In fact the ad-
missions that have been made arc as puzzling to the people of Russia as

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they are to the people of France. Those who, out of some fanatical sense
of devotion to the Bolshevik cause, find it all quite natural are probably
more numerous abroad than they are in Russia . . .

In the early years of the Russian Revolution, it was easy to put
everything down to the idea of the "Slavic soul"; yet the events that
were reputed to be exclusively Slavic phenomena have subsequently
been witnessed in Italy and Germany. When the beast in man is un-
leashed, the same consequences are visible everywhere, irrespective of
whether the man in question is Latin, German, or Slav, however differ-
ent he may appear on the surface.

And in any case, in France and everywhere else there are millions
of people who are in Stalin's pocket. The editors of L'humanile are
identical with the men at Pravda when it comes to flattery and syco-
phancy, and they don't have the excuse that a totalitarian dictator is
breathing down their necks. When an academician like [Vladimir]
Komarov demeans himself in Red Square yet again by asking for more
blood, one must bear in mind that if he had not done so, he would have
been effectively committing suicide. And with that in mind, what are we
to make of men like Romain Rolland, [Paul] Langevin, and [Andre]
Malraux, who admire and actively support the so-called Soviet regime
with its "culture" and "justice," and who aren't forced to do so by
hunger or torture?

In the same vein as the Marty letter is one sent to "Comrade L. P. Beria" (the
people's commissar of internal affairs in the U.S.S.R.) by the Bulgarian Stella
Blagoeva, an obscure employee in the cadre section of the Executive Commit-
tee of the Comintern:

The Executive Committee of the Communist International possesses
information drawn up by a series of comrades, all militants in friendly
parties, that we feel should be addressed to you so that you may check
the information and accordingly take any steps necessary . . . One of the
secretaries of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist
Party, [Frigyes] Karikas, has taken part in conversations that seem to
indicate insufficient devotion to the Party of Lenin and Stalin . . . Com-
rades have also been asking a very serious question: How is it that in
1932 the Hungarian court condemned him to only three years in prison,
whereas during the dictatorship of the proletariat in Hungary Karikas
carried out death sentences pronounced by the revolutionary tribunal
. . . There are many indications from comrades from Germany, Austria,
Lithuania, Poland, and elsewhere that political emigration is becoming a
dirty business . . . This problem must be addressed in a determined
fashion. 29

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Arkady Vaksberg notes that the Comintern archives also contain dozens
(perhaps even hundreds) of denunciations, a phenomenon that attests to the
moral decay that took hold within the Comintern and among officials of the
Soviet Communist Party. This decay was quite apparent during the great trials
of members of the Bolshevik "old guard," who had lent their support to the
establishment of power on the basis of "the absolute lie."

The Great Terror Strikes the Comintern

The assassination of Sergei Kirov on 1 December 1934 provided Stalin with an
excellent pretext for moving from severe repression to real terror both in the
Russian Communist Party and in the Comintern. 10 Until then, terror had been
used as a weapon only against the general population. After Kirov's murder, it
was used mercilessly against the very people who wielded power in the Party
itself.

The first victims were the members of the Russian Opposition who were
already in prison. From the end of 1935 on, anyone whose sentence had expired
was automatically reimprisoned. Several thousand militant Trotskyites were
grouped together in the Vorkuta region. There were some 500 in the mine,
1,000 in the Ukhto-Pechora camp, and several thousand in the Pechora region.
On 27 October 1936, 1,000 prisoners (including women and children) began a
hunger strike that lasted thirty-two days. They demanded separation from the
common criminals and the right to live with their families. The first death
among the prisoners came after four weeks. Several others met the same fate
before the authorities agreed to their demands. The following autumn, 1,200
prisoners (about half of whom were Trotskyites) were grouped together near
an old brickworks. At the end of March the camp administration posted a list
of 25 prisoners, who received a kilo of bread and orders to prepare to leave. A
few minutes later, shots were heard. The worst possible scenario soon proved
to be true when the other prisoners saw the convoy escort return to the camp.
Two days later there was a new list and a similar fusillade, and so it continued
until the end of May. The guards generally disposed of the bodies by pouring
gasoline over them and setting them on fire. The NKVD announced on the
radio the names of those shot, claiming that they had been killed u for counter-
revolutionary agitation, sabotage, banditry, refusing to work, and attempting to
escape." Even women were not spared. The wife of any activist who was
executed was also condemned to capital punishment, as were any children over
age twelve." 31

Approximately 200 Trotskyites in Magadan, the capital of Kolyma, also
went on hunger strike in the hope of being granted the status of political

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prisoners. Their declaration denounced the "gangster executioners" and
"Stalin's fascism, even worse than Hitler's." On 11 October 1937 they were
condemned to death, and 74 of them were executed on 26-27 October and
4 November. Such executions continued throughout 1937 and 193K.- 12

Wherever orthodox Communists were to be found, they were given orders
to combat the Trotskyite minority in their midst. After the war in Spain the
operation took a new turn, with the completely spurious revelation of links
between Trotskyism and Nazism, made even as Stalin was preparing to sign a
pact with Hitler.

Soon the Great Terror launched by Stalin reached the Central Committee
of the Comintern, A 1965 survey of the liquidation of Comintern workers was
Branko Lazich's evocatively titled "Martyrology of the Comintern." 1 -' Boris
Suvarin ended his "Commentaries on the Martyrology,' 1 which followed Laz-
itch's article, with a remark concerning the humble collaborators at the Comin-
tern, the anonymous victims of the Great Purge. It is a useful comment to bear
in mind when looking at this particular chapter of the history of Soviet Com-
munism: "Those who died in the massacres at the Comintern were no more than
the tiniest fraction of an enormous massacre, that of millions of workers and peasants
who were sacrificed without rhyme or reason by a monstrous tyranny hidden
by a proletarian label."

Officials in both the central and the national offices were affected by the
mechanisms of repression in the same way that ordinary citizens were. The
Great Purge of 1936-37 claimed not only opponents of the regime but also
officials in the Comintern apparatus and similar organizations: the Communist
Youth International (KIM), the Red Trade Union International (Profintern),
Red Aid (MOPR), the International Leninist School, the Communist Univer-
sity of Western National Minorities (KUMNZ), and other organizations.
Wanda Pampuch-Bronska, the daughter of one of Lenin's old companions,
reported under a pseudonym that in 1936 the KUMNZ was broken up, and its
entire staff and almost all its students arrested. 34

The historian Mikhail Panteleev, reviewing the records of the various
Comintern sections, has so far found 133 victims out of a total staff of 492
(that is, 27 percent). 15 Between 1 January and 17 September 1937, 256 people
were fired by the Secretariat Commission of the Executive Committee, made
up of Mikhail Moskvin (Meir Trilisser), Wilhelm Florin, and Jan Anvelt; and
by the Special Control Commission, created in May 1937 and consisting of
Georgi Dimitrov, Moskvin, and Dmitry Manuilsky. In general, arrest soon
followed dismissal: Elena Walter, who was fired from Dimitrov 's secretariat on
16 October 1938, was arrested two days later, although Jan Borowski (Ludwig
Komorovsky) was fired from the Central Executive Committee of the Comin-
tern on 17 July and not arrested until 7 October. In 1937, 88 Comintern

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299

employees were arrested, and another 19 the following year. Others were ar-
rested at their desks, including Anton Krajewski (Wladyslaw Stein), who was
then the press attache in charge of propaganda and was imprisoned on 27 May
1937. Many were arrested immediately following missions abroad.

All sections of the Comintern, from the Secretariat itself to its various
representatives in the Communist Parties, were affected in some manner. In
1937 and 1938 forty-one people were arrested at the Secretariat of the Execu-
tive Committee. In the Department for Internationa] Relations (the OMS),
thirty-four were arrested. Moskvin himself fell victim on 23 November 1938
and was condemned to death on 1 February 1940. Jan Anvelt died while being
tortured, and A. Munch-Peterson, a Dane, died in a prison hospital as a result
of chronic tuberculosis. Fifty officials, including nine women, were shot. A
Swiss national, Lydia Diibi, who was in charge of the underground Comintern
network in Paris, was called to Moscow in early August 1937. No sooner had
she arrived than she was arrested, together with her colleagues Karl Brichman
and Erwin Wolf, and accused of having belonged to an "anti-Soviet Trotskyite
organization 11 and of having spied for Germany, France, Japan, and Switzer-
land. She was condemned to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme
Court of the U.S.S.R. on 3 November and was shot a few days later. Her Swiss
nationality afforded her no protection, and her family was brutally informed
of the outcome with no explanation. The principle of familial responsibility,
which was used against the general population, was also brought to bear on
members of the Comintern. L. Jankowska, a Pole, was condemned to eight
years in prison for being a "member of the family of a traitor to the fatherland,"
a status she acquired when her husband, Stanislaw Skulski (Mertens), was
arrested in August 1937 and shot on 21 September.

Osip Pyatnitsky (Tarchis) had been second in command to Manuilsky at
the Comintern and had been in charge of the finances of foreign Communist
Parties and secret liaisons with the Comintern worldwide. In 1934 he was
appointed head of the political and administrative section of the Central Com-
mittee of the CPSU. On 24 June 1937 he intervened in a plenary session of the
Central Committee to protest the intensification of repressions and the grant-
ing of special powers to the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Ezhov. Stalin was
furious; he broke up the session and exerted great pressure to bring Pyatnitsky
into line. All in vain: when the session opened the next day, Ezhov accused
Pyatnitsky of being a former agent of the tsarist police, and had him arrested
on 7 July. Ezhov then forced Boris Muller (Melnikov) to testify against Pyat-
nitsky, and after Muller himself was executed on 29 July 1938, the Military
Collegium of the Supreme Court passed sentence on Pyatnitsky, who refused
to plead guilty to the fabricated charge that he was a spy for Japan. He was
condemned to death and shot on the night of 29-30 July.

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Many of the staff at the Comintern who were executed were accused of
belonging to "the anti-Comintern organization led by Pyatnitsky, |Wilhelm
Hugo] Knorin, and Bela Kun." Others were simply labeled Trotskyites or
counterrevolutionaries. Bela Kun, the former head of the Hungarian Com-
mune, who had taken a stand against Manuilsky, was in turn accused by
Manuilsky (probably on Stalin's orders), who twisted his words until they
amounted to a direct attack on Stalin. Kun protested his innocence and reiter-
ated his attack against Manuilsky and Moskvin, who he claimed were respon-
sible for the poor reputation of the CPSU abroad and the general inefficiency
of the Comintern. No one among those present, including Palmiro Togliatti,
Otto Kuusinen, Wilhelm Pieck, Klement Gottwald, and Arvo Tuominen, came
to his defense. When the meeting ended, Georgi Dimitrov tabled a motion
requesting that the "Kun affair" be examined by a special commission. Kun
was arrested as soon as he left the room and was executed in the basement of
the Lubyanka building at an unknown date.^

According to Mikhail Panteleev; the ultimate aim of these purges was the
eradication of all resistance to Stalinism.- 17 The main targets of the repression
were those who had been Opposition sympathizers or who had had any rela-
tionship with known Trotskyites. Other victims included German militants
belonging to the faction led by Heinz Neumann, who was himself liquidated
in 1937, and other former militants from the Democratic Centralist Group. At
the time, according to Yakov Matusov, joint chief of the First Department of
the secret Political Section of the Main Directorate for State Security (Glavnoe
upravlenic gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti; GUGB), then part of the NKVD,
all high-ranking leaders in the state apparatus, unbeknownst to them, had
dossiers containing evidence that could be used against them at any moment.
Kliment Voroshilov, Andrei Vyshinsky, Lazar Kaganovich, Mikhail Kalinin,
and Nikita Khrushchev all had such files. It is thus more than probable that
similar files were kept on the activities of Comintern leaders.

The highest-ranking non-Russian Comintern leaders also actively partici-
pated in the repression. One symptomatic case was that of Palmiro Togliatti,
one of the secretaries of the Comintern, who, after Stalin's death, was hailed
as one of the people who had been openly opposed to terrorist methods.
Togliatti himself accused Hermann Schubert, an official in the Red Aid, and
prevented him from giving an account of his actions. Schubert was arrested
shortly afterward and shot. The Petermanns, a German couple who were
Communists and had arrived in the U.S.S.R. after 1933, were accused by
Togliatti at a meeting of being Nazi agents, on the grounds that they had kept
in touch with their family in German). They were arrested a few weeks later.
Togliatti was present when everyone turned on Bela Kun, and he signed the
order that sent him to his death. He was also present at the liquidation of a

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301

Polish Communist in 1938. On that occasion he endorsed the Moscow trials,
and saying: "Death to the cowards, spies, and fascist agents! Long live the Party
of Lenin and Stalin, the vigilant guardian of the victories of the October
Revolution, and the sure guarantor of the triumph of the revolution throughout
the world! Long live the heir of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Nikolai Ezhov!" 1H

Terror within the Communist Parties

Once the Central Bureau of the Comintern had been purged, Stalin set about
attacking the other sections. The German section was the first to suffer. In
addition to the descendants of the Volga Germans, the German community in
Soviet Russia included militants from the German Communist Party (KPD)
and antifascist refugees and workers who had left the Weimar Republic to help
build socialism in the Soviet Union. But none of these people were exempt
when the arrests began in 1933. In all, two-thirds of the antifascists in exile in
the U.S.S.R. were affected by the repression,

The fate of militant German Communists is well documented thanks to
the existence of lists of cadres, Kuderlisten, which were drawn up under the
KPD leaders Wilhelm Pieck, Wilhelm Florin, and Herbert Wehner and used
to punish or expel Communists and victims of repression. The earliest list dates
from 3 September 1936, the last from 21 June 1938. A document from the late
1950s, drawn up by the control commission of the SKD (the Socialist Unity
Party, the name taken by the German Communist Party when it regrouped
after World War II), lists some 1,136 people. Arrests reached their peak in 1937,
when 619 people were arrested, and continued until 1941, when 21 were
arrested. The fate of 666 of these people is unknown, although it is almost
certain that they died in prison. At least 82 were executed, 197 died in prison
camps, and 132 were handed over to the Nazis. Approximately 150 survived
their long sentences and eventually managed to leave the U.S.S.R. One of the
ideological reasons invoked to justify the arrest of these militants was that they
had failed to stop Adolf Hitler's rise to power, as though Moscow itself had
played no role in the Nazi seizure of power. >J

The most tragic episode of all, the occasion on which Stalin displayed the
full extent of his cynicism, was the handing over to Hitler of the German
antifascists. This took place in 1937, when the Soviet authorities began expel-
ling Germans from the U.S.S.R. On 16 February ten were condemned and then
handed over by the Soviet special services. The names of some of them are
well known: Emil Larisch, a technician who had been living in the U.S.S.R.
since 1921; Arthur Thilo, an engineer who had arrived in 1931; Wilhelm
Pfeiffer, a Communist from Hamburg; and Kurt Nixdorf, a university em-
ployee at the Marx-Engels Institute. All had been arrested in 1936 on charges

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of spying or "fascist activities/ 1 and the German ambassador, Werner von der
Schulenberg, tried to intervene on their behalf with Maksim Litvinov, the
Soviet minister of foreign affairs. Arthur Thilo managed to get to the British
consulate in Warsaw, but many were not so lucky. Pfeiffer tried to get himself
expelled to England, knowing that if he returned to Germany he would be
arrested immediately. Eighteen months later, on 18 August 1938, he was taken
to the Polish border and was never heard from again. Otto Walther, a lithogra-
pher from Leningrad who had lived in Russia since 1908, arrived in Berlin on
4 March 1937 and subsequently killed himself by throwing himself out a
window of the house in which he was living.

At the end of May 1937, von der Schulenberg sent two new lists of
Germans who had been arrested, and whose expulsion he considered desirable.
Among the 67 names were several antifascists, including Kurt Nixdorf In the
autumn of 1937 negotiations took a new turn, and the Soviet Union agreed to
speed up expulsions in response to German demands, since only 30 had actually
been expelled so far. In November and December 1937 another 148 Germans
were expelled, and in 1938 the number rose to 445. Generally the people to be
expelled (including several members of the Schut/bund, the paramilitary arm
of the Austrian Social Democratic Party) were escorted to the frontier with
Poland, Lithuania, or Finland, where they were immediately registered and
classified by the German authorities. In some cases, including that of the
Austrian Communist Paul Meisel, victims were taken in May 1938 to the
Austrian frontier via Poland and were then handed over to the Gestapo. Meisel,
who was Jewish, subsequently died in Auschwitz.

This understanding between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia prefigured
the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, when, according to Jorge Semprum, "the truly
convergent nature of all totalitarian systems was revealed." After the pact was
signed, the expulsions increased dramatically. Once Poland was crushed by
Hitler and Stalin, the two powers had a common border, so the victims could
pass directly from a Soviet prison to a German one. From 1939 to 1941, as a
result of an agreement signed on 27 November 1939, between 200 and 300
German Communists were handed over to the Gestapo as a measure of the
goodwill of the Soviet authorities toward their new allies. Approximately 350
people were expelled between November 1939 and May 1941, including 85
Austrians. One of these was Franz Koritschoner, a founding member of the
Austrian Communist Part}', who had become an official in the Red Trade Union
International. After being deported to the far north, he was handed over to the
Gestapo in Lublin, transferred to Vienna, tortured, and executed in Auschwitz
on 7 June 1941.

The Soviet authorities refused to take Jewish origins into account in their
decisions to expel people. Hans Walter David, for example, a KPD member
who was a composer and a conductor, as well as being Jewish, was handed over

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to the Gestapo and gassed in 1942 in the Majdanek camp. There were many
other cases, some recounted in the memoirs of Alexander Weissberg, a physicist
who survived to tell his story. Margaret Buber-Neumann, the companion of
Hans Neumann, who had been pushed out of the KPD leadership and had
emigrated to the U.S.S.R., also wrote of the extraordinary complicity that
existed between the Nazis and the Soviet Union. After being arrested in 1937
and deported to Karaganda, in Siberia, she was handed over to the Gestapo
along with many other unfortunates and interned in Ravensbriick. 40
Weissberg recalled his transfer to the Germans:

On 31 December 1939, we were awakened at six in the morning . . .
After we had dressed and shaved we had to spend a few hours in a
waiting room. One Jewish Communist from Hungary called Bloch had
fled to Germany after the fall of the Commune in 1919. He had lived
there with false papers and managed to continue working secretly as a
Party activist. Later he emigrated with the same false papers. He had
been arrested, and despite his protests was to be handed over to the
German Gestapo . . . Just before midnight some buses arrived, and we
were taken to the station . . . During the night of 31 December 1939-1
January 1940, the train started moving. It was carrying seventy beaten
men back home . . . The train continued on through the devastated
Polish countryside toward Brest Litovsk. On the Bug River bridge the
other European totalitarian regime was waiting, in the form of the Ger-
man Gestapo. 41

Weissberg managed to escape the Nazi prisons, joined the Polish rebels, and
fought alongside them. At the end of the war he crossed into Sweden and then
went to England.

Margaret Buber-Neumann described the later stages of the same transfer:

Three people refused to cross the bridge: a Hungarian Jew named
Bloch, a Communist worker who had already been sentenced by the
Nazis, and a German teacher whose name I cannot remember. They
were dragged across the bridge by force. The SS disposed of the Jew
immediately. We were then put on a train and taken to Lublin ... In
Lublin we were handed over to the Gestapo. There it became apparent
that not only were we being handed over to the Gestapo, but that the
NKVD had also sent all our records and documents to the SS. In my
dossier, for instance, it was noted that I was the wife of Neumann and
that he was one of the Germans most hated in Nazi Germany. 42

Buber-Neumann remained in Ravensbriick until its liberation in April 1945.

At the same time that the German Communists were suffering, the cadres in
the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP), many of whom had emigrated from

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Poland, were also caught up in the terror. Joseph Berger, secretary of the
PCP from 1929 to 3931, was arrested on 27 February 1935 and was liberated
only after the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress in 1956. His survival was
exceptional. Other militants were executed, and many more died in camps,
Wolf Averbuch, the director of a tractor factory in Rostov-on-Don, was ar-
rested in 1936 and executed in 1941 . The systematic liquidation of members of
the PCP and of socialist Zionist groups who had come to the U.S.S.R. is
related to the more general Soviet policy toward the Jewish minority after the
establishment of Birobidzhan as a Jewish autonomous region, all of whose
leaders were arrested. Professor Iosif Liberberg, the president of the Executive
Committee of Birobidzhan, w r as denounced as an "enemy of the people, 1 ' and
all the other cadres of state institutions in the autonomous region were also
purged. Samuel Augursky was accused of belonging to a fictitious Judeo-
Fascist Center. The entire Jewish section of the Russian Party (the Rvreiskaya
sektsiya) was taken apart. The goal of destroying all Jewish institutions was
implemented even as the Soviet state was seeking support from Jewish notables
abroad. 11

The Polish Communists figure second only to Russians themselves in terms of
the number who suffered in the purges. Unlike its counterparts elsewhere, the
Polish Communist Party (KPP) had been dissolved following a vote by the
Central Executive Committee of the Comintern on 16 August 1938. Stalin had
always been suspicious of the KPP, which he felt was filled with deviationists.
Many Polish Communists had been part of Lenin's entourage before 1917 and
had enjoyed special protection in the US.S.R. as a result. In 1923 the KPP had
taken a stand in support of Trotsky, and after Lenin's death it had voted in
favor of the pro-Trotsky Opposition. The influence of Rosa Luxemburg on the
KPP was also criticized. At the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in June-July
1924, Stalin sidelined the people who had been the Party leaders — Adolf
Warsky, Henryk Walecki, and Wera Kostrzewa — in what was clearly the first
step toward total control of the KPP by the Comintern. The KPP was then
denounced as a hotbed of Trotskyism. But even this declaration does little to
explain the radical purge that then struck the Party, many members of which
were Jewish. There also followed the Polish Military Organization (POW)
affair in 1933 (discussed in Chapter 19). Other factors should also be borne in
mind, such as the fact that the Comintern had a policy of systematically
weakening the Polish state to increase its dependence on both the US.S.R. and
Germany. The theory that the most important element behind the liquidation
of the KPP was the need to prepare for the signing of the German-Soviet
agreements deserves to be taken seriously. How Stalin went about it is also
quite revealing. He made sure (with the assistance of the Comintern) that each

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305

of the victims was brought back to Moscow, and that as few as possible es-
caped. The only ones who survived were those who were imprisoned in Po-
land, such as Wladyslaw Gomulka.

In February 1938 the official Comintern bulletin that came out twice a
week, La correspondance Internationale, launched an attack, signed by
J. Swiecicki, on the KPP During the purge that began in June 1937, when
General Secretary Julian Lenski was called to Moscow and immediately disap-
peared, twelve members of the Central Committee, many leaders slightly lower
in the hierarchy, and several hundred militants, including Poles who had en-
listed in the International Brigades, were liquidated. The political leaders of
the Dombrowski Brigade, Kazimierz Cichowski and Gustav Reicher, were
arrested upon their return to Moscow. Stalin did not permit a new Polish
Communist Party to be formed until 1942, under the name Polish Workers'
Party (PPR), so that a new government could be formed to rival the official
government-in-exile that had been set up in London.

The Yugoslav Communists also suffered badly under the Stalinist terror. After
being banned in 1921, the Yugoslav Communist Party had been forced to
regroup abroad, in Vienna from 1921 to 1936, and in Paris from 1936 to 1939;
but after 1925 its main center was Moscow. A small core of Yugoslav emigres
first formed among the students at the Communist University of Western
National Minorities (KUMNZ), the Sverdlov Communist University, and the
International Leninist School. This group was considerably strengthened by a
second wave of emigres after King Alexander took power as dictator in 1929.
In the 1930s the 200 to 300 Yugoslav Communists residing in the US.S.R. had
a fairly high profile in the international organizations, particularly in the
Comintern and the International Youth Organization. They were thus usually
members of the CPSU

They began to acquire a bad reputation because of the numerous factional
struggles to take control of the YCP Intervention by the Comintern became
more and more frequent and constraining. In mid- 1925 the first chistka (purge)
took place at the KUMNZ, where the Yugoslav students were favoring the
Opposition and opposing the rector, Maria J. Frukina. A few students were
disgraced and expelled, and four of them (Ante Ciliga, V. Dedic, A. Dragic,
and G. Eberling) were arrested and banished to Siberia. Another sixteen mili-
tants were expelled in another purge in 1932.

In the aftermath of the Kirov assassination, control over political emigres
was reinforced, and in the autumn of 1936 all YCP militants were investigated
before the terror began. Although little is known about the fate of the anony-
mous workers, we do know that eight secretaries of the YCP's Central Com-
mittee, fifteen other members of the Central Committee, and twenty-one

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secretaries from regional or local bodies were arrested and disappeared. Sima
Markevic, one of the secretaries, who had been forced to flee to the US.S.R.
and had worked at the Academy of Sciences, was arrested in July 1939, sen-
tenced to ten years of hard labor, and forbidden any contact with the outside
world. He died in prison. Others were executed immediately, including the
Vujovic brothers, Radomir (a member of the YCP Central Committee) and
Gregor (a member of the Central Youth Committee). Another brother, Voja,
who had been the head of the Communist Youth International and a Trotsky
sympathizer, also disappeared. Milan Gorkic, a secretary of the Central Com-
mittee of the Yugoslav Communist Party from 1932 to 1937, was accused of
having established "an anti-Soviet organization within the International, and
of having directed a terrorist group within the Comintern, which was led by
Knorin and Pyatnitsky."

In the mid-1960s the YCP rehabilitated about 100 victims of the repres-
sion, but no systematic investigation was ever undertaken. Such an inquiry
would of course also have raised the question of the number of victims of the
repression of supporters of the US.S.R. in Yugoslavia after the 1948 schism.
And it would have demonstrated quite convincingly that the ascension of Tito
(Josip Broz) to the leadership of the Party in 1938 took place as a result of a
particularly bloody purge. The fact that Tito rose up against Stalin in 1948
takes nothing away from his responsibility for the purges of the 1930s.

The Hunt for Trotskyites

Having thinned the ranks of foreign Communists living in the US.S.R., Stalin
turned his attention to dissidents living abroad. Thus the NKVD gained an
opportunity to demonstrate its power worldwide.

One of the most spectacular cases was that of Ignaz Reiss, whose real name
was Nathan Poretsky. As a young Jewish revolutionary in Central Europe who
had emerged from the Great War, Reiss was among many who were eagerly
recruited by the Comintern. 44 A professional agitator, he worked in the inter-
national underground network and carried out his work with such efficiency
that he was decorated with the Order of the Red Flag in 1928. After 1935 he
was ''retrieved" by the NKVD, which took control of all foreign networks and
pur him in charge of espionage in Germany. The first of the great Moscow
trials came as a terrible shock to Reiss, who then decided to break with Stalin.
All too familiar with the house rules, he prepared his defection with extreme
care. On 17 July 1937 he sent an open letter to the CPSU Central Committee
in which he explained his position and attacked Stalin and Stalinism by name,
calling it "that admixture of the worst types of opportunism, unprincipled,
bloody, and deceptive, which is threatening to poison the whole world and to

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kill off what remains of the Workers' Movement. 1 ' Reiss also explained his
move into the Trotskyite camp, and in doing so unknowingly signed his own
death warrant. The NKVD immediately contacted its network in France and
found Reiss in Switzerland, where an ambush was laid for him. In Lausanne
on the night of 4 September he was riddled with bullets by two French
Communists while a female NKVD agent attempted to kill his wife and child
with a box of poisoned chocolates. Despite a long police search in both France
and Switzerland, the killers and their accomplices were never found. Trotsky
immediately suspected Jacques Duclos, one of the PCF secretaries, and he told
his own secretary, Jan Van Heijenoort, to send the following telegram to the
head of the French government: "Chautemps Head of Government France /
regarding Ignaz Reiss assassination affair / my files stolen among other crimes
/ suggest at least interrogating Jacques Duclos Vice President Chamber of
Deputies ex-GPU agent." 45

Duclos had been vice president of the Chamber of Deputies since 1936.
Nothing was done to follow up on this telegram.

The assassination of Reiss was quite spectacular, but it was part of a much
wider movement to liquidate Trotskyites wherever possible. It is hardly sur-
prising that Trotskyites were massacred in the US.S.R. along with all the others
who died in the purges. What is more surprising is the lengths to which the
secret services went to destroy their opponents abroad, as well as the different
Trotskyite groups that had sprung up in so many countries. The main method
used was the patient covert infiltration of all such groups.

In July 1937 Rudolf Klement, the leader of the International Secretariat
of the Trotskyite Opposition, disappeared. On 26 August a headless, legless
body was fished our of the Seine and was soon identified as the body of
Klement. Trotsky's own son, Lev Sedov, died in Paris shortly after a medical
operation, but the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death led his
family to believe it was an assassination organized by the Soviet secret services,
although this is denied in the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov. 4 * But undoubtedly
Lev Sedov was being closely watched by the NKVD. In fact one of his close
friends, Mark Zborowski, was an agent who had infiltrated the Trotskyite
movement.

Sudoplatov did admit, however, that in March 1939 he had been person-
ally ordered by Beria and Stalin to assassinate Trotsky. Stalin told him: u We
must do away with Trotsky this year, before the outbreak of the war that is
inevitably coming." He added, "You will be answerable to no one but Beria for
this, and you are to take full charge of the mission. ' M7 The manhunt was
launched, and after Paris, Brussels, and the United States the leader of the
Fourth International was found in Mexico. With the help of the Mexican
Communist Party, Sudoplatov's men prepared a first attempt on Trotsky's life

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on 24 May, which he miraculously escaped. The infiltration by Ramon Mer-
cader under an assumed name finally provided Sudoplatov with the means to
eliminate Trotsky. Mercader gained the confidence of one of the female mem-
bers of Trotsky's group and managed to get into contact with him. Rather
warily, Trotsky agreed to meet him to go over an article Mercader had suppos-
edly written in Trotsky's defense. Mercader then stabbed Trotsky in the head
with an ice pick. Mortally wounded, Trotsky cried out for help, and his wife
and bodyguards threw themselves on Mercader. Trotsky died the next day.

The connections among the various Communist parties, the Comintern sec-
tions, and the NKVD had been denounced by Trotsky, who knew very well
that the Comintern was dominated by the GPU and the NKVD. In a letter of
27 May 1940 to the procurator general of Mexico, three days after the first
attempt on his life, he wrote that u the traditions and methods of GPU organi-
zation are by now well established outside the Soviet Union. The GPU needs a
legal or semilegal cover for its activities, and an environment favorable for the
recruiting of new agents, and it finds the necessary environment and condi-
tions in the so-called Communist parties." 48 In his last text, regarding the
assassination attempt of 24 May, he visited in detail the incident that had
nearly taken his life. For him, the GPU (Trotsky always used that 1922 abbre-
viation from the days when he had been associated with it) was "Stalin's main
weapon for wielding power" and was "the instrument of totalitarianism in the
US.S.R.," from which "a spirit of servitude and cynicism has spread through-
out the Comintern and poisoned the workers' movement to the core." He
described at some length how this had influenced matters: u As organizations,
the GPU and the Comintern are not identical, but they are indissolubly linked.
The one is subordinate to the other, and it is not the Comintern that gives
orders to the GPU but quite the contrary: the GPU completely dominates the
Comintern." 49

This analysis, backed up a wealth of examples, was the result of Trotsky's
twofold experience as one of the leaders of the nascent Soviet state, and also
as a man on the run from the NKVD killers who trailed him around the world,
and whose names today are in no doubt. They were the successive directors of
the Special Tasks Department established in December 1936 by Nikolai Ezhov:
Sergei Spiegelglass (who failed), Pavel Sudoplatov (who died in 1996), and
Naum Eitingon (who died in 1981), who finally succeeded thanks to many
accomplices. 50

Most of the details about Trotsky's assassination in Mexico on 20 August
1940 are known thanks to successive inquiries carried out on the spot and again
later by Julian Gorkin. 51 In any case the man who ordered the killing was never

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309

in any doubt, and the people directly responsible were also known. All of this
was later confirmed by Pavel Sudoplatov. Jaime Ramon Mercader del Rio was
the son of Caridad Mercader, a Communist who had been working for the
services for a long time and who became the mistress of Naum Eitingon.
Mercader had approached Trotsky using the name Jacques Mornard, who did
in fact exist, and who died in Belgium in 1967. Mornard had fought in Spain,
and it was probably there that his passport was borrowed by the Soviet services.
Mercader also used the name Jacson, with another false passport, which had
belonged to a Canadian who had fought in the International Brigades and had
died at the front. Ramon Mercader died in 1978 in Havana, where Fidel Castro
had invited him to work as an adviser to the Ministry of the Interior. He had
been decorated with the Order of Lenin for his crime, and he was buried quietly
in Moscow.

Although Stalin was now rid of his most important adversary, the hunt for
Trotskyitcs continued. The French example is revealing of militant Commu-
nists 1 reflexive response to small Trotskyite organizations. During the occupa-
tion of France, some Trotskyitcs may well have been denounced by
Communists to the French and German police.

In the prisons and camps of Vichy, Trotskyites were systematically sepa-
rated from the rest. In Nontron, in the Dordogne, Gerard Bloch was ostracized
by the Communist collective led by Michel Bloch, the son of the writer Jean-
Richard Bloch. Later incarcerated in the Elysee prison, Gerard Bloch was
warned by a Catholic teacher that the Communist collective of the prison had
decided to execute him by strangling him in the night. 52

In this context of blind hatred, the disappearance of four Trotskyites,
including Pietro Tresso, the founder of the Italian Communist party, from the
FTP (Francs-Tircurs et Partisans) u Wodli" maquis in Haute-Loire is of greater
significance. The FTP was a Stalinist organization through which the Com-
munist-dominated National Front operated. Having escaped from the prison
in Puy-en-Velay with their Communist colleagues on 1 October 1943, five
Trotskyite militants were "captured" by the Communist maquis. One of them,
Albert Demazicre, somehow managed to break away from his companions, and
he was the only one to survive: Tresso, Pierre Salini, Jean Reboul, and Abraham
Sadek were executed at the end of October, after a farcical trial. 3j Witnesses
and the people involved (who are still alive) reported that the militants had been
plotting to poison the water supply in the camp, an almost atavistic explanation
that smacks of antisemitism against Trotsky (similar accusations were made
against his own son Sergei in the US.S.R.) and against at least one of the
prisoners, Abraham Sadek. The Communist movement showed that it, too, was

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capable of the crudest antisemitism. Before the four Trotskyites were killed,
they were photographed, probably so that they could be identified back at PCF
headquarters, and forced to write a summary of their lives.

Even inside the concentration camps, the Communists attempted to an-
nihilate their closest rivals by taking advantage of the hierarchies that existed
there. Marcel Beaufrere, leader of the Breton regional section of the Interna-
tionalist Workers 1 Party, was arrested in October 1943 and deported to Buchen-
wald in January 1944. The interblock chief (who was himself a Communist)
suspected him of being a Trotskyite. Ten days after Beaufrere's arrival, a friend
informed him that the Communist cell in Block 39 — his block — had con-
demned him to death and was sending him as a guinea pig to be injected with
typhus. Beaufrere was saved at the last minute through the intervention of
German militants.' 4 The Communists often used the concentration-camp sys-
tem to get rid of their political enemies, deliberately sending them to the
hardest sections, even though they themselves were victims of the same Ge-
stapo officers and the same SS divisions. Marcel Hie and Roland Filiatre, who
were deported to Buchenwald, were sent to the terrible camp Dora "with the
assent of KPD cadres who had high administrative functions in the camp,"
according to Rodolphe Prager. 55 Hie died there; Filiatre survived another at-
tempt on his life in 1948.

Other liquidations of militant Trotskyites took place during the liberation.
Mathieu Buchholz, a young Paris worker from the "Class War 11 group, disap-
peared on 11 September 1944. In May 1947 his group claimed that this had
been the work of Stalinists.

The Trotskyite movement had a sizable impact in Greece. A secretary from the
Greek Communist party (the KKE), Pandelis Poliopolos, who was shot by the
Italians, had joined the movement before the war. During the war the Trotsky-
ites rallied to the cause of the National Liberation Front (EAM), founded in
June 1941 by the Communists. Ares Velouchiotes, the leader of the People's
Army for National Liberation (ELAS), ordered some twenty Trotskyite lead-
ers to be killed. After the liberation the persecution of Trotskyites continued,
and many were tortured to reveal the names of their colleagues. In 1946, in a
report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Vasilis Bartziotas
noted that 600 Trotskyites had been executed by OPLA (Organization for the
Protection of the Popular Struggle), a figure that probably also includes anar-
chists and other dissident socialists. 5fi The Archeo-Marxists, militants who had
broken with the KKE in 1924, were also persecuted and assassinated. 57

It was no different for Albanian Communists. After unification in 1941,
differences emerged among the left-wing groups that rallied around Anastaste

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311

Lula, primarily between the Trotskyites and leaders of the orthodox parties
(Enver Hoxha, Mehmet Shehu) who were being advised by the Yugoslavs. Lula
was summarily executed in 1943. After several attempts on his life, Sadik
Premtaj, another popular Trotskyite leader, managed to reach France, but in
May 1951 he fell victim to another assassination attempt by Djemal Chami, a
former member of the International Brigades and an Albanian agent in Paris.
In China an embryonic movement had taken shape in 1928 under the
leadership of Chen Duxiu, one of the founders and earliest leaders of the
Chinese Communist Party. In 1935 it still had only a few hundred members.
In the war against Japan some of them managed to infiltrate the Eighth Army
of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the armed force of the Communist
Party. Mao Zedong had them executed and liquidated their battalions. At the
end of the civil war they were systematically hunted down and killed. The fate
of many of them is still unknown.

For a while the situation in Indochina was quite different. Trotskyites
from the Tranh Dau (The Struggle) and Communists put up a common front
from 1933 onward. The influence of Trotskyites was strongest in the south of
the peninsula. In 1937 a directive from Jacques Duclos forbade the Indochinese
Communist Party to cooperate with the Tranh Dau militants. In the months
following the conflict with the Japanese, another Trotskyite branch — the Inter-
national Communist League gained an ascendancy that troubled the Com-
munist leaders. In September 1945, when the British troops arrived, the
International Communist League shattered the peaceful welcome that the Viet
Minh (the Democratic Fronr for Independence) had reserved for them. On 14
September the Viet Minh launched a huge operation against the Trotskyite
cadres. Most of them were executed shortly after their capture. Having fought
against the Anglo-French troops in the paddy fields, they were crushed by the
Viet Minh troops. In the second part of the operation the Viet Minh turned
against the Tranh Dau. Imprisoned in Ben Sue, they too were executed as the
French troops approached. Ta Tu Thau, the leader of the movement, was
executed in February 1946. Ho Chi Minh himself wrote that all Trotskyites
were "traitors and spies of the lowest sort."'*

In Czechoslovakia, the fate of Zavis Kalandra is typical of the fate of all
his companions. In 1936 Kalandra had been thrown out of the Czechoslovak
Communist Party for writing a leaflet denouncing the Moscow trials. He later
fought in the resistance, and was deported by the Germans to Oranienburg.
Arrested in November 1949, he was accused of plotting against the republic
and tortured. His trial began in June 1950; he made a "full confession" and was
sentenced to death on 8 June. In Combat on 14 June, Andre Breton asked Paul
Eluard to intervene in his favor; both had known him since before the war.

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Eluard replied: "I am too busy worrying about innocent people who are pro-
testing their innocence to worry about guilty people who have admitted their
guilt." 59 Kalandra was executed on 27 June with three of his companions.

Foreign Antifascist and Revolutionary Victims of the Terror in the U.S.S.R.

The Communist terror targeted more than the Comintern, Trotskyites, and
other dissidents. In the 1930s there were still many foreigners living in the
U.S.S.R. who were not Communists but who had been attracted by the Soviet
dream. Many of them paid the highest price for the passion they had felt for
Soviet Russia.

In the early 1930s the Soviet Union launched a propaganda campaign in
the Karelia region, making much of the possibilities offered by the frontier
regions between Russia and Finland and of the golden opportunity presented
there to "build socialism." Some 12,000 people left Finland to live in Karelia
and were joined there by another 5,000 Finns from the United States. Most of
the latter were members of the American Association of Finnish Workers and
were experiencing tremendous hardship because of the stock-market crash of
1929. Amtorg agents (Amtorg was the Soviet advertising agency) promised
them work, good salaries, housing, and a free trip from New York to Leningrad.
They were told to bring all their possessions with them.

What Aino Kuusinen termed "the rush for Utopia" soon turned into a
nightmare. As soon as the Finns arrived, their machinery, tools, and savings
were confiscated. They were forced to hand over their passports and effective! v
found themselves prisoners in an underdeveloped region where there was
nothing but forest and conditions were extremely harsh. M> According to Arvo
Tuominen, who led the Finnish Communist Party and held a key position in
the Presidium of the Comintern Executive Committee until 1939 before being
condemned to death and then having his sentence commuted to ten years*
imprisonment, at least 20,000 Finns were detained in concentration camps. 61

Forced to live in Kirovakan after World War II, Aino Kuusinen also
witnessed the arrival of the Armenians, another set of victims of clever propa-
ganda who came to live in the Soviet Republic of Armenia. In response to
Stalin's appeal to all Russians living abroad to return home to rebuild the
country, many Armenians, most of whom had been living in exile in Turkey,
mobilized to promote the Armenian Republic, which they envisaged as the land
of their forefathers. In September 1947 several thousand of them gathered in
Marseille, and 3,500 boarded the ship Rossiya, which carried them to the
U.S.S.R. As soon as the ship had entered Soviet territorial waters in the Black
Sea, the attitude of the authorities changed markedly. Many understood im-
mediately that they had walked into a terrible trap. In 1948 another 200 Arme-

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313

nians arrived from the United States. Deceived by the festivities, they met the
same fate: their passports were confiscated as soon as they arrived. In May 1956
several hundred Armenians in France demonstrated when Christian Pineau,
the minister of foreign affairs, was to visit Erevan. Only 60 families managed
to leave the U.S.S.R. during these repressions. (a Almost all left as soon as they
could.

The terror affected not only those who had returned to the U.S.S.R. by
choice, but also those who had already suffered under other dictatorial regimes.
According to Article 29 of the 1936 Soviet constitution, "The U.S.S.R. grants
asylum to all foreign citizens persecuted for defending the interests or rights
of workers, for their scholarly work, or for their struggle to achieve national
liberation." In his novel Life and Fate, Vastly Grossman describes a confronta-
tion between an SS soldier and an ex-militant Bolshevik. In a Jong monologue
the SS soldier sums up the fate of thousands of men, women, and children
who came to seek refuge in the U.S.S.R.: "Who is in the camps in peacetime,
when there are no more prisoners of war? The enemies of the party, and the
enemies of the people. They are people whom you know very well, because
they're in your camps too. And if your prisoners came into our SS camps in
peacetime, we wouldn't let them out again because your prisoners are our
prisoners too."' 1,1

Whether they came from abroad solely because of Soviet propaganda,
because they sought refuge or security that they could not expect in their
countries of origin, or because of their political beliefs, all immigrants were
treated as potential spies. At least such was the excuse for condemning the
majority of them.

One of the first waves of immigration was that of Italian anti-Fascists in the
mid-1 920s. A number of them, believing that they had at last found the true
home of socialism and the country of their dreams, were cruelly deceived and
suffered egregiously under the terror. Italian Communists and sympathizers
numbered around 600 in the U.S.S.R. in the mid- 1930s— -about 250 emigre
political cadres and another 350 undergoing training in the political schools.
Because many of the students left the U.S.S.R. after their schooling, and
another 100 activists left to fight in Spain in 1936-37, the Great Terror affected
only those who remained. Around 200 Italians were arrested, mostly for espio-
nage, and about 40 were shot, 25 of whom have been identified. The remainder
were sent to the gulags, to the Kolyma gold mines or to Kazakhstan. Romolo
Caccavale has published a moving study tracing the movements and tragic
destiny of several dozen of these activists. w

A typical case is that of Nazareno Scarioli, an anti-Fascist who had fled
Italy in 1925. From there he reached Berlin and finally Moscow. Welcomed by

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World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

the Italian section of the Red Cross, he worked in an agricultural colony near
Moscow for one year before being transferred to a second colony in Yalta, where
some twenty other Italian anarchists were working under the direction of Tito
Scarselli. In 1933 the colony was dissolved, and Scarioli returned to Moscow,
where he found a job in a biscuit factory. He played an active role in the Italian
community there.

Then came the years of the Great Purge. Fear and terror divided the
Italian community, and everyone began to suspect his own comrades. The
Italian Communist leader Paolo Robotti announced to the Italian club the arrest
of thirty-six "enemies of the people 11 who worked in a ball-bearing factory.
Robotti forced each person present to approve the arrest of the workers whom
he knew personally. When the time came to vote, Scarioli refused to raise his
hand, and he was arrested the following night. After being tortured at the
Lubyanka building, he signed a confession. He was then deported to the
Kolyma region and forced to work in a gold mine. Many other Italians shared
the same fate, and many died, including the sculptor Arnaldo Silva; an engineer
called L. Cerquetti; the Communist leader Aldo Gorelli, whose sister had
married Egidio Sulotto, the future Communist politician; Vicenzo Baccala, the
former secretary of the Rome committee of the Italian Communist Party; a
Tuscan, Otello Gaggi, who worked as a porter in Moscow; Luigi Calligaris, a
laborer in Moscow; Carlo Costa, a Venetian unionist working in Odessa; and
Edmundo Peluso, who had been a friend of Lenin's in Zurich. In 1950 Scarioli,
who then weighed 36 kilos, left Kolyma but was forced to continue working in
Siberia. In 1954 he was granted amnesty and subsequently received a full
pardon. He then waited another six years for a visa to return to Italy.

The refugees were not limited to members of the Italian Communist Party
or to Communist sympathizers. Some were anarchists who had been persecuted
at home and decided to move to the Soviet Union. The most famous of such
cases is that of Francesco Ghezzi, a militant unionist and freedom fighter, who
arrived in Russia in June 1921 to represent the Italian Trade Union at the Red
Trade Union International. In 1922 he traveled to Germany, where he was
arrested; the Italian government had charged him with terrorism and de-
manded his extradition. A vigorous campaign by his supporters in Italy saved
him from the Italian prisons, but he was forced to return to the U.S.S.R, In the
autumn of 1924 Ghezzi, who was linked closely to Pierre Pascal and Nikolai
Lazarevich, had his first run-in with the GPU. In 1929 he was arrested again,
sentenced to three years in prison, and interned in Suzdal under what were
criminal conditions, considering that he was suffering from tuberculosis. His
friends organized a support campaign in France and Switzerland, and Romain
Rolland, among others, signed a petition in his favor. The Soviet authorities
then spread the rumor that Ghezzi was a secret Fascist agent. When he was
freed in 1931 he returned to work in a factory. He was arrested again in 1937,

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315

but this time his friends abroad could find out nothing about his whereabouts.
He was reported dead in Vorkuta in late August 1941. 65

In Linz on 1 1 February 1934, when the leaders of the Austrian Schutzbund
decided to resist all attacks from the Heimwehren (the Patriotic Guard), who
were trying to ban the Socialist Party, they could hardly have imagined the fate
that awaited them.

The Heimwehren attack in Linz forced the Social Democrats to begin a
genera] strike in Vienna, which was followed by an uprising. But Engelbert
Dollfuss was victorious after four days of hard fighting, and the militant social-
ists who escaped prison sentences or internment either went into hiding or fled
to Czechoslovakia, while others went on to fight later in Spain. Some of them,
attracted by intensive propaganda against the Social Democratic leadership,
fled to the Soviet Union. On 23 April 1934, 300 people arrived in Moscow, and
smaller convoys continued arriving right up until December. The German
embassy calculated that there were 807 Schutzbund immigrants in the
U.S.S.R/' 6 If one includes their families, about 1,400 people had sought refuge
in the U.S.S.R.

The first convoy to arrive in Moscow was greeted by the leaders of the
Austrian Communist Party (KPO), and the combatants paraded through the
streets. They were taken in hand by the Central Council of Trade Unions. One
hundred twenty children whose fathers had fallen on the barricades or been
condemned to death were gathered together and sent off to the Crimea for a
while, before all being housed in Children's Home No. 6 in Moscow, which was
specially built for them.'' 7

After a few weeks 1 rest, the Austrian workers were sent out to factories in
Moscow, Kharkiv, Leningrad, Gorky, and Rostov. They quickly became disen-
chanted by the terrible working conditions. Austrian Communist leaders were
forced to intervene. The Soviet authorities tried to pressure them into taking
Soviet citizenship, and by 1938, 300 of them had done so. But significant
numbers also contacted the Austrian embassy in the hope of being repatriated.
Seventy-three succeeded in returning to Austria in 1936. According to the
Austrian embassy, 400 had made the return journey before the spring of 1938
(after the Anschluss of March 1938, all Austrians became German subjects).
Another 160 traveled to Spain to fight in the war there.

But many did not have a chance to leave the U.S.S.R.; 278 Austrians were
arrested between late 1934 and 1938.^ In 1939 Karlo Stajner met a Viennese
named Fritz Koppensteiner in Norilsk but lost touch with him. w Some were
executed, notably Gustl Deutch, a former leader from the Floridsdorf quarter
and a former commander of the "Karl Marx 11 Regiment, whose brochure,
February Combat in Floridsdorf, the Soviet Union had published in 1934.

Even Children's Home No. 6 was not spared. In the autumn of 1936

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World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

arrests began among the parents of those housed there, and the children were
then taken into NKVD custody and sent away to orphanages. The mother of
Wolfgang Leonhard disappeared after her arrest in October 1936. In the sum-
mer of 1937 he received a postcard from the Komi republic, informing him
that she had been sentenced to five years in a forced-labor camp for "Trotskyite
counterrevolutionary activities." 70

On 10 February 1963 the socialist journal Arbeitcr Zeitung told the story
of the Sladek family. In mid-September 1934 Frau Sladek and her two sons
went to Kharkiv to join her husband, Josef Sladek, a Schutzbunder who had
worked on the railways in Semmering and then fled to the U.S.S.R. In 1937
the NKVD began its arrests among the Austrian community in Kharkiv, later
than it had in Moscow and Leningrad. Josef Sladek's turn came on 1 5 February
1938. In 1941, before the German attack, Frau Sladek asked permission to leave
the country and went to the German embassy. On 26 July the NKVD also
arrested her son Alfred, age sixteen, and Victor, age eight, who was sent to an
NKVD orphanage. NKVD functionaries, seeking to extract a confession from
Alfred at all costs, beat him and told his mother that he had been shot. Evacu-
ated because of the German advance, the mother and son then met by chance
in the Ivdel camp, in the Urals. Frau Sladek had been sentenced to five years
for espionage; Alfred had been sentenced to ten years for espionage and anti-
Soviet agitation. Transferred to the Sarma camp, they found Josef Sladek, who
had been sentenced in Kharkiv to five years of prison. They were then sepa-
rated again. Set free in 1946, Frau Sladek was assigned residency in Solikamsk,
in the Urals, where she was joined by her husband one year later. By now Josef
was suffering from tuberculosis and a weak heart and was unable to work. He
died a beggar on 31 May 1948. In 1951 Alfred was freed and rejoined his
mother. In 1954, after many more hardships, they managed to reach Austria
and returned to Semmering. The last time they had seen Victor was seven years
earlier. They never heard from him again.

In 1917 there were 2,600 Yugoslavs living in Russia, and by 1924 the number
had risen to 3,750. Their numbers were swelled by industrial workers and
specialists from America and Canada who had come with all their belongings to
try to "build socialism." They lived in colonies all over the country, from
Leninsk to Magnitogorsk and Saratov. Between 50 and 100 of them helped
build the Moscow subway. As with the other nationalities, Yugoslav emigration
was limited. Bozidar Maslaric claimed in 1952 that their fate was one of the
worst, adding that "the vast majority were arrested in 1937 and 1938, and
their fate remains unknown." 71 Mis view is supported by the fact that several
hundred emigres disappeared without a trace. Even now no definite informa-
tion is available about the fate of the Yugoslavs who worked in the U.S.S.R., in

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317

particular concerning those who worked on the subway, protested against
their working conditions, and were subsequently taken away, never to be seen
again.

In mid-September 1939 the division of Poland between Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union, which had been secretly decided on 23 August 1939, came into
force. The two invaders coordinated their action to control the population, and
the Gestapo and the NKVD worked together. Out of a Jewish community of
3.3 million, 2 million fell into the German zone of occupation. After the
persecutions, massacres, and burning of synagogues came the establishment of
the ghettoes, first in Lodz on 30 April 1940, and then in Warsaw in October,
before it was closed on 15 November.

Many Polish Jews had fled east before the advancing German army. In the
winter of 1939-40 the Germans were not overly worried about people fleeing
over the border, but many of those who did try their luck met an unexpected
obstacle: "The Soviet Guards in the 'classless society' in their long fur coats,
with their bayonets at the ready, often greeted with police dogs and bursts of
automatic gunfire the nomads who had set out for the promised land." 72 From
December 1939 to March 1940 the Jews found themselves trapped in a no-
man's-land about a mile wide, on the west bank of the Bug, and were forced to
camp out under the stars. Most of them then turned around and returned to
the German zone.

L. C., "I.D. no. 15015," a former soldier in the Polish army of General
Ladislav Anders, later summed up the situation as follows:

The territory was a sector of about 600-700 meters, where about 800
people had been stranded for several weeks. Ninety percent of them
were Jews who had escaped from the Germans. We were ill and con-
stantly damp from the incessant autumn rain, and we huddled together
for warmth. The ''humanitarian" Soviet border guards wouldn't give us
even a mouthful of bread or hot water. They didn't even let through the
peasants from the surrounding countryside, who were willing to help us
stay alive. Many of us died there as a result ... I can confirm that the
people who went back home to the German side were right to do so,
because the NKVD was no better than the Gestapo from any point of
view. The only difference was that the Gestapo killed you more quickly,
while the NKVD killed and tortured in a horribly long and slow way, so
that anyone who survived all of this came out a broken man and was an
invalid for the rest of his life. 71

Symbolically, Israel Joshua Singer had his hero die in this no-man's-land, after
he had become an "enemy of the people" and had been forced to flee from the
U.S.S.R. 74

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In March 1940 several hundred thousand refugees — some historians put
the figure at around 600,000 — were forcibly given Soviet passports. The So-
viet-German pact included the exchange of refugees. With their families bro-
ken apart and with poverty and NKVD oppression becoming ever more
unbearable, some decided to try to return to the German part of prewar Poland.
Jules Margoline, who had wound up in Uviv, in western Ukraine, reported that
in the spring of 1940 "the Jews preferred the German ghetto to Soviet equal-
ity.'' 75 It seemed to them a much better idea to try to flee the /one of occupation
to reach a neutral country than to attempt flight through the Soviet Union itself.

Early in 1940 deportations affecting Polish citizens began (see Chapter 19
for details), continuing into June. Poles of all denominations were taken by train
to the far north and to Kazakhstan. Margoline's own convoy took ten days to
reach Murmansk. One of the great observers of life in the concentration camps,
he wrote:

The main difference between the Soviet camps and detention camps in
the rest of the world is not their huge, unimaginable size or the murder-
ous conditions found there, but something else altogether. It's the need
to tell an endless series of lies to save your own life, to lie every day, to
wear a mask for years and never say what you really think. In Soviet
Russia, free citizens have to do the same thing. Dissembling and lies
become the only means of defense. Public meetings, business meetings,
encounters on the street, conversations, even posters on the wall all get
wrapped up in an official language that doesn't contain a single word of
truth. People in the West can't possibly understand what it is really like
to lose the right to say what you think for years on end, and the way you
have to repress the tiniest "illegal" thought you might have and stay
silent as the tomb. That sort of pressure breaks something inside peo-
ple. 76

A 1992 article revealed the fate of two Polish socialists. 77 Viktor Alter (born in
1890), a municipal magistrate in Warsaw, was a member of the Socialist Work-
ers 1 International and had also been the president of the Federation of Jewish
Unions. Henryk Erlich was a member of the Communal Council of Warsaw
and the editor of a Jewish daily called Folkstaytung. Both were also members of
the Bund, the Jewish Socialist Workers' Party. In 1939 they took refuge in the
Soviet zone. Alter was arrested on 26 September in Kow el, Erlich on 4 October
in Brest Litovsk. Transferred to Lubyanka, Alter was sentenced to death on 20
July 1940 for anti-Soviet activities (it was claimed that he had been in league
with the Polish police and been in charge of illegal Bund action). The sentence
imposed by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. was
commuted to ten years in camp. On 2 August 1940 Erlich was sentenced to
death bv a court-martial of the NKVD forces in Saratov, but his sentence, too.

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was reduced to ten years in camp. Freed in September 1941 after the Sikorsky-
Maisky agreement, Alter and Erlich were summoned to meet Beria, who pro-
posed that they establish a Jewish anti-Nazi committee, which they agreed to
do. They were sent to Kuibyshev and were arrested again on 4 December,
accused of having collaborated with the Nazis. Beria ordered that they be given
solitary confinement, and thereafter they were known as prisoners 41 (Alter)
and 42 (Erlich), their identity not to be revealed to anyone. On 23 December
1941, now considered to be Soviet citizens, they were again condemned to
death under section 1 of Article 58, which punished treason. Over the follow-
ing weeks they sent a series of requests to the authorities, probably unaware
that they had again been sentenced to death. Henryk Erlich hanged himself
from the bars of his cell on 15 May 1942. Until the archives were opened, it
was believed that he had been executed.

Viktor Alter had also threatened to commit suicide. Beria ordered a closer
watch to be kept on him, and he was executed on 17 February 1943. The
sentence, passed on 23 December 1941, had been personally approved by
Stalin. Significantly, the execution took place shortly after the victory in Stal-
ingrad. The Soviet authorities added a further calumny to the execution,
claiming that Alter and Erlich had been spreading propaganda in favor of the
signing of a peace treaty with Nazi Germany.

In the winter of 1 945-46 the physician Jacques Pat, secretary of the Jewish
Workers' Committee of the United States, went to Poland to begin an inquiry
into Nazi crimes. On his return he published two articles in the Jewish Daily
Forward on the fate of Jews who had fled to the U.S.S.R. By his calculations,
and on the basis of hundreds of interviews, 400,000 Polish Jews had died in
deportation, in the camps, and in forced-labor colonies. At the end of the war
150,000 chose to take back Polish citizenship so that they could leave the
U.S.S.R. a The 150,000 Jews who are today crossing the Soviet-Polish border
are no longer interested in talking about the Soviet Union, the Socialist father-
land, dictatorship, or democracy. For them such discussions are over, and their
last word is this gesture of flight." 78

The Forced Return of Soviet Prisoners

If having any contact with people from abroad, or simply being a foreigner,
made one suspect in the eyes of the regime, then having been kept prisoner for
four years during the war outside one's national territory was also enough to
make a Russian soldier a traitor as far as the Soviet authorities were concerned.
Under Decree No. 270 in 1942, which modified Article 193 of the penal code,
any soldier captured by the enemy ipso facto became a traitor. The circum-
stances under which the capture had taken place and the subsequent conditions

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of captivity were of little importance. In the case of the Russians, the condi-
tions had often been atrocious, as Hitler considered that all Slavs were subhu-
man and hence were to be disposed of en masse. Of the 5.7 million Russian
prisoners of war, 3.3 million died of hunger and the poor conditions.

It was thus very early on that Stalin, in response to the Allies' preoccupa-
tion with the idea that there were Russian soldiers in the Wehrmacht, decided
to obtain permission to repatriate all Russians who found themselves in the
Western zone. This permission was quickly granted. From the end of 1944 to
January 1945 more than 332,000 Russian prisoners (including 1,179 from San
Francisco) were transferred the Soviet Union, often against their will. This
transaction seemed to pose no crisis of conscience among British and American
diplomats, who were fairly cynical about the whole affair, since, like Anthony
Eden, they were aware that this was a question that had to be settled by the use
of force.

At the Yalta conference (5-12 February 1945) the three Allied powers —
Soviet, British, and American — drew up secret agreements that covered sol-
diers as well as displaced civilians. Churchill and Eden accepted the idea that
it was up to Stalin to decide the fate of prisoners who had fought in the Russian
Liberation Army commanded by General Andrei Vlasov, as though he had
offered some sort of guarantee that they would be well treated.

Stalin knew very well that some of the Soviet soldiers had been taken
prisoner principally because of the disorganization of the Red Army, for which
he had been mainly to blame, and thanks to the widespread military incompe-
tence of the generals, of which he himself was one. We can also be sure that
many of the soldiers simply had no desire to fight for a regime that they hated,
and, in Lenin's expression, they had probably "voted with their feet."

Once the Yalta accords had been signed, convoys left Britain weekly for
the US.S.R. From May to July 1945 more than 1.3 million people who had
been living in the Western occupied zones, and who were considered Russian
by the British, including people from the Baltics, which had been annexed in
1940, and Ukrainians, were repatriated. By the end of August more than 2
million of these "Russians" had been handed over. Sometimes they were kept
in terrible conditions. Individual and collective suicides involving whole fami-
lies were frequent, as was mutilation. Often, when the prisoners were handed
over to the Soviet authorities, they tried to put up passive resistance, but the
Anglo-Americans did not hesitate to use force to satisfy Moscow's require-
ments. When the prisoners arrived in the US.S.R. , they were placed under
police control. The day the ship Almanzora arrived in Odessa, on 18 April,
summary executions took place. This was also the case when the Empire Pride
arrived in port in the Black Sea.

The West feared that the Soviet Union might hold French, British, or

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American prisoners as hostages and use them as a sort of currency in ex-
change — an attitude very indicative of their view of the Soviet diktats demand-
ing the repatriation of all Russians, even those who had fled the revolution after
1917. This conscious policy of the Western allies did not in fact facilitate the
return of their own citizens, but it did allow the Soviet Union to send out a
veritable army of officials to hunt down people attempting to resist these laws.
The officials themselves often acted with supreme disregard for local laws.

In the French zone of occupation, the Bulletin of the military administra-
tion in Germany affirmed that on 1 October 1945, 101,000 "displaced persons"
had been sent back to the Soviet Union, Even in France itself, the authorities
accepted the creation of seventy transit camps that were somehow exempt from
French law. One of these, Beauregard, was in the Paris suburbs. France had no
control over what happened in such camps, which were operated by the NKVD
with impunity on French soil. These operations, which started as early as
September 1944 with the help of Communist propaganda, had been carefully
planned by the Soviet Union. The Beauregard camp was not closed until
November 1947 by the French security forces, after a scandal concerning the
abduction of children of divorced parents who were feuding. The closure came
at the behest of Roger Wybot, who noted that "this camp, according to the
information I have in my possession, was less a transit camp than a sort of
sequestration center."™ Protests against such policies were few, and took place
too late to be of any use. One did appear in the summer of 1947, in the Socialist
review Masses:

One can easily imagine Genghis Khan, at the height of his powers,
closing his frontiers to prevent his slaves from running away. But it is
hard to imagine that he would be granted the right to extradite them
from abroad . . . This is a true sign of our postwar moral decay . . . What
moral or political code can possibly be used to oblige people to go and
live in a country where they will live and work as slaves? What gratitude
does the world expect from Stalin for turning a deaf ear to the cries of
all the Russian citizens who have taken their own lives rather than return
home?

The editors of Masses went on to denounce the recent expulsions:

Spurred on by the criminal indifference of the masses regarding viola-
tions of the right to asylum, the British military authorities in Italy have
just been accessories to a heinous crime: on 8 May, 175 Russians were
taken from Camp 7 in Ruccione, and another 10 people from Camp 6
(where whole families are being kept), allegedly to be sent to Scotland.
When these 185 people were somewhat distant from the camp, all ob-
jects that could possibly have been of assistance to them, had they

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wanted to take their own lives, were removed from their possession, and
they were informed that their real destination was not in fact Scotland,
but Russia. Despite the precautions, some of them still managed to kill
themselves. That same day another 80 people, all of Caucasian origin,
were taken from the camp in Pisa. All were taken to the Russian zone in
Austria, in railway carriages guarded by British troops. Some of them
tried to escape and were shot by the guards/

The repatriated prisoners were interned in special camps called ''filtration
and control camps" (established in late 1941), which were scarcely different
from the forced-labor camps, and which became officially a part of the Gulag
Administration in January 1946. In 1945, 214,000 prisoners passed through
them. 81 These prisoners, sent into the Gulag at its height, generally received
six-year sentences, in accordance with section 1(b) of Article 58. Among them
were the former members of the Russian Liberation Armv; who had partici-
pated in the liberation of Prague, where they had fought against the SS.

Enemy Prisoners

The Soviet Union had not ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on prisoners
of war. Theoretically, all prisoners were protected by the convention even if
their country was not a signatory, but the Soviet government took little account
of this. In victory, it still kept between 3 million and 4 million German prison-
ers. Among them were soldiers freed by the Western forces who had come back
to the Soviet zone and been deported farther east to the US.S.R.

In March 1947 Vyacheslav Molotov declared that a million Germans had
been repatriated (1,003,974 was the exact number) and that there were still
890,532 interned in various camps. The figures provoked some controversy. In
March 1950 the Soviet Union declared that the repatriation process was com-
plete, but humanitarian organizations claimed that at least 300,000 prisoners
of war and 100,000 expatriate civilians remained in the U.S.S.R. On 8 May
1950 Luxembourg protested the ending of repatriation operations, in part
because at least 2,000 Luxembourg nationals were still trapped in the Soviet
Union. Was the holding back of information the cover for a more sinister fate?
This seems quite likely, given the atrocious conditions in the camps.

One estimate made by a special commission (the Maschke commission)
claimed that nearly 1 million German prisoners of war died in Soviet camps.
A typical case involved the 100,000 German prisoners taken by the Red Army
at Stalingrad, of whom only 6,000 survived. In addition to the Germans, there
were still around 60,000 Italian survivors in February 1947 (the figure of 80,000
has also often been put forward in this context). The Italian government
claimed that only 12,513 of those soldiers had returned to Italy at that date.
Romanian and Hungarian soldiers found themselves in the same position after

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the war. In March 1954, 100 volunteers from the Spanish "Azul" division were
finally liberated. This survey would not be complete without mention of the
900,000 Japanese soldiers taken prisoner in Manchuria.

The Unwilling

There was a saying in the camps that summed up the diverse national origins
of their inhabitants: "If a country isn't represented in the gulags, it doesn't
really exist." France also had prisoners in the gulags, and French diplomacy
was remarkably slow in coming to their aid.

The French departments of Moselle, Bas-Rhin, and Haut-Rhin were
treated in a special way when they came under Nazi occupation: Alsace-Lor-
raine was annexed, Germanized, and even Nazified. In 1942 the Germans
decided forcibly to conscript those born in 1920-1924. Many young people
from Alsace and Moselle did their utmost to avoid service. By the end of the
war, twenty-one age groups had been mobilized in Alsace, and another fourteen
in Moselle, or 130,000 people in all. Many of these soldiers, who were known
in France as the Malgre-nous, or "In Spite of Ourselves," were sent to the
eastern front, where 22,000 of them died. When the Soviet authorities found
out about this unusual situation from the Free French, they began to appeal to
French soldiers to desert, promising them that they would be reenlisted in a
regular French army. Whatever the circumstances were, 23,000 people from
Alsace-Lorraine were taken prisoner; at least this was the number of files
handed over to the French government in 1995. Many of these were kept in
Camp 188, in Tambov, guarded by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Minister-
stvo vnutrennikh del, or MVD — formerly the NKVD) in terrible conditions:
they were undernourished (receiving only 600 grams of black bread a day),
forced to work in the forests, and lived in primitive, half-buried huts, with no
medical care. People who escaped from this death camp estimated that at least
10,000 of their companions died there in 1944 and 1945. Pierre Rigoulot gives
the figure of 10,000 deaths in different camps, including those who died in
transit. 82 After lengthy negotiations, 1,500 prisoners were freed in the summer
of 1944 and were repatriated to Algiers. Although Tambov was the camp where
the greatest number of people from Alsace-Lorraine were interned, there were
certainly others that housed French prisoners, a sort of specialized subar-
chipelago.

Civil War and War of National Liberation

Although the signing of the German-Soviet pact in September 1939 had
brought about the collapse of a considerable number of Communist parties,
whose members were unable to accept Stalin's abandonment of an antifascist

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policy, the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 immediately
reactivated the antifascist response. The very next day the Comintern sent out
a message by radio and telegram that the time had come for a temporary halt to
the socialist revolution, and that all energy should be channeled into the strug-
gle against fascism and the war for national liberation. The message also de-
manded that all Communist parties in occupied countries rise up immediately.
The war was thus an opportunity to try out a new form of action: the armed
struggle and the sabotage of Hitler's war machine, which promised valuable
practice in guerrilla tactics. Paramilitary organizations were thus strengthened
to form the core of armed Communist groups. Where geography and circum-
stances were favorable, they formed guerrilla forces of considerable efficacy,
particularly in Greece and Yugoslavia after 1942, and in Albania and northern
Italy after 1943. In the most successful situations, this guerrilla action gave
Communists the opportunity to seize power, with recourse to civil war if
necessary

Yugoslavia furnished the clearest example of this new direction. In the
spring of 1941 Hitler was forced to come to the aid of his Italian ally, Benito
Mussolini, whose forces were being held in check in Greece by a small but
determined army. In April Germany also had to intervene in Yugoslavia, where
the government that supported the Nazis had been overthrown in a pro-British
coup. In both of these countries, small but experienced Communist parties had
existed in secret for many years, since being banned by the dictatorial regimes
of Milan Stojadinovic and Joannes Metaxas.

After the armistice, Yugoslavia was divided up among the Italians, Bul-
garians, and Germans. The right-wing extremist Ustasha group in Croatia, led
by Ante Pavelic, tried to establish an independent state, but it amounted to little
more than an apartheid regime that subordinated the Serbs and carried out
massacres of Jews and Gypsies. The Ustasha sought to eliminate all its oppo-
sition, driving numerous Croats to join the resistance.

After the surrender of the Yugoslav army on 18 April 1941, the first to
form a resistance movement were the royalist officers around Colonel Draza
Mihailovic, who was soon appointed commander in chief of the Yugoslav
resistance, and then minister of war for the royal government~in-exile in Lon-
don. Mihailovic created a largely Serb army in Serbia, the Chetniks. Only after
the German invasion of the U.S.S.R., on 22 June 1941, did the Yugoslav-
Communists rally to the idea of national liberation to "free the country from
the yoke of fascism and start the socialist revolution."** But whereas Moscow-
wanted to support the royalist government for as long as possible so as not to
alienate the U.S.S.R.'s British allies, Tito felt confident enough to follow his
own line, and he refused to pledge allegiance to the royalist government-in-
exile. Recruiting soldiers regardless of their ethnic background — Tito himself

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325

was a Croat — the Communist partisan leader began to establish guerrilla bases
in Bosnia in 1942. The two movements were soon opposed on key issues. Faced
with a Communist threat, Mihailovic chose to appease the Germans and even
to form an alliance with the Italians. The situation became a veritable imbroglio,
mixing war for national liberation and civil war, political and ethnic rivalries,
all within the larger context of occupation by foreign troops. Both sides com-
mitted numerous massacres and atrocities as each tried to exterminate its rivals
and to impose its own power on the population.

Historians estimate that there were slightly more than 1 million deaths,
out of a total population of just 16 million. Executions, the shooting of pris-
oners and the wounded, and vicious cycles of revenge dragged on endlessly in
a culture that had a long tradition of violent opposition between clans. There
was, however, a difference between the massacres carried out by the Chetniks
and those carried out by the Communists. The Chetniks, who hated any form
of centralized authority — many groups were actually outside the control of
Mihailovic — carried out their massacres far more often on an ethnic rather than
a political basis. The objectives of the Communists were much more clearly
military and political. Milovan Djilas, one of Tito's assistants, said many years
later:

We were quite put out by the excuses the peasants gave for rallying to
the Chetniks: they claimed to be afraid that their houses would be
burned and that they would suffer other reprisals. This question came
up in a meeting with Tito, and he offered the following argument: If we
can make the peasants understand that if they join with the invader
[note the interesting slippage here from Chetnik (royalist Yugoslav resis-
tance fighter) to "invader"], we will burn down their houses, too, they
might change their minds . . . After some hesitation, Tito made up his
mind, and said: "All right, we can burn down the odd house or village
now and then." Tito later issued orders to this effect, which looked all
the more resolute simply because he was taking a firm stand. M

Following Italy's surrender in September 1943, Churchill's decision to
help Tito rather than Mihailovic, and Tito's formation of the Yugoslav Na-
tional Anti-Fascist Council for Liberation (AVNOJ) in December 1943, the
Communists had a clear political advantage over their rivals. By the end of 1944
and early 1945 the Communist partisans had taken over nearly the whole of
Yugoslavia. As the German surrender approached, Pavelic and his army, his
aides, and their families — in all, tens of thousands of people — set off for the
Austrian frontier. Slovenian White Guards and Chetniks from Montenegro
joined them in Bleiburg, where they all surrendered to British troops, who
handed them over to Tito.

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Soldiers and policemen of all types found themselves forced to walk to
their deaths, hundreds of miles across the country. The Slovenian prisoners
were taken back to Slovenia near Kocevje, where as many as 30,000 were
killed. 85 In defeat, the Chetniks were unable to avoid the vengeance of the
partisans, who never took prisoners. Milovan Djilas described the end of many
of the Serb soldiers without going into any of the macabre details of the last
period of the campaign: "Draza Mihailovic's troops were completely annihi-
lated at about the same time as the Slovenians. The small groups of Chetniks
who managed to get back to Montenegro after they had been defeated brought
the full story of the horror they had seen. No one has ever spoken of that again,
not even people who make much of their revolutionary spirit, as though it was
all a terrible nightmare." 86 Once captured, Draza Mihailovic was tried, sen-
tenced to death, and shot on 17 July 1946. At his "trial," all offers to bear
witness for him by various officers from the Allied missions who had been sent
to his aid and who had fought the Germans by his side were turned down. 87
After the war, Stalin once shared his philosophy with Milovan Djilas: "Anyone
who occupies a territory always imposes his own social system on it."

When the war ended, the Greek Communists were in a situation roughly
similar to that of the Yugoslavs. On 2 November 1940, a few days after the
Italian invasion of Greece, Nikos Zachariadis, the secretary of the Greek Com-
munist Party (KKE), who had been in prison since 1936, sent out a call to
arms: "The Greek nation is now engaged in a war for its national liberation
from the fascism of Mussolini . . . Everyone must take his place, and everyone
must fight." 88 But on 7 December a manifesto from the underground Central
Committee called into question this decision, and the KKE returned to the
official line recommended by the Comintern, that of revolutionary defeatism.
On 22 June 1941 came the spectacular U-turn: the KKE ordered its militants
to organize "the struggle to defend the Soviet Union and the overthrow of the
foreign fascist yoke."

The experience with clandestine activity had been crucial for the Com-
munists. On 16 July 1941, like their counterparts in other countries, the Greek
Communists formed a National Workers' Front for Liberation (Ergatiko Eth-
niko Apelevtheriko Metopo, EEAM), an umbrella organization for three un-
ions. On 27 September they established the EAM (Ethniko Apelevtheriko
Metopo), the Party's political arm. On 10 February 1942 they announced the
creation of the People's Army for National Liberation (Ellinikos Laikos Ape-
levtherotikos), or ELAS. By May 1942 the first ELAS partisans were operating
under the leadership of Ares Velouchiotes (Thanassis Klaras), an experienced
militant who had signed a recantation in exchange for his freedom. From this
point on, ELAS numbers continued to grow.

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327

The ELAS was not the only military resistance movement. The National
Greek Democratic Union, (Ethnikos Demokratikos Ellinikos Syndesmos), or
EDES, had been created by soldiers and republican civilians in September
1941. Another group of resistance fighters was formed by a retired colonel,
Napoleon Zervas. A third organization, the National Social Liberation Move-
ment (Ethniki Kai Koiniki Apelevtherosis), or EKKA, came into being in
October 1942 under Colonel Dimitri Psarros. All these organizations were
constantly trying to recruit from one another.

But the success and strength of the ELAS made the Communists hopeful
of imposing their leadership on all the armed resistance groups. They attacked
the EDES partisans several times, as well as the EKKA, who were forced to
suspend operations to regroup. In late 1942 Major G. Kostopoulos (a renegade
from the EAM) and Colonel Stefanos Sarafis formed a resistance unit in the
heart of a zone that had been captured by the EAM in western Thessaly, at the
foot of the Pindus Mountains. The ELAS surrounded them and massacred all
those who did not escape or who refused to enroll in their ranks. Taken
prisoner, Sarafis finally agreed to assume leadership of the ELAS units.

The presence of British officers who had come to help the Greek resis-
tance was a cause of concern to the ELAS chiefs, who feared that the British
would attempt to reinstate the monarchy. But there was a difference in view-
point between the military branch, directed by Ares Velouchiotes, and the KKE
itself The latter, led by Giorgis Siantos, wished to follow the official line as laid
down by Moscow, advocating a general antifascist coalition. The actions of the
British were momentarily beneficial because in July 1943 their military mission
convinced the three main protagonists to sign a pact. At that time the ELAS
had some 18,000 men, the EDES 5,000, and the EKKA about 1,000.

The Italian surrender on 8 September 1943 immediately modified the
situation. A fratricidal war began when the Germans launched a violent offen-
sive against the EDES. The guerrillas, forced to retreat, confronted several
large ELAS battalions, which threatened to annihilate the EDES. The KKE
leadership decided to abandon the EDES, hoping thus to check British policy.
After four days of fighting, the partisans led by Zervas escaped encirclement.

This civil war within the main war was of great advantage to the Germans
as they swept down upon the resistance units one by one. w The Allies thus took
the initiative to end the civil war. Fighting between the ELAS and the EDES
stopped in February 1944, and an agreement was signed in Plaka. The agree-
ment was short-lived; a few weeks later the ELAS attacked Colonel Psarros'
EKKA troops. He was defeated after five days and taken prisoner. Mis officers
were massacred; Psarros himself was beheaded.

The Communists' actions demoralized the resistance and discredited the
EAM. In several regions, hatred for the EAM was so strong that a number of

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resistance fighters joined the security battalions set up by the Germans. The
civil war did not end until the ELAS agreed to collaborate with the Greek
government-in-exile in Cairo. In September 1944 six members of the EAM-
ELAS became members of the government of national unity presided over by
Georges Papandreou. On 2 September, as the Germans began to evacuate
Greece, the ELAS sent its troops to conquer the Peloponnese, which had always
eluded its control thanks to the security battalions. All captured towns and
villages were "punished." In Meligala, 1,400 men, women, and children were
massacred along with some 50 officers and noncommissioned officers from the
security battalions.

Nothing now seemed to stand in the way of EAM-ELAS hegemony. But
when Athens was liberated on 12 October it escaped the guerrillas 1 control
because of the presence of British troops in Piraeus. The KKE leadership
hesitated to undertake a trial of strength, unsure of whether it wanted a place
in a coalition government. When the ELAS refused a government demand to
demobilize, Iannis Zegvos, the Communist agriculture minister, demanded that
all government units be disbanded too. On 4 December, ELAS patrols entered
Athens, where they clashed with government forces. By the following day,
almost the entire capital had fallen under the control of the 20,000-strong
ELAS forces; but the British stood firm, awaiting reinforcements. On 18 De-
cember the ELAS again attacked the EDES in Epirus and at the same time
launched a bloody antiroyalist operation.

The offensive was contained, and in talks held in Varkiza the Communists
resigned themselves to a peace accord under which they agreed to disarm. The
accord was something of a sham, however, since large numbers of weapons and
munitions remained carefully hidden. Ares Velouchiotes, one of the principal
warlords, rejected the Varkiza conditions, rejoined the partisans with about one
hundred men, and then crossed into Albania in the hope of continuing the
armed struggle from there. Later, asked about the reasons for the defeat of the
EAM-ELAS, Velouchiotes replied frankly: "We didn't kill enough people. The
English were taking a major interest in that crossroads called Greece. If we had
killed all their friends, they wouldn't have been able to land. Everyone described
me as a killer — that's the way we were. Revolutions succeed only when rivers
run red with blood, and blood has to be spilled if what you are aiming for is
the perfectability of the human race." 90 Velouchiotes died in combat in June
1945 in Thessaly, a few days after he was thrown out of the KKE. The defeat
of the EAM-ELAS unleashed a wave of hatred against the Communists and
their allies. Groups of militants were assassinated by paramilitary groups, and
many others were imprisoned. Most of the leaders were deported to the islands.

Nikos Zachariadis, the secretary general of the KKE, had returned in May
1945 from Germany, where he had been deported to Dachau. His first decla-

The Comintern in Action

329

rations clearly announced KKE policy: "Either the EAM struggle for national
liberation is finally rewarded with the establishment of a people's democracy
in Greece, or we return to a similar but even more severe regime than the last
fascist monarchist dictatorship." Greece, exhausted by the war, seemed to have
little chance of enjoying peace at last. In October the Seventh Party Congress
ratified Zachariadis' proposal. The first stage was to obtain the departure of
the British troops. In January 1946 the US.S.R. demonstrated its interest in
Greece by claiming at a United Nations Security Council meeting that the
British presence constituted a danger to the country. On 12 February 1946,

when defeat for the Communists in the coming elections seemed inevitable

they were calling on their voters to abstain—the KKE organized an uprising,
with the help of the Yugoslav Communists.

In December 1945 the members of the KKE Central Committee had met
with various Bulgarian and Yugoslav officers. The Greek Communists were
assured that they could use Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia as bases. For
more than three years their troops did so, retreating with their wounded into
these countries and using them to regroup and build up supplies and munitions.
T hese preparations took place a few months after the creation of the Commu-
nist Information Bureau (Cominform), the Moscow-dominated grouping of
world Communist parties. It seems that the Greek Communist uprising was
perfectly coordinated with the Soviet Union's new policies. On 30 March 1946
the KKE declared that a third civil war was under way. The first attacks by the
Democratic Army (AD), which had been established on 28 October 1946 and
was led by General Markos Vafiadis, followed the usual pattern: police stations
were attacked, their occupants killed, and leading local figures executed. The
KKE openly continued such actions throughout 1946.

In the first months of 1947 General Vafiadis intensified his campaign,
attacking dozens of villages and executing hundreds of peasants. The ranks of
the AD were swollen by enforced recruitment/' 1 Villages that refused to coop-
erate suffered severe reprisals. One village in Macedonia was hit particularly
hard: forty-eight houses were burned down, and twelve men, six women, and
two babies were killed. After March 1947 municipal leaders were systematically
eliminated, as were priests. By March the number of refugees reached 400,000.
The policy of terror was met with counterterror, and militant left-wing Com-
munists were killed in turn by right-wing extremists.

In June 1947, after a tour of Belgrade, Prague, and Moscow, Zachariadis
announced the imminent formation of a "free" government. The Greek Com-
munists seemed to believe that they could follow the same path taken by Tito
a few years earlier. The government was officially created in December. The
Yugoslavs provided nearly 10,000 volunteers recruited from their own army. 92
Numerous reports from the UN Special Commission on the Balkans have

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World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

established the great importance of this assistance to the Democratic Arm)'.
The break between Tito and Stalin in 1948 had direct consequences for the
Greek Communists. Although Tito continued his aid until the autumn, he also
began a retreat that ended with closure of the border. In the summer of 1948,
while the Greek government forces were engaged in a massive offensive, the
Albanian leader Enver Hoxha also closed his country's border. The Greek
Communists became increasingly isolated, and dissent within the Party grew.
The fighting continued until August 1949. Many of the combatants fled to
Bulgaria and thence to other parts of Eastern Europe, settling particularly in
Romania and the US.S.R. Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, received thou-
sands of refugees, including 7,500 Communists. After this defeat, the KKE in
exile suffered a number of purges, and as late as 1955 the conflicts between the
pro- and anti-Zachariadis factions was still extremely fierce, so much so that at
one point the Soviet army was forced to intervene, resulting in hundreds of
casualties.*^

During the civil war of 1946-1948, Greek Communists kept records on
all the children aged three to fourteen in all the areas they controlled. In March
1948 these children were gathered together in the border regions, and several
thousand were taken into Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. The villagers tried
to protect their children by hiding them in the woods. The Red Cross, despite
the enormous obstacles placed in their path, managed to count 28,296. In the
summer of 1948, when the Tito-Cominform rupture became apparent, 1 1,600
of the children in Yugoslavia were moved to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Roma-
nia, and Poland, despite many protests from the Greek government. On 17
November 1948, the Third UN General Assembly passed a resolution roundly
condemning the removal of the Greek children. In November 1949 the General
Assembly again demanded their return. These and all subsequent UN resolu-
tions remained unanswered. The neighboring Communist regimes claimed that
the children were being kept under conditions superior to those they would be
experiencing at home, and that the deportation had been a humanitarian act. 44
In reality the enforced deportation of the children was carried out in
appalling conditions. Starvation and epidemics were extremely common, and
many of the children simply died. Kept together in "children's villages," they
were subjected to courses in politics in addition to their normal education. At
age thirteen they were forced into manual labor, carrying out arduous tasks such
as land reclamation in the marshy Hartchag region of Hungary. The intention
of the Communist leaders was to form a new generation of devoted militants,
but their efforts ended in failure. One Greek called Constantinides died on the
Hungarian side fighting the Soviet Union in 1956. Others managed to flee to
West Germany.

From 1950 to 1952 only 684 children were permitted to return to Greece.

The Comintern in Action

331

By 1963, around 4,000 children (some of them born in Communist countries)
had been repatriated. In Poland, the Greek community numbered several thou-
sand in the early 1980s. Some of them were members of Solidarity, and were
imprisoned after the introduction of martial law in December 1981. In 1989,
when democratization was well under way, several thousand Greeks still living
in Poland began to return home.

The warm welcome extended to the defeated Greek Communists in the
U.S.S.R. contrasted strangely with Stalin's annihilation of the Greek commu-
nity that had lived in Russia for centuries. In 1917 the number of Greeks in the
Soviet state was between 500,000 and 700,000, concentrated for the most part
around the Caucasus and the Black Sea. By 1939 the number had fallen to
410,000, mainly because of "unnatural 11 deaths, not emigration; and there were
a mere 177,000 remaining by 1960. After December 1937 the 285,000 Greeks
living in the major towns were deported to the regions of Arkhangelsk, the
Komi republic, and northeastern Siberia. Others were allowed to return to
Greece. During this period A. Haitas, a former secretary of the KKE, and the
educator J. Jordinis died in purges. In 1944, 10,000 Greeks from the Crimea,
the remnants of what had been a flourishing Greek community there, were
deported to Kirgizstan and Uzbekistan, on the pretext that they had adopted a
pro-German stance during the war. On 30 June 1949, in a single night, 30,000
Greeks from Georgia were deported to Kazakhstan. In April 1950 the entire
Greek population of Batumi suffered a similar fate.

In other countries in Western Europe, Communist attempts to seize power
after liberation from Nazi rule were rapidly snuffed out by the presence of
Anglo-American forces and by Stalin's directive at the end of 1944 urging
Communists to cache their arms and wait for a better time to seize power. This
line was confirmed by a report of a meeting in the Kremlin on 19 November
1944 between Stalin and Maurice Thorez, the secretary general of the French
Communist Party, before he returned to France after spending the war in the
US.S.R. 95

After the war, and at least until Stalin's death in 1953, the violent methods
and terror that had become the norm inside the Comintern continued in the
international Communist movement. In Eastern Europe the repression of real
or supposed dissidents by means of rigged show-trials was especially intense
(see Chapter 20 for details). The pretext for this terror was the confrontation
between Tito and Stalin in 1948. Having challenged Stalin's omnipotence, Tito
was transformed into a new Trotsky. Stalin tried to have him assassinated, but
Tito was extremely wary and had his own highly effective state security appa-
ratus. Unable to eliminate Tito himself, Communist parties around the world
launched a series of symbolic political murders and excluded all "Titoists" from

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their ranks, treating them as scapegoats at every opportunity. One of the first
expiatory victims was the secretary general of the Norwegian Communist Party,
Peder Furubotn, a former Comintern official who had worked in Moscow, and
who had already eluded one such purge by escaping to Norway in 1938. At a
Party meeting on 20 October 1949, a Soviet agent named Strand Johansen
accused Furubotn of Titoism. Confident that he would be given a fair hearing
within the Party, Furubotn called a meeting of the Central Committee on 25
October, where he announced his immediate resignation and that of his team,
provided that a new election for the Central Committee took place immediately
and that the accusations against him were examined by an international panel
of experts. Furubotn had thus temporarily outmaneuvered his opponents. But
to general amazement, Johansen and several armed men burst into the Central
Committee the following day and expelled Furubotn's supporters at gunpoint.
They then organized a meeting where Furubotn's expulsion from the Party
was agreed. Furubotn himself had anticipated these Soviet-style tactics and
had barricaded himself in his house with a few armed colleagues. Most of the
military forces of the Norwegian Communist Party died in the ensuing
gunfight. Johansen himself was manipulated by the Soviet Union to such an
extent over the next several years that he eventually went mad. %

The last act in this period of terror inside the international Communist
movement took place in 1957. Imre Nagy, the Hungarian Communist who for
a while had led the 1956 revolt in Budapest (see Chapter 20), had taken refuge
in the Yugoslav embassy, fearing for his life. After some tortuous maneuvering,
Soviet KGB officers took him into custody and then transferred him for trial
to the new Hungarian government of Janos Kadar. Unwilling to take sole
responsibility for what was clearly going to be a legalized murder, the Hungar-
ian Workers' Party used the first World Conference of Communist Parties, held
in Moscow in November 1957, to have all the Communist leaders present vote
for Nagy's death. Included among them were the Frenchman Maurice Thorez
and the Italian Palmiro Togliatti. Only the Polish leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka,
refused to endorse the move. Nagy was condemned to death and hanged on 16
June 1958. 97

The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain

Stephane Courtois and Jean-Louis Panne

n 17 July 1936 the Spanish military in Morocco, under the lead-
ership of General Francisco Franco, rose up against the Republican govern-
ment. The next day the mutiny spread throughout the peninsula. On 19 July it
was checked in many cities, including Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Bilbao,
thanks to a general strike and the mass mobilization of the working classes.
Months earlier, on 16 February 1936, the Popular Front's margin of victory in
the Spanish elections had been extremely narrow, 4,700,000 votes (267 depu-
ties), compared to 3,997,000 (132 deputies) for the right and 449,000 for the
center. The Socialists had won 89 seats, the Republican left 84, the Republican
Union 37, and the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) 16. The Marxist Workers'
Unification Party (POUM), born in 1935 from the fusion of Joaquin Maurin's
workers 1 and peasants' bloc and the Communist left of Andreu Nin, won a
single seat. One of the main forces in Spain was not represented at all. The
anarchists of the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) and the Federation
of Iberian Anarchists (FAI) — which had 1,577,547 members, compared to the
1,444,474 members of the Socialist Party and the General Workers' Union —
had, in accordance with their principles, not put forward any candidates for the
election. 1 The Popular Front would have been unable to win without the votes
of the anarchists' supporters. Support for the Communist Party was actually
much less than the figure of 16 elected members suggests. They claimed to

333

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World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

have 40,000 members, but in reality fewer than 10,000 sympathizers were
present in the many fragmented organizations that did not depend directly on
the Communist Party.

The left was thus extremely divided, and the right was powerful and
concentrated in the Falange faction. The cities were seething with political
demonstrations and strikes, and unrest spread to the countryside, where peas-
ants began to take over land. The army was strong, the government was
divided, there was a multitude of plots afoot, and political violence was con-
stantly escalating. All these factors indicated that a civil war was brewing, and
this was indeed the outcome desired by many.

The Communist Line

To increase their political clout, the Communists had proposed joining with
the Socialists. This tactic at first succeeded only with the two parties' youth
organizations. On 1 April 1936 the Unified Socialist Youth group was formed.
This event, however, was followed on 26 June by one of much greater impor-
tance — the creation of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia.

The Comintern had not been particularly interested in Spain, and began
to pay attention to the country only after the fall of the monarchy in 1931 and
the workers' uprising in Asturias in 1934. The Soviet Union had been equally
uninterested, and the two countries did not sign a pact of mutual recognition
until August 1936, after the civil war had broken out. A month earlier the Soviet
government had signed a noninterventionist pact adopted by France and Eng-
land in July, in the hope of preventing the war from escalating internationally. 2
The Soviet ambassador, Marsel Israelovich Rosenberg, took up office on 27
August.

In the government of Francisco Largo Caballero, formed in September
1936, the Communist Party had only two ministers: Jesus Hernandez at the
Education Ministry, and Vincente Uribe at the Ministry of Agriculture. But
the Soviet Union very quickly acquired much greater influence in the govern-
ment. Thanks to the sympathy of several other members of the government
(including Juan Alvarez del Vayo and Juan Negrin), Marsel Rosenberg became
a sort of deputy prime minister and even took part in meetings of the Council
of Ministers. He had several considerable advantages, since the U.S.S.R. was
eager to arm the Republicans.

Soviet intervention in an area so far outside the US.S.R.'s normal sphere
of influence became a matter of special importance. It came at a key moment,
when Spain was weakened by a powerful social movement and a civil war. In
1936-1939 the country became a sort of laboratory where the Soviet authorities
not only applied new political strategies and tactics but also tried out techniques

The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain

335

that would be used during and after World War II, Their aims were manifold,
but their primary goal was to ensure that the Spanish Communist Party (by
now run entirely by the Comintern and the NKVD) seized power and estab-
lished a state that would become another Soviet satellite. To achieve their goal,
they used traditional Soviet methods, such as establishing an omnipresent
police force and liquidating all non-Communist forces.

In 1936 the Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti (known then as Mario
Ercoli), who was a member of the Comintern directorate, defined the specific
features of the Spanish civil war, which he characterized as u a war of national
revolution." In his view, the nationalist, popular, and antifascist nature of the
Spanish revolution presented the Communists with a new agenda: "The people
of Spain are solving the problems of the bourgeois democratic revolution in a
new fashion." He quickly identified the Republican and Socialist leaders as
enemies of this new conception of revolution, calling them "elements who hide
behind anarchist principles and weaken the unity and cohesiveness of the
Popular Front with premature projects for forced 'collectivization.' " He estab-
lished Communist hegemony as a clear objective, to be realized by "a common
front of Socialist and Communist parties, the creation of a single Communist
Youth Organization, the creation of a single Proletarian Party in Catalonia [the
PSUC], and the transformation of the Communist Party itself into a large-scale
party of the masses." 1 In June 1937 Dolores Ibarruri — a Spanish Communist
better known by the name "La Pasionaria," who became famous because of her
calls for resistance — proposed a new objective: "a democratic parliamentary
republic of a new sort" 4

Immediately after the Franquista pronunctamento, Stalin again demon-
strated his relative indifference to the whole Spanish situation. Jef Last, who
accompanied Andre Gide to Moscow in the summer of 1936, recalled: "We
were quite indignant at finding such a total lack of interest in the events there.
At no meeting did this subject ever arise, and whenever we attempted to engage
officials privately in conversation on the topic, they scrupulously avoided airing
their own opinion." 5 Two months later, given the turn of events, Stalin realized
that he could take advantage of the situation for both diplomatic and propa-
ganda purposes. By cooperating with the noninterventionist pact, the Soviet
Union might gain greater international recognition and might even be able to
break up the Franco-British bloc. At the same time, of course, the Soviet Union
was secretly supplying the Republicans with guns and lending military aid,
hoping to exploit the Popular Front government in France, which seemed ready
to collaborate with the Soviet secret services in organizing further help for the
Republican forces in Spain. Acting on Leon Blum's instructions, Gaston Cusin,
the deputy head of the Cabinet at the Finance Ministry, met with Soviet
officials and emissaries who had established their headquarters in Paris to

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organize the shipment of arms and the recruiting of volunteers for Spain.
Although the Soviet Union initially intended to avoid an overt role, the Comin-
tern mobilized all its sections for the cause of Republican Spain, using the
conflict as a tremendous vehicle for antifascist propaganda, with particularly
good results for the Communist movement.

In Spain itself, the main Communist tactic was to occupy more and more
positions in the Republican government so as to direct policy in accordance
with the interests of the Soviet Union. Julian Gorkin, one of the POUM
leaders, was probably among the first to suggest that there was a link between
Soviet policies in Republican Spain and the ideals of a people's democracy, in
an essay titled Espana, primer ensayo de democracia popular}' By contrast, the
Spanish historian Antonio Elorza believes that Communist policies in Spain
came mostly from "a monolithic rather than a pluralist conception of political
relations in the Popular Front and from the role of the Party, which naturally
tried to turn the alliance into a platform for its own hegemony. 11 Elorza empha-
sizes the invariant pattern of Soviet policy, which encouraged the Spanish
Communist Party to exert itself against all antifascists, "not simply enemy
fascist groups, but also any internal opposition." He adds: u As such, the project
was a direct precursor of the strategy for taking power in all so-called people's
democracies." 7

Moscow predicted success in the elections of September 1937, when the
option of voting a straight ticket would allow the Spanish Communist Party to
profit from the national plebiscite. The goal, inspired and closely followed by
Stalin himself, was the establishment of "a democratic republic of a new type,"
to be accompanied by the elimination of all ministers hostile to Communist
policies. But the Communists failed, mostly because of opposition from their
allies, and because of the worrying turn of events with the failure of the
offensive in Teruel on 15 December 1937.

"Advisers" and Agents

As soon as StaJin had decided that Spain presented important opportunities for
the Soviet Union and that intervention was therefore necessary, Moscow sent a
large contingent of advisers and other personnel to that country. First and
foremost among these were the 2,044 military advisers (according to one Soviet
source), including the future marshals Ivan Konev and Georgy Zhukov, as well
as General Vladimir Gorev, the military attache in Madrid. Between 700 and
800 would stay permanently. Moscow also mobilized its Comintern workers
and other emissaries of various sorts, in both official and unofficial capacities.
Those who stayed included the Argentinian Vittorio Codovilla, who played a
considerable role in the Spanish Communist Party from the early 1930s on,

The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain

337

eventually becoming its leader; the Hungarian Erno Gero (known as "Pedro"),
who was to become a high-ranking Communist in Hungary after the war; the
Italian Vittorio Vidali (suspected of taking part in the assassination of the
Cuban Communist student leader Julio Antonio Mella in 1929), who went on
to become the chief political commissar of the Communist 5th Regiment; the
Bulgarian Stepan Minev (Stepanov), who had worked in Stalin's Secretariat
from 1927 to 1929; and the Italian Palmiro Togliatti, who arrived in 1937 as a
Comintern representative. Others came on inspection tours, including the
French Communist Jacques Duclos.

At the same time the Soviet Union sent a large number of officers from
its special services: Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko (who had taken part in the
assault on the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1917), who arrived in Barcelona
on 1 October 1936; H Aleksandr Orlov (whose real name was L. Feldbin), an
NKVD leader in Spain; the Pole Artur Staszewski, a former Red Army officer
who at the time was a commercial attache; General Ian Ber/in, chief of the
intelligence services of the Red Army; and Mikhail Koltsov, the editor of
Pravda and a secret spokesman for Stalin, who established himself in the
Ministry of War. From 1936 on, Leonid Eitingon, the deputy head of the
NKVD station in Spain, was in charge of terrorist operations in Barcelona. His
colleague Pavel Sudoplatov arrived in Barcelona in 1938.''

In short, as soon as Stalin decided to intervene in Spain, he sent in a
genuine army that could act decisively in several different domains. A formal
decision was probably made on the night of 14 September 1936 in Moscow at
a special meeting at the Lubyanka convened by Genrikh Yagoda, the head of
the NKVD. There, plans for action in Spain were coordinated to achieve two
main objectives: to combat the Franquistas and the German and Italian agents
and, at the same time, to remove the threat posed by enemies of the U.S.S.R.
and Communism in the Republican camp. Intervention was to be as covert as
possible so that the position of the Soviet government would not be compro-
mised. If General Walter Krivitsky, the chief of the NKVD's external forces
in Western Europe, is to be believed, only 40 of the approximately 3,000 Soviet
agents in Spain saw active service; the rest were advisers, politicians, or gath-
erers of intelligence.

The first concentrated Soviet effort was in Catalonia. In September 1936
the General Commissariat for Public Order in Catalonia, which had already
been infiltrated by Communists, created the Grupo de Informacion (Informa-
tion Group) inside the Catalan Secret Services (SSI), led by Mariano Gomez
Emperador. This official service, which soon employed some fifty people, was
in fact a camouflaged NKVD cell. At the same time the Unified Socialist Party
of Catalonia — a name chosen by the Communists — formed a Servicio Extran-
jero (Foreign Service) in room 340 of the Hotel Colon in the Plaza de

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World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

Catalunya. The latter's task was to control all foreign Communists arriving in
Barcelona to fight in Spain. The Servicio Extranjero was tightly controlled by
the NKVD and a front for its covert operations.

Both services were under the local control of Alfredo Hertz, an NKVD
commander who worked under the direct authority of Orlov and Gero. Hertz
was a German Communist whose true identity has never been established. He
had started out in the Cuerpo de Investigation y Vigilancia (Corps of Investi-
gation and Vigilance), where he had been in charge of passport control, includ-
ing all entry and exit visas to and from Spain. He was also extremely skilled in
his use of the Assault Troops, the elite police division. With his information
network in place inside the General Commissariat of Public Order, Hertz
filtered information from all other Communist parties — blacklists of other
antifascist groups, denunciations of Communists who had criticized the Party,
biographical information supplied by the cadre sections of the different
branches of the Party — and sent it on to the State Department, which was
controlled by the Communist Victorio Sala. Hertz set up his own service, the
Servicio Alfredo Hertz, which had a legal front but was in fact a private political
police force made up of foreign Communists and Spanish nationals. Under his
leadership, a list was drawn up of all foreign residents in Catalonia (later this
was done for the rest of Spain), with a separate list of wayward people to be
eliminated. From September to December 1936 the persecution of opponents
was not systematic, but gradually the NKVD drew up real plans to purge all
political opponents among the Republicans. The first targets were the Social
Democrats, followed by the anarchosyndicalists, the Trotskyites, and then the
more rebellious of the Communists. Many of these so-called enemies had called
into question the value of the pro-US.S.R. alignment. As was always the case
on such occasions, there were personal vendettas and feuds to be settled too. 10

The most banal as well as the most sophisticated police methods imagin-
able were employed by these double or even triple agents. The first police task
was the "colonization" of the Republican administration, the army, and the
police. The gradual takeover of key posts and the formation of Communist
cells were made possible by the fact that the Soviet Union was one of the few
countries supplying weapons to the Republican forces, and could demand
political favors in return. In contrast to Hitler's and Mussolini's extension of
aid to Franco's nationalist forces, the Soviet Union refused to grant the Repub-
licans any credit; it demanded that all arms be paid for in advance in gold from
the Bank of Spain. The gold was taken back to the U.S.S.R. by Communist
agents. Each delivery of arms thus presented one more opportunity to black-
mail the government.

Julian Gorkin, the POUM militant, provides a striking example of this
mixture of war and politics. Early in 1937, Largo Caballero, the head of the

The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain

339

Spanish government, with the support of President Manuel Azafia, had autho-
rized Luis Araquistain, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, to begin secret nego-
tiations with Dino Grandi, the Italian ambassador in London, and Hjalmar
Schacht, Hitler's financier, under the authority of Leon Blum and Anthony
Eden. The aim was to bring an end to the war. To thwart these plans, Juan
Alvarez del Vayo, the minister of foreign affairs, who was favorably disposed
toward the Spanish Communists, informed Communist leaders about the ne-
gotiations. The Communists, together with the Soviet secret service, decided
to push Largo Caballero out of office, thus eliminating the possibility of a
negotiated settlement of the conflict, which would have compelled all the Italian
and German forces to retreat. 11

"After the Lies, Bullets in the Neck"

The notion of "lies" and "bullets in the neck" was how Viktor Serge, the
Russo-Belgian writer set free by the U.S.S.R. in April 1936, explained Commu-
nist policy to Julian Gorkin when they met in 1937. The Communists in Spain
faced two serious obstacles: the huge anarchosyndicalist CNT, which was out-
side Communist influence; and the POUM, which was fundamentally opposed
to Communist policies. The POUM was an easy target for Communist exploi-
tation because of its marginal position in Spanish politics. It was also reputed
to be politically close to Trotsky. In 1935 Andreu Nin and Julian Gorkin had
tried to convince the Catalan authorities that Trotsky, who had been chased out
of France, should be allowed to settle in Barcelona. In the context of the hunt
for Trotskyites taking place in the Soviet Union, it is hardly surprising that the
Comintern Secretariat, meeting on 21 February 1936 (five days after the elec-
toral victory of the Spanish Popular Front), gave the Spanish Communist
Party permission to begin "an energetic struggle against the Trotskyite coun-
terrevolutionary sect." 12 In addition, the POUM had spoken out in the summer
of 1936 in defense of the victims of the first show-trials in Moscow.

On 13 December 1936 the Communists managed to eject Andreu Nin
from the General Catalan Council. They demanded his removal on the grounds
that he had insulted the U.S.S.R., and they threatened to disrupt the delivery
of arms if they did not get their way. On 16 December Pravda began an
international campaign against everyone who opposed Soviet policy: "In Cata-
lonia the elimination of Trotskyites and anarchosyndicalists has begun. It will
be carried out with the same energy and dedication as in the U.S.S.R."

To the Communist mind, political deviation was the equivalent of treason,
and everywhere it was met with the same punishment Calumny and lies were
spread about the POUM, whose front-line troops were accused of having
abandoned their positions, even when Communist troops had refused to sup-

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World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

port them. 11 Uhumanhe, the French Communist Party daily, was especially
vicious in its attacks, reprinting a series of articles by Mikhail Koltsov, a close
friend of Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. The central theme of the campaign
was repeated endlessly: the POUM was an accomplice of Franco, in league with
the fascist cause. The Communists took the precaution of infiltrating POUM
ranks with agents whose task was to gather information and draw up blacklists,
so that they could identify the relevant militants when they were arrested. One
particularly well-known case is that of Lev Narvich, who after contacting Nin
was unmasked and executed by a POUM self-defense squad. The executions
came after the disappearance of Nin himself and the arrest of other leaders.

May 1937 and the Liquidation of the POUM

On 3 May 1937, assault troops led by the Communists mounted an attack on
the Barcelona central telephone exchange, which was in the hands of the (-NT
and the Socialist trade union, Union General de Trabajadores (UGT). The
operation was Jed by Rodriguez Salas, the chief of police and a member of the
PSUC. The Communists had prepared for the attack by increasing the level of
propaganda and harassment and closing down both the POUM radio station
and La batalla, the POUM's official newspaper. On 6 Ma), 5,000 police agents
headed by leading Communists arrived in Barcelona. The ensuing violent
confrontations between Communist and non-Communist forces left nearly 500
dead and another 1,000 wounded.

Taking advantage of the confusion, the Communists seized every oppor-
tunity to liquidate their political opponents. Camillo Berneri, the Italian anar-
chist philosopher, and his companion Francesco Barbieri were abducted and
killed by a squad of twelve men; their bodies were found riddled with bullets
the following day. Only days before, Berneri had prophetically written in his
journal, Guerra di classe: "Today we fight Burgos, tomorrow we must fight
Moscow for our freedom." Alfredo Martinez, the secretary of the Free Youth
of Catalonia movement; Hans Freund, the militant Trotsky itc; and Erwin Wolf,
a former secretary of Trotsky, met the same fate.

Kurt Landau, an Austrian and an opposition Communist, had been a
militant in Germany, Austria, and France before moving to Barcelona and
joining the POUM. He was arrested on 23 September and then disappeared.
His wife, Katia, who was herself imprisoned, wrote about these purges: "The
Party houses, including 'La Pedrera 1 and 'Paseo de Garcia,' and the 'Karl Marx'
and 'Voroshilov' barracks, were just death traps. Witnesses last saw the men
from the radio station alive in La Pedrera. Young anarchists were taken to the
barracks to be tortured in the most vile manner, mutilated, and killed. Their
bodies were later found by accident." She quotes one article from the anarcho-

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341

syndicalist paper Soltdandad obrera: "It was determined that before dying they
had been tortured in a grisly manner, as was evident from the presence of
serious contusions and bruises on the stomach, which seemed swollen and
deformed ... It was clear that one of the bodies had been hung by the feet,
and the head and neck were terribly bruised. The head of another of these
unfortunates had obviously been beaten with the butt of a rifle."

Many militants such as Guido Picelli simply disappeared for good, with-
out a trace. George Orwell, who had enlisted as a volunteer in the POUM, lived
through these days and was forced to go into hiding and to flee. His account
of May 1937 in Barcelona survives in an appendix in Homage to Catalonia.

Assassinations planned by the Communist police squads were not
confined to Barcelona. In Tortosa on 6 May, twenty CNT militants who had
been arrested by government forces from Valencia were spirited out of their
cells in the basement of the town hall and slaughtered. Fifteen more freedom
fighters were coldly executed the following day in Tarragon.

Although the Communists were unable to kill off all their opponents, they
did manage to deprive them of political power. Jose Diaz, the secretary general
of the Spanish Communist Party, had declared in May that "the POUM should
be removed from the political life of the country." Largo Caballero, the head
of the government, refused to give in to Communist demands that the POUM
be dissolved. On 15 May, after the events in Barcelona, he was forced to resign.
His successor, Juan Negrin, was a "moderate" Socialist in thrall to the Com-
munists. Thus the final obstacle to the Communist political takeover was re-
moved. Not only did Negrin align himself with the Communists — writing to
the London Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews that the POUM "was
controlled by elements who rejected anything that might constitute a single,
supreme direction in the struggle, or any sort of common discipline" — but he
also approved the use of terror as a method of political control. 14 Julian Gorkin
witnessed the radical change: "A few days after Juan Negrin's government had
been formed, Orlov was already acting as though Spain was some sort of
Communist satellite. He turned up at the headquarters of the security offices
and asked for Colonel Antonio Ortega, whom he now considered to be one of
his subordinates, and demanded warrants for the arrest of members of the
POUM Executive Committee." 15

On 16 June 1937 Negrin officially banned the POUM and had the entire
Executive Committee arrested. This decision allowed Communist agents to act
with a semblance of legality. At 1:00 p.m. on 16 June, Andreu Nin was arrested
by the police. None of his companions ever saw him again, living or dead.

Police officers from Madrid, under orders from the Communists, took
over the newspaper La batalla and the various POUM buildings. Two hundred
militants, including Julian Gorkin, Jordi Arquer, Juan Andrade, and Pedro

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Bonet, were imprisoned. Later, to justify the liquidation of the POUM, the
Communists fabricated charges of treason, claiming that POUM members had
been spying for Franco. On 22 June a special tribunal was established and the
propaganda campaign launched. Conveniently, police investigations turned up
documents relating to espionage. u Max Rieger" (the name was either a collec-
tive pseudonym or a pseudonym for a journalist working under specific orders)
gathered together all these forgeries and published them under the title Espio-
nage in Spain, which came out simultaneously in several languages.

Under Orlov's orders and protected by Vidali, Ricardo Burillo, and Gero,
Nin was tortured. However, he neither admitted anything that could be used
to prove the validity of the accusations made against his party nor signed any
declaration. The Communists were thus compelled to liquidate him and to use
his disappearance to discredit him, claiming that he had gone over to the
Francoist side. Again, assassination and propaganda went hand in hand. The
opening of the Moscow archives confirmed what Nins friends and supporters
had supposed all along. 16

After the activity against the POUM on 16 and 17 June, a systematic manhunt
against all "traitors" — Trotskyites and others— began. The Communists used
information gathered by the police to carry out these operations. They set up
illegal prisons, called cekas, hispanicizing the name of the first Russian secret
police agency, the Cheka. The names of these places are now known: the
central ceka in Barcelona was at 24 Avenida Puerta <q Angel, with other
branches in the Hotel Colon in the Plaza de Catalunya, the former Atocha
convent in Madrid, Santa Ursula in Valencia, and Aleala de Henares. Several
private houses were also requisitioned and served as centers for detention,
interrogation, and execution.

In early 1938 some 200 antifascists and anti-Stalinists were held in the
Santa Ursula ceka, which soon came to be known as the Dachau of Republican
Spain. "When the Stalinists decided to open a ceka"" one victim recalled,

there was a small cemetery being cleaned out nearby. The Chckists had a
diabolical idea: they would leave the cemetery's tombs open, with the
skeletons and the decomposing bodies in full view. That's where the)
locked up the most difficult cases. They had some particularly brutal
methods of torture. Many prisoners were hung up by their feet, upside
down, for whole days. Others they locked in tiny cupboards with just a
tiny air hole near the face to breathe through . . . One of the worst
methods was known as "the drawer"; prisoners were forced to squat in
tiny square boxes for several days. Some were kept there unable to move
for eight to ten days.

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343

To do this sort of work, Soviet agents used depraved individuals who felt that
their actions had already been approved by "La Pasionaria" (Dolores Ibarruri).
She had once said at a meeting in Valencia: "It is better to kill one hundred
innocents than to let one guilty person go." 17

The use of torture was systematic.' 8 One common technique was to force
the prisoner to drink soapy water, a powerful emetic. Some techniques were
typically Soviet, such as sleep deprivation or enclosure in a tiny space known
as a cupboard cell, where the prisoner could not sit or stand, was unable to
move his limbs, could scarcely breathe, and was constantly blinded by an
electric light. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes one such cell at length in The
Gulag Archipelago, in his account of his arrival at Lubyanka.

Summary executions were also common practice:

Lieutenant Astorga Vayo, a member of the Military Investigation Serv-
ice and the NKVD, came up with an excellent means of preventing
escape: as the prisoners were lined up in rows of five, they would shoot
four prisoners for every one who was missing, and they also threatened
to shoot the rows both in front and behind. Some of his comrades
objected to this practice, but Vayo, though relieved of his functions, was
promoted and became the head of one of the main concentration camps
in Catalonia, Onclls de Nagaya, in Lerida Province. M>

Opinions vary on the total number executed. Katia Landau gives a figure
of 15,000 prisoners, including 1,000 POUM members, in both official and
unofficial prisons. 20 Yves Levy, who carried out an inquiry at the time, men-
tioned "approximately 10,000 civil and military revolutionaries in prison,"
including members of the POUM, the CNT, and the FAI. Some died as a result
of their treatment, including Bob Smilie, a correspondent for the Independent
Labour Party (a radical socialist group that had split from the British Labour
Party in 1932) who was closely aligned with the POUM; and Manuel Maurin,
the brother of Joaquin Maurin, who had been imprisoned by the Franquistas
but whose life had been spared in the cdrcel madelo (model prison) in Barcelona.
According to Julian Gorkin, some 62 people in Santa Clara had been sentenced
to death by the end of 1937.

Once the POUM had been crushed and the Socialists outmaneuvered or
sidelined, there remained the anarchists. In the months following the Republi-
can riposte to the military pronunc lament o, agrarian collectives had proliferated
under the anarchists' influence, particularly in Aragon. A few weeks after the
events of May 1937, villages and towns in Aragon were besieged by the Assault
Troops. The Congress of Collectives was taken over, and on 1 1 August a decree
was published ordering the dissolution of the Aragon Council. Its president,
Joaquin Ascaso, was arrested and charged with theft. He was replaced by a

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governor-general named Jose Ignacio Mantecon, a member of the Republican
left who was a Communist mole. 21 This was a direct attack on the CNT,
designed to undermine its foundations.

The Eleventh Division, under the command of the Communist Enrique
Lister, who had already carried out numerous operations in Castile (such as
executions and violence against peasant collectives), broke up the collectives
with the help of the Twenty-seventh Division (known as the "Karl Marx"
Division of the PSUC) and the Thirtieth Division. Hundreds of freedom
fighters were arrested and eliminated from municipal councils and replaced by
Communists. The land that had been turned into collectives was returned to
its original owners. The operation was timed to coincide with a large-scale
operation against Zaragoza, to make it look as if the actions were justified by
the preparations for the offensive. Despite the massacre of hundreds, the
peasants formed yet more collectives. In Castile, operations against the peasants
were led by the famous Communist general Valentin Gonzalez, who was known
as "El Campesino" (The Peasant). According to Cesar M. Lorenzo, Gonzalez
surpassed even Lister in his cruelty. 22 Once again hundreds of peasants were
massacred and villages burned, but this time the CNT reacted with military
force and halted El Campesino's campaign.

The NKVD at Work

In Spain in 1937, the NKVD, under the name Grupo de Informacion, had
become a sort of annex of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Communist agents
also controlled the leadership of the security department, and during the
spring and summer of 1937 the Servicio Alfredo Hertz saw its most intense
period of activity. Hertz himself was described by Julian Gorkin as "one of the
great masters of interrogation and execution." Hubert von Ranke, who had
been employed by Erno Gero since 1930, worked alongside Hertz. 21 He had
been a political commissar in the Thalmann battalion in the International
Brigades before being made head of security for German-speaking foreigners.
That was probably how he came to arrest Erwin Wolf, who was subsequently
released but disappeared for good shortly afterward.

Arrested by two members of the Grupo de Informacion on 1 1 September
1937, Katia Landau later wrote about von Ranked methods: "One of the worst
GPU agents, Moritz Bressler, alias von Ranke, reduced all accusations to the
minimum. He and his wife, Seppl Kapalanz, once arrested a comrade on the
suspicion that he had knowledge of the whereabouts of Kurt Landau. l If you
don't give us his address,' they said, 'you'll never get out of prison. He's an
enemy of Stalin and of the Popular Front. And as soon as we find out where
he lives, we're going to kill him.'" 2 *'

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345

On the night of 9-10 April 1937 a young Russian emigre named Marc
Rein, who had been a volunteer in extreme left-wing movements in Norway
and Germany, disappeared from his hotel room in Barcelona. A few days later
his friends noticed his absence and raised the alarm. Marc Rein was the son of
Rafael Abramovich, the exiled Russian leader of the Second International. That
fact, together with the determination of his friends and family to discover his
fate, caused a great stir abroad and much soul-searching in Republican Spain.
The Spanish government was forced to assign one of its own agents to launch
an inquiry, which found the Servicio Alfredo Hertz responsible for the disap-
pearance. The conflict between the NKVD police and the government became
so bitter that on 9 July 1937 the secretary of state at the Ministry of Internal
Affairs provoked a confrontation between one of his own intelligence agents
(SSI 29) and Hertz and Gomez Emperador. The next day SSI 29 was himself
arrested by the Servicio Hertz. However, the secret service that employed him
was powerful enough to get him released the following day. SSI 29, whose real
name was P. Laurencic, was found in 1938 and arrested by the Franquistas, sent
before a miliary tribunal, and executed as an NKVD agent.

Although the Rein affair remains unresolved to this day, it did have the
effect of ending the activities of Alfredo Hertz and Gomez Emperador in July
1937. Their secret services were disbanded and restructured under the new
leadership of Victorio Sala. On 15 August, Indalecio Prieto, the minister of
defense and a Socialist, established the Servicio de Investigacion Militar (SIM)
as an umbrella for all political surveillance and counterespionage organizations.
The SIM soon had 6,000 agents in its service. Numerous "technicians" from
the Servicio Hertz simply went straight into the organization. In 1939 Prieto
admitted that the SIM, which in principle was a counterespionage agency, had
basically been created by the Soviet NKVD, and that in no time at all, despite
the precautions taken, it was controlled by the Communists and used for their
own purposes. 25 Under pressure from the Soviet Union and the Communists,
Prieto was removed from the government on 5 April 1938.

Julian Gorkin described the activities of the SIM:

They arrested everyone according to their own whims or some policy of
NKVD reprisals. Suspects were then thrown into prison, and charges
were drawn up . . . The SIM kept files for months and months, on the
pretext that it always needed more information. The SIM was also the
scourge of all the magistrates and lawyers, because if a judge was con-
vinced of the prisoner's innocence, the SIM would simply override his
decision. 26

The Swiss Communist Rudolf Frei, a retired mechanic who had taken
courses at the International Leninist School in Moscow in 1931-32, was in

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charge of organizing the transfer of volunteers from Basel to Spain. At his own
request he was transferred to Spain in late 1937 and was put in charge of the
control service of the SIM, where he was to keep an eye specifically on the
Swiss volunteers. 27

After the summer of 1938, many of the antifascists who had been kept in
the prisons controlled by the Communists were taken to the front and forced,
along with the Franquista prisoners, to carry out heavy work such as terracing,
often under very harsh conditions, without food or medical care, and under the
permanent threat of Communist attacks. Karl Brauning, a member of a dissi-
dent German Communist group, managed to escape and six months later, in
December 1939, told some friends about his experience:

What we lived through in July was horrible and cruel. Dostoevsky's
House of the Dead is nothing in comparison . . . And we were so hungry
that we were often delirious. I'm half the man I used to be, just skin and
bones. We were ill all the time and had no strength left at all. There's no
difference between men and animals when you get down to that stage,
it's just pure barbarism. Fascism still has a lot to learn from those
bandits; it's culture and luxury in comparison. It must have been written
in our files that we were literally to be worked to death by legal means,
because that's exactly what they tried to do. 2s

A "Moscow Show-Trial" in Barcelona

Despite the restructuring, infiltration, and camouflage operations, the NKVD
encountered obstacles. Because of the savage repression against it, the POUM
received support from various revolutionary groups. These groups formed in
France a Cartel for the Defense of Revolutionary Prisoners in Republican
Spain. Thus overt public action was opposed to covert Soviet maneuvering.
Three delegations were sent to Spain to investigate. The third, led by John
MacGovern of the Independent Labour Party and by Felicien Challaye in
November 1937, was allowed to visit the prisons in Barcelona, notably the
model prison where 500 antifascists were kept, and to collect their testimony
on what they had suffered. MacGovern and Challaye managed to arrange for a
dozen prisoners to be freed. They also tried to get access to the secret NKVD
prison in Junta Square, but, despite the support of Manuel de Irujo, the
minister of justice, they were forbidden to enter. MacGovern concluded: "The
mask has been dropped. We have raised the veil and shown who holds the real
power. The ministers wanted to help, but they really couldn't." 2 ''

From 1 1 to 22 October 1938, members of the POUM Executive Commit-
tee— Gorkin, Andrade, Pascal Gironella, Jose Rovira, Arquer, Bonet, Jean
Reboul, and Jose Escuder — were brought before a special court in a scenario

The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain

347

highly reminiscent of the Moscow show-trials. One of the aims of the trial was
to lend credibility to Moscow's claim that Trotskyites were endangering the
Party on all fronts, However, Spanish militants roundly rejected the accusation.
Andre Gide, Georges Duhamel, Roger Martin du Gard, Francois Mauriac, and
Paul Rivet sent telegrams to Juan Negrin demanding that the accused be given
a fair trial. Because the charges were based on confessions extracted by force,
some considerable confusion followed. The Communist press vigorously de-
manded death sentences, but none was handed down. 30 Even so, the POUM
militants were convicted on 2 November and sentenced to fifteen years in prison
(the only exceptions were Jordi Arquer, who received eleven years; and David
Rey, who was acquitted). They were found guilty of having "falsely claimed in
the newspaper La batalla that the government of the Republic obeys orders
from Moscow and systematically hunts down all those who refuse to obey such
orders" — a statement that itself seemed more like a confession.

When the defeat of the Republic was complete in March 1939, the last
chief of the SIM tried to hand these prisoners over to the Franquista forces so
that they might be shot, counting on the enemies of the Republic to finish the
sinister task that the NKVD agents had begun. Luckily, all the members of the
POUM Executive Committee managed to escape.

Inside the International Brigades

The rallying cry to the cause of the Republican struggle had echoed around the
world. Numerous volunteers came to Spain to fight the nationalists, and they
enlisted in the militias or in fighting groups sponsored by organizations to
which they were sympathetic. But the International Brigades were created at
Moscow's instigation and constituted a genuine Communist army, even though
not all their troops were Communists.^ 1 A distinction should also be made
between the real combatants at the front and the men who formally belonged to
the Brigades but were absent from the field of battle. The history of the
Brigades is not simply the story of heroic battles fought on the front line.

The Brigades grew exponentially throughout the autumn and winter of
1936 as tens of thousands of volunteers flocked in from all around the world.
The Communists did not accept all newcomers instantly, since they needed to
prevent infiltration by double agents, Nazis, and Franquistas. While the Great
Terror was at its height in Russia, the orthodoxy of the volunteers in Spain
was also tested. The task of rooting out agents provocateurs— of unmasking any
dissident, critical, or undisciplined elements — fell to the cadre services of the
various Communist parties. Surveillance and control of volunteers also took
place outside Spain. For example, the Zurich police seized from the German
Communist Alfred Adolf a list of the names of "undesirable" volunteers, which

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he had intended to send to Soviet agents in Spain. In the autumn of 1937 a
document of the Executive Committee of the Comintern noted that the Bri-
gades should be cleansed of all politically questionable volunteers and that u the
selection of volunteers should be carefully controlled to prevent intelligence
agents, fascist spies, and Trotskyites from slipping into the Brigades. 1 ' 12 A
personal file for each Brigade member, including political details, was sent to
the Comintern headquarters in Moscow and regularly updated. The archives
have yielded up tens of thousands of such files.

Andre Marty, a member of the French Communist Party Politburo and a
secretary in the Comintern, who had arrived in Spain in August 1936 as a
Comintern delegate to the Republican government, became the official chief
of the Albacete base, where the International Brigades were organized. Along
with the Brigades, the Communists created a new Fifth Regiment, under the
control of Enrique Lister, who had been trained at the Frunze Military Acad-
emy in the US.S.R. in 1932. The SIM was also present in Albacete.

The scale of violent repressions within the Brigades is still a subject of
controversy. Some commentators persist in denying that Marty bore any re-
sponsibility, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Others claim that
the executions in question were justified by the circumstances. El Campesino
explained as follows: u Of course he had no choice but to get rid of some of the
dangerous elements. That he executed some people is quite incontrovertible;
but they were all deserters, or had killed someone, or were traitors in some
way."" The testimony of Gustav Regler, an assistant commissar in the 12th
Brigade, confirms that executions occurred. During a battle near El Escorial,
two anarchist volunteers had shown signs of weakness; Regler had them ar-
rested and proposed to send them to a sanatorium. He said as much to Marty,
who sent the two anarchists straight to Alcala de Henares. Much later Regler
learned that this in fact was not a sanatorium, but a center where Soviet NKVD
squads executed people. 34 A note signed in Marty's own hand, found in the
Moscow archives, explained to the Central Executive Committee of the Span-
ish Communist Party: "I am also not at all happy that spies and fascists whom
I sent to Valencia to be liquidated are being sent back to me here at Albacete.
You know very well that the International Brigades cannot do this themselves
here at Albacete." 15 One can well imagine that it would have been difficult to
execute "spies and fascists" in the middle of a military base. Whoever these
"spies and fascists" were, he preferred that the dirty work be done elsewhere
by other people, out of his sight.

A recent film has recounted the execution in November 1937 of Erich
Frommelt, a member of the Thalmann battalion of the 12th Brigade, who was
condemned to death on charges of desertion at 11:15 p.m. on one day and executed
the next day at 4:45 p.m. 16 Officially, Frommelt was listed as having died in the

The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain

349

battle of Teruel. Such dissembling naturally raises questions about who the
"deserters" really were. Roger Codou, another member of the International
Brigades, consulted their prison files and noted numerous references to "death
by hydrocution," which in his view was simply a euphemism for execution. There
were two special prisons for members of the International Brigades: one in the
Horta district of Barcelona, where there were 265 prisoners in 1937; and the
other in Castellon de la Plana. It is difficult to calculate the number of Brigade
members who were liquidated. According to Julian Gorkin, Andre Marty was
personally responsible for approximately 500 executions of "undisciplined members
or those who were simply suspected of having 'oppositional' tendencies." 37

Robert Martin, from Glasgow, also testified to the frequency of arrests in
Albacete. When he himself was arrested, he was placed in a cell with seventy
other Brigade members who had seen combat, some of whom were wounded.
The extremely harsh conditions spurred some prisoners to start a hunger
strike. After being told that they would be set free, they were taken to Barcelona
in small groups. Martin and his group were taken to the Falcon Hotel, which
had been the headquarters of the POUM before being transformed into a
prison, and then to Corsiga Street, where they were photographed and their
fingerprints taken. After a miraculous escape, Martin managed to cross into
France and heard nothing more about the fate of his companions. 38

According to the Social Democrat Max Reventlow, the Republican forces
had at least 650 prisoners with them during the Republican retreat after the
nationalist breakthrough to the Mediterranean. Once the prisoners arrived in
Catalonia, they were transferred to the prisons of Horta and Castellon, both of
which were under the command of the Croatian F. I. Copic. Sixteen of them
were shot as soon as they arrived. In these prisons, a special commission
pronounced death sentences, with no possibility of appeal. After an escape by
50 prisoners, another 50 were shot. The practice of torture was common. One
German lieutenant, Hans Rudolph, was tortured for six days, his arms and legs
broken and his fingernails ripped out. He was executed on 14 June 1938, along
with 6 other prisoners, with a bullet in the neck. Copic himself was later
accused of espionage but was saved by the intervention of Luigi Longo, Andre
Marty, and his brother, Colonel Vladimir Copic. 39

After killing an SS guard, the German Communist Deputy Hans Beimler
escaped from Dachau. Upon reaching Spain he helped establish the Thalmann
battalion. He was killed on 1 December 1936 in Palacete. Gustav Regler claimed
that Beimler fell victim to a bullet from the nationalists. Antonia Stern, Beim-
ler's companion, who was stripped of her rights and expelled from Spain,
disputed this version of events. She claimed that Beimler had spoken out
against the first Moscow show-trial and had been in contact with the former
directors of the KPD, Arkady Maslow and Ruth Fischer, who led an opposition

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group in Paris. On the basis of a report from the Secret Intelligence Service, a
special department of the Catalan Police Department that dealt with informers
in the Communist ranks, Pierre Broue also believes that Beimler was assassi-
nated. 40

Stalin and his agents cynically exploited the idealism that had brought so
many to Spain to fight for the Republican cause, then abandoned the country
and the Brigades to their fate. By then he was preparing his rapprochement
with Hitler.

Exile and Death in the "Fatherland of the Proletariat"

After the Republican defeat, a committee presided over by Togliatti was
formed in Paris in March 1939 to select Spaniards worthy of emigrating to the
u fatherland of the proletariat." El Campesino wrote about the conditions of his
departure for the US.S.R. 41 On 14 May 1939 he sailed from Le Havre on the
Siberia with 350 other people, including members of the Politburo and Central
Committee of the Spanish Communist Party, Communist deputies, the com-
manders of the Fifth Regiment, and some 30 Brigade chiefs. El Campesino was
present when Togliatti's committee was established under the aegis of the
NKVD. Its function was to monitor the 3,961 Spanish refugees, who were
immediately divided into eighteen groups and sent to different towns. In exile,
most of the leaders spied and informed on their compatriots, such as the
former secretary of the Spanish Communist Party Committee in Jaen, who had
half the Spanish contingent in Kharkiv arrested; and Jorge Cortina, who had
many injured people deported to Siberia. Accused of being a Trotskyite, El
Campesino was thrown out of the Frunze Military Academy and in March
1942 was working on the subway system in Moscow. He was later deported to
Uzbekistan and then to Siberia. In 1948 he managed to escape to Iran.

Jose Diaz, the former secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party,
died on 19 March 1942 after falling from his window on the fourth floor of a
building in Tbilisi, at a moment when none of his family were present. El
Campesino and his compatriots believed that this death was in fact an assassi-
nation. Just before his death, Diaz had been writing a book about his experi-
ences and seemed quite disillusioned by what he had seen. He had also written
a letter to the authorities, protesting the conditions in which children were
being kept in the Tbilisi colony.

During the civil war, thousands of Spanish children aged five to twelve
had been sent to the US.S.R. 42 Their living conditions changed dramatically
after the Republican defeat. In 1939 their teachers were accused of Trotskyism,
and, according to El Campesino, 60 percent of them were arrested and impris-
oned in the Lubyanka; the rest were sent to work in factories. One young

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351

woman was tortured for more than twenty months before being executed. The
fate of the children was particularly harsh because all the colonies were directed
by Soviet officials. The Kaluga colony was particularly severe under the strong
authority of Juan Modesto, a general who had learned his trade in the Fifth
Regiment, and of Enrique Lister. 41 In 1941, according to Jesus Hernandez,
roughly 50 percent of the children there had developed tuberculosis, and 750
of them (15 percent) died before the exodus of 1941. The adolescents ended
up in the Urals and in central Siberia, particularly in Kokand, where they
formed criminal gangs, while the women fell into prostitution. Many of them
committed suicide. According to Hernandez, 2,000 of the 5,000 children died. 44
In 1947, on the tenth anniversary of their arrival in the US.S.R., a ceremony
took place at the Stanislavsky Theater in Moscow involving 2,000 young Span-
ish people. In September 1956, 534 of them returned to Spain. In all, only
1,500 were ever permitted to return.

Other Spaniards came to know both life and death in the Soviet Union.
Among these were the non-Communist sailors and pilots who came voluntarily
to the Soviet Union to train. El Campesino tells the story of a group of 218
pilots who arrived in 1938 for what was supposed to be a six- to seven-month
training period in Kirovabad. At the end of 1939 Colonel Martinez Carton, a
member of the Spanish Communist Party Politburo and an NKVD agent, gave
the pilots a choice between remaining in the US.S.R. or departing from the
country. Those who chose to leave were sent to work in factories. On 1 Sep-
tember 1939 they were all arrested, and charges were drawn up against them.
Some were tortured, others were killed in the Lubyanka; most received camp
sentences of ten to fifteen years. Of the group that went to Pechoralev, there
were no survivors at all. Out of the original group of 218, there were 6
survivors.

In 1947 some refugees managed to leave the US.S.R. Those who stayed
were forced to sign a document saying that they would not try to leave again.
In April 1948 Jose Ester (Mauthausen political deportee no. 64553) and Jose
Domenech (Neuengamme political deportee no. 40202) held a press conference
in Paris on behalf of the Spanish Federation of Deportees and Political Intern-
ees to reveal the details they had gathered concerning deportees of Camp 99
in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, northwest of Lake Balkhash. Ester and Domenech
supplied the names of 59 deportees, including 24 pilots and 33 sailors. In a
broadside dated 1 March 1948, the two former deportees explained their ac-
tions as follows: "It is a binding duty for us, and an imperative for anyone who
has known famine, cold, and desolation under a regime like that of the SS or
the Gestapo, and it is a civic duty for everyone for whom the words Freedom
and Human Rights have any sense at all, to stand up and demand out of
solidarity the freedom of these men, who are facing the threat of certain death."

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After World War II, the Communists and their special services continued to
liquidate their opponents. Joan Farre Gasso, a former POUM leader from
Lerida, took part in the French resistance during the war. He was arrested and
imprisoned in Moissac by the Vichy regime, but was freed again at the end of
the war, when he tried to rejoin his wife in a small village in French Catalonia.
On the way to Montauban he was stopped by the Communist maquts, or
guemlleros espanoles, who executed him on the spot. 45 This assassination pro-
longed the civil war in Spain in its most sinister aspect: the liquidation of
thousands of the bravest and most determined antifascists. The Spanish exam-
ple shows the impossibility of separating the legal and criminal enterprises of
the Communists in their pursuit of their political objectives. Although it may-
be true that political and social violence was the norm in interwar Spain, and
that the civil war allowed this violence to erupt on a massive scale, it is still the
case that the Soviet Union brought into the equation the might of a party-state
born out of war and violence. Moscow's intervention was intended solely to
promote Soviet interests while pretending it was essential for the struggle
against fascism.

It is clear that the real goal of Stalin and his henchmen was to take control
of the destiny of the Republic. To that end, the liquidation of left-wing oppo-
sition to the Communists — Socialists, anarchosyndicalists, POUMists, and
Trotskyites — was no less important than the military defeat of Franco.

Communism and Terrorism

Remi Kauffer

In the 1920s and 1930s the international Communist movement
concentrated on the preparation of armed insurrections, all of which ulti-
mately failed. As a result, the movement largely abandoned this type of action.
In the 1940s it profited instead from wars of liberation from the Nazis or from
Japanese expansionism, and in the 1950s and 1960s it focused on the process of
decolonization, creating groups of organized insurgents that were slowly trans-
formed into regular Red Armies. In Yugoslavia, China, North Korea, Vietnam,
and Cambodia this tactic worked, allowing the Communist Party to seize
power. However, the failure of guerrilla movements in South America — where
they were opposed by special troops trained by the Americans— was an incen-
tive for the Communists to resume the "terrorist" methods that until then they
had used relatively infrequently, the most memorable exception being the Sofia
Cathedral explosion in 1924. The distinction between terrorism pure and sim-
ple and preparations for an armed uprising may sometimes appear slightly
academic, since the same people are usually involved. Moreover, the one course
of action does not preclude the other. Many national liberation movements
have combined terrorism and guerrilla warfare in their actions, as was the case
with the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) and the Armee de Liberation
Nationale in Algeria.

The Algerian case is an interesting one in that the supporters of French

353

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World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

Algeria saw the nationalist uprising as a plot drawn up in Moscow; and found
more confirmation of this idea in the fact that at the time of the battle of Algiers
(1956—57) the Algerian Communist Party had provided Yacef Saadi, the FLN
chief for the capital, with a number of its best explosives specialists. Can one
conclude from this that the nationalist movement was in thrall to the Commu-
nists? In many respects, this was clearly not the case. The Algerian Communist
Party and the FLN were constantly at loggerheads. In the international arena,
the FLN benefited from the open political support of the USSR., but apart
from a few extremely limited operations by its special services, Moscow was
careful not to implicate itself directly in the conflict with France. In fact the
main arms suppliers to the FLN were Nasser's Egypt, Tito's Yugoslavia, and
Czechoslovakia, which acted on behalf of the Eastern Bloc. In addition, a
number of FLN cadres had been trained in underground techniques by the
Czechs in Prague. But the Soviet Union deliberately remained in the back-
ground. Did the Soviet Union already have an intuition that the future state
of Algeria would be politically close to Moscow but at the same time careful to
retain its independence? The fact is that the Soviet special services never had
oversight of the holy of holies of the new regime, the Military Security, in
contrast to the Cuban Direction General de Inteligencia (DGI).

Another example of Soviet prudence regarding extremely controversial
nationalist movements is the Irish case. As an offspring of the IRA (the Irish
Republican Army, formed in Dublin after the failure of the 1916 Easter upris-
ing), "Republicanism" was a way of thinking quite specific to Northern Ireland.
Apart from social issues, after 1921 the IRA's nationalist program (the re-
unification of Ireland through the w resting of the six northern counties from
the British crown) was at the center of all its actions. In contrast, the pro-Soviet
figures who in 1933 formed the Communist Party of Ireland distanced them-
selves further and further from purely nationalist preoccupations to highlight
the importance of the class struggle.

The IRA needed arms to fight the British. Between the wars, it repeatedly
tried to get them from the U.S.S.R., but Moscow politely refused. Undoubtedly
it did not seem particularly judicious to arm pro-independence forces at the
risk of open conflict with Great Britain. The fact that several hundred IRA
members joined the International Brigades and fought in Spain did little to
change Moscow's position. In 1939-40, when the IRA was starting a new
bombing campaign in Britain, its most secret team was a small group of militant
nationalists who were less likely to arouse suspicion by virtue of being Protes-
tant. The core of this group consisted of Communists, notably Betty Sinclair.
Throughout Europe, groups of saboteurs such as the Ernst Wollwcber network
were ready to attack not only German ships but also French and British vessels.
Moscow intended to use the IRA to sabotage British ships, thinking that using

Communism and Terrorism

355

the underground organization would mask the Soviet origins of the sabotage.
But the project came to nothing. Moscow retained a certain suspicion of the
Irish, who would ally themselves with anyone simply to procure arms for their
own ends, but who refused categorically to pay any political price by compro-
mising their own political agenda. In the early 1970s the IRA again took up
arms (and more usually its speciality, explosives) against the British following
a revolt of the Catholic ghettoes in Northern Ireland. Contrary to a widely held
belief, neither the bombs nor the explosives came from the Soviet Union either
directly or indirectly. In fact the IRA's main support, both historically and
today, has come from the Irish-American community in the United States.

The "hand of Moscow" was thus not omnipresent. But it played an active
role in supporting certain Middle Eastern terrorist groups. Starting from the
idea that the Palestinian organizations represented a national liberation move-
ment comparable to the Algerian FLN, the Soviet Union was quick to come
out in favor of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its
main component, El Fatah. But the KGB also kept its eye on another Palestin-
ian nationalist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),
led by Doctor George Habash. Claiming to be a radical Marxist group, this
highly structured movement had no qualms about carrying out terrorist attacks
and spectacular hijackings. Its first attack was the hijacking of an El Al aircraft
in July 1968, followed by an attack on the Athens airport in December. These
actions culminated in 1970, just before the troops of King Hussein crushed the
Palestinians in Jordan, with the blowing up of three aircraft — a TWA Boeing,
a Swissair DC-8, and a BOAC Viscount VC-10 — at Zarka, in Jordan, where
they had been rerouted and the passengers taken prisoner.

One of the PFLP cadres, Nayef Hawatmeh, who was worried by what he
perceived as overly violent terrorism, formed a breakaway group in 1970-71
called the Democratic and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(DPFLP). After a period of continued terrorism, the DPFLP renounced vio-
lence in the name of the international proletariat and the working masses and
aligned itself along ever more orthodox Communist lines, thus becoming in
principle the main Soviet ally on Palestinian questions. Yet this was not really
the case, for at the same time the KGB was stepping up its support for the
PFLP. Habash himself was soon sidelined by his own assistant and director of
operations, Wadi Haddad, a retired dental surgeon who had trained at the
American University in Beirut.

Dr. Haddad was a man of considerable experience. In the opinion of
Pierre Marion, the former head of the DGSE, the French special services,
Haddad is the real inventor of modern terrorism: "It is he who dreamed up its
structures, he who trained its main practitioners; it is he who perfected recruit-
ment and training methods, he who refined tactics and techniques." 1 In late

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World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

1973 and early 1974 he broke from the PFLP to set up his own organization,
the PFLP-EOC (PFLP External Operations Command), which was entirely
dedicated to international terrorism, while Habash's organization carried out
other activities, including guerrilla operations against the Israeli army and
cooperative projects in the Palestinian refugee camps.

The Soviet KGB decided to support Haddad's terrorist group, as is evi-
dent from a straightforward message of 23 April 1974, with the filing designa-
tion of 1071-1/05. This message from the KGB was addressed to Leonid
Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party:

Since 1968 the Committee for State Security has been in secret contact
with Wadi Haddad, a member of the Politburo of the PFLP and the
head of External Operations for the PFLP.

When he met the KGB chief for the Lebanon region last April,
Wadi Haddad revealed in confidence the PFLP program for subversive
activities and terrorism, the main points of which are listed below.

There followed a list of terrorist targets in Israel and planned subversive
actions against Israeli territory, attacks against diamond companies and Israeli
diplomats, and sabotage of oil refineries and supertankers in Saudi Arabia, the
Persian Gulf, and even Hong Kong. The KGB report continued:

W. Haddad asks us to help his organization obtain certain special mate-
rials that are indispensable for subversive actions of this type. While he
cooperates with us and asks us for help, W. Haddad is well aware that in
principle we disapprove of terror, and he asks nothing of us with regard
to PFLP activities. The nature of our relationship with W. Haddad
allows us to a certain extent to control the activities of the External
Operations Command of the PFLP, to exert on it an influence beneficial
to the Soviet Union, and to use the forces of this organization to carry
out active operations in the appropriate manner when they are in our
interest.

Beyond the double-talk, the conclusion was obvious: principles count for
nothing so long as one can strike at the enemy without getting caught. Passed
on to Suslov, Nikolai Podgorny, Kosygin, and Gromyko, the document was
approved on 26 April 1974. 2

Haddad's most gifted pupil was a young Venezuelan, Ilyich Ramirez-
Sanchez, better known by the name Carlos. The two of them worked with the
survivors of an Asian terrorist group, the Japanese Red Army (J^). whose
history is instructive. Created at the end of the 1960s, when student radicalism
in japan was at its height and Maoism was in the air, the JRA quickly made
contact with North Korean agents (the Korean community is quite large
throughout the Japanese archipelago). The Korean agents passed instructions

Communism and Terrorism

357

to their cadres and brought the arms the JRA was lacking, but they were unable
to prevent a split in the group in the early 1970s, which resulted in a bloody
conflict between the dissenting and orthodox factions. Accordingly, some of the
cadres simply defected to North Korea, taking refuge in Pyongyang, where they
remain as businessmen and intermediaries with the West. The other faction
decided to internationalize its affairs even further, and joined up with Wadi
Haddad. As a result of this alliance, three members of the JRA acted on behalf
of the PFLP in killing twenty-eight people at Tel Aviv's Lod airport in May
1972.

The fact that the PFLP-EOC had worked hand in hand with the Swiss
Nazi banker Francois Genoud, as was revealed by Pierre Pean in Lextremiste
(where Genoud admitted this openly), was clearly no problem for the KGB. 1
Neither were the subsequent spectacular terrorist activities of Carlos, first for
the PFLP-EOC and later for the KGB itself, through his connections with
about fifteen secret services in Arab and Eastern bloc countries. A partial
inventory follows.

Ilyich Ramirez-Sanchez, the son of a Venezuelan lawyer who was a great
admirer of Lenin (he had named his three sons Vladimir, Ilyich, and Ulyanov),
when brought to trial in France in 1997, told Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere that
he had first met a member of the PFLP in 1969. The man in question was
Rifaat Abul Aoun, and the meeting took place in Moscow, where the bored
young student who later came to be known as Carlos was studying physics,
chemistry, and Marxism-Leninism. Carlos felt disappointed by the lack of
activity in the Latin American Communist parties, and was ready for action of
a more violent and radical nature. The PFLP-EOC offered him the opportunity
for such action not long after his arrival in Jordan. After a period of training
he became an operational agent in early 1971, passing easily through Europe
because of his wealthy upbringing and his consequently urbane manner. Sur-
face appearances aside, he soon carried out a series of spectacular and bloody
terrorist acts.

On 27 June 1975 Carlos killed two policemen in Paris and grievously
injured a third. In December he led an attack on the OPEC offices in Vienna,
killing three people before fleeing to Algiers. With the other members of his
team, who were Germans from a radical left-wing group calling themselves the
Revolutionary Cells (led by Johannes Weinrich), he moved about in Libya,
Yemen, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. He was also often in East Germany, where the
Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), or Stasi,
watched him very closely, wary of a man capable of such audacious acts.

"Separat" was the code name of Carlos' organization within the Stasi. In
1980 a top-secret file was sent to Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi. It was
called quite simply "Project for Stasi action regarding treatment and control

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World Revolution, Civil War, and Terror

of Carlos' group. 1 ' According to Bernard Violet, the author of a highly infor-
mative biography of Carlos, "Weinrich and Pascale Kopp [Carlos' assistant and
companion] were not really Stasi agents. They never carried out a mission for
the Stasi, and they were not actually on the payroll for passing information back
to the Germans. But they were very important go-betweens linking the East
German special services and the members of the group." After naming Carlos'
successive East German contacts — Colonel Harry Dahl, Horst Franz, Gunther
Jackel, and Helmut Voigt — Violet adds: u Carlos was fully aware of the contacts
that these two [Weinrich and Kopp] had with the [East] German secret serv-
ices."

Carlos' ties to the Stasi did not stop him from striking up an alliance with
the Romanians, or from imposing on the Hungarian state security forces by
treating Budapest as a base. His group, which renamed itself the Organization
for Armed Struggle for Arab Liberation, carried out ever-bloodier attacks.
Colonel Voigt of the Stasi blamed the "Separat" group for the attack on the
Maison de France in West Berlin on 25 August 1983, in which two people died.
That attack was blamed at the time on another terrorist group linked to the
Eastern bloc and based in Beirut, called the Secret Army for the Liberation of
Armenia.

It might seem amazing that the Stasi showed such indulgence toward an
agent who never seemed to do them any favors. This decision was apparently
taken at the very top of the Stasi hierarchy. One unproved psychological
explanation is that Erich Mielke, who was the head of various KPD combat
groups before the war and was charged with the murder of two policemen in
Berlin, saw a lot of himself in the Venezuelan terrorist and in the other mem-
bers of the Baader Meinhof gang, the most prominent terrorist group in West
Germany. But there must be a more objective link between the Stasi and these
international terrorist groups. Neither Mielke nor anyone else in the Stasi
seems to be much of a romantic revolutionary in spirit. If Carlos and his group
had links with at least fifteen different secret services in Arab and Eastern bloc
countries, we can be sure that it was not a matter of chance.

The indulgence with which Communist countries treated Middle Eastern ex-
tremists was not reserved for Carlos alone. Abu Nidal and his Fatah Revolu-
tionary Council, who were violently opposed to Yasser Arafat and the PLO,
working first for the Iraqis and then for the Syrians, also benefited from such
support, but to a lesser degree, since they were judged to be less controllable.
Nevertheless, their leader, when extremely ill, could still travel in secret to the
other side of the Iron Curtain for medical help.

Another example of direct intervention by Eastern bloc countries in mod-
ern international terrorism is their manipulation of the German RAF (Rote

Communism and Terrorism

359

Armee Fraktion), better known in the West as the Baader Meinhof gang. Born
out of student protest, this small organization of about fifty agents and about
one thousand supporters launched itself into terrorism in the 1970s, mainly
attacking American interests in Germany. After 1977 and the assassination of
the West German "patron of patrons" Hans Martin Schleyer, followed by the
death in prison of the group's two leaders, Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas
Baader, it found more support on the other side of the Berlin Wall, so much
so that its own identity gradually faded and the group became more or less a
secret arm of the Stasi itself. After German reunification, the last group mem-
bers who had escaped prison continued to live in the former East Germany.

The manipulation of guerrilla and terrorist groups is seldom easy; it
requires delicacy and great political skill. Perhaps for that reason the KGB,
through one of its most brilliant agents, Oleg Maksimovich Neehiporenko, and
with the help of the North Koreans, chose in 1969-70 to form a revolutionary
movement that was entirely under its own control. The Movimiento de Accion
Revolucionaria (MAR) was finally destroyed by the Mexican police in 197 ] .**
Quite clearly the objective of this bold initiative was to avoid the threats, lack
of discipline, and double-dealing that were rife in other Castroist and Maoist
organizations. Some of these groups did manage to escape from their mentors.
The Spanish FRAP — the Revolutionary Anti-Fascist Patriotic Front — flirted
for a while in the early 1970s with the Chinese and Albanians in the vain hope
of obtaining arms, and then transformed itself into GRAPO — the Anti-Fascist
Resistance Group of October First. In contrast, Abimael Guzman's Peruvian
Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) army, which claims allegiance to hard-line
Maoist doctrines and the prolonged popular war, always hated Deng Xiaoping
and still has little to do with the new Chinese leadership. In December 1983 it
even went so far as to attack the Chinese embassy in Lima.

In a few rare cases — for the risks are too great in the modern period™
Communist countries carried out terrorist attacks themselves through their
own secret services. This happened, for example, in 1987, when a team of two
North Korean agents, one an experienced cadre called Kim Seung-il, and the
other a young woman called Kim Hyuon-hee, who had trained for three years
at the military academy in Keumsung, failed to rejoin their flight during a
stopover in Abu Dhabi, leaving a bomb in a radio on the Korean Airlines plane
that was heading for Bangkok. Some 1 15 people died in the subsequent blast.
When arrested, Kim Seung-il committed suicide, while Kim Hyuon-hee made
a full confession and went on to write a book about her experiences. It is still
too soon to determine how much of the book is fabrication. However true it is,
it remains the case that by 1997 the only Communist country systematically
committed to the practice of terrorism was North Korea.

The Other Europe:
Victim of Communism

Andrzej Paczkowski and Karel Bartosek

Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

Andrzej Paczkowski

Soviet Repression of the Polish People

Poland was one of the nations that suffered the most under Soviet rule. This
was the case even though Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the man who masterminded the
early Soviet terror, was himself Polish, as were many others who worked in the
various repressive organizations that characterized Soviet rule, including the
Cheka, the OGPU, and the NKVD. There are several reasons for Poland's
special status as an u enemy nation." Some are specific to the Soviet regime;
others can be put down to the traditional hostility between Russians and Poles.
Thus, the origins of this conflict were rooted both in the distant past and in the
mistrust that various leaders — and in particular Stalin — felt toward Poland
and its nationals. Between 1772 and 1795 Poland had been partitioned three
times, and each time the tsarist empire had taken the lion's share. The Poles
had risen up against Russia in 1830 and 1863, but both rebellions had been
violently suppressed. Thereafter patriotism and resistance against foreign oc-
cupation — whether Russian or Prussian — had been centered in the nobility
and the Catholic clergy. World War I and the collapse of the three empires-
German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian— that had oppressed Poland for
more than a century offered a historic opportunity for Poland's rebirth as an
independent nation. But the drive for independence, led by an army of volun-
teers under Jozef Pilsudski, immediately came into conflict with the revolu-
tionary aims of Moscow, for which control of Warsaw was vital to extending
the revolution to Germany.

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The Other Europe

In the summer of 1920, Lenin launched a Red Army offensive against
Warsaw This audacious move was thwarted by nationwide Polish resistance,
and in 1921 the Soviet Union was forced to sign the Treaty of Riga, which was
favorable to Poland. Stalin, whose own carelessness had contributed to the
defeat of the Red Arm}', never forgot this affront or forgave those who criticized
him on this occasion: Trotsky, who was the head of the Red Army; and Marshal
Tukhaehevsky, who was the commander of the troops. The events of 1921
provided the framework for the ill will felt by Soviet leaders, and by Stalin in
particular, toward Poland, the Poles, and those who had fought so hard for
independence — the nobility, the army, and the church.

The Poles, regardless of whether they were Soviet citizens, suffered every
aspect of Stalinist terror: the hunt for spies, dekulakization, anticlericalism,
national and ethnic ""cleansing," the Great Purge, the purges of border regions
and of the Red Army itself, "pacification" operations to help the Polish Com-
munists into power, and all the forms that terror took, including forced labor,
the execution of prisoners of war, and mass deportations of groups of people
labeled as "socially dangerous elements.' 1

The Polish Military Organization (POW) Affair and the "Polish Operation" of
the NKVD (1931-1938)

By 1924 the repatriation of Poles under the Treaty of Riga was coming to an
end, although there were still between 1 .1 and 1 .2 million in the U.S.S.R. The
vast majority of these lived in either Ukraine or Belorussia. At least 80 percent
were peasants who had resided there since the Polish colonization of the region
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were also sizable Polish
communities in the large cities such as Kyiv and Minsk. Another 200,000 Poles
lived in Russia itself, principally in Moscow and Leningrad, as well as in the
Caucasus and Siberia. Among these were several thousand exiled Communists
and about an equal number who had taken part in the revolution and civil war.
'['he rest were economic refugees who moved there earlier in the century.

Tension persisted between the two countries, despite the signing of the
peace treaty and the establishment of diplomatic relations. Given the scale of
the Polish-Soviet conflict in 1920 and the strength of the belief that the "for-
tress of thf proletariat" was being assaulted by imperialists, it is hardly surpris-
ing that so many Poles in the U.S.S.R. found themselves accused of spying. In
1924-1929 several hundred were shot, although only a handful had actually
been involved in espionage. During the Soviet campaign against religion, sev-
eral hundred Catholics were persecuted and dozens were shot or disappeared.
Although this repression seems insignificant in comparison with the scale of
the repression against the Russian Orthodox Church, it resulted in the disap-

Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

365

pearance of a church that had formed the foundation of social, cultural, and
spiritual life for hundreds of thousands of Polish peasants.

These peasants were among the victims of collectivization. According to
official classifications in use at the time, 20 percent of them were designated as
kulaks and a slightly larger share as "subkulaks " In Ukraine, Polish resistance
was fierce and had to be broken by force. According to approximate figures at
the time, the population of the regions inhabited by Poles fell by around 25
percent in 1933 alone. In Belorussia the collectivization of Polish farms was
less brutal.

Aside from the repression of "Polish spies," the logic of the repressions
was clear — they were part of the "class struggle" (that is, collectivization and
the campaign against religion) as it was then conceived. But along with collec-
tivization, another form of repression was launched: between 15 August and
15 September 1933 the authorities arrested about twenty Polish Communists,
most of whom were emigres, including one member of the Politburo of the
Polish Communist Party, the KPP Subsequent waves of arrests followed. All
these people were accused of belonging to a "POW [Polish Military Organiza-
tion] espionage and sabotage operation."

The Polish Military Organization, or POW, had been formed in 1915 by
Jozef Pilsudski as an underground organization whose activities were directed
against Austro-Hungary and Germany, and in 1918-1920 it had carried out
reconnaissance missions in the areas where the civil war was raging, principally
in Ukraine. It definitively ceased operations in 1921. Most of its members were
leftists; many belonged to the Polish Socialist Party; several had broken with
the Socialists to establish the Communist Party. In 1933 the POW quite simply
no longer existed. Nevertheless, several Poles (including the well-known avant-
garde poet Witold Wandurski) were arrested, falsely charged with belonging to
the organization, condemned to death, and shot. Others died in prison. Those
who survived in prison were later shot during the Great Purge.

For several years the POW affair fed internal conflicts in the KPP: it was
as bad to be accused of being a POW agitator as it was to be labeled a Trotskyite.
More important, the OGPU (and later the Main Directorate for State Security
of the NKVD) began to compile detailed files and records of Poles working in
the Soviet administration, the Comintern, and the security services. These were
complemented by lists of Poles living in Ukraine and Belorussia in the two
so-called autonomous Polish regions. The first, in Ukraine, called the "Julian
Marchlewski" (after one of the founders of the KPP who had died in 1925),
had been established in 1925; the second, in Belorussia, had been created in
1932 and bore the name of Feliks Dzerzhinsky. These regions, with their own
local governments, newspapers, theater, schools, and publishing houses, were
"Soviet Polish" enclaves in the U.S.S.R.

September 1935 saw a new wave of arrests in Minsk, Kyiv, and Moscow,

366

The Other Europe

officially aimed at putting an end once and for all to the supposed POW
network. Liquidation of the autonomous Polish regions began at the same time.
During the time of the Great Purge in 1936-1938, arrests of NKVD officials
of Polish origin began, reaching to the very top of the security hierarchy before
spreading ever more widely at the base. During a plenary session of the Central
Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in June 1937, Nikolai Ezhov af-
firmed that the POW u had infiltrated the Soviet counterespionage and intelli-
gence services" and that the NKVD "had broken and liquidated the largest
Polish espionage operation." Hundreds of Poles, many of them KPP leaders,
had already been interned, and the false accusations against them were "sub-
stantiated" by confessions extracted under torture.

In the summer of 1937 the NKVD embarked on new repressions against
national minorities, beginning with the Germans and moving on to the Poles.
On 1 1 August Ezhov signed Operational Order No. 00485:

I order that:

1. On 20 August 1937 a vast operation is to begin, with the aim of
completely eradicating all local POW organizations. Particular
attention is to be paid to the cadres responsible for subversion,
espionage, and rebellion in industry, communications, sovkhozy,
and kolkhozy. This operation is to be carried out within three
months — that is, it is to be completed on or before 20 Novem-
ber 1937.

2. Arrests are to be made of:

a. the most active members of the POWs (see enclosed list)
found during the investigation who have remained uniden-
tified until now

b. all Polish prisoners of war who are still in the U.S.S.R.

c. all Polish refugees, regardless of the date of their arrival in
the U.S.S.R.

d. all political immigrants and political prisoners who have been
exchanged with Poland

e. former members of the Polish Socialist Party and all other
anti-Soviet parties

f. local anti-Soviet elements and the most active nationalists in
the Polish regions

3. The arrest operation is to be divided into two phases: first, all
relevant personnel in the NKVD, the Red Army, the weapons
factories, the military departments of all other enterprises, the
railway, road, shipping, and aviation industries, the energy sec-
tor, industry in general, and refineries and gas works; second, all
those who work in industries where national security is not at
such a premium, such as the sovkhozy and kolkhozy, and in
government administration.

Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

367

4. All investigations are to be carried out simultaneously. During
the investigations, considerable pressure must be brought to
bear on all organizers and leaders of subversive groups to force
them to divulge all their collaborators and reveal the true extent
of their networks. This information must be acted on immedi-
ately, so that all spies, harmful elements, and subversive groups
can be arrested on the basis of this information. To carry out
such investigations, a special task force is to be established.

5. Classify all people arrested during the investigation in one of
two categories:

a. Those in the first category, people belonging to Polish espio-
nage networks, groups of saboteurs, subversive agents, and
Polish insurrectionists, must be shot.

b. Those in the second category, people less active than the
first, are to receive prison or camp sentences of five to ten
years.

A decision by the NKVD and the Soviet Council of People's Commissars
on 15 November 1938 formally ended the "Polish Operation," although it was
in fact prolonged by a purge of NKVD agents who had taken part in its earlier
stages. The repressions wiped out many Polish Communist leaders (46 full
members and 24 nonvoting, or candidate, members of the Central Committee
of the Polish Workers' Party were shot) as well as ordinary citizens — workers
and, above all, peasants. According to an NKVD report of 10 July 1938, the
number of prisoners of Polish origin was 134,519, 53 percent of whom came
from Ukraine or from Belorussia. Between 40 and 50 percent (that is, between
54,000 and 67,000) were shot. 1 The survivors were sent to camps or deported
to Kazakhstan.

The Poles account for some 10 percent of the total number of victims of
the Great Purge, and for around 40 percent of the victims of purges against
national minorities. These figures are, if anything, understated, since thousands
of Poles were deported from Ukraine and Belorussia for reasons unconnected
with the "Polish Operation." It was not only the Polish Communist suites and
offices at the Hotel Lux that were emptied, but whole Polish villages and
kolkhozy as well.

Katyh, Prisons, and Deportations (1939—1941)

A secret protocol to the nonaggression pact signed by the U.S.S.R, and Ger-
many on 23 August 1939 partitioned Poland into "spheres of interest." The
order to attack Poland was given on 14 September 1939, and three days later
the Red Army invaded the country with orders to "liberate" the parts de-
scribed as "western Belorussia" and "western Ukraine" from what was termed

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"the Polish fascist occupation" and to incorporate these territories into the
U.S.S.R. Annexation proceeded quickly, accompanied by measures to repress
and intimidate the population. On 29 November the Presidium of the Su-
preme Soviet of the US.S.R. extended Soviet citizenship to all residents in the
new territories. Vilnius and its surroundings were ceded to Lithuania, then in
its last few months of independence. The Soviet system of repression and
internal control was extended to these new r regions. The regime rightly foresaw
that a considerable local resistance movement would take shape; almost imme-
diately, some detachments from the Polish army who had avoided capture set
about organizing resistance. In response the NKVD sent troops into the Polish
regions and began to establish its own units, replete with a large staff and
border guards. The new authorities had to solve the problem of what to do
with the prisoners of war, as well as to determine how society in general would
respond to the new system.

Moscow's main preoccupation was the Polish army, which had consisted
of 240,000 to 250,000 troops, including 10,000 officers. The Soviet authorities
made some important decisions immediately after the attack on Poland was
launched: On 19 September Lavrenti Beria set up within the NK YD a new
Directorate for Prisoners of War (Glavnoe upravlenie po dclam voenno-plen-
nykh), or GUVP, under Order No. 0308, as well as a network of prison camps,
In early October 25,000 Polish prisoners of war were sent to mend roads, and
12,000 were put at the disposal of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry
to be used as forced labor. A still unknown number were dispersed in small
groups throughout the huge gulag system. At the same time officers 1 camps
were established in Starobielsk and in Kozielsk, and a special camp for police-
men, prison guards, and frontier guards in Ostaszkow. Soon Beria formed
another special group to begin prosecutions inside the camps. At the end of
February 1940, 6,192 policemen and 8,376 officers had been interned.

Moscow was undecided regarding their fate. Many expected that some of
them, beginning with those in the camp at Ostaszkow, would be charged with
offenses under section 13 of Article 58 of the penal code, aimed at people who
u had resisted the international workers' movement." It did not take much
imagination to see that this could be applied to any Polish police officer or
prison guard. The punishment was usually five to eight years in the camps, and
in some cases deportation to Siberia (and in particular to Kamchatka).

A decision was finally made in late February 1940, perhaps because of a
sudden turn in the secret war with Finland. If one is to judge from documents
that are now public, this decision was unexpected. On 5 March, at Beria's
instigation, the Politburo decided to "apply the supreme penalty" to prisoners
in Kozielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostaszkow, as well as to another 11,000 Poles
imprisoned in western Ukraine and Belorussia (see the extract in Chapter 1 1),

Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

369

This verdict was approved by a special tribunal, the troika of Ivan L.
Bashtakov, Bogdan Z. Kobulov, and Ysevolod N. Merkulov. Beria's memoran-
dum was approved by Stalin, Yoroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoyan, all of whom
prominently signed it. The clerk noted that Kalinin and Kaganovich, who were
absent, also supported the proposal.

Technical preparations went on for a month. Over the next six weeks, from
3 April to 1 3 May, all the prisoners were taken out of the camps in small groups.
A total of 4,404 people were taken from Kozielsk camp to Katyh, where they
were shot with a bullet in the neck and buried in a mass grave. The 3,896
Starobielsk prisoners were shot in the NKVD headquarters in Kharkiv, and
their bodies buried in an outlying region of the city, Pyatishatki. The 6,287
from Ostaszkow were executed in the NKVD headquarters in Kalinin (for-
merly Tver) and buried in the Mednoe district of the city. In all, 14,587 people
were liquidated. On 9 June 1940 an assistant to the head of the NKVD, Vasily
V. Chernyshev, filed a report saying that the camps were now empty and
awaiting new prisoners.

Stanislaw Swianiewicz, who escaped the Katyh massacre at the last min-
ute, when, at Moscow's orders, he was suddenly separated from the group of
captured Polish officers and transferred to a prison in Smolensk, gave the
following account:

Below the ceiling [of the railway car] I could look through a hole in the
wall and see what was happening outside ... In front of us there was a
grassy square , . . The place was cordoned off by large numbers of
NKVD troops, their bayonets fixed at the ready.

This was different from what we had already been through. Even at
the front, after we had been taken prisoner, our captors had never fixed
bayonets ... An ordinary-looking bus arrived in the square. It was much
smaller than the ones usually found in cities in the West. The windows
had been chalked up so you couldn't see inside. Its capacity was prob-
ably about thirty people. The entrance was at the back.

We wondered why we couldn't see through the windows. The bus
backed up until it was nearly touching the railway car, so that the prison-
ers could get straight in, without having to get down. The NKVD were
watching closely on both sides, bayonets at the ready . . . Every half-
hour the bus would take away another load. Therefore, the place where
the prisoners were being taken wasn't far away - . .

The NKVD colonel, a very tall man who had taken me out of the
car, was standing in the middle of the square with his hands deep in his
pockets. It was obvious that he was in charge of the whole operation.
But what was the point? I must say that looking out at that fine spring
day, it never crossed my mind that these people were all being taken
away to be executed. 2

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The Other Europe

The 11,000 prisoners mentioned by Beria were only a tiny portion of all
the Polish prisoners. Of the other categories of prisoners, the largest was the
bezhentsy, people arrested after they had fled the German occupation of west-
ern Poland. More than 145,000 bezhentsy passed through the various prisons;
some were sent on to other prisons, and others were allowed to leave. Another
category was the perebezhchiki, Poles arrested while trying to flee into Lithu-
ania, Romania, or Hungary. Some of them were freed after a few weeks, but
around 10,000 were sentenced by the OSO (Osoboe Soveshchanie, the special
NKVD board) to anywhere from three to eight years, and they ended up in the
gulags, especially in the Dallag but also in Kolyma. Some of them were shot
in accordance with Beria's order of 5 March 1940. The third category consisted
of militants from the resistance networks, officers who had not been mobilized
in 1939, high-ranking officials in the state apparatus or local governments, and
various sorts of pomeshchiki (landowners) — in sum, all those deemed sotsialno
opasnyt, or "socially dangerous elements." Most of the 7,305 who were shot
(out of a total of 1 1,000 prisoners) under the directive of 5 March came from
the last category. The place of their burial is still unknown; all that is known is
that 3,405 were shot in Ukraine and 3,880 in Belorussia.

The total number of people imprisoned in territories incorporated into
the U.S.S.R. (including Lithuania in 1940) has not yet been established defini-
tively, but as of 10 June 1941 there were 39,600 prisoners in western Ukraine
and Belorussia, of whom roughly 12,300 had already been sentenced. Their
number had doubled since March 1940. The proportion of common criminals
versus political prisoners is also unknown.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union, most of the prisoners met
a terrible fate. In the prisons of western Ukraine alone, around 6,000 people
were executed, although it is highly unlikely that they had received death
sentences for any crime. In the NKVD reports these mass killings were re-
garded as simply "a decrease in the number of people belonging to the first
category." 1 In one instance several hundred prisoners were killed for attempting
to flee a convoy. In another case the convoy commander took personal respon-
sibility for shooting 714 prisoners (500 of whom had not appeared before any
court), killing several of them himself

Mass deportation was another tactic used in the new territories of the
U.S.S.R. Though consisting chiefly of four separate large-scale operations, the
deportation of families or small groups began as early as November 1939. The
real number of people involved is not known. The same can be said about the
numbers of those deported from Bessarabia and the eastern regions of Belorus-
sia and Ukraine in the latter half of 1940. Until recently the only figures
available were those provided by the Polish resistance or those issued by the
Polish embassy in 1941. Today the NKVD archives make it clear that these

Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

371

numbers are actually a bare minimum and will almost certainly have to be
revised upward.

The first wave of deportations began on 10 February 1940, as a result of
a decision by the Soviet Council of People's Commissars on 5 December 1939.
The preparations, particularly the reconnaissance on the ground and the com-
pilation of lists, took two months. The organizers of the deportation had many
technical obstacles to surmount, including a dearth of railway tracks of the
correct gauge for Soviet trains. The entire operation was directed in person by
Vsevolod Merkulov, one of Beria's assistants, an unusual measure that under-
scores the importance of the operation for the Soviet Union. The deportation
of February 1940 took its greatest toll on the peasantry, the inhabitants of
villages, forestry workers, and the settlers who had moved into these regions as
part of a political strategy to "Polonize" the area. According to NKVD statis-
tics, some 140,000 were deported, 82 percent of whom were Polish. The
operation also included Ukrainians and Belorussians. The convoys left for
northern Russia, the Komi republic, and western Siberia.

Even before Soviet leaders approved the execution of the prisoners, the
SNK ordered a new wave of deportations on 2 March 1940. This time the
families of prisoners were deported (even as their husbands or fathers were
being executed) as well as ''socially dangerous elements." The NKVD figures
show that approximately 60,000 people were deported, almost entirely to
Kazakhstan, enduring terrible conditions of famine and cold. A good deal is
now known about this operation from survivors' testimony. One such survivor,
Lucyna Dziurzyhska-Suchon, recalled:

I can still remember one of the worst times in our life. For a few days we
had had nothing to eat at all, literally nothing. It was winter, and the
cabin was covered in snow. We could still get out thanks to a tunnel that
someone had dug on the outside . . . Mother could still get out to work.
She was just as hungry as we were. We just lay there, huddling together
in the straw to try to keep warm. We kept seeing tiny lights dancing
before our eyes, and we were too weak to stand. It was really cold in the
cabin ... We just slept, we just slept the whole time. My brother would
wake from time to time and cry out that he was hungry. That was all he
could say, except "Mother, Tm dying." Mother cried a lot. She went to
ask for help from our friends in one of the neighboring cabins. It was no
use. We just had to pray to "Our Father" all the time. It probably was a
miracle that saved us. A friend came from another cabin with a handful
of wheat.

The third operation, also a result of the March SNK decree, took place
during the night of 28-29 June 1940 and affected all those who before Septem-
ber 1939 had not lived in the territories annexed by the Soviet Union, and had

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not returned home across the Soviet-German demarcation line in Poland.
(People who had fled after the partition and had been found in the other zone
still had the right to return home. Thus 60,000 people, including 1,500 Jews,
returned to the German sector from the Soviet zone.) Of the 80,000 Poles who
were deported as part of this operation, 84 percent were Jews, who, if they
managed to escape the massacre carried out by the Einsatzgruppen (Task
Forces, a euphemism for Nazi death squads) in the summer of 1941, were sent
to the gulags.

The fourth and final operation began on 21 May 1941 , following a decision
by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) and the
Soviet Council of People's Commissars on 14 May. Its aim was to cleanse the
border regions and the Baltic regions of u undesirable elements." The deportees
belonged to the category of silposelentsy, people who had been sentenced to
twenty years or more of forced exile in the designated regions (particularly in
Kazakhstan). This wave of deportations affected 86,000 people in the border
regions, not counting Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Using the NKVD's own figures, we arrive at a total of between 330,000
and 340,000 people deported. If we include the other available figures, the
number of victims of these repressions rises to between 400,000 and 500,000.
Some groups wound up in distant parts of the U.S.S.R., notably the more than
100,000 young men who were forced to work in Soviet industry (above all in
the mining districts of Donetsk, the Urals, and western Siberia), and the
150,000 men who were mobilized into the stroibataDmy, the construction bat-
talions of the Red Army.

During the two years of Soviet rule in the eastern half of Poland, approxi-
mately 1 million people (10 percent of the population) were directly affected
by Soviet repression in one form or other: execution, prison, the camps, de-
portation, or forced labor. No fewer than 30,000 people were shot, and another
90,000 to 100,000 (8-10 percent of the deportees) died in the camps or en route
in railway convoys.

The NKVD against the Armia Krajowa (Homeland Army)

During the night of 4-5 January 1944, the first Red Army tanks crossed the
Polish-Soviet border established in 1921. In reality this border was recognized
neither by Moscow nor by the Western powers, and following the revelation of
the Katyn massacres, the Soviet Union had broken all diplomatic links with the
legal Polish government-in-exile in London on the pretext that the Poles had
demanded an international inquiry by the Red Cross, a demand that by chance
coincided with a similar request by the German authorities. The Polish resis-
tance assumed that as the front approached, the Homeland Army, or Armia

Poland, the "Enemy Nation'

373

Krajowa (AK), would mobilize the population and begin to fight the Germans,
and that the Red Army would come to its defense. The operation was code-
named "Burza" (Storm). The first skirmishes took place in late March 1944, in
Volhynia, where the partisan division of the AK fought alongside Soviet units.
On 27 May the Red Army forced several AK units to lay down their arms.
Consequently, most of the AK had to fight their way through German lines
back to Poland.

The Soviet Union's way of proceeding here — cooperation on a local level
followed by forced disarmament — is confirmed by examples elsewhere. The
most spectacular actions took place in the Vilnius region. A few days after the
fighting was over, the Internal Troops of the NKVD arrived and, in accordance
with Order No. 220145 from headquarters, began systematically disarming AK
soldiers. According to the report received by Stalin on 20 July, more than 6,000
partisans were arrested, while 1,000 managed to escape. All the leaders of the
partisan units were arrested. Officers were interned in NKVD camps, where
they were offered a choice between remaining there or joining the Polish army
of Zygmunt Berling, formed under the aegis of the Soviet Union. The AK
units that had participated in the liberation of Lviv suffered the same fate. All
these events took place on what the Soviet authorities considered to be their
territory.

On 1 August 1944 the commanders of the AK began an uprising in
Warsaw, knowing that Soviet military commanders were planning to launch an
all-out attack on German positions in Warsaw on 8 August. Stalin halted the
offensive on the Vistula River, which had already been crossed to the south of
Warsaw, and allowed the Germans to crush the rebellion, which lasted until
2 October.

To the west of the Curzon Line, where the NKVD had mobilized between
30,000 and 40,000 soldiers and liberated many small areas, NKVD, SMERSH
(the military counterespionage section), and filtration units proceeded in the
same manner, in accordance with the U.S.S.R.'s Supreme Command No.
220169 of 1 August 1944. According to a report compiled in October, which
contains details of how that directive was carried out, around 25,000 soldiers,
including 300 AK officers, were arrested, disarmed, and interned.

NKVD units and SMERSH operational groups had their own prisons
and camps where they detained Polish partisans as well as Volksdeutsche and
German prisoners.* Officers and soldiers who refused to enlist in Berling's
army were sent to distant gulags, along with their comrades from Vilnius and
Lviv. The exact number of those imprisoned as a result of Operation Burza is
still not known; estimates vary between 25,000 and 30,000. The territories
newly annexed by the U.S.S.R. in the autumn of 1944 subsequently witnessed
arrests on a massive scale followed by deportations to the gulags or transfer to

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The Other Europe

forced-labor sites, particularly in the Donetsk region. Although most of the
deportees this time were Ukrainian, it has been estimated that these various
forms of repression also affected tens of thousands of Poles.

NKVD and SMERSH operations did not cease once most of the AK units
had been dispersed. On 15 October 1944 Beria signed Order No. 0012266/44,
which decreed that a special division (Division 64, known as the francs-ttreurs
et partisans) be stationed in Poland. In the border regions of Poland, NKVD
units from Belorussia and Ukraine lent a hand in the operations. After the
formation of Division 64 in late 1944, more than 17,000 people were arrested;
4,000 were deported to distant Soviet camps. After 1 March 1945 the Soviet
units were put under the command of the general adviser to the NKVD,
General Ivan Serov, through the Polish Ministry of Public Security (of which
he was appointed head), and they remained in Poland until the spring of 1947.
Until August-September 1945 they were the main security force on the ground
in zones where there was still effective independent partisan resistance. From
January 1945 to August 1946, 3,400 fighters from different resistance groups
were arrested. Most of them were sent to camps; the rest were handed over to
the Polish authorities. In addition, some 47,000 people were detained for inter-
rogation. After the entry of the Red Army into the Polish regions annexed by
Germany in 1939, there had been arrests not only of Volksdeutsche but also of
all Poles who, under pressure from the Germans, had signed the so-called third
national list (Etngdeutsche). h At least 25,000 to 30,000 civilians from Pomerania
and Upper Silesia were deported to the U.S.S.R., including 1 5,000 miners who
were sent to the Donbass region and to the mining regions of western Siberia.

The NKVD did not stop at mass repressions, manhunts, and pacification
operations. At the end of the summer of 1944, SMERSH set up local groups
that operated regularly in Poland, recruiting in particular a network of inform-
ers. The best-known operation, led personally by NKVD commander Serov,
was the arrest of sixteen leaders of the underground Polish government, in-
cluding the deputy prime minister, three of his assistants, the leader of the AK,
and members of the Council for National Unity — a sort of underground
parliament that had been established during the German occupation. On 22
February 1945 the council had protested the Yalta accord and had given notice
that it was prepared to negotiate directly with the Soviet Union. As a result,
General Serov had invited the leaders of the underground government to make
themselves known publicly. The moment they arrived at the agreed meeting
place in Pruszkow, near Warsaw, they were arrested and taken directly to the
Lubyanka in Moscow. On 19 June a public trial began in the Palace of Trade
Unions, where the great prewar show-trials had been held. At the same time,
talks began in Moscow between the pro-Soviet Polish authorities and repre-
sentatives of the Polish democratic forces to discuss the clauses of the Yalta

Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

375

accord that affected Poland. The democratic forces had already declared their
willingness to negotiate directly with the Soviet Union, The verdict of the trial
was reached the same day that the United States, the US.S.R., and Great
Britain consented to the agreement among various Polish parties for the for-
mation of a coalition government, in which the Communists and their satellite
parties held a huge majority. The sentences at the trial were relatively light — the
longest was ten years in prison — but three of the accused never returned to
Poland. Leopold Okulicki, the general commander of the AK, died in prison
in December 1946.

The System of Repression, 1944-1989

The extent of political repression in Poland and the various forms it took
reflected the evolution of the political system. To paraphrase a popular saying,
u Tell me the exact system of repression, and I'll tell you the phase of Com-
munism to which it corresponds."

Two major problems affect a description and analysis of the repressive
system. First, because various aspects of repression were extremely secret,
many of the documents are still classified. Second, looking at the past only from
the point of view of repression risks a somewhat deformed assessment of the
Communist system, since even in the most repressive periods the system did
have other functions. Nonetheless, the centrality of repression is of fundamen-
tal importance in any evaluation of the regime and its ideological roots. During
the forty-five years of the Communist Party's monopoly on power in Poland,
five phases of repression are discernible. The one thing they all had in common
was their dependence on the existence of a secret police force accountable to
the policymaking unit of the Party and a few of its leaders.

The Conquest of the State, or Mass Terror (1944-1947)

On the domestic level, the foundations of the Communist state in Poland were
established by the presence of the Red Army. In matters of foreign policy,
Stalin's oversight was decisive. The role of the Soviet security system was not
limited to fighting enemies of the new regime. The NKVD/KGB, with a few
minor but important modifications, became the model of choice for the Polish
Communists who were trained at the NKVD officers' school in Kuibyshev. In
addition, a core of several hundred advisers (or sovetniki, with General Serov at
their head as chief adviser) was set up, forming the central structure of the
Polish Security Service. Because the security chiefs at the Lubyanka had access
to any information they wanted through a network of Soviet experts, Moscow
did not have to establish its own full-fledged intelligence network in Poland.

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The Other Europe

Because of the political and ideological interests common to the Polish Com-
munists and the Soviet state, the Polish Security Service became an integral
part of the Soviet machine. This commonality of interest was even more
apparent where the Polish military counterespionage system was concerned.

In Poland the Communists had been a marginal group, with no chance of
being elected to power in a democratic process. They were all the more un-
popular because the majority of Poles were traditionally wary of, or even overtly
hostile to, the US.S.R. and Russia in particular, especially after the recent bitter
experience of "liberation" by the Red Army. In the early years of the postwar
period, the main opposition to Sovietization came from resistance movements,
underground political groups, and legal parties, among which the only impor-
tant one was the Polish Peasant Party, the PSL. The first task that the new
Communist-led government set for itself was breaking the resistance of the
Polish people so that a Soviet-style system could be consolidated. It is sig-
nificant that the first representative of the Committee of National Liberation
(created in Moscow on 21 July 1944) to make an appearance in public was the
minister of public security, Stanislaw Radkiewicz. A full year passed before the
Polish security apparatus (known after 1945 as the Ministry of Public Security,
or MBP) was able to take over the consolidation of power launched by the Red
Army and the NKVD, By the second half of 1945 the MBP had developed an
operational structure that employed more than 20,000 officials (not including
its police), as well as a military organization known as the Internal Security
Corps (KBW) of around 30,000 heavily armed soldiers. The war against the
resistance, which was quite intense until 1947 and continued until the early
1950s, was both bloody and brutal. Polish historians disapprove of the use of
the term "civil war" in this context, given the large numbers of Soviet military
and NKVD troops deployed in the country.

The security apparatus employed a wide range of methods, from infiltra-
tion and provocation to the pacification of entire regions. It had an absolute
materia] advantage over the partisans— more and better communications and
weapons, as well as the option to call in KBW troops, an asset that the regime
never hesitated to exploit. According to the Third Department, which was
responsible for combatting the anti-Communist resistance, 1,486 people died
in the conflicts in 1947, while the Communist losses were a mere 136. 7 Large-
scale pacification operations were Jed not only by the KBW but also by specially
assigned units of the regular army. Around 8,700 opponents of the government
were killed in 1945-1948. Most of these operations were led by the Commission
for State Security, presided over by the ministers of security and defense. Mass
deportations also occurred whenever they were deemed necessary. That was
precisely how the problem posed by the Ukrainian resistance in southeastern
Poland was resolved: from April to July 1947, all Ukrainians in Poland (around

Poland, the "Enemy Nation'

377

140,000 people) were deported as part of Operation Wisla (Vistula) and reset-
tled in what had been the German territories in the west and north of the
country.

The records of the Security Service show that many of these operations
were planned with great care. Examples include the massive fraud perpetrated
during the referendum of June 1946, the "preparations' 1 for the elections of
January 1947 (that is, the enormous propaganda machine that was put into
action), the thousands of arrests, particularly during the election campaign, the
systematic recourse to fraud, and the development of a network of collabora-
tors — some 17,500 as of 1 January 1946. However, it is clear that the most
characteristic tactic was the use of brute force, even though the precise number
of prisoners is still not known. In 1947 approximately 32,800 people were
arrested by the Third Department (many of whom were ordinary criminals).
The Fourth Department, whose task was to safeguard industry, arrested 4,500
people that same year. In the weeks preceding the elections, between 50,000
and 60,000 militants from the PSL (the Peasant Party) were arrested by the
various departments of the MBP, the military police, the KBW, and the army.
There arc many known cases of murder, some definitely carried out by local
branches of the Communist Party.

Interrogations were often extremely brutal. Beatings and torture were
common, and the detention conditions were inhuman.

Kazimierz Moczarski, an anti-Nazi resistance fighter arrested in 1945, was
imprisoned for 225 days in the same cell as SS general Jiirgen Stroop, who had
been in charge of the annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. After Moczar-
ski was freed he wrote a memoir of this confrontation. 8 The following account
records his treatment during his imprisonment.

Kazimierz Moczarski

Prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment

Article 2 of decree of 31 August 1944

Sztum Central Prison
23 February 1955

Tribunal of the Supreme Penal Chamber
Ref. Ill K 161/52

Following the request for a retrial and reconsideration of previous
events drawn up by my lawyers, I declare the following:

During the investigation carried out by an officer of the former
Ministry of Public Security from 9 January 1949 to 6 June 1951, I
underwent forty-nine different types of torture and beatings, among
which I single out in particular:

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The Other Europe

1. Blows from a hard-rubber truncheon on particularly sensitive
parts of the body (bridge of nose, chin, salivary glands, protrud-
ing parts like shoulder blades).

2. Blows from a whip covered with sticky rubber to the external
parts of my bare feet, particularly my toes, an extremely painful
method.

3. Blows from a hard-rubber truncheon on my heels (in a series of
ten blows, on each heel, several times a day).

4. Hair torn out on my temples and neck ("plucking the goose 1 '),
beard, chest, perineum, and sexual organs.

5. Cigarette burns on my lips and eyelids.

6. Burning of the fingers of both hands.

7. Sleep deprivation: For seven to nine days prisoners are forced to
stand upright in a dark cell and are kept awake with blows to the
face . . . This method, which the officers called "the beach,' 1 or
Zakopane, brings on a state of near madness. Prisoners experi-
ence severe mental problems, and see visions like those experi-
enced by people taking mescaline or peyote.

I should add that for six years and three months 1 was deprived of
a walk. For two years and ten months I never had a bath. For about four
and a half years I was kept in total isolation with no possibility of
contacting the outside world (no news of my family, no letters, books,
newspapers, etc.).

The tortures and agony I describe above were carried out by,
among others, Lt. Colonel Jozef Dusza, Commandant Jerzy Kaskiewicz,
and Captain Eugeniusz Chimczak to terrorize me and to extract confes-
sions that were not true, but that were considered necessary to confirm
the charges and accusations that had been leveled against me.

They were acting under the orders of Colonel [J6zef| Rozanski,
Colonel [Anatol] Fejgin, and the deputy minister. General [Roman]
Romkowski told me on 30 November 1948, in the presence of Colonel
Rozanski, that I was to undergo an investigation that would be "sheer
hell." This is in effect what happened. 9

In many cases the authorities were not content with a summary condem-
nation, and instead staged open trials, during which a hand-picked "public"
would humiliate the accused prisoners and demonstrate "the hatred of the
people" toward them. The dates of some trials were fixed to coincide with
various elections so that the propaganda effect was maximized. This was the
case for the trial of the largest underground group, Wolnosc i Niezawislosc
(WIN; Liberty and Independence). The accused had to wait from November
1945 until January 1947 before finally coming to trial one week before the
elections. Another common procedure was the condemnation of anti-German

Poland, the "Enemy Nation'

379

resistance fighters as collaborators. The Communists' reasoning here was quite
simply that anyone who was not with them was against them. Consequently,
the AK, the main anti-German resistance unit, was considered to be an ally of
Hitler because it had not actually fought alongside the Red Army. To lend
credence to these charges, Gestapo functionaries were brought forward to bear
false witness and justify the accusations.

One of the most scandalous miscarriages of justice was that of Witold
Pilecki. Born in 1901, Pilecki participated in the defense of Vilnius against the
Bolsheviks in 1920. A landowner and an officer in the reserves, he organized
cavalry squads that were incorporated into the army in 1939. After the defeat
of Poland he set up one of the first underground resistance movements, the
Secret Polish Army (founded on 10 November 1939), In 1940, at his own
initiative and with the authorization of his superior officers in the AK, he
allowed himself to be caught in a raid and taken to Auschwitz (he was prisoner
no. 4859) to form a resistance network. In April 1943 he escaped to carry on
his resistance activities, particularly in the Niepodleglosc (Independence) net-
work, and subsequently took part in the Warsaw uprising. After the city's
surrender, he was sent to the officers' camp (Oflag) in Murnau. When he was
freed, he joined the second corps of General Ladislav Anders' army. In the
autumn of 1945 he returned to Poland to rejoin the underground movement,
organizing a small and highly efficient network to gather intelligence about the
Bolshevization of the country and send it back to General Anders. He was
arrested on 5 May 1947, tortured, and given three death sentences on 15 March
1948. The principal charge was "espionage for a foreign power,' 1 in this case
the Polish army in the West. He was executed on 25 May 1948 and rehabilitated
in 1990.

The Party leaders themselves decided the sentences in the major trials.
The Party also kept a close watch on all appointments to key posts in the
Security Service.

All organized and coordinated resistance was broken in the autumn of
1947. After the flight of several leaders of the PSL and the arrest of the fourth
leader of the WIN, the resistance network ceased to exist as a nationwide
movement. The political situation began to stabilize: exhausted after years of
war, society gave up all hope of assistance from the Western powers. The need
to adapt to the new reality was paramount, however shameful and unwanted
that reality might be. The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948
reinforced Moscow's grip on Central and Eastern Europe. The Polish Com-
munist Party prepared to fuse with its main ally, the Socialist Party. With
economic improvements and progress in reconstruction, Polish settlement in
previously German territories caught the interest of the public. Such factors
enabled the Communist Party to proceed to the following stage: the Sovietiza-

380

The Other Europe

tion of Poland and the domination of the whole of society. Quite logically the
MBP began to reduce its personnel, and the number of its agents and secret
collaborators (some 45,000 at the time) began to fall.

The Conquest of Society, or Generalized Terror (1948-1956)

In the aftermath of the Prague coup and Yugoslavia's demotion to pariah status
in the international Communist movement, the Eastern-bloc countries went
through similar transformations, including the absorption of socialist parties
by Communist parties, the formation {de facto or dejure) of a one-party system,
total centralization of economic planning, accelerated industrialization pro-
grams along the lines of the Stalinist five-year plans, the beginnings of collec-
tivization in agriculture, and an intensification of activity against the church.
Mass terror became commonplace.

From 1945 through 1947, thousands of people who had never taken any
part in opposition activity fell victim to pacification campaigns and preventive
measures, even though the machinery of repression was directed, in principle,
against the concrete enemies of the regime and active militants such as the
Polish Workers' Party (PPR). After 1948, the Security Service used terror to
subjugate the whole of society, including segments that were more or less
favorably disposed toward the regime. In this period of generalized terror,
anyone, including Communist Party leaders and high-ranking state officials,
could suddenly fall under close scrutiny by the Security Service or become yet
another of its victims. Although some functionaries in the MBP had called for
"intensification of revolutionary vigilance 11 as early as 1947, it was only in 1948
that this slogan became the key to the actions of the Security Service, echoing
the Stalinist call for "intensification of the class struggle."

The point of departure was the conflict with Tito, which, for Central and
Eastern Europe, played a role similar to that of the fight against the Trotskyites
in the US.S.R. In Poland the issue arose in early September 1948 with the
"critique of right-wing nationalist deviation 11 directed against the general sec-
retary of the PPR, Wladyslaw Gomulka. The first arrests in mid-October did
not affect his immediate entourage, but everyone familiar with the Moscow
trials of the 1930s knew very well that once the base was attacked, it was not
long before the very top fell victim, too.

In a generalized system of repression, the Communists suffered less than
the rest of the population, but their experiences were far from negligible. In
Poland a relatively small number of victims were involved. In seeking to un-
cover "an espionage and subversion network 11 the Security Service turned its
attention to the army, concentrating on career officers who had enlisted before
the war. In this instance, joint action by the MBP and the military Main

Poland, the "Enemy Nation'

381

Intelligence Directorate (GZI) led to the arrest of hundreds of officers, fol-
lowed by many trials and twenty executions. The disappearance from the public
stage of Gomulka, who was arrested with several hundred officials from all
levels of the Party, was a clear signal: the time had come for the total submission
of the Party apparatus, including the Security Service itself. Several high-rank-
ing officials from the Security Service also found themselves in prison. Because
Gomulka was never actually put on trial, 10 the Sovietization of Poland was not
marked by any one main show-trial, such as that of Laszlo Rajk in Budapest
or of Rudolf Slansky in Prague.

Only a small part of the Security Service, which had grown spectacularly
since 1949 and employed some 34,000 people by 1952, was involved in the affair
concerning the "provocation within the workers' movement." The agents in
question all belonged to Department 10, which employed about 100 people
altogether. A Security Commission headed by Boleslaw Bierut (who had suc-
ceeded Gomulka in 1948) was established by the Politburo to handle many of
the most important investigations of the organizational problems of the MBP
and GZI, and to formulate general directives.

The omnipresence of the "Bezpieka 11 (the name by which the Security
Service was popularly known) in all domains of social and political life was one
of the main features of the era. In the summer of 1949, when a network of
74,000 informers was no longer sufficient for the Security Service's needs,
small units called Protection Squads (Referat Ochrony, or RO) were established
in all industrial enterprises. Within a few years there were 600 such cells. Inside
the MBP, particular attention was given to several departments of the Eco-
nomic Protection Section. From 1951 through 1953 the majority of people
arrested (around 5,000 to 6,000 each year) were victims of this service, which
had the largest network of informers (26,000 people) at its disposal. Any
breakdown or disruption in industry was automatically considered to be the
result of sabotage or subversion. In some cases, dozens of workers from a single
company were imprisoned. To help protect state institutions, the Security
Service was asked to give assessments of candidates doing polytechnic studies.
In 1952, some 1,500 people were prevented from carrying out their studies as
a result of the service's conclusions.

The "protection and organization of agricultural cooperatives" (that is,
collectivization) and the controls and decrees on wheat and meat quotas con-
stitute a separate chapter. In this last case, the most active institution was not
the security apparatus but the police and the Special Commission for the Fight
against Economic Abuses and Sabotage, established in 1945. This name, which
recalled that of the Cheka, struck terror into people's hearts. Thousands of
peasants in fifteen regions were imprisoned for failing to deliver their quotas.
The security forces and the police carried out the arrests according to a specific

382

The Other Europe

political plan: the better-off peasants (kulaks) were arrested first, even if they
had delivered their quota. They were held for several weeks without trial before
being sentenced, and their wheat, livestock, and other property were confis-
cated. The Extraordinary Commission also preyed upon the urban population.
Most sentences were for speculation, black marketeering, or, in 1952-1954,
hooliganism. The commission's rulings became more and more repressive. In
1945-1948 it sent 10,900 people to forced-labor camps; in 1949-1952 the figure
reached 46,700. The total for the years up to 1954 was 84,200. These verdicts
were not for political crimes, but the nature of the measures, affecting the rural
population and so-called speculators, stemmed from the same repressive sys-
tem.

The main objective of the security apparatus was the pursuit of under-
ground militants. The targets included former PSL militants, soldiers who had
returned from the West, and officials, political cadres, and officers from before
the war. In early 1949, registers of suspect elements were standardized into
several categories. By January 1953 the Security Service had files on 5.2 million
individuals, one-third of the adult population. Despite the elimination of illegal
organizations, the number of political trials continued to rise. The number of
prisoners rose as a result of the various "preventive measures." Thus in Octo-
ber 1950, as a result of "Operation K," 5,000 people were arrested in one night.
In 1952 more than 21,000 people were arrested. According to official figures,
in the second half of 1952 there were 49,500 political prisoners. There was even
a special prison for juvenile political delinquents, of whom there were 2,500 in
1953.

After the liquidation of the opposition, the Catholic Church was the
principal independent institution that remained. It was watched much more
closely after 1948, and was the object of constant attacks. In 1950 the imprison-
ment of bishops began. In September 1953 Bishop Czeslaw Kaczmarek was tried
and received a prison sentence of twelve years, and Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski,
the primate of Poland, was also interned. In all, more than 100 priests were
sent to prison. Jehovah's Witnesses, who were considered to be American spies,
were a particular target. In 1951 more than 2,000 of them were imprisoned.

This was a period when everyone seemed to be going to prison: members
of the Politburo, prewar officials (including the former prime minister), gener-
als, commanders of the AK, bishops, partisans who had fought the Germans
and then turned their weapons against the Communists, peasants who refused
to join the kolkhozy, miners in a pit where a fire had broken out, young people
arrested for breaking the glass on a poster or for writing graffiti on the walls.
Any potential opponent of the system was removed from society, and all free-
dom of action was prohibited. One of the main functions of the system of
generalized terror was the diffusion throughout society of a feeling of perma-
nent fear and atomization.

Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

383

A political prisoner named Andrzej Staszek described conditions in

Wronki prison shortly before 1950:

Tuberculosis was the worst illness in postwar Poland ... We were seven
in a cell. It was small, barely eight square meters, and we had hardly any
room to move. One day an eighth prisoner arrived, and we could see
immediately that there was something seriously wrong with him. He
didn't have a bowl or a blanket and he looked seriously ill. It soon
became clear that this man was suffering from advanced stages of tuber-
culosis. His body was covered with tubercular sores. When I saw how
frightened my companions were, I started to feel really scared too . . .
We tried to keep as far away as possible from him. But you can imagine
how absurd the situation was, when in a cell of eight square meters
seven men are trying to keep an eighth away. The situation got worse
when they brought the next meal. He didn't have a bowl, and no one was
going to bring him one. 1 looked at the others, but no one would meet
anyone else's eye or look at him.

I couldn't take this any more, so I gave him my plate. I told him to
eat first, and that I would eat afterward. He turned his dead and apa-
thetic face to me (he seemed quite indifferent to everything), and I heard
him say, "The thing is, I'm dying ... I have only a few days left." "You
eat, eat to my health," I told him, as the others looked on horrified.
Then they began to try to avoid me as well as him. When he finished, I
washed off the plate with what little water there was, and I began to
eat. 11

The system began to change slightly at the end of 1953. The network of
informers was dismantled, conditions in the prisons began to improve, some
of the prisoners were released for health reasons, fewer people were put on trial,
and sentences became lighter. Beatings and torture became less frequent.
Officers who had particularly bad reputations were dismissed, Department 10
was broken up, and staffing levels at the Security Service were cut. When on
28 September 1954 Radio F'Yee Europe began transmitting a series of reports
by Jozef Swiatlo, the former deputy head of Department 10 who had "chosen
liberty" (defected) in December 1953, it was like a bomb going off. In a few
weeks the MBP was restructured and superseded by the Ministry of Internal
Affairs (MSW) along with a separate Committee for Public Security (KBP).
The minister and three of the hva deputy ministers of the MBP were forced
to resign. In December 1953 Gomulka was set free and the head of the Inves-
tigations Department, Jozef Rozanski, imprisoned instead. The Special Com-
mission for the Fight against Economic Abuses and Sabotage was disbanded.
In January 1955 the Central Committee denounced "faults and errors," putting
all the blame for these on the Security Service, which had supposedly "put

384

The Other Europe

itself above the Party." Some of the MBP executioners were arrested, and the
numbers employed by the Security Service were again cut.

In fact, however, most of these changes were a sham. In 1955 there were
still around 30,000 political prisoners, and the latter half of that year saw the
trial of former minister Wlodzimierz Lechowicz, who had been arrested in
1948 by the special Swiatlo group. 12 Marian Spychalski, who had been a mem-
ber of the Politburo until 1949, was arrested in 1950 and remained in prison
without trial until April 1956. A real abatement in political repression came
only after the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress in 1956 and the death of Bierut
at nearly the same time. An amnesty was then proclaimed, although 1,500
political prisoners remained behind bars. Some of those who had been sen-
tenced were rehabilitated. Both the procurator general and the minister of
justice were replaced, and the former deputy minister for security and the head
of the former Department 10 were arrested. Control of the prisons, which until
then had been run by the Internal Affairs Ministry, was handed over to the
Justice Ministry. As a result of much in-fighting, the security organs began to
lose their sense of direction, and some of the more secret collaborators began
to withdraw their services. The strategy, however, did not change: the Security
Service was still interested in exactly the same people, and the prisons had been
only half emptied. Thousands of investigations were still carried out, and even
after reductions the network of informers numbered 34,000. The system of
generalized terror simply functioned on a slightly smaller scale. It had obtained
its objectives: the most active opponents of the regime had died by the thou-
sands, and society had understood the lesson, now knowing the fate that awaited
"defenders of people's democracy."

Real Socialism, or Selective Repression (1956-1981)

The cataclysm of "iron socialism" was of relatively short duration in Poland,
and with the coming of the thaw, the strategy of the Security Service began to
change slightly. The control exercised by the security organs over the popula-
tion was more discreet. At the same time, the security forces stepped up their
surveillance of legal and underground opposition movements, the Catholic
Church, and intellectual circles.

Politicians expected the security apparatus to be ready to disperse street
demonstrations at a moment's notice, a new role that began during the second
great revolt of workers in the Eastern bloc, in Poznah in June 1956. The
security forces, the police, and the KBW had all been caught by surprise by the
strike, both in practical terms and from an ideological point of view, and the
strike had been followed by a demonstration involving tens of thousands of
protestors who had attacked a number of public buildings. In one sense, the

Poland, the "Enemy Nation'

385

Poznah revolt was the last chapter in the civil war of 1945-1947, and was the
only occasion when the demonstrators were the first to open fire. The Party
reacted brutally: the prime minister declared that "any hand raised against the
people's regime will be cut off." The army moved in with tanks. Around
seventy people died, hundreds were arrested, and dozens of demonstrators
were brought before the courts; but the sentences issued during this period of
thaw, which set in during October 1956, were relatively light.

Shortly after the Eighth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish
United Workers' Party (PZPR, as the Communist Party had been renamed),
held on 19-21 October 1956, the KBP was dissolved and the Security Service
integrated into the MSW. The number of personnel in the security apparatus
fell by 40 percent, leaving 9,000, and 60 percent of all informers were dis-
missed. The so-called Protection Squads inside industry were suppressed, and
half of the investigations then under way were abandoned. The last Soviet
advisers returned to Moscow and were replaced by an official KGB mission.
The organization of the security apparatus was reviewed again, and many of
the cadres, who were for the most part of Jewish origin, were dismissed to make
way for younger people. The whole repressive apparatus was radically scaled
back. However, the Party leadership, including Gomulka, who had returned to
power in October 1956, opposed the trial of these officials. As a result, only a
few discreet trials were ever held. The general concern among PZPR leaders
was not to disturb a mechanism that might be called on again.

As early as February 1957, at the first general meeting of the MSW,
Minister Jerzy Wicha affirmed that the notion of an "intensification of the class
struggle" (as Stalin had proposed) was quite wrong, but he also managed to
claim that the struggle was becoming more and more radical. 11 From this
moment until the end of the system, the Security Service and other organiza-
tions, including the PZPR, the army, and the propaganda machine, constantly
acted in this contradictory manner.

Twenty years of silent, calm, and well-organized work, occasionally punc-
tuated by strikes and revolts, formed the basis for the system of repression.
This consisted of a control system with a large number of informers as well as
eavesdropping techniques and the monitoring of correspondence, all of which
was slowly perfected over the years. In the 1970s the new Security Service
(Sluzba bezpieczehstwa; SB) paid particularly close attention to economic tar-
gets, but its main interests, unlike those of the previous security services, were
the use of new technology and the profitability of various enterprises. Break-
downs no longer led to the arrest of workers, but to discreet pressure from the
Party organization for the removal of inefficient managers. The MSW had one
means of persuasion that had been irrelevant in the Stalinist years but that now
became extremely valuable: the authority to deliver a passport (which was good

386 The Other Europe

for only one trip). Because many people would quite willingly cooperate so that
they would be granted a passport, the MSW could pick up all sorts of intelli-
gence about what was happening inside institutions, businesses, and universi-
ties. Slowly but systematically, the SB rebuilt its network, particularly in areas
that were considered sensitive. In the struggle against the church the MSW
established a new, specialized department in June 1962 that soon had several
hundred employees. In the first half of the 1960s, there were numerous attacks
by the police on congregations who gathered to defend chapels or crosses that
had been erected without the permission of the authorities. Although court
sentences were relatively light, hundreds of people were beaten, and many more
were fined.

In 1967, after the Six-Day War between the Israelis and Arabs, the strug-
gle against "Zionism" became the new order of the day. This particular rallying
cry had a triple political, social, and international function, and the government
needed a new means of motivating nationalist fervor. A number of PZPR
officials began purveying antisemitic ideas to sideline the old guard and im-
prove their own career prospects. The antisemitic campaign also served to
discredit the student protest movements of March 1968. A special service
employing dozens of officials was created. The MSW passed on information
to local Party organizations to attack various individuals. The Security Service,
in Poland as well as in the U.S.S.R., was the great inspiration for "Antisemitism
without Jews," promoted by both the Party and the state. (This phrase was
commonly used to describe the Communist regime's promotion of antisemi-
tism even though Poland's once-huge community of Jews had been reduced to
a trivia] number by the Holocaust.)

The SB's comprehensive penetration of public groups undermined many
attempts to form illegal organizations. The members of such organizations,
who in many cases were very young, henceforth constituted the majority of
political prisoners. Most organizations had only a few dozen members. Intel-
lectuals were watched extremely closely. If necessary the security forces could,
with the express permission of the authorities, identify people who collaborated
with Radio Free Europe or the international press. Isolated arrests on such
grounds took place throughout the 1960s. The most important case was that
of Melchior Wankowicz, an elderly writer who had a large following. The SB
watched Communist heretics most closely of all. Cases in which Trotskyites or
Maoists were incarcerated met with relative indifference, but one exception was
the case of Jacek Kuroh and KaroJ Modzielewski. In 1970 forty-eight people
from the illegal political group known as Ruch (Movement) were arrested. The
leaders were sentenced to seven or eight years in prison — and this in a period
of relative leniency.

The use of violent repression had never ceased. Just a year after Gom-

Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

387

ulka's return to power, when young people came out in protest against the
closure of the weekly Po prostu (Simply), which in 1956 had played a consid-
erable role in the pressure for change. Dozens of people were beaten, and ten
received sentences. The strikes and demonstrations in March 1968 were ex-
tremely widespread. The protests were broken up with tremendous brutality;
2,700 people were arrested, and 1,000 went before courts of various types!
Dozens received prison sentences of several years, and hundreds were forcibly
enlisted in the army for "retraining."

Demonstrations by workers had different effects. Those that took place in
December 1970 rook a dramatic turn in the towns on the Baltic coast. Despite
the presence of special police units, the authorities called in the army as they
had done in Poznan fourteen years earlier. According to official statistics,
forty-five people were killed. Thousands of people were beaten by the police,'
often inside the police stations. Workers had to pass through what was known
as "the road to health/ 1 which consisted of two rows of policemen hitting them
with truncheons. But in keeping with the times, there were no prosecutions by
the authorities after the events of December, and all detainees were released
after Gomulka stepped down that month. In industry, the ringleaders of the
strikes suffered various types of intimidation.

During the relatively brief strikes that erupted in several towns in 1976,
the authorities forbade the use of arms by special police units, but this measure
was not sufficient to prevent several killings. Roughly 1,000 people were ar-
rested, several hundred were fined, and a few dozen received prison sentences.

The trials that followed were the occasion for renewed contact among the
families of the accused workers, young people, and dissident intellectuals, and
they sparked a large human-rights movement among the intelligentsia. They
also resulted in the establishment—for the first time since the PSL had been
disbanded in 1947 — of organized opposition groups, notably the Workers'
Defense Committee (KOR) and the Movement for the Defense of Human and
Civil Rights (ROPCIO). Faced with this new situation, the authorities were
forced to make a tactical choice. For several reasons, chief among them the
regime's growing financial dependence on the West and the threat that a
domestic crackdown would provoke international reprisals, the government
decided instead to employ tactical harassment: keeping people under close
watch for forty-eight hours (a measure authorized by the penal code), firing
people from their jobs, using psychological pressure, confiscating copying
equipment, and rejecting passport applications. The SB rapidly developed a
large network of agents. In 1979 the Special Department for Defense of the
Economy was reactivated in response to fears that the influence of the opposi-
tion would spread to industry.

This development had almost no lasting effect, and in mid-1980 a new

388

The Other Europe

wave of strikes began. Hard-liners were still in charge at the top of the Party,
but no one would take responsibility and make the decision to crush the strikes
by force. In any case, as was pointed out at a PZPR Politburo meeting on
28 August 1980, the troops that would be required were neither numerous
enough nor at all willing to confront the hundreds of thousands of strikers who
were occupying hundreds of factories. On this occasion, the strikers, unlike in
1956, 1970, and 1976, followed the advice of Jacek Kuroh, who had counseled:
"Don't just break up the Party committees; organize your own."

The government used the same tactics with Lech Walesa's Solidarity trade
union as it had in previous years. The intention was to weaken the union by
provoking divisions within it and gradually bringing it under the control of the
PZPR, as had been done in the 1940s with the Front for National Unity. In
October 1980 the MSW and the army made preparations to impose martial law
{start wojenny, or "a state of war"). The MSW systematically infiltrated Soli-
darity (by the following summer there were more than 2,400 informers in
Warsaw alone) and tried a series of small-scale confrontations to gauge the
reaction of the union, arresting its members for forty-eight hours without
charge and using force to evacuate public buildings that were occupied. By
February 1981 the lists of people to be arrested were ready, and the prisons had
been prepared for their arrival, but the PZPR leadership decided to continue
with just harassment and provocation techniques, as in Bydgoszcz in March
1981, when plainclothes police attacked unionists. The Polish Security Service,
which initially had been rather passive, received reinforcements, and after the
strikes of 1980 the Stasi, the East German secret police, set up an operational
group in Warsaw. 14 This in itself was quite an event, although the collaboration
of Eastern-bloc security services against the democratic opposition, coordi-
nated by the KGB, had already been in place for a few years.

This situation continued until early December 1981, when, to test the
power of Solidarity, the antiterrorist unit of the police broke up a strike at the
fire department in Warsaw. Ten days later, in the early hours of 13 December,
martial law was declared in Poland.

"A State of War," an Attempt at Generalized Repression

What followed was a large-scale police and military operation that had been
prepared with astonishing precision. More than 70,000 soldiers and 30,000
police, armed with 1,750 tanks, 1,900 armored personnel carriers, and 9,000
trucks and cars, along with several helicopter squadrons and transport aircraft,
went into action. Forces were concentrated in the main cities and industrial
centers. Their task was to break the strikes and to paralyze the normal life of
the country in a way that would cow the population and preclude any response

Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

389

by Solidarity. Telephone lines were cut (resulting in numerous deaths, as peo-
ple were unable to phone for ambulances), and the borders and gasoline sta-
tions were closed. Passes were required to move from one locality to another. A
strict curfew and comprehensive censorship were enforced. After ten days the
strikes and the demonstrations came to an end, proving the effectiveness of the
plan. Fourteen were killed, and several hundred were injured. About 4,000
strikers were arrested, and the first trials, which began at Christmas, resulted in
prison sentences of three to five years (with some as long as ten years). All the
accused were judged by special military courts, which were responsible for
halting and punishing "any infraction of martial law." Throughout this time
the Soviet, East German, and Czechoslovak armies were also on a war footing,
ready to step in if the strikes and demonstrations turned into a full-scale
insurrection rhat the Polish army could not quell.

The second part of the repression consisted of the internment of all
opposition and Solidarity militants, which began just before midnight on the
night of 1 2- 1 3 December. In a few days, by means of this simple administrative
decision, more than 5,000 people were locked up in forty-nine isolation centers
located outside the main cities. The primary objectives were to paralyze the
union and to replace the leaders with SB collaborators. The strategy of intern-
ment, which lasted for twelve months, was a seemingly less rigorous form of
imprisonment and relatively easy to apply, since it dispensed with the need for
magistrates or trials. In principle the SB did not use "forbidden methods"
(torture) on people who were interned, imprisoned, or sentenced, contenting
itself instead with "persuasion techniques" backed up by force. The SB also
intensified the recruitment of collaborators and efforts to persuade militants to
emigrate, often blackmailing their families.

Genera] Wojciech Jaruzelski, who had taken over as PZPR first secretary
on 1 8 October 1 98 1 (he retained his earlier posts as prime minister and defense
minister), had to cope with ultra-hard-liners in the Party, among them Party
cadres in industry, army officers, and retired MSW officials. These individuals
had formed self-defense groups (although no one had attacked them), arming
themselves with heavy guns. They demanded that those interned be brought
to trial and given stiffer sentences, including the death penalty. The hard-liners
wanted generalized terror; they regarded generalized repression (with no death
sentences) as unacceptably lenient. Despite an aggressive propaganda campaign
against Solidarity, the Party leaders decided against using the methods de-
manded by the hard-liners. Rather than crush social resistance by Stalinist
methods, they decided to "reduce tensions." Despite this policy, the authorities
forcefully suppressed Solidarity's demonstrations on 1 and 3 May 1982 (mark-
ing the anniversary of the 1791 constitution and hence a traditional festival)
and on 31 August 1982 (the anniversary of the Gdansk agreement of 1980).

390

The Other Europe

Thousands of people were arrested, hundreds were brought to trial, and six
people were killed. In these public trials, some of the leaders of the Solidarity
underground were sentenced to up to five years' imprisonment. After the
internment centers were closed in December 1982 and martial law was formally
lifted on 22 July 1983, there were still perhaps as many as 1,000 political
prisoners incarcerated for underground union activity, underground printing,
the dissemination of forbidden literature and books, or sometimes just for
taking up a collection for prisoners. The authorities also dismissed many people
from their jobs. Thousands of strikers suffered in that fashion in December
1981, and journalists in particular were singled out for "verification proce-
dures" — in all, more than a thousand of them lost their jobs.

With the exception of the first few weeks after 13 December 1981, Poland
did not again experience a period of repression comparable to that of 1949-
1956. The security apparatus did use a number of new methods, known in the
language of the secret services as ''disinformation and disorientation, 1 ' which
had already been practiced in the 1970s when the Ministry of Internal Affairs
set up the autonomous Group D of the Fourth Department, with many local
branches. Until 1981 this new department concentrated its attention on the
church and similar organizations. After martial law was proclaimed, it broad-
ened its activities to include Solidarity and carried out a series of attacks against
the union's properties. Group D also burned union buildings, set fire to cars,
beat up Solidarity militants, sent death threats, and distributed false tracts and
fake underground newspapers. In a few cases, victims were abducted and left
by the side of the road after being given huge doses of barbiturates or other
drugs. Several people died in beatings, including a schoolboy called Grzegorz
Przemyk, who was killed in a police station in 1983.

One of the best-known actions of this type, carried out by officers from
Group D, was the murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko on 19 October 1984.
According to the official version of events, the murderers were acting on their
own, without the knowledge of their superiors. This claim seems highly im-
plausible, given that the security system was very tightly controlled and all
important actions required a ministerial green light. In this case the MSW did
eventually prosecute and punish the culprits, but there were several other cases
of murders of priests and people linked to Solidarity that went unpunished. If
one is to judge by the reaction of the population, this sort of activity did not
achieve its main objective, which was to spread fear in selected circles. Instead,
opponents of the regime seem to have become more and more resolute.

The period following the violent confrontations of the first days of martial
law and the full-scale repression of the demonstrations in 1982-83 was marked
by more limited repression. Underground militants were aware that they were
rarely risking more than a few years in prison and that there were regular

Poland, the "Enemy Nation'

391

amnesties of political prisoners. By this stage of its evolution, the system was
far from its Stalinist origins.

From Cease-Fire to Capitulation, or the Government in Disarray (1986-1989)

That was the situation at the end of 1986, when under the influence of per-
estroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union and the stagnation of the Polish
economy, General Jaruzelski's team tried to pick out opposition groups with
which it could arrive at a compromise. This effort was preceded by a consider-
able abatement of repression. On 1 1 September 1986 the minister of internal
affairs, General Czeslaw Kiszczak, announced the liberation of the remaining
225 political prisoners. To maintain a minimum punitive standard, it was
decided that any participation in a forbidden organization or an underground
publication was to be punished by a fine or by detention under house arrest or
in a minimum-security facility. These repressions were thus similar to those of
1976-1980, with one important difference; now the government was con-
fronted not by hundreds, but by tens of thousands of militants. In early 1988,
after a first wave of strikes, repressions increased again, but on 26 August a
communique announced the opening of negotiations with Solidarity.

Although security-force personnel were frustrated with these develop-
ments, most behaved with discipline. However, it is likely that some of them
attempted to prevent an agreement from being reached. In January 1989 two
priests who worked for the pastoral section of Solidarity at a local level were
murdered. It is still unclear whether this was simply a criminal act or the work
of Group D.

After the elections of 4 June 1989 and the installation of the government
of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, control of the "ministries of force" (Internal Affairs
and Defense) remained in the hands of their previous chiefs. On 6 April 1990
the SB was dissolved and replaced by the Bureau for State Protection, the UOP.

In Poland the Communist system could never truly claim any legitimacy
or legal basis, since it respected neither international law nor its own constitu-
tion. As a criminal entity from its birth in 1944-1956, the system was always
ready to resort to brute force (including military force) on a grand scale.

Select Bibliography

The preceding chapter is based largely on my archival work for the Commis-
sion for Constitutional Responsibility, which has given me access to many files
that are still secret, particularly for the years 1980-1982. The following selec-
tion lists the most complete works published since the recent opening of the
relevant Soviet archives.

392

The Other Europe

Bedynski, Krystian. Sluzba xviezienna jako organ bezpieczemtwa publtcznego, 1944-1956
(The prison system as an organ of public security, 1944-1956). Warsaw: BGW,
1988.
Chmielarz, Andrzej, and Andrzej K. Kunert, eds. Proves szesnastu: Dokumenty NKWD
(The trial of sixteen: Documents of the NKVD). Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza
Rytm, 1995.
Ciesielski, Stanislaw, Grzegorz Hryciuk, and Aleksander Srebakowski. Masowe depor-
iacje radzieckie m okresie II wojny swiatowej (Mass Soviet deportations during
World War II). Wroclaw: Instytut Historyczny Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego,
1994. See especially the chapter on Polish deportations, pp. 26-82.
Dudek, Antoni, and Tomasz Marszalkowski. Walki uliczne w PRL, 1956-1989 (Street

battles in Poland, 1956-1959). Krakow: Wydawn. Krakowske, 1992.
Eisler, Jerzy. Marzec 1968: Geneza, przebieg, konsekwencje (March 1968: Origin, devel-
opment, consequences). Warsaw: Wydawn. Naukowe, 1991.
Golimont, Andrzej. Generalowie bezpiekt (Generals of the security apparatus). Warsaw:

BGW, 1992.
Gross, Jan T Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine

and Western Belorussta. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Iwanow, Mikolaj, Polacy m Zwiazku Radzieckim w latach 1921-1939 (Poles in the Soviet

Union, 1921-1939). Warsaw: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego, 1990.
Jarosz, Dariusz, and Tadeusz Wolsza, eds. Komisja Specjalna do Walki z Naduzyctami i
Szkodmctwem Gospodarczym, 1945-1954: Wybor dokumentow (Special Commis-
sion for the Fight against Economic Abuses and Sabotage, 1945-1954: Selected
documents). Warsaw: Karta, 1995.
Komorowski, Krzysztof, ed. Armia Krajowa: Rozwoj orgamzacyjny (Homeland Army:

Organizational development). Warsaw: Wydawn. Bellona, 1996.
Machcewicz, Pawel. Polski rok 1956 (Poland's year 1956). Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawn.

M6wia_Wieki, 1993.
Maciszewski, Jarema, ed. Tragedta Komumstycznej Partit Polski (The tragedy of the

Polish Communist Party). Warsaw: Ksiaika i Wiedza, 1989.
Marat, Stanislaw, and Jacek Snopkiewicz. Ludzie bezptekt: Dokumenty czasu bezprawta
(The security forces: Documentation of a period of lawlessness). Warsaw: Polska
oficyna wyd., 1990.
Materski, Wojciech, and Andrzej Paczkowski, eds. NKWD o Polsce t Polakach: Rekone-
sans archiwalny (The NKVD on Poland and the Poles: An archival investigation).
Warsaw: Instytut Studiow Politycznych PAN, 1996.
Materski, Wojciech, et al., eds. Katyn: Dokumenty zbrodni (Katyn: Documents of a

crime). Warsaw: Wydawn. "TRIO," 1995.
Michel, P., and G. Mink. Mort dun pretre. Lajfaire Popteluszko, analyse dune logique

norm alxsatr ice. Paris: Fayard, 1985.
Nalepa, Edward Jan. Pacyfikacja zbuntowanego mtasta: Wojsko Polskte w czerwcu 1956 r.
w Poznamu w swietle dokumentow wojskowych (Pacification of a rebel town: The
Polish army in Poznah in June 1956 in light of military documents). Warsaw:
Wydawn. Bellona, 1992.

Poland, the "Enemy Nation'

393

Noskova, A. F, ed. NKVD i pohkoe podpole 1944-1945 [po tl osobym papkam" J. V.

Stalma (The NKVD and the Polish underground, 1944-1945, based on the "spe-
cial files" of J. V. Stalin). New ed. Moscow: Institut balkanistiki i slavyanove-

deniya, 1994.
Otwinowska, Barbara, and Jan Zaryn, eds. Polacy wobec przemocy 1944-1956 (Poles in

the face of violence, 1944-1956). Warsaw: Editions Spotkania, 1996.
Paczkowski, Andrzej, ed. Aparat bezpieczemtwa w latach 1944-1956: Taktyka, strategta,

melody (The security apparatus, 1944-1956: Tactics, strategy, methods). 2 vols.

Warsaw: Instytut Studiow Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1994, 1996.
Poksinski, Jerzy. TUN: Tatar— Utnik Nowicki. Warsaw: Wydawn. Bellona, 1992.
Popinski, Krzysztof, Aleksander Kokurin, and Aleksander Gurjanovv. Drogt imierci:

Ewakuacja wt^zien sowwckich z Krezow Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej w czerwcu i

Itptu 1941 (Paths of death: The evacuation of Soviet prisoners from eastern

Poland under the Second Republic in June and July 1941). Warsaw: Karta, 1995.
"ReJ<a Jezowa." Karta (Warsaw), no 1 1, special issue (1993).
Sariusz-Skapska, Isabella. Polscy swiadkmme Gulagu: Uteratura lagrowa, 1939-1989

(Polish witnesses of the Gulag: Literature from the camps, 1939-1989). Krakow:

Universitas, 1995.
Siedlecki, Julian. Losy Polakow w ZSRR w latach 1939-1986 (The fate of Poles in the

U.S.S.R, 1939-1986). London: Gryf, 1987.
Suchorowska, Danuta. Wtelka edukacja: Wspomnienia wiezniow politycznych PRL,

1945-1956 (A great education: Memoirs of political prisoners in Poland, 1945-

1956). Warsaw: Agencja Omnipress, 1990.
Szwagrzyk, Krzysztof. Golgota we Wroclawtu (The Golgotha of Wroclaw). Wroclaw:

Komisja Badania Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, 1995.
Topol, Andrzej, ed. Obozy pracy przymusowej na Gornym S/qsku (Forced -labor camps

in Upper Silesia). Katowice: Wydawn. Uniwersytetu Slaskiego, 1994.
Turlejska, Maria. Te pokolema zalobami czarne: Skazani na smierce t ich s(dziowte 1944-

1954 (These generations black with mourning: Those condemned to death and

their judges, 1944-1954). London: u Aneks," 1989.
Walichnowski, Tadeusz, ed. Ochrona bezpieczemtwa panstwa i porzqdku publtcznego w

Polsce, 1944-1988 (Defense of state security and public order in Poland, 1944—

3988). Warsaw: ASW, 1989.
Zaron Piotr. Obozy jencow polskuh w ZSRR w latach 1939-1941 (Camps of Polish

prisoners in the U.S.S.R., 1939-1941). London: Unicorn Publishing Studio, 1994.

Central and Southeastern Europe

395

Central and Southeastern Europe

Karel Bartosek

Imported" Terror?

In Central Europe, one must always think of terror in relation to the war,
which was its most extreme expression in the first half of this century. World
War II, which began in this region, far surpassed General Uudcndorffs "total
war." What Miguel Abensour described as the "democratization of death"
thereafter affected tens of millions of people as total annihilation beeame an
integral part of the idea of war. Nazi barbarism struck the entire population,
particularly with the extermination of the Jews. The figures themselves are
eloquent: in Poland, military losses accounted for 320,000 dead, while civilian
losses were 5.5 million; in Hungary, there were 140,000 military losses and
more than 300,000 civilian deaths; in Czechoslovakia, civilian losses were 80-
90 percent of the total.

Bur the great terror of the war did not come to an end with the German
defeat. With the arrival of the Red Army, the fighting arm of the Communist
regime, populations underwent "national cleansing," which had a quite specific
character in this region. Political commissars and counterintelligence units in
this army, under SMERSH and the NKVD, were deeply involved in such
operations. The repression was especially severe in the countries that had sent
troops to fight against the Soviet Union — Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia —
where the NKVD deported hundreds of thousands to the Soviet gulags. Their
exact number is still being calculated.

According to new studies in Hungary and Russia published since the
opening of the archives — studies that are quite conservative regarding the exact
figures — hundreds of thousands of people were deported: soldiers and civil-
ians, children as young as thirteen, and old men of eighty. Approximately
40,000 were taken to the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine, which had be-
longed to Czechoslovakia but was occupied by Hungary in 1939 in accordance
with the 1938 Munich agreement and then annexed by the Soviet Union in
1944. From Hungary, which had a population of about 9 million in 1944, more
than 600,000 people were deported (the Soviet figure of 526,604 is based on
the number of people who arrived at the camps; it does not take into account
those who died in transit camps in Romania). There were camps in Brasov,
Timisoara, Sighet Marmatiel, Moldavia, Bessarabia, and Sambor; around 75
percent of all deportees passed through these. Among the deportees were Jews
who had been engaged in the work battalions of the Hungarian army. Two-
thirds of these prisoners were sent to forced-labor camps and one-third to
prison camps, where the mortality rate, as a result of epidemics, was twice as
high. Current estimates suggest that around 200,000 of these deportees from
Hungary — including people belonging to the German minority, Russians who
had arrived after 1920, and French and Poles who were living in Hungary —
never returned. 1

Some of these purges were carried out by "popular" or "extraordinary"
courts. At the end of the war, and in the first months of the postwar period,
violent extrajudicial action was common, including executions, assassinations,
torture, and the taking of hostages. This was facilitated by the absence of, or
the failure to respect, international conventions regarding prisoners of war or
the civilian population. Bulgaria, which had a population of 7 million at the
time, was particularly noteworthy in this respect. Immediately after 9 Septem-
ber 1944, when the Popular Patriotic Front seized power and the Red Army
marched into the country, a police force and a security department controlled
by the Communist Party moved into action. On 6 October "people's tribunals"
were established by decree. By March 1945 they had issued 10,897 sentences
in 13 3 trials and condemned 2,138 people to death, including the regents, the
brother of King Boris III, high-ranking officers, policemen, judges, industrial-
ists, and journalists. According to specialists, a savage purge accounted for the
death or disappearance of another 30,000 to 40,000 people, mainly the local
nobility, mayors, teachers, Orthodox priests, and shopkeepers. In 1989, thanks
to witnesses who were no longer afraid to talk, previously unknown mass graves
were uncovered. Yet Bulgaria had never sent troops to fight the Soviet Union
and had saved most of its Jews from genocide. To get an idea of the scale of
Communist repression in the country, one can compare the number of victims
from the period of monarchic rule in 1923-1944, often thought of as dictatorial:

394

396

The Other Europe

according to an investigation by the new parliament in 1945, 5,632 people were
assassinated, executed, or died in prison or as a result of a prison sentence
during that period. 2 From 1941 to 1944, the years of antifascist resistance and
its repression, only 357 people — not even all resistance fighters — were con-
demned to death and lost their lives.

Purges under the influence of the Red Army brought about a generalized
fear in the societies concerned. The purges affected not only those who had
actively supported the Nazis or the local fascists, but also many others who were
innocent or had simply refused to take sides.

In a Bulgarian documentary made after the fall of the Communist regime
in the early 1990s, one woman recounted an episode in the autumn of 1944:

The day after my father was first arrested, another policeman arrived
around midday and instructed my mother to go to Police Station No. 10
at five o'clock that afternoon. My mother, a beautiful and kind woman,
got dressed and left. We, her three children, all waited for her at home.
She came back at half past one in the morning, white as a sheet, with her
clothes tattered and torn. As soon as she came in, she went to the stove,
opened the door, took off all her clothes, and burned them. Then she
took a bath, and only then took us in her arms. We went to bed. The
next day she made her first suicide attempt, and there were three more
after that, and she tried to poison herself twice. She's still alive, I look
after her, but she's quite severely mental ly ill. I have never found out
what thev actually did to her,'

At this time, after the 'liberation by the Red Arm}," which, according to
the official propaganda, established international relations of a "new type,"
many people tried to change their affiliations, and denunciations Hew thick and
fast. Name changes were common; Rosenzweigs often quickly became
Rozariskis, and Breitenfelds became Bares.

The terror in Central and Southeastern Europe did not stop with this,
The armed struggle against the new authorities continued in Poland, prolong-
ing the war, and also affected Slovakia in 1947, when the Bandera units fleeing
from Ukraine arrived. At the same time, armed groups of former members of
the fascist Iron Guard, calling themselves the "Black Shawls," roamed the
Carpathian Mountains. Central Europe was still prey to virulent antisemitistm
The last pogroms or attempted pogroms in European history took place in 1946
in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

An aggressive anti-German nationalism took hold in Central Europe.
Although this was understandable in light of the Nazi German occupation, it
hindered the evolution of democratic behavior. Violence was common on a
day-to-day level, particularly in the deportation of millions of people belonging

Central and Southeastern Europe

397

to German minorities who had been in some regions since as long ago as the
thirteenth century. More than 6.3 million Germans were forced to leave their
homes in the territories of Silesia and Pomerania, which had been given to
Poland; roughly 3 million were thrown out of Czechoslovakia, 200,000 from
Hungary, and more than 100,000 from Yugoslavia. These impersonal figures
represent millions of individual dramas. While many of the men were soldiers
in prisoner-of-war camps, women, children, and old people were forced out of
their houses, apartments, businesses, workshops, and farms. This massive
transfer, which took place with official backing from the Allies in the summer
of 1945, had been preceded in some countries by unofficial outbreaks of vio-
lence. Czech nationalists had been particularly ruthless, and in the hunt for
Germans had killed several thousand civilians.

Thus there were elements of terror present in Central Europe before the
installation of the Communist regimes, and violence was an integral part of the
recent experience and mentality of the countries concerned. Societies were
often powerless to resist the new wave of barbarism that was about to descend
upon them.

The Communist parties were instrumental in the new violence. Their
leaders and disciples were often faithful followers of the Bolshevik doctrine,
"enriched' 1 in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Stalin. As we have seen
in previous chapters, the goal of all their actions was quite clear: to ensure by
any means necessary that the Communist Party had a monopoly on power, and
that the Party played the same leading role that it did in the Soviet Union.
There was never any attempt at power-sharing, political pluralism, or parlia-
mentary democracy, even if the parliamentary system was formally retained.
The doctrine in place at the time presented the Soviet Union as the glorious
victor in the struggle against Nazi Germany and its allies, and the principal
force and universal guide toward worldwide revolution. Naturally, local Com-
munist forces were expected to coordinate and subordinate their activities to
the center of world Communism, in Moscow, and its chief, Stalin.

The Communist monopoly on power was assured almost at the moment
of liberation in two countries: in Yugoslavia, where the Communists were led
by Josip Broz, better known as Tito; and in Albania, where Enver Hoxha had
risen to the leadership of the Communist Party. These two leaders had domi-
nated their respective national resistance movements against the Nazi or Italian
invaders, and despite pressure from outside, and even from the Soviet Union,
they accepted power-sharing for only very limited periods.

Rarely in the course of history had the arrival of a new regime been
preceded by a bloodbath on the scale of the one seen in Yugoslavia, where out
of a population of 15.5 million, 1 million people died. A series of ethnic,
religious, ideological, and civil wars tore the country apart, and many of the

398

The Other Europe

victims were women, children, and old people. This was a truly fratricidal war,
and the genocide and purges ensured that at the moment of liberation, Tito
and the Communist Party had hardly any political rivals left. They swiftly set
about eliminating them all the same. Events took a similar turn in neighboring
Albania, with the help of the Yugoslav Communists.

In other countries in Central and Southeastern Europe, with the exception
of Czechoslovakia, the prewar Communist parties had been marginal forces,
with only a few thousand members. In Bulgaria, for instance, the Party had
been an important force from 1919 to 192.1 and had then been forced under-
ground (although it did play an important role in the resistance). Throughout
the region, Partv leaders were convinced that the moment was right and that
they had the support of the Red Army. They quickly emerged as an important
political force and joined the new governments. Almost everywhere Commu-
nists took charge of the ministries in charge of repression (the internal affairs
and justice ministries) and of those that might be used in a similar manner,
such as the defense ministries. In 1944-45 Communist parties held the Ministry
of Internal Affairs in Czechoslovakia, E3ulgaria, Hungary, and Romania; the
Ministry of Justice in Bulgaria and Romania; and the Ministry of Defense in
Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. The ministers of defense in both Czechoslovakia
and Bulgaria, Generals Ludvik Svoboda and Darnian Velchev, were crypto-
Communists. Communists were also in charge ot the state security or secret
police (the Durzhavna Sigurnost in Bulgaria, and the Allamvedelmi Osztaly, or
AYO — later the Allamvedelmi Hatosag, or AY hi — in Hungary) and of the
intelligence services in the armed forces. In Romania the Special Service, which
was the precursor of the infamous Securitate, was controlled by Emil Bodn^ras,
a former army officer who, according to Cristina Boico, had been a Soviet agent
in the 1930s. 4 Everywhere the Communists strengthened their grip on the
apparatus of terror, The need for absolute control of the AYO was stressed by
Mat > as Rakosi, the secretary general of the Hungarian Workers 1 (Communist)
Pariv: "This is the onlv institution of which we must keep total control,
categorically refusing to share it with any other parties in the coalition, regard-
less of the proportion of our respective forces. "*

The Political Trials of Non-Communist Allies

Occasional speeches given bv certain Communist leaders regarding the ''na-
tional road to Socialism" without the Soviet-style '"dictatorship of the proletar-
iat" often acted as a cover for the real strategics followed by Communist parties
in Central and Southeastern Europe This strategy was identical with the
Bolshevik practices used in Russia in 1917, and repression followed the tried
ami tested Soviet pattern. In the same manner that the Bolsheviks had elimi-

Central and Southeastern Europe

399

nated their initial allies such as the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Central and
East European Communist parties eliminated their coalition partners. Analysts
have discussed the "process of Sovietization" in these countries, and the strate-
gic plan laid out in Moscow. It was Stalin himself who ordered the rejection of
the Marshall Plan in the summer of 1947, and who instigated the creation of
the Communist Information Bureau (the Cominform) in September 1947 to
increase his control of the parties in power.

There were, of course, many differences in the trajectory of events in these
various countries. But everywhere it was the aim of the Communist parties to
eliminate their actual or potential adversaries and to crush all political, ideo-
logical, and spiritual competitors. Marxist-Leninist doctrine demanded that the
rivals be wiped out for good, and all means to that end were considered
legitimate, including death sentences, execution, long prison sentences, and
forced exile in the West. The last of these options was a less cruel procedure,
but it was very effective at breaking down resistance, and its importance has
been generally underestimated in the analysis of the history of these countries.
After all, the right of abode and the right to a home are fundamental human
rights. In addition, in 1944-45 tens of thousands of Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles,
and other nationals fled their countries in fear of the Red Army.

The first tool used in the panoply of repression was the political trial of
non-Communist leaders, many of whom had been resistance fighters and had
suffered in the prisons and camps of the Nazis or fascists. Under the direct
control of the Red Army, the trials began first in the countries that had been
allies of Nazi Germany, notably Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. In the inter-
Allied commissions that were created in 1944 and existed until 1947, the Soviet
military was a dominant force and often forcibly imposed its own point of view.
In Hungary the Smallholders 1 Party, which had been the great victor in the
1945 elections, gaining 57 percent of the vote, became the target not only of
considerable political wrangling but also of large-scale police operations. In
January 1947 the Ministry of Internal Affairs, under the control of the Com-
munist Laszlo Rajk, who had fought in the International Brigades in Spain and
been a leader of the resistance toward the end of the war, announced the
discovery of a plot against the state involving the Hungarian "Community"
group, which had been set up in secret during the war to fight the Nazi invaders.
The police arrested a minister and several deputies from the Smallholders'
Party; the alleged ringleader, Gyorgy Donath, was sentenced to death and
executed; the others received long prison sentences.

In February 1947 Bela Kovacs, the secretary general of the Smallholders,
was arrested by the Soviet authorities for "plotting against the security of
the Red Army. 1 ' He was detained in the Soviet Union until 1956. The number
of victims rose rapidly, for in Hungary, as everywhere else, the Commu-

400

The Other Europe

nist secret police believed that every plot must include a large number of
people.

The result of all this was that two years after the end of the war what had
been the most important party in Hungary was ''decapitated and decimated. 116
Like Bela Kovacs, its main representatives — Ferenc Nag, the president of its
council; Zoltan Tildy, his predecessor; Bela Varga, president of the National
Assembly; Jozsef Kovago, the mayor of Budapest — and do/ens of deputies and
other party members were all either in prison or in exile. Between late 1947
and early 1949, both the Independence Party and the People's Democratic
Party were dissolved. In what was known as the l 'salami tactics 11 later recom-
mended by Matyas Rakosi, the secretary general of the Hungarian Workers 1
Party, who had returned from Moscow with the Red Army, opponents, such as
the Smallholders 1 Party, were eliminated in successive slices. The belief was
that a few slices at a time would never result in violent indigestion.

In February 1948 the persecution of the Social Democrats in Hungary
continued with the arrest of Justus kelcmen, under secretary of state to the
minister of industry. Persecution of the Social Democrats (excluding Poland)
probably began in Bulgaria, where in June 1946 their leader Krastiu Pastukhov
was sentenced to five years in prison. By the summer of 1946 fifteen members
of the Central Committee for Independent Social Democracy, led by Kosta
Lulchev, found themselves in prison. Lulchev and other leaders were arrested
in 1948 and sentenced in November to fifteen years in prison. This form of
repression struck hard at all those opposed to the forced unification of Social
Democratic and Communist parties, such as Constantin Titcl Petrescu and
Anton Dimitriu, the president and secretary general of the Independent Social
Democratic Party in Romania, who were arrested in May 1948.

Many of these prisoners were detained under an extremely harsh regime
in the political prison at Sighet Marmatiel, on the northwestern border of
Romania. In May 1950 police trucks brought more than 200 well-known lead-
ing figures to Sighet, including several people who had served in the govern-
ment after 1945. Most of them were quite old, notably the leader of the
National Peasant Party, Iuliu Maniu, who was seventy-three, and the head of
the Briitianu family (instrumental in the founding of modern Romania), who
was eighty-two. The prison was filled with politicians, generals, journalists,
priests, Greek and Catholic bishops, and others. In the space of five years,
fifty-two of these prisoners died.

The alliance with the Social Democrats thus revealed itself to be purely
tactical; pluralism of workers 1 movements never really had a place under Com-
munist regimes. In the Soviet-occupied zone of German), which later became
East Germany, 5,000 Social Democrats, of whom 400 died in prison, were
sentenced by Soviet and East German courts between 1945 and 1950. The last
great trial of Social Democrats in this period took place in Prague in 1954.

Central and Southeastern Europe

401

In Bulgaria, in the run-up to the elections of 27 October 1946, twenty-four
Agrarian Union Party activists were killed. Nikolai Petkov, the party's leader,
was arrested on 5 June 1 947 while attending a session at the National Assembly
with twenty-four other deputies. A republican Francophile, he had spent seven
years of exile in France after his brother, a deputy for the Agrarian Union Party,
was assassinated in 1924. In 1940 Petkov had been interned for a few months
in a camp in Gonda Voda and then placed under house arrest. At that time he
made preparations to set up a Patriotic Front, which included in its ranks many
Communist resistance fighters. He became deputy prime minister in the in-
terim government of Bulgaria at the end of the war, but resigned in protest
against the terrorist violence carried out by the minority Communists during
the period of cleansing. After Petkov became the head of the opposition, his
earlier alliance with the Communists counted for nothing. He was brought up
on spurious charges of conspiring in an armed plot against the government,
tried on 5 August, and condemned to death on 16 August.

After the summary statement of the prosecution requesting the death
sentence, Petkov had the right to make a last statement. He calmly took a paper
out of his pocket and read out the following:

Respected ludges, being of calm conscience and fully aware of my
responsibility to the Bulgarian justice system, to Bulgarian society in
general, and to the political organization of which I am a member and
for which I am ready to lay down my life, I believe it is my duty to make
the following declaration.

I have never participated, nor ever had the intention of participat-
ing, in any illegal activity directed against the popular government of
9 September 1944, of which, together with the rest of the Agrarian
Union, I was an architect.

I have been a member of the Bulgarian Agrarian Lnion since 1923.
The fundamental principles of its ideology are peace, order, legality, and
popular power. Its only weapons are the ballot box and the written and
spoken word. The Agrarian Union of Bulgaria has never had any re-
course to secret or conspiratorial organizations, and has never taken part
in any coup d'etat, although it has often been the victim of such actions.

Petkov then went on to describe the events of 9 June 1923 and 19 May
1934, a the beginnings of fascism in Bulgaria/' and the events surrounding his
resignation from the government.

If, as my accusers have suggested, I really was greedy for power and
mindful only of my career, today I would be deputy chairman of the
Council of Ministers of Bulgaria. From the moment I went over to the
opposition, and from the moment of my arrest, I have not ceased to
work toward an understanding between the Agrarian Union and the
Communist Workers 1 Party, which I consider to he a historical necessity.

402

The Other Europe

I have never been part of any reactionary force either within the country
or abroad.

Respected judges, for more than two years now, since 25 June 1945
to give the exact date, I have been the victim of the crudest and most
merciless campaign ever directed against a politician in Bulgaria. No
part of my private or public life has been spared. I have been burned in
effigy three times in Sofia alone and about ten times elsewhere. I have
read my own obituary notice at the entrance to the cemetery in Sofia on
these occasions, and I never complained. I will also face with courage
anything else that awaits me, for such is the ineluctable nature of the sad
reality that is Bulgarian politics today.

As a modest worker in public life, 1 don't have the right to com-
plain, particularly when two people universally recognized as great men
of state, Dimitri Petkov and Petko Petkov, were assassinated like traitors
in the streets of Sofia. [Petkov's father, Dimitri, then chairman of the
National Council, had been shot twice in the back on 11 March 1907.
Petko, his brother, a deputy, had been shot repeatedly in the chest on 14
June 1924 and died immediately.]

Respected judges, I allow myself to believe that in reaching a ver-
dict you w^ill leave aside political concerns that have no place in a court
of law, and look only at the facts that have been established, I am sure, or
at least I hope, that in following your conscience as judges you will
acquit me of the charges laid against me.

On 16 August, after hearing the sentence that condemned him to death
by hanging "in the name of the people of Bulgaria, 1 ' Nikolai Petkov cried out
loudly: "No! Not in the name of the people of Bulgaria! I am being sent to my
death by your foreign masters from the Kremlin and elsewhere. The people of
Bulgaria, crushed by this bloody tyranny that passes for justice, will never
believe your lies!"'

Petkov was hanged on 23 September. Among the Communist leaders and
State Security (Durzhavna Sigurnost) workers who arranged his arrest and trial
was a certain Traicho Rostov, who was himself hanged two years later.

In the two other former Nazi client states, political trials were also used
first against the leaders of the powerful agrarian parties, who had contributed
to breaking the alliance with Germany and thus provoked the arrival of the Red
Army. In Romania in October 1947 Iuliu Vlaniu and Ion Mihalache were
sentenced to life imprisonment on the basis of police evidence after a lengthy
trial, together with seventeen other key officials from the National Peasant
Party. The trial paved the way for the massive prosecution of non-Communist
politicians. Maniu died in prison in 1952. Even before the elections of 18
November 1946, several politicians, including the liberal Yintila Bratianu, were
convicted bv a miiitarv court on charges of running a terrorist organization.

Central and Southeastern Europe

403

Concerning the political trials of previous allies, Czechoslovakia perhaps
offers the purest and most cynical examples. It ended the war on the side of
the victors, and its restoration in 1945 swiftly enabled people to forget the
earlier alliance of the Slovaks with Germany, which had effectively been ended
by the Slovak national uprising against the Nazi occupiers in late August 1944.
In November 1945, as a result of the accord signed with the Allies, the Red
Army was forced to retreat, as were the Americans, who had occupied the
province of Western Bohemia. The Czechoslovak Communist Party won the
elections in May 1946, but it was in the minority in Slovakia, where the
Democratic Party gathered 62 percent of the vote. The politicians who had
been sharing power with the Communists since the liberation had already
proved their attachment to freedom and democracy by taking part in the
resistance inside and outside the country, as well as in Slovakia.

The opening of the Czechoslovak and Soviet archives has brought to light
the perverse behavior of the followers of the Bolsheviks. In December 1929
their leader, Klement Gottwald, had made the following claims in a speech to
the parliament in response to accusations that the Czechoslovak Communist
Party was following orders from Moscow: u We are the party of the Czecho-
slovakian proletariat, and naturally our supreme revolutionary headquarters is
in Moscow. And you know very well why we go to Moscow: we go there to
learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to wring your necks. You all know that
the Bolshevik Russians are past masters in that art!"*

After the elections of May 1946 this determined "wringer of necks,"
whose trajectory from autodidact worker to leader of the Czechoslovak Com-
munist Party was akin to that of the Frenchman Maurice Thorez, became the
chairman of the Council. He then became the director of all the repressions,
first behind the scenes and then in public.

The first target of political maneuvering and harassment by the State
Security (Statni bczpecnost; StB) organization was the Slovak Democratic
Party. The other non-Communist Czech parties, many of which were fueled
by anti-Slovak nationalism, mounted little opposition to these tactics. In Sep-
tember 1947 the Communist-controlled police announced the "discovery" of
a plot against the state in Slovakia. As a result of the ensuing crisis the Demo-
cratic Party lost its majority in the Slovak government, and two of its three
general secretaries were arrested.

The process of repression was accelerated considerably with the Prague
coup in February 1948, which opened wide the door for a Communist Party
monopoly of power. During the crisis in February, which was provoked by the
resignation of a majority of the non-Communist ministers, many people found
themselves in prison, including the Slovak Jan Ursiny, the president of the
Democratic Party, who had been deputy prime minister in the Gottwald gov-

404

The Other Europe

ernment until he was forced to resign in the autumn of 1947; and Prokop
Drtina, the justice minister. Both men had been in the resistance during the
occupation.

The leaders of the Slovak Democratic Party were the first to be tried
publicly, in April and May 1948. Twenty-five people were sentenced, one for
thirty years. By then the general aims of judicial and police repression seem to
have been already established: enemies inside the army and the security services
were sought out, as were Democratic-Liberal and Social Democratic Party
leaders, all of whom had been allies until February 1948; some of them had
even been strongly in favor of close cooperation with the Communists.

The cases of Heliodor Pika and Josef Podsednik are typical of the fate of
political prisoners at this time.

General Heliodor Pika, a great patriot and democrat, had played an im-
portant role in the resistance. Favorably disposed toward cooperation with the
Soviet Union, he was promoted to the leadership of the Chechoslovakian
military delegation in the U.S.S.R. in the spring of 1941, well before 22 June
and the German attack. His actions and policies favoring amicable collaboration
with Moscow had been well known since the 1930s, as well as his conflicts with
the Soviet state. The latter stemmed from his attempts to free the more than
10,000 Czech citizens who were in Soviet camps and prisons, mostly for "illegal
crossing of U.S.S.R. borders' 1 in 1938-39, when they had attempted to join the
Czechoslovak army that was forming inside the U.S.S.R. His patriotism and
his services to the "national and democratic revolution" were incontestable even
after 1945, when he was working as first assistant to the Czechoslovak army's
chief of staff.

Since late 1945, Pika's activities had been closely monitored by the mili-
tary intelligence services, led by Bedfich Reicin, a Communist with close ties to
the Soviet intelligence services. In February 1948 General Pika was dismissed
from the army; in May he was arrested and accused of sabotaging the Czecho-
slovak war effort in the U.S.S.R. by working as a British agent. He was sen-
tenced to death on 28 January 1949 by a special court established in mid- 1948
for purposes of political repression. He was hanged on the morning of 21 June
1949 in the courtyard of the prison in Pl/en. Bedrich Reicin told his colleagues
that the Soviet Union had demanded the general's liquidation because he had
known too much about the Soviet intelligence services. Such knowledge un-
doubtedly also explains why Reicin himself was hanged three years later.

In February 1948 Josef Podsednik was the mayor of Brno, the capital of
Moravia. He had attained the post in the democratic elections of 1946 as a
candidate for the National Socialist Party (a party created in the early years of
the century that had nothing in common with Hitler's version of "National
Socialism"). As a man who favored the democratic and humanitarian ideal of

Central and Southeastern Europe

405

Tomas Masaryk, the first president of the republic, Podsednik was a repre-
sentative figure for a great number of Czech Socialists, who numbered more
than 60,000 as of 31 December 1947. He was also a sincere believer in coop-
eration with the Communists. After February 1948 the mayor of Brno decided
to emigrate, but then abandoned the idea in order to concentrate on helping
former party members who were being persecuted. Arrested on 3 September
1948, he was sentenced by the State Court in March 1949 to eighteen years in
prison for illegal activities, attempting to overthrow the regime by violent
means, liaison with reactionary foreign powers, and so on. Nineteen other party
members who were condemned at the same time received sentences totaling
seventy-four years in prison. All the witnesses in this trial were themselves
political prisoners awaiting trial. Other groups, including thirty-two activists
from southern Moravia, were later sentenced as part of the "Podsednik affair"
to a total of sixty-two years' imprisonment.

The Podsednik trial was a public one. Years later, Podsednik, who was
released in 1963 after serving fifteen years of his sentence, noted: "A few dozen
of the Czechoslovak Communist Party leaders came to the trial, which was the
first big political trial to be heard in the State Court, and they included Otto
Sling [who was later to receive the death sentence in the Slanksy trial], who
laughed at the moment the sentence was read out."

The elimination of" Democratic and Socialist allies in Czechoslovakia
culminated in the trial of Milada Horakova, which took place in Prague from
31 May to 8 June 1950. Thirteen people — the leaders of the Socialist Party, the
Social Democratic Party, and the People's Party, as well as one Trotskyite —
were sentenced. Four, including Horakova, received the death penalty; another
four received life imprisonment; and five were given sentences of between 15
and 28 years (totaling 1 10 years). The report prepared by the official Commis-
sion of Inquiry during the Prague Spring in 1968 shows that 300 other political
trials were linked to the Milada Horakova trial, and that more than 7,000 former
members of the Socialist Party alone were sentenced. Many of the larger trials
took place from May through July of 1950 in several provincial towns to
demonstrate the national dimension of the supposed conspiracy. In thirty-five
trials there were 639 sentences handed out, including 10 death sentences, 48
sentences of life imprisonment, and a total of 7,850 years in prison.

The Milada Horakova trial was a milestone in several respects. According
to the distinguished Czech historian Karel Kaplan, it was the country's first
real show-trial, and the first trial prepared directly by Soviet u advisers," the
heads of the Soviet special services, who had come to help orchestrate the
terror. It was a carefully prepared spectacle in which all the participants, from
witnesses to judges, knew their lines beforehand, and the whole show served as
an enormous propaganda coup for the authorities.

406

The Other Europe

The trial also marked an important stage in the history of repression in
Europe in general, and not simply in the history of Communism: a woman was
hanged, a woman who had fought bravely in the resistance in the earliest days
of the occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and who had then been
imprisoned for nearly five years by the Nazis. A female victim, in short, who
was also a democrat, who had never intended to put up any sort of armed
resistance to the Communist dictatorship.

The affair raises many questions. Why did the West not protest more
vociferously against this crime? Why did no one respond to Albert Einstein's
protests or collect signatures for a petition? Why did the others who had fought
in the resistance against the Nazis in the rest of Europe fail to respond, and
why did they not try to save one of their own from the gallows?

The following account of a Communist intellectual party game in Paris at
about this time sheds some light on the mentality then prevailing.

"Psychodramas" weren't much talked about at the end of 1951. I turned
up with Claire toward midnight on New Year's Eve, coming from one
family party at my relatives 1 to this other family party at Pierre Cour-
tade's house. [He was a Communist journalist and writer.] Everyone was
very happy. In fact, everyone was quite drunk. "You're the one we were
waiting for/' said all my friends. They explained the game to me, Jean
Duvignaud [an art historian and sociologist] said that every epoch in-
vents its own literary genre or form: the Greeks had had tragedy, the
Renaissance the sonnet, the classical age the five-act play in verse with
the three unities, etc. The socialist age had invented its own form: the
Moscow show-trial. These partygoers, who were all slightly the worse
for drink, had decided to play at being on trial. All they needed was an
accused, and as I had come last I was the obvious choice. Roger Vail land
[a Communist writer] was the prosecutor, Courtade was the defense
lawyer. I had to take my place in the dock. I resisted rather feebly, and
then decided to go along with it. The charges were very serious, as I had
broken ten different articles of the Code, and was accused of sabotaging
the ideological effort, collaborating with the cultural enemy, plotting
with international spies, philosophical high treason, etc. When I wanted
to argue during the examination, the procurator, lawyer, witnesses, etc.
all got quite angry. My lawyer's address to the court was terrible, and he
pleaded that there were attenuating circumstances, but that I should be
relieved of the burden of life as soon as possible. Thanks to the alcohol,
the clowning around soon became quite nightmarish, and what was
supposed to be a parody really began to hurt. When the sentence was
passed (I got the death sentence, of course), two women there, including
my wife, really began to get quite upset. Everyone was shouting and
crying, looking in the cupboards for indigestion tablets, putting cold

Central and Southeastern Europe

407

compresses on heads, etc. We all — judge, lawyer, and accused — attended
to these people and tried to calm them down, 1 think I was the only one
who wasn't drunk; but I wasn't the only one to feel ashamed.

No doubt about it, looking back on it now we were all quite mad.
There must be a point past which madness diminishes your responsibil-
ity. But before you get to that point, madness doesn't relieve you of the
burden of your responsibility. You choose madness to escape the noose
that is closing around your neck, which you don't dare slip.

Our insanity was the consequence of the insanity of the moment.
We were rationalizing and internalizing a sort of general dementia. 9

The Destruction of Civil Society

To understand what made such show-trials possible, we have to think very
carefully about the meaning of "civil society." Civil society evolves with capi-
talism and the formation of the modern state. As the counterpart to the power
of the state, it is also an independent force. It depends first of all on a system of
needs, in which private economic activity plays a primary role. Civil society
supposes an individual who has many needs, and it depends on the values of
these individuals, their consciences, actions, and their sense of freedom. Indi-
viduals are both selfish and citizens interested in public affairs and the commu-
nity. Lubomir Sochor, a philosopher and political thinker, defines civil society
as "the ensemble of suprafamilial, nonstate institutions that organize the mem-
bers of society into coordinated groups and allow them to express their opin-
ions and particular interests. Of course, the prerequisite is that these
institutions and organisms are autonomous and are not merely transformed
into offshoots of the state apparatus, or simple 'transmission belts' for state
power." 111 Among the organizations of civil society that constitute a means of
social control over the state are groups such as corporations and associations,
churches, unions, municipalities and local government bodies, regional self-
government groups, and political parties, as well as general public opinion.

The constant strategy of Communist repression, whose central aim was
always the establishment of absolute power and the elimination of political
rivals and anyone else who had any sort of real power in society, was to attack
systematically all the organisms of civil society. Because the aim was a monop-
oly on power and truth, the necessary targets were all other forces with political
or spiritual power. Hence the systematic targeting of unionists and political
activists, priests, journalists, writers, and the like.

There was also a sort of international criterion that operated in the choice
of victim. Governments that were totally subordinate to the Soviet Union
decreed that the many rich links existing between civil society and the outside

408

The Other Europe

world should all be severed. Social democrats, Catholics, Trotskyites, Protes-
tants, and others were all targeted not simply because of their domestic activi-
ties, but also because by their very nature they had strong, useful, and quite
traditional links with the outside world. The interests and aims of the global
strategy of the U.S.S.R. demanded that all these links be cut.

In the new "people's democracies," civil society was on the whole quite
weak. Before the war, its development had been halted by authoritarian or
semiauthoritarian regimes or by a rather backward level of economic and social
life. War, fascism, and the different policies of the occupying forces were all
factors in its relative weakness. When the liberation finally came, the behavior
of the Soviet Union and the bloody purges that followed were a further im-
pediment to the development of civil society.

Soviet intervention in the occupied zone of East Germany goes a long way
toward explaining the relatively mild nature of judicial and police repressions
there, and the absence of show-trials in the German Democratic Republic
during the period up to 1949. Elsewhere, repression and show-trials invariably
accompanied the founding of the new regimes. But in East Germany at that
moment there was no need for recourse to such means, since the new govern-
ment's aims had already been attained by policies pursued earlier. According
to studies conducted since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the occupying
Soviet forces interned 122,000 people in their zone in 1945-1950, 43,000 of
whom died in detention and 736 of whom were executed. By its own estimates,
the SED (Socialist Unity Party) adopted repressive measures against 40,000 to
60,000 people. 11

Czechoslovakia is an exception of a different type, because of the violent
repression of civil society after February 1948. Of all the countries in Central
and Southeastern Europe, it was the only one with a history of parliamentary
democracy in the interwar years, although there had been a limited experiment
in Romania as well. Czechoslovakia, at the time, was also one of the ten most
industrialized countries in the world. At the moment of liberation, it had by
far the most structured and developed civil society in Central and Southeastern
Europe, and it had quickly tried to reorganize itself in 1945. By 1946 more than
2.5 million citizens, or nearly half the adult population, belonged to one or
another of the four main Czech political parties in Bohemia, Silesia, and
Moravia. Two million Czechs and Slovaks were members of unions. Hundreds
of thousands of people belonged to numerous organizations and associations.
One organization alone, the Sokol (Falcon) Club, a politicized sporting asso-
ciation that had existed since the previous century and had been an important
factor in nationalist affirmation, counted more than 700,000 members in 1948.
The first Sokol members were arrested in the summer of 1948 at the slet, the
annual sporting assembly festival. The first political trials of the members

Central and Southeastern Europe

409

began in September. Two years later, with several thousand of its leaders
arrested, the organization had been almost completely destroyed. The segments
in the villages were simply integrated into the state apparatus. Like so many
other organizations in civil society, such as the Boy Scouts and various Catholic
and Protestant organizations, the Sokol was reduced to nothing by persecutions
and repression, purges, the occupation or expropriation of property, and the
confiscation of goods — all activities in which the secret police, under the cover
of the "action committees" created in February 1948, excelled.

For the Communist governments, the churches were the greatest obstacle
to annihilation or control of the mechanisms of civil society. The Catholic
Church, with its organization directed from the Vatican, represented a rival
international faith to the one with its headquarters in Moscow. Moscow's
well-defined strategy was to force the Roman Catholic and Uniate churches to
break their links with the Vatican and to keep the resulting "national 1 ' churches
in its own power. This much can certainly be understood from consultations
that took place between Soviet leaders and the Information Bureaus of the
different Communist Parties in June 1948, as reported by Rudolf Slansky, the
secretary general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

To reduce the influence of the churches on society, bring them under the
bureaucratic control of the state, and transform them into instruments of
policy, the Communists combined repression, attempts at corruption, and even
infiltration of the church hierarchy. The opening of the archives, in Czecho-
slovakia for instance, has revealed that numerous priests and even a few bishops
actively collaborated with the secret police. Were they perhaps trying to avoid
a worse fate?

The first antireligious repressions — if one excludes the victims of the
purges, such as the Bulgarian priests mentioned above — probably took place in
Albania. Gaspar Thaci, the archbishop of Shkoder, died under house arrest at
the hands of the secret police. Vincent Predushi, archbishop of Durres, who
was sentenced to thirty years of hard labor, died in February 1949, probably as
a result of torture. In February 1948 five clergymen, including Bishops Gjergj
Volaz and Fran Gjini of the apostolic delegation, were condemned to death and
shot. More than a hundred priests, nuns, and seminarians were executed or
died in custody. At least one Muslim also died as part of this wave of persecu-
tion, a lawyer by the name of Mustafa Pipa, who was executed for coming to
the defense of the Franciscans. Years later, in 1967, Enver Hoxha was to declare
that Albania had become the first officially atheist state in the world. The official
newspaper Nendon (November) proudly announced that same year that all
mosques and churches, 2,169 in total, including 327 Catholic sanctuaries, had
been destroyed or closed.

In Hungary violent confrontations between the government and the

410

The Other Europe

Catholic Church began in the summer of 1948, with the nationalization of
numerous religious schools. 12 Five priests were sentenced in July, and more in
August. Joszef Cardinal Mindszenty, the indomitable primate of Hungary, was
arrested on 26 December 1948 and sentenced to life imprisonment on 5 Feb-
ruary 1949. He was accused of plotting with various accomplices against the
state and of espionage for foreign imperial powers, including the United States.
A year later the government occupied most convents and monasteries, expelling
the majority of the twelve thousand monks and nuns. In June 1951 Monsignor
Jozsef Grosz, the archbishop of Kalocsa, leader of the episcopate and a close
friend of Mindszenty, met the same fate as the primate. Persecution of the
churches and religious orders in Hungary did not affect only Catholics. The
Lutheran and Calvinist churches were considerably Jess numerous but were
also affected and also lost pastors and bishops, including an eminent Calvinist,
Bishop Laszlo Ravasz.

In Czechoslovakia as in Hungary, the government tried to create a dis-
senting faction within the Catholic Church that was ready to collaborate with
the government. When this tactic met with only partial success, the scale of
repressions increased. In June 1949 Josef Beran, the archbishop of Prague, who
had been imprisoned by the Nazis in 1942 in camps in Terezin and Dachau,
was placed under house arrest and later interned. In September 1949 several
dozen vicars who were protesting the new law concerning churches were ar-
rested. On 3 1 March 1950 a trial of several high-ranking church officials began
in Prague; they were accused of spying for the Vatican and other foreign
powers, organizing arms caches, and preparing a coup d'etat. The Redempror-
ist Jan Mastiliak, the rector of the theological institute, received a life sentence,
and others received a total of 132 years of prison. On the night of 13-14 April
1950 a massive operation against the convents was carried out, which had been
prepared with military precision by the Ministry of Interior. Almost all the
nuns and priests were removed and interned. At the same time the police placed
all bishops under house arrest and forbade them to communicate with the
outside world.

In the summer of 1950 in eastern Slovakia the regime ordered the liqui-
dation of the Greek Catholic Uniate Church and ordered it to fuse with the
Orthodox Church, a procedure that had been used in Soviet Ukraine in 1946.
Dissenting priests were interned or thrown out of their parishes. The archpri-
est of Soviet Ruthenia, Jozsef Csati, was convicted in a trial that was clearly
rigged, and then deported to a camp in Vorkuta, in Siberia, where he was
imprisoned until 1956.

Repression against the churches was conceived and controlled bv
Czechoslovak Communist Party leaders. In September 1950 the leadership
approved a series of trials of Catholics, which opened in Prague on 27 Novcm-

Central and Southeastern Europe

411

ber 1950. Nine people connected to the bishops, headed by Stanislav Zela, the
vicar-general of Olomouc, in central Moravia, were given heavy sentences. On
15 January 1951, this time in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, a trial of three
bishops, including the bishop of the Greek Catholic Church, was finally con-
cluded. In these two trials, all those accused of being "agents of the Vatican in
Czechoslovakia" were sentenced to terms ranging from ten years to life impris-
onment. This tactic was used for the last time later that year in trials of more
people connected to the bishops. But the repressions did not end there. The
bishop of Litomcfiec, in Central Bohemia, Stepan Trochta, a resistance fighter
who had been arrested in May 1942 and detained in concentration camps in
Terezin, Dachau, and Mauthausen, was sentenced to twenty-five years in
prison in Jul 1954.

The people who conceived and carried out these repressions sought not
only to remove those at the top of the hierarchy, but to strike at all Christian
intellectuals in general. Ruzena Vackova, who had fought in the resistance and
was a professor of art history at Charles University, was also a great supporter
of the cause of political prisoners. She was arrested in June 1952 and impris-
oned until 1967. The Catholic intelligentsia was quite severely affected by this
and another trial in 1952. The second took place in July in Brno, the capital of
Moravia, and was probably the largest political trial of "men of letters" in the
history of twentieth-century Kurope.

One of those tried in Brno was Bedfich Fucik, a Czech Catholic intellec-
tual who had little time for the church hierarchy. Arrested in the spring of 1951,
he was tortured throughout his interrogation. One day, after giving the usual
evasive answers to his torturers for seven hours— "nothing," "I don't know,"
"none, 11 and so forth— he finally cracked and began to "confess. 11 "Leave me
alone, I beg you, 11 he told them. "I can't stand it any more. It's the anniversary
of my mother's death today. 11 for a whole week before the trial, he was coached
in the answers he was to give the court. He weighed 48 kilos (he had weighed
61 kilos before his arrest) and was in a very bad physical state. Fucik was
sentenced to prison for fifteen years hut was amnestied and released in I960.
The following is an excerpt from several interviews he gave to Karel Bartosek,
recorded in Prague between 1978 and 1982.

B.: Did you have the feeling, when you were in court, that you were like an
actor in a play?

E: Absolutely. I knew that from the very beginning.

B.: Why did you agree to go along with it? How could you, as a Catholic in-
tellectual, accept this highly staged Stalinist comedy?

E: This was the worst thing that one takes away from prison, the thing that
haunts you the most. The hunger, the cold, the black hole they keep you

412 The Other Europe

in, the terrifying; headaches at the time when I seemed to be losing my
sight, all those things, you can forget them, even if they always stay with
you, hidden away in your brain somewhere. But the one thing I'll never
forget, the most horrible thing that will never leave me, is the way that
suddenly there are two people inside you, two different men. The first
one, me, the person 1 had always been, and me, the second one, the new
one who says to the old one, "you Ye a criminal, you did such and
such . . ." The first one fights back, and an argument follows between
these two people, its like a total doubling of the personality, the one re-
lentlessly humiliating the other. "You Ye lying! It's not true! 11 and the
other saying "Yeah, okay, it's true, I did do it, I signed, etc."

B.: You Ye not the only one who made such a confession, of course. Many
people did. You were men, strong-willed individuals, all with your own
unique physical and mental characteristics, yet you all acted in a similar
or even identical manner: you all went along with the game, and learned
the parts you had been assigned. I've talked a lot about the causes of
these "confessions" with Communists, and the way such men were
beaten and broken at the end of it all. But you are a man with a different
vision of the world. What happened inside you? Why did you collaborate
with the government?

E: 1 couldn't protect myself, physically or mentally, against their relentless
brainwashing any longer. I gave in. Tve already told you about the mo-
ment that something cracked inside me. | At this point he became more
and more agitated, and was almost shouting.! After that, I simply wasn't
myself any longer ... I consider the state of nonbeing to be the greatest
humiliation, the lowest thing that one can experience, it's like a destruc-
tion of being itself And they make you do it to yourself.

Repression of the churches followed a similar pattern in the Balkans. Ln
Romania, the liquidation of the Greek-Catholic Uniate Church, which was
second only to the Orthodox Church in the number of its followers, became
more intense in the autumn of 1948. The Orthodox Church stood by in silence,
and its hierarchy generally supported the regime — a fact that did not prevent
the government from closing many of its churches and imprisoning a number
of its leaders. In October all the Uniate bishops were arrested. The Greek-
Catholic Church was officially banned on 1 December 1948. At that time its
faithful numbered 1,573,000 (out of a population of 15 million people), and it
had 2,498 buildings and 1,733 priests. The authorities confiscated all its goods,
closed the cathedrals and churches, and in some cases even burned its libraries.
More than l,4fR) priests (about 600 in November 1948 alone) and some 5,000
followers were sent to prison, where approximately 200 were murdered.

Central and Southeastern Europe

413

In May 1948, with the arrest of ninety-two priests, it was the turn of the
Roman Catholic Church, which had 1,250,000 followers in Romania, to un-
dergo repression. The government closed all the Catholic schools and nation-
alized the religious charities and medical centers. In June 1949 several Roman
Catholic bishops were arrested, and the following month all monastic orders
were banned. Repressions culminated in September 1951 with a large trial in
Bucharest in which several bishops and eminent lay figures were convicted of
"espionage."

One of the Greek-Catholic bishops, who had been ordained secretly and
who served fifteen years in prison followed by a period of hard labor, had the
following to say:

For years on end we endured torture, blows, hunger, cold, the confisca-
tion of our goods, and endless mockery and ridicule in the name of the
Church. We would kiss our handcuffs, our chains, and the iron bars of
our cells as though they were sacred objects, and we loved our prison
clothes as if they were sacred vestments. We had chosen our cross to
bear, and we kept it, despite the constant offers of freedom, money, and
the easy life if we renounced our faith. Our bishops, priests, and faithful
were sentenced in total to more than fifteen thousand years in prison,
and they served well over one thousand. Six bishops were imprisoned
for refusing to renounce their allegiance to Rome. And despite the blood
of all these victims, our Church today has as many bishops as it had at
the time when Stalin and the Orthodox Patriarch Justinian triumphantly
proclaimed its death. u

Ordinary People and the Concentration Camp System

The history of dictatorships is complex, and the history of Communism no
less so. Its birth in Central and Southeastern Europe was at times marked by
massive popular support, linked to the crushing of the Nazi menace as well as
to the unquestionable skill with which the Communist leaders nurtured peo-
ple's illusions and fanaticism. The Left Bloc, for instance, which was estab-
lished in Hungary at the initiative of the minority Communist Party after the
elections of November 1945, organized a demonstration by more than 400,000
people in Budapest in March 1946.

The newly installed Communist regimes favored the promotion of hun-
dreds of thousands of people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. In
highly industrialized Czechoslovakia, where the workers made up some 60
percent of the population in the Czech lands and 50 percent in Slovakia,
between 200,000 and 250,000 workers took the places of people who had been
removed in purges or who came to fill various departments. The vast majority

414

The Other Europe

of them, of course, joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Millions of
peasants and agricultural workers in Central and Southeastern Europe unde-
niably did benefit immediately from the agrarian reforms and the redistribution
of previously privately owned land (including land that had belonged to the
Catholic Church) and of the confiscated property of the expelled Germans.

This happiness of the few, built on the misery of others, was often short-
lived, for Bolshevik doctrine mandated the liquidation of all private property.
In pursuit of the "intensification of class war' 1 and "the offensive struggle of
the masses," in 1945 all the new regimes implemented a broad program of
nationalization of properties previously owned by "Germans, traitors, and
collaborators." Once the Communists' monopoly of pow r er was assured, it was
the turn of the small landowners, shopkeepers, and artisans to have their
property seized. The owners of small workshops and modest shops, who had
never exploited anyone other than perhaps themselves or members of their
families, had good reason to be unhappy. The peasants 1 turn came in 1949-50,
when they were forced into collectivization. The workers in large industrial
centers also suffered from new measures that affected their freedoms and their
standard of living, often wiping out the gains they had made in the past.

As discontent grew, social tension increased. To express discontent, the
workers soon tired of vocal or written demands and began to organize strikes
and demonstrations in the streets. In the summer of 1948, a few months after
"victorious February/ 1 a strike supported by demonstrations began in fifteen
Czech and Moravian cities and in three Slovak cities. The strikes began again
in late 1951 in all the industrial regions, with protest meetings in the factories
and demonstrations of between 10,000 and 30,000 people in the streets of Brno.
Then, in early June 1953, to protest against a draconian currency reform,
strikes and work stoppages were declared in about ten of the major factories,
often accompanied by demonstrations, which in Plzeri became a rebellion. In
1953, 472 strikers and protesters were arrested, and the Communist Party
leadership immediately demanded that a list of all participants in the strikes be
drawn up, so that they could be "isolated and placed in work camps."

Peasants also revolted from time to time. One of the participants in the
Romanian peasant revolt of July 1950 recalled how they all met outside the
Communist Party headquarters, unarmed and peaceable, only to be fired upon
by a Communist militant.

After that we forced our way into the building, and we threw the por-
traits of Stalin and Gheorghiu Dej on the floor and stomped on
them . , . Reinforcements arrived quite soon, first of all the village gen-
darmes . , . Luckily, a young girl named Maria Stoian had cut the wires
at the telephone exchange and rung the bells. But the Bolsheviks shot at

Central and Southeastern Europe

415

us as much as they could . . . In midmorning, about ten o'clock I think,
the Securitate arrived with machine guns and all sorts of heavy weapons.
Women and children fell to their knees. "Don't shoot us or our children!
You've all got children too, and relatives! We're dying of hunger, and
we've come here to beg for our wheat not to be taken away!" Lt. Major
StSnescu Martin gave the order to open fire.

The author of this statement was arrested, tortured, and sent away into forced
labor until 1953. I4

Under these regimes, which systematically denied freedom and funda-
mental human rights, any expression of discontent was treated as political and
"antistate." The leaders used persecution to plunge society into what Karel
Kaplan described as the "psychology of fear," which they viewed as a "stabi-
lizing factor" for the regime.

In the years 1949-1954 millions of people were affected by repression —
not only those in prison, but also members of their families. The repression
took multiple forms. There were mass deportations from Budapest, Sofia,
Prague, and Bucharest to the provinces. In the summer of 1951 they included
14,000 Jews from Budapest, who had survived the wartime massacres and
formed the largest Jewish community in Lurope. Also affected were the families
of emigres, students who were thrown out of their universities, and hundreds
of thousands named on the lists of those judged to be "politically suspect" or
"hostile." Such lists were first instigated by the security forces in 1949 and
continued to grow longer and longer.

The immense sea of suffering was constantly augmented. After the elimi-
nation of figures from political parties and civil society, repression turned to
ordinary people. In factories, "troublemakers" were treated as "saboteurs" and
were punished with "class justice." The same fate awaited those in the villages
who had enjoyed authority because of their knowledge or wisdom, and who
simply failed to believe that collectivization was the best or fairest agricultural
method. Millions of people then began to see that the promises made earlier,
to encourage them to follow Communist ideas, had often been no more than
tactical lies. Some dared to voice their discontent.

In-depth studies of the social dimension of these repressions and of the
persecution of ordinary people are still rare. We do have quite reliable statistics
for the Czech provinces and for Slovakia, where the archives are now open. In
most of the other countries we are forced to make do with the investigations
of journalists and with eyewitness reports, which luckily have been quite nu-
merous since 1989.

In Czechoslovakia, as early as mid- 1950, people described as workers
made up 39. 1 percent of all those imprisoned for crimes against the state. Office

416

The Other Europe

workers, who were often victims of purges in the administration, were second,
with 28 percent. The proportion of peasants was slightly lower. In 1951-52
nearly half of all the people arrested by State Security were workers.

The ""Report on the Activity of the Courts and the Magistrates 11 for 1950
presents statistics for people sentenced for "minor crimes against the Republic"
(such as inciting people to rebel, spreading false reports, and small-scale sabo-
tage), adjudicated in the Czech provinces by local courts. Of these, 41.2 percent
were workers, and 17.7 percent were peasants. In Slovakia the figures were 33.9
percenr and 32.6 percent, respectively. Although the share of workers and
peasants brought to trial in the main state courts was somewhat smaller, the
social category of workers, including agricultural workers, accounted for 28.8
percent of those sentenced (this figure also includes the peasantry), 1 8.5 percent
of those sentenced to death, and 17.6 percent of those sentenced to life impris-
onment.

The same pattern was common in other countries, although the peasants
were sometimes the main victims of repression. This influx of ordinary people
into the prisons was tied to the expansion of the camps and the creation of a
concentration-camp system, which was perhaps the most remarkable feature of
the barbarism of the Communist regimes. The prisons were never large enough
to receive a mass of prisoners, and governments again followed the lead of the
Soviet Union and created their own gulag archipelago.

Both Bolshevism and Nazism enriched the history of repression in the
twentieth century by establishing camp systems in times of peace. As Annette
VYieviorku pointed out in a special issue on camps in the journal Yingtiime Steele
in 1997, before the invention of the Gulag and the Lagers (the gulags came
first), prison camps had been a wartime means of repression and exclusion.
During World War II the concentration-camp system arose in continental
Europe, and camps, Lagers, and gulags were to be found from the Urals to the
foothills of the Pyrenees. But their history did not end with the defeat of
Germany and its allies.

During the war the fascist and dictatorial regimes allied with Germany
had incorporated the camp into the culture of their countries. In Bulgaria the
conservative government had established an internment camp on the small
island of Saint Anastasia in the Black Sea, near Burgas, and then built the
camps of Gonda Voda and Belo Pole, where political opponents were interned.
In 1941-1944 the populists in power in Slovakia had built fifteen "penitential
work establishments" near civil-engineering projects that lacked manpower,
and sent there "asocial elements, 1 ' which generally meant Romany Gypsies. In
Romania camps had been created for political prisoners by the dictatorial
regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu, most notably the Tirgiu Jiu camp, in the
territory between the Dniester and the Bug, which was used for racial repres-
sion.

Central and Southeastern Europe

417

Thus, when the war ended there were already well-established camps that
could serve as transit points for the new deportees (as in the case of Hungary)
or as internment camps for people suspected of having collaborated with the
Nazis. This was the new function of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, infamous
concentration camps under the Nazis that lay in the Soviet-occupied zone of
East Germany.

After 1945 new types of camps sprang up, to which governments sent
their political adversaries. The camps may have been established first in Bul-
garia, where a 1945 decree allowed the police to establish camps to educate
people through work, known as labor-educational communes (trudovo-vuzpi-
tatchni obshchezhiiiya, or TVO). Hundreds of people, including dozens of
anarchists, were sent to the Kutsian camp, near the mining center in Pernik,
which at the time was already known as "the kiss of death," and to Bobov Dol
and Bogdanov Dol, known to its inmates as "the camp of shadows." After
receiving detailed information about these sites in March 1949, French anar-
chists denounced them publicly as u Bolshevik concentration camps.' 115

The "Gulag archipelago" came to Central and Southeastern Europe in
1949-50. Unlike the case of the Nazi camps, there is no mass of studies and
eyewitness testimony to provide a picture of these camps. Nevertheless, we
must attempt at least a sketch, both to deepen our understanding of the nature
of the Communist regimes and to do justice to the memory of the victims who
lost their lives in this part of Europe.

An analysis of the Soviet system leads to the conclusion that the main
purpose of the camps was economic. Obviously, the system was meant to isolate
and punish certain segments of society. But the geographic distribution of the
camps makes it clear that they were situated primarily where the authorities
most needed disciplined, plentiful, and cheap manpower. These modern slaves
may not have built pyramids, but they did build canals, dams, factories, and
buildings in honor of the new pharaohs. They also worked in coal, anthracite,
and uranium mines. Could it be that the choice of prisoners and the extent and
rhythm of repression were all influenced by the needs of the construction sites
and the mines?

In Hungary and Poland the camps were systematically located near mining
areas. In Romania the vast majority of the camps were set up along the route
of the Danube-Black Sea canal and in the delta of the Danube. The biggest
and most important group of camps was known as the Poarta Alba, where
names like Cernavoda, Medgidia, Valea Neagra, and Basarabi were engraved
in people's memories, together with places in the Danube delta (Periprava,
Chilia Veche, Stoenesti, Tataru). The Danube-Black Sea canal soon became
known as "the canal of death." This was indeed a terrible place, where thou-
sands of peasants who had opposed collectivization were sent, along with other
"suspect individuals." In Bulgaria, detainees in the Kutsian camp worked an

418

The Other Europe

open-cast mineral mine, in Bukhovo they worked in a uranium mine, and in
Belene they shored up the banks of the Danube. In Czechoslovakia, the camps
were grouped mainly around the uranium mines in the Jachymov region, in
Western Bohemia, and in the coalfields of Ostrava, in Northern Moravia.

Why were such places known as u labor camps"? Could the leaders possibly
have been unaware that u Arbeit macht frei" had been the inscription above the
gates of Nazi death camps? Living conditions in these camps, particularly in
the period 1949-1953, were extremely hard, and the daily tasks usually resulted
in the total exhaustion of inmates.

One former inmate of a labor camp recalled conditions there in a 1988
interview for a program called "The Other Europe."

After the war Imre Nyeste, a Hungarian resistance fighter in charge of a
youth organization, had refused to join the Communist Party. After his trial he
was sentenced to a labor camp, where he stayed until 1956. Inmates there broke
stones for twelve hours a day in winter and sixteen hours a day in summer. But
worst of all for him was the hunger.

The difference between the Communist secret police and the Nazis — I
am one of the happy few who have experience of both— isn't a question
of their respective levels of brutality and cruelty. The torture chamber
in a Nazi jail is the same as one in a Communist jail. The difference is
elsewhere. If the Nazis arrested you as a political dissident, in general
what they wanted to know was what your activities were, who your
friends were, what your intentions were, etc. The Communists never
bothered with all that. They already knew when they arrested you what
sort of confession you were going to sign. But you yourself did not. I
had no idea that I was going to become an "American spy"! 16

The exact number of prisons and camps is now more or less clear, bur
determining the number of inmates is more difficult. For Albania, a map drawn
up by Odile Daniel locates nineteen camps and prisons. A map of the Bulgarian
gulag prepared in 1990 shows eighty-six localities. Around 187,000 people were
imprisoned in Bulgaria in the period 1944-1962, according to a list compiled
in 1989 by the association of former political prisoners. That figure includes
not only those sentenced but also those sent to camps without trial and those
kept for weeks on end in police stations — often a means used to force peasants
to join agricultural cooperatives. According to other estimates, approximately
12,000 people were in camps between 1944 and 1953, and 5,000 between 1956
and 1962.

In Hungary several hundred thousand people were prosecuted in 1948—
1953, and, according to different estimates, between 700,000 and 800,000 were
convicted. Most cases were trials for "crimes against state property." Here, as

Central and Southeastern Europe

419

in other countries, administrative internments carried out by the secret police
should also be included in the figures. In the German Democratic Republic
before the Berlin Wall had been erected, new political prisoners (other than
those mentioned in the previous section) seem to have been quite rare.

In Romania, estimates for the number of people incarcerated throughout
the Communist period vary between 300,000 and 1 million. The second figure
probably includes not only political prisoners but also common criminals (al-
though for crimes like "parasitism" it is extremely hard to tell the two apart).
The British historian Dennis Deletant estimates that approximately 180,000
people were detained in camps in Romania in the early 1950s. In Czechoslova-
kia, the number of political prisoners for the years 1948-1954 has now been
established at 200,000. For a population of 12.6 million inhabitants, there were
422 camps and prisons. The figure for those imprisoned includes not only those
brought to trial and sentenced, but also those sent to prison without trial or
interned in camps on the whim of local authorities.

The penal world differed only slightly from country to country, since all
were modeled quite closely on the Soviet system, whose emissaries often came
to inspect such establishments. However, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Roma-
nia added some new elements to the Soviet system.

Czechoslovakia brought bureaucratic perfectionism. Some analysts be-
lieve that the weight of the Austro-Hungarian imperial bureaucracy left an
imprint on the behavior here. The Czechoslovak government provided itself
with ample legislation to legitimate its actions, including Law 247 of 25 October
1948, which ratified the forced-labor camps (id bury nucene prdce, or TNP) for
people aged eighteen to sixty. Their purpose was to educate prisoners for a
period ranging from three months to two years, which could be shortened or
lengthened at will. The law was aimed at delinquents and at the work-shy, but
also at those whose "lifestyle needed improvement." Administrative penal Law
88 of 12 July 1950 authorized sending to the TNP anyone who, for example,
failed to respect "the protection of agriculture and forestry" or who "demon-
strated an attitude hostile toward the people's democratic order of the Republic
or its construction." As was pointed out in the National Assembly, these meas-
ures necessitated "effective repression of all class enemies." 17

Under these laws, sentencing to the camps was decided by a commission
of three members, created first by a national regional committee and after 1950
by a national district committee or, alternatively, by a special penal commission
from the committees headed by the chief of the local branch of the security
forces. In all provinces, most of those sent to the TNP were ordinary people,
and, as studies carried out since 1989 have confirmed, most of them were
workers.

In 1950 the Communist bureaucracy came up with another means of

420

The Other Europe

repression, using the army: the technical support battalion (pomocny technicky
prapor, or PTP). Those inducted into these battalions were often significantly
older than those doing military service, and they were forced to work extremely
hard in the mines, living in conditions similar to those of the labor camps.

Romania was also quite innovative. The Seeuritate, the Romanian secret
police, used all the classic methods of torture during their interrogations:
beatings, blows to the soles of the feet, hanging people upside down, and so
forth. But in the prison built in the 1930s in Pitesti, about 1 10 kilometers from
Bucharest, the cruelty far surpassed those usual methods. The philosopher
Virgil Ierunca recalls: u The most vile tortures imaginable were practiced in
Pitesti. Prisoners' whole bodies were burned with cigarettes: their buttocks
would begin to rot, and their skin fell off as though they suffered from leprosy.
Others were forced to swallow spoonfuls of excrement, and when they threw
it back up, they w r ere forced to eat their own vomit" 1 *

These tactics were part of a program of "reeducation." Romania was
probably the first country in Europe to introduce the methods of brainwashing
used by the Communists in Asia. Indeed, these tactics may well have been
perfected there before they were used on a massive scale in Asia. The evil goal
of the enterprise was to induce prisoners to torture one another. The idea was
conceived in the prison in Pitesti. The experiment began in early December
1949 and lasted approximately three years. It resulted from an agreement
between the Communist Alexandru Nikolski, one of the chiefs of the Romanian
secret police, and Eugen Turcanu, a prisoner who had been arrested in 1948
because of his role as a student organizer for the fascist Iron Guard in 1940-41 .
After arriving in prison, Turcanu became the head of a movement called the
Organization of Prisoners with Communist Beliefs, or OPCB. The goal of the
organization was the reeducation of political prisoners, combining study of the
texts of Communist dogma with mental and physical torture. The hard core
of reeducators consisted of fifteen hand-picked detainees, who first had to make
contact with other prisoners and win their confidence.

According to Virgil Ierunca, reeducation occurred in four phases. The first
phase was known as "exterior unmasking/ 1 The prisoner had to prove his
loyalty by admitting what he had hidden when the case had been brought
against him and, in particular, admit his links with his friends on the outside.
The second phase was "interior unmasking," when he was forced to denounce
the people who had helped him inside the prison. The third phase was "public
moral unmasking," when the accused was ordered to curse all the things that
he held sacred, including his friends and family, his wife or girlfriend, and his
God if he was a believer. In the fourth phase, candidates for joining the OPCB
had to "reeducate" their own best friend, torturing him with their own hands
and thus becoming executioners themselves. "Torture was the key to success.

Central and Southeastern Europe

421

It implacably punctuated all confessions, between sentences. You couldn't es-
cape the torture. You might perhaps be able to shorten it, if you admitted the
worst horrors. Some students were tortured for two months; others, who were
more cooperative, got away with a week." ,y

Eugen Turcanu devised especially diabolical measures to force seminari-
ans to renounce their faith. Some had their heads repeatedly plunged into a
bucket of urine and fecal matter while the guards intoned a parody of the
baptismal rite. One victim who had been systematically tortured in this fashion
developed an automatic response that went on for about two months: every
morning, to the great delight of his reeducators, he would plunge his own head
into the bucket.

Turcanu also forced the seminarians to take part in black masses that he
orchestrated himself, particularly during holy week and on Good Friday. Some
of the reeducators played the part of choirboys; others masqueraded as priests.
Turcanifs liturgy was extremely pornographic, and he rephrased the original
in a demonic fashion. The Virgin Mary was called "the Great Whore," and
Jesus "that cunt who died on the cross." One seminarian undergoing reeduca-
tion and playing the role of a priest had to undress completely and was then
wrapped in a robe stained with excrement. Around his neck was hung a phallus
made of bread and soap and powdered with DDT. In 1 950 on the Saturday
before Easter the students who were undergoing reeducation were forced to
pass before the priest, kiss the phallus, and say, "He is risen." 20

In 1952 the Romanian authorities tried to extend the Pitesti experiment,
particularly in the work camps on the Danube- Black Sea canal. When West-
ern radio stations got wind of the operation, the Communist leaders decided
to end the "reeducation" program. In a trial in 1954, Turcanu and six accom-
plices were condemned to death, but no one else in the police hierarchy was
ever held accountable.

The 1 -ovech camp in Bulgaria offers a third and final example of the new
elements added by Central and Southeastern Europe to the history of Com-
munist repression. This camp was established in 1959, six years after Stalin's
death and three years after Khrushchev's speech at the Twentieth Party Con-
gress condemning the Stalinist camps. It was a time when many of the camps
for political prisoners were being closed, even in the Soviet Union. The Lovech
camp was not particularly large— its capacity was about 1,000 prisoners— but
the killings carried out there by the executioners were truly atrocious. People
were tortured and finished off in the most primitive fashion imaginable: they
were simply clubbed to death.

The government opened the Lovech camp after closing the camp at
Belene— a camp unforgettable to the Bulgarians, since the bodies of prisoners
who died there were fed to the pigs. Officially, the camp was created to deal

422

The Other Europe

with repeat offenders and hardened criminals. But according to eyewitness
reports made in 1990, most of the inmates were in fact sent there without trial:
"You're wearing jeans, you've got long hair, you listen to American music, you
speak the language of a country that is hostile to us, you've been talking to
tourists ... off to camp with you!" Accordingly, the majority of people in the
camp were very young.

In the preface to a book of statements from victims, their families, and
former members of the repressive apparatus, Tzvetan Todorov summed up life
in Lovech as follows:

During morning roll call, the chief of police (i.e., the head of the State
Security forces in the camp) would choose his victims. He would take a
little mirror out of his pocket and shove it in their faces, saying, "Here,
take a last look at your face!" The victims were then given a sack, in
which they would be brought back to the camp that evening: they had to
carry it themselves, like Christ carrying his own cross up to Golgotha.
They left for the site, which in fact was a quarry. There they were beaten
to death by the brigadiers and tied up in the sack with some wire. That
night their comrades would have to bring them back to the camp in a
handcart, and the bodies were then stacked up behind the toilets until
there were twenty of them, when a truck would arrive and take them
away. Those who didn't make their daily quota were singled out during
the evening roll call; the police chief would draw a circle in the sand
with his baton, and the designated people who were pushed into the
circle were beaten repeatedly. 21

The exact number of deaths in this camp has not yet been established.
The camp was closed by the authorities in 1962. Although the regime inside
the camp began to improve a little in 1961, and although the actual number of
deaths was only a few hundred, the name Lovech will always remain an impor-
tant symbol of barbarism in formerly Communist countries.

This mass terror cannot be explained as "natural for those times," or as
part of the Cold War that began in 1947 and reached its height with the Korean
war of 1950-1953. The opponents of Communist power inside these countries,
despite their huge majority, demonstrated almost no interest in violent or armed
struggle (Poland is a notable exception, and there were also armed groups in
Bulgaria and Romania). Their opposition was often spontaneous, unorganized,
and quite democratic. Some of the politicians who had not immediately emi-
grated believed that the repression would be short-lived. Armed resistance was
rare, and when it did occur it was usually a case of the secret services settling
grudges, or of underworld killings being passed off as political murders, rather
than a result of genuine political opposition.

Thus there is no way to explain the violence of the repression by pointing

Central and Southeastern Europe

423

to violence in society or the scale of opposition. The "class struggle" was highly
orchestrated, and opposition networks were sometimes deliberately established
by agents provocateurs from the secret police. Occasionally those agents were in
turn killed by the secret services.

People still try to explain away the history of Communism with reference
to the "spirit of the moment" or the "context of the time." But such attempts
are part of a specifically ideological approach to history and a revisionism that
does not correspond to the facts as they have now come to light. Scholars and
others should pay closer attention to the social dimensions of the repression,
and concentrate more on the persecution of ordinary people.

The Trials of Communist Leaders

The persecution of fellow Communists is one of the most important episodes
in the history of repression in Central and Southeastern Europe in the first
half of the twentieth century. Neither the international Communist movement
nor any of its local branches ever ceased to denounce "bourgeois justice and
legality" and fascist and Nazi repression. Undoubtedly, there were thousands
of militant Communists who died as victims of Nazi and fascist repression
during World War II.

But the persecution of Communists did not stop with the progressive
installation of "people's democracies," when the "dictatorship of the proletar-
iat" took over from the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie."

In Hungary in 1945 the secret police imprisoned Pal Demeny, Jozsef
Skolnik, and a number of their friends. All considered themselves to be Com-
munists, and it was under that label that they had led underground resistance
groups, to which they had often recruited young people and workers. In the
industrial centers, membership in their groups was higher than that of Com-
munist groups who had sworn allegiance to Moscow, and who considered
competitors like Demeny to be Trotskyites or "deviationists." When the mo-
ment of liberation finally arrived, Demeny met the same fate that befell those
he had fought against, and he was imprisoned until 1957. In Romania the fate
of §tefan Foris, general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party in the
mid- 1930s, was even more tragic. He was accused of being a police agent, kept
under surveillance until 1944, and killed in 1946 with a blow from an iron bar.
His mother, who had looked everywhere for him, was found drowned in a river
in Transylvania with stones tied around her neck. Ceau§escu denounced the
political assassination of Foris, and his friends in 1968.

The examples of Demeny, Fori§, and others demonstrate quite clearly that
for the people in charge, there were "good" Communists, who were in the Party
and faithful to Moscow, and "bad" Communists, who refused to join what they

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saw as a Party with no independence. The principle varied over time in certain
countries, but the dialectic of Communist persecution became considerably
more complicated after 1948, when it moved inside the Party itself.

In late June 1948 the Cominform, which had been established in Septem-
ber 1947 and included all the Communist parties then in power except Albania,
together with the two most powerful Communist parties in Western Europe —
the French and Italian — roundly condemned Tito's Yugoslavia and called for
his overthrow. In the months that followed, "deviationism" (opposition to the
reigning powers in Moscow) began to take shape as a new phenomenon in the
Communist movement. The desire to be autonomous and independent of the
center, which previously had been discernible only in small groups, now became
the province of an entire state. One small Balkan state, in which the Communist
Party's monopoly on power had already been tried and tested, challenged the
entire Communist empire. The increasingly tense situation offered new per-
spectives on the repression of Communists. Communists themselves, as well as
citizens of Communist states, could now be accused of being allies or agents
of hostile foreign Communist powers.

There were two important aspects of this historical novelty in the perse-
cution of Communists — events in Yugoslavia and the repression of Titoists —
and little attention has been paid to the former until now. After what the
newspapers described as the Tito-Stalin split, Yugoslavia went through an
economic crisis worse, according to some, than the one experienced during the
war. Links to the outside world were repeatedly cut, and with Soviet tanks
deployed near the border the country was under serious threat. In 1948-49 the
prospect of a Soviet invasion and a new war was not a happy one in a country
already devastated by war and its aftermath.

The government in Belgrade reacted to the accusation of "Yugoslav trea-
son" and threats of force by isolating those who were faithful to Moscow, whom
it termed inform birovtsi (Cominformers), as well as anyone who approved the
Cominform resolution of June 1948. This isolation was not merely a process
of internment that would have prevented contact with the outside world. Tito's
government was still deeply imbued with Bolshevik ideas and came up with the
solution one might expect: it opened more prison camps. Yugoslavia has many-
islands, and in an allusion perhaps to the first Bolshevik camp set up in the
Solovetski archipelago, the main camp was called Goli Otok, or "Naked Is-
land." This was no ordinary camp; it used reeducation methods similar to those
practiced in Pitesti in Romania. For instance, there was a practice known as the
"walk of dishonor" or "jack-rabbit," which forced newcomers to run a gauntlet
of prisoners, who, partly to improve their standing with the authorities, would
beat them, insult them, and throw stones as they passed. There were also rituals
of criticism, self-accusation, and confession.

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425

Torture was the daily bread of the internees. Among the methods was one
known simply as "the bucket," which forced a prisoner's head into a receptacle
filled with excrement. Another, called "the bunker," forced prisoners to stay in
a tiny space for long periods. The most widespread method used by reeduca-
tors — reminiscent of work done in Nazi camps — was stone-breaking on the
rocky islands of the Adriatic. To complete the humiliation, the stones were
thrown back into the sea at the end of the day.

The persecution of Communists in Yugoslavia that began in 1948-49 was
probably one of the most massive persecution movements that Europe had yet
witnessed, including those of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the 1940s,
Germany in the 1930s, and the repression of Communists during the Nazi
occupation. What happened in Yugoslavia was a truly immense phenomenon
considering the number of inhabitants and the number of Communists. Ac-
cording to official sources that were long kept secret, the purges affected 16,371
people, 5,037 of whom were brought to trial, and three-quarters of whom were
sent to Goli Otok and Grgur. Independent analysis by Vladimir Dedijer sug-
gests that between 31,000 and 32,000 people went through the Goli Otok camp
alone. But even the most recent research has been unable to come up with a
figure for the number of prisoners who died as victims of executions, exhaus-
tion, hunger, epidemics, or even suicide — a solution chosen by many Commu-
nists to escape their cruel situation.

The other aspect of the persecution of Communists is better known: the
repression of Titoists in the other "people's democracies." T his usually took
the form of show-trials aimed at affecting public opinion in the countries
concerned, as well as serving an international function. The progress of these
trials proved that Moscow's suspicions were well founded: the principal enemy
was within the Communist Party itself Vigilance and mistrust, it followed,
must therefore become a way of life for true Communists.

In early 1948 the Romanian Communist Party opened the case of Lucrepu
Patrascanu, an intellectual and renowned Marxist theorist who had been a
founding member of the Party in 1921 at the age of twenty-one and minister
of justice since 1944. Some aspects of his case foreshadowed the campaign
against Tito. Dismissed from office in February 1948 and imprisoned, Patras-
canu was condemned to death in April 1954, one year after the death of Stalin,
and executed on 16 April. The mystery of this late execution has not yet been
cleared up. One theory is that Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the general secretary
of the Romanian Communist Party, feared Patrascanu's rehabilitation, viewing
him as a potential rival. This idea is only partly plausible, however, inasmuch
as the two had been in conflict since the war.

In 1949 the first trials of Communist leaders in countries bordering Yu-
goslavia took place. The first were in Albania, where the leadership had close

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The Other Europe

ties to the Yugoslav Communists. The designated victim, Koci Xoxe, had been
a chief of the armed Communist resistance before being made minister of
internal affairs and general secretary of the Party after the war. Xoxe was
devoted to Tito's cause. After a political campaign within the Party in the
autumn of 1948 attacking the "pro-Yugoslav Trotskyite faction led by Xoxe
and Kristo," all allies of the Yugoslav Communists were arrested in March
1949. Xoxe was brought to trial in Tirana with four other leaders — Pandi
Kristo, Vasco Koleci, Nuri Huta, and Yango Mitrojorgji. Me was sentenced to
death on 10 June and executed the next day. His four companions received
heavy sentences, and it was not long before other pro- Yugoslav Communists in
the Albanian Party also fell victim to the purge,

A second show-trial in the anti-Tito series took place in September 1949
in Budapest. The accused was Las/16 Rajk, who had fought in the International
Brigades in Spain. Rajk had been one of the heads of the resistance and as a
minister of internal affairs had carried out severe repressions of non-Commu-
nist democrats before being made minister of foreign affairs. After his arrest
in May 1949, Rajk was tortured and blackmailed by his previous colleagues,
who told him that he would not be killed if he helped the Party. He was ordered
to confess in court and to reel off a string of accusations against Tito and the
Yugoslavs as "enemies of people's democracy." The verdict of the Hungarian
court was reached on 24 September, with no right to appeal: Las/lb Rajk, Tibor
Szonyi, and Andras Szalai were condemned to death, and the Yugoslav Lazar
Brankov and the Social Democrat Pal Justus were given life sentences. Rajk was
executed on 16 October. In a subsequent trial a military court condemned four
high-ranking officers to death.

In the repressions following the Rajk trial, 94 people in Hungary were
arrested, sentenced, and interned; 15 were executed; 1 1 others died in prison;
and 50 of the accused received prison sentences of more than ten years. The
total number of deaths in this affair was about 60, including a number of
suicides among prisoners, their relatives, and judges and police officers caught
up in the affair.

Animosities within the leadership, and the zeal of the general secretary of
the Party, Matyas Rakosi, and the chiefs of the secret police, influenced the
choice of victims and their leader, Laszlo Rajk. These and other factors, how-
ever, should not obscure the essential fact that many of the main decisions were
made in Moscow by, among others, the heads of the security forces and intel-
ligence services responsible for Central and Western Europe. This had been
the case since the earliest waves of repression. Soviet leaders were preoccupied
with discovering a huge international anti-Soviet conspiracy. The Rajk trial
played a key role, particularly through its main witness, the American Noel
Field, who was secretly a Communist and helped the Soviet Union, as has
recently been proved in the archives. 22

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427

This attempt to find an international conspiracy in Titoism was also
evident in the trial of Traicho Kostov, in Sofia. Kostov was an experienced
Comintern official who had been condemned to death by the previous regime.
He had fought in the resistance during the war, had been made vice president
of the National Council after the war, and was considered the heir apparent to
Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov was a previous general secretary of the Comintern
and had been head of the Bulgarian Communist Party since 1946, but in 1949
his health began to deteriorate steadily. He was treated in the Soviet Union
beginning in March of that year but died on 2 July.

From late 1948, the "Muscovites" at the head of the Bulgarian Commu-
nist Party (that is, the leaders who had spent the war in Moscow, people of the
same mold as Rakosi in Hungary and Gottwald in Czechoslovakia) had been
criticizing the faults and failures of Kostov, above all his "incorrect relationship
with the U.S.S.R." concerning economic questions, despite his "self-criticism."
With the consent of Dimitrov, who had condemned Kostov in violent terms in
a letter dispatched on 10 May from a Soviet sanatorium, Kostov was arrested
in June 1949 with several other collaborators.

The trial of Traicho Kostov and the nine accused with him opened in
Sofia on 7 December 1949. A verdict was reached one week later, and Kostov
was sentenced to death as an agent of the Bulgarian police of the old regime,
as a Titoist traitor, and as an agent of Western imperialism. Four other lead-
ers — Ivan Stefanov, Nikolai Pavlov, Nikolai Nechev, and Ivan Tutev — were
given life sentences; three more received fifteen years, one received twelve years,
and another received eight years. Two days later, after Rostov's appeal for
clemency was rejected, he was hanged.

The Sofia trial has a unique place in the history of the trials of Communist
leaders under Communist regimes. While giving his evidence Kostov contra-
dicted statements that had been forced from him under torture and claimed his
innocence. He was immediately silenced but was able to make a last plea that
he was a friend of the Soviet Union. He was prevented from finishing, but his
outburst made those who staged subsequent show-trials extremely careful in
their preparations.

The Kostov affair did not end in Bulgaria with the execution of the
principal victim. In August 1950 the trial of twelve of his collaborators, chosen
from leading economic officials, took place. Another trial of two more "mem-
bers of Rostov's band of conspirators" took place in April 1951, which in turn
was followed by a third trial of two members of the Central Committee of the
Bulgarian Communist Party. There were also several related trials of army
officers and members of the security forces.

In Czechoslovakia, the leaders had been warned in June 1949 that a
number of conspirators were plotting within the Communist Party. To flush
them out — and to find in particular the "Czech Rajk" — a special group was set

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The Other Europe

up in Prague, consisting of leaders from the Central Committee, the secret
police, and the Control Commission of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.
The first Communist leaders, initially of the third order, were arrested in 1949.
But during this first wave of trials the regime could mount only one anti-Tito
trial. It took place from 30 August to 2 September 1952 in Bratislava, the capital
of Slovakia. Sixteen people, including ten Yugoslavs, were brought to trial.
Their leader w r as Stefan Kevic, the vice-consul of Yugoslavia in Bratislava. Two
Slovaks were condemned to death in the trial, and one of them, Rudolf Lan-
canic, was executed.

In late 1949 the police began to close in on the "Czech Rajk," reinforced
by the assistance of experienced agents from the Soviet KGB. The Soviet
advisers made no secret of their aims. One of them, Mikhail Likhachev, irri-
tated by the lack of zeal of a Slovak security leader, exclaimed, "Stalin sent me
to set up the trials, and I don't have any time to waste. I haven't come here to
discuss things with people, I have come to Czechoslovakia to cut off heads
[svolchit goiovy]. I'll kill 150 people with my own hands before I get into
trouble! 1 ' 2 '

The historical reconstruction of" this repression has been carried out
meticulously because historians in 1968 had access to secret Party and police
archives and after November 1989 were able to pursue the question even
further.

The Pavlik couple — Gejza and Charlotte — were arrested in May 1949 as
part of the preparations for the Rajk trial in Hungary. The trial of Gejza Pavlik
began in June 1950. In June 1949 the Hungarian Party leader Matyas Rakosi
gave a list to the Czechoslovak Communist leader Klement Gottwald in Prague
of about sixty Czechoslovak leaders whose names had come up in the course
of the Rajk investigation. As a result of the Rajk case, and under pressure from
the Soviet and Hungarian security forces, Prague became more and more
obsessed with Communists who had been exiled to the West during the war,
and in particular with those who had served in the International Brigades. That
autumn the Czechoslovak Communist Party set up a special section of the state
security forces to unmask enemies inside the Party. They did not hesitate to
use former members of the Gestapo, the "specialists" of the Communist move-
ment. After the arrest of Evzen Lobl, the deputy minister of foreign trade, in
November 1949, repression against the Communists intensified. It reached the
highest-ranking cadres and intensified further in 1950, affecting even regional
Party leaders.

In January and February 1951 a great wave of arrests swept through a
section of the power structure. Among fifty arrests of high-ranking Party and
state officials was the detention of a group of "Francophone Communists" and
others accused, like Karel Svab, of having contact in one manner or another
with foreign parties.

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429

The hunt for the "Czech Rajk" took more than two years, and during that
time a variety of people were accused of being at the head of such a plot. It
was only in the summer of 1951 that Stalin, with the consent of Klement
Gottwald, decided that the man in question must be Rudolf Slansky, the
general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, whose righthand man
was Bedfich Geminder, another key figure in the Comintern. Geminder's name
was found next to that of Slansky almost everywhere, from the correspondence
between Stalin and Gottwald to the interrogations of Communists imprisoned
in the lead-up to Slansky's arrest. If worse came to worst, thought the Soviet
advisers, they could pin most charges on Geminder instead. The state security
forces arrested both men on 24 November 1951. In subsequent months two
other leaders joined them behind bars: Rudolf Margolius, deputy minister of
foreign trade, on 12 January 1952; and Slansky's assistant, Josef Frank, on 23
May 1952.

Soviet advisers and their local assistants took turns torturing and breaking
the accused in preparation for the show-trial. On 20 November 1952 the trial
of "the conspiracy against the state with Rudolf Slansky at its head" finally
began. The verdict was pronounced one week later. Eleven of the accused were
sentenced to death, and three received life imprisonment. On the morning of
3 December 1953, between 3:00 and 5:45 a.m., the eleven were hanged at
Pankrac prison in Prague.

Aside from the trials of Bolshevik leaders in Moscow in the 1930s, the
Slansky trial was the most spectacular and the most talked-about judicial pro-
ceeding in the history of Communism. Among the condemned were a number
of eminent figures on the international Communist scene who had made Pra-
gue the Communist Geneva during the Cold War. The Czech capital had played
a crucial role, particularly in relations with the French and Italian Communist
Parties.

Rudolf Slansky, who had been general secretary of the Czechoslovak
Communist Party since 1945, was a faithful servant of Moscow and the presi-
dent of the "Group of Five," a special body established to follow the repres-
sions day by day. Among its functions was the approval of dozens of death
sentences.

Bedrich Geminder and Josef Frank were deputy general secretaries.
Geminder had held a high position in the Comintern and had returned spe-
cially from Moscow to Prague to lead the International Department of the
Czechoslovak Communist Party. Frank had been a prisoner in a Nazi concen-
tration camp from 1939 to 1945 and had supervised economic affairs and the
financial aid sent to Western Communist Parties. As deputy minister of foreign
trade, Rudolf Margolius had maintained relations with various businesses and
commercial enterprises that were under the control of the Party. Otto Fischl,
the deputy minister of finance, also had in-depth knowledge of the financial

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The Other Europe

affairs of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Ludvik Frejka had participated
during the war in the Czech resistance based in London, and since 1948, when
Gottwald had become president of the republic, Frejka had been head of the
Economic Department in the Treasury.

Among those sentenced who had links with the Soviet special services,
either directly or through the Communist International, were Bedrich Reicin,
the head of military intelligence and deputy minister of defense since 1948;
Karel Svab, who had been a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp and was
head of personnel in the Czechoslovak Communist Party, a function that had
brought him an appointment as deputy minister of state security; Andre Si-
mone, a journalist who before the war had worked in Germany and France;
and Artur London, who had assisted the Soviet NKVD during the war in
Spain, fought in the resistance in France, been deported, helped the Commu-
nist intelligence services after 1945 in Switzerland and France, and been made
deputy minister of foreign affairs in Prague early in 1949.

Two other figures from the Foreign Affairs Ministry were among those
sentenced. The first was a Slovak, Vladimir dementis, who had been a Com-
munist lawyer before the war and been exiled to France. From abroad, he had
been critical of the German-Soviet pact, a stance that resulted in his expulsion
from the Party, although the decision was reversed in 1945. He had been
minister of foreign affairs since the spring of 1948. The other was Vavro Hajdu,
a deputy minister, who was also a Slovak. The third Slovak involved in the trial,
Evzen Lobl, who had spent the war in London, was deputy minister of foreign
trade when he was arrested.

Otto Sling had also participated in the Czech resistance in London after
fighting in the International Brigades in Spain. After the war he had become
the regional secretary of the Communist Party in Brno, the capital of Moravia.

The three who received life sentences— Vavro Hajdu, Artur London, and
Fvzen Lobl — saw their Jewish origins produced as evidence in court. This was
also the case for all those condemned to death, with the exceptions of demen-
tis, PVank, and Svab.

Although the Slansky trial became a symbol of repression in the "people's
democracies," most of the victims of the repression were not Communists. In
1948-1954 Communists in Czechoslovakia accounted for 0.1 percent of all
people sentenced, 5 percent of those condemned to death, and 1 percent of all
deaths, including death sentences, suicides provoked by persecution, and
deaths in prison or in the camps as a direct consequence of imprisonment
(accidents in the mines or shootings by guards during attempted escapes,
termed "acts of rebellion").

The Slansky trial was carefully prepared by Soviet advisers who were
acting on orders from the highest authorities in Moscow. It was part of the

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431

second wave of the great political trials of Communist leaders in the "people's
democracies" after 1949.

In Czechoslovakia the Slansky trial was followed by others in 1953 and
1954, despite the deaths of both Stalin and Gottwald in March 1953. The
culmination came in 1954. The first great trial in the series took place in Prague
from 26 to 28 January. Marie Svermova, a founding member of the Czecho-
slovak Communist Party and a member of its leadership from 1929 to 1950,
was sentenced to life imprisonment; six other high-ranking Party members who
had been accused of the same crimes were given sentences totaling 113 years.
In a second trial, from 23 to 25 February, seven members of the "Great
Trotskyite Council," all Czechoslovak Communist Party activists, received
sentences totaling 103 years. A third trial took place in Bratislava on 21-24
April, in which previous leaders of the Slovak Communist Party were accused
of "bourgeois nationalist" tendencies. Gustav Husak, who had been a leader in
the resistance, was sentenced to life; the four other accused received 63 years
in total. In six more trials in 1954 the accused were high-ranking army officers,
economic officials (eleven of whom were collectively sentenced to 204 years in
prison), and Social Democrats. As had been the custom for several years in all
important trials, the political secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party
approved the charges and the sentences, and the Party leadership then drew up
a report on the progress of the trial.

The trials of 1953 and 1954 were not the big show-trials of previous years.
The last political trial for the period 1948-1954, which took place on 5 Novem-
ber 1954, was that of Edward Outrat, an economist.

Osvald Zavodsky, the last Communist to be executed in this wave of
repressions, had fought in the International Brigades, had served in the resis-
tance and then been deported during the war, and by 1948 had become chief
of State Security. The court sentenced him to death in December 1953, and
the government refused to commute the sentence. He clearly knew too much
about the Soviet special services. He was hanged in Prague on 19 March 1954.
Various questions arise here. How did this repression of such high-rank-
ing Communists come about? Was there a logic in the choice of victims? The
opening of the archives has confirmed many ideas put forward before 1989: the
trials were all fabrications, confessions were systematically extracted by force,
and operations were directed from Moscow against a frenzied ideological back-
drop that was initially anti-Titoist but soon acquired an anti-Zionist and anti-
American character. Several facts have supplemented our knowledge of events.
But this opening of the archives also allows us to formulate some hypotheses
about the second wave of repression against Communists, launched by an
immediate need to stamp out the Yugoslav heresy.

Richly documented studies have confirmed the obvious causes. Interven-

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The Other Europe

tion by Moscow was clearly the determining factor. The trials of Communists
were directly related to the international situation at the time; after Tito's revolt
the Stalinist regime had to impose total control upon the Communist move-
ment and to accelerate the process of making the Communist states satellites
of the Soviet Union. The repression was also linked to the social, economic,
and political problems of each country. The condemned Communist leaders
served as scapegoats; their faults were used to explain away the failures of the
government and to channel the people's anger. The omnipresent terror sowed
and nurtured fear among the leaders; it was a means of obtaining absolute
obedience and total submission to Party orders and to the needs of the "peace
camp," which were defined by Soviet leaders.

Dissension within the leadership was also a major factor in the choice of
victims. Hatreds and reciprocal jealousies, so frequent in any basically colonial
society, likewise played a role. Moscow acted as a central manipulator, pulling
the strings and frightening its servants; it had long had detailed information on
all those jealousies and hatreds.

Each of the two waves of repression sweeping over the Communist leaders
had a model victim. In one case repression was concentrated on those who had
fought as volunteers in the civil war in Spain, had served in the resistance
abroad or in Yugoslavia, or had spent time in France or England. In the other
case, in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, the victims were chiefly those who
had fought in the resistance inside the country.

But we should go further and ask why the Slansky trial in particular was
so important, and why it effectively became a worldwide spectacle. What un-
derlying interests of Stalinist power surfaced here 3 Why was ir accorded such
publicity? Why were the sentences so brutal? Why was the violence so spec-
tacular at a moment when the Soviet Union seemed to have such a tight grip
on the "people's democracies"? Much more is constantly being discovered
about such questions, particularly concerning the sort of control that Moscow
exercised, the letters it sent and the meetings it organized, and above all the
exact role of the Soviet advisers in situ.

Let us formulate an initial hypothesis for the logic behind this repression:
the Soviet bloc was preparing for war in Europe. "American imperialism" had
become the principal enemy, and Soviet leaders believed — or wished to make
people think they believed— that an American attack on them was being pre-
pared. The Slansky trial, its development, its carefully organized echoes, and
its violently anti-American ideology (the pervasive antisemitism was secon-
dary), were all a part of Soviet preparations for war. The terror was aimed not
only at the Communist ranks but also at the enemy. Stalin had already used it
in the Soviet Union during the great purges of the 1930s and in the lead-up to
the war. Did he believe that he could use the tactic again?

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433

Those who have worked in the archives agree that around 1951-52, when
the war in Korea was still under way, the Soviet Union was making intense
preparations for a war in Europe, and might even have been preparing for a
full-scale invasion and occupation of Western Europe. At a meeting of political
and military officials in 1951, Stalin referred to the likelihood of war in 1953,
Militarization of the economy was everywhere at its maximum.

Czechoslovakia would have played a major role in any such contingencies.
The country had had a highly developed armaments industry since the days of
the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In the 1930s Czechoslovakia was one of the
world's major exporters of arms. After 1949 it also began to supply weapons
to the Soviet Union. Soviet advisers oversaw a militarization of the Czecho-
slovak economy, an intensification of propaganda about the imminence of war,
an unprecedented increase in the defense budget — over five years, spending on
the military increased by 700 percent — the ravaging of civil society, and the
comprehensive pillaging of Czechoslovakia's uranium mines.

The military historian Jindfich Madry, who has worked in archives
opened since 1989, recently concluded that "until May 1953, Czechoslovakia's
armaments industry had been geared up to the maximum for what was regarded
as an 'inevitable war.' " 24 The projected 1 953 budget for the Ministry of Defense
was ten times greater than that of 1948. In line with Soviet demands, the
Czechoslovak economy was to evolve on a war footing. On 1 January 1953 the
army numbered 292,788 men, twice its size in 1949. In April the president of
the republic lengthened the term of military service to three years. Financial
and material reserves were stockpiled in preparation for war. It is against this
backdrop that one should place the monetary reform of June 1953, which
stripped away savings. According to some indications, the situation changed in
June 1953, when "inevitable war" no longer seemed the preferred strategy of
Moscow's new leadership.

If we view the repression of Communist leaders from this perspective, we
can more clearly understand the logic behind the choice of victims. "Big
Brother" was well aware who his loyal comrades were, and he had an idea of
who his enemies were in the West. This "pedagogy of corpses" seemed to be
the height of Machiavellian policy. What better way was there to convince one's
enemies of one's vigor and determination (and even at times to give the illusion
of being weak) so as to plunge them into complete disarray? What better way
was there to convince one's loyal allies, who knew all one's secrets, of the gravity
of the situation and the necessity of iron discipline as well as the necessity of
sacrifice in the coming conflict?

The answer was to sacrifice the most loyal, to choose victims who would
ensure that the decision had the widest possible repercussions both interna-
tionally and in the Soviet Union, to use the cheapest lies and worst calumnies

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The Other Europe

as weapons. If those tried had been the likes of Antonin Zapotocky or Antonin
Novotny, who were hardly known in Moscow or elsewhere, the effect of the
spectacle would have been greatly diminished. Can anyone seriously believe
today that Thorez, Togliatti, Khrushchev, and Gottwald believed that Rudolf
Slansky, Bedfich Geminder, and their companions really were American
agents? The effort of trying to believe it wore everyone down, and wearing
people down was the name of the game.

If what Annie Kriegel has called "that infernal pedagogy" was to be
echoed around the world, the victims had to be well-known figures in the
antifascist movements in Spain, France, England, and the U.S.S.R. They were
well-known for having been deported or otherwise persecuted by the Nazis.
The members of the Soviet security organs knew very well what sort of service
had been rendered to them by these people and how loyal to Moscow they really
were. Among the Communists who were sacrificed, many were themselves
responsible for the earlier persecution or assassination of other non-Commu-
nists, and many had collaborated very closely with Soviet organizations.

The trials continued in 1953 and 1954, until the moment when the Soviet
Union decided to opt for a new policy of ''peaceful coexistence."

A second hypothesis, which it seems important to advance here, concerns
the widespread antisemitism in the repression of the Communists. Analyses of
the trials regularly mention "the struggle against Zionism and the Zionists,"
and there is no doubt that this aspect was linked to changes in Soviet policy
regarding Israel and the Arab world. The new state of Israel, to whose birth
Czechoslovakia in particular had greatly contributed (supplying arms to the
Haganah), became the Great Enemy, and Soviet policy realigned itself behind
the Arab struggle for national liberation.

Nicolas Werth (see Part I) has already pointed out the antisemitic elements
in the repressions in the Soviet Union after December 1947 and in the prepa-
ration for the "great final purge" of the 1950s. In Central Europe, antisemitism
was quite apparent in the Rajk trial, when the judge stressed the Jewish origins
of the names of four of the accused, including Rajk. This antisemitism reached
its height in the Slansky trial, which stressed the Jewish origins of eleven of
the accused and their alleged links with international Zionism.

To appreciate the extent of this latent antisemitism, one need onlv read
one of the reports from a Moscow adviser already cited above, Comrade Lik-
hachev, who had asked for information about the subversive activities of certain
Slovak leaders. According to a statement by his Slovak interlocutor, Likhachev
declared: "I don't care where this information comes from. I don't even care
if it's true or not. I'm ready to believe it, and let me do the rest. Why worry
about these Jewish shits anyway?" 25

There is another, unknown side to this intractable antisemitism. It would

Central and Southeastern Europe

435

appear that Stalin and his followers wanted to settle scores with all the Jews in
the International, definitively eliminating them. These Jewish Communists did
not practice their religion; they seem to have identified with the nation to which
they belonged or with the international Communist community. We have no
sources to indicate how they thought their identity had been affected by the
Holocaust. But, of course, many of their relatives had died in Nazi death camps.
After the war there were still many Jewish Communists occupying key
posts in parties and organizations in Central Europe. In a comprehensive
survey of Hungarian Communism, Miklos Molnar writes: "At the very top of
the hierarchy, almost without exception, the leaders were of Jewish origin, as
they were in a slightly lower proportion in the Central Committee, the secret
police, the press and publishing houses, and the theater and cinema . . . Al-
though a policy was in place to promote young workers to positions of
influence, the fact remains that for the most part power was wielded by the
Jewish petite bourgeoisie." 20 In January 1953 Gabor Peter, the chief of the
Hungarian secret police and an old friend of Rajk, found himself in prison as
a Zionist conspirator. An official speech by Rakosi, who was himself a Jewish
Communist, stigmatized u Peter and his gang" and turned him into a scapegoat.
In Romania, the fate of Jewish Comintern worker Ana Pauker was settled
in 1952. She had been a member of the ruling "troika," together with Gheor-
ghiu-Dej, the Party leader, and Vasile Luca. According to a statement that
cannot be confirmed from other sources, at a meeting with Gheorghiu-Dej in
1951 Stalin expressed surprise that agents of Titoism and Zionism had not yet
been arrested in Romania, and demanded immediate action. As a result Vasile
Luca, the minister of finance, was dismissed in May 1952 along with Teohari
Gheorghescu, the minister of interior, and sentenced to death. Luca's sentence
was later commuted to life imprisonment, and he died in prison. Ana Pauker,
the minister of foreign affairs, was sacked in early July, arrested in February
1953, and freed in 1954, returning to family life. The antisemitic repression
moved on to smaller targets.

Events that took place around this time in Moscow, such as the complete
reorganization of the security services and the arrest of the chief of the secret
police, Viktor Abakumov, in July 1951, permit yet a third hypothesis: in-
fighting within the Soviet security services may have been decisive in the choice
of victims who collaborated with the services and in the sentences they were
given. Karel Kaplan has recently pointed out that "it remains an open question
whether the liquidation of a group of people who cooperated with the Soviet
security services and their replacement by others (Karol Bacilek, A. Keppert,
and others) originated in the conflicts and changes in the central security
apparatus in Moscow." 27

The validity of this last hypothesis cannot be established until after

436

The Other Europe

lengthy work in the principal Moscow archives. There is no doubt that at the
end of Stalin's reign, differences existed among his potential successors, in-
cluding Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Beria, who were in charge of different
parrs of the security apparatus, We already have a reasonable idea of the sort
of rivalry that existed between military intelligence and the NKVD, which were
in open competition in the "people's democracies." 28

The Prague archives reveal a lack of resolution on the part of the Soviet
security services. In the spring of 1950, Moscow began to replace the advisers
it had sent to Prague the previous autumn, who had failed to produce the
desired results. In a meeting in the Kremlin on 23 July 1951 attended by
Gottwald (who had been invited by Alexej Ccpicka, the minister of national
defense), Stalin criticized these advisers for their irresponsible work. He sub-
sequently wrote a letter to Gottwald, which was brought from Moscow by
Ccpicka, about the respective fates of Slansky and Geminder:

Regarding your positive appreciation of the work of Comrade
[Vladimir | Boyarsky [the main Soviet adviser] and your desire to keep
him in the post of adviser to the minister of national security for the
Republic of Czechoslovakia, we are of a quite different opinion. The
experience of Bovarsky's work in the Czech Republic has shown that he
lacks the necessary qualities and qualifications to carrv out his task as
adviser in a satisfactory fashion. This is why we have decided to recall
him from Czechoslovakia. If you feel you really need an adviser for State
Security (and it is your decision) we will attempt to find a more reliable
replacement who has more experience.- 1 '

Under these conditions, the position of the heads of State Security was
extremely precarious; the chief of the Czechoslovak officers responsible for
training noted in a memorandum to one of his advisers that "one never leaves
the security services early, unless it is in a box." Jindfich Vesely, chief of State
Security, made an unsuccessful suicide attempt in 1950; a second attempt, in
1964, was successful. Before he died he wrote a long explanation of the motives
for his action, which can be consulted in the archives of the Central Committee
of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and appears to be totally sincere. He
knew perfectly well that Stalin regularly liquidated the heads of his security-
services and wished to avoid his own liquidation.

A fourth hypothesis might also be advanced to explain the logic of the
choice of victims among Communist leaders. There was clearly a need for a
large show-trial in rhe Soviet Union, to crown the series of political trials in
other countries and to punish the supposed culprits in a huge international plot
in the center, in Moscow itself. The new elements brought to light by Nicolas

Central and Southeastern Europe

437

Werth earlier in this book are strong arguments for this interpretation of the
repression exercised against Communists in Central and Southeastern Europe.

From "Post-Terror" to Post-Communism

Before examining the period extending from 1955 to 1989, which the historian
Miklos Molnar has called the u post-terror," we should take note of a few facts
that may shed light on the evolution of the repression and its logic.

Let us note first that the mass terror and repression implemented in the
Communist regimes were in violation of fundamental liberties and human
rights. These had been acknowledged in international conventions, particularly
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was passed in the United
Nations General Assembly in December 1948 despite the abstention of the
U.S.S.R. and five "people's democracies." Repression violated the constitutions
of all the countries in which it was implemented, and it was the leaders of the
Communist parties in these countries who were behind these unconstitutional
actions. In Czechoslovakia, for instance, the 'leading role of the Communist
Party" did not become a part of the constitution until 1960, when Czechoslo-
vakia became the second Communist country to adopt a socialist constitution.
No legislation ever allowed the widespread use of torture during questioning
and detention, and no law ever gave power to the secret police to resort to the
massive fabrication of evidence. It is worth remembering in this context that
the commentaries accompanying the first reassessments of Communist trials
criticized the police for " placing themselves above the Party" but not for
placing themselves "above the law." Clearly, the aim was to diminish or elimi-
nate any responsibility by the political leaders for the functioning of the police
system.

The specific nature of Communist dictatorship should also be borne in
mind. This was not one state that covered one-sixth of the globe, but several
states and an international movement. Communist dictatorships were inti-
mately linked with one another and with their center, Moscow. Thanks to the
opening of the archives we know that after 1944, repression in these countries
was inspired and directed by a very powerful international Communist appa-
ratus within the Communist International itself, which was integrated into the
central Soviet apparatus. On 12 June 1943, after the dissolution of the Comin-
tern announced on 9 June, the International Information Department of the
Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party (Cominform) was created,
with Aleksandr Shcherbakov at its head, assisted by Georgi Dimitrov and
Dmitry Manuilsky. This department gave constant instructions to foreign
Communist parties. Dimitrov, who was the real chief from the very beginning,
was officially instated as head in late December 1943 by a decision of the Soviet

438

The Other Europe

Politburo. The department sent out its directives through the foreign offices of
Communist Parties in the US.S.R. (only Yugoslavia and Albania had no such
offices), by radio or mail, and later on by "consultations" in Moscow. Wta-
dyslaw Gomulka received such a directive from Dirmtrov on 10 May 1945. He
was reproached for using insufficiently severe measures in Poland, and told that
u one can never have too many concentration camps." The concentration-camp
system was thus already envisaged for political enemies at the end of the war. 30
The spread of the Bolshevik experiment to states not integrated into the
Soviet Union was not without risks. Nationalist sentiment persisted and was
often expressed, despite attempts from Moscow to homogenize the different
regimes in the Eastern bloc. After the events in Yugoslavia in 1948-49, in
Hungary in 1953-1956, and in Poland in 1956, the diversification of Commu-
nist regimes became still more pronounced with the break between the Soviet
Union and China in the 1960s and its repercussions in the European satellite
states, particularly in Albania and Romania.

Finally, it should be noted that Communists who had formerly held power
were able to confront their past as oppressors; and this is one of the major
differences between Nazism and Communism. Nazism never had a Khrush-
chev, nor men like Imre Nagy, Alexander Dubcek, or Mikhail Gorbachev, in
the 1950s the rehabilitation of victims became a major factor in the power
struggles to succeed the great leaders who had died, such as Stalin and
Gottwald in 1953 or Bierut in Poland in 1956, or those who had been removed
as General Secretary, Like Rakosi in Hungary in 1956. Rehabilitation did not
involve simply denouncing obvious injustices; it also implied searching out the
culprits. The importance of rehabilitation in the struggles at the top of the
parties lasted into the 1960s, particularly in Czechoslovakia. The phenomenon
also touched many of the real believers in Communism, above all the intelli-
gentsia, for whom the Communist ideal had a moral dimension and who felt
betrayed by the revelation of the crimes of the regime, From 1953 to the 1960s,
the history of repression is also a history of amnesties, even if they were often
only partial.

So in 1955-56, the massive, grinding machine was still functioning, but it
was becoming rusty. Officials in the secret police, the consummate actors in the
repressions of 1949-1953, had been fired, and sometimes arrested and sen-
tenced, however leniently. Political leaders were also obliged to resign, some-
times to be replaced by former prisoners, like Gomulka in Poland and Kadar
in Hungary. On the whole, repressions seemed to be easing considerably.

But the founding period of many of the Communist regimes had left many
open wounds. Mass terror did not completely disappear as a method of repres-
sion in the 1950s and 1960s. It surely can be said to have continued with the
various Soviet military interventions in Eastern Europe. Driving a tank through

Central and Southeastern Europe

439

the street was one highly effective means of sowing terror and panic in the
population.

Soviet tanks intervened for the first time in East Germany on 17 June 1953
to crush spontaneous uprisings by workers in East Berlin and other cities,
sparked by government measures that created difficult conditions in the work-
place. According to the most recent studies, at least 51 people died in the riots
and ensuing repression: 2 were crushed by tanks, 7 were sentenced to death by
Soviet courts and 3 by German courts, 23 died of wounds received during the
clashes, and 6 members of the security forces lost their lives. By 30 June, 6,171
people had been arrested, and another 7,000 were arrested subsequently. 11

After the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Soviet
leaders ordered two more spectacular military interventions, in Hungary in
1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. In both cases the use of force was intended
to crush a popular antitotalitarian revolt.

In Hungary the Soviet army was already in place, and its units went into
action twice: at 2:00 a.m. on 24 October in Budapest, before retreating on 30
October; and on the night of 3-4 November. The worst of this fighting ended
on 6 November, with a few pockets of resistance in the suburbs holding out
until 14 November, as did the insurgents in the Mecsek Mountains. Confron-
tations with the army continued in December, linked to demonstrations in the
streets. In Salgotarjan on 8 December, 131 people were killed in crossfire
between Soviet and Hungarian units.

Thus for a few weeks violent death was part of everyday life for the
Hungarians. Nearly 3,000 people died in the fighting, two-thirds of them in
Budapest; and nearly 15,000 people were wounded. Thanks to the opening of
the archives, historians have also been able to establish the number of victims
on the side of the oppressors: between 23 October and 12 December, the secret
police (the AVH), the Soviet and Hungarian armies, and the Hungarian Min-
istry of Interna] Affairs recorded the loss of 350 lives; 37 people from the AVH,
the police, and the army were executed without trial, some shot, some lynched.
Thus, according to a number of historians, "the honor of the revolution was
sullied." 12

The repression that followed the crushing of the Hungarian revolution,
in which the Soviet military police played an important role until early 1957,
affected more than 100,000 people. Tens of thousands were interned in camps
that were officially created on 1 2 December; 35,000 people were prosecuted and
around 25,000 jailed. Several thousand Hungarians were deported to the
US.S.R., 229 rebels were condemned to death and executed, and 200,000
people emigrated.

Repression followed the tried and tested pattern. Extraordinary courts
were set up in the form of People's Tribunals and Special Chambers of Military

440

The Other Europe

Courts. The trial of Imre Nagy took place in the People's Tribunal in Budapest.
Nagy was a Communist of long standing who had emigrated to Moscow during
the war. Removed from power in 1948, he became prime minister in 1953, and
had been ousted again in 1955 before taking the lead role in the revolutionary
government. The trial of Nagy and those accused with him ended in June 1958.
Two of the defendants were absent. Geza Losonczy, a Communist journalist
and former resistance fighter who had been imprisoned from 1951 to 1954, and
had been a minister in the Nagy government, died in custody on 21 December
1957, almost certainly with the help of his questioners. Jozsef Szilagyi, another
Communist of long standing, who had fought in the resistance and been
imprisoned during the war, and had risen to become head of Nagy's cabinet in
1956, was condemned to death on 22 April 1958 and executed two days later.
According to documents now available, Szilagyi resisted with tremendous cour-
age, repeatedly telling his accusers that in comparison with the Communist
prisons, the prisons of Miklos Horthy's interwar regime had been like mere
hospitals.

The Imre Nagy trial opened on 9 June 1958; the verdict was reached on
15 June. The death sentence passed on three of the accused was carried out the
following day. Besides Imre Nagy, the others who received death sentences were
General Pal Maleter, who had been a resistance fighter during the war, a
Communist since 1945, and minister of defense in the revolutionary govern-
ment in 1956; and Miklos Gimes, a Communist journalist who had founded an
underground newspaper after the failure of the revolution. Five others received
sentences ranging from five years to life.

The Imre Nagy trial, one of the last great political trials in the Eastern
bloc, confirmed that it was impossible for the Communist regime, propped up
by Soviet military intervention, not to resort to this supreme form of repres-
sion. But the days of the big show-trials were over: Nagy's trial took place tn
camera, in a specially converted chamber of the police headquarters at the
central prison in Budapest. In 1958 Nagy and his companions, who refused to
recognize the legitimacy of Soviet intervention and the seizure of power by
Janos Kadar, and who stood as symbols of the popular revolt, could not possibly
remain alive.

New research underscores the cruelty of these repressions and refers to
this period as one of terror; but it also reveals the ambivalent nature of the
period and its differences from the years 1947-1953. In 1959, when the first
trials of the rebels took place, a partial amnesty had already been declared. In
1960 the exceptional measures that had been decreed began to be phased out,
and the internment camps were closed. In 1962 there was a purge of officers
in the secret police who had fabricated evidence in the Rakosi period; Rajk and
190 other victims were also definitively rehabilitated. In 1963 a general amnesty

Central and Southeastern Europe

441

was declared, but it did not apply to the rebels who had been condemned as
"murderers." Violent repression came to an end. Nevertheless the rehabilita-
tion of Imre Nagy and his followers did not occur until 1989, and even in 1988,
police in Budapest beat up demonstrators who were commemorating the thir-
tieth anniversary of his death.

Two external factors influenced this evolution. The first was obviously the
criticism of Stalin's reign inside the Soviet Union and the sidelining of various
Stalinist leaders. The second was the thaw in international relations that ac-
companied the idea of peaceful coexistence between East and West. The effects
of these changes were not felt in Hungary alone.

After the execution of the eleven accused in the Slansky trial in Czecho-
slovakia in December 1952, the bodies were cremated and the ashes simply
scattered on the frozen roads and fields around Prague. Six years later, incin-
eration no longer seemed the answer for Communist authorities. Alajos Dorn-
bach, the civil-rights lawyer who demanded a reopening of the Nagy case in
1988, provided the following information about the successive disposals of the
bodies. 11

Once Imre Nagy and his companions were executed, they were first buried
under a thick layer of concrete inside the prison on Kozma Street, where the
trial had taken place. But burying bodies in a place unknown to the families
became a source of anxiety. In the summer of 1961 they were exhumed and
buried in extreme secrecy, at night, in the main communal cemetery in Buda-
pest, near the place where Geza Losonczy and Jozsef Szilagvi, two others who
had died as a result of the trial, had been laid to rest. The coffins were passed
over the wall, and the cemetery employees knew nothing about the burial of
these three corpses, who were given false names. For thirty years the families
searched in vain for the burial place. On the basis of fragmentary information
they began to erect gravestones in Lot 301 in the communal cemetery; but the
police threatened them when they came to visit and knocked down the stones
on several occasions, trampling them with horses.

In March 1989 the bodies were finally exhumed again. An autopsy per-
formed on Geza Losonczy revealed several broken ribs, some of which had
preceded death by three to six months, and some of which were much more
recent. The government then ordered a few young officers to conduct an
inquiry into the location of the graves. Sandor Rajnai, who had been in charge
of the Nagy trial and was the Hungarian ambassador to Moscow in 1988-89,
was among those who refused to help this commission.

Twelve years after the events in Hungary, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslova-
kia to spread mass terror there. The military intervention of 1968 was quite
different from that of 1956, although the aim was identical: to crush a popular

442

The Cither Europe

revolt against "Soviet socialism." The passage of time had brought a new
international situation and a specific moment in world Communism. Most of
the assault troops came from the Soviet Union, but four other Warsaw Pact
countries also participated: Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and East Germany all
sent troops. There was another fundamental difference: Soviet troops were not
already stationed in Czechoslovakia as they had been in Hungary in 1956,
when Hungary was basically an occupied country. In Czechoslovakia, the So-
viet Union feared a massive armed resistance movement leading to a localized
or even a European war.

For this reason, a huge number of troops were deployed. The operation
began during the night of 20-21 August, under the code name "Danube." It
had been minutely prepared since 8 April, when Marshal Andrei Grcchko, the
Soviet minister of defense, had signed Order GOU/ 1/87654, mobilizing So-
viet troops in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. Most of these were tank
regiments, and tanks now became the symbol of oppression, as they did in
Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. More than 165,000 men and 4,600 tanks
were sent in the first wave; five days later Czechoslovakia was occupied by
twenty-seven divisions, with 6,300 tanks, 800 aircraft, 2,000 artillery pieces, and
approximately 400,000 soldiers. To appreciate the scale of the terror here, it
should be borne in mind that in 1940 Hitler invaded France with approximately
2,500 tanks and that in 1941 the Germans used 3,580 tanks in the attack on the
Soviet Union. At the time, Czechoslovakia had a population of approximately
14.3 million, a small fraction of the population of France in 1940.

But no war occurred, and resistance to the invasion was quite peaceful.
The invaders killed 90 people, mostly in Prague; around 300 Czechs and
Slovaks were seriously injured; and another 500 sustained minor injuries. The
number of victims among the invading forces (as a result of incompetent
handling of weapons, execution of deserters, or the usual road accidents) is not
yet known. AH we know with certainty is that one Bulgarian was shot by-
Czechoslovak civilians. The Soviet authorities arrested and deported several
Czechoslovak leaders, but within a few days the Soviet Politburo had to set
them free and open negotiations with them. The political scenario that had been
envisaged after the intervention was a failure, insofar as the occupying forces
failed to set up a collaborationist "workers 1 and peasants' government" as they
had planned.

Repression linked to this military intervention did not stop in 1968.
Several people acquired—and retain—the status of symbolic victims by be-
coming "human torches," setting themselves on fire in public to protest the
occupation. The first to choose this fate was Jan Palach, a twenty-year-old
student who set himself alight at 2:30 p.m. on 16 January 1969 in the center of
Prague; his death three days later was followed by huge demonstrations. In
February Jan Zajic, another student, followed suit. A third human torch, a

Central and Southeastern Europe

443

forty-year-old Communist called Evzen Plocek, sacrificed himself in early April
in Jihlava, in Moravia.

Repression reverted to an old pattern in Czechoslovakia, carried out for
the most part by internal security forces, the army, and the regular police force.
The pressure exerted by the Soviet occupying army was immense. More fuel
was added to the fire by spontaneous demonstrations by more than half a
million people during the night of 28-29 March 1969. Czechs and Slovaks went
out onto the streets in sixty-nine cities to cheer the victory of their national
ice-hockey team over the Soviet Union in the world championships; and
twenty-one of the thirty-six Soviet garrisons came under attack. Alexander
Dubcek, who was still the secretary general of the Czechoslovak Communist
Party (until 17 April), was told that if the situation failed to improve, he risked
meeting the same fate as Imre Nagy.

The repressive potential of the "normalized' 1 Czechoslovak forces — the
special units in the army and police, and the People's Militia at factories — was
put to the test on the first anniversary of the invasion, but these forces had been
carefully prepared. There were numerous confrontations with the demonstra-
tors, most of whom were quite young. The fighting was intense, especially in
Prague, where two young men died on 20 August. Tanks and armored cars
were seen on the streets of all the main cities. Military historians consider this
episode the biggest combat operation by the Czechoslovak army in the postwar
period. Three more demonstrators lost their lives on 21 August, and dozens
more were seriously wounded. Thousands of people were arrested and beaten
by the police. By the end of 1969, 1,526 demonstrators had been sentenced
under a decree from the Presidium of the Federal Assembly, which had the
force of law and had been signed by the chairman of that legislative body,
President Dubcek himself. 14

In 1969 a few more people who had been involved in the 1968 revolt were
imprisoned, including a group from the Revolutionary Youth Movement
(Hnuti revolucniho mladeze), which had been active in preparing the demon-
strations to mark the anniversary of the events of 1968, and which had been
infiltrated by the secret police. Despite strong pressure from hard-liners, the
government did not give an automatic green light to the trials of the reform-
minded Communist leaders of 1968. Analysts have often pointed out that the
new leadership was perhaps rather wary of the process, fearing it would
backfire. Gustav Husak, the new first secretary of the Czechoslovak Commu-
nist Party, chosen as Dubcek's replacement by the Soviet leadership, knew the
pattern all too well. He himself had been sentenced to life imprisonment back
in 1954 in a trial of "Slovak bourgeois nationalists," and had spent nine years
behind bars. Nonetheless, mass repressions were approved by Moscow and
carried out in a cruel and insidious fashion, as part of a subtle strategy to inspire
fear. Hundreds of thousands of people could no longer take part in public life

444

The Other Europe

and were forbidden to work in their professions, and their children were pre-
vented from entering secondary or higher education, effectively being held
hostage. When "normalization" began, the regime lashed out at the elements
in society that had begun to regroup in 1968, and roughly seventy organizations
were banned or forcibly merged with other governmental organizations. Cen-
sorship was also rigorously enforced. Tens of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks
joined those who had gone into exile after February 1948. During the forty
years of Communist rule, around 400,000 people, most of whom were well-
qualified and highly trained, chose exile from their homeland. After 1969, many
of them were sentenced in absentia.

Political trials reappeared after the crushing of the Prague Spring. The
trial of the sixteen members of the HRM took place in March 1971; the leader,
Petr Uhl, received a four-year sentence. Nine other trials followed in the
summer of 1972. Most of the accused were "second-rank" protagonists in
1968, charged with illegal activity following the occupation. Of the 46 accused,
two-thirds of whom were ex-Communists, thirty-two received prison sentences
totaling ninety-six years; and sixteen others; after being detained for several
months, received suspended sentences of twenty-one years. The longest sen-
tence imposed was one for five and a half years in prison, which was mild in
comparison to the atrocities of the founding years of the regime. Some of those
sentenced in this particular wave of repression — Petr Uhl, Jaroslav Sabata,
Rudolf Battek — were imprisoned again when their sentences expired and spent
nine years behind bars in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, Czechoslovakia
had one of the worst records for political persecution in Europe.

The great revolts of 1956 and 1968 and their crushing by the Soviet Union
reveal another important aspect of the logic of repression: events in one coun-
try had repercussions elsewhere, particularly when military engagement was
involved. As a result of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, the post-Stalinist
leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was prepared to send units
from the Czechoslovak army into Hungary. At the same time, it stepped up
domestic repression, sent a number of political prisoners who had recently-
been freed back to prison, and prosecuted the Czechs and Slovaks who were in
sympathy with the Hungarian revolt. Of the 1,163 who were taken into cus-
tody, mostly for verbal expressions of solidarity, 53.5 percent were workers.
Sentences, however, were rarely for more than a year in prison. Repression at
that time was much more severe in Albania, where on 25 November 1956 the
Hoxha regime announced the sentencing and execution of three u Titoist"
leaders: Liri Gega, a member of the Central Committee of the Albanian Com-
munist Party (who was pregnant at the time); General Dale Ndreu; and Petro
Buli. In Romania, Gheorghiu-Dej, who was beginning to play the Chinese card

Central and Southeastern Europe

445

in his relations with the U.S.S.R., provided clemency to persecuted nationalists
even as he instigated a large trial of high-ranking industrialists involved in
international trade, many of whom were Jewish Communists.

In 1968 many of the Communist regimes, including the U.S.S.R., feared
contagion from the ideas of the Prague Spring and stepped up their repression
both before and after the military intervention in Czechoslovakia. The fate of
Alfredo Foscolo is a good indicator of the spirit of the times. Born of a
Bulgarian mother and a French father who had taught in Bulgaria until 1949,
Foscolo often spent his holidays in Bulgaria. In 1966, while studying law and
Oriental languages in Paris, he typed 500 copies of a tract in France and brought
them to his friends in Sofia. The tract demanded free elections, freedom of the
press, and freedom of movement, autonomy for workers, the abolition of the
Warsaw Pact, and the rehabilitation of the victims of repression. That same
year he had a daughter with Raina Aracheva, a Bulgarian. Fredy and Raina then
asked for official authorization to marry, which was slow in coming. Then came
the events of 1968. Alfredo Foscolo described what followed:

In early 1968 I was drafted for military service. In July the Bulgarian
embassy informed me that 1 would receive authorization to get married
if I went to Sofia. I had a fourteen-day furlough, and 1 rushed down
there. But when I got there I met with another refusal. This was August
1968, and on 21 August the Soviets marched into Prague; a week later,
still empty-handed, I got onto the Orient Express to return to Paris. But
it took me several years to get home. I was arrested at the border by
agents from the Durzhavna Sigurnost. I effectively disappeared for two
weeks while I was kept in the State Security headquarters. During that
time Captain [A.] Nedkov told me that I had a simple choice: either I
admitted that I was an imperialist agent, or no one would ever hear of
me again. I accepted, in the hope that the truth might come out in a trial.

The trial began on 6 January 1969. Two friends, as well as Raina,
were beside me in the witness box. When the prosecutor demanded the
death sentence for me, my lawyer answered that it was in fact what I
deserved, but that he was pleading for clemency all the same. The whole
trial was a farce, played out purely for the purposes of propaganda. I was
sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison, including fifteen years of
solitary confinement for espionage. My friends got ten and twelve years,
and Raina, who hadn't known anything about the tracts, got one year.
Another friend, who was a political refugee in Paris, was sentenced to
death in absentia.

After a month on death row in the central prison in Sofia (7th
division), I was transferred to the prison in Stara Zagora, where most of
the 200 to 300 political prisoners in Bulgaria were kept. I learned a lot
there about the prison history of Bulgaria over the first twenty-five years

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The Other Europe

of Communism, and quickly saw that what I had been through was
nothing in comparison to what thousands of Bulgarians had lived
through. I also witnessed a revolt on 8 October 1969, which led to the
deaths of a number of prisoners. At the same time, a new request for
authorization to marry, made during our detention, was rejected.

Quite unexpectedly, I was freed on 30 April 1971 and sent back to
France. Our arrest in 1968 and the big trial that followed against the
backdrop of the Czechoslovak affair had all clearly been intended to
implicate "imperialist forces" in the freedom movement in the Eastern
bloc. But by 1971, with negotiations over the Helsinki agreement under
way, the world had changed again, and my presence in Bulgarian jails
was no longer desirable. Unfortunately, my two Bulgarian friends did
not benefit from that new clemency.

When I got back to Paris, I tried a variety of schemes to enable
Ra'ina and my daughter to join me there. Finally, on 31 December 1973,
I went to Sofia in secret, under a false name, with two other false
passports. Thanks to those documents and a lot of luck, we managed to
slip across the Bulgarian-Turkish border on the night of 1-2 January
1974. Two days later we were in Paris. 1 '

In the period 1955-1989 repression followed a fairly predictable pattern: a
powerful police presence constantly harassed the opposition, whether opposi-
tion took the form of spontaneous social movements such as strikes or street
protests, or was deliberately structured, with well-formulated demands and a
well-organized network. In the second half of the 1970s the apparatus of
repression developed an ever-larger network of informers to infiltrate and
destroy opposition movements that had benefited from the 1975 Helsinki
agreement. That this form of control was needed in ever-increasing amounts
was undoubtedly a sign of the decline of the system. In Czechoslovakia, for
instance, in 1954—3958 there had been roughly 132,000 officially recruited
secret informers. By the end of the 1980s the number had risen to 200,000.

The logic of repression in the post-terror period was also marked by
specific national characteristics and by the trajectory of internal power strug-
gles in the countries concerned. Regimes acted differently depending on their
confidence in their legitimacy or the success or failure of political and economic
projects. On 13 August 1961, at the initiative of the SED leadership and with
approval from the Soviet leadership, the Berlin Wall was erected, a clear sign
that the East German regime was panicking about its own future.

In Romania, the Communist leadership had clearly expressed its inde-
pendence by refusing to participate in the military intervention in Czechoslo-
vakia. Nonetheless this brand of ''national Communism' 1 revealed itself to be
the most repressive (with the possible exception of Albania), particularly in the

Central and Southeastern Europe

447

1980s. Repression was inherent in the Communist system, even without gui-
dance from Moscow.

In the late 1970s Nicolae Ceau^escu, who styled himself "the Great
Leader" (Conductor) in the manner of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, was
facing a tremendous economic and social crisis in Romania, and a large protest
movement began to emerge. The movement was inspired by the struggles for
democratic rights occurring in other countries, but in Romania the movement
was strengthened by the participation of workers. The great strike of 35,000
miners in the Jiu valley in August 1977; the demonstrations and strikes of the
summer of 1980 in which factories were occupied in Bucharest, Galati, Tir-
goviste, and the mining regions; the uprising in the Motru valley in the autumn
of 1981; and other manifestations of discontent all provoked severe and massive
repression: arrests, forced evacuations, house arrests, beatings, summary firings
from jobs, incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, trials, and assassinations. Re-
pression won in the short term, but opposition inevitably resurfaced. Demon-
strations and strikes broke out again in 1987 and culminated in 1988 in a
popular uprising in Bras,ov, Romania's second-largest city. Confrontations with
the forces of law and order were extremely violent and bloody, resulting in
deaths and hundreds of arrests.

The suffering of some of Romania's political prisoners seemed eternal.
One example was the case of Gheorghiu Calciu Dumirreasa, known as Father
Calciu. Born in 1927, he was arrested while a medical student and was impris-
oned in Pite§ti (see above). His captivity lasted until 1964. When he came out
of prison, he decided to become a priest. He became involved with the founders
of the Free Union of Romanian Workers (SLOMR). Arrested again, he was
sentenced in camera on 10 May 1979 to ten years for "passing on information
and endangering state security." In prison he went on five separate hunger
strikes. Another example was Ion Puiu, a leader of the National Peasant Party
who received a twenty-year sentence in 1947 and was released in 1964. In 1987
he was again imprisoned for his involvement in opposition movements.

In 1987 a French journal listed some cases of current Romanian political
prisoners: 16

Francise Barabas, a forty-year-old mechanic in a textile factory, had been
sentenced to six years in prison. A Hungarian from Transylvania, with
his brother and fiancee he had distributed some tracts in Hungarian that
read "Down with the shoemaker [Ceausescu's first trade]! Down with
the murderer!"
• Ion Bugan, an electrician born in 1936, had been sentenced to ten years
for driving around Bucharest in March 1983 with a sticker on his car
that read: "Executioners, we don't want you any more.'*

448

The Other Europe

Ion Guseila, an engineer, had been sentenced to four years in prison in
late 1985 for distributing tracts that demanded a new head of state.
Gheorghiu Nastasescu, a fifty-six-year-old construction worker, had
been sentenced to nine years for spreading antigovernment propaganda.
He had already spent four years in prison for antisocialist propaganda.
In the autumn of 1983 he had dropped fliers off some scaffolding in
Bucharest urging people to show their discontent.

Victor Totu, Gheorghiu Pavel, and Florin Vlascianu, all workers born in
1955, had been sentenced to seven or eight years. On 22 August 1983,
on the eve of the national holiday, they had been caught writing anti-
Ceaus,escu graffiti comparing his regime to that of the Nazis.
Dimitru luga had been forty when he was sentenced to ten years in
1983. He had held several meetings trying to organize young people to
demonstrate against Ceau^escu. They were determined to act peacefully.
Seven of them were sentenced to five years, and were freed — although
luga was not — in an amnesty in 1984.

Nicolae Litoiu at age twenty-seven had been sentenced in 1981 to fifteen
years for "plotting against state security." In the summer of 1981 he had
thrown a firecracker onto one of the Party's stands at Ploie§ti, and had
also dropped fliers from the top of the Omnia store in Ploie§ti. His
brother-in-law had been sentenced to eight years for having known in ad-
vance of these events and not having acted.

Attila Kun, a doctor, had been sentenced to three years in January 1987
for refusing to deliver a death certificate for a political prisoner who had
died under torture.

I. Borbely, a fifty-year-old philosophy professor, had been sentenced to
eight years in 1982 for publishing an underground newspaper in
Hungarian.

Variations in the degree of repression were always linked to changes in
the international political situation, to relations between Eastern and Western
Europe, and to changes in Soviet policy. From Brezhnev to Gorbachev the
world changed dramatically, as did the ideology of repression. After the 1960s
people were very rarely persecuted as "Titoists" or "Zionists." In most coun-
tries the focus shifted to "ideological subversion 1 ' or "illegal relations with
foreign countries,' 1 particularly, of course, with the West.

"Milder" repressions then became more common in several countries.
Involuntary exile, especially in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and "psy-
chiatric treatment" on the Soviet model often replaced imprisonment. As vio-
lence within the regimes drew wider comment in the West, some victims began

Central and Southeastern Europe

449

telling their stories to mass-circulation newspapers. Increased media coverage
forced many regimes, even the Romanians, to reflect more on their actions.

But if the suffering was less intense, the repressions were no less real. The
slave-labor camps disappeared, except in Albania and Bulgaria (where they
were used in the 1980s as internment camps for Turks). But political trials
continued, marking out the evolution of all these countries except Hungary. As
before 1956, trials were aimed chiefly at people who wished to improve civil
society, at opposition figures who were to be liquidated, at independent unions,
and at those who had helped the churches to survive in the shadows. Commu-
nist leaders were also placed on trial. Examples include Paul Merker in East
Germany, who was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment in March 1955 and
freed the following year; Rudolf Barak, the Czechoslovak minister of interior,
who received a six-year sentence in April 1962; and Milovan Djilas, a vocal
Yugoslav dissident who was first imprisoned in 1956-1961 and again in 1962-
1966. When Albania broke with the U.S.S.R. and aligned itself with China,
pro-Soviet officials, such as Liri Beleshova, a member of the Politburo, and
Koco Tashko, the president of the Control Commission of the Albanian Com-
munist Party, were punished severely. Similarly, Rear Admiral Temo Sejko was
executed in May 1961 along with several other officers. In 1975, after Albania
had broken with China, Enver Hoxha liquidated Beqir Balluku, the minister of
defense, and Petrit Dume, the chief of staff.

In the many political trials of the period, death sentences were rare, except
for genuine cases of espionage, and were rarely carried out. This was true for
the Bulgarian Dimitar Penchev, who in 1961 was sentenced to death, together
with an accomplice, for attempting to resurrect the Agrarian Union Party of
Nikolai Petkov. His sentence was commuted to twenty years, and he was freed
in the autumn of 1964 as part of a general amnesty. He was then forced to work
as a laborer, but he had not seen the last of prison. He was jailed again from
1967 to 1974 for illegally attempting to cross the border, an escapade that led
to the death of one of his friends. In 1985, suspected of terrorist offenses,
Penchev spent two months in the prison camp on Belene Island, before ending
up under house arrest in a small mining village called Bobov Dol.

The number of deaths and victims of repression was clearly lower in the
period of post-terror than it was in the period up to 1956. Apart from those
mentioned above who were killed in Hungary in 1956 and in 1968-69 in
Czechoslovakia, only a few hundred died. Many of them, about two hundred
in all, were shot trying to cross the border between East Germany and the
Berlin Wall. One of the last political prisoners during this period, the Czecho-
slovak dissident Pavel Wonka, died in prison from insufficient medical attention
on 26 April 1988.

450

The Other Europe

Calculations of the victims are piecemeal and difficult to make. Among
the deaths one must include assassinations by the secret police that were some-
times passed off as car accidents, as was the case for two Romanian engineers
who led a strike in the Jiu valley in 1977 and who were killed a few weeks after
the strike had been broken.

Future research on the period after 1956 will perhaps result in a typology
of victims and a profile of the typical prisoner. We know that many of the
victims of this period were not always in prison, as was the case for those killed
during military intervention or while desperately trying to cross a border. It
would also be wrong to concentrate too specifically on high-profile victims such
as the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, the Hungarian philosopher Istvan Bibo,
the Romanian writer Paul Goma, or other members of the intelligentsia, while
overlooking tens of millions of ordinary people in the countries concerned.
Indeed, cynics might suggest that in fact no one of the stature of Babel or
Mandelstam was executed between 1956 and 1989. There was, of course, the
assassination of the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov in London in September
1978, executed with the poison-tipped umbrella of a Bulgarian secret agent.
There may have been other young victims, whose talent was never allowed to
flourish. But everywhere, particularly in Romania, most of the victims who
were imprisoned and killed were simply the people in the streets; and history
should never forget the names of ordinary people.

It is well known that Communist dictatorships feared artists and creative
people, and anyone who could express himself with originality. In early 1977
the Communist leaders in Czechoslovakia panicked when they were faced with
260 signatures on the opposition manifesto known as Charter 77. But Commu-
nist regimes were considerably more frightened when tens of thousands of
people took to the streets.

By the end of the 1980s, people were suddenly no longer afraid of mass
terror. And thus there finally came a general assault on all government power.

The Complex Management of the Past

Is it possible to forget, or to make people forget, the suffering brought on by a
system and its jackbooted agents, when the suffering lasted for decades? Can
one be generous and indulgent toward those who have been defeated, when
they are executioners or torturers? When one wishes to set up democracy and
the rule of law, what can be done with previous leaders and their assistants,
particularly when they were so numerous and the state apparatus was so vast?
The new democracies in Central and Southeastern Europe have sought
answers to these questions. The cleansing of the Communist apparatus was the
order of the day, even if this meant dredging up extremely unpleasant memo-

Central and Southeastern Europe

451

ries. Not surprisingly, the new leaders, who include many former Communists,
are divided in their views about how extensive this cleansing should be and the
methods it should involve. There have been calls for radical measures— for the
banning of Communist parties as criminal organizations, and for trials of all
former leaders who are still alive. On the other hand, there is an overwhelming
desire to avoid a purge reminiscent of old Communist practices. For the Polish
prime minister Tadeusz iMazowiecki or for the president of the Czech and
Slovak republics, Vaclav Havel, denouncing the crimes of the previous regime
and removing its agents from positions of authority could not mean a return
to the methods of the previous regime. These anti-Communist democrats did
not want to govern in an atmosphere of fear. Gyorgy Dalos, a Hungarian writer
and a longtime opponent of the authoritarian regime, wrote in 1990 that
"purification and cleansing, even if one hides behind terms like 'spring clean-
ing,' can still create a deep-seated feeling of insecurity among those who worked
under the old regime, whom we still need very much ... It would be very
serious if fear gave rise to a new loyalty,' which frankly would have very little
to do with the idea of democracy itself." 17

In the first days after freedom had been restored, victims of the Commu-
nist regimes, concretely identified, living or dead, silent or vocal, were at the
center of investigations of responsibility. Victims of all different types were in
the spotlight, from people who had been unjustly executed or imprisoned to
people whose livelihoods had been taken away, to people who had been humili-
ated on a daily basis by their submission to the lies of the Party. Post-Commu-
nist society had to face up to what Vaclav Havel termed this ''monstrous
heritage, 11 and to face as well the grave issues of crime and punishment. In
seeing the victim as the main witness to suffering, societies necessarily appealed
to their new political officials, to provide a framework that would either exploit
or calm the resentment produced by this suffering. There were some who
exploited the situation for personal gain, and those who wanted to prevent the
rise of blind vengeance, those who simply watched, and those who were con-
scious of human frailty and sought the true causes of the evil, while proposing
democratic measures. A u silent majority" had existed in all the Communist
regimes; and ironically, those who had remained most passive, becoming semi-
collaborators, ended up calling most loudly for brutal revenge on the oppres-
sors.

It is hardly surprising that after so many years of amputated memories,
the interpretation of the recent past was so impassioned. Naturally, there was
an explosion in publishing after the abolition of censorship, as a multiplicity of
viewpoints began to emerge. The journalistic, highly media-focused approach,
with its constant hunt for sensationalism, led to oversimplification, a black-and-
white view in which history was reduced to victims versus executioners, until

452

The Other Europe

suddenly it seemed possible to believe that a whole nation had been resistance
fighters against a regime imposed from abroad. In the process, words lost their
finer meanings. The term "genocide" was bandied about: the Communists had
perpetrated genocide on the Romanians, the Czechs, and others; the Czechs
had tried to launch genocide against the Slovaks. In Romania, people began
talking about a a Red holocaust"; and in Bulgaria the formula "innumerable
Auschwitzes lacking only crematoria" became the standard way of referring to
the gulags.

These approaches to the recent past have already been the object of
dispassionate studies, which demonstrate clearly how strongly the effects of
World War II persist in post-Communist societies. The extreme case is that of
the former Yugoslavia, where the recent war was, in part, an extension of the
conflicts generated fifty years before, and where memories were flagrantly
manipulated to fuel the conflict. The shadows of the war have not dissipated,
particularly among the former allies of Nazi Germany. If Marshal Petain had
been Romanian or Slovak, many would have claimed him as a victim of Com-
munism, as was the case with the Romanian dictator Antonescu and the Slovak
president Monsignor Jozef Tiso, both of whom were sentenced to death and
executed after the war for the atrocities committed within their countries.

The history of Communist regimes is now extremely politicized, espe-
cially when parties and movements seek to rediscover their ancestors and
traditions. The Pole Andrzej Paczkowski, one of the authors of this book,
speaks unhesitatingly about a "civil war" in Poland over the search for origins,
although happily this war is merely one of words. The past is manipulated and
used as a tool as ancient myths and legends are reborn and new ones appear.
The myth of the number of victims is one that commands special attention.
According to the French historian Robert Frank, the figure becomes a key
symbol, a mathematical truth; it lends authority to discourses about death, and
it transforms mass deaths into a kind of sacrament. Hence the special need for
prudence among those researching new national or social mythologies.

The Hungarian Gyorgy Litvan, director of the Institute for the History
of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, has suggested that a politically aware
interpretation of extreme points in history facilitates in-depth analysis of the
political evolution of a country. He claims that a country's relation to the recent
past can tell us much more about the democratic roots of certain types of
discourse than it can about economic problems or other changes that might be
under way at the time.

All memories are "created" to some extent, and the official version of
events is no exception. Panels of legislators and decisionmakers select the
traditions that will underlie new constitutions, choose the figures whose heads
will appear on stamps and banknotes, determine the national holidays to be

Central and Southeastern Europe

453

celebrated, the medals to be handed out, the events to be commemorated, and
the names to be given to streets, squares, and public places — and, of course,
draw up the curriculum to be taught in schools. The heroes and victims of the
Communist period cannot be forgotten. Nevertheless, many post-Communist
regimes have decided to put the Communist period in their history in brackets.
This is hardly new in the twentieth century, as the Italian historian Maria
Ferretti, who specializes in Russian memory, has pointed out: Benedetto Croce
proposed a similar approach in order to bury the ghost of Italian fascism. 18
Bracketing, however, is always an illusion, and whole decades cannot simply be
buried and forgotten. These decades have molded the outlook of the vast
majority of the citizens in each country, and they have also determined the
course of social and economic development. Dispassionate analyses attempt to
propose explanations of behavior, including the absence (or inadequacy) of
historical self-criticism among individuals, groups, and whole peoples; the
desire to avoid any reflection about collective responsibility (in the form of tacit
support for the regime); or the presence of a "martyred people" mentality that
excuses an entire nation for everything. (Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine has stud-
ied the idea of "collective martyrology" in Romania, which is accompanied by
an "innocence complex" that causes everything to be seen as someone else's
fault.)

Control over the past in post-Communist states is a topic sufficiently
complex to merit a book-length study in its own right. Most notable at this
point are the differences among the countries concerned. In Romania in par-
ticular, men from the old Communist regime kept power until the legislative
and presidential elections of November 1996, and a similar situation existed for
some time in Bulgaria as well. But even in those two countries, considerable
documentation about repression under the Communists is now available. Yet
although citizens in all the countries have in their own possession considerable
documentation pertaining to the years of Communist rule, and although victim
testimonies are now commonplace, in-depth histories based on a close scrutiny
of archival sources are still lacking, excepr perhaps in the Czech Republic,
Poland, and Hungary.

It should also be pointed out that no Communist Party has yet been
banned. These parties have changed their names except in the Czech Republic,
where a referendum inside the Party resulted in a decision to keep the name
unchanged. Almost everywhere, the most compromised leaders have been
thrown out and the leadership entirely replaced.

Few trials of people responsible for the repressions have taken place. The
most spectacular one occurred in Romania, where a pseudotrial ended in the
execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife on 25 December 1989, after which
the dictator's body was shown on national television. In Bulgaria, Todor

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The Other Europe

Zhivkov, the former general secretary of the Party, was tried in April 1991 but
allowed to go free. Paradoxically he most visibly failed to live up to one of the
mottoes of the Bulgarian Party elite: u We took power with bloodshed, we won't
give it up without bloodshed. " In Albania, some of the Communist leaders were
sentenced for "abuse of public goods and infringing the equality of citizens";
one such person was the wife of Enver Hoxha, who received an eleven-year
prison sentence. In Czechoslovakia, Miroslav Stepan, a member of the Party
Presidium and first secretary of the Prague municipal Party committee, was
sentenced to two years in prison in 1991 for violence carried out against a crowd
of demonstrators on 17 November 1989. Several trials have been brought
against the former leaders of East Germany. The most recent was the trial of
the last Communist leader, Egon Krenz, in August 1997. He was sentenced to
six and a half years in prison and freed pending an appeal. As of 1999 charges
were still being pressed against General Wojcicch Jaru/.elski for the deaths of
strikers in Gdansk in December 1970, when as defense minister he relayed the
orders to open fire. (Jaruzelski was granted a pardon by the Polish parliament
in 1996 on separate charges brought against him for his role in imposing martial
law in December 1981.) Similarly, an effort is still under way in Prague to try
a few of the Czechoslovak Communist leaders who "invited 11 in the occupying
forces in 1968.

Post-Communist justice has also involved several trials of officials from
the various security services directly implicated in crimes. One of the most
interesting was the trial in Poland of Adam Humer and eleven other officers
from the UB (Urza^d Bezpieezehstwa, the Security Bureau) for crimes commit-
ted during the repression of the opposition in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humer was a colonel at the time, and the deputy head of the Investigations
Department of the Ministry of Public Security until 1954. These crimes are
generally described as crimes against humanity. At the end of the trial, which
lasted two and a half years, Humer was sentenced on 8 March 1996 to nine
years' imprisonment. In Hungary, those who shot at civilians on 8 December
1956 in Salgotarjan, an industrial town northeast of Budapest, were convicted
in January 1995 of crimes against humanity. But the verdict reached in January
1997 by the Hungarian Supreme Court decreed that after 4 November 1956,
because of the illegal intervention of Soviet forces, a state of war existed
between Hungary and the U.S.S.R., and therefore these crimes had to be
considered war crimes instead.

Of all the countries of the former Soviet bloc, the Czech Republic has
developed perhaps the most original approach to the management of the coun-
try^ Communist past. It is the only country to have adopted laws mandating
the return of goods confiscated by the authorities after 25 February 1948, and
decreeing the mass rehabilitation of all those unjustly convicted. In 1994, for

Central and Southeastern Europe

455

example, regional and district courts rehabilitated approximately 220,000 peo-
ple. Until 1998, when Poland adopted a law requiring the screening of all
judicial and police officials, the Czech Republic was alone in having passed a
law on "lustration," limiting access to public office. The law requires verifica-
tion of and open access to any senior official's past as it appears in the police
records of the old regime. It is also the only country that has a special admin-
istrative body, the Bureau for Documentation and Inquiry into the Crimes of
Communism, to pursue members of the old regime. As an integral part of the
Investigations Bureau of the Police of the Czech Republic, this body has full
powers to gather information and file charges for any Communist crime com-
mitted from 1948 to 1989. The Bureau for Documentation has a staff of about
90. It intervenes with legal opinions in judicial procedures; it has to make the
case for each crime, assemble the necessary evidence, and then submit the case
to the department for public prosecutions. Of the 98 people investigated in
1997, 20 cases were deemed valid, 5 were actually taken to court, and a single
person — a former investigator in the State Security organs — was sentenced to
five years in prison. All cases are to be concluded by 29 December 1999.

The current director of the Bureau of Documentation, Vaclav Benda, a
mathematician by training and an important figure in the opposition during the
1970s and 1980s, himself spent four years in prison. Today he is a Christian
Democratic senator, and in a recent interview he made clear his position re-
garding Communist crimes and crimes against humanity:

The waiver of the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity
does exist in our legislation, but we are not sure what Communist crimes
it can be applied to. We can't automatically define all the crimes of
Communism as crimes against humanity. Besides, our international po-
sition on the elimination of the statute of limitations was taken by
Czechoslovakia in 1974, and legal opinions differ as to whether we can
consider that crimes committed before that date fall within the remit of
the waiver of the statute of limitations. ly

Pavel Rychetsky, who was deputy prime minister of the federal govern-
ment in 1991 and 1992, is now a Social Democratic senator and chairman of
the Legislative Commission of the Czech Senate. In June 1997 he told us;

In the Czech Republic, everyone believes that we do need trials, not
simply to punish the old men, but to bring everything that happened out
into the open, as a sort of catharsis. In fact most of the information is
out in the open already, and it's hard to believe we will find out anything
that is worse than the things we already know. Genocide, as a crime
against humanity, is of course without a statute of limitations. But none
of the Communist crimes in Czechoslovakia fell under that category,

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The Other Europe

and we will never be able to prove that any actions corresponding to a
really close definition of genocide were ever carried out. By contrast, in
the Soviet Union there were certainly crimes of genocide committed
against ethnic groups or specific segments of the population, such as the
Cossacks and the Chechens. But those crimes can't really be punished
either, because they were not explicitly against any law that was in force
at that time.

These examples, of which many more could be found, lead inexorably to
the conclusion that numerous crimes have gone unpunished, because of the
statute of limitations, lack of witnesses, or lack of proof. After the fall of
Communism, justice has once again become independent of executive power,
and it has ensured that the principles of so-called civilized countries are re-
spected, including both the principle of the statute of limitations and the idea
that no law can have retroactive effects. However, some countries have amended
their legislation to allow the prosecution of certain crimes. In Poland, the law
of 4 April 1991 replaced the law of April 1984 on the Principal Commission
for Research into the Crimes of Hitler and the Institute for National Memory.
The new law places Communism in the same category as fascism and intro-
duces the concept of Stalinist crimes, which it defines as u any attacks on
individuals or groups of people committed by the Communist authorities or
inspired or tolerated by them during the period preceding 31 December
1956. ""^ Such crimes are not subject to a statute of limitations. In 1995, the
articles in the penal code regarding the statute of limitations were modified,
allowing the most serious crimes committed against civil liberties before
31 December 1989 to be prosecuted within a thirty-year period starting on
1 January 1990. In the Czech Republic, the law regarding the "illegitimacy of
the Communist regime and resistance to it," adopted in 1993, extended the
statute of limitations for crimes committed between 1948 and 1989 that could
be described as "political."

Dealing with the past is an extremely complex business. But I would like
to finish this section on a personal note. In my opinion, the punishment of the
guilty was not carried out promptly enough or in an appropriate manner.
Despite the efforts of many, myself included, Czechoslovakia, for instance, has
failed to introduce any new categories of crime such as "national indignity,"
which could be punishable by "national degradation" and the removal of rights,
as was done in France in the aftermath of World War II. On the other hand,
the Germans' opening of the Stasi archives to any interested citizen seems a
brave and good decision. It increases a sense of responsibility, inviting everyone
to take charge of his or her own "trial": your husband was an informer, and
now you know . . . what are you going to do?

Whatever happens, the wounds will take some time to heal.

Communism in Asia:
Between Reeducation
and Massacre

Jean-Louis Margolin and Pierre Rigoulot

Introduction

Two features distinguish Communism in Asia from Communism in Europe.
First, with the exception of North Korea, most of the regimes established
themselves through their own efforts and built independent political systems
with a strongly nationalist character. (Laos is a partial exception in this regard,
because of its dependence on Vietnam.)

Second, at the time this book was written all these regimes were still in
power, even to a certain extent in Cambodia. Therefore, the only essential
archives then open were those dealing with the Pol Pot period in Cambodia (the
Comintern archives in Moscow do not cover any of the regimes still in place.) 1
Even so, our knowledge of these regimes and their past has increased consid-
erably. It is now relatively easy to do field research in China, Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia, and some interesting sources are now available there: official
media (including translations of Chinese radio transmissions available from
various Western sources), the regional press, memoirs by former leaders of the
regimes, written testimonies of refugees who fled abroad, and oral records
gathered inside the countries. For internal political reasons, Cambodians are
now encouraged to decry the Pol Pot period, and the Chinese to denounce the
horrors of the Cultural Revolution. However, this selective opening of materi-
als has had some bizarre effects. For example, we still have no access to any
debates that may have taken place among Party leaders; we still have no idea
how or why Chairman Mao's designated successor, Marshal Lin Biao, died in
1971; and Mao's intentions during the Cultural Revolution remain quite mys-
terious. Little is known about the purges of the 1950s in China and in Vietnam,
and perhaps even less about the Great Leap Forward. Almost nothing is known
about events in the vast death camps located in western China. As a rule, more
is known about the fate of Communist cadres and intellectuals who suffered in
the repressions than about the fate of normal citizens, who account for the great
majority of the victims. North Korea, one of the last bastions of hard-line
Communism, is still solidly closed to the outside world, and until very recently
almost no one ever managed to leave the country.

For all these reasons, the account that follows is inevitably somewhat
approximate, and some of the figures are rather speculative. But the ends and
means of Communism in the Far East are very much evident.

Main units of the laogat penal network (based on a map in Jean-Luc Domenach, Chine: Larchipel
oubite, Paris: Fayard, 1992)

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3
C

China: A Long March into Night

Jean-Louis Margolin

After our armed enemies have been crushed, there will still be our
unarmed enemies, who will try to right us to the death. We must never
underestimate their strength. Unless we think of the problem in pre-
cisely those terms, we will commit the gravest of errors.

Thus Mao Zedong adjured the Central Committee of the Seventh Congress of
the Chinese Communist Party in March 1949. 1

Was repression in Communist China simply a replication of the practices
of the Soviet Big Brother? After all, until the early 1980s Stalin's portrait was
still to be seen everywhere in Beijing. 2 In some respects the answer is no. In
China, murderous purges in the Party itself were very rare, and the secret police
were relatively discreet, although the influence of their leader, Kang Sheng,
and of the Yan'an maquis was constantly in the background from the 1940s until
his death in 1975.* But in other respects the answer is assuredly yes. Even if
one excludes the civil war, the regime must be held accountable for a huge
number of deaths. Although the estimates are quite speculative, it is clear that
there were between 6 million and 10 million deaths as a direct result of the
Communist actions, including hundreds of thousands of Tibetans. In addition,

This chapter is dedicated to Jean Pasqualini (d. 9 October 1997), who revealed the horrors
of the Chinese concentration camps to the world.

463

464

Communism in Asia

tens of millions of "counterrevolutionaries" passed long periods of their lives
inside the prison system, with perhaps 20 million dying- there. To that total
should he added the staggering number of deaths during the ill-named Great
Leap Forward- estimates range from 20 million to 4.i million dead for the
years 1959-1%] - all victims of a famine caused by the misguided projects of
a single man, Mao Zedong, and his criminal obstinacy in refusing to admit his
mistake and to allow measures to be taken to rectify the disastrous effects. The
answer again is yes if one looks at the scale of the genocide in Tibet; some 10
to 20 percent of the inhabitants of the "rooftop of the world" died as a result
of Chinese occupation. The genuine surprise of Deng Xiaoping as he observed
that the massacre in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, where perhaps 1,000
died, was totally insignificant in comparison to the scale of events in China in
the comparatively recent past, clearly amounts to an admission of guilt, One
can hardly argue that these massacres were the sad consequences of an ex-
tremely blood)' civil war, since the war was not in fact particularly violent and
the regime was firmly entrenched by 1950. Nor can one argue that this was the
continuation of a generally bloodstained history, If one discounts the Japanese
occupation, which was not followed by famine or other disasters, one has to go
back to the third quarter of the nineteenth century to find slaughters on
anything resembling a comparable scale. And at that time there was nothing to
compare to the generality or the systematic and carefully planned character
of the Maoist atrocities, despite the dramatic nature of events in China at the
time.

An analysis of Chinese Communism is doubly important. Since 1949, the
Beijing regime has governed nearly two-thirds of all people who lived under
the red flag. When the Soviet Union finally broke up in 1991 and Kastern
Europe abandoned Communism, the figure rose to nine-tenths. It is therefore
quite clear that whatever happens to "real socialism" now depends on the
development of Communism in China. Beijing has been a sort of second Rome
for Marxism-Leninism, openly so since the Sino-Soviet break of I960, but in
actuality since the birth of the free /one of Van'an in 19.15- 1947 after the Long
March. Korean, Japanese, and even Vietnamese Communists would retreat to
China to consolidate their strength. Although Kim II Sung's regime predates
the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party, and owes its existence to Soviet
occupation, it also owes us survival during the Korean war to the intervention
of more than 1 million armed Chinese "volunteers." Repressions in North
Korea were based quite closely on the Stalinist model, but what the master of
Pyongyang took from Maoism, which after l'an'an became synonymous with
Chinese Communism, was the idea not of the Party line but of the mass
line — the intense effort to classify and mobilize the entire population — and its
logical consequence, an insistence on permanent education as a means of social

China: A Long March into Night

465

control. Kim paraphrased Mao when he noted that "the mass line is to mount
an active defense of the interests of the working masses, to educate and reedu-
cate them so that they rally to the cause of the Party, to count on their strength,
and to mobilize them for revolutionary tasks." 4

Even more apparent is China's influence on Asian Communist regimes
established after 1949. The memoirs of the Vietnamese leader Hoang Van
Hoan, who went over to Beijing, reveal that from 1950 until the Geneva accord
of 1954 numerous Chinese advisers trained troops and administrators for the
Viet Minh, and that from 1965 to 1970 some 30,000 soldiers from Beijing
helped North Vietnamese troops in their fight against the South. 5 General Vo
Nguyen Giap, the victor at Dien Bien Phu, indirectly acknowledged the Chi-
nese contribution in 1964: u After 1950, in the wake of the Chinese victory, our
army and our people learned some precious lessons from the Chinese People's
Liberation Army. We educated ourselves according to the military thought of
Mao Zedong. That was the important factor that allowed our army to mature
and that led to our successive victories." 6 The Vietnamese Communist Party,
which at the time was known as the Workers' Party, inscribed in its statutes in
1951 that "The Workers' Party recognizes the theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin,
and Stalin and the thought of Mao Zedong, adapted to the realities of the
Vietnamese revolution, as the theoretical foundation of its thought and as the
magnetic needle that points the way in all its activities." 7 The "mass line" and
the idea of reeducation were placed at the center of the Vietnamese political
system. The chengfeng ("the reform of work style"), which had been invented
in Yan'an, was transcribed into Vietnamese as chink huan and became the
justification for the ferocious purges of the mid-1950s. s In 1975-1979 Cambo-
dia under the Khmer Rouge also received powerful support from Beijing and
tried to carry out what Mao himself had failed to accomplish, taking up in
particular the idea of the Great Leap Forward. All these regimes, like that of
Mao, were strongly colored by their military origins (though less so in North
Korea, even if Kim often boasted of his alleged exploits as a guerrilla fighter
against the Japanese), which inevitably resulted in a permanent militarization
of society. This occurred the least in China, which had no front line. It is
notable that the central role played by the secret police in the Soviet system
was in China always played by the army, which sometimes carried out repres-
sive measures on its own.

A Tradition of Violence?

During his lifetime, Mao Zedong was so powerful that he was often known as
the Red Emperor. In light of what is now known about his unpredictable
character, his ferocious egotism, the vindictive murders he committed, and the

466

Communism in Asia

life of debauchery that he led right up to the end, it is all too easy to compare
him to one of the despots of the iMiddle Kingdom (ancient China). 9 Yet the
violence that he erected into a whole system far exceeds any national tradition
of violence that we might find in China.

As in most other countries, there had been periods of great bloodletting
in China, which usually occurred against a backdrop of religious tension or an
irreconcilable ideological clash. What separates the two great Chinese traditions
of Confucianism and Taoism is less the theoretical differences than the conflict
between the focus by Confucius on society and on rationality and the emphasis
by Lao Tsu, the great promoter of Taoism, on the individual and intuitive and
irrational aspects of behavior. Chinese generally incorporate some mixture of
these two traditions. Sometimes in moments of crisis Taoists will gain the
upper hand among the disinherited and the lost, launching a massive assault
on the bastions of Confucianism — the educated and the state. Over the centu-
ries there have been numerous uprisings inspired by apocalyptic, messianic
sects, including the Yellow Turbans of 184, the Maitreyist revolt of Faqing in
515, the Manichean rebellion of Fang La in 1120, the White Lotus in 3351,
and the Eight Trigrams of 1813. 10 The message of these movements was often
quite similar, synthesizing Taoism and popular Buddhism, and often using the
figure of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future whose imminent, luminous, and
redemptive coming is to be accomplished in a universal cataclysm of the old
world. The faithful, the chosen few, must help bring about the realization of
the prophecy for salvation to occur. All contingent links must be broken, even
with one's own family. According to the chronicle of the Wei dynasty in 515,
"Fathers, sons, and brothers did not know one another." 11

In China most morality is based on respect for familial obligations. Once
these are broken, anything can happen. The replacement family that the sect
becomes annihilates the idea of the individual. The rest of humanity is con-
demned to hell in the hereafter and to violent death in this world. Sometimes,
as in 402, officials were cut into pieces, and if their wives and children refused
to eat them, they were dismembered themselves. In 1120 massacres evidently
involved millions of people. All values can be inverted: according to a procla-
mation of 1130, "The killing of people is the carrying out of the dhartna
[Buddhist law]." Killing becomes an act of compassion, delivering the spirit.
Theft serves the purposes of equality, suicide is an enviable happiness; the
worse a death is, the greater its reward will be. According to a text from the
nineteenth century, "Death by slow slicing will ensure one's entry [into heaven]
in a crimson robe.' 112 From certain points of view it is difficult not to draw a
comparison here between this millenarian cruelty and the Asian revolutions
of this century. This does not help explain a number of the latter's charac-
teristics, but it does help explain why they sometimes triumphed, and why the

China: A Long March into Night

467

violence that accompanied them could initially appear quite ordinary and
normal.

Social safeguards were nonetheless extremely powerful, a fact that ex-
plains why society was only rarely troubled. European visitors in the Middle
Ages and the Enlightenment were always struck by the tremendous peace that
reigned in the old empire. Confucianism, the official doctrine taught in the
countryside, made benevolence the cardinal virtue of the sovereign and mod-
eled the state on the family. Without any risk of anachronism, one can speak
here of humanist principles that have valorized human life from time imme-
morial. Looking at the work of thinkers who have been the cardinal points of
reference for nearly twenty-one centuries of imperial rule, we can single out
the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti (ca. 479-381 B.C.), who condemned wars of
aggression thus: "If a simple homicide is to be considered a crime, but the
multiple homicide that is an attack on another country is to be considered a
good action, can we possibly call that a reasonable distinction between good and
evil?" 1 - 1 In his famous treatise The Art of War, Sun Tzu (writing around
500 B.C.) noted that "war is like fire; people who do not lay down their arms
will die by their arms." One should fight for economic reasons, as swiftly and
efficiently as possible: "No long war ever profited any country: 100 victories in
100 battles is simply ridiculous. Anyone who excels in defeating his enemies
triumphs before his enemy's threats become real." Saving one's strength is
essential, but neither should one allow oneself to annihilate the enemy entirely:
"Capturing the enemy is far better than destroying him: do not encourage
murder." That is perhaps less of a moral tenet than an opportunistic consid-
eration: massacres and atrocities provoke hatred and lend the enemy the energy
of despair, possibly allowing him to turn the situation around in his favor. In
any case, for the victor, "The best policy is to capture the state intact: it should
be destroyed only if no other options are available." 14

Such is the typical reasoning of the great Chinese tradition, as illustrated
above all by Confucianism: ethical principles are derived not from some tran-
scendental vision, but from a pragmatic vision of social harmony. This is surely
one of the reasons for their effectiveness. A different "pragmatic" approach,
developed by lawmakers who were contemporaries of Confucius and Sun Tzu,
implied that the state must affirm its omnipotence by terrorizing society. The
fundamental failure of this approach was immediately apparent, even in its
hour of glory during the short Qin dynasty, in the third century B.C. Despite
enormous variations from one reign to the next, such arbitrary rule became
more and more uncommon, particularly after the Northern Song dynasty
(960-1 1 27). The most common punishment for errant officials became the long
walk into exile, which did not exclude the possibility of pardon and return.
The Tang dynasty in 654 drew up an extremely humane penal code, which took

468

Communism in Asia

into account both the intentions of individuals and any repentance they might
show and abolished the idea of familial responsibility in case of rebellion. The
procedures leading to capital punishment became very long and complex, some
of the more horrible punishments were abolished altogether, and an appeals
procedure was also established. 15

State violence was thus quite limited and controlled. Chinese historians
have always been appalled by the behavior of the first emperor, Qin Shi (221-
210 B.c), who buried aJive 460 administrators and men of letters, burned all
the classical literature (and made anyone who mentioned it subject to capital
punishment), condemned to death or deported at least 20,000 nobles, and killed
as many as several hundred thousand people during the construction of the
Great Wall. This emperor was explicitly taken as a model by Mao. With the
arrival of the Han dynasty (206 B.C-220 A.D.), Confucianism returned to the
fore, and the empires never again saw such severe tyranny or such bloody
massacres. The law was strict, and justice was harsh, but apart from the (re-
grettably frequent) times of rebellion and the invasions from abroad, human
life was safer there than it was in most other states in the ancient world or in
medieval and modern Europe.

Admittedly, even under the peaceful Song dynasty in the twelfth century
some 300 offenses were punishable by death, but in principle every sentence
had to be checked and countersigned by the emperor himself. Wars often
dragged on until hundreds of thousands had lost their lives, and the death
count inevitably rose during the ensuing epidemics, famines, disruption of the
transport system, and floodings of the Yellow River. The Taiping revolt and its
repression were responsible for between 20 million and 100 million deaths,
causing the population of China to fall from 410 million in 1850 to 350 million
in 1873. !6 But only a small fraction of those dead, probably about 1 million,
can be considered to have been intentionally killed in connection with the
revolt. 17 In any case this was an exceptionally troubled period, marked by
immense rebellions, repeated attacks by Western imperialists, and the growing
despair of a population living in abject poverty. It was in this context that the
two, three, or four generations who preceded the Communist revolutionaries
grew up. It made them accustomed to a level of violence and social disintegra-
tion unprecedented in China's history.

Even in the first half of this century there was no warning, in scale or in
kind, of what Maoism would unleash. True, the relatively undramatic revolu-
tion of 191 1 was followed by a growing number of deaths in the sixteen years
before the partial stabilization imposed by the Kuomintang regime. In Nanjing,
a hotbed of revolution, the dictator Yuan Shih-kai ordered several thousand
people executed from July 1913 to July 1914. 18 In June 1925 the police in
Guangzhou killed fifty-two people taking part in a workers 1 demonstration. In

China: A Long March into Night

469

May 1926 in Beijing, forty-seven students were killed in a peaceful anti-Japa-
nese demonstration. In April and May 1927 in Shanghai, and then in other big
cities in the east, thousands of Communists were executed by a coalition uniting
the head of the new regime, Chiang Kai-shek, and the local secret societies. In
The Human Condition Andre Malraux recalled the atrocious nature of some of
the executions, which took place in a locomotive boiler. Although the first
episodes of the civil war between nationalists and Communists do not appear
to have involved any massacres greater than those in the Long March of
1934-35, the Japanese did commit thousands of atrocities in the huge part of
China that they occupied from 1937 to 1945.

More murderous than many of these events were the famines of 1900,
1920-21, and 1928-1930 that struck the north and northwest of the country,
the areas most vulnerable to drought. The second of these caused the death of
500,000 people, and the third between 2 million and 3 million. 19 But although
the second was made worse by the disruption of the transport system as a result
of the civil war, one can hardly say this was an intentional effect that should be
described as a massacre. The same cannot be said about Henan, where in
1942-43 between 2 million and 3 million people, or 5 percent of the population,
died of hunger, and many cases of cannibalism were recorded. Even though
the harvest had been disastrous, the central government in Chongqing refused
to reduce the tax levy. In effect, the government seized from a great number of
peasants all the goods they produced. The proximity of the front was another
factor. The peasants were drafted to help with military operations, such as the
digging of a 500-kilometer antitank trench, which in practice proved useless. 20
This was a foretaste of other great errors of judgment such as the Great Leap
Forward, even if in this case the war might be seen to have provided an excuse.
The resentment felt by the peasants was enormous.

The most numerous and, taken as a whole, the most murderous atrocities
occurred quietly and left few traces. These often involved the poor fighting the
poor, far from the main centers, in the great ocean of China's villages. Innu-
merable brigands roamed at large, sometimes in organized gangs, pillaging,
looting, racketeering, and kidnaping. They kilted anyone who resisted or whose
ransom was not delivered in time. When they were captured, the whole village
would join in their execution. For the peasants, the soldiers were sometimes
worse than the bandits they were supposed to be fighting. In 1932 a petition
from Fujian demanded that all the forces of law and order be withdrawn, u so
that we will have only the bandits to fight." 21 In the same province in 1931,
angry peasants annihilated the majority of a band of 2,500 soldiers who had
pillaged and raped the local populace. In 1926 a group of peasants to the west
of Hunan, under the cover of the secret society of the Red Lances, apparently
killed 50,000 "soldier-bandits" serving a local warlord. When the Japanese

470

Communism in Asia

began their offensive in the same region in 1944, the locals, remembering the
earlier murderous troops, hunted them down and huried some alive. 22 And yet
the Chinese soldiers were no different from their executioners. They were
simply peasants, the unlucky and terrified victims of conscriptions that, ac-
cording to the American General Wedemeyer, had hit the villages like a flood
or a famine and had taken an even greater number of victims.

Numerous other revolts, generally less violent, focused on various govern-
ment exactions: taxes on land, opium, alcohol, and livestock; forced conscrip-
tion; government loans; unfair judgments. The worst violence often involved
peasants against peasants. There were savage wars between villages. Clans and
secret societies ravaged the countryside and, by honoring the cult of murdered
ancestors who demanded to be avenged, created inextinguishable hatreds. In
September 1928, for example, the Little Swords in Jiangsu Province massacred
200 Big Swords and burned six villages. Violent hostility between the Black
Flag and Red Flag villages of the eastern part of Guangdong Province dated
from the late nineteenth century. In Puning County, in the same region, the
Lin clan hunted down and killed anyone bearing the patronymic Ho, including
lepers, who were often burned alive, and numerous Christians. Such struggles
were neither political nor social; they were simply jockeyings for position by
local gangs. The adversaries were often immigrants, or simply people who lived
on the other side of the river. 21

A Revolution Inseparable from Terror (1927-1946)

When in January 1928 the inhabitants of a Red Flag village saw a group
approach brandishing a scarlet flag, they rallied enthusiastically to one of the
first Chinese "sovicts," that of Hai-Lu-Feng, directed by P'eng P'ai. The
Communists tailored their speeches to take account of local hatreds and used
the coherence of their message to win the locals over to their own ends while
allowing the new partisans to give full vent to their crudest impulses. These
few months in 1927-28 adumbrated the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolu-
tion and the Khmer Rouge forty and fifty years later. The movement had been
prepared since 1922 by intense activity in Communist Party-led peasant
unions, which had produced a strong polarization between "poor peasants 1 *
and "landowners," with the latter being constantly denounced. Although nei-
ther traditional conflicts nor social realities had accorded much importance to
this division, the canceling of debts and the abolition of tenant farming en-
sured wide support for the new Soviets. P'eng P'ai took advantage of it to
establish a regime of ''democratic terror": the whole people were invited to
public triaLs of ''counterrevolutionaries," who almost invariably were con-
demned to death. Everyone participated in the executions, shouting out "kill,

China: A Long March into Night

471

kill" to the Red Guards whose task it was to cut victims into pieces. Sometimes
the pieces were cooked and eaten, or force-fed to members of the victim's
family who were still alive and looking on. Everyone was then invited to a
banquet, where the liver and heart of the former landowner were shared out,
and to meetings where a speaker would address rows of severed heads freshly
skewered on stakes. This fascination for vengeful cannibalism, which later
became common under the Pol Pot regime, echoes a very ancient East Asian
archetype that appears often at cataclysmic moments of Chinese history. At a
time of foreign invasions in 61 3, Emperor Yang of the Souei dynasty avenged
himself on one rebel by pursuing even his most distant relations: u Those who
were punished most severely were broken apart, and their heads were displayed
on stakes, or they were dismembered and shot full of arrows. The emperor
then ordered all the state dignitaries to eat the flesh of the victims piece by
piece." 24 The great writer Lu Xun, who was an admirer of Communism before
it became imbued with nationalism and antiwestern sentiments, wrote that
"Chinese people are cannibals." Less popular than these bloody orgies were the
actions of the Red Guards in 1927 in the temples and against the Taoist monks.
The faithful painted the idols red in an attempt to save them, and P'eng P'ai
himself began to benefit from the first signs of deification. Fifty thousand
people, including many peasants, fled the region during the four months of the
Soviet's reign. 2S

P'eng P'ai, who was shot in 1931, was the first real promoter of rural
militarized Communism. His ideas were picked up by a previously marginal
Communist cadre, Mao Zedong (himself of peasant origin), and theorized in
his 1927 Report on the Peasant Movement in the Hunan. This peasant Commu-
nism represented an alternative to the Communism of the urban workers'
movement, which at the time had been weakened as a result of repressions
carried out by Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang. It quickly gathered momentum
and resulted in the establishment in 1928 of the first Red Bases in the Jinggang
Mountains, between Hunan and Jiangxi. It was in the eastern part of that
province that on 7 November 1931, the anniversary of the October Revolution,
the consolidation and extension of the main base led to the proclamation of a
Chinese Republic of Soviets, with Mao presiding over the Council of People's
Commissars. Until its final triumph in 1949, Chinese Communism was to go
through many incarnations and terrible setbacks, but the main model was
established here: concentrating the energy of the revolution on the construction
of a state, and focusing the efforts of that state, which was to be warlike by
nature, on forming a strong army to crush the enemy, which was the central
government of Nanjing, presided over by Chiang Kai-shek. There is nothing
surprising in the fact that the military and repressive apparatus was present
from the very beginning. We are a long way here from Russian Bolshevism, and

472

Communism in Asia

even further from pure Marxism. Bolshevism was an intermediary means,
linked to a strategy for seizing power and reenforcing a national revolutionary
state, through which the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, and in
particular their major thinker, Li Dazhao, came to Communism in 1918 and
1919. 2h Wherever Chinese Communism triumphed, it was the socialism of the
barracks, of courts-martial, and of firing squads that took power. P'eng Pai
was simply the first to provide this model.

The originality of Chinese Communist repressive practices is attested by
one surprising fact: the Stalinist Great Terror of 1936-1938 was predated by
the terror carried out by the Chinese Soviets, which according to some estimates
claimed 186,000 victims, excluding the war dead, in Jiangxi in 1927-1931. 27
Most of these people had offered some sort of resistance to the radical agrarian
reforms, which had been imposed almost immediately, or to the heavy taxation
and the mobilization of young people that were justified as a military necessity.
In the areas where Communism was especially radical (in 1931 Mao was criti-
cized and temporarily removed from the leadership because of his terrorist
excesses, which had alienated the population) or where heal cadres had been
marginalized (as happened around the soviet "capital," Ruijin), the Nanjing
forces encountered only weak resistance. Resistance was more vigorous, and
sometimes even victorious, in bases that were established later, which tended
to be more autonomous and whose leaders had learned the painful lessons of
the politics of terror. 2 * The same tensions were felt at the North Shaanxi base,
centered in Yan'an, although by then the Communist Party had learned to deal
with them through more selective and less bloody repressions. Fiscal pressure
on the peasants was acute: 35 percent of the harvest was taken in 1941, four
times as much as in the zones held by the Kuomintang. Villagers went so far
as to call openly for Mao's death. Repressions were severe, but there were also
concessions: the Party began secretly to grow and export opium, which until
1945 accounted for 26-40 percent of all public revenues. 2 ''

As so often under Communist regimes, the repression of Party activists
left more traces, since these people knew how to express themselves and since
their networks often survived. Some scores were settled decades later, and the
cadres who suffered most were invariably those who had the closest links with
the population. Their enemies, most of whom worked for the central apparatus,
would often accuse them of being overly concerned with local issues, which
undoubtedly did lead to some moderation in their views, and perhaps even led
them to question the orders they had been given. This conflict, however, masks
another: local activists often came from the wealthier segments of the peasantrv
and from the families of landowners (who furnished the literate core of the
Party) who had rallied to Communism as a radical form of nationalism. On the
other hand, the militants from the center and the soldiers from the regular army

China: A Long March into Night

473

were recruited mainly from the lower strata and the marginalized segments of
society, including bandits, beggars, mendicant monks, mercenaries, and, among
the women, prostitutes. From as early as 1926 Mao had intended members of
these groups to play a major part in the revolution: "These people can fight
with great courage, and, led in the right manner, they will become a genuine
revolutionary force." 10 He was still trying to identify with them in 1965, when
he presented himself to Edgar Snow, an American journalist, as "an aged monk,
walking along with an umbrella full of holes, under the stars." 11 The remainder
of the population, with the exception of a minority of resolute opponents
(many of whom were also members of the elite), was startlingly passive and
unemotional, according to Communist leaders. This assessment included the
a poor and semipoor peasantry," which constituted the class base of the Com-
munist Party in the countryside. Once the people from the center had become
cadres, they owed their entire social status to the Party and were often hungry
for revenge. With the support of the Center 32 they tended to choose the most
radical solutions, such as the elimination of local cadres wherever this seemed
appropriate or necessary. After 1946 this became a very common response to
the bloodier aspects of agrarian reform."

The first recorded purge, in 1930-31, ravaged the Donggu base in north-
ern Jiangxi. There the tensions described above were exacerbated by the AB
(Anti-Bolshevik) Corps, a highly active secret police force linked to the right
wing of the Kuomintang, which sowed suspicion of treachery among Commu-
nist Party members. These suspicions arose because the local Communist Party
had found many recruits among the secret societies. Even the head of the Three
Dots society enlisted in the Party in 1927, in what at the time was considered
a major coup for the Communists. Initially, numerous local cadres were exe-
cuted. Then the purge spread to the Red Army itself, resulting in the liquida-
tion of around 2,000 soldiers. A number of cadres escaped and attempted to
stir up a revolt against Mao, the "Emperor of the Party." They were invited to
take part in negotiations, arrested, and killed. The Second Army, one unit of
which was in revolt, was entirely disarmed and its officers executed. Persecu-
tion decimated civil and military cadres for more than a year, claiming thou-
sands of victims. Of the nineteen highest-ranking local cadres, who included
the founders of the base, twelve were executed as "counterrevolutionaries," five
were killed by the Kuomintang, one died of illness, and the last one gave up
the revolution altogether and emigrated." 14

In the early days of Mao's presence in Yan'an, the elimination of the base's
founder, the legendary guerrilla fighter Liu Zhidan, seemed to fit the same
pattern, revealing a central apparatus without scruples but with considerable
Machiavellian reasoning. The man responsible seems to have been the Mos-
cow-allied Bolshevik Wang Ming, who had not yet been sidelined inside the

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Communism in Asia

leadership and who evidently wanted to control Liu's troops. Liu confidently
accepted his arrest and under torture refused to admit anything. His main
supporters were then buried alive. Zhou Enlai, one of Wang Ming's adversaries,
set him free, but because Liu insisted on retaining autonomy in command, he
was labeled an "unrepentant right-winger." Sent to the front, he was soon
killed, possibly with a bullet in the back. 35

The most famous purge of the period before 1949 began with an attack
on the most brilliant Communist intellectuals of Yan'an in June 1942. As he
did again fifteen years later on a nationwide scale, Mao first authorized a
two-month period of free criticism. Then suddenly all militants were "invited"
to "struggle" at thousands of meetings against Ding Ling, who had denounced
the sham of official equality between men and women, and against Wang
Shiwei, who had advocated freedom of expression and creativity for artists.
Ding cracked and made a full public apology and attacked Wang, who refused
to give way. Wang was thrown out of the Communist Party, put in prison, and
executed during the provisional evacuation of Yan'an in 1947. The dogma of
the submission of intellectuals to politicians, promulgated by the Party presi-
dent in February 1942 in his Remarks on Art and Literature, soon had the force
of law. Cheng feng sessions proliferated until people began to submit.

A Comintern representative in Yan'an commented on Maoist methods
there:

Party discipline is based on stupidly rigid forms of criticism and self-
criticism. The president of each cell decides who is to be criticized and
for what reason. In general it is a Communist who is attacked each time.
The accused has only one right: to repent his "errors." If he considers
himself to be innocent or appears insufficiently repentant, the attacks
are renewed. It is a real psychological training . , . I understood one
tragic reality. The cruel method of psychological coercion that Mao calls
moral purification has created a stifling atmosphere inside the Party in
Yan'an. A not negligible number of Party activists in the region have
committed suicide, have fled, or have become psychotic. The chengfeng
method is a response to the principle that "everyone should know the
intimate thoughts of everyone else." This is the vile and shameful direc-
tive that governs every meeting. All that is personal and intimate is to be
displayed shamelessly for public scrutiny. Under the protocol of criti-
cism and self-criticism, the thoughts and aspirations and actions of
everyone are on full view. ,6

In early July 1943 the purge revived and expanded. The leader of this
"Campaign of Salvation," aimed at protecting people from their own hidden
doubts and insufficiencies, was Politburo member Kang Sheng, whom Mao had
appointed in June 1942 to head a new General Studies Commission, which was

China: A Long March into Night

475

to supervise "Rectification." This "black shadow," who dressed in black leather,
rode a black horse, and was invariably accompanied by a savage black dog, had
been trained by the NKVD in Russia and organized the first "mass campaign"
in Communist China: criticisms and public self-criticisms, selective arrests
leading to confessions that in turn led to more arrests, public humiliations,
beatings, and the elevation of the thoughts of Chairman Mao to the status of
inviolable faith, the only sure point of reference. During one meeting Kang
Sheng gestured at the entire audience and declared: "You are all agents of the
Kuomintang . . . the process of your reeducation will go on for a long time." 37
Arrest, torture, and death became more and more common, claiming at least
sixty members of the Center (some of whom took their own lives), until the
Party leadership itself became concerned, despite Mao's assertion that "spies
are as numerous as the hairs on a head." 18 After 15 August "illegal methods"
of repression were banned, and on 9 October, Mao, in the sort of about-turn
that was to become his trademark, proclaimed: "We should not kill anyone;
many should never have been arrested at all." w The campaign was then defini-
tively stopped. In December Kang Sheng was himself forced to perform an act
of self-criticism and to admit that only 10 percent of all those arrested had been
guilty and that the dead should be rehabilitated. His career stagnated from then
until the Cultural Revolution in May 1966. Mao himself, appearing before an
assembly of high-ranking cadres in April 1944, was forced to apologize and to
bow three times in homage to the innocent victims before he was applauded.
Once again his spontaneous extremism had met with stiff resistance. But the
memory of the terror of 1943 remained indelible among those who had lived
through it. What Mao lost in popularity, he gained in fear.* 1

Repression became ever more sophisticated. While war against both the
Japanese and the Kuomintang saw an increasing number of terrorist massacres
claiming thousands of victims, 41 the assassination of carefully targeted indi-
viduals became more and more common. As is common practice among gangs
and secret societies, the targets were often renegades. According to one guerrilla
chief, "We killed a great number of traitors, so that the people had no choice
but to continue on the path to revolution."" 12 The prison system expanded, with
the result that executions became less common than before. In 1932 the Chinese
Soviets in Jiangxi had established corrective labor camps, which ironically had
been anticipated by a Kuomintang law. Beginning in 1939, prisoners with
long-term sentences were assigned to labor and production centers by a new
type of court set up to handle these cases. There were three reasons for this:
the authorities did not wish to disaffect the population with punishments that
seemed too harsh, they wanted to make use of the large, captive workforce, and
they wanted to convert new faithful to the cause by a clever process of reedu-
cation. Even Japanese prisoners of war could thus be integrated into the

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Communism in Asia

People's Liberation Army (PI .A), the heir to the Chinese Red Army, and used
to fight Chiang Kai-shek. 43

Agrarian Reform and Urban Purges (1946-1957)

By the time the Communists seized power in China in 1949, violence and
massacres were already everyday events, and governance often consisted in
settling scores with one's neighbors. The actions taken to establish a new state
w r ere thus a sort of riposte to other very real acts of violence (one of the victims
of P'eng P'ai, a local magistrate, had ordered the execution of almost 100
peasants) and were recognized as such by many rural communities. For this
reason the period has been glorified both in official post-Maoist history (until
the Antiright movement of 1957, the Helmsman was perceived to have steered
a steady course) and in the memory of many eyewitnesses and those who were
or were perceived to be the direct beneficiaries of the suffering of their fellow
countrymen. The Communists themselves, including Communist intellectuals,
were not affected too badly by the purges. Yet what resulted was in fact the
bloodiest wave of repressions yet launched by the Chinese Communists, affect-
ing the entire country. In its breadth of application, generality, length, and
planned and centralized nature, the repression marked a new departure for the
sort of violence seen in China. There were brief moments of respite, but
almost every year saw the launching of a new "mass campaign." The Yan'an
''Rectification" of 1943 may have been a sort of dress rehearsal on a local scale.
Where certain social strata were concerned, the massacres took on a genocidal
aspect previously unknown in China, at least on a national scale. Even the
Mongols in the thirteenth century had ravaged only the northern parts of the
empire. Some of the atrocities occurred in the context of a brutal three-year
civil war; one example is the massacre of 500 mostly Catholic inhabitants of the
Manchurian town of Siwanze after its capture. In addition, once the Commu-
nists had gained a considerable advantage in 1948, they abandoned their pre-
vious practice of freeing prisoners for propaganda reasons. Henceforth people
were locked up by the hundreds of thousands, and the prisons quickly became
overcrowded. These prisoners became the first occupants of the new labor
camps, called the laodong gaizao, or laogai for short, which combined a drive for
reeducation with a concern for the war effort. 44 But during the period of
hostilities the worst atrocities were committed behind the lines, outside any
military context.

The Countryside: Modernization and Social Engineering

Unlike the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949 began
in the countryside and spread to the cities. It is therefore logical that the urban

China: A Long March into Night

477

purges were preceded by the movement for agrarian reform. As we have al-
ready seen, the Communists had extensive experience with this policy. But to
maintain a unified anti-Japanese front with the central Kuomintang govern-
ment, after 1937 they were forced to be silent about this fundamental aspect of
their program. Only in 1946, after the Japanese defeat, did they relaunch
agrarian reform as part of the civil war that was to carry them into power
learns of thousands of professional agitators, most of whom came from out-
side the regions in which they worked so that they could avoid any feeling of
solidarity with local inhabitants, clans, and secret societies, traveled from vil-
lage to village, especially in the zones that had been liberated by the PLA. As
the movement progressed, they spread across the south and west of the coun-
try, not including Tibet for the moment.

The agrarian revolution, which was to engulf hundreds of thousands of
Chinese villages one by one, was neither the result of manipulation from on
high nor a response by the Communist Party to the "will of the masses."" 15 The
masses had many reasons to be discontented and to desire change, One of the
most salient was the inequality to be found among peasants. For example, in
the village of Long Bow (Shanxi), where William Hinton followed the revolu-
tion, 7 percent of the peasants owned 31 percent of the cultivable land and ^?f
percent of the draft animals." 16 A national inquiry in 1945 attributed approxi-
matelv 26 percent of all land to 3 percent of the population. 4 ' Inequality in the
distribution of property was compounded by the effects of usury (3-5 percent
per month, upward of 100 percent per year), which was controlled by a very
small group of people in the richest rural areas.

Were these areas the richest, or simply the least poor? Although there were
properties of several hundred hectares in the southern coastal regions, most
properties there measured no more than two to three hectares. In Long Bow,
which had 1,200 inhabitants, the richest property measured scarcely ten hec-
tares. Furthermore, the defining limits among the different peasant groups
were often vague; most rural people fell into an intermediate category between
those who had no land at all and the landowners whose main source of income
was not their own labor. In comparison with the extreme social contrasts found
in Europe before 1945 and still visible in much of South America even today,
rural Chinese society was in fact relatively egalitarian. Conflict between the rich
and poor was far from being the principal cause of the conflict. As in 1927 in
Hai-Lu-Feng, the Communists, including Mao himself, began to play at social
engineering by trying artificially to polarize carefully defined rural groups and
then decreeing that this polarization was the major cause of peasant discontent.
These groups were determined in a highly arbitrary fashion, often in accord-
ance with quotas fixed by the Party: 10-20 percent "privileged 1 ' per village,
depending on political vicissitudes and the location of the zone. The path
toward salvation was then easv to find.

47B

Communism in Asia

The agitators began by dividing the peasantry into four groups — poor,
semipoor, average, and rich. Anyone outside these categories was decreed a
landowner and thus became a marked man. Sometimes, in the absence of clear
distinguishing factors and because it pleased the poorest villagers, the rich
peasants were added to the list of landowners. Although the destiny of small
rural landowners was henceforth mapped out quite clearly, the path toward it
was somewhat tortuous, though usually politically effective. It was simply a
matter of ensuring the participation of the u great masses' 1 so that they would
fear the consequences of the failure of Communism; and if it was possible to
give them the illusion that they had some sort of free will, too, then the
government happily cooperated with their decisions. There is no doubt that it
was an illusion, for everywhere, almost simultaneously, the process and the
results were identical, despite the enormous variation in conditions from region
to region. It is now known exactly what sort of effort was required of the
activists to give the illusion that the peasant revolution was a spontaneous
movement, and how they constantly had to refrain from using their basic
mechanism, which of course was terror, to achieve their ends most effectively.
During the war, many young people preferred to flee to the zones held by the
Japanese rather than enroll in the PLA. The peasants, who generally formed
an apathetic mass, were ideologically quite distant from the ideals of the Com-
munist Party and were often so in thrall to the landowners that they continued
secretly to work on the landowners' farms even after the government had
reduced their size as a prologue to agrarian reform. Among themselves, the
agitators classed peasants according to their political position as activists^ ordi-
nary peasants, reactionaries, or supporters of the landowners. They then at-
tempted to transfer these categories onto actual social groups; the result was a
sort of Frankenstein sociology that allowed old grudges and private quarrels,
such as the desire to get rid of a troublesome husband, to resurface. 48 The
classification could be revised at will; to complete the redistribution of land,
the authorities in Long Bow swiftly changed the number of peasants who fell
into the poor category from 95 to 28 (out of 240). 49 Among the Communist
cadres, civilians were generally classed as "workers," and soldiers as "poor
peasants" or "medium peasants," despite their actual origins among the more
privileged social classes. 50

The key element in agrarian reform was the "bitterness meeting." Land-
owners were called before an assembly of the entire village, where for good
measure they were often labeled "traitors." (The Communists systematically
associated all landowners with those who really had collaborated with the
Japanese invaders and, except in 1946, quickly "forgot" that poor peasants had
often collaborated too.) Whether out of fear of these people who so recently
had been powerful or out of a sense of injustice, things often began very slowly,

China: A Long March into Night

479

and the militants were forced to hurry things along a hit by physically beating
and humiliating the accused. At that point the opportunists or those who bore
a grudge against the accused would begin the denunciations and accusations,
and the temperature would begin to rise. Given the tradition of peasant vio-
lence, the outcome was usually a death sentence for the landowner (accompa-
nied by confiscation of all goods and possessions) and immediate execution
with the active participation of the peasants. The cadres often attempted, not
always successfully, to bring the prisoner before the local magistrate to have the
sentence confirmed. This Grand Guignol theater in which everyone knew his
role by heart prefigured the "struggle meetings" and self-criticism sessions that
were to become the everyday lot of all Chinese people right up to Mao's death
in 1976. From these early days the traditional Chinese propensity for ritual and
conformism, which any cynical government could use and abuse at will, was
immediately apparent.

There is no precise tally of the number of victims, but because there
was necessarily at least one per village, 1 million seems to be the absolute
minimum, and many authors agree on a figure of between 2 million and
5 million dead/ 1 In addition, between 4 million and 6 million Chinese "kulaks"
were sent to the new laogai, and almost double that number were placed under
observation for varying lengths of time by the local authorities, which meant
constant surveillance, ever harder work, and persecutions in the case of any
"mass campaign."" If we extrapolated from the number killed in Long Bow —
15 — we would arrive at the top end of the estimates. But the reform process
started early there, and after 1948 some of the excesses of the previous period
were banned. Long Bow had been hit extremely hard, with a massacre of the
whole family of the president of the local Catholic association (and the closure
of the church), beatings, confiscation of the goods of poor peasants who had
shown solidarity with the rich, and a search for any "feudal origins" in the last
three generations (which meant that almost no one was safe from some sort of
reclassification). People were tortured to death in attempts to force them to
reveal the whereabouts of alleged treasure. Interrogations were systematically
accompanied by torture with red-hot irons. The families of people who were
executed were tortured and the tombs of their ancestors robbed and destroyed.
One cadre, who was a former bandit and a renegade Catholic, forced a four-
teen-year-old girl to marry his son and declared to the world at large: "My
word is law, and anyone I condemn to death dies." 53 On the other side of China,
in Yunnan, the father of He Liyi, a police officer in the previous government,
was classified as a landowner on those grounds alone. As an official, he was
sentenced to hard labor. In 1951, in the middle of the agricultural reforms, he
was paraded from town to town as a "class enemy" before being sentenced to
death and executed, without ever being accused of any particular act. His eldest

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Communism in Asia

son, a soldier who had been officially congratulated for having rallied soldiers
from the Kuomintang to the PLA cause, was nonetheless classified as a reac-
tionary and placed under observation. 54 All of these acts appear to have been
popular among most of the peasants, who were then allowed to share the
expropriated land. Some, however, for a variety of reasons (often related to the
experience of their families), perceived themselves as having been affected by
these arbitrary executions. Their desire for revenge was sometimes expressed
indirectly, during the Cultural Revolution, as a sort of ultraradicalism against
the existing establishment. 5 ' Thus the massacre of scapegoats did not unite
peasants behind Party "justice" in the manner intended.

The real aims of this vast movement were primarily political, secondarily
economic, and only lastly social. Although 40 percent of the land was redistrib-
uted, the small number of rural rich and the extreme population density in
most of the countryside meant that the economic situation of most peasants
improved only marginally. After the reform movement, the average plot mea-
sured 0.8 hectare. 16 Other countries in the region — Japan, Taiwan, and South
Korea — where the distribution of land was even more inequitable carried out
equally radical agrarian reforms in the same period with considerably greater
success. As far as we know, there was not a single death associated with those
reforms, and people were compensated more or less satisfactorily for their
losses. The terrible violence in China seems to have been a result not of the
reforms themselves, but of the power struggle carried out by the Chinese
Communists, in which a minority of activists were chosen as militants and
cadres, a "blood pact" with the mass of villagers implicated them in the exe-
cutions, and the Communist Party demonstrated to the world that it was
capable of the worst atrocities. All these things also allowed the Communists
to develop an intimate knowledge of the way in which villages functioned,
knowledge that was to be extremely helpful when the Party sought to dispose
of industrial capital in the service of collectivization.

The Cities: "The Salami Tactic" and Expropriations

Although the massacres were supposed to be a spontaneous movement from
below, Mao Zedong thought it a good idea, during the phase of radicalization
that followed the entry of the Chinese troops into the Korean conflict in
November 1950, to sanction them personally and publicly, remarking: "We
surely must kill all those reactionary elements who deserve to be killed." 57 But
what was new at the time was not the agrarian reform, which, at least in
northern China, was drawing to an end. (In southern China, which was "liber-
ated" later, and particularly in areas filled with civil unrest, such as Guang-
dong, the movement was still far from finished in early 1952.) 58 It was rather

China: A Long March into Night

481

the spread of the violent purges to the cities, through a series of carefully
targeted "mass movements" that aimed to bring into submission, either simul-
taneously or one at a time, entire groups — intellectuals, the bourgeoisie, small
bosses, non-Communist militants, and overly independent Communist cadres —
who threatened the totalitarian control of the Chinese Communist Party. This
approach was remarkably similar to what had occurred a few years earlier,
when the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe were being established
through so-called "salami tactics." This was the period when Soviet influence
was most pronounced, both in the economy and in repressive political measures.
At the same time, and despite some extremely powerful alliances that were
struck at this time between two previously opposing groups — class enemies and
brigands — who were united by being labeled "enemies of the people's govern-
ment," criminals and marginalized elements were treated extremely severely,
and there were crackdowns on prostitution, gambling, and opium dealing.
According to the Communist Party's own figures, 2 million bandits were liqui-
dated between 1949 and 1952, and as many again were locked up in prison. 5V

The system of control, most of which was in place before victory was
achieved, soon had considerable means at its disposal. At the end of 1950 it
had a militia 5.5 million strong. By 1953 it had added another 18 million
activists, as well as 75,000 informers charged with coordinating the activists and
ensuring their zeal, In the towns a perfect traditional system of mutual control
(baojia) had been restored by the Kuomintang, in which groups of fifteen to
twenty families were watched over by neighborhood committees, who were in
turn subordinate to street or district committees. m Nothing was supposed to
escape their vigilance. Any nocturnal visit or stranger who came for more than
a day had to be recorded by the residents 1 committee. Such visitors had to have
a hukou, a certificate stating that they had registered in the town; the require-
ment had been established to prevent a rural exodus. Accordingly, everyone
became a police informer to some extent. The police themselves, who at first
served the same function they had under the old regime, as part of the justice
and prison systems (roles that made them natural targets for future movements
once their transitory usefulness was past), quickly burgeoned in number: when
Shanghai was taken in May 1949 there were 103 police stations; by the end of
the year there were 146. The troops in the security services (the secret police)
numbered 1.2 million. Even the smallest brigades opened improvised prisons,
and the harshness of conditions in the official prisons reached unprecedented
levels: up to 300 in cells of 100 square meters, and 18,000 in Shanghai's central
prison; starvation-level rations and overwork; inhuman discipline and a con-
stant threat of physical violence (for instance, people were beaten with rifle
butts to make them keep their heads high, which was obligatory when march-
ing). The mortality rate, which until 1952 was certainly in excess of 5 percent

482

Communism in Asia

per year— the average for 1949-1978 in the laogai— reached 50 percent during
a six-month period in Guangxi, and was more than 300 per day in one mine in
Shanxi. The most varied and sadistic tortures were quite common, such as
hanging by the wrists or the thumbs. One Chinese priest died after being
interrogated continuously for 102 hours. The most brutish people were allowed
to operate with impunity. One camp commander assassinated or buried alive
1,320 people in one year, in addition to carrying out numerous rapes. Revolts,
which were quite numerous at that time (detainees had not yet been ground
into submission, and there were many soldiers among them), often degenerated
into veritable massacres. Several thousand of the 20,000 prisoners who worked
in the oilfields in Yanchang were executed. In November 1949, 1,000 of the
5,000 who mutinied in a forest work camp were buried alive. 61

The campaign to eliminate "counterrevolutionary elements' 1 was launched
in July 1950, followed in 1951 by the "Three Ami" (antiwaste, anticorruption,
antibureaucracy) and "Five Ami" movements (against bribery, fraud, tax eva-
sion, lying, and revealing state secrets, all aimed at the bourgeoisie) and the
campaign to u reform thought," which was directed at Westernized intellectuals.
Members of the last group were forced to undergo regular periods of "reedu-
cation" and to prove to the local labor collective (danwei) that they had made
progress. The temporal conjunction of these movements reveals their essential
intent: to demonstrate to the urban elite that no one was safe. The definition
of "counterrevolutionary" in particular was so vague and so wide that any past
or current position that diverged even slightly from the Party line was enough
to bring condemnation. The result was that local Party secretaries had almost
all the repressive power they could want. With encouragement from the Center
and with help from the security forces, they could use and abuse their power
at will. Alain Roux's term "Red Terror" applies, especially to the year 1951. 6:
The few official figures available are appalling. There were 3,000 arrests
in one night in Shanghai (and 38,000 in four months), 220 death sentences and
public executions in a single day in Beijing, 30,000 interrogations over nine
months in Beijing, 89,000 arrests and 23,000 death sentences in ten months in
Guangzhou. More than 450,000 small businesses were investigated, including
100,000 in Shanghai alone; at least one-third of the bosses and numerous
managers were found guilty of some sort of fraud, usually tax evasion, and
punished with varying degrees of seventy. Around 300,000 of them received
prison sentences. 61 Foreign residents were also targeted: 13,800 "spies" were
arrested in 1950, including many priests; one Italian bishop was condemned to
life imprisonment. As a direct result of this persecution, the number of Catho-
lic missionaries fell from 5,500 in 1950 to a few dozen in 1955, after which the
Chinese faithful began to feel the full force of repression without any awkward
witnesses from abroad. There were at least 20,000 arrests in 1955; the number

China: A Long March into Night

483

of Christians of all denominations who were arrested over the next two decades
ran into the hundreds of thousands.'* Former political and military cadres from
the Kuomintang, who had been granted amnesty in 1949 in an attempt to slow
their massive exodus to Taiwan and Hong Kong, were decimated more than
two years later, with the press sternly noting that u even the extreme kindness
of the people toward such reactionaries has its limits." Penal legislation con-
tinued to facilitate oppression, punishing past as well as current "counterrevo-
lutionaries" through retroactive legislation. Judgment could also be passed "by
analogy" to a similar crime if the accused had not committed any specific act
that fell within the remit of a particular law. Penalties were extremely severe:
eight years in prison was a minimum for ordinary crimes; the norm was nearer
twenty years.

It is still difficult to venture with precision beyond the few official figures.
But Mao himself spoke of the liquidation of 800,000 counterrevolutionaries.
Executions in the cities almost certainly reached 1 million, that is, one-third of
the probable number of liquidations in the countryside. But since at least five
times as many people lived in the country as lived in the city, we can assume
that the repressions were harsher in urban areas. The picture becomes even
darker if one includes the 2.5 million people who were imprisoned in reeduca-
tion camps, a figure that represents approximately 4.1 percent of the urban
population, as opposed to 1.2 percent for the countryside.^ 5 Then there are the
numerous suicides of people harried by the authorities. On some days in
Guangzhou as many as fifty people committed suicide. Chow Chingwen
estimates the total number of suicides at around 700,000. 66 Urban purges
closely resembled those of the agrarian reforms, differing substantially from
the essentially secret purges in the U.S.S.R. carried out by the police. In China
the local Party committee had a firm grip on the police. The committee's
primary aim was to ensure that as large a segment of the population as possible
took part in the repressions, while being careful to ensure that full control of
the proceedings remained with the Party.

Workers, within the framework of the street committees, attacked the
"lairs" of "capitalist tigers," forcing them to open their accounts to public
scrutiny, to be criticized and to criticize themselves, and to accept state control
over their affairs. If they repented completely, they were then invited to par-
ticipate in investigative groups and to denounce their colleagues. If they were
at all uncooperative, the whole cycle began again. The situation was very similar
for intellectuals: they had to attend "submission and rebirth" meetings at their
workplace, confess their errors, and show that they had definitively abandoned
"liberalism" and "Westernism," understood the evils of "American cultural
imperialism," and had killed the "old man" inside them with all his doubts and
independent thoughts. During this period, which could range from two months

484

Communism in Asia

to a year, all other activities were banned. Their accusers had all the time they
needed, and there was no means of escape except suicide, a traditional Chinese
solution chosen by those who wished to escape repeated humiliations and the
ignominy of the obligatory denunciations by colleagues or who simply could
take no more. The same phenomena recurred during the Cultural Revolution
on an even larger scale, often accompanied by physical violence. For the mo-
ment, the entire population and all the activities of the towns passed under the
absolute control of the Party. Heads of industry were subjected to ever-increas-
ing restrictions. Beginning in 1951 they were forced to make all their accounts
public and were subjected to crippling taxes. In December 1953 they were
forced to hand over their entire capital to the state. In 1954, by which time
rationing was ubiquitous, they had to affiliate themselves with public supply
companies. In October 1955 they were again forced to submit to general scru-
tiny, and they held out for no more than two weeks. In January 1956 they were
"offered" collectivization in exchange for a modest pension for life and some-
times a place as technical director in what had been their own company. The
Cultural Revolution later reneged even on these promises. One person from
Shanghai who refused to cooperate was brought to trial on various charges by
his workers, was ruined in two months and then sent to a labor camp. Many of
the heads of small and medium-sized companies, which were systematically
plundered, took their own lives. The heads of larger companies tended to fare
better, since their knowledge of and contacts with the extensive network of
Chinese who lived abroad were recognized as being useful: even then it was
realized that competition with 1 aiwan was of great importance. 67

The repressive machinery rolled on and on. The campaigns of 1950 and
1951 were declared to be over in 1952 or 1953, and with good reason: the
repressions had been so widespread that there were few opponents left. Nev-
ertheless, repression continued. In 1955 the Party began a new campaign to
eliminate "hidden counterrevolutionaries," known as sufan, targeting the intel-
ligentsia in particular, including any former Party members and sympathizers
who had shown a modicum of independence. One example was the brilliant
Marxist writer Hu Feng, who was a disciple of the revered Lu Xun, and who
in July 1954 had denounced the "five daggers" used by the Central Committee
to attack writers and particularly the idea that all creativity should submit to
the Party line. In December an enormous campaign was launched against him.
Prominent intellectuals took turns denouncing him, and the masses rushed in
for the kill. Hu found himself totally isolated and made a public act of contri-
tion in January 1955, but this act was not accepted. He was arrested in July
along with 130 "accomplices" and spent ten years in a camp. He was arrested
again in 1966 and moved around within the penitentiary system until his
complete rehabilitation in 1980. 6 * In the accompanying purge, Party members

China: A Long March into Night

485

were affected on a large scale for the first time: the People's Daily announced
that 10 percent of Party members were hidden traitors, a figure that seems to
have been used as a guideline for arrest quotas. 6 '' In estimating the number of
victims of the sufan campaign, one source gives 81,000 arrests (which seems
rather modest), while another gives 770,000 deaths. There is at present no way
of determining the truth.

The well-known Hundred Flowers Campaign of May and June 1957 was
also part of the mass repressions and the cycle of successive campaigns. In this
case the crushing of the "poisonous weeds" destroyed the optimism generated
during the few weeks of liberalization proclaimed and then withdrawn by Mao.
The brief liberalization had two objectives. First, as in all rectification move-
ments, Mao initially encouraged people to speak freely about their grievances,
then crushed those who had revealed "evil thoughts." 70 Second, in the face of
the harsh criticism, he sought to reunite the Party around radical positions he
had adopted in the aftermath of the Twentieth Soviet Communist Party Con-
gress, which had emphasized the need for the legal regulation of repressive
practices in order to increase juridical control over activities of the security
service and over the execution of sentences, thus calling into question Mao's
own position. 71 Communist intellectuals, frightened by the Yan'an experience,
for the most part prudently stayed quiet. But hundreds of thousands of people
who were more naive, and particularly those who had taken part in the events
of 1949 or who were members of "democratic parties" that the Communist
Party had allowed to survive, were caught in the trap of their own outspoken-
ness once the brutal Antirightist operation began. There were in general few
executions, but between 400,000 and 700,000 cadres, including at least 10
percent of all Chinese intellectuals, technicians, and engineers, were given the
invidious label ''right-winger" and sentenced to twenty years of "repentance"
in prisons or camps in remote regions. Those who did not succumb to age, the
(amines of 1959-1961, or despair when a decade later the Red Guards ram-
paged through the country with new persecutions still had to wait until 1978
for the first rehabilitations. In addition, millions of cadres and students, includ-
ing 100,000 in Henan alone, were moved to the countryside, either provisionally
or definitively. 72 Sending them to the countryside was a punishment, but it was
also preparation for the Great Leap Forward, which would focus mainly on the
rural areas.

During the Antirightist "struggle," penal detention was generally pre-
ceded by social exclusion. No one wanted to know "right-wingers"; no one
would even offer them hot water. They still had to go to work, but there they
had to make confession after confession and to attend an endless succession of
"criticism and education" meetings. Because housing was generally based on
employment, their neighbors and colleagues, and even their children, gave

486

Communism in Asia

them no respite, hurling sarcastic taunts and insults, forbidding them to walk
on the left side of the road, and chanting a children's song that ended
with the line 'The people will fight right-wingers to the death."" The wisest
course of action was silent acceptance, lest one make things worse. 74 It is easy
to understand why suicides were so common. After the innumerable inquiries
and criticism sessions, and after the purge that affected 5 percent of the mem-
bers of every labor unit (7 percent in the universities, which were singled
out for particular attention during the Hundred Flowers campaign), Party
officials were placed at the head of the main cultural institutions/ 5 The bril-
liant intellectual and cultural flourishing that China had witnessed in the first
half of the century simply died. The Red Guards tried to kill off even its
memory. 76

This was the moment when Maoist society reached its maturity. Even the
later upsets of the Cultural Revolution did not destabilize it for more than a
moment. No page would be turned thereafter until the first great reforms of
Deng Xiaoping. Its basis can be summed up in the words of the Helmsman:
"Never forget the class struggle!' 1 And in practice everything did rest upon the
labeling and classification of people, first sketched out in rural areas at the time
of agrarian reform and in the towns during the mass movements of 1951, but
completed only in 1955. The labor collective had a role to play in the process,
but in every case it was the police who had the final say. As before, the social
groupings were quite fantastical, with diabolical consequences for tens of mil-
lions of people. In 1948 an official in Long Bow stated that "the way one makes
one's living determines the way one thinks." 77 According to the Maoist logic,
the reverse was also true. Social groups, which were divided up in a fairly
arbitrary fashion, were mixed with political groups, resulting in a binary divi-
sion between "red" categories, such as workers, poor peasants, medium peas-
ants, party cadres, PLA soldiers, and "martyrs of the revolution"; and "black"
categories, such as landowners, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, "evil ele-
ments," and right-wingers. Between these two groups were some "neutral"
categories, such as intellectuals and capitalists; but these, together with the
marginalized in society, especially Party leaders who had "chosen the capitalist
way," were progressively shifted toward the "black" category. During the Cul-
tural Revolution, intellectuals were officially placed in the "stinking ninth
[black] category." The labels stuck no matter what one did later. Even after an
official rehabilitation, a right-winger would remain a target for mass campaigns
and would never have the right to return to the city. The infernal logic of the
system was such that there were always enemies to hunt down and kill. If the
stock of enemies ran low, it could be increased by an expansion of incriminating
traits or by a search for people who had fallen back into old ways. Any Com-
munist cadre could thus become a right-winger.

China: A Long March into Night

487

These classifications had less in common with Marxist classes than they
did with Indian castes, even though traditionally China had known no such
system. To some extent they took into account the social system that had existed
before 1949, but not the enormous changes that had come about in the mean-
time. They also addressed another perceived problem. Traditionally the father's
name had been passed on automatically to his children (while women by
contrast retained their maiden names). This hereditary system threatened to
cause ossification in a purportedly revolutionary society and posed an insur-
mountable obstacle to those who were not "well born." Discrimination against
these "blacks" and their children was quite systematic, not only for entry into
universities and into normal life (as stipulated in a directive of July 1957) but
also for entry into political life. It was very difficult for them to obtain permis-
sion to marry a "red" partner, and society tended to ostracize them, since as a
general rule people were afraid that they might have problems with the author-
ities if they associated with such people. It was during the Cultural Revolu-
tion that labeling attained its height and its worst effects, even for the regime
itself.

The Greatest Famine in History (1959-1961)

For many years one myth was common in the West: that although China was
far from being a model democracy, at least Mao had managed to give a bowl of
rice to every Chinese. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
The modest amount of food available per person probably did not increase
significantly from the beginning to the end of his reign, despite demands made
on the peasantry on a scale rarely seen in history. Mao and the system that he
created were directly responsible for what was, and, one hopes, will forever
remain, the most murderous famine of all time, anywhere in the world.

Undoubtedly it was not Mao's intention to kill so many of his compatriots.
But the least one can say is that he seemed little concerned about the death of
millions from hunger. Indeed, his main concern in those dark years seems to
have been to deny a reality for which he could have been held responsible. It is
always difficult to apportion blame in such situations, to know whether to attack
the plan itself or its application. It is, however, indisputable that the Party
leadership, and especially Mao himself, displayed economic incompetence,
wholesale ignorance, and ivory-tower utopianism. The collectivization of 1955—
56 had been more or less accepted by most peasants: it grouped them around
their own villages, and it allowed them to pull out of the collective — 70,000
farms did so in Guangdong in 1956-57, and many of the bigger collectives were
broken up. 78 The apparent success of reform and the good harvest of 1957
pushed Mao to propose — and to impose on the more reluctant farmers — the

488

Communism in Asia

goals of the Great Leap Forward (first announced in December 1957 and
refined in May 1958) and the means of achieving it — the People's Commune
(announced in August 1958).

Within a very short time ("Three years of hard work and suffering, and
a thousand years of prosperity, 11 said one slogan at the time), the Great Leap
Forward caused nationwide disruption of the peasant way of life. Peasants were
to form themselves into huge groups of thousands or even tens of thousands
of families, with even thing to become communal, including food. Agricultural
production was to be developed on a massive scale through pharaonic irrigation
projects and new farming methods. Finally, the difference between agricultural
and industrial work was to be abolished as industrial units, in particular small
furnaces, were created everywhere, The goal was quite similar to the Khrush-
chev ideal of the "agrotown." The aim was to ensure the self-sufficiency of
local communities and to accelerate industrial takeoff by creating new rural
industries and using the large agricultural surpluses that the communes were
to make for the state and the industry it controlled. In this happy dream that
was to bring real Communism within reach, the accumulation of capital and a
rapid rise in the standard of living were to go hand in hand. All that had to be
done was to achieve the simple objectives set by the Party.

For months everything seemed to be going perfectly. People worked night
and day under red flags blowing in the wind. Focal leaders announced the
breaking of one record after another as people produced larger quantities
"more quickly, better, and more economically." As a result, the goals were
continually raised even higher: 375 million tons of gram for 1958, almost
double the 195 million tons of the preceding year. In December it was an-
nounced that the goal had been met and the results verified by the staff of the
Centra] Statistics Bureau, who had been sent out to the countryside after
expressing doubts. The original plan had been to surpass Great Britain in
fifteen years; now it appeared certain that it would be done in two. As produc-
tion quotas continued to rise, it was decided to move more people into industrial
production. In Henan, a province intended to serve as a model, 200,001) workers
were generously moved to other, more needy regions where results had been
poorer. 74 "Socialist emulation" was pushed ever further; all private land and
free trade was abolished along with the right to leave the collective, and there
was a massive campaign to collect metal tools to transform everything into steel.
At the same time, any wood, including doors, was collected to fuel the new
furnaces. As compensation, all communal food reserves were eaten at memo-
rable banquets. "Fating meat was considered revolutionary," according to one
witness in Shani. S(l This was no problem because the next harvest was bound
to be enormous. "The human will is the master of all things," the press in
Henan had already proclaimed, at the provincial hydraulic conference in Oc-
tober 1957. S1

China: A Long March into Night

489

But soon the leaders who still emerged from the Forbidden City from time
to time (which Mao seldom did) were forced to face facts. They had fallen into
their own trap, believing in the power of their own optimism and thinking that
after the Long March, success would naturally follow because they felt them-
selves omnipotent and were used to commanding the workers and the economy
like soldiers in a battle. It was easier for cadres to doctor the figures or to put
intolerable pressure on administrators to deliver them than it was to admit that
the sacrosanct objectives had not been reached. Under Mao, a move to the left
(since voluntarism, dogmatism, and violence were left-wing virtues) was always
less dangerous than right-wing mediocrity. In 1958-59, the bigger a lie was, the
faster its author was promoted. The headlong race was under way, the baro-
meters of success were soaring, and all potential critics were in prison or work-
ing on the irrigation projects.

The reasons for the catastrophe were fairly technical. Some agricultural
methods advocated by the Soviet academic Trofim Lysenko, who rejected
genetics, won great favor in China under the auspices of Mao. They were
imposed on the peasants, and the results were disastrous. Mao had proclaimed
his belief that "in company grain grows fast; seeds are happiest when growing
together" -attempting to impose class solidarity on nature. 82 Accordingly, seeds
were sown at five to ten times the normal density, with the result that millions
of young plants died. The intensity of the farming methods dried out the soil
or caused the salt to rise. Wheat and maize never grow well together in the same
fields, and the replacement of the traditional barley crop with wheat in the high,
cold fields of Tibet was simply catastrophic. Other mistakes were made in the
nationwide campaign. The extermination of the sparrows that ate the grain
resulted in a massive increase in the number of parasites. A large amount of
hydraulic equipment that had been hurriedly and carelessly built was found to
be useless or even dangerous because of the increased erosion and the risk of
flooding at the first high tide. Moreover, the cost of its construction in terms
of human life had been enormous: more than 10,000 out of 60,000 workers had
died on one site in Henan. Risking everything on one large cereal crop (as on
steel in industry, where the slogan was "Big is beautiful") ruined all the smaller
associated agricultural activities, including the raising of livestock that was
often vital for balance in the ecosystem. In Fujian, for instance, the highly
profitable tea plantations were all resown as rice fields.

From an economic point of view, the reallocation of resources was disas-
trous. Although the accumulation of capital reached a record level (43.4 percent
of the gross domestic product in 1959) it was used to build ill-conceived or
badly finished irrigation projects and to develop industry inside the towns. 83
Although one famous Maoist slogan proclaimed that "China walks on two
feet," all the blood from agriculture was pumped into industry. The incompe-
tent allocation of capital was a decisive factor in the no less aberrant allocation

490

Communism in Asia

of manpower: stare industry rook on 21 million new workers in 195N, which
represented an 85 percent rise in a single sector in one year. In l°o7 1%0 the
share of the population working outside agriculture increased from 15 percent
to 20 percent, and all these people had to he ted by the slate, Meanwhile,
workers in the countryside were being exhausted by ever) thing except agricul-
ture. They were being dratted into large engineering projects, small steelworks
whose output tor the most part was worthless, the destruction ot traditional
villages, and the construction of new towns. After the mar clous harvest ot"
195$, it was decided that cereal production could be cut by 13 percent. M This
combination of "economic delirium and political lies" resulted in the hancsts
of i960, which many of the peasants were loo weak to gather. '" I lenan, the first
province to be declared "100 percent hydraulic," since the construction of dikes
and irrigation work there was technically finished, was also one ot the regions
hardest hit by the famine; estimates ot' the deaths there vary from 2 million to
8 million. m The state quota had reached its height, going from 48 million tons
of cereal in 1957 (17 percent of all production), to 67 million in 1959 (28
percent), to 51 million in 1960. The trap closed around those who had lied, or
rather, around their administrators. In the supposedly model district of Kengy-
ang (Anhui), 199,000 tons of grain were announced tor 1959, ;i considerable
increase over the 178,000 tons of the previous car; but real production was a
mere 54,000 tons, as opposed to 89,000 in 1958. I )espite the shortfall, the stare
rook a very real part of this phantom haiwesl, claiming 29,000 tons. The
following year, almost everyone had to cat clear rice soup, and the somewhat
surreal slogan for the year 1959 in the Peopled Ihi/y was: ik J ,ie frugally in a
year of plenty" The national press began to sing the praises of a dail nap, and
medical professors came out to explain the particular physiology of the Chi-
nese, for whom fat and proteins were an unnecessary luxur. v

There was perhaps still lime to change direction and alter things for the
better. Steps were taken in that direction in December 1958. Hut the inception
of a serious split with the L.S.S.R., and above all the attack in Jul) 1959 by the
well-respected Marshal Peng Dehuai on the Communist Party Politburo and
Mao's strategy, gave Mao pureh tactical political reasons to refuse to acknowl-
edge that the country was facing any difficulties and rhus to acknowledge any
blame. The overly lucid minister of defense was thus replaced In Lin liiao, who
showed himself to be a servile creature of the Helmsman. Peng was sidelined
but not actually arrested at the time. In 1967 he was thrown out of the Part)
and sentenced to life in prison, dying in 1974. Mao's hatred was long lasting.
To turn the situation to his advantage, he tried in 1959 to reinforce the Great
Leap Forward by calling for people's communes to be extended into the cities
(a strategy never actually implemented). China then experienced its great fam-
ine, but .Mao would survive. As Lin Biao was to say later, ii is geniuses who
make historv.

Mao ,-' .-■■ Univ. liiuI the Chi
in .c Communists took
power in 1949, In I * > 5 S ihev
launched the ( ircal 1 .rap
Ftirw ail in accelerate ilu 1
prnce^i of industriali/at inn.
I is chief ettcct, how e cr,
was an iimm-nsc famine.
W liile Man ami Perag <- '.hen
were posing lor these propa
ganda photographs, an esti-
mated al) million ( Chinese
uta'e d inu of hunger.
I K.isitoio

Mao launehed the Cireal Proletarian
(ailiural Resolution in l%(>to
bring the country firmly under his
eonrrol once more, bul he suc-
ceeded mainl in starting a civil
war. Red Guards spread destruction
and humiliation around the country,
lynching and murdering countless
people. 1 I ere a historian named
Chien Po-tsan is handed over to rhe
mob. £ UK.

TllOM- br.liull'll ' IK II! ()f ibu ])y

pic" In ::.'li]i i ja iii t an.i ] ■ were nth

treated, beaten, and fn mam case'
kilted, I kre J rich ihm-..uu is shal fui
ha injl "t&Jthiittrd the | u M-.MriT i v/'
! ArchK*: Pihotui

fa*- f

Beijing, !^7.v The dispkn of

portraits of ] .en in and S i a I i n

(Mao described Ehc hitter as

the "ureal friend nf the Chi

ncsc people'*) demonstrates

that i he founders of the

I .S.S.R., despite the Sinn-

Soviet conflict, were still [he

essential points ol' reference

for the C '.hinese Communist

reffime. < ivlmr Phuius

The theatricality of ( '.nnuiiu-

nisni. IVoin high on the rain

parls of ilu- Forbidden ( ai,

the leaders of ihe ( '.hinese

( Jiniinunist Parh sure llie

massed ranks of ihcir stih

jeets in Tiananmen Square.

The distance between llie

leaders and llie militarized

asscmhK is charaelenshc of

I He rei.'anie. i kr slum;

n agitprop scene with Red
( j'u.trds in Tiananmen Square.
Main bf them suffered harsh
reprisals once Mao behewd
thai he had attained his objer
liux ears later, mam finalK
spoke about the realities of
the ( .uhural kcolution and
joined ihe struggle for (he
"fifth tntHfcrfux&rittir 1 (i.e.,
deinoeracN ) after Mao death.
• K.rafniM

In die spring of IMS') a new gen-
eration of fetjiflg students took
oer Tiananmen Square. Their
principal deiiunul was for dcnioc
rac, swnboli/ed iiere b a siatue
placed in front of the gistftl f»K
trail of Mao. l Cathiaine
llniriette/ AiT

Mtt'i 1 sewral weeks the imwTiinh.'iil umi! toii- against llm .uiilnii nuAiirn-ni. whuh h.ul ;n .11 popular
support. On the niiihl ot -1 5 Jliih-, Links broU' up lln. Ktif'lltMH I .nop Om ! in > n ■ .muI aiiiliiii- tftCtl
1 kou hi inuil;i M.i'.'.nuni I'hiiliis

(. .hiiH.^f dissidents refused lo il.haii.duU die Mni'.".di One r.[inple is ilu In! im | Ivd (.nurd
Wei Jin;>.slu-!i;..! (sealed, rij'.hl ). Initialh senieneed l<> 1 5 uai , in pi i-.mi Im ". mum i u voIliiiuii
arv I'rinirs," lie was senieneed auam in 1 kvemln r LU95 tu .iinulit-i 1 £&[ [I vn Im uMinbir
! 997, dftejr uearl l l J ears in prison, he WSK released and <-m1-. d m liir I ntl« tl Slates
1 Xinhua News Ai.-A'in-v HI'

1 '.hina own ;..',Lil;n' sWem. the

taogtfi, is a vasi rtchviifk ol prison

faoiorieii batted ee)usirl on penal

labor. Mam pmduels made there

are Ji.-siined tor export. I l;irr \ |

was imprisoned in one tor l ( ' years

for Cftliei'/ing dieSoiel imasiun ut

I liiiiuarv I Ic n laimvicti !o ;.',aiher

eunMderable doemuental mn about

hi:, exprrieih e. I lie fVU pliolu

graphs here wiTr laken m seerei.

i 1) R.

Ill a major offensive against Soufh ietnam in the aprim'. d l l, o. the it?l linh at in tg &
the town ot Hue. \ hen South ieinamese forces tv.apiund the town, iln found ■.ru.-.l
mass graves* i L&mnu

Communist reeducation camp in North Vietnam-. 1 he aim of rcedm ation , v'Cfj Specific: dttailtCCS ait

to approve oi the ssk'in that has imprisoned them and to adopt the ideo|u>.! nj their oppressors.
i Henri J in ft-au / Suan.i

Termr us a means ot education: the execution of a "a)untmvoluti<.>n;iry" provides t he opportunity to

nintnive a political ami social ssstem. i Coll. I Niatl VtfH Toai

'['he ictnr of the ( aurmuinisr
regime in ieinam in I^T.s ied to *
a mass rodus of locals who felt
their lies lo lie at risk. "Uoat
fK«opk: M iletl iii small, ricketv
crafl, prefen 'irtg to risk I heir lives
at sea, where piratr attacks were
common, than tn remain under
the new i lu 1 at< >rsliip. ' K. ( iwigtef/

S«m;i

( '.ambodia, April l'JT.x The VtStorfftUS Mmier l&QUfpe emerim- Phnom Penh. In .1 show time, voung
soldiers, mnsrh ajftil fifteen and sixteen, Inviiinr the instruments of Pol Pot, "Mi;.', Hrother ulhWt I >nc"
rnipr iiH'. liir capital of all its inhabitants. 1 Ffciffd Sip.i p u -.s

A 1 1 or 1 he (all o[ Pol Pol's regfrnCi die new pro A ieiruniese :.:■ > t-nni h.'ih opened ,1 "museum of neMinndc"
in which the skulls of thousands of unidentified vlcClhlti of the k Inner Rom<e *Htte disphned.
( Spmider/ ' S lima

AUtkOtluU

^fc* ^W r^

rv © f

Phc '['uo Sfeftg prison, a former M'hool, was one of the worst renters for Ujim urc and execution. I'.ach
prisoner cut nun, woman, ami child was photographed beftife beinu cruelly executed. < Photo

The photographer said: kl s a rule,

1 look the photographs as soon as

the prisoners arrived, after a nunc

her had been pinned on them with a

safe!) pin. If the arricii bare

chested, the number was pinned to

their skin. 11 I Phoin Aivlme Group/

Tuo) SI em.'.', Mu&C« du uciioeidc

1'dI Pol. his ionu.uk-., aiu.1 his f,imil. l )SU. In Jul [*#£} \> |>m w.-, ih .i-.-.m J Uion .; p%i ■iulf.irilMin.il In
His iam) liruinunK ami JLicl'.M'J in .1 ni.i! m which tither political cunctTEi! w;it< i L.uh p,n .nouum Ik

dttdul ,t hc.U! ,l!!,uL 111 pr»1 l ,Jt >^ ilm. Pilots

liehind thr imnrlirlds. ilic KIuiht Rmi'.'r S?UI lu f ,1 number ni ,uiiu- unih m ( amhudi.i l ambodii m
t lu hi ■ i u. .1 proportion of victim-, oi landmine in ih< world. \o<i victims ,:i i !■■< uildreii Slid .iJolcMXniS.

1 I o mns I i.imin.i

V hen rhc Batista regime fdl in Cuba, Castro was only one of the rebels involved, and hopes for change
were hi-h among ( Cubans. Castro's rapid seizure of power brought eonsiderable opposition among other
tactions. Left to right; IVclro Luis lioiiel, a prisoner who died on hunger strike in 1972; Humbertn Sori
Marin, who was slmt after attempting lo organize an armed Struggle agains his former comrade-in-arms,
t ailrtj; A\d the port Jorge Vails, -who was sentenced lo 20 years in prison and only recently freed. (& I). R.,
■ I iir Vilnan n-hi

C ieueral Oehoa, the former commander of the Cuban force in Angola,

was accused b Castro of pUnring' against him. On the grounds that

Ochtia had been trafficking in drugs (as the special services of the

regime had done tor ears), Castro had him condemned to death

and executed. LI K Carrie / Gamma

( imp. i cIH'l. iich iuu//hM s(ku:i thruu-.h ihr u-r i( t ommili { lor l'rinisr <i{ the
RcM>hnmn (0>Rs) established (hum hi ui ilu raunfFY. T1u- uti i i cntialh designed
to keep IVdfi li «»u-i latBtliesj I be itthci maim' t-lriiu TI.I in the I ulun FCpfCSNiw -ippLiratUs

IS the popi.il.il 'II 'il'iliul, UMialh hi Id Ml t -I >K hrad^iurkT . I I 'ill U .h .limn Sgn«

I Mfu <m fin tin l'i..n TH-npk- ill il icin.in nn <>f thousand* oi ^urm rtW kviwus: ( uhj un makeshift

raffs hkL- the one pH'Iiitrtl Ihic. Tin tU'-.iiui 1 died SI .c.l. ■ oi.uu- Kr uti Sip* Ff«&

l v idel Castro with Eden

Pastor* ( iomez, known as

( !oniandanlc Zero, rhe

inosi prestigious Saudi

nisi a guerrilla chid' in the

struggle against Somoza,

Pastora became a voeifer

ous opponent of the

Sandiuista regime in

Managua when it

attempted to turn the

countn into .1 Soviet style

republic. 1 lc started a new

guerrilla war, which lasted

uiuil 1985 (Tight), C D. R.

In Peru the Shining Path,
;i Maoist terrorist group,

rdoes not hesitate to mas-
sacre peasants who refuse
to cooperate. Seventy twi

se
iperatc. seventy two
people lost rheir lives in
the village of Ma/amari
in this particular attack.
Pictured is the head of
one victim, fi Monica Sun
.Vhirtin/(ianiiiKi

Ethiopia, 1-1 September 1°7 ( '. 1'hr Nuifi prune miniMi i. l«Aivi ko\ijJTi, im a tsit id
Addis baba Inr i hi iifih .mni i-r^.=r ui Mcngisili 1 huh 1 ,u t,tm- >* i/uu ej| power. His
dictatorial iruimc was run alouv Sown lines I In: Worked Pftrtj i I ihinpi.i e prevail A
(icSifi* to be "the inheritors of die ;_-reat < >i aohei Revolution" l<in:i < >.triiii l.i

Jn the mid I ''NIK drought Hit I ahiopia. < guisin w idrspn .id tainiiK-. Uenmsm used ihc weapon oi hunger
It) force LiriAf segments (if the popuhlt itm lu move out of aiea*, u here ^m-rrJILis jftert! ">pef -Jtinp EthkttttQj
ihti:, became hostages in a "poliiual rcprffflfiiyJHftUI of the tcrnim % "' i i Su-Hi- iVrhns/ Minimi RioW

Supported bv die Soviet Lnion alter 1 ( J74, the
Popular Movement for the Liberation of
Angola also received help from Cuba in 1 ( ^75.
Tens of thousands of "volunteers 11 came to
figfcl the non Marxist movements, rivals of
the MIM .A, before beginning a withdrawal in
lanuarv I'JiSM. ; ft \cnturiL'i7Uaniuia

On 11 U-cemlvr *f!% So
viel Hoops entered I'^hani
si. in in response to appeals
Irom the local t ioinmunisl
leaders, who were losing
control. n extremely
blood) war ensued. In ihe
lace of widespread resis ■■■
lance, the Soviet troops ear
ned out a "scorched earth 11
policv dust nn in;; towns and
villages, t Children were
often the first ielims of
antipersonnel mines (above).
Out ten sears, So iel nidi
iar operations claimed I
1..S million lives, of which
90 percent were cisilians.
1 L ai (Jet Smekl /( iammti

■

l&l'''

dtmiimmi

Manua I )ro;.::i, the Road of Death. In
1949 Stalin biigan a rail\a link north of
the Vrctit; Cirujc between NakheLird and
Igarka. kl < )nw actl to ( '.nmmunism" pro
ehiims the banner above, fier Stalin's
death, the projcci was abandoned. The "hi
eoniotive ot history; v uhieh niux pulled
Tn>lsk\ train HcfofC pulliih: so main bo>
ears of deportees, now lie* a rusting wreck
in the foivsl. I Tumult/ Ki/n u

■

5wmE i*'jra IT' 1 ' • '*8i

■

i r4 i '" "■:>*"

s^^SmMbV^hH BML/vy -i3F ft oat-

China: A Long March into Night

491

The resulting famine affected ihe whole country. In Beijing, playing ; fields
and recreation areas were transformed into allotments, and 2 million chickens
were to be found on people's balconies in the capital. ,ss No province was spared,
despite the immense size of the country and the wide variety of climates and
cultures. That fact alone shows the ridiculousness of the official explanation,
which blamed the famine on some of the worst climatic conditions of the
century. In fact 1054 and 1980 saw far greater climatic disturbances. In 1960,
onlv 8 of the 1 20 Chinese weather stations noted a drought of any consequence,
and only a third mentioned drought as a problem at all.* 1 ' The 1960 harvest of
143 million tons of grain was 26 perceni lower than that of 1957, which was
almost the same as that of 1958. The harvest had fallen to its level in 1950,
while the population had grown by 100 million during the decade. 1 * 1 The towns,
which were general!) privileged in terms of allocations of food stocks, partly
because of the proximity of the government, were not hit as hard. In 1961, at
the darkest moment, their inhabitants on average received IS] kilos of grain,
whereas peasants received 153; the peasants 1 ration had fallen bv 23 pereent,
that of" the townspeople bv 8 percent. Mao, in the tradition of ( Chinese leaders,
but in contradiction to the legend that he encouraged to grow up around him,
showed here how little he really cared for what he thought of as the clumsy
and primitive peasants.

There were considerable ariations among regions. The most fragile re-
gions, in the north and northwest, the only ones that had really suffered famine
over the lasl century, were the hardest hit. By contrast, in Heilongjiang, in the
far north, which was relatively untouched and largely virgin territory, the
population climbed from 14 million to 20 million as the region became a haven
for the hungrv. As in earlier Kuropean famines, regions that specialized in
commercial agricultural products (such as oil seed, sugarcane, sugar beet, and
above all cotton) saw production fall dramatically, sometimes by as much as
two-thirds. Since the hungry no longer had the means to buy their products,
hunger struck here with particular severity The price of rice on the free market
(or on the black market) rose fifteen or even thirtyfold. Maoist dogma exaeer
bated the disaster: because people's communes had a duty to be self-sufficient,
the transfer of goods between proinces had been drastically reduced. There
was also a lack of coal as hungry miners left to find food or to cultivate
allotments wherever they could. The situation was compounded by the general
apathy and dissolution brought on by hunger. In industrialized provinces such
as Liaoning the effects were cumulative: agricultural production in 1960 tell To
half of 1958 levels, and whereas an average of 1.66 million tons of foodstuffs
had arried in that region each year during the 1950s, after 1958 transfers for
the whole country fell to a mere 1.5 million tons.

The fact that the famine was primarily a political phenomenon is demon-
strated by the high death rates in provinces where the leaders were Maoist

492

Communism in Asia

radicals, provinces that in previous years had actually been net exporters of
grain, like Sichuan, Henan, and Anhui. This last province, in north-central
China, was the worst affected of all. In 1960 the death rate soared to 68 percent
from its normal level at around 15 percent, while the birth rate fell to 1 1 percent
from its previous average of 30 percent. As a result the population fell by
around 2 million people (6 percent of the total) in a single year 91 Like Mao
himself, Party activists in Henan were convinced that all the difficulties arose
from the peasants' concealment of private stocks of grain. According to the
secretary of the Xinyang district (10 million inhabitants), where the first peo-
ple's commune in the country had been established, "The problem is not that
food is lacking. There are sufficient quantities of grain, but 90 percent of the
inhabitants are suffering from ideological difficulties. 1 ' 92 In the autumn of 1959
the class war was momentarily forgotten, and a military-style offensive was
launched against the peasants, using methods very similar to those used by
anti-Japanese guerrilla groups. At least 10,000 peasants were imprisoned, and
many died of hunger behind bars. The order was given to smash all privately
owned cutlery that had not yet been turned to steel to prevent people from
being able to feed themselves by pilfering the food supply of the commune.
Even fires were banned, despite the approach of winter. The excesses of re-
pression were terrifying. Thousands of detainees were systematically tortured,
and children were killed and even boiled and used as fertilizer — at the very
moment when a nationwide campaign was telling people to "learn the Henan
way." In Anhui, where the stated intention was to keep the red flag flying even
if 99 percent of the population died, cadres returned to the traditional practices
of live burials and torture with red-hot irons. 91 Funerals were prohibited lest
their number frighten survivors even more and lest they turn into protest
marches. Taking in the numerous abandoned children was also banned, on the
ground that "The more we take in, the more will be abandoned." 94 Desperate
villagers who tried to force their way into the towns were greeted with machine-
gun fire. More than 800 people died in this manner in the Fenyang district, and
12 percent of the rural population, or 28,000 people, were punished in some
manner. This campaign took on the proportions of a veritable war against the
peasantry. In the words of Jean-Luc Domenach, "The intrusion of Utopia into
politics coincided very closely with that of police terror in society." 95 Deaths
from hunger reached over 50 percent in certain villages, and in some cases the
only survivors were cadres who abused their position. In Henan and elsewhere
there were many cases of cannibalism (63 were recorded officially): children
were sometimes eaten in accordance with a communal decision. %

In 1968 Wei Jingsheng, an eighteen-year-old Red Guard pursued by the
authorities like millions of others, took refuge with his family in a village in
Anhui, where he heard many stories about the Great Leap Forward: 97

China: A Long March into Night

493

As soon as 1 arrived here, 1 often heard peasants talking about the Great
Leap Forward as though it was some sort of apocalypse that they had by
some miracle escaped. Quite fascinated, I questioned them in detail
ahout the subject so that soon I too was convinced that the "three years
of natural catastrophes 11 had not been as natural as all that, and had
rather been the result of a series of political blunders. The peasants said,
for example, that in 1959-60, during the "Communist Wind" [one of
rhe official names for the Great Leap Forward] their hunger had been so
great that they had not even been strong enough to harvest the rice crop
when it was ready, and that it would otherwise have been a relatively
good vear for them. Many of them died of hunger watching the grains
of rice fall into the fields, blown off by the wind. In some villages there
was literally no one left to take in the harvest. One time I was with a
relative who lived a small distance away from our village. On the way to
his home, we went past a deserted village. All the houses had lost their
roofs. Only the mud walls remained.

Thinking it was a village that had been abandoned during the
Great Leap Forward, when all the villages were being reorganized and
relocated, 1 asked why the walls hadn't been knocked down to make
room for more fields. My relative replied: "But these houses all belong
to people, and you can't knock them down without their permission. 11 I
stared at the walls and couldn't believe that they were actually inhabited.
"Of course they were inhabited! But everyone here died during the
'Communist Wind, 1 and no one has ever come back. The land was then
shared out among rhe neighboring villages. But because it seemed possi-
ble that some of them might come back, the living quarters were never
shared our. Still, that was so long ago, I don't think anyone will come-
back now. 11

We walked along beside the village. The rays of the sun shone on
the jade-green weeds that had sprung up between the earth walls, accen-
tuating the contrast with the rice fields all around, and adding to the
desolation of the landscape. Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up
one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which
the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the
worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's
children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field
seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their par-
ents. 1 felt sorry for the children, but not as sorry as 1 felt for their
parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the
tears and grief of other parents — flesh that they would never have imag-
ined tasting, even in their worst nightmares? In that moment 1 under-
stood what a butcher he had been, the man "whose like humanity has
not seen in several centuries, and China not in several thousand years": 9 "
Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong and his henchmen, with their criminal po-

494

Communism in Asia

litical system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led them to hand
their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh of others to
appease their own hunger. Mao Zedong, to wash away the crime that he
had committed in assassinating democracy [an allusion to the Hundred
Flowers trap], had launched the Great Leap Forward, and obliged thou-
sands and thousands of peasants dazed by hunger to kill one another
with hoes, and to save their own lives thanks to the flesh and blood of
their childhood companions. They were not the real killers; the real
killers were Mao Zedong and his companions. At last I understood
where Peng Dehuai had found the strength to attack the Central Com-
mittee of the Party led by Mao, and at last I understood why the peas-
ants loathed Communism so much, and why they had never allowed
anyone to attack the policies of Liu Shaoqi, "three freedoms and one
guarantee.' 1 For the good and simple reason that they had no intention
of ever having to eat their own flesh and blood again, or of killing their
companions to eat them in a moment of instinctual madness. That
reason was far more important than any ideological consideration.

At the moment that Yuri Gagarin was being launched into space, a country
possessing more than 30,000 miles of railway lines and an extensive radio and
telephone network was being ravaged by a subsistence crisis of the sort that
had plagued premodern Europe, but on a scale that in the eighteenth century-
would have affected the population of the entire world. Literally countless
millions were trying to boil grass and bark to make soup, stripping leaves off
trees in the towns, wandering the roads of the country desperate for anything
to eat trying vainly to attack food convoys, and sometimes desperately banding
together into gangs (as in the Xinyang and Lan Kao districts in Henan) w They
were sent nothing to eat, but on occasion the local cadres who were supposedly
responsible for the famine were shot. There were armed raids on houses all
over the country in a search for ground maize. m An enormous increase in
disease and infections increased the death rate further, while the birth rate fell
to almost zero as women were unable to conceive because of malnutrition.
Prisoners in the laogat were not the last to die of hunger, although their
situation was no less precarious than that of the neighboring peasants who came
to the camps to beg for something to eat. In August 1960, after one vear of
famine, three-quarters of Jean Pasqualini's work brigade were dead or dying,
and the survivors were reduced to searching through horse manure for undi-
gested grains of wheat and eating the worms they found in cowpats. 101 People
in the camps were used as guinea pigs in hunger experiments. In one case flour
was mixed with 30 percent paper paste in bread to study the effects on diges-
tion, while in another study marsh plankton were mixed with rice water. The
first experiment caused atrocious constipation throughout the camp, which

China: A Long March into Night

495

caused many deaths. The second also caused much illness, and many who were
already weakened ended up dying.

For the entire country, the death rate rose from 11 percent in 1957 to 15
percent in 1959 and 1961, peaking at 29 percent in 1960. Birth rates fell from
33 percent in 1957 to 18 percent in 1961. Excluding the deficit in births, which
was perhaps as many as ^ million (although some births were merely delayed),
loss of life linked to the famine in the years 1959-1961 was somewhere between
20 million and 43 million people. 102 The lower end of the range is the official
figure used by the Chinese government since 1988. This was quite possibly the
worst famine not just in the history of China but in the history of the world.
The second worst had occurred in northern China in 1877-78 and had taken
between 9 million and 13 million lives. The one that had struck the U.S.S.R.
in a similar political and economic context in 1932-1934 had caused around
6 million deaths, a smaller proportion of the total population than in China
during the Great Leap Forward. 101 Under normal conditions, mortality in the
countryside was between 30 percent and 60 percent higher than in the cities.
In 1960 it doubled, climbing from 14 percent to 29 percent. Peasants managed
to delay the effects of the famine slightly by consuming their own livestock,
which amounted to using up their productive capital. In 1957-1961, 48 percent
of pigs and 30 percent of all dairy animals were slaughtered. m The surface area
given over to nonfood crops such as cotton, which was the country's main
industry at the time, diminished by more than one-third in 1959-1962, and this
fall in production inevitably hit the manufacturing sector. Although after 1959
peasant markets were reopened to stimulate production, the prices demanded
were so high and the quantities available so low that few of the starving could
find enough to survive. In 1961, for example, the price of pork was fourteen
times higher in the markets than in the state shops. The price of ked went up
less than that of grain in the pastoral northwest, which was chronically deficient
in grain. In Gansu people were still dying of hunger in 1962, and the grain
ration was equivalent to only half the official limit for conditions of "semi-
starvation. 1 '

Whether through unawareness of or, more likely, indifference to the sev-
eral million lives that had to be sacrificed to build Communism, the state
responded (if such a word can be used here) to the crisis with measures that
under the circumstances were quite simply criminal. Net grain exports, prin-
cipally to the U.S.S.R., rose from 2.7 million tons in 1958 to 4.2 million in 1959,
and in 1960 fell only to the 1958 level. In 1961, 5.8 million tons were actually
imported, up from 66,000 in 1960, but this was still too little to feed the
starving. 105 Aid from the United States was refused for political reasons. The
rest of the world, which could have responded easily, remained ignorant of the
scale of the catastrophe. Aid to the needy in the countryside totaled less than

496

Communism in Asia

450 million yuan per annum, or 0.8 yuan per person, at a time when one kilo
of rice on the free market was worth 2 to 4 yuan. Chinese Communism boasted
that it could move mountains and tame nature, but it left these faithful to die.

From August 1959 until 1961, the Party acted as though it was powerless
to help, simply standing by and watching events unfold. Criticizing the Great
Leap Forward, behind which Mao had thrown all his weight, was a dangerous
business. But the situation became so bad that Liu Shaoqi, the number two
leader in the regime, finally put the Chairman on the defensive and imposed a
partial return to the easier form of collectivization that had been the policy
before the invention of the people's communes. People were again allowed to
own a small amount of land, peasant markets were reopened, small private
workshops were opened, and labor teams were subdivided into labor brigades,
which were equivalent to the size of the earlier village teams. As a result of
these measures the country quickly emerged from the famine. 106 But it did not
emerge as fast from poverty. Agricultural production, which had grown stead ily
from 1952 to 1958, had lost its way, and the effects were felt for two decades.
Confidence would return only "when the belly was full 1 ' (as Mao said would
occur in the people's communes). Overall agricultural production doubled
between 1952 and I978, but during this time the population rose from 574
million to 959 million, and most of the per-capita increase in production had
taken place in the 1950s, In most places production did not reach 1957 levels
until at least 1965 (and as late as 1968-69 in Henan). 107 Overall, agricultural
productivity was severely affected; the Great Leap Forward's astonishing
waste of resources caused it to fall by about one-quarter. Not until 1983 did
productivity again reach 1952 levels." 18 Eyewitness reports from the days of the
Cultural Revolution all concur that China was still a traditional village society
of great poverty, functioning as a subsistence economy where luxuries were
extremely rare (cooking oil, for instance, was like gold dust). ,tw The Great Leap
Forward made the people extremely suspicious of the regime's propaganda. It
is hardly surprising that the peasants responded most enthusiastically to Deng
Xiaoping's economic reforms, and were the driving force behind the reintro-
duction of a market economy twenty years after the launch of the people's
communes.

The disasters of 1959-1961 , the regime's great secret, which many foreign
visitors also managed to deny, were never recognized for what they really were.
Liu went out on a limb in January 1962 when he claimed at a conference of
cadres that 70 percent of the famine had been due to human error. 1 " 1 It was
impossible to say any more than that without directly incriminating Mao. Even
after his death, in the Chinese Communist Party's televised final verdict on his
life in 1981, there was no criticism of the Great Leap Forward,

China: A Long March into Night

497

The LaogahThe Hidden Gulag

Chinese Communism has many skeletons in the closet, and it is amazing how
long they have escaped the world's attention. The immense concentration-
camp system is no exception. There were nearly 1,000 large-scale camps as well
as innumerable detention centers (see the maps at the beginning of the chap-
ter), but in many histories of the People's Republic, even in some of the more
detailed and recent works, they receive no mention. The repressive apparatus
hid itself extremely well. Because punishment by prison or forced labor
smacked too much of the old regime, people were sent instead for "reform" or
"reeducation" through labor. The main internment camps were disguised as
large public enterprises, so one had to know, for instance, that the "Jingzhou
Industrial Dye Works," which was the name on the door, was actually Prison
No. 3 of Hubei Province, or that the "Yingde Tea Plantation" was Labor
Reeducation Center No. 7 of Guangdong Province." 1 Even the families of
prisoners wrote only to an anonymous post office box. Throughout the Mao
era, visits were forbidden during the whole instruction process, which gener-
ally lasted for more than a year. Particularly during the Cultural Revolution,
relatives were not always notified about the incarceration or even the death of
prisoners, or were informed only much later. The children of Liu Shaoqi, the
former president of the Republic, who was held in a secret prison, did not learn
about his death in November 1969 until August 1972; only then were they
allowed to visit their mother, who like her husband had been locked up since
August 1967. 112 If prisoners ever went out into the world, they were under
strict orders to remain invisible. Accustomed to hanging their heads and stay-
ing silent in their cells, they received strange new orders at the station: "Behave
normally in the train. It is forbidden, I repeat, forbidden to bow your head. If
anyone has to go to the latrine, signal to the guard, the fist with the thumb
sticking out. Smoking and talking will be allowed. No funny stuff The guards
have orders to shoot." 113

For many years statements from former prisoners were extremely rare.
One reason was that under Mao it was extremely difficult for anyone who had
entered the penal system to emerge from it. Another was that prisoners who
were freed had to swear that they would not talk about their experiences;
otherwise they would be reimprisoned. So it was foreigners, who formed only
a tiny fraction of the number of those imprisoned, who provided most of the
stories that still account for most of the available information. Because the
foreign prisoners were protected by their governments, they generally came out
alive. Some were explicitly charged with the mission to bear witness to the
outside world of the suffering of the army of people trapped in those forgotten

498

Communism in Asia

prisons. Such was the case of Jean Pasqualini, whose Chinese name was Bao
Ruo-wang. One of his fellow prisoners told him why he and his companions
were looking after him so carefully: "All these people, and none of them will
ever make it out, myself included. Lifetime contract. You are the only one who
is different, Bao. You might get out the big door someday. It could happen to
a foreigner, but not to us. You will be the only one who can tell about it
afterward if you do. That's why we wanted to keep you alive . . . Don't worry
as long as you're here, you'll live. I can promise you that. And if you get
transferred to other camps, there will be other people who thmk like us. YouVe
precious cargo, old man!" 114

The Biggest Penal System of All Time

The laogai was a sort of nonplace, a black hole where the light of Maoism
blinded tens of millions of people. As a rough indication, Harry Wu calculates
that up to the mid-1980s some 50 million people passed through the system. 115
Many died there. According to estimates by jean-Luc Domenach, there were
roughly 10 million detainees each year, which equals 1-2 percent of the overall
population. Given that the mortality rate was around 5 percent, some 20
million Chinese must have died during imprisonment, including approxi-
mately 4 million in 1959-1962 during the famine caused by the Great Leap
Forward (although a return to normal rations took place only in 1 964). !!s Along
with Jean Pasqualini's extraordinary revelations, two recent studies (those of
Wu and Domenach) now yield a better general picture of the least-known of
the century's three great concentration-camp systems.

The scale of the system was enormous, as were the variety of prisoners
and the system's durability (the first great wave of liberations began only in
1978). In 1955, 80 percent of inmates were technically political prisoners,
although many common criminals had been reclassified as political offenders
and their sentences correspondingly lengthened. By the beginning of The fol-
lowing decade the share of political prisoners had fallen to 50 percent, and by
1971 to one-third — perhaps indications of popular discontent with the regime,
and of the rise of criminality in a situation of political instability. 1!: Internment
took a variety of forms. m There were preventive centers, prisons (including
special establishments for former leaders), the official laogat, and more moder-
ate deportation centers, known as laojiao and jiu ye. Detention centers, number-
ing some 2,500 and located in various cities, were stepping-stones on the way
to the penal archipelago. Here detainees waited while the cases against them
were drawn up— a process that sometimes took ten years. Sentences of less than
two years were also served in these centers. The approximately 1,(KK) prisons

China: A Long March into Night

499

proper contained only 13 percent of detainees and generally were run directly
by the central authorities. In these heavily guarded, high-security centers peo-
ple with the stiffest sentences were detained. They included those sentenced to
death with the sentence suspended for two years, which was usually converted
to life imprisonment "for sincere reform of character" at the end of the two
years. These prisons also housed the more sensitive cases, including high-rank-
ing cadres, foreigners, priests, dissidents, and spies. Living conditions were
extremely variable, and in some cases were almost luxurious: in Beijing Prison
No. 1, a model prison where foreign visitors were taken on tours, people ate as
much as they wanted and slept on a tatami rather than on wooden slats. 119 But
harsh discipline, the severity of the industrial labor performed there, and the
constant ideological battering often led prisoners to request transfer to the
"open air' 1 of the labor camps.

The majority of detainees ended up in these huge camps, which were
scattered all over the country. The biggest and the most populated were situated
in the semidesert zones of northern Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Xin-
jiang, and above all Qinghai, which was a genuine penal province — the Chinese
equivalent of the Russian Kolyma, with a climate that was scorching in the
summer and freezing in the winter. 120 Camp No. 2 there was perhaps the largest
in China, holding at least 50,000 deportees. 121 The camps in the distant western
and northeastern regions were reputed to be extremely harsh, but on the whole
working conditions were worse in the prison factories in the urban zones than
at these huge state penal farms. Because detainees were in principle under the
authority of the provincial or municipal administration (Shanghai had a net-
work of camps spread over several different regions), they tended to come from
the same general area, so that, for example, there were no Tibetan detainees in
eastern China. Unlike Soviet camps, Chinese camps were integrated into the
local or regional economic framework and only occasionally were part of na-
tional projects such as the u friendship railway" to Soviet Kirgiziya (Kirgizstan),
whose construction was halted for more than thirty years on account of the
Sino-Soviet split.

The inmates of the camps were divided into three categories. Under Mao
the biggest group, which stayed the longest, consisted of people who had been
sentenced specifically to the laogai, which can be translated as "reform through
labor." 122 These medium- or long-term prisoners were organized in a military
fashion into squadrons, battalions, companies, and so on. They had lost their
civil rights, received no payment for their labor, and were rarely allowed to
receive visitors. In the same camps, or occasionally in special establishments,
was a second category, those who were there for "reeducation through labor,"
or laojiao. This was a form of administrative detention invented in August 1957

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in the heat of the Antirightist campaign, and to some extent it formalized the
extrajudicial incarceration activities of the security forces. Victims were not
actually sentenced, so there was no fixed term for their detention, and they had
not been formally stripped of their civil rights, although it was impossible, for
example, to vote in the camps. They received a small wage, most of which was
held back to pay for their food and lodging. Most of the crimes of which they
were accused were slight, and their stay in the laojiao was rarely longer than a
few years, but they were given to understand that much depended on their
attitude. The discipline and the detention and working conditions in the laojiao
were very similar to those found in the laogai, and both were in practice run
by the state security organs.

Slightly more privileged were the "forced job-placement personnel" of
the jiuye, who were sometimes known as "free workers" although they had no
right to leave their place of work, which was usually a camp, except perhaps
Twice a year. They were treated better and paid slightly more than the laojiao
prisoners, and they could bring their families to the camps or even get married
there. They lived, however, in semi prison conditions. These were a sort of
decompression chamber for the camps, where people who had been freed were
often kept for the rest of their lives. Until the 1960s, 95 percent of all prisoners
in the laogui were kept in the jiuye once their sentences had been served. At the
beginning of the 1980s that figure was still 50 percent, plus between 20 percent
and 30 percent of former laojiao prisoners. 12 -* Cut off from their original mi-
lieus, having lost their jobs and their right to reside in a city, generally divorced
because wives were constantly incited by the authorities to leave "criminal"
husbands, and condemned to being suspects for the rest of their lives because
they had "sinned" once, they had nowhere left to go, and thus were forced to
resign themselves to their condition. Because they had nothing left to hope for,
even the laogai prisoners felt sorry for them:

The free workers we began running across were a sorry lot. They looked
as if they belonged in prison. They were lazy, unskilled, and dirty.
Evidently they had concluded that nothing was worth the effort any
more, and in a way they were right. They were constantly hungry and
subject to the orders of guards and warders, and they were locked up at
night just like the rest of us. The only difference between our condition
and theirs was the home visit privilege. Nothing else counted. True,
they now received salaries, but they had to spend them on food and
clothing, which were no longer gifts of the government. These free
workers just didn't give a damn. 124

Under Mao, any sentence was thus effectively a life sentence.

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501

The Search for the "New Man'

Imprisonment with no possibility of returning to society was a fundamental
contradiction of the much-vaunted aim of the penal system: the reform of the
detainee and his transformation into a "new man." As Jean-Luc Domenach has
pointed out, the system constantly claimed that "detention is not a punish-
ment, but an opportunity for the criminal to reform his habits." 125 One internal
document from the security services made clear the process that faced new
detainees: "One can submit to the law only if one has first acknowledged the
error of one's wavs. Acceptance and submissiveness are the first two lessons
that prisoners must be taught, and they must keep these lessons in mind
throughout their stay." Once prisoners had broken with their past, they could
begin to accept "correct ideas": "It is imperative that the four basic educational
principles be instilled to set the criminal's political ideas back on the right path:
Marxism-Leninism, faith in Maoism and socialism, the Communist Party, and
the democratic dictatorship of the people." 12 * As a consequence, penitentiaries
were above all places to teach these "bad students" who had been unruly or
slow to learn; for such at least was the thinking of the Party. "Welcome to our
new schoolmates!" read one banner that Pasqualini came across in a labor
camp. 127 And there certainly were studies involved. During the training period,
there were at least two hours of study each day, after dinner in the cells. But
when the progress of some prisoners was unsatisfactory or when there were
political campaigns, study could last a whole day, a week, or even a month. In
many cases "nonstop study" lasting from two weeks to three months served as
a sort of introduction to the penal system. ,2K Classes followed an extremely-
rigid pattern, during which it was forbidden to walk around, to get up (or even
to change one's sitting posture), to talk, or, of course, to fall asleep, which was
a permanent temptation after a hard day's work. Pasqualini, who was brought
up a Catholic, was surprised to discover meditation, confession, and repen-
tance reinvented as Marxist-Leninist practices, with the only difference being
the relentlessly public nature of the acts. The goal was no longer to rebuild a
bridge between man and God, but to dissolve the individual into a mass sub-
missive to the Party. To vary things a little, the sessions that centered upon
confessions (which were extremely detailed) alternated with reading and com-
mentary on the People's Daily or discussion of an event chosen for their edifica-
tion. During the Cultural Revolution, the works of Chairman Mao were read
instead; everyone was obliged to carry around a copy of the volume of his
thoughts.

In all cases the aim was the same: the destruction of individual personality.
The cell chief, who was himself a prisoner, and who usually had been a Party

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member, had a key role to play here: u He would constantly start the ball rolling
in group discussions or tell stories with moral principles for our instruction.
AH the other things we might have talked about — family, food, sports, pastimes,
or sex of course — were totally forbidden. 'Facing the government, we must
study together and watch each other'; that was the motto, and it was written
up everywhere in the prison.' 1 Confession was a good idea, as was admitting
that one had done wrong because one was bad: u Whatever category we fit into,
all of us have committed our crimes because we had very bad thoughts, 1 * the
cell chief would say. 129 And if that was the way it was, then the explanation had
to be that everyone was contaminated by capitalist, imperialist, or reactionary
ideas. In the final analysis, in a society in which nothing escaped politics, all
crimes were political.

The solution, then, was quite simple: change people's ideas. Because in
China ritual was inseparable from the heart, Marshal Lin Biao promoted a
model that encouraged people to want to become another revolutionary in a
blue boilersuit, or a hero like the soldier Lei Feng, who was proud to be a tiny
cog in the great machine in the service of the Cause, and who had been luckv
enough to die while on a mission in the early 1960s. "The prisoner," Lin Biao
declared, "quickly learns to talk in noncommittal slogans. The danger of this,
of course, is that he might end up thinking in slogans. Most do. Generally it
takes the realities of camp life to pull him out of it." 1 * 11

Jean Pasqualini recalls an episode exemplary of the schizophrenic universe
created by the system of confession:

On a cold, windy night at study time, I left the cell to go out and take a
leak. When the cold northwesterly wind caught me, I felt less inclined to
walk the 200 yards over to the latrine. I went over to a storage building
and pissed against the wall. After all, I reasoned, no one would see me in
the dark.

I was wrong. 1 had barely finished when I received a very sharp and
swift kick in the ass. When I turned around I could make out onlv a
silhouette, but the voice belonged to a warder.

"Don't you know the sanitation rules 1 " he demanded. lt Who are
you anyway?"

I gave my name, and what happened next was a lesson I would
never forget . . .

"I admit that I am wrong, warder, but what I am doing is only a
violation of prison regulations, whereas you have broken the law. Gov-
ernment members are not allowed to lay hands on prisoners. Physical
violence is forbidden/'

There was a pause while the silhouette considered, and I expected
the worst.

China: A Long March into Night

503

"What you say is right, Bao," he said with measured calm. "I admit
that I have made a mistake — and I will bring up this subject at our [the
warders'] next self-criticism session. Would you be ready to return to
your cell and write me a thorough confession?"

I was surprised by his reaction. I was touched, too; for here was a
warder admitting his mistake before a prisoner. An unheard-of thing!
What else could I do but blurt out, "Yes, warder, I certainly will."

... I sat in my place and began preparing my confession. At the
weekly examination of conscience a few days later, I read it aloud for the
entire cell to hear.

"What I did may appear on the surface to be not too serious," I
added after I had finished reading, "but on further examination it dem-
onstrates a disregard for the teachings of the government and a resis-
tance to reform. By pissing I was displaying my anger in an
underhanded manner. It was a cowardly act. It was like spitting in the
face of the government when I though no one was looking. I can only
ask that the government punish me as severely as possible."

The confession was sent to Warder Yang, and I waited. I was
bracing myself for another bout of solitary. Two nights later Yang came
to the cell with his verdict.

"A few days ago," he said, "one of you thought he was above the
law and committed a big mistake . . . We'll let him go this time, but don't
think this means that you can always weasel out of trouble by just
writing an apology."''"

The so-called brainwashing described by a number of Western observers
was precisely that. There was nothing subtle about it; it was simply the rather
brutish imposition of a heavy-handed ideology with a simplistic answer for
everything. The essential point was to ensure that prisoners had no chance of
individual expression. The means were multiple. The most original were sys-
tematic underfeeding which weakened resistance, and permanent saturation
with the message of orthodoxy. These techniques were used in a context in
which there was no free time (study, work, and obligatory exercises filled the
long days) or personal space (the cells were overcrowded, the lights were kept
on all night, and very few personal belongings were permitted), and no oppor-
tunity to express one's own ideas: all the obligatory contributions to discussions
were carefully recorded and kept in the file of the person who had made them.
Pasqualini paid dearly for one remark in 1959, in which he showed a slight lack
of enthusiasm for the Chinese intervention in Tibet. Another original feature
of the system was the delegation of most of the ideological work to the pris-
oners, demonstrating the effectiveness of the system. The prisoners searched
each other, evaluated their companions' performance at work and controlled
the amount of food they ate, discussed the extent of "reform" undergone by

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those who were to be set free; above all, criticized their cell companions to push
them to complete self-criticism in order to demonstrate their own progress. 113
Pasqualini recalls the use of food as a weapon:

What power food can have — it is the only important thing, the greatest
joy, and the most powerful motivating force in the entire prison svstem.
I had the bad luck to go to Grass Mist Lane [one of the biggest deten-
tion centers in Beijing] only a month after rationing had been intro-
duced as a formal part of the interrogation process. No greater weapon
exists for inducing cooperation. The distressingly thin and watery corn
gruel, the hard little loaves of wo'tnu fa Chinese equivalent of bread,
eaten more than rice in northern China |, and the sliver of vegetable
became the center of our lives and the focus of our deepest attentions.
As rationing continued and we grew thinner, we learned to eat each
morsel with infinite attention, making it last as long as possible. Rumors
and desperate fantasies circulated about how well prisoners ate in the
camps. These rumors, I later learned, were often planted by the interro-
gators to encourage confessions. After a year of this diet 1 was prepared
to admit virtually anything to get more food.

The starvation was painstakingly studied — enough to keep us alive,
but never enough to let us forget our hunger. During my fifteen months
in the interrogation center, I ate rice only once and never ate meat. Six
months after my arrest, my stomach was entirely sunken in, and 1 began
to have the characteristic bruised joints from simple bod contact with
the communal bed. The skin on my ass hung loose like the teats of an
old woman. ision became unclear, and I lost my power of concentra-
tion. I reached a sort of record point for vitamin deficiency when ] was
finally able to snap off my toenails without using the clipper. My skin
rubbed off in a dusty film. My hair began falling out . . .

"Life here didn't used to be so bad," Loo told me. "We used to
have a meal of rice every 15 days, steamed white bread at the end of
every month, and some meat on big holidays, like the New Year, I Mav,
and 1 October. It was alright. 11

What changed it all was that some people's delegation came to
inspect the prison during the Hundred Flowers period |m fact during
the Antirightist movement that followed |. They were horrified to see
prisoners eating enough. It was intolerable, they concluded, that these
counterrevolutionaries, the scum of society and the enemies of the peo-
ple, should have a standard of living higher than that of many peasants.
From November 1957 on there was no more rice or meat or wheat flour
for prisoners on festive occasions.

Food obsessed us so completely that we were insane, in a wav. We
were ready for anything, It was the perfect climate for interrogations.
Every one of us began begging to be sent to the camps. No one ever left

China: A Long March into Night

505

the Grass Mist Lane without specifically requesting it in writing. There
was even a form for it. "Please give me the authorization to show repen-
tance for my sins by working in the camps."

Later, no matter how bad the conditions became in the camps,
every warder could truthfully tell us that we were there only because we
had asked for ir. m

The more traditional methods of persuasion were also used on prisoners.
The incentive offered was the promise of better treatment for people who
admitted their crimes, behaved well, made an active contribution to the retrain-
ing of their companions, and denounced their accomplices or rebellious com-
panions. Denunciation was an essential test of genuine reform. In the words of
one of the official formulas, u the denunciation of others is a very good method
of repentance." Inside the investigation bureau was a banner that proclaimed:
"Leniency to those who confess; severity to those who resist; redemption to
those who obtain merits; rewards to those who gain big merits" 04 Many of
those who had received long sentences showed themselves to be zealous propa-
gandists in the hope of getting their sentences shortened. The problem — and
Pasqualini gives several examples — was that they never got anything in return:
either their good conduct was never enough to prevent a heavy sentence, or,
worse still — as sentences were usually announced only orally and people were
often not present at their own trial — the reduction in the sentence brought it
down to the length that had always been foreseen anyway. One old detainee
explained the system as follows: "Communists don't feel obliged to keep prom-
ises they make to their enemies. As a means to an end, they feel free to use any
scheme or ruse that happens to serve them, and that includes threats and
promises . . . And remember another thing — Communists don't have any re-
spect for turncoats either.' 1 '^

Coercive measures were more common. Sentences were lengthened for
anyone who failed to confess, who refused to denounce his comrades ("with-
holding information from the government is a punishable offense"), 136 who
spoke in what was judged to be a heretical fashion, or who appealed his sentence
and thereby demonstrated that he refused to accept the will of the masses. Thus
it was relatively easy to have one's sentence changed from five years to life.
Prisoners could also drastically affect the lives of their fellow prisoners. The
"career" of the cell chief depended on the others, so he would always attack
those who resisted the most and was generally supported by the others in these
attacks. In addition to this process of weeding out, there was the "test" or
"struggle." There was nothing spontaneous about this; the victim had been
chosen by the prison authorities, and the time and the place were also deter-
mined in advance. The atmosphere recalled that of the peasant pogroms during

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Communism in Asia

the agrarian reform, although here death was only rarely a consequence.
Pasqualini recalls:

Our victim was a middle-aged prisoner charged with having made a false
confession. He was an obstinate counterrevolutionary, a cadre shouted
to us through a cardboard megaphone . . . Every time he raised his head
to say anything — truth or falsehood, that wasn't our concern — we
drowned him with roaring cries of "Liar! Scum!" or even "Son of a
bitch! 1 ' and the like . . . The struggle continued for about three more
hours like this, and with every minute that passed we grew colder and
meaner. I almost think we would have been capable of tearing him to
pieces to get what we wanted. Later, when I had the time to reflect, ]
realized that of course we had been struggling ourselves at the same
time, mentally preparing to accept the government's position with pas-
sionate assent, whatever the merits of the man we were facing." 7

Under such conditions the vast majority of prisoners were eventuallv
beaten into submission. In this process the role of the Chinese approach to
identity was at most secondary. Many French prisoners of war held by the Viet
Minh, who on the whole were treated better than the Chinese prisoners but
went through a similar process of reeducation, reacted in the same way. us The
effectiveness of the reeducation process derived from a combination of two
powerful means of psychological persuasion. One was radical infantilization,
in which the Party and the administration became father and mother, reteach-
ing the prisoner how to talk and walk (head down, at double speed, with the
guard shouting out instructions) and controlling his appetite and hygiene, all
in a relation of absolute dependence. The other was the fusion of the prisoners
into a single unit, in which every gesture and every word were significant. This
group became a replacement family even as contact with the real family became
almost impossible. Wives were forced to divorce their husbands and children
to disown their parents.

We may welt wonder how deep the personal reform really went. Speaking
in slogans and reacting like an automaton were forms of self-abasement and
could lead to "psychic suicide," 139 but they were also means of self-protection
and survival. The idea that people could maintain a sort of private space by
somehow splitting their personality is perhaps naive. But people who ended up
no longer hating Big Brother were often reasoning strategically rather than
through conviction. Pasqualini notes that in 1961 his reeducation seemed to be
complete and he sincerely believed everything that the guards told him. But he
adds: "I also knew well that it was very much in my interest to keep my behavior
as close as possible to the letter of the law. 1 ' Pasqualini provides another example
in the response to an ultra-Maoist cell chief: To prove his ardor and devotion
to the regime, he claimed that prisoners should be allowed to work even after

China: A Long March into Night

507

the temperature fell below the legal limit of five degrees above zero Fahrenheit
and that they should be allowed to get up earlier to do more work. The guard
interrupted this speech, judging it to be "totally unorthodox"— and the other
prisoners were mightily relieved. 140 Like so many Chinese, they did have some
belief in the system, but what they really wanted was to avoid trouble at all
costs.

Once a Criminal Always a Criminal

There was no room in this system for the idea that an accusation might have
been false or that anyone on trial might be acquitted. In China, people were not
arrested because they were guilty; they were guilty because they had been
arrested. All arrests were carried out by the police, which were part of the
"people's government 11 led by the Communist Party and controlled by Mao
Zedong. To question the reason for one's arrest was tantamount to opposing
Chairman Mao, thus revealing that one really was a counterrevolutionary. By
the same line of reasoning, any prison guard who was being disobeyed could
simply shout "What! Do you dare to disobey the people's government?" Ac-
ceptance of one's crimes and total submissiveness were the only options possi-
ble. Self-castigation was the rule in the cells: "You are a counterrevolutionary.
All of us are. Otherwise we would not be here." m According to the delirious
logic of the system, the accused had to provide the motives for his arrest
himself. "Tell us why you are here" was usually the first question the instructor
asked a new prisoner. He also had to draw up the charges he would face,
including a recommendation for sentencing. Prisoners were also required to
present successive confessions (as soon as a serious problem arose, they had to
start again from the beginning), which sometimes took months and sometimes
ran to hundreds of pages, detailing whole decades of people's lives. The inter-
rogations themselves went on for long periods, some for as long as 3,000
hours. 142 As people said, the Party had plenty of time. The interrogators often
used sleep deprivation (which was reinforced by the fact that many interroga-
tions took place at night), the threat of extreme punishment— even execu-
tion — or a terrifying visit to a torture chamber, later claimed to be a
"museum. " m

Nien Cheng, a former inmate of a Shanghai prison, recalls:

The day after I returned from the prison hospital, the guard on duty
handed me a pen and a bottle of ink. She said, "Get on with writing
your confession! The interrogator is waiting for it."

I picked up the roll of paper the interrogator had given me and saw
that instead of the blank sheets I was given in the winter of 1966 when I
was told to write my autobiography, page one had a special quotation of
Mao. It was enclosed in a red-lined square under the heading "Supreme

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Directive," and it said, "They are allowed only to be docile and obedi-
ent. They are not allowed to speak or to act out of turn. 11 At the bottom
of the sheet, where the prisoner usually signed his name, was written,
"signature of criminal.' 1

My immediate reaction was anger at the insulting word "criminal/'
and determination not to sign my name after it. However, after several
minutes of consideration, I devised a scheme to exploit the situation . . .

Under the printed quotation of Mao, I drew another square over
which I also wrote "Supreme Directive 11 Within the square, I wrote
another of Mao's quotations: it did not appear in the Little Red Book,
but I remembered it from his essay "On the Internal Contradictions of
the People. 1 ' The quotation said, "Where there is counterrevolution, we
shall certainly suppress it. When we make a mistake, we shall certainly
correct ir 11 . . .

I handed the paper to the guard on duty. That very afternoon, 1 was
called for interrogation.

Except for the soldier, the same men were in the room. A dark
scowl was on each face, which I had anticipated when I decided to
contest their right to assume I was a criminal when I was not. 1 did not
wait for a signal from the interrogator, but bowed to Mao's portrait
immediately. The quotation the interrogator chose for me to read was,
"We must exercise the full power of dictatorship to suppress the run-
ning dogs of the imperialists and those who represent the interests of
the landlords and the Kuomintang reactionary clique. They have only
the right to be docile and obedient. They do not have the right to speak
or to act out of turn."

The paper 1 had written was in front of the interrogator. After I sat
down, he banged the table while glaring at me. Then he banged the table
again and shouted, "What have you done here 111 He pointed at the
paper. "Do you think we are playing a game with you 3 ' 1

I remained silent.

"Your attitude is not serious," the old worker said.

"If you do not change your attitude, you will never get out of this
place," the young worker said.

Before I could say anything, the interrogator threw my account on
the floor, scattering the pages, and stood up. He said, "Go back to your
cell and write ir again!"

A guard appeared at the doorway and shouted, "Come out!" m

Physical violence as such was quite rare, at least between the mid-1950s
and the Cultural Revolution. Anything that resembled torture, such as blows
or even insults, was strictly forbidden, and the prisoners knew this; if they
could prove that they had been maltreated, they had some small hope of
redress. Thus the only real violence was extremely subtle, consisting either in

China: A Long March into Night

509

a "struggle session," in which other prisoners were permitted to inflict blows
on the victim; or in confinement in unheated, badly ventilated cells so small
that it was impossible to stretch out, where prisoners were permanently hand-
cuffed or chained, often with their hands behind their backs, so that hygiene
and eating were almost impossible. Prisoners in these cells usually died if the
punishment lasted more than eight days. Permanent manacling in too-tight
handcuffs was one of the commonest forms of quasi-torture, causing rapid
swelling of the hands, intolerable pain, and often irreversible scarring.

To put those special handcuffs tightly on the wrists of a prisoner was a
form of torture commonly used in Maoist China's prison system.
Sometimes additional chains were put around the ankles of the prison-
ers. At other times a prisoner might be manacled and then have his
handcuffs tied to a bar on the window so that he could not move away
from the window to eat, drink, or go to the toilet. The purpose was to
degrade J man in order to destroy his morale . . . Since the People's
Government claimed to have abolished all forms of torture, the officials
simply called such methods "punishment" or "persuasion." I4s

The official purpose of these measures was to obtain a confession, which
itself carried the force ol proof, and denunciations, which showed the pris-
oner's sincerity, as well as proving that the police accusation was well founded.
The rule was that three denunciations validated the arrest, and so the chain
extended endlessly. With few exceptions, the tactics used by the police were the
same as those used by police everywhere: highlighting contradictions, pretend-
ing that all is known already, and comparing one confession with other confes-
sions or denunciations. Denunciations, whether they were extracted by force
or were spontaneous (the streets of most cities had a special "denunciation
box") were in general so numerous that it was extremely difficult to hide
anything of anv significance about one's past. It was the act of reading the
letters in which he had been denounced that finally broke Pasqualini's resis-
tance: "It was a frightening revelation. On those hundreds of pages were
handwritten denunciations from colleagues, friends, and various people I had
encountered only once or twice . . . how many people w r hom I had trusted
without a second thought had betrayed me!" 14 ' 1 Nien Cheng, who was freed in
1973 without having made any confession (this was quite unusual, and a result
partly of extraordinary strength of character and partly of changes in police
practice after the Cultural Revolution), was surrounded for years afterward by
relatives, friends, students, and servants all of whom had reported her to the
security forces. Some of them even admitted as much, claiming that they had
had no choice in the matter. H7

When the case was finally ready, the "true story" of the prisoner's guilt

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Communism in Asia

was staged as a coproduction between the prisoner and the judge and involved
"the semantic subversion of the real facts."' 48 The "crime" had to have had
some real impact (it was more useful if both the judge and the prisoner believed
this to some extent, and it helped a lot if others were implicated, too), but it
was totally recast in a paranoid fashion, as the constant expression of some
radical and desperate political opposition. So the simple act of mentioning in
a letter abroad that grain rations had fallen slightly in Shanghai during the
Great Leap Forward became the official proof that one was a spy, despite the
fact that the figures had already been published in the official press and were
well known to all the foreigners in town. 149

The usual outcome was abdication of the personality, as Pasqualini attests:

It doesn't take a prisoner long to lose his self-confidence. Over the years
Mao's police have perfected their interrogation methods to such a fine
point that I would defy any man, Chinese or not, to hold out against
them. Their aim is not so much to make you invent nonexistent crimes,
but to make you accept your ordinary life, as you led it, as rotten and
sinful and worthy of punishment, since it did not accord with the po-
lice's conception of how life should be led. The basis of their success is
despair, the prisoner's perception that he is utterly and hopelessly and
forever at the mercy of his jailers. He has no defense, since his arrest is
absolute and unquestionable proof of his guilt. (During my years of
prison, I knew of one man who was in fact arrested by mistake — right
name but wrong man. After a few months he had confessed all the
crimes of the other. When the mistake was discovered, the prison
authorities had a terrible time persuading him to go home. He felt
himself too guilty for that.) The prisoner has no trial, only a well-
rehearsed ceremony that lasts perhaps half an hour; no consultation
with lawyers; no appeal in the Western sense. 1S0

Once the sentence had been passed, the prisoner was sent off to a labor
camp, such as a state farm, a mine, or a factory. Although studies at these camps
continued (though in a less intense manner), and although prisoners were
occasionally subjected to "struggle sessions" to remind them of their place, the
essential thing was to work. There was nothing hypothetical about the final
word in the term "reform through labor." People were graded according to
their capacity to keep going for twelve hours a day on two meals as meager as
those in the detention centers. The incentive now was to get the food ration of
a "high-performance worker," which meant that one ate considerably more
than the normal workers. Results were averaged out for the whole cell or room,
to encourage teamwork and to see who could work sixteen or eighteen hours a
day for the good of the team. In the late 1950s, this was known as "doing a
Sputnik." There were no days off other than the big national holidays, when

China: A Long March into Night

511

the prisoners had to put up with interminable political speeches. They had
hardly enough clothing. In the 1950s, people simply wore what they had been
wearing at the moment of their arrest. Winter jackets were provided only in
the camps of northern Manchuria, the Chinese equivalent of Siberia, and the
rules were that prisoners received one new undergarment per year. 151

The average food ration was between 12 and 1 5 kilos of grain each month,
although any detainee accused of not pulling his weight could be put on iron
rations of 9 kilos per month. This ration was lower than that in French prisons
in the early nineteenth century, lower than that in the Soviet camps, and about
the same as that in the Vietnamese camps of 1975-1977. ,S2 The vitamin and
protein deficiencies were quite frightening: the prisoners were fed almost no
meat, nor did they receive any sugar or oil. They had very few vegetables and
little fruit, so many resorted to stealing food, a crime for which the punishments
w r ere particularly severe. People also tried to feed themselves as much as they
could, searching out edible plants and little animals, with dried rat being
particularly sought after. Medical care was minimal except where highly con-
tagious diseases were concerned, and those who were too weak, too old, or too
desperate were sent to true death camps, where rations were so low that life
was quickly extinguished. 1 " The only advantages of the labor camps over the
detention centers were that discipline was slightly less harsh and that hardened
prisoners were slightly more willing to bend the rules once the guards had
turned their backs, though never going so far as to revert to linguistic or
behavioral habits from their previous lives. However, life was bearable, and
there was a modicum of solidarity among the prisoners.

The further detainees advanced in the laogai system, the dimmer the
original idea of reeducation became. The trajectory followed by individuals was
similar to that of the country itself: after the "perfection" phase in the laogai
(from about 1954 to 1965), during which millions of zealous "students" disci-
plined themselves with very little outside intervention and sometimes became
faithful Communists inside the prison, the system began to unravel slightly and
to lose its way. This coincided with the arrival in the camp system of more and
more common criminals, many of them extremely young, as part of the general
demoralization that seemed to follow the Cultural Revolution. Slowly the sys-
tem began to lose the grip that it held on society, while inside the camps a
number of gangs began to form among the detainees. Obedience and respect
for authority were no longer automatic; they had to be gained either through
concessions or by recourse to violence — and this violence was no longer simply
a one-way process. The real victim was the idea that people's thoughts could
be reformed though suppression of the will. But a certain amount of contra-
diction had been inscribed inside the project from the very beginning. On the
one hand there was the imperative to raise people above themselves, to force

512 Communism in Asia

them to improve and purify themselves so that they could rejoin the proletarian
mass that was marching toward the radiant future. On the other hand, there
was the sinister reality of a life to be passed in captivity, regardless of what was
achieved there, or, in the rare case of a real liberation, social ostracism, because
there was no way to wash away the crime that had landed one in prison. In
short, a discourse about the perfectibility of man failed to mask the absolute
rigidity of a society ruled by fate, whether that fate involved a momentary error
or, more often, having been born into the wrong family. The same inhuman
and insupportable contradiction would produce both the societal implosion
known as the Cultural Revolution and its unresolved failure.

We leave the laogai with an account of a summary execution:

In the middle of them all was the barber, tied up in chains and fetters. A
rope around his neck and cinched at the waist kept his head bowed. His
hands were tied behind his back. The guards shoved him directly in
front of us. He stood there silently, like a trussed penitent, as the steam
wisped up around his feet. Yen had prepared a speech.

"I have something awful to speak about. I'm not happy to do it and
it's nothing to be proud of. But it's my duty and it should be a lesson for
you. This rotten egg here was jailed on a morals charge — homosexual
relations with a boy. He received only seven years for this offense. Later,
when working in the paper mill, his behavior was constantly bad and he
stole repeatedly. His sentence was doubled. Now we have established
that while here he seduced a young prisoner nineteen years old — a
mentally retarded prisoner. If this happened in society, he would be
severely punished. But by doing what he did here, he not only sinned
morally, but he also dirtied the reputation of the prison and the great
policy of reform through labor. Therefore, in consideration of his re-
peated offenses, the representative of the Supreme People's Court will
now read you his sentence. 1 '

The man in the blue uniform strode forward and read out the
somber document, a recapitulation of the offenses that ended with the
decision of the People's Court: death with immediate execution of sen-
tence.

Everything happened so suddenly then that I did not even have the
time to be shocked or frightened. Before the man in the blue uniform
had even finished pronouncing the last word, the barber was dead. The
guard standing behind him pulled out a huge pistol and blew his head
open. A shower of blood and brains flew out and splattered those of us
in the front rows. I looked away from the hideous twitching figure on the
ground and vomited. Yen came up to speak again.

u Let this serve as a warning to you. I have been authorized to tell
you that no more leniency will be shown in this camp. From now on, all

China: A Long March into Night

513

moral offenses will be punished in the same way. Now go back to your
cells and discuss this. 11 ' 54

The Cultural Revolution: Anarchic Totalitarianism (1966-1976)

By comparison with the terrifying but almost unknown horrors of the agrarian
revolution and the Great Leap Forward, the effect of the "Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution" seems almost modest. Estimates vary greatly for the
number of dead: most authors cite figures between 400,000 and 1 million,
although Domenach calculates between 1 million and 3 million. 155 The Cul-
tural Revolution's effects, past and present, on the world's imagination and
memory stem not only from the extreme radicalism of its discourse and actions
but also from its visibility; largely an urban phenomenon, it occurred in the age
of television, for which it presented superb images of deftly organized political
ceremonies filled with a touching fervor. Furthermore, unlike earlier move-
ments, the Cultural Revolution was officially condemned in China itself almost
as soon as it was over, when it became quite acceptable to complain about the
excesses of the Red Guards, particularly if the excesses involved older cadres
and Communist leaders. Less welcome were complaints about the massacres
carried out by the PLA during the return to order.

The Cultural Revolution was full of paradoxes. First, it was a moment
when extremism seemed almost certain to carry the day, and when the revolu-
tionary process seemed solidly institutionalized, having swept through all the
centers of power in a year. But at the same time it was a movement that was
extremely limited in scope, hardly spreading beyond the urban areas and having
a significant impact only on schoolchildren. At that time the countryside was
still recovering from the Great Leap Forward, tension with the U.S.S.R. was
at its peak, and the "Cultural Revolution Group" (CRG) decided that the
peasantry, the army, and scientific research (which for the most part centered
upon nuclear weapons) should remain unaffected. 156 The CRG's theory was
that the country would have to step back slightly so that it could spring forward
better: in the long run no sector of society or the state could escape the
revolutionary process. But rural people clung tightly to the small freedoms they
had been granted by Liu Shaoqi, and especially to their small private plots of
land. There was no intention of destroying either defense or the economy: the
recent experience of the Great Leap Forward inspired prudence on the latter
score. The main aim instead was to seize the initiative in the intellectual and
artistic "superstructure" of society and to take control of the state. This last
objective was never fully realized. Although the rules were sometimes broken,
there are no reports of major confrontations or massacres in the villages, where
the vast majority of the population still lived; some 64 percent of incidents

514

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classed as rural took place in the outlying areas of major urban areas. 157 How-
ever, in the final stages of the emergence from the revolution there are reports
of numerous executions of individuals who had taken the wrong side in the
conflict and of Red Guards who had fled to the countryside. The major differ-
ence between these events and the purges of the 1950s was that in this case
there was never a clear aim to eliminate a whole section of the population. Even
intellectuals, who were particularly affected at the outset, were not for long the
prime targets of persecutions. Moreover, the persecutors often came from
within their own ranks. The most murderous episodes were generally the result
of police brutality or of relatively spontaneous violence on a local scale, and
not the result of a general strategy. On the rare occasions when the central
government did issue edicts ordering military operations that resulted in mas-
sacres, these were essentially reactive measures to a situation that was perceived
to have got out of hand. In general, such situations bore a closer resemblance
to the events of 1989 than they did to the agrarian revolution. The Cultural
Revolution, in many ways, was the first sign that Chinese Communism had
reached an impasse and was running out of steam.

By way of contrast, a second paradox explains the presence of the Cultural
Revolution in this account: the Red Guard movement was a "repressive rebel-
lion," 1 ^ and the manner in which it was put down was even more repressive.
A degree of terror had been present in Chinese Communism since the end of
the 1 920s. In 1966-67 the most radical groups, whose primary goal was to attack
state institutions, still had a foot in government and had several friends there,
including Mao himself, who was constantly invoked whenever a tactical deci-
sion was to be taken. In the great Chinese tradition, these radical groups used
the government's authority even in rebellion itself, and they never refused to
outdo one another in repression. Criticizing the government for its softness
toward the class enemy, they established their own heavily armed squads of
"investigators," their own police of morals, their own "tribunals," and their
own prisons. Throughout the Cultural Revolution, "one finds again and again
the struggle of low against high, but the Mow' were mobilized, drilled, and
terrorized by a government and an elite that dared not identify itself as such."
The government's reinvention of itself under another name, in a form that
allowed it to criticize and even punish itself, was representative of the "defini-
tive formula of Maoism, which, after a lengthy quest, ended up combining
rebellion and authority into the permanent principle of an alternative form of
politics that was above both the state and society." lsy This was not, of course,
a real alternative, for it was founded on illusion; hence the enormous frustration
among those who really tried to create a revolution. "Changing everything so
that it all remained the same," in the classic formula from The Leopard, ulti-
mately meant that the people questioned not just the revolution but also the

China: A Long March into Night

515

whole center of power. This was a movement among a minority, but it had
important consequences, leading, for example, to the Democracy Wall of 1979.
Its most daring theorist, Wei Jingsheng, highlights the ultimately fatal contra-
dictions in a movement that emerged from legitimate discontent:

This explosion of anger quickly turned into a personality cult centered
upon a tyrant and was channeled into the struggle to impose tyranny on
the people . . . This led to an absurd and paradoxical situation in which
a people rose up against its own government in order to defend it. The
people came out in opposition to the hierarchical system that was caus-
ing them so much suffering, while brandishing banners in support of
the founders of the system. They demanded democratic rights while
denigrating democracy and allowed themselves to be guided, in their
struggle to impose their rights, by the ideas of a despot. 160

The Cultural Revolution gave birth to an abundant literature of great
interest and quality, and there arc many eyewitness reports available from both
the victims and their persecutors. As a result it is much better known than any
previous episode in Chinese history. It really was more of a revolution (abortive,
incomplete, a PLA-like imitation of the others but a revolution nonetheless)
than simply another mass campaign. There was much more to it than repres-
sion, terror, and crime, and it was an extremely protean movement, varying
greatly in its effects from one place to another. Only the repressive aspects will
concern us here. These can be divided into three quite distinct categories:
violence against intellectuals and political cadres, mostly in 1966-67; a series
of confrontations among factions of the Red Guards in 1967-68; and the brutal
repressions carried out by the army to restore order in 1968. In 1969, at the
Ninth Chinese Communist Party Congress, some of the changes from 1966
were institutionalized in a rather halfhearted way, while inside the palace there
began a struggle for the succession to Mao Zedong, who by then was quite
weakened by illness. There were numerous tremors: Lin Biao, the official
successor, was eliminated in September 1971; Deng Xiaoping was restored as
Deputy Prime Minister in 1973, and large numbers of cadres who had been
eliminated as "revisionists" were reintegrated into the power structure; in 1974
there was a major "leftist" offensive within the Party; in 1976, between the
death of the moderate prime minister Zhou Enlai in January and that of Mao
Zedong himself in September, the "Shanghai Four," led by Mao's wife, Jiang
Qing, tried to seize power; by October the Four were no more than a "Gang"
and were all in prison. The country was then led for two years by Hua Guofeng,
who officially declared the Cultural Revolution to be at an end. Repressions in
the years following the crushing of the Red Guards were harsh but very similar
to those of the 1950s.

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Prominent Figures in the Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was the convergence of one man and an entire gen-
eration. That man of course was Mao Zedong. Having been at the heart of
government during the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, he had suffered a
]oss of prestige and been forced to hand over power for two years in 1962 to the
President of the Republic, Liu Shaoqi. Reduced to the (admittedly prestigious)
position of Party chairman, he began to rely more and more on his eloquence,
since he had few rivals as a public speaker. A seasoned old campaigner, he was
aware of the dangers of being simultaneously worshipped as a figurehead and
effectively marginalized in that position, so he began to look for more effective
ways of imposing his choices. The Party was kept well in hand by Liu and his
assistant, the secretary general Deng Xiaoping, and was protected from any
outside influence. The government, which as in all Communist countries was
under the control of the Communist Party, was run effectively by Zhou Enlai,
an intelligent opportunist and a moderate in thought if not in deed; in fact he
was a relatively neutral figure in the confrontation between the two factions.
Mao was aware that he had lost the support of many cadres and intellectuals in
the purges of 1957, and the support of the rural masses in the famine of
1959-1961. But in a country like Communist China, a passive majority that is
divided and afraid counts for much less than an active minority that is in the
right place. Since 1959 the PLA had been led by Lin Biao, one of Mao's
devoted supporters. Lin gradually transformed the PLA into an alternative
center of power that after 1962 played a major role in the Movement for
Socialist Education, an antirightist purge promoting military qualities such as
puritanism, discipline, and devotion to the cause. After 1964 at least one-third
of all new political cadres came up through PLA ranks, and they cooperated
closely with a small group of intellectuals and failed artists who gathered
around Jiang Qing and her program for the total destruction of all art and
literature that failed to follow the Party line. Military training became obliga-
tory for all students, and after 1964 armed militia groups were established or
reorganized in all factories, districts, and rural areas. The army itself was never
a candidate for power, as it was effectively controlled by the Party; and the
mediocre Lin Biao, who was widely rumored to be a heroin addict, had no
deeply held political convictions. 161 The army above all was Mao's life insur-
ance policy, or, as he said himself, his own Great Wall. 162

The other strategic lever on which Mao believed he would always be able
to count was the younger generation, or more exactly the part of it that was in
secondary education, higher education, and the professional training institutes,
including in particular the military academies, which were the only part of the
PLA authorized to train Red Guard units. m These had the immense advantage

China: A Long March into Night

517

of being concentrated in the cities, and particularly in the major cities, where
the struggles for power would inevitably take place. One-quarter of all the
inhabitants of Shanghai attended one or another such school. 164 People who in
1966 were between ages fourteen and twenty-two would be Mao's most enthu-
siastic tools, for they were both fanatically dogmatic and enormously frustrated.
Belonging to the first generation educated entirely after the 1949 revolution,
they were both too young and too urban to know anything of the horrors of
the Great Leap Forward;"' 5 Liu and his henchmen would come to regret not
having criticized it officially. Spoiled by the regime, persuaded that they were
for Mao the clean white page on which the great epic of Chinese Communism
was to be written, assured by Mao that "the world belongs to you; the future
of China is yours," they had quickly learned, in the words of one Red Guard
song, that u the Party is our father and our mother." 16 * Faced with any conflict
about paternity, their choice was clear: they were to renounce their parents.
Pasqualini recounts the story of the visit of one child, "a mean little brat of
around ten or eleven," to see his father in the laogai in 1962;

4i I didn't want to come here," he brayed loudly, "but my mother made
me. You are a counterrevolutionary and a disgrace to the family. You
have caused grave losses to the government. It serves you right that you
are in prison. All 1 can say is that you had better reform yourself well, or
you will get what you deserve, 11 Even the guards were shocked by this
tirade. The prisoner returned to the cell in tears — itself forbidden —
muttering, "If I had known that this would happen I would have stran-
gled him the day he was born." Tien [the guard] let the incident pass
without even a reproach. lf>7

The child would have been fifteen years old in 1966, just the right age to join
the Red Guards. The youngest were often the most violent, and the most
zealous to humiliate their victims.

At the same time, these youngsters also felt frustrated. They had had no
opportunity for heroism, whereas the generation of their parents was always
telling them about its revolutionary or wartime experiences: the Long March,
the first red bases, the anti-Japanese guerrilla operations of 1936-1938. Once
again, to paraphrase Marx, history was to repeat itself, but this time as farce.
Deprived of most of their literary heritage and of freedom of discussion by the
hyperprudent teachers who had escaped the "Rectification" repression of 1957,
they used the little knowledge they had — bits of Mao with a pinch of Lenin
added — to question, in the name of the revolution, the gray mess that it had
become as a result of its institutionalization. Many of them, who came from
"black" categories and had been subjected to obstacles such as class-based
selection procedures and quotas, had little real hope of ever achieving a job or

518 I Communism in Asia

situation in life that reflected their worth or their ambitions. The elite scholarly
institutions in which "blacks" were often in the majority were also often the
most revolutionary, and the Cultural Revolution Group's decree of 1 October
1966 officially opening the Red Guard to the "ill born" was an essential step in
the launching of the process. 168

The authorizations, on 16 November and 15 December, for the formation
of Red Guard groups in the factories and the villages decisively extended the
movement. The same period brought the repeal of much of the negative
political legislation enacted to control workers at the beginning of the Cultural
Revolution. Seizing the moment, those who had been rehabilitated sought the
abolition of the label "right-wing" and the destruction of the secret files in
which everyone's opinions and "errors" were kept. Two types of workers joined
forces with the students: "backward elements" and others who had been dis-
criminated against politically (although in practice everything had become
political) regardless of their age; and seasonal workers, generally quite young,
who were paid by the day and thus had no job security or union membership,
and who wanted wage increases and permanent contracts. 164 The latter group
in fact accounted for the majority of workers in the new large factories. There
were also many young cadres who saw an unexpected opportunity to advance
their careers, managers who had been punished in some manner in the past and
who were eager for some sort of revenge, and the usual opportunists. 17 " The
resulting coalition was a mixed bag of malcontents who, rilled with bitterness
and a desire to better themselves socially, were ready to launch an assault on all
institutions — schools, factories, and offices. But in the final analysis they were
always in the minority, accounting for only 20 percent of city dwellers and for
an even smaller minority countrywide. Thus they could succeed only when the
state was paralyzed by contradictory orders from the Center and when the PLA
was hampered by its own regulations. Ultimately it was always Mao himself
who alternately spurred and checked the pace of revolution, although he, too,
was often unsure what to do; power struggles and rapidly changing local
situations left him constantly seeking a conciliation between rebellion and his
own hold on power. When these "rebels" — whose only unity consisted in the
name — finally did seize power (or rather, had it handed to them), the contra-
dictions within their ranks and their own selfish ambitions immediately took
over, giving rise to terrible struggles, often armed ones, among groups that had
been able to define themselves only as being against something. 171

The Red Guards' Hour of Glory

The persecutions carried out in 1966 by the students and schoolchildren who
made up the majority of the "rebel revolutionaries" typify the entire Cultural

China: A Long March into Night

519

Revolution. There were relatively few deaths, and no new tactics were used.
Though carried out with the enthusiasm and sadism of youth, otherwise they
were very similar to the purges launched against intellectuals in the 1950s. We
might well wonder if they were even spontaneous. It would surely be absurd to
believe that Mao and his henchmen pulled the strings in every Red Guard unit,
but, for instance, the jealousy of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, toward Wang Guang-
mei, the wife of President Liu Shaoqi, is clearly discernible behind the misfor-
tune that befell Liu. 172 He was forced to carry out an act of self-criticism and,
when Mao believed he was sufficiently isolated, was thrown into prison, where
he died under torture. On the other hand, Zhou Enlai, who was also severely
criticized, escaped humiliation. The really sensational aspect of the movement
was the use of Red Guards to settle scores at the top, showing the definitive end
to the Party solidarity that predated even the Long March. This was aug-
mented by purges of young Communist cadres, 60 percent of whom were
removed from their posts, although many, like Deng Xiaoping, were reinte-
grated a few years later, even before Mao's death in 1976. Even in these cases
violence was far from extreme. Unlike in Stalin's U.S.S.R. in the 1930s, many
of the high-ranking leaders and cadres survived the bad treatment they re-
ceived. One little-known minister of mining was beaten to death by Red
Guards, but there were no high-level judicial executions. Liu died insane in
1969. Peng Dehuai had two ribs broken in July 1967 in what was officially
described as "a struggle" and died of cancer in 1974. Chen Yi, the minister of
foreign affairs, was sent to the countryside in 1969 but persuaded the authori-
ties to allow him to return in time to be present at the deathbed of Lin Biao
before himself dying shortly afterward. The most dramatic case was that of the
minister of security, Luo Ruiqing, who was removed in a purge in November
1965 to clear the way for Kang Sheng, was imprisoned the following year, and
subsequently suffered a serious foot injury while attempting to throw himself
out a window. His foot was amputated in 1969, and the difficult operation was
long delayed to get him to make a full confession. Nevertheless he went on to
outlive Chairman Mao. Prison conditions for the leaders were humiliating and
painful, but they were much less severe than anything experienced by the
millions of prisoners whom they themselves had sent to the iaogai, and they at
least had a minimum of medical care. 171

Red Guard tactics were sadly similar all over the country, in every city and
university. Everything began on 1 June 1966, after the reading out on the radio
of a daztbao (a notice in large characters) by Nie Yuanzi, who was a philosophy
teacher at Beida University in Beijing, the most prestigious university in the
country. The notice called for a "struggle" and demonized the enemy: "Break
the evil influence of revisionists, and do it resolutely, radically, totally, and
completely! Destroy these monsters, these Khrushchev-like reformers!" 174 Mil-

520

Communism in Asia

lions of students began to organize into committees, and soon they identified
their professors, their teachers, and the municipal and provincial authorities
who had tried to defend them as the "monsters and devils 11 to be hunted down,
With a certain amount of imagination, they termed them "evil geniuses, 1 '
"bovine ghosts," or "reptilian spirits. 11 Qi Benyu, an extremist from the Cul-
tural Revolution Group, said of Peng on 18 July 1967: "The poisonous snake
is no longer moving, but he is not dead yet. The paper tiger Peng Dehuai can
kill without blinking. He is a master of death. Don't be fooled by his pose, he's
an immobile lizard, he's simply feigning death, that's his instinct. Even insects
and the lowest animals have an instinct for survival; with carnivores like him
it's even worse. Kick him to the floor, and stamp on him. 11 '"'These images must
be taken very seriously, for their purpose was to suppress pity by making it
impossible to identify with the victim. Such name-calling promoted the "strug-
gle" and often the death of the person in question. The call to "kill all the
monsters," which launched the university movement in Beijing, was not an idle
threat. "Class enemies 11 had notices stuck on their backs, were dressed up in
ridiculous clothes and hats (particularly women), and forced into grotesque and
painful positions. Their faces were smeared with ink, they were forced to bark
like dogs on all fours so that they would be deprived of human dignity. One
professor named Ma, which means "horse, 11 was forced to eat grass. Another
professor, one of whose colleagues was beaten to death bv his students, said: "1
can almost understand how it happened. The landlords were enemies then,
They were not people really. You could use violence against them. It was
acceptable." 17 '' In August 1967 the Beijing press declared that anti-Maoists were
"rats that ran through the streets 11 and should all be killed. 177 This process of
dehumanization had been seen before, in the period of the agrarian reform in
1949. In one example, a landowner was tied to a plow and whipped while being
forced to plow the held, while the peasants shouted: "You treated us like beasts.
Now you can be our animal! 11178 And millions of other "animals' 1 were exter-
minated in similar fashion. Some were even eaten: at least 137 in Guangxi,
mostly teachers and college principals, and this with the help of cadres from
the local branch of the Communist Party. Some Red Guards asked to be served
human flesh in the canteen, and apparently this did actually happen in some
places. Harry Wu remembers one man who was executed in a laugai in 1970
and whose brain was then eaten by a member of the securitv forces. His crime
had been to scribble "Down with Chairman Mao 1 ' on a wall. 1 ™

It is unclear what the main motivation of the Red Guards was in these
early days of violence. They seemed to oscillate between a real desire to trans-
form society and a sense of participation in a large-scale "happening 11 that was
perhaps a reflection of the long hot summer. These feelings were combined
with a traditional conformist desire to avoid trouble, at a time when doing

China: A Long March into Night

521

nothing meant one risked being treated as a revisionist. All these factors led
naturally to further revolt. Contradictions were apparent from the very outset:
the simplistic slogan "One is always right to revolt," which Mao had announced
on 18 August, was heard everywhere. Somehow this slogan was assumed to
sum up the "thousand tenets" of Marxism. At the same time a real personality
cult began to take root around the president and his works, such as the famous
Little Red Book, Above all it was the government that seemed to decide who
had the right to revolt and when revolt should take place. The result was
ferocious competition among Red Guard organizations to qualify for the pre-
cious label "left." The claim was that all organizations were under attack, but
the army, under the control of Lin Biao, protected the Red Guards, who were
given free transport and top priority throughout China in the autumn of 1966.
The "experience exchanges" that were used to justify this often became little
more than dizzying tourist excursions for young people who had never left their
villages, with the five-star attraction of a chance of meeting Chairman Mao
himself Such meetings featured obligatory displays of fervor and tears from
the girls. Sometimes people were crushed to death in the rush. IS(1

On 18 August Mao decreed: "We don't want gentleness; we want war,"
and the Red Guard Song Binbin (whose name meant "Gentle Song") swiftly
changed her name to Song Yaowu ("Song Wants War"). m The new minister
of security, Xie Fuzhi, who was one of Jiang Qing's circle, told an audience of
police cadres in late August:

We can't act like everyone else and follow normal police procedure. If
you arrest people because they have beaten others, you are mistaken:
should Red Guards who kill be punished' My opinion is that if people
have died, well, they're dead; there's nothing we can do about that, and
it isn't our problem. I am not happy with the idea that the masses are
killing people, but if the masses hate bad people so much that we can't
stop them, then let's not bother trying to stop them. The people's police
has to be behind the Red Guards. We must sympathize with them and
pass information to them, particularly where the Five [black] Categories
are concerned. 1 * 2

Thus initially conflict was relatively risk free: faced with a Party buffeted by
contradictory currents, stunned by Mao's audacity, and afraid to condemn
what they saw, intellectuals and everything associated with them — books,
paintings, porcelain, libraries, museums, and monuments — were easy targets
on which all the factions could easily agree.

The Chinese Communist Party had a long tradition of anti-intellectual-
ism, and Mao was a particularly noteworthy example. Red Guards everywhere
repeated his slogan: "The capitalist class is the skin; the intellectuals are the

522

Communism in Asia

hairs that grow on the skin. When the skin dies, there will be no hair.' 1|s1
Officials became incapable of pronouncing the word "intellectual" without
adding the adjective "stinking/' Jean Pasqualini, when he was once cleaning his
sandal after emerging from a pigsty, was told by a guard: "Your brain is dirtier
than that, and it smells worse too! Stop that immediately. That is a bourgeois
habit. Clean your head instead!" 1 *" 1 At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution,
all schoolchildren and students were given a little volume by Mao about teach-
ing, in which he condemned all teachers who could not distinguish the five
different types of grain, and who "become stupider the more they learn. 1 ' He
favored shorter periods of study and the abolition of selective entry by an exam
system: universities were for training Reds, not experts, and they should be
open to anyone who was born a Red.'^

Having for the most part already been through several self-criticisms, the
intellectuals had little will to resist. Older writers, often wearing ridiculous
outfits, were paraded through the streets for hours until they dropped from
exhaustion, while the young hurled insults and blows. A number of them died
that way. Others killed themselves, including the great Lao She in August, and
Fu Lei, the translator of Balzac and Mallarme, in September. Teng To was
killed; Wu Han, Chao Shu-li, and Liu Ching died in prison; and Pa Kin spent
years under house arrest. Ding Ling had ten years' work confiscated and
destroyed. 1 * h The sadism and fanaticism of these rebellious killers was over-
whelming; at the University of Xiamen (Fujian), "Some teachers could no
longer stand the constant attacks and criticism and fell ill and died more or less
in our presence. I felt no pity for them, no more than I did for the handful who
killed themselves by throwing themselves out of windows or for the one who
threw himself into our hot spring and boiled to death.' 1 '*' About one in ten of
all teachers were removed, and many more suffered serious intimidation.

Cities waited for the arrival of the Red Guards in the way that one waits
for a storm to hit, particularly during the campaign against "the [our Old-
Fashioned Things' 1 — old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits —
which was launched by Lin Biao on 18 August. Temples were barricaded
(although a great number were badly damaged or destroyed all the same, often
in public autos-da-fe)) treasures were hidden, frescoes were whitewashed for
protection, and books were hidden. All the sets and costumes at the Beijing
Opera were burned to make way for the revolutionary operas with contempo-
rary themes that were demanded by Mao's wife and that for a decade were to
be the only authorized form of cultural expression. The Great Wall itself was
partially destroyed as bricks were removed from it to build pigsties. Zhou had
the Imperial Palace in Beijing partially walled up and protected bv his troops. 1 **
Various religious groups were affected; the monks were expelled from the
famous Buddhist monastery on Wutai Mountain, its ancient manuscripts were

China: A Long March into Night

523

burned, and several of its sixty temples were partially destroyed; the Korans
of the Uighurs in Xinjiang were burned; and celebrations of the Chinese New
Year were banned. Xenophobia, which had a long history in China, was taken
to an extreme. "Imperialist 1 ' tombs in some cemeteries were looted, 189 all Chris-
tian practices were more or less banned, and all English or French inscriptions
on the Bund in Shanghai were chiseled away. Nien Cheng, who was the widow
of an Englishman and who had offered a Red Guard a cup of coffee while he
was on requisition duty, found herself being asked: "Why do you have to drink
a foreign beverage? Why do you have to eat foreign food? Why do you have so
many foreign books? Why are you so foreign altogether?" 190 The Red Guards,
who took themselves extremely seriously, thought it was a good idea to ban
"wastes of revolutionary energy 11 such as cats, birds, and flowers. The prime
minister himself was forced to intervene to prevent legislation that would have
made a red traffic light mean "go." In big cities such as Shanghai, teams shaved
the head of anyone caught in the streets with long or lacquered hair, tore up
trousers that were too tight, ripped high heels off shoes, slit open pointed shoes,
and forced shops to change their names; the presence of hundreds of shops
called "East Is Red," all filled with identical portraits of the leader, caused the
inhabitants to lose their bearings. 191 Anyone who failed to comply received a
picture of Mao that it was considered a sacrilege to destroy. Red Guards
stopped passersby and forced them to recite their favorite quotation from
Mao. 192 Many people were afraid to leave their houses.

The hardest times for millions of "Black" families were the cycles of Red
Guard requisitioning. Searching for proof of imaginary crimes, looking for
silver and gold for the local authorities, their organization, or themselves, and
carrying out acts of wanton vandalism, the Guards looted and destroyed many
houses. Humiliation, insults, and blows were all part of the process. Anyone
who tried to resist was punished severely. The slightest expression of disdain
or mockery, or any refusal to reveal the location of "treasures," led to a rain of
blows often ending in death, and at the very least to wholesale destruction of
the property. 191 There were also a few deaths among the Guards. People were
often "visited" several times, by different units, and so as not to lose face, the
last to arrive would often carry off the tiny amount of belongings that re-
mained, which had been left by the others to enable the family to survive. In
such conditions most deaths undoubtedly came about as a result of suicide, but
it is impossible to put a number on these deaths; many murders were also made
to look like suicides.

Some figures are available, however. The Red Terror in Beijing caused
approximately 1,700 deaths, 33,600 houses were raided, and 84,000 "blacks"
were chased out of the city. 194 In Shanghai, 150,000 lodgings were taken over,
id 32 tons of gold was seized. In the great industrial city of Wuhan, in Hubei

an<

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Province, 21,000 properties were raided, 32 people were beaten to death, and
there were 62 suicides. 195 Sometimes genuine atrocities were committed. In the
Daxing district, south of the capital, 325 "blacks" and their families were
murdered in the space of five days — the eldest was eighty and the youngest was
thirty-eight days old. One doctor was executed for "assassinating a Red" — his
patient had died of an allergic reaction to penicillin. 196 The "investigations"
inside the government administration, carried out by policemen dressed as Red
Guards, were massive and sometimes murderous: there were 1,200 executions
in the purge of the Ministry for Security; 22,000 people were interrogated and
many imprisoned during the investigation into Liu Shaoqi; 60 percent of the
members of the Central Committee (which hardly ever met) and 75 percent of
all provincial Party secretaries were expelled and usually also arrested. In all,
for the whole period of the Cultural Revolution, between 3 million and 4
million of the 18 million cadres were imprisoned, as were 400,000 soldiers,
despite the banning of Red Guards in the PLA. 197 Among the intellectuals,
142,000 teachers, 53,000 scientists and technicians, 500 teachers of medicine,
and 2,600 artists and writers were persecuted, and many of them were killed
or committed suicide. 198 In Shanghai, where intellectuals were especially nu-
merous, it was officially estimated in 1978 that 10,000 people had died violent
deaths as a result of the Cultural Revolution. 11 * 9

It is astonishing how easy it was for these young Red Guards, who in 1966
and 1967 had relatively few allies in the other strata of society, to attack and
criticize Party leaders in the stadiums of Beijing, or even torture them to death,
as was the case for the Party leader in Tianjin and the mayor of Shanghai. The
latter was attached to the crane of a street-car breakdown truck and severely
beaten while announcing that he would rather die than confess to anything. 2m
The only possible explanation was that Chairman Mao, which meant the state
apparatus, supported the "revolutionaries" with decisions like the one on
26 July 1966 (subsequently revoked) to close all secondary schools and higher-
education establishments for six months to mobilize what was in effect a force
of 50 million schoolchildren. With nothing to do, and free to do whatever they
liked, even killing (deaths were later described as "accidents"), and endlessly
egged on by the official media, what could have stood in the way of these
schoolchildren?

One of their first pogroms took place in one of the top secondary schools
in Xiamen:

At twelve o'clock ... as a few of us were on our way back from a swim
in the sea, we heard screams and shouts as we approached the school
gate. Some schoolmates ran up to us shouting, "The struggle has begun!
The struggle has begun!"

China: A Long March into Night

525

I ran inside. On the athletic field and farther inside, before a new
four-story classroom building, I saw rows of teachers, about 40 or 50 in
all, with black ink poured over their heads and faces so that they were
now in reality a "black gang." Hanging on their necks were placards with
words such as "reactionary academic authority so-and-so,'' "corrupt
ringleader so-and-so," "class enemy so-and-so," "capitalist roader so-
and-so": all epithets taken from the newspapers. On each placard was a
red cross, making the teachers look like condemned prisoners awaiting
execution. They all wore dunce caps painted with similar epithets and
carried dirty brooms, shoes, and dusters on their backs.

Hanging from their necks were pails filled with rocks. I saw the
principal; the pail around his neck was so heavy that the wire had cut
deep into his neck and he was staggering. All were barefoot, hitting
broken gongs or pots as they walked around the field crying out: "I am
black gangster so-and-so." Finally, they all knelt down, burned incense,
and begged Mao Zedong to "pardon their crimes."

I was stunned by this scene and I felt myself go pale. A few girls
nearly fainted.

Beatings and torture followed. 1 had never seen such tortures be-
fore: eating nightsoil and insects, being subjected to electric shocks,
being forced to kneel on broken glass, being hanged "like an airplane" by
the arms and legs.

Those who immediately took up the sticks and applied the tortures
were the school bullies who, as children of Party cadres and army
officers, belonged to the five "red" categories, a group that also included
children of workers, poor and lower-middle peasants, and revolutionary
martyrs . . . Coarse and cruel, they were accustomed to throwing around
their parents 7 status and brawling with the other students. They did so
poorly in school that they were about to be expelled, and presumably
resented the teachers because of this.

Greatly emboldened by the instigators, the other students also
cried "Beat them!" and jumped on the teachers, swinging their fists and
kicking. The stragglers were forced to back them up with loud shouts
and clenched fists.

There was nothing strange in this. Young students were ordinarily
peaceful and well-behaved, but once the first step was taken, all were
bound to follow . . .

The heaviest blow to me that day was the killing of my most
respected and beloved teacher, Chen Ku-teh . . .

Teacher Chen, over sixty years old and suffering from high blood
pressure, was dragged out at 1 1:30, exposed to the summer sun for more
than two hours, and then paraded about with the others carrying a
placard and hitting a gong. Then he was dragged up to the second floor
of a classroom building and down again, beaten with fists and broom-

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Communism in Asia

sticks all along the way. On the second floor some of his attackers ran
into a classroom to get some bamboo carrying poles with which to beat
him further, I stopped them, pleading, "You don't have to do this. This
is too much!"

He passed out several times but was brought back to consciousness
each time with cold water splashed on his face. He could hardly move
his body. His feet were cut by glass and thorns. But his spirit was
unbroken. He shouted, "Why don't you kill me? Kill me!" This lasted
for six hours, until he lost control of his excrement. They tried to force
a stick into his rectum. He collapsed for the last time. They poured cold
water on him again — it was too late. The killers were stunned momen-
tarily, as it was probably the first time they had ever beaten a man to
death, and it was the first time most of us had ever witnessed such a
scene. People began to run away, one after another . . . They dragged
him off the field to a wooden shack where the teachers used to play-
ping-pong. There they put him on a dirty gym mat and summoned the
school doctor.

"Check carefully whether he died of high blood pressure. You are
not allowed to defend him."

The doctor examined him and pronounced him dead of torture.
Some of those present seized the doctor and began to beat him up, too.

"Why are you breathing air from the same nostril as his? Do you
want to be like him?"

Finally, the doctor wrote on the death certificate "Death due to a
sudden attack of high blood pressure." 201

The Revolutionaries and Their Mastei

For a long time there was a much-cherished legend in the West: that the Red
Guards were nothing more than a slightly more fanatical version of the French
revolutionaries of 1 968. 2{)2 After the fall of the Gang of Four, a legend just as far
from the truth arose in China: that the Red Guards were the cryptofascisr
helpers of a bunch of political opportunists. The reality was very different: the
"rebels" thought of themselves as good Maoist Communists, untouched by any
democratic or libertarian ideal; and for the most part they were precisely that.
In the absence of democratic centralism, the whole experiment effectively
ended in less than two years, but during that time they collectively represented
a strange alternative Communist Party at a moment when the real "Communist
Party" was paralyzed by division at its very heart. They were ready to give up
their lives for Mao, and although they also had strong personal and ideological
Jinks to Lin Biao and to the Cultural Revolution Group of Jiang Qing, they
were only really an alternative insofar as they opposed the municipal and

China: A Long March into Night

527

provincial authorities who were opposed to Mao. They were also of course a
supplementary force in the struggles for power inside the palace in Beijing.
The boundless energy of these tens of millions of young people was almost
purely destructive. During the brief periods when they did hold positions of
power they achieved absolutely nothing and failed to modify the totalitarian
structure that was already in place in any significant way. The Red Guards
often pretended that their aim was to model themselves on the French Com-
munards of 1871, but the elections that they organized were never free or open.
All decisions were taken by small, self-appointed groups, and any changes were
simply the result of struggles within the movement and in the administrative
structures that were under their control. 20 - 1 From time to time there were small,
individual victories, and some of the social demands by workers in factories
were met; but these achievements only made the swing back again in 1968
more difficult. 204

The Red Guards were linked to the Communist movement in many
different ways. In June and July 1966 the working parties that were sent into
the main educational establishments by Liu Shaoqi's group and the various
provincial groups that depended on them established the first "black dens 1 ' for
professors and provided the impetus for the first Red Guard groups. Although
they were officially taken out of service in early August, as part of Mao's task
force in the Central Committee they sometimes had a lasting influence in
various local organizations. 2(,s In any case they were a major cause of the
systematic recourse to violence against teachers and cadres in the education
system, and they opened the way for the movement against the Four Old-
Fashioned Things. That movement, though supported by local authorities, was
largely the work of the police, who provided all the necessary information,
gathered evidence, and confiscated property. In 1978 Nien Cheng was surprised
and overjoyed to recover a large amount of her porcelain collection, which had
been seized under such violent circumstances twelve years earlier. At that time
those who had taken part in previous campaigns, as well as a few middle-rank-
ing cadres, were used as scapegoats to protect the people who had really been
directing operations.

The extension of the movement into the factories, along with Mao's
growing sense that his goal — the elimination of all political rivals — was slipping
out of his grasp, led to ever-greater confrontations between rebels and munici-
pal or provincial authorities. But the local authorities invariably knew very well
how to orchestrate mass demonstrations, which were hard to distinguish from
demonstrations by rebels closer to the Maoist line. The rebels on the other hand
were more independent locally and saw their salvation in alignment with the
"super-Central Committee" that the Cultural Revolution Group had become,
in which Kang Sheng played a discreet but essential role. Specialized teams

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Communism in Asia

maintained close contact with Beijing (in the early days, these teams were often
made up of students from the capital), which sent advice and blacklists (includ-
ing the names of two-thirds of the members of the Central Committee), waited
for results and evidence, and rewarded its allies with the precious "good labels 1 '
that served as a sort of magic shield against the PLA. 20 " The rebels were just
as dependent on the state machinery as their adversaries were, but in a different
manner. All groups were united on the question of repression, which was one
enormous difference from the revolutionary tradition in the West. If the laogai
camps were ever criticized (something that happened very rarely), it was for
their laxity: Nien Cheng, for example, recalls how brutal and inhumane the new
Maoist prison guards were. Hua Linsham, who was an ultraleft rebel and
openly opposed to the PLA, worked in the part of a prison factory where arms
were manufactured; yet "throughout our stay there, the prisoners stayed in
their cells and we had almost no contact with them." 207 The Red Guards, who
used kidnaping as an essential weapon in their repressive armory, had their own
network of penitentiaries in every school, government office, and factory. In
these "stables" or "foyers" (the preferred euphemism was "study centers")
people were confined, interrogated, and tortured incessantly, with great care
and imagination. Ling recalls one informal "psychological study group" in his
school: "At group meeting we avoided mentioning the tortures, but we re-
garded torture as an art . . . We even thought our study inadequate . . . there
were many methods we could not test." 20 * One "radical" militia in Hangzhou,
consisting mostly of "blacks" who had themselves been persecuted, had on
average 1,000 people in its three "investigation centers" at any given time. It
condemned twenty-three people for slandering its leader, Weng Senhe; and its
workers received three days off for every day that they worked, as well as free
meals. 209 In all statements made by former Red Guards, descriptions of repres-
sive practices have a central place. There are countless stories of adversaries
who were beaten to the floor, paraded around, humiliated, and sometimes
killed, seemingly without opposition from any quarter. The period of the
Cultural Revolution was also marked by the reimprisonment of former de-
tainees, by the reapplication of previously removed "right" labels, and bv the
systematic arrest of foreigners or Chinese people who had lived abroad. There
were also new infamies, such as a daughter's obligation to serve out the remain-
der of the sentence of a father who had died. 21 " Civil administration suffered
considerably, that of the laogai much less. Perhaps this generation was a gen-
eration of jailers rather than rebels. 211

From the ideological point of view, even radical rebel groups that were
concerned with the elaboration of new theories, such as the Shengwulian group
in Hunan, were unable to break from the extremely limited Maoist frame of
reference. 212 Mao's thinking was always so vague and his words so contradictory

China: A Long March into Night

529

that they could be turned to mean almost anything: both conservatives and
rebels had their stock of quotations — sometimes the same quotations, inter-
preted differently. 21 ^ In the strange place that was China during the Cultural
Revolution, a beggar could justify stealing by quoting Mao's words about
mutual assistance, and a worker in the underground economy who had stolen
bricks could reject all scruples, for "the working class must exercise leadership
in everything." 214 But there was always one hard, central idea: the sanctification
of violence, the radical nature of class struggle and its political implications. 215
For people who followed the correct line, anything was permitted. Even the
rebels could not distance themselves from official propaganda; their texts
closely imitated the official language of the Party. They lied outrageously not
only to the masses but also to their own comrades. 216

Perhaps the most dramatic effect of the Cultural Revolution was its rein-
forcement of the consensus favoring the caste system created in the 1950s.
Things could have gone quite differently. To speed things along, the Cultural
Revolution Group had opened the doors of its organization to "blacks," who
rushed to join. Since 45 percent of the children of all intellectuals in China
were enrolled in schools in Canton, a disproportionate number signed up in
the south. The children of cadres and of people formally recognized as workers
made up 82 percent of conservatives in the great southern metropolis. The
rebels, buoyed by the support of workers who had no recognized status, were
the natural enemies of political cadres, while the conservatives concentrated
their fire on the "blacks." But because the rebels' program included the elimi-
nation of sociopolitical divisions (an aspect that promised escape from the
stigma of their own inferior status), they launched a campaign of repression
against both the conservatives and the "blacks," hoping that the blows would
not fall on their own relatives. Worse still, they accepted for themselves the new
notion of class heredity that had been put forward by the Beijing Red Guards,
most of whom were the children of cadres and soldiers.

This notion was expressed, for example, in a remarkable marching song:

If the father is brave, the son will be a hero.
If he's a reactionary, the son will be an asshole.
If you're a revolutionary, step forward and join us.
If you're not, get lost!

Get lost!

We're gonna chase you out of your fucking job!

Kill! Kill! Kill! 217

One " well-born" person commented: "We were born Red! Our Redness
comes from the body of our mother. And I tell you quite clearly: You were born

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Communism in Asia

Black! What can you do about that?" 218 The racialization of categories was
devastating. Zhai Zhenhua, belt in hand and insults at the ready, forced the
"black" half of his class to spend all their time studying Mao: "If they are to
save themselves, they must first learn to be ashamed of their horrible family
origins, and to hate their parents." 219 Naturally there was no question of their
joining the Red Guards. Red Guards patrolled the train station in Beijing,
beating up and sending home any Red Guard who had the wrong origins.
People were often more tolerant in the provinces, and there "blacks" sometimes
did hold positions of responsibility, but the advantage always went to the
"wellborn." Thus, in the case of a schoolgirl nicknamed "Piggy," Ling recalls:
"Piggy's class background, a major qualification, was very good: she was from
a mason's family and often boasted that for three generations her family had
never had a roof over their heads." 22u In any verbal confrontation, the class card
was always played and always won. Hua Linsham, who was a very militant
rebel, was once thrown off a train by some rather conservative Red Guards:
"What I still feel today was how much they found my physical presence
offensive and dirty ... I suddenly had the feeling that I was something quite
disgusting." 221 In demonstrations, children with parents in the Five Red cate-
gories (Party cadres, army officers, workers, poor peasants, and revolutionary
martyrs) always played the leading role. 222 Apartheid divided the entire society.
At a meeting of a neighborhood committee in 1973, Nien Cheng sat down by
mistake with the proletariat. "Almost as if an electric shock had hit them, the
two workers closest to me immediately moved their stools away from me so that
I sat isolated in the crowded room," She then went over to join a group of
women, "members of the denounced capitalist class and intellectuals, the out-
casts of the Cultural Revolution." 221 She makes it clear that it was neither the
police nor the Party that imposed this segregation.

From Factional Fighting to the Crushing of the Rebels

The second phase of the movement began in early January 1967, when the
question of power came to the fore. The Maoist Center knew that the point of
no return had been reached in the confrontation with the former Liuist leader-
ship, which was up against the ropes in Beijing but could still count on power-
ful allies in most of the provinces. To kill it off definitively, the rebels had to
seize power. Since the army, the major player in the game, was steadfastly
refusing to step in, it was clear that the president's new troops would have all
the room to maneuver that they needed. Shanghai gave the first signal in
January, and quickly all the municipalities and Party committees were over-
thrown. Suddenly the rebels could no longer simply criticize from the side-
lines, but had to take on the task of governing. And so the disaster began:

China: A Long March into Night

531

tensions began to mount between rival groups of rebels, between students and
workers, and between workers on long-term contracts and day laborers. 224
These tensions quickly grew into major confrontations involving entire cities,
and then escalated into hand-to-hand fighting with guns and knives. The
Maoist leaders, now so close to seizing power, suddenly took fright: industrial
production was collapsing (falling 49 percent in Wuhan in January), 225 the
government administration was crumbling, and splinter groups were begin-
ning to take power. China was suffering from a cruel lack of competent cadres,
and so the rebels had no option but to reinstate most of those who had come
under attack. Production at factories had to be restored, and educational estab-
lishments could not remain closed indefinitely. So at the end of January the
leadership made two decisions: to create a new power structure, composed of
the Revolutionary Committees and based on the principle of "three in one,"
meaning an alliance among the rebels, the former cadres, and the PLA; and to
push the Red Guards gently toward the exits (or back to the classrooms), if
necessary by making use of Mao's other weapon, the army itself, which had
been on alert for six months.

Proximity to the Center was no protection to the rebels then, and the
Cultural Revolution still had many surprises to come. In April the return to
normalization was going so smoothly that Mao was worried. Everywhere the
conservatives and the people who had been pushed out in January were lifting
their heads again and in some cases even forming a potentially dangerous
alliance with the PLA. Such was the situation in Wuhan, where the rebels were
in retreat. The time had therefore come for another swift turn to the left, which
was reinforced in July by the arrest of Wuhan's military leaders over a two-day
period by CRG representatives. But as occurred whenever the Maoist Red
Guards felt that things were going well, the shift unleashed violence and
factional fighting verging on anarchy, making the formation of Revolutionary
Councils impossible in some places. As a result, in September the PLA was
authorized to use its weapons (until then it had been forced to stand by and
watch as its arsenals were raided). This move gave a new impetus to the rebels.
In some senses 1968 was a repetition of 1967. In March Mao was again worried
and made another but more moderate turn to the left. The confrontations
became more and more bloody, and the rebels were completely crushed in July.

Thus much depended on Mao's hesitations as he found himself faced with
a cruel and inescapable dilemma: chaos on the left or order on the right. All
the actors awaited the director's next move, hoping it would be to their advan-
tage. It was a strange situation, with mortal enemies all dependent on the same
living god. So, for example, when the powerful conservative Confederation of
the Million Heroes in Wuhan learned in July 1967 that things were not to go
its way, it declared: "Whether we arc convinced or not, we must follow and

532

Communism in Asia

apply the decisions that come from the Center, without any reservations" and
immediately disbanded. 226 Because there was never a definitive interpretation
of what Mao said, those who might be imagined to be in a position of author-
ity — the Party committees^were little heeded in practice. Confusion also
reigned concerning the real intentions of the Center, as people found it hard
to believe that Mao himsel f could be so indecisive. The swings of the pendulum
were so great that soon everyone was demanding some sort of vengeance, and
the victors of the moment never practiced magnanimity.

In addition to these external factors, two internal factors played an impor-
tant role in increasing violence, particularly inside the rebel organizations. The
interests of small groups and individual ambitions, which were never arbitrated
in a democratic fashion, constantly led to new splits inside the parties, while
cynical "political entrepreneurs" tried to improve their positions by associating
with the new local powers, especially by cultivating close relations with the
regional PLA headquarters. Many ended up having close links with the Gang
of Four and effectively became provincial dictators. Little by little the factional
struggles lost their political character and became straightforward struggles for
power between those who had the top positions and the people who wanted to
replace them. 227 And as was the case in the laogai, anyone who made accusations
was always right, since the accusations came with a barrage of quotations and
sacrosanct slogans. As a rule, those who tried to defend themselves always
ended up in even deeper trouble. The only effective riposte was a counterac-
cusation at a higher level. It mattered little whether the accusation had any
basis; the important thing was that it be couched in correct political terms. The
logic of the debate thus constantly expanded the battlefield and the number of
targets. 22 * In the final analysis, since everything was political, the tiniest incident
could be overinterpreted as proof of the worst criminal intentions. The out-
come was arbitration through physical elimination.

These events might be described as civil war rather than massacre, although
the one leads almost automatically to the other. It was increasingly a war that
involved everyone. In Wuhan, in late December 1966, the rebels imprisoned
3,100 cadres and conservatives. 229 The first death in the confrontations between
the rebels and the Million Heroes came about on 27 May 1967. As a result
armed positions were taken up at strategic points. The rebel headquarters was
seized on 17 June with 25 deaths. Casualties rose to 158 by 30 June. After their
defeat, 600 conservatives were killed, and another 66,000 suffered persecution
of one sort or another. At the moment of the turn to the left in March 1968,
the hunt suddenly intensified. Tens of thousands were held in a stadium,
militia groups that were increasingly ruled by the mob sowed panic in the

China: A Long March into Night

533

streets, and arms flooded in from neighboring provinces. In May, fighting
between rebel factions led to a generalized belief that civil war was under way
once more, and on 27 May 80,000 weapons were stolen from the army in a
single day. This was a new record. A real black market in arms opened up on a
nationwide scale. Factories even began to turn out tanks and explosives for the
different rebel factions. By mid-June, 57 people had been killed by stray bul-
lets. Shops were looted, banks were raided, and the population began to flee the
city. But like a deus ex machine a single statement from Beijing saved the day,
causing the rebels to fold. The PLA intervened on 22 July and took charge
without the firing of a single shot, and the factions were forced to disband in
September. 210 In areas such as the relatively nonindustrial Fujian region, the
split was less one between conservatives and rebels than it was the age-old
divide between town and country. When Red Guards from Xiamen arrived in
the provincial capital, they were attacked by people shouting: "Fuzhou belongs
to the Fuzhou natives! . . . People of Fuzhou, do not forget your ancestors! We
shall always be sworn enemies of the people of Xiamen!" 2 * 1 In Shanghai, in a
slightly less direct manner, the real confrontation was between people from
regions to the north and south of Jiangsu Province. 212 Even on the tiny local
level of Long Bow, the struggle among revolutionary factions barely disguised
the reemcrgence of the old quarrel between the Lu clan, which dominated the
north side of the village, and the Shen clan, which ruled the south side. This
was also the moment when old scores were settled, including quarrels that
dated back to the Japanese occupation or the bloody beginnings of agrarian
reform in 1946. 2 - V1 In the highly rural Guangxi region, the conservatives, who
had been thrown out of Guilin, progressively encircled the town with peasant
militias and ultimately emerged victorious. 214 In Canton in July and August
1967, pitched battles among various factions of the Red Flag and East Wind
groups led to 900 deaths. 215 Some of the battles even involved artillery.

How hard conditions really were during this period can be gauged from
the following statement by a Red Guard who was then fourteen years old: "We
were young. We were fanatical. We thought that Mao was a really great man,
that he alone had the truth, that he was the truth. I believed everything that he
said. And I believed that there were good reasons for the Cultural Revolution.
We thought we were revolutionaries, and because we were the revolutionaries
who followed Mao's orders, we thought we could solve everything, solve all the
problems of our society." 2 ^ Atrocities became more and more widespread, and
were of a more "traditional 11 nature than they had been the year before. The
following events were witnessed near Lanzhou, in Gansu: "There must have
been about fifty vehicles . . . each one had a body strapped across the radiator.
Some lorries had more than one tied to them. They were all stretched out

534

Communism in Asia

diagonally, and tied there with rope and wire . . . The crowd surrounded one
man and stabbed him with spears and rustic swords, until he fell to the ground
and lay there, a bleeding heap of flesh." 237

In the second half of 1968 the army reasserted control and tightened its
grip. The Red Guards were disbanded, and that autumn millions of young
people (by 1970 the total was 5.4 million) were sent out into the countryside in
the hope that they would remain there. 21 * Many stayed for a decade or more.
Before Mao's death, between 12 million and 20 million people were forcibly
ruralized in this fashion, including 1 million people from Shanghai, repre-
senting 18 percent of the city's population. 2 -™ Three million cadres who had
been removed from their posts were sent (often for several years) to the 7 May
Schools, rehabilitation centers that were prisons in all but name. 240 Without any
doubt this was the year of the greatest massacres, as worker parties and soldiers
took back various campuses and cities in the southern regions. Wuzhou, in
Guangxi, was destroyed with heavy artillery and napalm. Guilin was taken on
19 August by 30,000 soldiers and armed peasants after a real military campaign
in which political and military teams managed to fan the country dwellers'
indifference toward the Cultural Revolution into active hostility. For six days
rebels were executed en masse. In the month after the righting in Guilin had
ended, the terror spread throughout the countryside, this time directed against
the "blacks" and the Kuomintang, who were the eternal scapegoats. It was so
thorough that at the end some regions could boast that they were "entirely free
of any member of any of the five Black categories." 241 It was then that the future
chairman of the Communist Party, Hua Guofeng, who was in charge of security
for his province, gained the title "the butcher of Hunan." The southern part
of the country suffered most: there were perhaps 100,000 deaths in Guangxi,
40,000 in Guangdong, 30,000 in Yunnan. 242 The Red Guards were extremely
cruel, but the worst atrocities were carried out by their executioners, the
soldiers and militias carrying out the Party's orders.

Former Red Guard Hua Linshan recalls the reprisals in Guilin:

As soon as day broke, the soldiers started searching the houses and
arresting people. At the same time they shouted instructions through
megaphones. They had drawn up a list of ten crimes, including the
seizure of a prison, raids on a bank, attacks on any military installation,
forcible entry into any facility of the security services, raids on trains,
and participation in the armed struggle. Anyone who was suspected of
any of these crimes was arrested and suffered the justice of the "dicta-
torship of the proletariat." I did a quick calculation and realized that I
was guilty or at least six of those crimes. But I had done all of them "for
the good of the revolution." I had not obtained any personal advantage
or profit from any of them. If 1 had not wanted to take part in the

China: A Long March into Night

535

revolution, I would not have carried out any of those criminal acts.
Suddenly I was being asked to be responsible for them. It seemed quite
unfair, and naturally I was very afraid . . .

I learned later that the soldiers had killed a number of our
wounded heroes who were lying in the hospital, and they had cut the
supplies of blood and oxygen to those who were undergoing transfu-
sions, killing more of these sorts of people. Those who could still walk
had all their medication taken away, and they were taken to temporary
prisons.

One wounded man managed to slip away, and the soldiers cordoned
off the whole area. They searched all the rooms all over again. Anyone
whose name was not written on the local lists was arrested, and that was
my fate too . . .

When I was in prison [in School No. 7 in Guilin] I met up with an
old classmate from the time I was studying to be a mechanic. He told me
that one of the combat heroes from our school had been killed by the
soldiers. He had become a hero by holding out on a hilltop against the
enemy assault for three days and three nights. The rebel general, in
recognition of his courage, had given him the nickname "unique and
courageous hero." The soldiers who took over the school and arrested so
many people had asked him to come out from the crowd. They tied him
up in a sack and hung him from a tree in front of all the students so that
he truly resembled a "gall bladder" [in Chinese the term evokes the
notion of "unique and courageous hero"]. Then they beat him to death
in the sack with their rifle butts.

There were many other stories as horrible as that one going around
the prison, but I tried not to listen to them. Executions had gone on for
two days all over town, and they had become the major topic of conver-
sation. The killing started to seem almost normal. The people who were
carrying them out did not seem much bothered by them, and the people
who talked about them had become cold and unfeeling. I listened to
these stories as though they were about some other world.

The worst thing in prison was always when one of the prisoners
agreed to cooperate with the authorities, and came around to try to
single out his previous companions. The guards would suddenly give us
an order like "Lift your horrible dog heads!" and a few masked individu-
als would then enter the room and stare at us for a long time. If they saw
someone they knew, the soldiers would point a gun at him and order him
to leave with them. Often they were executed immediately. 241

Thus, in 1968 the state reasserted itself with all its former perquisites. It
again assumed a monopoly of institutionalized violence, and did not hesitate
to use it. An increase in the number of public executions marked a return to
the police tactics used before the Cultural Revolution. In Shanghai, former

536

Communism in Asia

worker Wang Hongwen, a protege of Jiang Qing and soon to be vice chairman
of the Party, proclaimed a 'Victory over anarchy.' 1 On 27 April several rebel
leaders were condemned to death and immediately killed in front of a vast
crowd. 244 Zhang Chunqiao, another member of the Gang of Four, said in July:
"If a few people are wrongly accused, it does not really matter; but it would be
disastrous to allow any of the guilty to escape." 2 - 15 China entered a dark era of
nonexistent plots and conspiracy theories, during which arrests were carried
out on a massive scale, and society returned to dumb silence. Only the death
of Lin Biao, in 1971, attenuated the worst period of terror that China had seen
since the 1950s.

The first plot was that of the so-called People's Party of Inner Mongolia,
which in fact had been dissolved and absorbed by the Communist Party in 1947,
but which the authorities claimed had secretly reconstituted itself More than
346,000 people were investigated in February-May 1968, Three-quarters of
the suspects were Mongols, and xenophobia was undoubtedly a major factor in
the affair. There were 16,000 deaths from execution, torture, and suicide, and
87,000 people were maimed for life. 24h Similar accusations led to 14,000 execu-
tions in Yunnan, another province with a large number of ethnic minorities. 247
Especially sinister was the "conspiracy" of the 16 May Regiment. This was
probably a tiny and very ephemeral organization of ultra-left-wing Beijing Red
Guards, one of thousands of comparable groups. The group had left a few
traces, including statements hostile to Zhou Enlai made in July 1967. For
reasons that are still unclear, the Maoist Center decided to portray the organi-
zation as a huge network of "black bandits" and counterrevolutionaries. The
campaign against them, launched in 1970, ended quite inconclusively and
without any major trials in 1976, after years of torture and forced confessions
all across the country. Of the 2,000 staff at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, 600
were investigated during the affair. Mao's own personal guard, Unit 8341,
distinguished themselves at Beijing University by unmasking 178 "enemies"
and killing 10 during their investigations. In a factory in Shaanxi in late 1968,
547 "spies" were unmasked, together with 1,200 accomplices. Yan Fengyingl
an actress in the Beijing Opera, was accused on thirteen different counts and
committed suicide in April 1968. An autopsy was carried out in an attempt to
find a radio transmitter that she supposedly had hidden inside her body. Three
great table-tennis champions also took their own lives. 248

Nien Cheng provides an account of one episode of theatricalized terror,
a "struggle meeting" in 1969:

The audience in the room was shouting slogans and waving Little Red
Books. After "Long Live Our Great Leader Chairman Mao!" came
"Good Health To Our Vice-Supreme Commander Lin, Always Good

China: A Long March into Night

537

Health!" This seemed to me not only a reflection of the elevated posi-
tion of Lin Biao after the Ninth Party Congress, but also testimony to
the fact that those who organized this meeting were his intimates, anx-
ious to promote Lin Biao's personality cult.

Two legs came into my limited field of vision. A man's voice spoke
in front of me. He introduced me to the audience by giving an account
of my family background and personal life. I had noticed already that
each time my life story was recounted by the Revolutionaries I became
richer and my way of life became more decadent and luxurious. Now the
farce reached fantastic proportions. Since 1 had promised not to answer
back but to remain mute, I was much more relaxed than at the previous
struggle meeting in 1966. However, the audience jumped up from their
seats when the speaker told them that 1 was a spy for the imperialists.
They expressed their anger and indignation by crowding around me to
shout abuse.

To be so maligned was intolerable. Instinctively I raised my head to
respond. The women suddenly jerked up my handcuffed hands. Such
sharp pain tore at my shoulder joints that I had to bend my body
forward with my head well down to ease the agony. They kept me in this
position during the rest of the man's denunciation of me. Only when
the people were again shouting slogans did they allow my arms to drop
back. I was to learn later that I had been subjected to the so-called "jet
position" invented by the Revolutionaries to torment their more recalci-
trant victims and to force them to bow their heads in servile submis-
sion . . .

The people in the audience soon worked themselves into a state of
hysteria. Their shouts drowned out the voice of the speaker. Someone
pushed me hard from behind. I stumbled and knocked over the micro-
phone. One of the women tried to pick it up, tripped over the wires, and
fell, dragging me with her. I fell in an awkward position. My face was
pressed against the floor; many others fell on top of us in the confusion.
Everybody seemed to be yelling. There was pandemonium. Several
minutes passed. Finally I was pulled up again.

Utterly exhausted, I longed for the meeting to end. But the
speeches continued. It seemed everyone sitting around the table on the
platform wanted to make a contribution. They had ceased to denounce
me; instead they were competing with each other to sing the praises of
Lin Biao in the most extravagant flattery the rich Chinese language
could provide. Their efforts to register their devotion to Lin Biao could
be explained, I thought, only by the probable presence of Lin Biao's
loyal lieutenants listening in an adjacent room.

Suddenly the door behind me opened. A man's voice shouted,
"Zuo-la!" This meant that someone had departed. The two simple
words produced an effect that was electrical. The speaker stopped in

538

Communism in Asia

midsentence. Since the important person or persons listening in the
adjoining room had gone, there was no more need to go on with the
performance. Some of the audience were already on their feet, while
others were collecting their bags and jackets. Hastily the speaker led
them to shout slogans. He was largely ignored. Only a few responded
while walking out of the room. It seemed the people were no longer
angry with me. Though they did not smile, the glances directed at me
were indifferent. I was just one of the many victims at whose struggle
meeting they had been present. They had done what was required of
them. Now it was over. Once when a man brushed against me, someone
behind him even stretched out a hand to steady me.

The room cleared in a moment. I could hear members of the
departing audience chatting as they left the building. u Getting rather
chilly, isn't it?" "Where are you going for supper?" "Not raining, is it?"
etc., etc. They sounded no different from an audience departing after a
show at a cinema or theater. 249

All witnesses concur that in 1969 and the years that followed China was
a violent place ruled by slogans and political campaigns. The obvious failure of
the Cultural Revolution caused most city dwellers to lose all faith in politics.
The young were particularly affected because they had invested so much in the
process. Their frequent refusal to go to the countryside led to the formation of
an underclass that lived a semiclandestine existence. Cynicism, criminality, and
selfishness were the norm everywhere. Jn 1971 the brutal and unexpected
elimination of Lin Biao, the man whom Mao himself had named as his succes-
sor, opened many people's eyes at last. Mao, u the Great Helmsman," was not
infallible after all. 250 The Chinese were tired and fearful, and rightly so: the
number of people in the laogai had grown by 2 million between 1966 and
1976. 251 The darkness, however, was about to lift. People still pretended to be
faithful to their leader. But underneath, civil society was emerging from its
torpor, prior to its explosion in the years 1976-1979. This was a movement
much more fertile than the Cultural Revolution, which would always be best
summed up by the slogan with which Mao had rewarded a good student in
August 1966: "It is because I am obedient that I revolt." 252

The Deng Era: The End of Terror

When Mao finally died in September 1976, he had been a spent force politically
for some time. The muted nature of the popular response to his death was
sufficient proof of that, as was his obvious incapacity to assure his own succes-
sion. The Gang of Four, to whom he was very close ideologically, were all
imprisoned within a month of his death. Hua Guofeng, who was supposed to

China: A Long March into Night

539

be the guarantor of continuity, relinquished most of his powers in December
1978 to make way for the irrepressible Deng Xiaoping, who was hated by the
Maoist camp. The great turning point perhaps had been 5 April 1976, the
Chinese Day of the Dead, when, in what was apparently a spontaneous out-
pouring of grief, the people of Beijing commemorated the death of Prime
Minister Zhou, who had died in January. The government was astonished at
the unforeseen scale of the demonstrations: it could not be explained away by
reference to any faction or to Party manipulation. Some of the poems included
with the wreaths contained thinly veiled attacks on Mao. The crowds were
dispersed by force (although, unlike in 1989, there was no shooting in Tianan-
men Square itself), leaving 8 dead and 200 wounded. There were many demon-
strations outside the capital; thousands were imprisoned all over the country.
In the aftermath there were at least 500 executions including at least 100
demonstrators who had been arrested. Investigations continued until October,
affecting tens of thousands of people. 2 " But this was not simply "business as
usual." The post-Maoist era had already begun, with politicians in retreat and
the Center no longer capable of directing all operations. "Whereas in 1966
Tiananmen Square was filled with intimidated crowds of people tearfully
watching the man who had taken away their liberty, ten years later those same
people had gathered their strength, and they looked him right in the eye." 254

The Democracy Wall, lasting from the winter of 1978 to the spring of
1979, symbolized this new state of affairs, but it also showed its limits. With
Deng's consent, several former Red Guards posted on the wall their opinions,
which were almost unthinkable for people who had been brought up under
Maoism. The most articulate of these thinkers, Wei Jingsheng, in a poster titled
u The Fifth Modernization: Democracy," actually came out and said that people
were being exploited by the ruling classes through a system of feudal social-
ism. 2 " He argued that democracy was the only way forward to lasting change,
that it was the natural fifth consequence of the four other modernizations
suggested by Deng, and that Marxism, as the source of all totalitarianism,
should be discarded in favor of more democratic forms of socialism. In March
1979, when Deng was somewhat more secure in his position, he had Wei and
several others arrested. Wei was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for passing
information abroad, which was regarded as a counterrevolutionary crime. He
never made a confession, and was freed in 1993. But he continued to speak out
so forcefully that he was arrested again eight months later and in 1995 sen-
tenced to fourteen years in prison for "drawing up a plan for a campaign to
overthrow the government. 1 ' 256 In November 1997 he was suddenly released
from prison and sent into exile in the United States.

Under Deng Xiaoping, however, it was possible to be critical and to
survive. This was a great step forward from the Mao era, when a word out of

540 Communism in Asia

place or a scribble on a wall was enough to have someone shot. The major
post-Maoist reforms were economic, but politics were not forgotten among the
changes. Everything bore witness to a growing sense of emancipation and a
rejection of the government's arbitrary decisions. In the 1980s, the suppression
of organizations of poor and middle-rank peasants meant that only about
one-tenth of the peasantry was actually represented in the Chinese Communist
Party, and the peasantry as a whole returned to traditional family farming on
a massive scale. 2 " In the cities, the explosion of private enterprise meant that
a large section of the workforce was no longer under direct political control.
The state machinery became more formal and predictable, providing citizens
with a better line of defense against the state. After 1978 the freeing of pris-
oners (approximately 1 ()(),()()()) became commonplace, and rehabilitations
(though often posthumous) became increasingly widespread, particularly as far
as artists and writers were concerned. For example, Ding Ling, a victim of the
rectification campaign of 1957-58, was finally allowed to return from his rural
exile in 1959, ending a long series of persecutions stretching back to Yan'an.
This was the beginning of a 'literature of scars, 11 and of a still timid return to
creative freedom. Two-thirds of the people who had been sent to the country-
side during the Cultural Revolution were allowed to return to the cities. The
new constitution afforded a basic minimum of legal rights. In 1979 the People's
Republic of China produced its first penal code; Mao had never wanted one
because he feared that it would unnecessarily restrict the room he needed to
maneuver. In this new code, the death penalty was reserved for "abominable
crimes, 11 a right to appeal was instituted (so that appeals no longer automatically
brought stiffer sentences), and the entire legal mechanism was removed from
direct Party control.

An even larger wave of rehabilitations came in 1982, when 242,000 people
were rehabilitated in Sichuan alone. In Guangdong, 78 percent of all people
who had been labeled "counterrevolutionaries" had that label removed and
were given a small indemnity for each year they had spent in prison. Of the
new prisoners who were sentenced that year, only 0.5 percent were political
prisoners. In 1983 the minister of security's area of responsibility was drasti-
cally reduced, and administration of the laogai was transferred to the Ministry
of Justice. The courts began to reject a number of arrests, a complaints proce-
dure against the police was established, torturers were prosecuted and tried in
public, and new inspections of the camps were carried out. Social class was no
longer to be taken into account during trials. In 1984 integration of people
emerging from prison or camp was made much easier, while inside the prisons
professional training began to take the place of ideological study. Innovations
such as the reduction of sentences for good behavior, suspended sentences, and
parole were introduced, and families were encouraged to maintain their links
with prisoners. By 1986 the number of people in prison had fallen to 5 million

China; A Long March into Night

541

and has remained steady ever since. This is half the figure for 1976, and
represents 0.5 percent of the total population, more or less identical with the
proportion in the United States, though lower than the proportion in the
U.S.S.R. during its final few years. Despite strenuous efforts, the share of gross
domestic product accounted for by the laogai remains large, although it is three
times lower than it was in the late 1950s. 258

Progress has continued despite the events of Tiananmen Square. Since
1990 citizens have been allowed to sue the government. Since 1996 all detention
without trial has come under strict regulation and has been reduced to a
maximum of one month, while the maximum laojiao sentence has been reduced
to three years. The role and autonomy of lawyers have increased considerably;
their number more than doubled between 1990 and 1996. Since 1995 magis-
trates and judges have been recruited by a process of open competition, al-
though most are still former soldiers or policemen. 259

Much remains to be done, however, before China becomes a free and open
society. People are still not innocent until proved guilty, and the crime of
counterrevolution is still on the statute books, although it is now used with
much greater restraint. In December 1994 the term laogai was replaced with
the much more banal "prison," but as the Legal Gazette noted, "the function,
character, and role of our penal institutions remain unchanged." 26 " Most trials
still take place in camera, and judgment is often passed extremely quickly and
without due care. No case is ever prepared for more than three months. Al-
though corruption is enormously widespread among cadres, in 1993-1995 less
than 3 percent of prosecutions were for crimes of corruption. 261 In general,
while the 4 percent of the population who were members of the Communist
Party accounted for 30 percent of all people who were charged with crimes,
they made up only 3 percent of people who were executed; 262 clearly, solidarity
persists between the political and legal spheres. The arrest in the 1990s of
several members of the political administration in Beijing on charges of cor-
ruption and embezzlement caused quite a stir, but was a relatively isolated
event. Communist officials, who are increasingly involved in business, are still
quite invulnerable.

The death penalty continues to be widely used in China. Each year hun-
dreds of people are sentenced to death for crimes ranging from serious cases
of smuggling, including the illegal export of art works, to "passing state se-
crets," which in practice can mean almost anything. Presidential pardons, which
technically have been available since 1982, are never used. Thousands of people
arc executed each year; China accounts for more than half the total annual
number of executions worldwide. Furthermore, the number of executions is
rising in comparison to the 1970s, as it did in the last centuries of the Chinese

262

empire.

Exercise of the death penalty remains linked to political campaigns and

542

Communism in Asia

crises. In 1983 the rising crime rate resulted in perhaps 1 million arrests, and
there were at least 10,000 executions. Many of these were held in public as a
lesson for the people, even though such practices are forbidden by the penal
code. All of these were part of a mass campaign reminiscent of the events of
the 1950s. As then, there was an attempt to group together all the "criminal"
elements. Many intellectuals, priests, and foreigners were intimidated during
what was termed the "Campaign against Spiritual Pollution," which was
launched amid much publicity. The occupation of Tiananmen Square in the
spring of 1989 resulted in significant repression, reflecting the fragility of Deng
Xiaoping's position. Unlike the Maoist leaders of 1976, Deng gave the order
to open fire. At least 1,000 people were killed and perhaps 10,000 injured in
Beijing. Hundreds of additional executions in the provinces were carried out
in secret or disguised to look like normal executions for criminal activity. At
least 10,000 people were arrested in Beijing, and another 30,000 throughout the
country. Thousands of people were given prison sentences, and the leaders of
the movement, who refused to repent, received up to thirteen years in prison.
Much pressure was brought to bear on the families of the accused (a practice
that most people believed had disappeared for good), and the practice of forcing
criminals to hang their heads in public was reinstated. The treatment received
by prisoners and the length of their sentences were directly related to the
amount of contrition they expressed and the number of colleagues they de-
nounced. Although political prisoners are still a small minority of all detainees,
there were 100,000 of them in 1991, including at least 1,000 recent dissidents. lb4
Communist China in the late twentieth century is considerably more
prosperous and less violent than it was under Mao, and it seems to have
definitively rejected Utopian goals and permanent civil war. But because the
regime has never really disavowed its founder, it is still prepared to return to
some of his original methods in difficult moments.

Tibet: Genocide on the Rooftop of the World?

Tibet was the site of some of the worst excesses of the Deng era, and nowhere
was the long-term influence of Mao more strongly felt. Although China is a
unitary state, the government gives special rights to national minorities, and a
certain amount of administrative autonomy to the larger ones. But the 4 mil-
lion to 6 million Tibetan nationals had made it quite clear that they were not
happy being part of the Chinese state and longed for a return to the days when
they had been masters of their own country, before their historic region was
divided into the Autonomous Region of Tibet, which in fact included only half
of the country's former territory, and several Chinese provinces. Qjnghai was
constituted in the 1950s from the Tibetan region of Amdo. The small Tibetan

China: A Long March into Night

543

minorities in Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan had very few rights. For the most
part they were treated worse than Tibetans who lived in the autonomous
region, a fact that led to the rebellion of the nomad Golok warriors of the
Amdo, in northern Tibet, in May 1956. 265

Tibet had been through much since the first arrival of the PLA in 1950.
Although the intensity of repression varied from region to region, it was also
largely a result of the traditional prejudice among people of the Chinese
lowlands against the "backward savages" of the highlands. According to dissi-
dents, 70,000 Tibetans died of hunger in 1959-1963 (as in other isolated
regions, pockets of famine persisted longer there than elsewhere). 266 That figure
represents 2 to 3 percent of the population, considerably less proportionally
than in the rest of China. Jasper Becker's more recent study gives figures that
are considerably higher, with a mortality rate of 50 percent in Qinghai, the
native district of the Dalai Lama. 267 From 1965 to 1970 Tibetan families were
grouped together into people's communes that were run along almost military
lines. Famine resulted from the absurd attempt to produce the same "great"
cereals that were being grown in mainland China through ill-conceived irriga-
tion and terracing projects, abandonment of the fallow farming system that was
vital for agriculture on such poor unfertilized soil, the replacement of barley
crops that were well adapted to cold and drought with more fragile wheat crops,
and a reduction in the amount of grazing land for yaks. Many yaks died, leaving
Tibetans without dairy products (butter is a staple of their diet) and without
animal skins to cover their tents in winter; many people died of cold. As
elsewhere, government quotas were excessively high. Beginning in 1953, tens
of thousands of Chinese colonizers were resettled in eastern Tibet (Sichuan),
where they were given a share of the collectivized land. The presence in the
autonomous region of some 300,000 Han Chinese, two-thirds of whom were
soldiers and all of whom needed feeding, further increased the strain on local
agriculture. The 1965 report on rural liberalization measures implemented by
Liu Shaoqi in 1962 noted that these measures were symbolized in Tibet by the
slogan "One farm, one yak." 26S

Tibet also suffered under the Cultural Revolution. In July 1966 Red
Guards, including some Tibetans (despite denials by supporters of the Dalai
Lama), began requisitioning private property and replacing Buddhas on altars
with pictures of Mao Zedong. They forced the monks to participate in "strug-
gle meetings" that they did not always survive. Above all they attacked the
temples, including the most famous ones. Zhou Enlai was forced to protect the
Potala (the ancient home of the "living God") in Lhasa with his own troops.
The sacking of the Jokhang monastery in Lhasa was followed by similar inci-
dents throughout the region. According to one monk who witnessed the events
at Jokhang, "There were several hundred chapels, but only two were spared.

544

Communism in Asia

All the others were pillaged or defiled. AJ] the statues, sacred texts, and objects
were broken or carried off . . . Only the statue of Qakyamuni at the entrance
to Jokhang was spared by the Red Guards because it symbolized the links
between China and Tibet. The destruction went on for more than a week. After
that the Jokhang was transformed into a barracks for the Chinese soldiers
Another part . . . was turned into an abattoir. " 2f,t; Given the absolutely central
place of religion in traditional Tibetan society, these measures — which were
fairly typical for the time — must have been felt more deeply in Tibet than
elsewhere. It would also appear that the army, which had fewer links to the local
population, provided more assistance to the Red Guards than was the case
elsewhere, at least wherever resistance was encountered. Most of the massacres
took place in 1968, at the end of the movement, as a result of battles among
Maoist factions that had caused hundreds of deaths in Lhasa in January. The
casualties were particularly high in the summer, when the army imposed a
Revolutionary Committee on the population. As a result of these actions, more
Chinese than Tibetans died in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. 27 "

But the worst years by far for Tibet were those that had begun with the
arrival of the Chinese troops in 1950 and culminated in forced collectivization
in 1959, three years after the rest of the country. The collectivization drive
sparked an insurrection, which was put down with brutal repression and led to
the flight to India of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet,
together with 100,000 other refugees, including the majority of the country's
tiny cultivated elite. Although the 1950s were also an extremely difficult decade
for China proper, exceptionally violent measures were used in Tibet to impose
both Communism and Chinese domination on a ferociously independent peo-
ple who were either scminomadic (about 40 percent) or attached to monasteries.
Tensions increased further during collectivization in the middle of the decade.
The army responded to an uprising by Khampa guerrillas with atrocities out
of all proportion to the rebellion's scale. In 1956, during the Tibetan New Year
celebrations, the great Chode Gaden Phendeling monastery in Batang was
destroyed by aerial bombardment; at least 2,000 monks and pilgrims were
killed. 271

The litany of atrocities is hair-raising and in many cases unverifiabie. But
the eyewitness reports concur so precisely that the Dalai Lama's assessment of
this period seems beyond challenge: u Tibetans not only were shot, but also were
beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled,
hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded." 272 The
darkest moment was undoubtedly 1959, in the aftermath of the uprising in
Kham, in eastern Tibet, in which the rebels captured Lhasa. Several factors
promoted the uprising, including reaction against the people's communes, the
Great Leap Forward, several years of Chinese quotas, and the large-scale

China: A Long March into Night

545

repatriation by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency of the Khampa warriors
they had trained in guerrilla camps in Colorado and Guam. 273 The civilian
population, which was quite sympathetic to the rebels and allowed them to
blend into society, suffered massive bombardment by the Chinese army. The
wounded were left untended and were often buried alive or devoured by stray
dogs — accounting for the high number of suicides on the losing side. Lhasa
itself, a bastion of 20,000 Tibetans armed with only muskets and swords, was
retaken on 22 March at a cost of between 2,000 and 10,000 lives, with the
Ramoche and Potala temples suffering major damage. The Tibetan leader and
100,000 of his followers then set off for India. Another large-scale revolt in
Lhasa in 1969 was put down with great bloodshed. The Khampa guerrilJas
struggled on until 1972. The cycle of revolt and repression began again in
Lhasa in October 1987, leading to a declaration of martial law in 1989 after
three days of rioting in favor of independence and what were depicted as the
beginnings of anti-Chinese pogroms. According to General Zhang Shaosong,
there were more than 600 deaths in eighteen months. Despite some atrocities,
particularly against nuns, Chinese methods have clearly changed; there have
been no more massacres. But by now almost all Tibetans have at least one family
member who has suffered under the Chinese. 274

The worst tragedy in modern Tibet was the internment of hundreds of
thousands of people — perhaps as many as one in ten Tibetans — during the
1950s and 1960s. It appears that very few people (perhaps as few as 2 percent)
ever returned alive from the 166 known camps, most of which were in Tibet
or the neighboring provinces. 27s In 1984 the Dalai Lama's intelligence service
estimated that 173,000 people had died during detention. Entire monastic
communities were sent to the coal mines. Detention conditions on the whole
appear to have been dreadful, with hunger, cold, or extreme heat the daily lot
of the prisoners. There are as many tales of execution of prisoners refusing to
renounce Tibetan independence as there are tales of cannibalism in prison
during the Great Leap Forward. 276 It was as though the entire population of
Tibet (one in four of all adult men in Tibet are lamas) were suspects. Nearly
one in six was classified as a right-winger, as opposed to one in twenty in China.
In the Tibetan prairie region in Sichuan, where Mao had rested and gathered
his strength during the Long March, two-thirds of the population were ar-
rested in the 1950s, and not freed until 1964 or 1977. In 1962 the Panchen
Lama, the second-highest dignitary in Tibetan Buddhism, protested to Mao
against the famine and repressions that were decimating his countrymen. In
retaliation, he was thrown into prison and then placed under house arrest until
1977, The verdict by which he had been sentenced was not annulled until
1988. 277

If there is no definitive proof that the Chinese planned a physical genocide

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Communism in Asia

in Tibet, there is no doubt that they carried out a cultural genocide. Immedi-
ately after the Cultural Revolution, only 13 of the 6,259 designated places of
Buddhist worship were still open. Most of the others were turned into barracks,
storerooms, or detention centers. Some of those that survived have sub-
sequently reopened. But many were emptied totally, and their treasures —
manuscripts, frescoes, thanka paintings, statues, and other objects — were
destroyed or stolen, particularly if they contained any precious metals. By 1973,
one Beijing foundry had melted down 600 tons of Tibetan sculptures. In 1983
a mission from Lhasa found 32 tons of Tibetan relics in the Chinese capital,
including 13,537 statues and statuettes. 278 The attempt to eradicate Buddhism
altogether was accompanied by a drive to give Chinese names to all newborn
Tibetan babies. Until 1979 all school classes were taught in Mandarin. Finally,
as a last reminder of the anti-Manchu revolution of 1911, the Red Guards cut
off the pigtails of Tibetans of both sexes and tried to impose Han-style Chinese
dress on the whole nation.

Violent deaths were proportionally much greater in Tibet than in China
proper. Even so, it is difficult to believe the figures released by the Tibetan
government-in-exile in 1984: 1 .2 million victims, or approximately one-quarter
of all Tibetans. The figure of 432,000 deaths in combat seems even less cred-
ible. But one can legitimately speak of genocidal massacres because of the
numbers involved, the lack of heed paid to the wishes and rights of civilians
and prisoners, and the regularity with which atrocities were committed. Ac-
cording to official Chinese figures, the population of the autonomous region
fell from 2.8 million inhabitants in 1953 to 2.5 million in 1964. If one takes into
account the number of exiles and the (admittedly uncertain) birth rate, the
number of deaths could be as high as 800,000 — a scale of population loss
comparable to that in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. 279 The fact that so
many Tibetan women fear that any form of hospitalization may result in
abortion or enforced sterilization is an indication of the draconian nature of
the region's recently adopted antinatal policies, which are modeled on the
practices in force for the Han. Previously, minorities had been excused from
these measures. It is said that the secretary general of the Chinese Communist
Party, Hu Yaobang, when visiting Lhasa in 1980, cried in shame when con-
fronted with so much misery, discrimination, and segregation between Hans
and Tibetans, a situation he described as "colonialism pure and simple." The
Tibetans, so long forgotten or unknown in their remote country of snow and
gods, have the misfortune to live in a region of enormous strategic importance,
in the heart of Asia. Although they seem no longer threatened by physical
extermination, their culture remains in jeopardy.

Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy
in North Korea

Pierre Rigoulot

I he People's Democratic Republic of Korea was created on 9 Sep-
tember 1948 in the part of the Korean peninsula north of the 38th parallel. In
accordance with an agreement signed with the United States in August 1945,
the Soviet Union was provisionally responsible for administering this zone,
while the United States was to administer South Korea, below the 38th par-
allel.

North Korea quickly became the most closed state in the world. The
Soviet Union in effect banned access to the North to anyone from the interna-
tional community, and during the first two years of the Republic's existence,
the closure became more formal. The war launched by the North on 25 June
1950 and formally ended by an armistice on 27 July 1953 increased the diet of
lies, disinformation, and propaganda fed to its citizens to the point that almost
any information was classified as a state secret.

But the war was not the only cause. The North Korean regime is intrin-
sically inward looking, even to the exclusion of other Communist powers;
during the Sino-Soviet conflict it vacillated constantly between one side and
the other. In addition, like the Cambodians and the Albanians, the North
Korean leaders feared that influence from the outside world might corrupt the
^ideological unity of the people and the Party " Together these factors explain
why North Korea is sometimes called "the hermit kingdom." This inward-

547

548

Communism in Asia

looking tendency has been theorized as the ideology of juche, which means
self-control, independence, and self-sufficiency. This ideology was officially
introduced at the Fifth Congress of the Korean Workers' (Communist) Party
in November 1970.

Under these conditions, and because North Korea is unique in lacking an
active opposition movement cither inside the country or abroad, which could
gather and pass on information, it is almost impossible to provide a general
picture of the country or details about the realities of repression there. We must
therefore content ourselves with official statements, which need to be inter-
preted and decoded; with statements from people who have managed to escape;
and with information from the intelligence services of neighboring countries,
especially South Korea. All these sources of information have to be treated with
care.

Before the Establishment of the Communist State

Contrary to the claims made in the hagiographics released by the North Ko-
rean authorities, Korean Communism was not founded by Kim II Sung, but
dates back considerably earlier. In 1919 there were already two groups that
claimed to be Bolshevik in origin. Moscow did not give its immediate support
to either faction, and the struggle between them was ferocious. Thus the first
victims of Communism in Korea were Communists themselves. The anti-
Japanese guerrillas of the Pan-Russian Korean Communist Party, known as the
Irkutsk group, fought an armed battle with guerrillas from a group who had
founded a Korean Workers' Party in June 1921. The affair resulted in several
hundred deaths and forced the Comintern to try to impose unitv on the Ko-
rean Communist movement.

Korea had been a Japanese colony since 1910. Korean Communists were
at the forefront in the struggle for independence, and fierce colonial repression
claimed many victims in their ranks. The Communists themselves were to
blame for some of these deaths. Many of the cadres had been trained abroad
and knew little about the country, and heroic actions often brought disastrous
consequences; demonstrating on symbolic days such as 1 May was an invitation
to the authorities to take repressive action against them.

After the defeat of Japan, when the country was divided into two zones,
more Communists fell in factional fighting. Kim II Sung, the commander of a
small anti-Japanese guerrilla group near Manchuria, was chosen by the Soviet
Union to be the Korean leader over several other militant Communists who
had been in the country a long time. In September 1945 potential rivals of Kim
II Sung, notably Hyon Chun Hyok, were assassinated in Pyongyang. Whether
these assassinations ran to the dozens or the hundreds is still unknown.

Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea

549

Nationalists who had been allowed to stay in Pyongyang in the winter of
1945-46 were then hunted down and arrested. Together with their leader, Cho
Man Sik, they had objected to the decision made at the conference of Allied
ministers of foreign affairs, held in Moscow in December 1945, to keep Korea
under a sort of trusteeship for at least five years. Cho was arrested on 5 January
1946 and executed in October 1950, during the evacuation of Pyongyang that
preceded the advance of United Nations troops. Many of his close political
allies met the same fate.

Repression was felt by the entire population. In the northern part of the
country, the Soviet Union quickly established a state in its own image; agrarian
reform opened the way to collectivization, the population was forced into
large-scale organizations, and a one-party state was introduced. Political oppo-
nents, landowners, opponents of agrarian reform, and suspected collaborators
with the Japanese were systematically intimidated. But the purge that followed
cannot be blamed entirely on the Communists; it was also prompted by an
upsurge in nationalist sentiments. The arrival of the new regime was heralded
not by a bloodbath, but by a migration of hundreds of thousands of people to
the South. The migrants included not only the categories mentioned above,
but anyone who feared for his life or possessions. Although the North was
quickly closed to any official organizations from the South, until 1948 it re-
mained reasonably easy to pass from one zone to the other.

Victims of the Armed Struggle

This generalized exodus, during the first three years of the existence of a
Communist regime that had not yet declared itself to be an autonomous state,
did not put an end to its leaders' interest in the "Communization" of the entire
peninsula. On the contrary, they believed that the whole country would soon be
unified under their authority. Archives recently opened in Moscow show that
Kim II Sung was impatient to overthrow what he was already calling the
American "puppets." The puppets in question had a much smaller army than
the North Koreans; furthermore, they were under pressure from strikes and
terrorist and guerrilla actions by various Communist groups. Kim II Sung
believed (or said he did) that the people of the South trusted both him and his
army. In the spring of 1950 Stalin approved the invasion, which began on 25
June 1950 and took the South by surprise. Over the next three years more than
1 million civilians on both sides died, and millions lost their homes. An addi-
tional 400,000 died, and almost the same number were wounded among the
Chinese troops who rescued the North Koreans from defeat by General
Douglas MacArthur's United Nations forces. There were 200,000 dead among
the North Korean soldiers, 50,000 among the South Koreans, and 50,000

550

Communism in Asia

American dead. Three hundred French soldiers died in the UN forces, and
another 800 were wounded.

Few wars have been so clearly designed to extend the Communist zone of
influence. At the time a number of French left-wing intellectuals, including
Jean-Paul Sartre, supported the Communists, seeing South Korea as the ag-
gressor against the North. Today, thanks to the archives that are now open,
there is no longer any room for doubt. All this suffering, including the suffering
of prisoners (6,000 Americans and as many again from other countries, mostly
South Koreans, died in detention), and the personal hell of British and French
diplomats who had remained in Seoul and of Christian missionaries working
in the South who were deported by the advancing North Koreans, was attrib-
utable to actions by the Communist regime in North Korea. 1

The armistice signed in July 1953 established a demilitarized zone be-
tween the two countries more or less where the fighting began, on the 38th
parallel. This was an armistice but not a peace. Subsequent incursions and
attacks by the North on the South, against both civilians and military person-
nel, have claimed many lives. In one action carried out in 1968 by a squad of
thirty-one commandos against the South Korean presidential palace, all but
one of the attackers were killed. An assassination attempt against members of
the South Korean government in Rangoon, Burma, on 9 October 1983 led to
the death of sixteen people, including four Korean government ministers. The
midflight explosion of a Korean Air Lines jet on 29 November 1987 killed 115
people.

North Korea is not a mere suspect; it is clearly guilty of these acts. A
terrorist who was arrested shortly before the Olympic games in Seoul in 1988
explained that he was working for Pyongyang and that his mission was to
demonstrate that the South was not capable of assuring the security of the
games, and thus to destroy its international reputation. 2

Furthermore, North Korea's war against the entire capitalist world led it
in the 1960s and 1970s to assist various terrorist groups, including most notably
the Japanese Red Army (which carried out actions in Israel), several Palestinian
organizations, and guerrillas in the Philippines.

Communist Victims of the North Korean Party-State

As in Stalin's Soviet Union, in North Korea the list of victims of purges within
the Party would be extremely long. One human-rights organization has calcu-
lated that of the twenty-two members of the first North Korean government,
seventeen were assassinated, executed, or purged.^

The ink was barely dry on the Panmunjon armistice before a purge struck
a number of high-ranking cadres at the heart of the North Korean Party. On

Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea

551

3 August 1953 there was a major trial of Communists accused of spying for the
Americans and plotting to overthrow the regime. Tibor Meray, a Hungarian
journalist and writer, witnessed the events. He knew one of the accused, Sol
Jang Sik, who had served as an interpreter for the North Korean delegation in
the Kaeshong negotiations in July and August 1951. Sol Jang Sik was also a
poet and a translator of Shakespeare.

All the prisoners had a large number sewn onto the back of their jackets.
The main suspect was number 1, and the others were classified in de-
creasing order of importance, through number 14.

Number 14 was Sol Jang Sik.

I hardly recognized him. His once handsome, impassioned face was
now a picture of misery, fatigue, and resignation. No spark was left in
his eyes at all. He moved like a robot. I learned years later that the
accused were all fed very well in the weeks leading up to their first public
meeting, so that their appearance would improve after all the torture and
stress they had been through. When trials took place in public, the
authorities tried to show the audience, and particularly any repre-
sentatives from the international press who might be there, that the
prisoners were in good health, were well fed, and were generally in good
shape both physically and mentally. Foreign correspondents from the
West were never present in North Korea, but there were always journal-
ists from the Soviet Union and other Communist states. The clear aims
of the trial were to demonstrate the defendants' guilt and thereby hu-
miliate people who had once been major figures in society but were now
just prisoners sitting in the dock.

Apart from that, the trial was exactly the same as political trials in
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Bulgaria. I was so surprised by Sol's con-
dition, and the translation was so cursory, that I can hardly remember
what the charges were. My only hope was that Sol could see me, but 1 do
not think that he could because the room was so full. As far as I can
remember, the main issue was some story about a plot against the Ko-
rean People's Republic, and an assassination attempt against Kim II
Sung, the leader they all loved so much. The idea was that the accused
had been trying to turn the country back into a feudal state and to hand
North Korea over to Syngman Rhee, and that they had been spying for
the American imperialists and passing information to their agents, etc.^

Among the accused were a number of high-ranking officials, including Lu
Sung Yop, one of the secretaries of the Party's Central Committee; Paik
Hyung Bok, the minister of internal affairs; and Cho II Myung, assistant
minister of culture and propaganda. Sol was a small fish in this group. Some of
the others came from South Korea.

Pak Hon Yong, the minister of foreign affairs, a Communist who had

552

Communism in Asia

fought for the country for many years, was sentenced to death on 15 December
1955 and executed three days later as an American secret agent. Others followed
in 1956, including Mu Chong, a member of the so-called Yenan group, who
had been a general in the Eighth Chinese army, a commander in the North
Korean artillery forces, and then chief of staff of the combined Sino-North
Korean forces in the war against the South. A separate purge affected all cadres
who had Jinks to the Soviet Union, including Ho Kai; cadres linked to the
Yenan faction who were close to the Chinese, including Kim 1 )u Bong in March
1958; and cadres who had voiced approval of the Khrushchev reforms in the
Soviet Union. Various other purges took place in I960, 1967 (when Kim Kwang
Hyup, a secretary in the Party's Secretariat, was sent to the camps), and 1969,
when the best-known victim was Hu Hak-bong, who was in charge of secret
operations against the South. The disappearance of eight) students from the
Revolutionary Institute for foreign Languages in Pyongyang was also presum-
ably connected with the purge. In 1972 Pak Kum Chui, a former deputy prime
minister and member of the Politburo, was sent to a camp. In 1977 Li Yong
Mu, another former Politburo member, was sent to a prison camp, and more
students disappeared. Most of the latter were the children of cadres who were
under investigation. Other purges occurred in 197S and 1980.

These purges were sufficiently common that they seem to have been
structural in nature, rather than contingent on events. The latest purge oc-
curred in September 1997. One of the secretaries of the Party Central Com-
mittee, So Hwan Hi, who was in charge of agriculture, was executed in public
together with seventeen other cadres as a scapegoat for the severe food short-
ages currently afflicting the country. According to statements made by refugees,
whenever tension rises in the country because of material difficulties such as
shortages, Communist cadres are held responsible, and a number are sent to
prison camps or executed.

Executions

There is no way of knowing exactly how many executions have taken place in
North Korea, but an indication can be gained from the penal code. At least
forty-seven crimes are punishable by the death penalty. These can be broken
down into crimes against the sovereignty of the state, crimes against the state
administration or against state property, crimes against individuals, crimes
against property, and military crimes.

Kang Koo Chin, one of the great specialists on the North Korean legal
system, has estimated that in 1958-1960, a period of particularly brutal repres-
sion, at least 9,000 people were ejected from the Party, tried, and sentenced to
death. Extrapolating from this estimate to include the other nine purges of a

Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea

553

similar scale, one arrives at a figure of 90,000 executions. For now, this figure
must be merely an estimate of the size of the problem; perhaps one day the
Pyongyang archives will reveal the full story.

People who have escaped from the country have attested to the routine
execution of civilians for crimes such as prostitution, treason, murder, rape,
and sedition. The crowd is invited to participate, and sentencing is accompa-
nied by cries of hatred, insults, and stone-throwing. Sometimes the prisoner is
kicked and beaten to death while the crowd chants slogans. Class origin is very
important in determining punishment. Two witnesses told Asia Watch that
rape was punishable by death only for members of the lower social classes.

The North Korean justice system exists solely to promote the interests of
the regime. All judges and almost all lawyers act on the orders of the Party and
are explicitly instructed to work along strict Marxist-Leninist lines. Trials often
cover only some of the accusations, leaving the rest to be handled extrajudi-
cially. Much more drastic measures are often taken independently of the trial.

Prisons and Camps

Mrs. Li Sun Ok was a member of the Workers' Party and in charge of a supply
center reserved for cadres. She fell victim to one of the purges and was arrested
together with some of her comrades. She was tortured for a long time with
water and electricity, was beaten and deprived of sleep, and ended up confess-
ing to anything she was asked, including specifically the misappropriation of
state goods. She was then given a thirteen-year prison sentence. It was indeed a
prison sentence, although that was not the official term used. In her peniten-
tiary, some 6,000 people, including 2,000 women, worked as slave labor from
5:30 a.m. until midnight, manufacturing slippers, holsters, bags, belts, detona-
tors, and artificial flowers. Any detainees who became pregnant were brutally
forced to have abortions. Any child who was born in the prison was smothered
or had its throat cut. s

The harshness of prison conditions is well known from earlier testimony.
One exceptional account of life in the prisons of North Korea in the 1960s and
1970s comes from Ali Lameda, a Venezuelan Communist poet who was well
disposed toward the regime and went to Pyongyang to work as a translator of
official propaganda. In 1967, after expressing reservations about the effective-
ness of some of the propaganda, he was arrested and imprisoned/' In a bro-
chure published by Amnesty International, Lameda described his farcical trial,
which ended with a sentence to twenty years of hard labor for "attempted
sabotage, espionage, and trying to help foreign agents infiltrate North Korea. "
Although he himself was never tortured during the year he was in prison, he

554 Communism in Asia

heard the cries of many who were. During his six-year detention he lost about
45 pounds and developed abscesses and sores all over his body.

Other witness statements mention the pervasive use of hunger as a weapon
to break prisoners' resistance. Not only was the amount of food inadequate,
but everything possible was done to spoil whatever was distributed. Many
prisoners succumbed to diarrhea, skin complaints, pneumonia, hepatitis, and
even scurvy.

Prisons and camps are part of a vast ensemble of repressive institutions.
Among them are:

■ "Help posts," which are essentially transit camps where people await
trial for minor political crimes and nonpolitical crimes.

• "Work regeneration centers," which house between 100 and 200 people
who have been labeled antisocial, ineffective, or simply lazy. Most major
towns have one of these centers. People stay for between one month and
a year, often without ever having been to trial or even having been
charged with a specific offense.

• Hard-labor camps, At least twelve of these exist in the country, each
holding between 500 and 2,000 people. Most inmates there are common
criminals accused of theft, attempted murder, rape, or similar crimes.
Children of political prisoners, people who have been caught attempting
to flee the country, and other minor political prisoners are also incarcer-
ated in these camps.

Deportation zones, where "untrustworthy elements 1 ' such as former
landowners or people with family members who have escaped to the
South are kept. Tens of thousands of such people are placed under
house arrest in distant regions.

Special dictatorship zones. These are full-fledged concentration camps
for political prisoners. Approximately a dozen such camps exist, contain-
ing a total of 150,000-200,000 people. This figure is approximately
I percent of the population of the country, a much lower share than that
in the Soviet gulags in the 1940s. The figure should not be interpreted
as a sign that the Koreans are particularly lenient, but as a sign of how
cowed the population has become.

Most of the special dictatorship zones are in the northern part of the
country, in inaccessible mountainous regions. The Yodok zone is the biggest
and holds approximately 50,000 prisoners. It includes the Vongpyang and
Pyonjon camps, which are extremely isolated and contain some two-thirds of
all prisoners in the region, as well as the Kou-oup, Ibsok, and Daesuk camps,
where, among other groups, the families of people who have lived in Japan are

Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea

555

incarcerated. Other special dictatorship zones are located in Kaeshong, Hwa-
song, Hoiryong, and Chongjin.

These camps were established in the late 1950s to house political criminals
and Kim II Sung's opponents within the Party. Their population grew consid-
erably in 1980 as a result of a particularly large purge after the opponents of
the institutionalization of dynastic Communism were defeated at the Sixth
Congress of the Workers' Party. Some of these camps, especially Camp 15 in
the Yodok zone, are divided into a "revolutionization" sector, where prisoners
who hope to be set free are kept, and a high-security sector, which no one has
any hope of ever leaving. The "revolutionization 1 ' section is filled mainly with
prisoners from the political elite and people repatriated from Japan who have
links with Japanese organizations known to be favorably disposed toward North
Korea.

The few eyewitness descriptions of these camps mention total isolation —
high barbed-wire fences, German shepherd dogs, armed guards, surrounding
minefields — poor and insufficient food, and extremely hard work, involving the
excavation of mines, quarries, and irrigation canals, as well as wood-cutting
operations. Prisoners work twelve hours a day, followed by two hours of "po-
litical training." Hunger is perhaps the worst torture; detainees try to eat
anything from frogs and toads to rats and earthworms. Prisoners not only suffer
progressive physical decay; they also are used for special tasks such as the
digging of secret tunnels or work at dangerous nuclear projects. Some have
been used as moving targets during shooting practice by guards and troops.
Torture and sexual violence are common.

As part of the regime's affirmation of familial responsibility, entire fami-
lies have been sent to camps because one member has received a sentence. At
the time of the first great purge of Kim II Sung's opponents, in 1958, this form
of punishment was often extended to include three generations. One young
man who managed to escape to the South, Kang Chul Hwan, had been sent to
a prison camp in 1977 at the age of nine along with his father, one of his
brothers, and two of his grandparents. The grandfather, who had once been in
charge of a Korean association in Kyoto, Japan, had been arrested for making
remarks about life in a capitalist country that were judged to be too compli-
mentary. Until he was fifteen, Kang Chul Hwan followed the schedule laid
down for children in the camp: school in the mornings, where most of the
teaching involved studying the life of Kim 11 Sung, and work such as weeding
and picking up stones in the afternoon. 7

A number of French diplomats who were taken prisoner by the North
Koreans in July 1950, when the war first broke out, later spoke about their
experiences. Other statements have come from Americans on the Pueblo, a U.S.
surveillance ship captured off the Korean coast in 1968. Both sources attest to

556

Communism in Asia

the brutality of the interrogations, the indifference shown toward human Jife,
and the systematically bad conditions of detention. 8

In 1992 two refugees brought more information about life in Yodok, one
of the biggest camps in North Korea. They noted that detention conditions
were so bad that about fifteen people would try to escape each year, despite
electrified fences, watchtowcrs, and the guarantee that failure would result in
trial and execution in front of all the other prisoners. So far, no one had ever
managed to escape.

Another exceptional testimony that is now available is that of a camp guard
in the Hoiryong zone, near the China border. Thanks to this man, who fled
first to China and then to Seoul in 1994, we now have considerably more
knowledge about the world of the concentration camps in Korea.*' According
to this witness, whose name is An Myung Chul, lt bad subjects 1 ' are singled out
to be executed; "rebels, ringleaders, murderers, pregnant women (all prisoners
are forbidden to have sexual relations), and people who have killed cattle and
livestock or sabotaged material used in production. In the tiny cell, a big lump
of wood is tied to their folded legs and buttocks, and they stay like that on their
knees. In the end the damage to the circulation is enormous, and even if they
are set free, they are no longer able to walk; they die after a few months."

This particular guard had been assigned to the execution center, where
since 1984 all executions have been carried out in secret. At this camp, execu-
tions were no longer carried out in public because killing was so common that
it no longer inspired fear and terror but became an incentive to rebel.

Who carried out the executions 5 The choice was left to the discretion of
security agents, who shot when they did not want to dirtv their hands or
killed slowly if they wished to prolong the agony. I learned that people
could be beaten to death, stoned, or killed with blows from a shovel.
Sometimes the executions were turned into a game, with prisoners
being shot at as though they were targets in a shooting competition at a
fairground. Sometimes prisoners were forced to fight each other to the
death and tear each other up with their bare hands . . . With my own
eves I saw several atrocious deaths. Women rarely died peacefully. I saw
breasts slashed with knives, genitals smashed in with shovel handles,
necks broken with hammers ... In the camps, death is very banal. And
political criminals do whatever they have to do to survive. They do
anything to get a fraction more corn or pig fat. Even so, every day four
or five people would die in this camp, of hunger, by accident, or through
execution.

Escape from the camps is almost unthinkable. A guard who catches
anyone trying to escape can aspire to join the [Korean Workers' Party]
and then maybe go to university. To get these rewards, some guards

Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea

557

force prisoners to climb the fence and then shoot them or pretend to
have arrested them.

In addition to the guards, attack dogs watch the political prisoners.
These terrifying animals are basically killing machines. In July 1988 two
prisoners in Camp 13 were assailed by dogs. Nothing was left but their
bones. In 1991, two boys of fifteen were devoured by these dogs.

An Myung Chul reports a conversation between the chief of the guards and
two other personnel of Camp No. 13 that alluded to practices reminiscent of
Nazi death camps. The second in command of the squad addressed his chief:
"Comrade, I saw a lot of smoke coming out of the chimneys in the Third
Bureau yesterday. 10 Is it true that the bodies are being pressed to extract the
fat?"

The chief said that he had once gone into one of the tunnels of the Third
Bureau, near a hill. "I could smell blood, and I saw a lot of hair stuck to the
walls. I couldn't sleep that night. The smoke you saw would have come from
the cremation of the bones of those criminals. But don't talk about it or you'll
regret it. Who knows when you'll get a black bean [a bullet] in the head?"

Other guards described experiments carried out in the camp, including
deliberate efforts to starve prisoners to death so that their resistance could be
studied. According to An,

The people who carry out these executions and these experiments all
drink before they do it. But they are real experts now; sometimes they
hit prisoners with a hammer, on the back of the head. The poor prison-
ers then lose their memory, and they use them as zombies for target
practice. When the Third Bureau is running out of subjects, a black van
known as u the crow" turns up and picks out a few more prisoners,
sowing panic among the rest. The crow comes about once a month and
takes forty or fifty people off to an unknown destination.

Arrest is always discreet, with no legal procedures, so that relatives and
neighbors know nothing about it. When they realize that someone has disap-
peared, they avoid asking questions to keep out of trouble themselves.

Despite appalling working conditions, insufficient food, armed guards,
and tiny prison cells for anyone who fails to observe North Korean ways, the
North Korean logging camps, which have been located in Siberia since 1967,
pale by comparison with such horrors. Thanks to the testimony of workers who
have escaped from the camps and of Sergei Kovalev, the former human-rights
commissioner of the Russian Federation, the working conditions of these
rather special immigrants have improved enormously since the breakup of the
U.S.S.R., and they are no longer solely under North Korean control.

As in the case of Party purges, no extensive investigation is necessary to

558

Communism in Asia

reveal the scale of the problem. By extrapolating from the estimate of an
eyewitness, who reported that 5 of every 10,000 prisoners in Camp 22 were
dying every day, we can see that of the total camp population of about 200,000,
100 people died every day and 36,500 died every year." If we multiply this
number by the forty-six years of the regime's existence, we rind Korean Com-
munism directly responsible for the death of more than 1.5 million people.

Control of the Population

Even outside the camps, individual freedom of choice is almost nonexistent in
North Korea. According to a radio commentator on 3 January 1996, u The
whole of society should be welded together into one solid political force, which
breathes, moves, and thinks as one, under the leadership of a single man." A
contemporary slogan in the country says: u Think, talk, and act like Kim II
Sung and Kim Jong II."

From the top to the bottom of the social ladder, the state and the Part),
with their large organizations and police forces, control the citizens of the
country in the name of "the Party's ten principles in the drive toward unity."
That text, not the constitution, controls the everyday life of the citizens of
North Korea. Article 7 is a good indication of its nature: "We must impose the
absolute authority of our leader."

In 1945 a Social Security Bureau was established to monitor and control
the population. The Ministry of National Political Protection, set up by the
secret police in 1973 and now renamed the National Security Agency, is sub-
divided into bureaus, including the Second Bureau, for foreigners; the Third
Bureau, for border security; and the Seventh Bureau, for the camps. The official
establishment of a National Censorship Committee in 1975 institutionalized a
practice that had existed from the regime's inception. The Legal Committee
for Socialist Life was created in 1977. I2

Once a week every North Korean attends an obligatory indoctrination
meeting and a criticism and self-criticism meeting. The latter is known in North
Korea as a "balance sheet of life." Everyone must accuse himself of at least one
political fault and must reproach his neighbor for at least two faults.

North Korean cadres receive a number of privileges and material benefits,
but they are also under extremely tight control. They are forced to live in a
special area, all their telephone conversations are closely monitored, and any
audio or video cassettes in their possession are regularly examined. Because of
the systematic jamming of foreign broadcasts, all radios and televisions in
North Korea can pick up only state channels. To make any journey, special
permission is required from the relevant local authority and the necessary work

Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea

559

unit. In Pyongyang, the capital and hence a showplace for the country,
housing is tightly controlled by the government.

all

Repression and terror affect the mind and spirit as well as the body. The effects
of deliberate total isolation on the inhabitants of the country, together with the
permanent ideological barrage to which they are subjected on a scale unknown
elsewhere, must also be counted among the crimes of Communism. The re-
ports of the few who have managed to slip through the net and leave the
country are a remarkable testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.

There are two main forms of propaganda in North Korea. One is the
classic Marxist-Leninist axis, which claims that the socialist and revolutionary
state offers the best of all possible worlds to its citizens. People are to be
constantly alert, on the lookout for the imperialist enemy, all the more so today
since so many erstwhile friends on the outside have now "surrendered." The
second type of propaganda is peculiarly national and almost mystical. Instead
of relying on the arguments of dialectical materialism, the government has
created a whole mythology around the idea that the Kim dynasty represents
the will of both heaven and earth. A few examples from among the thousands
that could be cited may clarify this type of propaganda. On 24 November 1996
in Panmunjon — the village where the armistice was negotiated, and the only
place where the armies of North and South Korea and the United States are
in immediate contact — during an inspection of the North Korean army by Kim
Jong II, a thick fog suddenly covered the area. The leader could thus come and
go in the mist, examining the positions while remaining more or less hidden.
Equally mysteriously, the fog lifted at the moment he was to be photographed
with a group of soldiers ... A similar thing happened on an island in the Yellow
Sea. He came to an observation post and began to study a map of the opera-
tions. The wind and rain suddenly stopped, the clouds cleared, and the sun
came out and shone radiantly. Dispatches from the same official agency also
mention "a series of mysterious phenomena that have been noted all over Korea
as the third anniversary of the death of the Great Leader [Kim II Sung]
approaches . . . The dark sky was suddenly filled with light in the Kumchon
canton . . . Three groups of red clouds were seen to be heading toward Pyong-
yang ... At 8:10 p.m. on 4 July the rain that had been falling since early
morning suddenly stopped, and a double rainbow unfolded over the statue of
the President . . . then a bright star shone in the sky right above the statue." 13

A Strict Hierarchy

In a state claiming to base itself on socialism, the population is not only
carefully monitored and controlled; it is also subject to disparate treatment

560

Communism in Asia

depending on social origin, geographic origin (that is, whether the family
originates in North or South Korea), political affiliation, and recent signs of
loyalty toward the regime. In the 1950s the whole society was carefully subdi-
vided into fifty-one social categories that powerfully determined people's so-
cial, political, and material future. This extremely cumbersome system was
streamlined in the 1980s; now there are only three social categories. Even so,
the system of classification remains very complex. In addition to these three
basic classes, the secret services are particularly vigilant in regard to certain
categories within the classes, particularly people who have come from abroad,
who have traveled overseas, or who have received visitors.

The country is divided into a "central" class, which forms the core of
society, an "undecided" class, and a "hostile" class, which includes approxi-
mately one-quarter of the North Korean population. The North Korean Com-
munist system uses these divisions to create what is in effect a sort of apartheid:
a young man of "good origin," who might have relatives who fought against
the Japanese, cannot marry a girl of "bad origin," such as a family that origi-
nated in the South. One former North Korean diplomat, Koh Young Hwan,
notes that "North Korea has what is in effect an extremely inflexible caste
system. 1 ' 1 " 1

Although this system in its early days may have had some basis in .Marx-
ist-Leninist theory, biological discrimination is much harder to justify. Yet the
facts are there: anyone who is handicapped in North Korea suffers terrible
social exclusion. The handicapped are not allowed to live in Pyongyang. Until
recently they were all kept in special locations in the suburbs so that family
members could visit them. Today they are exiled to remote mountainous re-
gions or to islands in the Yellow Sea. Two such locations have been identified
with certainty: Boujun and Euijo, in the north of the country, close to the
Chinese border. This policy of discrimination has recently spread beyond
Pyongyang to Nampo, Kaesong, and Chongjin.

Similar treatment applies to anyone out of the ordinary. Dwarves, for
instance, are now arrested and sent to camps; they are not only forced to live
in isolation but also prevented from having children. Kim Jong II himself has
said that "the race of dwarves must disappear." 1 '

Escape

Despite heavily guarded borders, some North Koreans have managed to es-
cape. Since the war, some 700 have crossed to the South, and it is estimated
that several thousand have gone to China. The number arriving in the South
has quintupled since 1993 and continues to grow; about 100 arrived there in
1997. Most of them either are fleeing some sort of punishment or already have

Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea

561

some experience of the outside world. Thus a number of diplomats and high-
ranking Party officials are among the escapees. In February 1997, Hwang Jang
Yop, one of the Party's chief ideologists, fled to the South Korean embassy in
Beijing and then to Seoul. The ambassador to Egypt, who defected to the
United States in August 1997, had been afraid for his political future; his son
had "disappeared" a year previously. Koh Young Hwan, the North Korean
diplomat mentioned above, feared that he would be arrested because of an
imprudent remark, after a televised broadcast of the Ceausescu trial, that he
"hoped nothing similar would happen in [his] own country"; the statement was
taken to be flagrant evidence of a lack of trust in the leaders of his country. He
fled when he heard that agents from the state security bureau would be coming
to the embassy a few days later. According to his statement, failure to escape
would have meant at best automatic arrest and a camp sentence. At worst, as he
had seen in Amman, Jordan, an attempt by a diplomat to flee could end in
"neutralization," being totally encased in plaster and returned to Pyongyang.
Once at the airport, the story would probably have been that he had been in an
auto accident.

Ordinary people who failed in their attempts to flee fared little better.
According to a 1997 report in the French press, "Statements taken from people
all along the [Yalu] river are in agreement: the police who picked up fugitives
held them together by putting a wire through the cheeks or noses of these
traitors to the nation who had dared to try to leave the fatherland. As soon as
they reached their destination they were executed, and their families were sent
to labor camps." 16

Activities Abroad

Not content with crushing attempts to flee the country, the North Korean
authorities send agents abroad to attack enemies of the regime. In September
1996, for example, the cultural attache at the South Korean consulate in Vladi-
vostok was assassinated. Japan also suspects the North Koreans of kidnapping
about twenty Japanese women and forcing them to train spies and terrorists.
Another bone of contention between Japan and North Korea is the situation of
the hundreds of Japanese women who went to North Korea in 1959 with their
Korean husbands. Despite promises made at the time by the North Korean
government, none of them has ever been allowed to return home, even tempo-
rarily. According to statements made by the very few Koreans who have man-
aged to escape after being in a camp, several of these women were subsequently
detained, and the death rate among them has been extremely high. Of the
fourteen Japanese women who were incarcerated in the Yodok camp in the late
1970s, only two were still alive fifteen years later. The North Korean govern-

562

Communism in Asia

ment has consistently used these women as a bargaining chip in negotiations,
often promising their imminent departure in exchange for Japanese food aid. It
is not known exactly how the North Korean authorities make their calculations,
or how much rice would have to be provided for one Japanese woman to be set
free. Amnesty International and other international human rights organiza-
tions have examined these cases several times.

The North Koreans also kidnap South Koreans. According to the South
Korean government, more than 400 fishermen were abducted between 1955
and 1995. Those still missing include the passengers and crew members of an
airliner hijacked in 1969, a South Korean diplomat captured in Norway in April
1979, and a priest, Father Ahn Sung Un, who was kidnapped in China and
taken to North Korea in July 1995. All these people are examples of the many
South Korean citizens who have been victims of North Korean violence on
foreign soil.

Shortages and Famine

Another grave charge against the North Korean government involves the food
supply for the population. The situation has long been poor, but over the last
few years it has grown so bad that the North Korean authorities, disregarding
their sacrosanct principle of self-sufficiency, have launched an appeal for inter-
national aid. In 1996 the grain harvest was 3.7 million tons, almost 3 million
tons less than at the beginning of the decade. The poor harvests of 1997 and
1998 made the situation worse. When asked by the UN World Food Program,
the United States, and the European Union about the situation, the North
Koreans have blamed it on a series of natural disasters, including flooding in
1994 and 1995 and drought and tidal waves in 1997. The real causes of this
breakdown in the food supply are linked to the structural difficulties invariably
experienced by centrally planned socialist economies. Large-scale errors, in-
cluding the deforestation of entire areas and the hasty construction of badly
planned terraces on orders from the very top of the Party, contributed to the
seriousness of the flooding. In addition, the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the political reorganization in China have curtailed aid from these two coun-
tries; both now seek to trade in accordance with the normal laws of the interna-
tional market. Because the North Korean government is extremely short of
hard currency, the acquisition of agricultural machinery, fertilizer, and fuel is
increasingly difficult.

It is impossible to know how grave the food situation really is. World
Vision has forecast a possible 2 million victims; the German Red Cross claims
that 10,000 children are dying of starvation every month. 17 There is no doubt
that the situation is serious, and the rumors that circulate among the inhabitants

Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea

563

on the Chinese border have been confirmed by reports from experts at the
United Nations. Shortages exist in many places, and in some places there is
famine. But the exploitation of well-meaning individuals on goodwill visits,
who claim that millions of deaths will inevitably result if aid is not increased,
and the dissemination abroad of photographs of undernourished children and
videos of television programs, which apparently teach the population how to
eat grass instead of food, are perhaps signs of a highly organized campaign to
blacken a picture that, though far from ideal, is perhaps not as catastrophic as
suggested. While North Korea is trying to convince the world that it is facing
a grave crisis and that any interruption in aid would have catastrophic conse-
quences for political stability in the peninsula and peace in the Far East, the
North Korean army is extremely well fed and is building bigger and better
missiles.

Almost the only figures available for the number of victims of the food
crisis come from data released by the North Koreans themselves, which show
a not negligible number of children suffering from the effects of malnutrition.
Nutrition experts from the World Food Program made a study of a population
sample, provided by the government, of 4,200 children, which revealed that 17
percent were suffering from malnutrition. 18 This figure seems to confirm the
existence of widespread shortages and probably regional and local pockets of
famine. The shortages and famine, which are closely linked to political deci-
sions made by the North Korean regime, have been held in check to some extent
by the efforts of the imperialist" outside world, which has provided millions
of tons of grain in aid. Deprived of such aid, the population of North Korea
would face a real famine with catastrophic consequences.

Final Figures

In North Korea, perhaps more than anywhere else, the effects of Communism
are difficult to translate into numbers. Some of the reasons are insufficient
statistical data, the impossibility of carrying out any field research, and the
inaccessibility of all the relevant archives. But there are also other reasons. How
can one calculate the soul-destroying effects of constant, mindless propa-
ganda? How can one put a figure on the absence of freedom of expression,
freedom of association, and freedom of movement; on the ways in which a
child's life is destroyed simply because his grandfather received a prison sen-
tence; on the consequences for a woman who is forced to have an abortion in
atrocious conditions? How could statistics show what life is really like when
people are obsessed by the possibility of starvation, by lack of heating, and by
other acute shortages and privations? How can one compare the admittedly

564

Communism in Asia

imperfect democracy in the South with the nightmarish situation in North
Korea?

Some have argued that North Korean Communism is a caricature, a
throwback to Stalinism. But this museum of Communism, the Asian Madame
Tussaud's, is all too alive.

To the 100,000 who have died in Party purges and the 1.5 million deaths
in concentration camps must be added at least 1.3 million deaths stemming
from the war, which was organized and instigated by the Communists, a war
that continues in small but murderous actions, including commando attacks on
the South and acts of terrorism; and the uncertain but growing number of
direct and indirect victims of malnutrition. Even if we content ourselves with
a figure of 500,000 victims of the primary or even secondary effects of malnu-
trition (including the usual, unverifiable rumors of cannibalism), we end up
with an overall figure of more than 3 million victims in a country of 23 million
inhabitants that has lived under Communism for fifty years.

Vietnam and Laos:

The Impasse of War Communism

Jean-Louis Margolin

We must transform our prisons into schools.

Le Duan, secretary general of the Vietnamese Communist Party

admitting the damage caused by Communism in Vietnam is today
still anathema to many Westerners, who took a stand against French colonial-
ism and American "imperialism" in the area and found themselves in the same
camp as the Vietnamese Communist Party. At the time it seemed quite logical
to assume that the Party was an expression of the hopes and aspirations of the
people to build a fraternal and egalitarian society. Its appeal was enhanced by
the charisma of Ho Chi Minh, who founded the Party and led it until 1969, as
well as the extraordinary tenacity of its members and its clever manipulation of
propaganda abroad, where it presented itself as a peace-loving, democratic
organization. At the very time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to
feel sympathy for Kim II Sung and his odious regime, it seemed ever more
logical to prefer the smiling austerity of the Hanoi mandarins to the rotten and
corrupt regime of Nguyen Van Thieu that ruled in Saigon from 1965 to 1975.
People genuinely wanted to believe that the Vietnamese Communist Party was
not just another Stalinist regime, but instead was above all a nationalist regime
that used a Communist label in order to receive aid from China and the Soviet
Union.

It would be ridiculous to question the sincerity of the Vietnamese Com-
munists' nationalist aspirations, given the unparalleled determination with
which they fought against the French, the Americans, the Chinese, and the

565

566

Communism in Asia

Japanese. For them the accusation of "treachery" or "collaboration" had the
same force that the label "counterrevolutionary" did in China. But Commu-
nism was never incompatible with nationalism or even xenophobia, particularly
in Asia. Unfortunately, beneath the surface of this apparently amiable and
unanimously accepted nationalism there lurked a Stalinist form of Maoism that
followed its prototypes extremely closely.

The Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) got off to a bad start. 1 Soon
after its founding in 1930, several Party activists were involved in a spectacular
trial for actions taken in Saigon in 1928. Influenced by traditions of the local
secret societies and by nationalist terrorism, Party members had judged and
executed one of their comrades and then burned his corpse. His crime had been
to seduce a female member of the Party. 2 In 1931 the Party threw itself into
the creation of rural "soviets" in Nge Tinh and started liquidating local land-
owners by the hundreds. In creating the Soviets, the ICP followed the Jiangxi
model, despite Vietnam's comparatively minuscule size. The flight of many of
the inhabitants facilitated the rapid return of colonial troops. When the Indo-
Chinese Communist Party, which hid behind the "united front" of the League
for the Independence of Vietnam (Viet Minh), finally dared to launch a full-
scale armed struggle in the spring of 1945, it seemed more hostile to "traitors"
and "reactionaries" (who sometimes included its own functionaries) than to the
better-armed occupying Japanese forces. One of the Party's leaders proposed
an assassination campaign to "speed up the advance of the movement." Land-
owners and local mandarins were targets of choice, and popular tribunals were
established to sentence them and confiscate their goods. The terror was also
aimed at political opponents of the comparatively weak ICP, which at the time
had only 5,000 members. The Party wanted to produce a power vacuum as
soon as possible so that it could assume leadership of the nationalist movement.
The Dai Viet, a nationalist party allied with the Japanese, was savagely perse-
cuted, and the Viet Minh units under Son lay asked Hanoi to send an elec-
tricity generator and a specialist so that they could torture "traitors" on a larger
scale. 1

The August revolution that catapulted Ho Chi Minh to power in the wake
of the Japanese surrender made the ICP the central element in the new state.
In the several weeks preceding the arrival of Allied troops (French and British
from the south, Chinese from the north), the ICP redoubled its campaign to
liquidate all competition. The victims of this terror included leaders of most
of the major opposition forces in Vietnam, including the emblematic moderate
constitutionalist Bui Quang Chieu, the great intellectual and right-wing poli-
tician Pham Quynh, and Huynh Phu So, the founder of the political religious
sect Hoa Hao, who had himself ordered numerous assassinations. But it was
the Trotskyites, who though relatively thin on the ground were still active in

Vietnam and Laos

567

the Saigon region, who were the objects of systematic extermination. Their
main leader, Ta Tu Thau, was arrested and killed in September 1945 in Quang
Ngai, an area that suffered particularly badly in the cleansing/ These actions
were supported by the Communist leader in Saigon, Tran Van Giau, who had
spent time in Moscow, though he was later to deny any involvement in the
assassinations. He declared on 2 September: "A number of traitors to the
fatherland are swelling their ranks to betray their country and serve the enemy
... we must punish the groups who are creating trouble in the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam and facilitating an invasion by the enemy." 5 An article in
the Viet Minh press in Hanoi on 29 August recommended that the people set
up "traitor elimination committees" in every neighborhood and village. 6 Doz-
ens, perhaps hundreds, of Trotskyites were captured and killed. Others, who
in October had helped defend Saigon against British and French forces, were
deprived of munitions and food, and most were killed, 7 On 25 August a state
security organization was established in Saigon on the Soviet model, and the
prisons that had just been emptied began to fill again. The Viet Minh formed
an Assault Assassination Committee, which marched through the streets. Most
of its members were recruited from the local underworld, and it was at the head
of the anti-French pogrom of 25 September that left dozens of mutilated
corpses in its wake.* Vietnamese women who had married Frenchmen were also
systematically slaughtered, although these actions were blamed on people who
were not really members of the Viet Minh. In August and September alone the
Viet Minh carried out thousands of assassinations and tens of thousands of
kidnappings. These were often local initiatives, but there is no doubt that the
central authorities were encouraging such actions on a huge scale, and the ICP
later declared publicly that it regretted not having wiped out more of its
enemies at that time. 4 In the north, which was the only part of the country
really under ICP control before the outbreak of the Indochina war in 1946,
secret police and detention camps were already in place. In practice, the Demo-
cratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was already a one-party state; the radical
nationalists of the Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD, the Vietnamese Na-
tional Party, founded in 1927), who had been engaged in a bloody struggle with
the Viet Minh, had been eliminated as a political force in July 1945 as a result
of the combined efforts of the ICP and the colonial powers. The latter had
come down hard on the VNQDD ever since the party had organized the Yenbai
mutiny in 1930.

After World War II the repressive violence of the Communists was re-
deployed as armed resistance against the French colonial powers. Numerous
eyewitness accounts are available about the prison camps in which soldiers of
the French Expeditionary Force were held. 10 Many suffered and died there; out
of 20,000, only 9,000 were still alive to be liberated when the Geneva peace

568 Communism in Asia

accord was signed in 1954." The terrible diseases endemic to the mountains of
Indochina decimated the prisoners, who received woefully inadequate medical
care, lived in extremely unhygienic conditions, and were often deliberately
starved. Beatings and torture were also common, but French soldiers could be
useful to their captors. The ICP considered them u war criminals" and forced
them to repent and take on the values of their captors so that they could be
used in propaganda against their own camp. This Chinese-style reeducation
was assisted by many advisers sent by Mao after 1950. These propaganda
sessions forced all "students" to participate actively and divided all participants
into "reactionaries" and "progressives." They made extensive promises, in-
cluding the possibility of liberation, and met with some impressive successes,
mainly because of the physical and psychological exhaustion of the prisoners,
but also because, later on, the French prisoners were treated less badly than the
Vietnamese themselves were in South Vietnam.

In December 1953, when victory seemed imminent, the Viet Minh
launched agrarian reforms in the liberated zones. By the end of 1954 this
measure had been extended to all the land north of the 17 th parallel, which had
been given to the Communists in the Geneva peace accord. The reforms were
completed in 1956. The aims and pace of the land reforms were similar to those
of the Chinese agrarian reforms of 1946-1952, and they strengthened the links
between the Party, which had officially reappeared in 1951, and the poor and
middle-range peasantry. By eliminating potential centers of resistance to Com-
munism, the land reform became an important stepping-stone on the way to
complete state control of the economy. And yet, even more so than in China,
the traditional elite in the countryside maintained strong support for the Viet
Minh because of the Party's strongly nationalist stance. The Viet Minh's
ferocious and murderous methods were identical with those of their neighbors
to the north. In every village, activists, occasionally enlisting the help of theat-
rical troupes, tried to incite the poorer peasants (this was often extremely
difficult) and encourage them to put their victims on public trial. The victims
were chosen in a fairly arbitrary manner, frequently according to a quota of 4-5
percent, recalling again the sacred 5 percent of Maoism. 12 These victims were
often killed, or at the very least imprisoned, and their goods confiscated. As in
China, the entire family was forced to suffer. By not taking political merit into
consideration, these fanatics showed not only their unpitying dogmatism, but
also the will toward a totalitarian classification of society that was a driving force
inside the Vietnamese Communist Party. One woman who was a rich landowner
and a successful entrepreneur was singled out for the attention of the peasants
even though she was a benefactor of the revolution and the proud mother of
two Viet Minh soldiers. When the peasants refused to react, "a group who had
been well trained in China were called in, and they managed to turn the

Vietnam and Laos

569

situation around . . . Mme. Long was accused of having killed three sharecrop-
pers before 1945, of having slept with a Frenchman, and of having collaborated
with the French and spied for them. Exhausted by the treatment she received,
she ended up admitting everything and was sentenced to death. One of her
sons, who was in China at the time, was brought home, deprived of his rank,
stripped of his medals, and sentenced to twenty years in prison." As in Beijing,
people were found guilty simply because they had been accused by the Party,
which never made mistakes. Therefore, the best response was often to do what
was expected of you: "It was better to have killed your father and mother and
admitted it than to say nothing and to have done nothing wrong at all." 13

The scale of violence was extraordinary. The theme of hatred of the
adversary was hammered home again and again. According to Le Due Tho,
who was later to share the Nobel Peace Prize with Henry Kissinger, "If one
wishes to convince the peasants to take up arms, first of all you have to fill them
with hatred for the enemy." In January 1956, in an article in Nhan da (The
people), the official organ of the Communist Party, one could read that "the
landowning classes will never be quiet until they have been eliminated " The
motto was similar to those found in China: "Better ten innocent deaths than
one enemy survivor." Torture was practiced routinely, to an extent that began
to worry Ho Chi Minh by the end of 1954: "A number of cadres have once
again made the mistake of using torture. This is a savage method that is used
by the imperialists, capitalists, and feudal landlords to hold the masses and the
revolution in check . . . Throughout this phase, the recourse to torture is once
again strictly banned. " M

There was one major difference from the Chinese model. Whereas in
China reform of the Party came after the experiment in social engineering that
was agricultural reform, in Vietnam the two were carried out simultaneously.
The reason was undoubtedly the relative sizes of the privileged classes in the
two countries. In Vietnam, as in China, 5 percent of the population was sus-
pected of being infiltrators from the VNQ_DD, a party that was compared to
the Chinese Kuomintang. In a distant echo of the Jiangxi purges, the Vietnam-
ese authorities engaged in witch-hunts for phantom "anti-Bolshevik counter-
revolutionary elements." Paranoia swept the country, and even heroes of the
Indochina war were assassinated or sent to camps. In the discourse of the
Vietnamese Communists, the memory of 1956 (the chink huan reached its high
point early in that year) still evokes horror in all the participants: "One Com-
munist Party secretary who fell before a firing squad died shouting 'Long live
the Indochinese Communist Party!' Unable to understand what was happening,
he died convinced that he was being shot by the fascists." 15 The exact number
of losses is hard to gauge, but they were certainly catastrophic. There were
probably some 50,000 executions in the countryside (excluding combat deaths),

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that is, 0.3-0.4 percent of the population (a figure very similar to the fraction
of the population that died in the Chinese agrarian reforms). 16 Between 50,000
and 100,000 people were imprisoned; 86 percent of the members of Party cells
in the countryside were purged, as were 95 percent of the cadres in the anti-
French resistance. In the words of the leader of the purge, who in 1956
admitted that mistakes had been made, u the leadership [of the rectification
committee] made some rather tendentious judgments about the Party organi-
zation. It was decided that the rural cells, particularly those in zones that had
been newly liberated, were without exception controlled by the enemy or had
been infiltrated by them, and that all the district or provincial leadership
committees were being controlled by the landowners or by counterrevolution-
aries." 17 These purges foreshadowed the mass condemnations of entire classes
by the Khmer Rouge (see Chapter 24).

The army was the first to organize a chmh huan, which was more ideo-
logical than repressive, within its ranks in 1951. From 1952 to 1956 "rectifica-
tion" was a constant. Tension was so high in some reeducation camps that
razors and knives had to be confiscated, and the lights kept on all night to
prevent suicides among the inmates. 18 And yet it was the army that finished its
purge first. Persecutions hit its own cadres so hard that many deserted to the
South. 19 This trend seriously worried the authorities, whose aim after all was
to reunify the country. By contrast with China, the weight of military necessity
brought a certain realism to the whole business, and the relatively small size of
the country meant that those who were unhappy found it easier to flee. These
factors led to a certain attenuation of the violence. This is also evident from
the fate of Catholics in the North, who at 1 .5 million people made up 1 percent
of the population. Initially persecuted, they were well enough organized to take
advantage of the mass exodus to the South, leaving under the protection of the
last French troops. At least 600,000 of them reached South Vietnam.

The effects of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party
were also beginning to be felt, and Vietnam experienced a timid Hundred
Flowers movement in April 1956. September marked the appearance of the
review Nhan van (Humanism), symbolizing the aspirations of a number of
intellectuals for freedom. The daring writers mocked the prose of the official
censor To Huu, the author of the following poem:

Long live Ho Chi Minh

The guiding light of the proletariat!

Long live Stalin

The great eternal tree!

Peace grows in his shadow!

Kill, kill again, let your hands never stop

Let fields and paddyfields produce rice in abundance

Vietnam and Laos

571

So that taxes can be paid at once.

Let us march together with the same heart

So that the Party may last for ever

Let us adore Chairman Mao

And build an eternal culr to Stalin. 20

The intellectuals were punished for their audacity. Literary reviews that
criticized the regime were soon banned, and a campaign similar to the one in
China against Hu Feng and freedom of artistic expression began, with the
personal support of Ho Chi Minh. 2 ' The plan was to ensure a united front
among all intellectuals in Hanoi who were members of the Party or close to it
and many of whom had previously fought in the resistance. Early in 1958, 476
"ideological saboteurs" were forced to make public acts of self-criticism and
were sent either to work camps or to the Vietnamese equivalent of the Chinese
iaojiao. 12 As in the People's Republic of China, the temptation to enact Khrush-
chev-style reforms was quickly rejected in favor of strengthening the orthodox
line. The factor that both limited repression and kept it going was the war in
the South, which flared up again in 1957 in response to the ferocious anti-Com-
munist policies of the U.S.-supported Ngo Dinh Diem regime. In May 1959
the Vietnamese Communist Party made a secret decision to try to spread the
war and to support it by sending troops and arms, despite the immense cost to
the people of North Vietnam. This did not prevent the government from also
attempting a Chinese-style Great Leap Forward in agriculture, initiated with
a series of enthusiastic articles by Ho Chi Minh himself in October 1 958. 21 The
combination of massive irrigation projects and a long period of drought led,
as it did in China, to a fall in production, followed by a serious famine with an
unknown number of victims. 24 The war effort was not enough to prevent the
purging of numerous pro-Soviet cadres inside the Party in 1964-65 and again
in 1967, including the former personal secretary of "Uncle Ho." Such events
were enough to show that the leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party
shared the antirevisionist tendencies of their Chinese counterparts. Some vic-
tims of the purges remained in prison for more than a decade, without ever
being brought to trial. 25

The so-called American war, which ended only with the final withdrawal
of US. troops following the signing of the Paris peace treaty in January 1973
and the subsequent fall of the South Vietnamese regime on 30 April 1975, was
not in fact followed by the bloodbath that so many feared and that did take
place in neighboring Cambodia. But the Vietnamese prisoners of the Commu-
nist forces — including "traitors" from their own ranks— were severely abused
and often simply liquidated rather than moved. 2f> It is clear that the civil war
and struggle for freedom were accompanied by many atrocities on both sides.

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Communism in Asia

Atrocities were also committed against civilians who had elected to support one
side or the other. As a result, it is extremely difficult to calculate the numbers
involved or even to describe the methods used. But the Communists did carry
out at least one large-scale massacre. During the few weeks when the Viet Cong
controlled the ancient imperial capital, Hue, during the Tet offensive in Feb-
ruary 1968, at least 3,000 people were massacred, including Vietnamese priests,
French religious workers, German doctors, and a number of officials and
government workers. 27 The number of deaths was far higher than in the mas-
sacres carried out by Americans. Some of the victims were buried alive; others
were taken away to "study sessions" from which they never returned. 28 It is
difficult to understand such crimes, which have never been officially recognized
and which were clearly an adumbration of what was to come from the Khmer
Rouge. Would the Communists have acted in the same manner if they had taken
Saigon in 1968?

In any case, they did not act in such fashion when they captured it in 1975.
For a few brief weeks, the approximately 1 million officials and soldiers in the
Saigon regime could even believe that the much-vaunted "policy of clemency"
of President Ho was more than simple political rhetoric. As a result, these
officials began to cooperate and register with the new authorities. Then, in early
June, people were suddenly called in for reeducation, which officially lasted
three days for simple footsoldiers and an entire month for officers and civil
servants. 29 In fact three days often became three years, and the month became
seven or eight years. The last survivors of the reeducation programs did not
return home until 1 986. u> Pham Van Dong, the prime minister at the time,
admitted in 1980 that 200,000 had been reeducated in the South. Serious
estimates range from 500,000 to 1 million out of a population of 20 million.
The victims included a large number of students, intellectuals, monks (both
Buddhist and Catholic), and political militants (including Communists). Many
of these people had been in sympathy with the National Liberation Front of
South Vietnam, which revealed itself to be no more than a cover for Northern
Communists and which almost immediately broke all its promises to respect
the wishes of the people of the South. As in 1954-1956, onetime comrades-in-
arms were soon suffering in the rectification campaigns. To the number of
prisoners who were trapped in special camps must be added an indeterminate
but large number of "minor" reeducation cases who were locked up for several
weeks in their place of work or study. By comparison, during the worst periods
of the anti-Communist regime in the South, enemies on the left claimed that
some 200,000 people were locked up in camps. 11

Conditions of detention under Communist rule varied considerably. Some
camps near towns did not even have barbed-wire fences, and the regime there

Vietnam and Laos

573

was more one of constraint than of actual punishment. The more difficult cases
were sent farther north, to the more unhealthy, distant areas, to camps originally
built for French prisoners. Isolation was total, and there was almost no medical
care. Survival in these camps often depended on parcels sent by the families of
prisoners. Undernourishment was as bad as it was in the prisons; detainees
w r cre fed only 200 grams of poor-quality rice filled with stones per day. As
elsewhere, hunger was often used as a weapon by the authorities against those
awaiting trial. Doan Van Toai has left a gripping account of life in one such
prison, which shows that this universe shared many of the characteristics of
the Chinese prison camps, but was somewhat worse in terms of overcrowding,
sanitary conditions, the prevalence of violent and often fatal punishments such
as whipping, and long delays before trial. 'There were sometimes seventy to
eighty prisoners in a cell built for twenty, and walks were often impossible
because of construction inside the prison yard. The cells of the colonial period
were seen as havens of peace and tranquillity in comparison. The tropical
climate and the lack of air made breathing very difficult. All day long, people
took turns standing by the one small airhole. The smells were unbearable, and
skin complaints were rife. Even water was severely rationed. The hardest
punishment was undoubtedly solitary confinement, sometimes for years on
end, with no contact allowed with family. Torture was hidden but ever-present,
as were executions. In prison, the tiniest infringement of regulations was
punished harshly, and rations were so small that death often came within
weeks. 12

One testament about prison conditions, "signed" orally by forty-eight
courageous prisoners, was memorized and circulated through the prisons of
Ho Chi Minh Citv:

We,

workers, peasants, and proletarians,

believers, artists, writers, and patriotic intellectuals interned in dif-
ferent prisons across Vietnam,

wish first of all to express our debt of gratitude to;

progressive movements throughout the world,

workers' and intellectual struggle movements,

everyone who over the last ten years has supported the fight for
human rights in Vietnam and supported the struggle for democracy and
the freedom of oppressed and exploited Vietnamese citizens . . .

The prison system of the old regime (which was itself widely
condemned by international opinion) was quickly replaced by a more
subtly planned system that is far harsher and cruder. All contact be-
tween prisoners and their families is forbidden, even by mail. The fami-

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Communism in Asia

lies of prisoners are kept in the dark about the fate of those in prison,
which adds to the suffering and anguish. In the face of these humiliat-
ing, discriminatory procedures prisoners keep quiet, fearing that any
objections they raise might result in further punishment for their rela-
tives, who could be killed at any moment without their knowledge . . .

Conditions inside the prisons are unimaginably bad. In the Chi
Hoa prison, the official Saigon prison, 8,000 people under the old re-
gime were kept in conditions that were universally condemned. Today
there are more than 40,000 people in the same prison. Prisoners often
die from hunger, lack of air, or torture, or by their own hand . . .

There are two sorts of prison in Vietnam: the official prisons and
the concentration camps. The latter are far out in the jungle, and the
prisoner is sentenced to a lifetime of forced labor. There are no trials,
and hence no possibility of using a legal mechanism in their defense . . .

If it really is the case that humanity at present is recoiling from the
spread of Communism, and rejecting at last the claims of the North
Vietnamese Communists that their defeat of American imperialism is
proof of their invincibility, then we, the prisoners of Vietnam, ask the
International Red Cross, humanitarian organizations throughout the
world, and all men of goodwill to send us cyanide capsules as soon as
possible so that we can put an end to our suffering ourselves. We want to
die now! Help us to carry out this act, and help us kill ourselves as soon
as possible. We would be eternally in your debt.

Vietnam, August 1975— October 1977"

To this strange tableau of "liberation" should be added the spectacle of hun-
dreds of thousands of boat people who fled misery and repression, many of
whom drowned or were killed by pirates. The first real sign of relaxation in
repression came only in 1986, when the new secretary general of the Vietnam-
ese Communist Party, Nguyen Van Linh, freed a large number of political
prisoners and closed the killing camps of the northern region. A new penal
code is at last going to be promulgated. The process of liberalization has been
timid and contradictory, and the 1990s have been marked by an uneasy balance
between conservatives and reformers. Repressive urges have dashed the hopes
of many, even though arrests are now much more carefully targeted and carried
out on a relatively small scale. Many intellectuals and religious figures are still
persecuted and imprisoned, and rural discontent in the north has sparked riots
that have been put down with extreme violence. The best chance for a relaxa-
tion of the situation in the longer term is probably the hope that private
enterprise will inevitably bring change, as it has in China, enabling an ever-
growing number of inhabitants to escape the direct control of the state and the

Vietnam and Laos

575

Party. At the same time, there is a growing business mafia that is extremely
corrupt and that itself constitutes a new, more ordinary form of oppression of
a population that is even poorer than the population of China.

Laos: A Population in Flight

Everyone has heard about the drama of the Vietnamese boat people, but Laos,
which became Communist in the aftermath of the events of 1975 in Vietnam,
has seen a proportionally larger section of the population take flight. Admit-
tedly, all that Laotians have to do to flee is to cross the Mekong River into
Thailand. Since most of the population of Laos lives in the river valley or
nearby, and since repressions are relatively limited, departure is quite easy.
Around 300,000 people (10 percent of the population) have lied the country,
including well over 30 percent of the Hmong minority in the mountains
(around 100,000 people) and about 90 percent of all intellectuals, technicians,
and officials. In Communist Asia, only North Korea in 1950-1953 saw a larger
share of its population flee the country.

Since 1945 the fate of Laos has depended on that of Vietnam. The French
and subsequently the Americans lent their support., including military support,
to what was basically a right-wing monarchy. The Vietnamese Communists
backed the Pathet Lao, which was dominated by a few local Communists who
invariably had personal links to Vietnam. The movement was totally dependent
on Vietnam for military support. The sparsely populated eastern part of the
country was directly involved in the American phase of the Vietnamese conflict.
Ho Chi Minh's supply lines passed through the area, and as a result it was
bombed relentlessly by the Americans. The US. Central Intelligence Agency
established a powerful, armed anti-Communist movement among the local
Hmong. No significant atrocities occurred in the ensuing military campaign,
which in general was desultory and intermittent. By 1975 the Communists
controlled the greater part of the eastern region but only one-third of the
country's population. The rest, including some 600,000 interned refugees
(20 percent of the inhabitants), were along the Mekong, to the west.

The seizure of power, in the new Indochinese political configuration, was
quite peaceful, a sort of Asiatic "velvet revolution." The neutral former prime
minister, Souvanna Phouma, became a special adviser to the new regime headed
by Prince Souphanouvong, a relative of the deposed king. The new "people's
democratic republic" followed the Vietnamese example. Almost all officials of
the old regime (around 30,000 people) were sent to reeducation camps in distant
northern and eastern provinces along the Vietnamese border, where the climate
is inhospitable. Many remained there for as long as five years. Around 3,000

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Communism in Asia

"hardened criminals" — mainly police and army officers— were interned in
camps with particularly harsh regimes on the Nam Ngum Islands. The royal
family itself was arrested in 1977, and the last prince died in detention. Such
events are probably enough to explain most of the departures, which were often
quite dramatic. It was not unusual for people fleeing the country to be fired
upon.

The main difference from the pattern of events in Vietnam was the
presence of an anti-Communist guerrilla force that was several thousand
strong, consisting primarily of Hmong. In 1977 the guerrilla resistance was a
sufficient cause of concern in Vientiane that the government ordered aerial
bombardment of the region. Unconfirmed statements claim that there was a
"yellow rain" of chemical or biological weapons. What is certain is that after
their mobilization during the war, the Hmong guerrilla forces took part in the
large-scale departures from the country. In 1975 huge columns of Hmong
civilians set off for Thailand, leading to at least one serious incident with the
Communist army. Refugees' accounts claim that at least 45,000 victims either
were killed or died of starvation during the journey. In 1991 there were still
55,000 people from Laos, including 45,000 Hmong people from the mountain
regions, in camps in Thailand, waiting for a final destination. Some later
managed to find sanctuary in French Guyana.

There have been several purges of state and Party leaders, but these have
not been bloody. One took place in 1979 as part of a rupture with China;
another occurred in 1990, when some people advocated a course similar to the
one being pursued in Eastern Europe. The departure of some 50,000 Vietnam-
ese soldiers in 1988, a series of liberal economic reforms, and the reopening of
the border with Thailand have also lightened the atmosphere. Today there are
few political prisoners, and Communist propaganda is quite attenuated. But
only a few thousand refugees have returned to the "country of a million
elephants." Laos remains extremely poor and backward, and its future depends
on increasing ties with the hundreds of thousands of wealthy and educated
people who left at the height of the Communist regime.* 4

Cambodia:

The Country of Disconcerting Crimes

Jean-Louis Margolin

We must give a pure and perfect depiction of the history of the Party.
Pol Pot

I he lineage from Mao Zedong to Pol Pot is obvious. This is one of
the paradoxes that make the Khmer Rouge revolution so difficult to analyze
and understand. The Cambodian tyrant was incontestably mediocre and a pale
copy of the imaginative and cultivated Beijing autocrat who with no outside
help established a regime that continues to thrive in the world's most populous
country. Yet despite Pol Pot's limitations, it is the Cultural Revolution and the
Great Leap Forward that look like mere trial runs or preparatory sketches for
what was perhaps the most radical social transformation of all: the attempt to
implement total Communism in one fell swoop, without the long transitional
period that seemed to be one of the tenets of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.
Money was abolished in a week; total collectivization was achieved in less than
two years; social distinctions were suppressed by the elimination of entire
classes of property owners, intellectuals, and businessmen; and the ancient
antagonism between urban and rural areas was solved by emptying the cities in
a single week. It seemed that the only thing needed was sufficient willpower,
and heaven would be found on Earth. Pol Pot believed that he would be
enthroned higher than his glorious ancestors — Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Ze-
dong — and that the revolution of the twenty-first century would be conducted
in Khmer, just as the revolutions of the twentieth century had been in Russian
and then Chinese.

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Cambodia

In reality, the Khmer Rouge's mark in history will always be written in
blood. 1 There is now an abundant bibliography to ensure that this is the case.
All eyewitness statements and analyses by researchers highlight the theme of
inhuman repression. The only real questions are why and how such horror
could have come about. In the scope of repression, Cambodian Communism
surpasses and differs radically from all other forms of Communism. 2 Depend-
ing on how one phrases these questions, one can see it as an extreme and
aberrant case, pointing to its brevity — it lasted only three years and eight
months — or as a grotesque but revealing caricature of certain fundamental
traits of the Communist phenomenon. The debate is far from over, not least
because we still know very little about the leaders of the Khmer Rouge them-
selves — they hardly ever spoke in public and they published almost nothing —
but also because Chinese and Vietnamese archives, which might be of help, are
still inaccessible.

Still, we do have an abundance of information at our disposal. Although
Cambodia was one of the last countries in the world to become a Communist
state, it was also Communist for only a brief period, and by 1979 it had
dissociated itself altogether from the more extreme forms of Communism. The
strange "people's democracy" that accompanied the decade of Vietnamese
military occupation seemed to base its ideology entirely on condemnation of
the u Pol Pot-Ieng Sary genocidal clique," judging all forms of socialism to be
too traumatic after the events of those years. 1 Victims, for the most part refu-
gees who had managed to escape abroad, were encouraged to speak about their
experiences and were often very eager to do so. Researchers were also welcomed
into the country. A pluralist political regime was established under the watchful
eye of the United Nations in 1992. 4 (At the same time, a sizable research grant
was given by the U.S. Congress to the Cambodian Genocide Program run by
Yale University, which made material conditions in the country considerably
easier.) For some, however, these stabilization measures have gone too far. For
them, the reintegration of the last surviving Khmer Rouge officials into the
political sphere seems to indicate a worrying form of amnesia inside the coun-
try. The Museum of Genocide has also been closed, and many of the killing
fields are buried once again.

Nevertheless, we do know more or less what happened in Cambodia from
1975 to 1979, although there is still much work to be done in determining the
exact number of those who died, the extent of local variations in policy, the
exact chronology of events, and the manner in which decisions were made
inside the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). We certainly know enough
to prove that the early claims of Francois Ponchaud were justified. 5 Like Simon
Leys before him, he shook up the conformism among leftist intellectuals, who
at first refused to accept his message. 6 Because these claims slowly came to be

579

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Communism in Asia

recognized as the truth, in part thanks to the efforts of the Vietnamese Com-
munists, stories of life under the terror of the Khmer Rouge played an impor-
tant role in the crisis faced by Communism and Marxism in the West. Like the
Jews who gave their last ounce of strength so that the world would know about
the realities of the Holocaust, bearing witness was sometimes the last despairing
goal of a number of Cambodians who braved all sorts of dangers to escape
abroad. Their tenacity often bore fruit. All of mankind should take up their
flame today, remembering cases like that of Pin Yathay, who wandered alone
and starving through the jungle for a month "to bring news of the genocide in
Cambodia, to describe what we have been through, to tell how several million
men, women, and children were all coldly programmed for death . . . how the
country was razed to the ground and plunged back into a prehistoric era, and
how its inhabitants were tortured so relentlessly ... I wanted to live so that I
could beg the world to come to the aid of the survivors and try to prevent total
extermination." 7

The Spiral of Horror

Despite a rather prickly nationalism, rational Cambodians recognize that their
country was really a victim of a purely domestic tragedy — a small group of
idealists turned toward evil — and that the traditional elites were tragically
incapable of reacting to save the country or themselves. The combination is far
from exceptional in Asia or elsewhere, but only rarely does it lead to revolu-
tions. Other factors were also to blame, including the unique geographic situ*
ation of the country, especially its long border with Laos and Vietnam, and the
historical moment. The full-scale war that had been raging in Vietnam since
1964 was undoubtedly a decisive factor in these events.

Civil War (1970-1975)

The Khmer kingdom, which had been a French protectorate since 1863, es-
caped the Indochinese war of 1946-1954 more or less unharmed. 8 At the
moment when resistance groups linked to the Viet Minh began to form in
1953, Prince Sihanouk began a peaceful "crusade for independence." Facili-
tated by excellent diplomatic relations between Sihanouk and Paris, this "cru-
sade" met with considerable success and undercut his adversaries on the left.
But in the face of the ensuing confrontation between the Vietnamese Commu-
nists and the United States, the subtle balancing act by which he attempted to
preserve Cambodian neutrality earned him only the mistrust of all parties and
growing incomprehension inside the country.

In March 1970 the prince was ousted by his own government and by the

Cambodia

581

Assembly, with the blessing (but apparently not the active participation) of the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The country was thrown into disarray, and
terrible pogroms against the Vietnamese minority began. Of the roughly
450,000 Vietnamese in the country, two-thirds were forced to flee to South
Vietnam. Communist Vietnamese embassy buildings were burned down, and
an ultimatum was issued for all foreign troops to leave the country immediately.
The ultimatum was of course ignored. Hanoi, which found itself with no ally
except the Khmer Rouge inside the country, decided to back them to the hilt,
supplying arms and military advisers and providing access to training camps
inside Vietnam. Vietnam eventually occupied the greater part of the country
in the name of the Khmer Rouge, or rather in the name of Sihanouk, who was
so furious at his earlier humiliation that he joined with the local Communists,
until then his worst enemies. On the advice of Beijing and Hanoi, the Commu-
nists rolled out the red carpet for him but gave him no actual political power.
Thus the internal conflict became one of royalist Communists versus the
Khmer Republic, with the latter led by General (soon Marshal) Lon Nol. The
forces of the Khmer Republic were considerably weaker than those of the
North Vietnamese and seemed unable to capitalize on Sihanouk's unpopularity
among intellectuals and the middle classes in the cities and towns. They were
soon forced to ask for American aid in the form of bombing raids, arms, and
military advisers; they also accepted a futile intervention from the South Viet-
namese.

After the catastrophic failure of operation Chenla-II in early 1972, when
the best republican troops were decimated, the war became a long agony as the
Khmer Rouge tightened the screws around the main urban areas, which even-
tually could be supplied only by air. But this rearguard action was murderously
destructive, and it destabilized the population, who, unlike the Vietnamese, had
never experienced anything like it. American bombing raids were massive: more
than 540,000 tons of explosives were dropped on the combat zones, mostly in
the six months before the U.S. Congress cut off funding for such raids in
August 1973. The bombing slowed the progress of the Khmer Rouge, but it
also ensured that there would never be a shortage of recruits in a countryside
now filled with hatred for the Americans. It also further destabilized the repub-
lic by causing a tremendous influx of refugees into the cities, probably one-third
of a total population of 8 million. y This buildup of refugees facilitated the
evacuation of urban areas after the Khmer Rouge's victory and enabled the
Khmers to claim repeatedly in their propaganda: u We have defeated the world's
greatest superpower and will therefore triumph over all opposition — nature,
the Vietnamese, and all others." 10

The fall of Phnom Penh and the last republican cities on 17 April 1975
had been expected for so long that it came as something of a relief, even to the

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Communism in Asia

losers. Nothing, it was assumed, could be worse than such a cruel and futile
civil war. Yet the signs had always been there: the Khmer Rouge had not waited
for victory to demonstrate their disconcerting aptitude for violence and extreme
measures. Tens of thousands of people were massacred after the capture of the
ancient royal capital, Oudong, in 1974. 11

As "liberation" swept the country, "reeducation centers" were established
and became harder and harder to distinguish from the ''detention centers" that,
in theory, were reserved for hardened criminals. Initially the reeducation cen-
ters were modeled on the Viet Minh prison camps of the 1950s and reserved
chiefly for prisoners from Lon NoPs army. There was never any question of
applying the Geneva Convention here, since all republicans were considered
traitors rather than prisoners of war. In Vietnam there had been no deliberate
massacres of prisoners, whether French or native. In Cambodia, by contrast,
the strictest possible regime became the norm, and it seems to have been
decided early on that the normal fate of a prisoner was to be death. One large
camp, which contained more than 1,000 detainees, was studied by Henri Lo-
card. 12 Established in 1971 or 1972, it confined enemy soldiers and their real or
supposed families, including children, together with Buddhist monks, suspect
travelers, and others. As a result of harsh treatment, a starvation diet> and
widespread disease, most of the prisoners and all the children died very quickly.
Executions were also very common, with as many as thirty killed in a single
evening. 13

Massive deportations of civilians began in 1973. Some 40,000 were trans-
ferred from Takeo Province to the border /ones near Vietnam, and many fled
toward Phnom Penh. After an abortive attempt to take the town of Kompong
Cham, thousands of citizens were forced to accompany the Khmer Rouge in
their retreat. 14 Kratie, the first city of any size to be taken, was entirely emptied
of its population. The year 1973 also marked a decisive break with North
Vietnam. Offended by the Kampuchean Communist Party's refusal to join the
negotiations in Paris in January 1973 concerning the U.S. withdrawal, the
North Vietnamese drastically reduced assistance, and thus their ability to
influence the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot's team' 5 took advantage of this turn of
events to begin eliminating approximately 1,000 u Viet Minh Khmers" who had
returned to Cambodia. These former anti-French resistance fighters had left
for Hanoi after the Geneva peace accord of 1954. w> Because of their experience
and their links with the Vietnamese Communist Party, they represented a real
alternative to the Khmer Rouge leaders, most of whom had come to Commu-
nism only after the Indochinese war or while studying in France. A number of
the latter had begun their political training as militants in the French Commu-
nist Party. 17 After the break with Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge began to rewrite
history, imposing the dogma that the Kampuchean Communist Party had been

Cambodia

583

founded in 1960, not, as was really the case, in 1951 as part of Ho Chi Minh's
Indochinese Communist Party, which was centered in Vietnam. This tactic
removed all historical legitimacy from the u, 51s," who were then persecuted.
It also paved the way for an artificial break with the Vietnamese Communist
Party. The first serious clashes between Vietnamese troops and the Khmer
Rouge date from this period. 18

Deportation and Segregation of the Population (1975-1979)

The total evacuation of Phnom Penh following the Khmer Rouge victory came
as a great shock both to the city's inhabitants and to the rest of the world, 19
which began to realize for the first time that exceptional events were unfolding
in Cambodia. The city's inhabitants themselves seemed to accept the explana-
tion given by their new masters, who claimed that the evacuation was a safety
measure to ensure protection from possible American bombing raids and that
people would be better fed elsewhere. The evacuation of the cities, for which
the regime will undoubtedly always be remembered, was a spectacular event
but cost relatively few lives. At the time people were still well fed and healthy,
and they were allowed to take some belongings and articles of exchange value,
such as gold, jewelry, and even dollars. 20 There was little systematic brutality,
although an example was made of people who resisted, and there was certainly
no shortage of executions of enemy prisoners. Most deportees were neither
robbed nor searched. Direct or indirect victims of the evacuation — hospital
patients, the old, the sick, and the infirm, as well as people (sometimes whole
families) who committed suicide — numbered perhaps 10,000, out of a total city
population of 2 million to 3 million. Several hundred thousand were also
moved out of other cities, so that 46—54 percent of the population of the
country found themselves on the road. 21 Despite the lack of brutality, the
evacuation of the cities was a traumatic event that remains indelibly etched on
the memory of all survivors. They had twenty-four hours to leave their homes.
Though somewhat reassured by the lie that they would be allowed to return
after three days, 22 they found themselves caught up in a human maelstrom in
which it was easy to lose their closest relatives, perhaps forever. Unsmiling
soldiers (yothea) dragged them away to a departure point whose destination
depended on the neighborhood from which they left; thus families who were
separated before reaching the departure point stood little chance of meeting
again. Scenes of death and despair abounded, and no one received any food or
medical assistance from the Khmer Rouge during the journey to the destina-
tion, which often lasted several weeks.

The first classification of city dwellers took place during this first depor-
tation, at the roadside in the country. It was quite rudimentary and depended

584 Communism in Asia

more or less on what people said about themselves. The aim was to find as many
urmy officers and middle- and high-ranking officials as possible, in theory so
that Sihanouk, who was nominally head of state until 1976, could form a new
government in the capital. In practice, most of them were immediately massa-
cred or died shortly afterward in prison. Inexplicably from the point of view
of police control, the Khmer Rouge had ordered that all identity papers be
destroyed; 2,1 as a result, many government employees and former soldiers were
able to pass themselves off as peasants and, with a bit of luck, survive. 24

Controlling such a huge exodus was well beyond the organizational capac-
ity of the Khmer Rouge, who in 1975 numbered only 120,000 activists and
sympathizers; most of these had joined recently, and only half were soldiers.
Kvacuees were thus allowed to establish their new homes wherever they wanted
(or wherever they could), provided the village chief agreed. Cambodia is nei-
ther big nor densely populated, and almost all city dwellers had relatives some-
where in the country. Many simply went to join them, and thus vastly increased
their chances of survival, provided they were not deported again. On the whole,
things were not too difficult. Sometimes the villagers even killed a cow in honor
of the evacuees, and often they helped the evacuees set up new homes. 2> More
generally, from this moment until the fall of the regime, all witness state-
ments concur that people tended to help one another and did not engage in
much physical violence or carry out spontaneous murders .^ Relations seem
to have been particularly amicable with the Khmer Loeu (an ethnic min-
ority in a remote region). 27 The fact that this last group, among whom the
Khmer Rouge had established their first base, was particularly favored by the
regime until at least 1977 allows us to conclude that tensions between the
peasants and the new arrivals, which were increasing elsewhere, usually result-
ed from the generalized poverty that caused a mouthful for one to mean
hunger for another. Such situations are rarely conducive to aets of great

altruism. 2>

The influx of city dwellers to the villages caused a tremendous upheaval
in rural life, particularly in the balance between resources and consumption. In
the fertile rice plains of Region 5, in the northwest, the 170,000 inhabitants
were joined by 2 10,000 new arrivals. 24 The CPK did all it could to drive a wedge
between the prasheasfom shah, the country people, also known as the "'70s/'
most of whom had been under the control of the Khmer Rouge since the war
had broken out; and the prasheashmi thmei, the "New People; 1 also known as
the ^75s" or the "17 Aprils." It tried to incite class hatred among the "patriotic
proletariat" for these "lackeys of the capitalist imperialists." A two-tier legal
svstem was introduced; in effect only the rural people, who were in a small
majonn, had any rights. In the early days they were allowed to cultivate a small
amount of private property to eat in the obligatory canteen before the others.
Their food was marginally better, and occasionally they were also allowed to

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585

vote in elections in which only a single candidate appeared on the ballot. An
apartheid system was quickly achieved. The two groups lived in separate areas
of the village and, in principle, were not allowed even to talk to each other, let
alone intermarry. 10

These two population groups were soon subdivided. As part of total
collectivization, the peasants were divided into "poor peasants," "landed peas-
ants," "rich peasants," and former traders. Among the New People, nonofficials
and those who lacked an education were soon separated from former civil
servants and intellectuals. The fate of these last two groups was generally dire:
they were purged little by little, with each successive purge reaching a little
further down the hierarchy, until both groups completely disappeared. After
1978 the purges also included women and children.

But ruralizing the entire population was not enough for the leaders of the
CPK. After only a few months, many of the New People were ordered to new
deportation centers, and this time they had no voice in their fate. For example,
in September 1975 alone, several hundred thousand people left the eastern and
southeastern regions for the northwest/ 1 It was not uncommon for an individ-
ual to be deported three or four times. In addition there were "work brigades,"
which would take all young people and parents with no young children far
from their assigned village for several months. The intention of the regime was
fourfold. First, to preclude any potential political threat, the regime sought to
forestall the formation of any lasting links between the peasants and the New
People. 32 Second, the regime sought to "proletarianizc" the New People ever
more thoroughly by preventing them from taking their possessions with them
and from having the time to reap what they had sown.-" Third, the Khmer
Rouge sought to maintain total control of population movements through the
initiation of large-scale agricultural projects, such as cultivating the relatively
poor land in the mountains and the sparsely populated jungle regions in the
outlying areas of the country. Finally, the regime undoubtedly sought to rid
itself of a maximum of "useless mouths." Each successive evacuation —
whether on foot, in carts, or in slow, badly overcrowded trains that sometimes
took as long as a week to reach their destination — was an extremely demanding
experience for severely undernourished people. In light of the severe shortage
of medical facilities, losses were high.

"Voluntary" transfers were a slightly different matter. New People were
often given the chance to "return to their native village" or to work in a
cooperative where conditions were easier, with better health care and better
food. Invariably the volunteers, who were often quite numerous, would then
find themselves in places where conditions were even worse. Pin Yathay, the
victim of one such transfer, learned to see through these promises: 'This was
really nothing more than a ploy to weed out people with individualist tenden-

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cies . . . Anyone who fell into the trap showed that he had not yet got rid of
his old-fashioned tendencies and needed to go through a more severe regime
of retraining in a village where conditions were even worse. By coming forward
as volunteers, people in effect denounced themselves. Using this infallible
criterion, the Khmer Rouge rooted out the more unstable among us, those who
were least satisfied with their fate." H

The Time of Purges and Massacres (1976-1979)

The mania for classification and elimination of different elements of society
slowly reached to the very top of the political hierarchy. As noted above,
genuine supporters of the Vietnamese such as Hou Youn were wiped out quite
early on. Diplomats from the "royal government;' not all of whom were
Communists, were recalled in December 1975. All but two were tortured and
executed. 15 But because the CPK never seemed to have any regular pattern of
behavior and because the different geographic zones had varying degrees of
autonomy, there was a constant air of mutual suspicion. The army was not
unified until after 17 April. Things were made still more difficult by the
disintegration of the economy and by increasingly successful Vietnamese
counteroffensives in 1978.

With the arrest of Keo Meas, "Number 6" in the CPK hierarchy, in
September 1976, it became apparent that the Party was being devoured from
within at an ever-increasing rate. There were never any trials or clear charges
brought, and everyone who was imprisoned was tortured in a barbaric fashion
before being killed. Only the victims 1 "confessions" provide an idea of what
"charges" might have been brought against them, but divergences from the Pol
Pot line were never very clear. Undoubtedly the aim was to crush anyone who
showed exceptional qualities or the slightest sign of a spirit of independence,
not to mention any past association with the Vietnamese Communist Party (or,
like Hu Nim, with the Chinese Gang of Four). Any quality that might threaten
the preeminence of Pol Pot led to repression.-* The paranoia among the lead-
ership was like a caricature of the worst excesses of Stalinism. During one
study session for Communist Party cadres, immediately following a debate
about the purge, the top leaders in the "Center" concluded proceedings by
talking about "a fierce and uncompromising fight to the death with the class
enemy . . . especially in our revolutionary ranks." 17 In July 1978 the Party
monthly, Tung padevat (Revolutionary flags), announced: "There are enemies
everywhere within our ranks, in the center, at headquarters, in the zones, and
out in the villages."* 8 By that point, five of the thirteen highest-ranking officials
of October 1975 had been executed, along with most regional secretaries. 39 Two
of the seven new leaders who took office in 1978 were executed before January
1979. The purge fueled itself; all that was required for an arrest was a total of

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587

three denunciations as a "CIA agent." The interrogators zealously extorted
successive confessions by any means possible in order to please their bosses.
Imaginary conspiracies abounded, and more networks were constantly being
uncovered. The blind hatred of Vietnam caused people to lose all sense of
reality. One doctor was accused of being a member of the "Vietnamese CIA";
he had allegedly been recruited in Hanoi in 1956 by an American agent dis-
guised as a tourist. 40 Liquidations were also carried out at the grass-roots level;
according to one estimate, 40,000 of the 70,000 inhabitants in one district were
killed as "traitors collaborating with the CIA. ,M!

But the really massive genocide took place in the eastern zone. Hostile
Vietnam was nearby, and Sao Phim, the military and political chief of the
region, had built up a solid local power base. It was here that the only full-
fledged rebellion against the central regime ever occurred, in a short-lived civil
war in May and June 1978. In April, after 409 cadres from the east had been
locked up in the central prison in Tuol Sleng and it was clear that all was lost,
Sao Phim killed himself, and his wife and children were murdered while
attending his funeral. A few fragments of the armed forces in the region tried
to foment a rebellion, then crossed into Vietnam, where they established the
embryonic Front for National Salvation, which later accompanied the Vietnam-
ese army from Hanoi to Phnom Penh. When the central authorities regained
control in the east, they condemned to death all the people living in the region,
labeling them "Vietnamese in Khmer bodies.' 1 From May to December 1978
between 100,000 and 250,000 people out of a population of 1.7 million were
massacred, starting with militants and young people. In Sao Phim's village all
120 families (700 people) were killed. In another village, there were 7 survivors
out of 15 families, 12 of which were totally wiped out. 42 After July any survivors
were taken away in trucks, trains, and boats to other zones, where they were
progressively exterminated. Thousands more died in transit. They were forced
to wear blue clothes specially imported from China; everyone else under Pol
Pot's rule wore black. Gradually, with little fanfare, and generally out of sight
of the other villagers, the people dressed in blue disappeared. In one coopera-
tive in the northwest, when the Vietnamese army finally arrived, only about
100 easterners of the original 3,000 remained. 4 ^ These atrocities took a horrific
new turn just before the fall of the regime. Women, children, and old people
were massacred together with the young men, and the original peasants were
killed together with the New People. Because the task was so overwhelmingly
large, the Khmer Rouge forced the ordinary population, including even the
uv 75s," to help them carry out the massacres. The revolution was out of control
and was threatening to engulf every last Cambodian.

The scale of despair created by the Khmer Rouge is attested by the number
who fled abroad. Excluding those who arrived in April 1975, more than 23,000

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refugees had fled to Thailand by November 1976. * By October 1977, there
were 60,000 Cambodians in Vietnam. 45 All these refugees braved terrible dan-
gers when they fled: capture meant certain death, and escape entailed wander-
ing for days or weeks through hostile jungle. 46 People were invariably in a state
of exhaustion before setting out, and such dangers were enough to deter most.
Of those who did try, only a small fraction succeeded. Pin Yathay's group
planned their escape quite meticulously, but out of the original twelve only
four survived.

After twenty months of sporadic border clashes, the Vietnamese invaded
in January 1979. The vast majority of Cambodians perceived their arrival as a
moment of tremendous liberation, and it is still remembered as such today. In
one typical incident, the villagers in Samlaut (heroes of the 1967 revolt) mas-
sacred their Khmer Rouge tormentors. 47 The Khmer Rouge also carried out a
number of atrocities at the last minute; in several prisons, including Tuol Sleng,
the liberators found almost no one to set free. 4 * Although many Cambodians
became disenchanted with their liberators in the following months, and al-
though the intentions of the Hanoi regime were by no means humanitarian, a
central fact remains: given the increasing murderousness of the Khmer Rouge,
especially in 1978, the Vietnamese incursion saved an incalculable number of
lives. Since then the country has been gradually nursing itself back to life; the
inhabitants are slowly recovering their rights, cultivating their crops, pursuing
their religion and education, and reintegrating their country into the rest of
the world.

The Various Forms of Martyrdom

Horror is not always a matter of numbers. The account above gives a good idea
of the real nature of the Kampuchean Communist Party. But numbers do help
us to understand. If no section of the population was spared, which section
suffered most, and when? How does the tragedy of Cambodia relate to the
other tragedies of the century and to its own larger history? A combination of
methods (demography, quantitative microstudies, eyewitness reports), none
sufficient in itself, can advance us inch by inch toward the truth.

Two Million Dead?

Inevitably we must begin with an overall figure; yet even here we find enor-
mous disparity among the claims. This fact in itself can be taken as an indica-
tion of the scale of events: the bigger a massacre is, the harder it is to come to
terms with it, to reduce it to exact numbers. Everyone has an interest in
stretching the figure in one direction or another — the Khmer Rouge to deny

Cambodia

589

their responsibility, the Vietnamese and their allies to justify their intervention.
Pol Pot, in the last interview he ever gave to a newspaper as leader of the CPK,
claimed in December 1979 that "only a few thousand Cambodians have died as
a result of the application of our policy of bringing abundance to the people." 49
Khieu Samphan, in an official pamphlet in 1987, was a little more precise:
3,000 died "by mistake," 11,000 "Vietnamese agents 1 ' were killed, and 30,000
people were killed by "Vietnamese agents who had infiltrated the country."
The document adds that the invading Vietnamese killed approximately 1.5
million Cambodians in 1979 and 1980. This last figure is enormously exagger-
ated, and can reasonably be taken as an involuntary admission that close to that
number died after 1975, mostly as a result of the activities of the Khmer
Rouge. 50 The manipulation of figures is even more flagrant in the claims about
the number who died before 17 April, during the civil war. In June 1975 Pol Pot
cited the grossly inflated figure of 600,000; by 1978 he was talking about "more
than 1.4 million." 51 As for the victims of the Khmer Rouge, President Lon Nol
cited 2.5 million; Pen Sovan, the former secretary general of the People's
Revolutionary Party of Kampuchea (PRPK), which took power in 1979, cited
3.1 million, the figure used in Vietnamese propaganda and by the PRPK.

The first two studies that can be taken seriously— although they, too,
acknowledge uncertainties— are those of Ben Kiernan, who calculates 1.5 mil-
lion dead, and Michael Vickery, who arrives at a figure half that size. 52 Stephen
Heder, using Kiernan's figures, asserts that the dead were evenly divided
between peasants and New People (a claim that is hard to accept) and also
evenly divided between victims of famine and victims of assassinations." David
Chandler, a renowned specialist in the field, but who has not himself carried
out an analytical evaluation, estimates a minimum of 800,000 to 1 million
dead. 54 A CIA study based on approximate data estimates the total demographic
deficit (including the fall in the birth rate as a result of the situation) at 3.8
.[lion for the years 1970-1979, including war losses for the years 1970-1975,
ith a resulting population of 5.2 million in 1979. 55 Another study based on a
comparative analysis of the extent of cultivated rice fields in 1970 and 1983
comes up with a figure of 1.2 million victims. 56 Marek Sliwinski, in a recent
innovative study using demographic techniques (rendered less reliable by the
lack of any census from the late 1960s to 1993), speaks of a little more than 2
million dead, or 26 percent of the population, not including deaths from natural
causes, which he estimates at 7 percent. Sliwinski's is the only study that tries
to break down the 1975-1979 figures by age and gender. He concludes that 33.9
percent of men and 15.7 percent of women died. A difference of that size is
strong evidence that most of the deaths were from assassinations. The death
rate is horrendous for all ages, but especially high for young mates (34 percent
of men aged twenty to thirty, 40 percent of men aged thirty to forty, and 54

mil

wii

590

Communism in Asia

percent of people of both sexes over age sixty). As during the great famines
and epidemics that occurred under the ancten regime, the birth rate plummeted
to nearly zero: in 1970 it was 3 percent; in 1978 it was 1.1 percent. No other
country in the world seems to have suffered so much since 1945. In 1990 the
total population had still not returned to the level of 1970. And the population
is still unbalanced, with 1.3 women for every man. In 1989, 38 percent of adult
women were widows, whereas only 10 percent of adult men were widowers. 57
Close to 64 percent of the adult population was female, and 35 percent of heads
of families were women, these proportions are the same among Cambodian
refugees in the United States. 58

This level of losses — at the very least one in seven, and more likely one
in five or four — is enough to obliterate the oft-heard argument that the violence
of the Khmer Rouge, however terrible it was, was only the reaction of a people
driven mad by the original sin of American bombing. 54 Many other peoples —
including the British, the Germans, the Japanese, and the Vietnamese— have
suffered badly in bombing raids in this century, and no extremist fervor took
root in their populations as a result; in fact the contrary was often the case.
However bad the ravages of war were, they were not comparable to what the
Kampuchean Communist Party achieved in times of peace, even if one ex-
cludes the last year and the border conflict with Vietnam. Pol Pot himself, who
had no interest in minimizing the figures, stated that the civil war claimed
600,000 lives. Although he never explained how this figure was determined, it
was often taken up by other specialists. Chandler talks rather lightly about "half
a million victims" and cities various studies claiming that the American bomb-
ing raids cost anywhere from 30,000 to 250,000 victims. 60 Sliwinski reckons
240,000 victims to be a reasonable figure, to which perhaps 70,000 Vietnamese
civilians should be added, most of whom died in the pogroms of 1970. By his
calculations 40,000 died in the bombing, a quarter of whom were military
personnel. He also notes that the areas worst affected by the bombing were
relatively unpopulated, and in 1970 probably contained no more than a million
inhabitants, many of whom fled to the cities. By contrast, assassinations carried
out by the Khmer Rouge during the war period probably totaled around
75,000. 61 There is no doubt that the war weakened society's resistance and
destroyed or demoralized the elite and educated sections of the population. At
the same time, the power of the Khmer Rouge was increased tremendously
thanks to Hanoi's strategic choices and Sihanouk's irresponsible decisions.
Accordingly, the people behind the 1970 coup attempt have much to answer
for. But none of that affects the responsibility of the CPK for its actions after
1975; there was nothing spontaneous about the violence of those years.

The serious quantitative studies also furnish some estimates of the num-
ber of victims of different modes of mass murder. The forced ruralization of

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591

city dwellers (including deaths in transit, exhaustion at work, and the like) led
to 400,000 deaths at most, and quite possibly fewer. Executions are the hardest
to calculate; the average hovers around 500,000. Henri Locard, by a process of
extrapolation, calculates that between 400,000 and 600,000 died in prison. That
figure excludes executions carried out on the spot, which were also extremely
numerous. 62 Sliwinski arrives at a total of 1 million executions. Hunger and
disease were undoubtedly the biggest killers, accounting for at least 700,000
deaths/ 13 Sliwinski mentions 900,000 in that context, including lives lost as a
direct result of ruralization. M

Targets and Suspects

Trying to arrive at overall figures from local studies is difficult because circum-
stances varied tremendously across the country. The "70s" suffered consider-
ably less than the "75s," especially from hunger, even if one takes into account
the distortions arising from the fact that most published eyewitness statements
come from New People rather than the peasants. The death rate was extremely
high among the people who had come from the cities; today it is almost
impossible to find a family that did not lose one or several of its members. City
dwellers made up half the population. Out of the 200 families that settled in a
village in the northern zone, only 50 survived until January 1979, and only one
family had lost "only" its grandparents. 65 Certain categories were even more
severely affected. We have already seen how former officials and high-ranking
soldiers from the Lon Nol administration were persecuted; successive purges
struck even lower in the hierarchy. 66 Only railway employees, who were judged
to be impossible to replace, were unaffected. The wiser among the station
chiefs declared that they occupied a post more lowly than the one they actually
held. 67 Monks, who had traditionally played an important role in society, were
considered to represent too much competition, and those who did not defrock
were systematically eliminated. In 1979, out of a group of 28 monks who had
been evacuated to a village in Kandal Province, there was only 1 survivor. 6 *
Nationwide, their number fell from approximately 60,000 to 1,000. 6 *' Almost all
press photographers disappeared. 70 The fate of the "intellectuals" varied con-
siderably; 71 sometimes they were persecuted simply for being who they were;
more often, though, they apparently were allowed to survive if they renounced
all pretense to expertise in any field and abandoned attributes such as books
and spectacles.

The peasants were treated considerably better, particularly when it came
to food supplies. Within certain limits they could consume fruit, sugar, and a
little meat. Their rations were larger, and they could eat hard rice rather than
the universal clear rice soup, which came to be a symbol of famine for so many

592

Communism in Asia

inhabitants of the country. The Khmer soldiers were always the first to eat,
despite their pretensions of frugality. The "'70s" sometimes had access to
pharmacists and real medicines from China. But such advantages were only
relative. Although the villagers had not been deported, they were still forced to
carry out duties far from their homes and villages, and they worked extremely
long hours. The tiny working class, which lived in the military-camp atmo-
sphere of Phnom Penh, was also subjected to extremely harsh discipline.
Gradually, poor peasants, who were considered more reliable than workers,
replaced workers who had been in Phnom Penh before 1975 . 2

In 1978 there were some signs that the barriers between the peasants and
the New People were to be abolished. By that time some New People had even
begun to take up low-ranking position of local authority. The positive inter-
pretation here would be that such people had adapted to the demands of the
new regime. A more sinister interpretation would be that unification of the
population was being attempted in the face of the brewing conflict with Viet-
nam, similar to Stalin's unification of the Soviet population against the Ger-
mans in 1941. Or, given the generalized scale of the purges, there may simply
have been so many holes in the state apparatus that there was no other option.
Whatever the reason, the general increase in repression in the last year of the
regime seems to have been a downward leveling movement; it was during this
period that a major change took place, as a majority of the u, 70s" began silently
opposing the Khmer Rouge.

'['he fate of the twenty or so ethnic minorities who in 1970 made up 15
percent of the population was often quite different. An initial distinction should
be drawn between essentially urban minorities, such as the Chinese and the
Vietnamese, and the rural minorities, such as the Cham Muslims in the lake
and river regions and the Khmer Loeu, a generic term covering various groups
that were spread thinly through the mountains and jungles. The urban groups
did not sutler specific reprisals until 1977. Some 150,000 Vietnamese were
repatriated on a voluntary basis between May and September 1975 (half as
many as in 1970, under I, on Nol). This action reduced the community to a few
tens of thousands, most of whom had intermarried with Khmers. But escaping
from the Khmer Rouge was important enough for many Khmers to try to pass
themselves off as Vietnamese, an actum that did not seem to be particularly
dangerous. In the regions where deportees ended up, there seems to have been
little discrimination between urban minorities and other former city dwellers.
Their new common test seemed to provide an important social bond: "Cam-
bodians from the towns, Chinese, and Vietnamese were gathered together
indiscriminately, all under the invidious label New People. 1 We were all broth-
ers. We forgot ancient nationalist rivalries and grudges . . The Cambodians
were probably the most depressed. They were sickened by the actions of the

Cambodia

593

Khmer Rouge, who were their compatriots and their executioners ... All of
us were revolted by the idea that our torturers were of the same nationality as

we.

How then did it come about that some minorities were entirely wiped out
by the Khmer Rouge regime? It has been suggested that 50 percent of the
400,000 Chinese died, 74 as did an even higher proportion of Vietnamese who
stayed after 1975; Sliwinski calculates a 37.5 percent death rate for the Viet-
namese and 38.4 percent for the Chinese. The answer must lie in the compari-
son with other groups of victims: according to Sliwinski, 82.6 percent of
officers in the republican army, 51.5 percent of all "intellectuals," and, most
important, 41.9 percent of all residents of Phnom Penh perished. 75 This last
figure is very close to the one generally quoted for minorities, many of whom
were pursued as "ultra city dwellers' 1 (according to the 1962 census, 18 percent
of the residents of Phnom Penh were Chinese, and 14 percent Vietnamese) or
as merchants and traders, many of whom were unable to disguise their recent
past. 7 '' Many of these were better off than the Khmers, which was both a
blessing and a curse: it meant that they could survive longer by using the black
market, but it also turned them into easy targets for their new masters. 77
However, as good Communists, the Khmer Rouge believed that the class strug-
gle was much more important than struggles between different peoples or races.

This is not to say that the Khmer Rouge were not above using and abusing
nationalism and xenophobia. In 1978 Pol Pot stated that Cambodia was building
socialism on its own model. His 1977 speech in Beijing in homage to Mao
Zedong was not reported at home. Hatred for Vietnam, which had "stolen"
Kampuchea Krom in the eighteenth century and integrated it into Cochin
China, became a central theme in Khmer propaganda and seems to be the only
raison d'etre for the few Khmer Rouge who are still politically active today.
After mid- 1976 the Vietnamese who had stayed in the country found them-
selves forbidden to leave. A few killings took place on a local level. They became
more widespread after a directive from the Center on 1 April 1977 required
that all Vietnamese be arrested and handed over to the central security forces.
By this stage their numbers were already considerably reduced. For good
measure, their friends were to be arrested as well, as was anyone else who spoke
Vietnamese, In Kratie Province, which shared a border with Vietnam, having
a Vietnamese ancestor was enough to make people liable to arrest, and the
authorities classified all Yuon as "historical enemies." 78 In this atmosphere,
accusing all the inhabitants of the eastern zone of being "Vietnamese in Khmer
bodies" was tantamount to condemning them to death.

According to Sliwinski, Cambodian Catholics were the group that met the
worst fate; at least 48.6 percent of them disappeared. 79 Many factors conspired
against them: they came mostly from the cities, were primarily Vietnamese in

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Communism in Asia

origin, and inevitably were associated with colonial imperialism. The cathedral
in Phnom Penh was one of the few buildings razed to the ground. Ethnic
minorities saw their separate identity denied. According to one decree, "in
Kampuchea there is only one nation and one tongue, the Khmer. Henceforth
there are no more different nationalities inside Kampuchea. " 80 People from the
mountains, such as the Khmer Loeu and small groups of forest hunters re-
ceived reasonably preferential treatment in the early days because the CPK had
had its first bases there and had recruited a large number of troops from these
groups. But after 1976, to satisfy the official obsession with rice production,
the Khmer Rouge destroyed highland villages and forced their inhabitants to
settle in the valleys, totally disrupting their traditional way of life. 81 Even Pol
Pot's guards, who belonged to the Jarai ethnic group, were arrested and liqui-
dated in February 1977.

The Cham, who were the largest indigenous minority — numbering
250,000 in 1970 — and who were for the most part farmers and fishermen, had
a unique fate because of their Muslim faith. 82 Because they were reputed to be
excellent warriors, they were courted by the Khmer Rouge in the early stages
of the "war of liberation." At that time they were generally integrated into the
peasant group, although they were often reprimanded for being overly involved
in commerce. They were the main suppliers of fish for most of Cambodia. But
beginning in 1974, on secret orders from Pol Pot, their tiny villages were
destroyed. In 1976 all cadres with Cham origins were removed from their posts.
A Khmer Rouge text in 1975 demanded that the Cham take new names that
would more closely resemble Khmer names. "The Cham mentality is abolished
forthwith. Anyone who does not conform to these orders will be punished
accordingly" 81 In the northwestern zone, people were sometimes killed merely
for speaking Cham. Women were also forbidden to wear the sarong and were
forced to cut off their hair.

The attempt to eradicate Islam provoked some extremely serious inci-
dents. In 1973, mosques were destroyed and prayers banned in the liberated
zones. Such measures became more widespread after May 1975. Korans were
collected and burned, and mosques were either transformed into other build-
ings or razed. Thirteen Muslim dignitaries were executed in June, some for
having gone to pray rather than attending a political rally, others for having
campaigned for the right to religious wedding ceremonies. Often Muslims were
forced to make a choice between raising pigs and eating pork or being put to
death — an ironic demand, given that meat all but disappeared from the Cam-
bodian diet during these years. Some Cham were forced to eat pork twice a
month (a number of them of course then vomited up the meal). The more
fervent were all but wiped out: of the 1,000 who had made the pilgrimage to
Mecca, only 30 survived these years. Unlike other Cambodians, the Cham

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frequently rebelled, and large numbers of them died in the massacres and
reprisals that followed these uprisings. After mid- 1 978 the Khmer Rouge began
systematically exterminating a number of Cham communities, including
women and children, even though they had agreed to eat pork. 84 Ben Kiernan
calculates that the overall mortality rate among the Cham was 50 percent;
Sliwinski's figure is 40.6 percent. 85

Geographic and Temporal Variations

There were large regional differences in the mortality rates. The place of origin
of the victims was a major factor. According to Sliwinski, 58.1 percent of the
population of Phnom Penh was still alive in 1979 (that is, 1 million died,
accounting for approximately half the total number of dead), whereas 71.2
percent of the inhabitants of Kompong Cham (another densely populated
region) survived, as did 90.5 percent of the people of Oddar Mean Chhey, in
the north. In this last region there was only a 2.1 percent increase in the death
rate. 86 Not surprisingly, the zones that were conquered last, which were more
densely populated and were closer to the capital (the evacuation of the suburbs
was less dramatic than the evacuation of the capital itself), were the zones that
suffered most. In Democratic Kampuchea, survival depended most of all on
the destination to which one was deported. Being sent to a wooded or moun-
tainous zone or to a region where the main crop was jute was a sentence to
almost certain death, since there was very little interregional communication,
and supplies rarely arrived. 87 The regime demanded identical production quo-
tas from all regions and never supplied any form of assistance. Because people
had to begin by clearing the land and building cabins to live in, when they were
already exhausted from working on starvation rations and were also exposed to
dysentery and malaria, the loss of human life was appallingly high. According
to Pin Yathay, one-third of the population of his camp died in the space of four
months in 1975. In the village of Don Ey, famine was widespread, there were
no births at all, and as many as 80 percent of the inhabitants died.* 8 If by
contrast one ended up in a prosperous agricultural region, the odds of surviv-
ing were relatively good, particularly if there were not too many New People to
upset the equilibrium of the local economy. But such villages did suffer in
other ways. The population was more closely controlled, and there were more
purges. Chances of survival were also quite good in remote regions, where
cadres were more tolerant, the Khmer Loeu locals were quite welcoming, and
the main danger was most often disease.

At the village level the behavior of local cadres was decisive, since they
controlled how the peasants were treated. The weakness and mediocrity of the
Khmer bureaucratic apparatus meant that for better or for worse, local leaders

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had considerable autonomy. 89 There were sadistic brutes (many of them young
women), 90 neophytes with something to prove, or the usual failures who tried
to stand out by being more repressive or more demanding than the rest when
it came to fulfilling work quotas. Two types of cadres improved chances of
survival: humane ones, such as the village chief who in 1975 made sure that
refugees worked no more than four hours a day, or those who allowed the sick
or exhausted to rest, permitted husbands to sec their wives, and turned a blind
eye to people's efforts to feed themselves, a practice that was forbidden yet vital
to survival; and the corrupt, notably the officials who accepted bribes of
watches or gold jewelry to issue permits allowing people to switch residences
or work teams, or even to drop out of the work teams altogether for a while. 91
Over time, as the regime became more centralized, such tolerance was increas-
ingly rare. Furthermore, under the regime's infernal logic, cadres suspected of
weakness or corruption were inevitably replaced in purges by leaders who were
younger, more zealous, and cruder.

The mortality rate also varied considerably over time. The regime's short
duration and the geographic variation in its policies make clear distinctions
among periods difficult. Hunger and terror were constant and widespread.
Their intensity varied, and chances of survival depended on that intensity.
Nevertheless, eyewitness statements make a chronology possible. The first
months of the regime were marked by mass killings of carefully targeted social
groups; these slaughters were facilitated by the initial naivete of the u1 75s"
about their new masters. Hunger was not a major factor until at least the
autumn, and it was not until then that the collective canteens forbade families
from eating together. 1 ' 2 On several occasions between the end of May and
October the Center ordered massacres to cease, either as a result of the residual
influence of the more moderate leaders or in an attempt to rein in /ones that
were perceived to be out of control. The murders continued, but at a reduced
rate. According to Komphot, a banker who escaped to the northern zone,
"people were killed one by one — there were no mass killings. The first to go
were a dozen New People, people who were suspected of having been soldiers,
and so forth. During the first two years about a tenth of them were killed, one
by one, together with their children. I don't know how many died in all."**-*

The year 1976 appears to have been marked by terrible famines. The
Center was involved in large-scale projects at the expense of agriculture. Al-
though the main harvest, in December and January, staved off famine in the
first half of the year, the total harvest was probably only half that normally
produced in the 1960s. 44 According to some accounts, 1977 was the worst year,
marked by both widespread famine and massive purges. 45 These purges differed
from those of 1975: they were more political (often the result of the increasingly

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bitter in-fighting within the regime), more ethnically biased, more systemati-
cally targeted against groups that had previously escaped the attentions of the
authorities (such as schoolteachers and wealthy and middle-income peasants),
and more ferocious. Although the instructions in 1975 had forbidden the
execution of women and children of officers of the former regime, in 1977 the
wives of men who had already been executed (sometimes considerably earlier)
were themselves arrested and killed. Whole families were slaughtered, and
sometimes entire villages, such as that of former president Lon Nol, where 350
families were wiped out on 17 April 1977 to celebrate the anniversary of the
"liberation. " % There are contradictory accounts regarding 1978: Sliwinski be-
lieves that the famine abated because of a better harvest and better management
of the economy; in Charles Twining's version, which is backed up by several
witnesses, drought and war combined to make the situation worse than ever
before. 97 What is certain is that the killings became more and more widespread
among the peasants, particularly in the eastern /one, and reached an all-time
high.

Daily Death under Pol Pot

In Democratic Kampuchea, there were no prisons, no courts, no univer-
sities, no schools, no money, no jobs, no books, no sports, and no pas-
times . . . There was no spare moment in the twenty-four-hour day.
Daily life was divided up as follows: twelve hours for physical labor, two
hours for eating, three hours for rest and education, and seven hours for
sleep. We all lived in an enormous concentration camp. There was no
justice. The Angkar | Angkar Padevat, or Revolutionary Organization,
the semisecret cover for the CPK] regulated every moment of our
lives . . . The Khmer Rouge often used parables to justify their contra-
dictory actions. They would compare people to cattle: "Watch this ox as
it pulls the plow. It eats when it is ordered to eat. If you let it graze in the
field it will eat anything. If you put it into another field where there isn't
enough grass, it will still graze uncomplainingly. It is not free, and it is
constantly being watched. And when you tell it to pull the plow, it pulls.
It never thinks about its wife or children . . . 1,<J *

For all the survivors, the memory of Democratic Kampuchea is extremely
strange. It was a place with no values or stable points of reference. It really was
the nightmare world on the other side of the mirror. To survive there, everyone
had to adapt to a completely new set of rules. The first article of faith was a
radical dismissal of the idea that human life had any value. "Losing you is not
a loss, and keeping you is no specific gain" went one terrifying official slogan
that recurs time and again in statements by witnesses/' 9 What the Cambodians

598 Communism in Asia

experienced was a descent into the underworld, which for some began as early
as 1973, From that time on the "liberated" zone in the southwest experienced
the suppression of Buddhism, the forced separation of young people from their
families, a uniform dress code, and the militarization of all cooperatives. What
must now be told are the myriad ways in which one could perish.

Slavery, Famine, and the Radiant Future

The first thing that people had to do was accept their new condition. For the
u '75s" this was halfway between being a beast of burden and a war slave (in
accordance with the Angkor tradition). 100 It was a lot easier to gain access to a
peasant village if one looked strong and healthy and was not accompanied by
too many "useless mouths." 101 People were progressively stripped of their
possessions: during the evacuation, by the Khmer Rouge soldiers; in the coun-
tryside, by the cadres and peasants; and finally through the black market, where
a 250-gram box of rice sometimes sold for as much as 100 dollars. 102 All
education, all freedom of movement and trade, all medicine worthy of the
name, all religion, and all writing disappeared. Strict dress codes were im-
posed: people had to wear black, long-sleeved shirts buttoned up to the neck.
There were also strict codes of behavior: all public displays of affection were
banned, as were arguments, insults, complaints, and tears. All figures of
authority were to be blindly obeyed. People were forced to attend interminable
meetings and while there to look alert, shout disapproval or approbation on
command, and to voice public criticism of others or themselves. The 1976
constitution of Democratic Kampuchea specified that the first right of all
citizens was the right to work; many of the New People never received any
other rights. Not surprisingly, the early days of the regime were marked by a
huge increase in suicides, particularly among those who were separated from
their loved ones, among the old who felt that they were a burden on their
family, and among those who had been accustomed to a comfortable life style.

It was often very hard for the "75s" to adapt to the terrible conditions at
their destination. Many were sent to unhealthy regions, particularly in the
autumn of 1975. They had only the most rudimentary tools and were invariably
given insufficient rations. They never had any technical assistance or practical
training and were punished severely for failures of any sort, regardless of the
reason. People with handicaps were simply treated as shirkers and executed.
Unless one had particularly strong family ties, location was always provisional;
constant transfers of production teams and repeated deportations to new areas
reinforced the impression of arbitrary power. Thus even the strongest were
often tempted to flee to some place still governed by reason and humanity. Too
often, flight itself was only suicide of a different kind, since it was usually
carried out without maps or compasses, in the rainy season to avoid pursuit and

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to cover one's traces more easily, and with little food. 103 People were exhausted
before they set out, and many must have died before even meeting a Khmer
Rouge patrol. Nevertheless, escape attempts were numerous, and facilitated by
the relatively lax surveillance, since the number of Khmer soldiers and cadres
was never very high. 104

As though it was not already difficult enough to adjust to a new way of
life, the system gave people no time to rest and recover. The leaders seemed
convinced that the radiant future was just around the corner, at the end of the
Four- Year Plan presented by Pol Pot in August 1976. His objective was to
increase production massively by increasing capital through the export of
agricultural products, which were the country's only obvious resource. The
Khmer Rouge believed that the way forward would come through the indus-
trialization of agriculture and the development of diversified light industry,
followed later by the construction of heavy industry. 105 Strangely, this modern-
ist mystique was based on the old mythology about the state of Angkor:
"Because we are the race that built Angkor, we can do anything," said Pol Pot
in a long speech on 27 September 1977, in which he also announced that the
Angkar was really the Communist Party of Kampuchea. 106 His other justifica-
tion for his belief in the Khmer Rouge was the "glorious 17 April," which had
demonstrated the superiority of the poor peasants of Cambodia over the
world's greatest imperial power.

These were days of tremendous futility. The population was asked to
increase production to three tons of paddy per hectare, 107 despite the fact that
production levels had remained stable at around one ton since 1970. Equally
pointless was the attempt to triple the surface area of the rice fields in the rich
northwest, which would involve clearing huge amounts of land and developing
enormous irrigation projects — previously unimportant in this country with a
small population, abundant rainfall, and an annual flood. The goal was to pass
quickly to two, and eventually to three, harvests a year. The planting of all other
crops was suspended. No calculations were made regarding the size of the
"work army" of New People that would be necessary to implement this proj-
ect. 108 The effort quickly drained off the strongest: since the fittest were worked
the hardest, they often died first. Ordinarily the working day was eleven hours
long; but sometimes, during competitions among villages, launched by the
cadres, workers were obliged to rise at four in the morning and to work until
ten or eleven at night. In some places rest days were abolished entirely; else-
where one was allowed every ten days, but was filled with obligatory and
interminable political meetings. Usually the pace at which people were expected
to work was no higher than that of the Cambodian peasant. The differences
lay in the absence of rest periods and work breaks and in the chronic under-
nourishment. 10 ^

The future might have been radiant, but the present was disastrous. In

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Communism in Asia

November 1976 the American embassy in Bangkok calculated, on the basis of
refugee reports, that the surface area being farmed in Cambodia had fallen by
50 percent from its pre-1975 level. 110 People who traveled through Kampuchea
described the countryside as being almost deserted, with existing fields aban-
doned as a result of the massive population movements to newly cleared land
and the major development projects. Laurence Picq's testimony is typical:

On both sides of the road abandoned rice fields stretched to the horizon.

I looked in vain for planting teams. There were none; only a team
of a few young girls every ten kilometers or so.

Where were the hundreds of young mobile brigades that were
mentioned on the radio every day?

Here and there groups of men and women wandered around, their
possessions wrapped up in a handkerchief and a vacant look in their
eyes. From their clothes, old rags that had once been brightly colored,
you could see that they were New People, city dwellers who had been
driven out of the towns.

I learned that new population transfers were planned for the mid-
dle of the year, to offset the effects of the absurd policies of a "gang of
traitors."

In the early days these city dwellers had been sent to the desolate
regions of the southwest, where in total deprivation they had been
forced to create "a new concept of the world." During all that time, the
fertile regions had been left untended. People were dying of hunger all
over the country, and only one-fifth of the fields were actually being
tended!

What had happened to the peasant workforce that traditionally
worked the land? Many such questions remained unanswered.

The much-vaunted mobile brigades lived in very difficult condi-
tions too. Meals were brought to them in the fields: bindweed in boiled
water, with a few spoonfuls of rice, about half of what we used to eat in
Phnom Penh. With rations like that it was impossible to make a real
effort to produce anything . . .

I stared hard. The spectacle was frightening: indescribable human
misery, total disorganization, and appalling waste.

As the car moved quickly on, an old man came toward us gesturing
with his arms. At the roadside there lay a young woman, obviously ill.
The driver just swerved around him, and the old man remained in the
middle of the road, his arms raised to heaven.' 11

The economic project of the CPK caused intolerable tensions. These were
made even worse by the high-handed incompetence of the cadres who were
supposed to oversee the work. Irrigation was the cornerstone of the plan, and
huge efforts were made to develop it, sacrificing the present for the future. But

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601

the poor planning and execution of the projects rendered the sacrifice largely
futile. Although some dikes, canals, and dams were well planned and continue
in use today, many were carried away by the first flood. On occasion hundreds
of villagers and workers were drowned in the process. Other projects caused
the water to flow in the wrong direction or created ponds that silted up in a
matter of months. Hydraulic engineers in the workforce were powerless to stop
such events. Any sort of criticism was viewed as an act of hostility toward the
Angkar, which inevitably brought consequences that can be imagined all too
easily. "To build dams, all you need is political education," the slaves were
told. 112 For the illiterate peasants who were often in charge of operations, the
solution was always more manpower, more man-hours, and more earth.

This rejection of technology and technicians was often accompanied by a
rejection of the most elementary common sense. It was perhaps the sons of the
soil who controlled operations on the ground, but their real masters were urban
intellectuals who were in love with rationality and uniformity and convinced
of their own omniscience. They ordered that all dikes dividing the rice fields
be abolished so that all fields would measure exactly one hectare. 111 The agri-
cultural calendar for the whole region was regulated from the Center, regardless
of local ecological conditions. 114 Rice production was the only criterion of
success. Some cadres decided that all trees, including fruit trees, should be cut
down in the agricultural regions to destroy the habitat of a few small birds,
thus destroying a vital source of food for the starving population. 11 ' While
nature was steamrollered, the workforce was divided into absurdly specialized
groups, with each age category — seven- to fourteen-year-olds, people of mar-
riageable age, old people, and so forth — "mobilized" separately. 11 " Special teams
dedicated to one particular task became more and more common. The cadres,
by contrast, remained distant figures, caught up in their own importance and
power, seldom working alongside their teams, giving out unchallengeable or-
ders.

The hunger that crushed so many Cambodians over the years was used
deliberately by the regime in the service of its interests. The hungrier people
were, the less food their bodies could store, and the less likely they were to run
away. If people were permanently obsessed with food, all individual thought,
all capacity to argue, even people's sex drive, would disappear. The games that
were played with the food supply made forced evacuations easier, promoted
acceptance of the collective canteens, and also weakened interpersonal relation-
ships, including those between parents and their children. Everyone, by con-
trast, would kiss the hand that fed them, regardless of how bloody it was. 117

It was a sad irony that a regime that wished to sacrifice everything to an
almost mystical belief in rice (in the same way that Russia had a belief in the
power of steel, and Cuba in sugar) managed to turn this once-plentiful product

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into something almost unobtainable. Since the 1920s Cambodia had regularly
exported hundreds of thousands of tons of rice each year while feeding its own
population frugally but adequately. After collective canteens became the norm
in early 1976, the majority of Cambodians were reduced to a daily diet of thin
rice soup, containing on average four teaspoons of rice per person. 118 Harvests
varied from the miserable to the catastrophic. Daily rations fell constantly, to
extraordinarily low levels. It has been calculated that before 1975, an adult in
the Battambang region would have consumed on average 400 grams of rice per
day, the minimum quantity required in a normal diet. Under the Khmer Rouge,
a box of rice for one person was an almost unheard-of feast. Rations varied
considerably, but it was not unusual for five, six, or even eight people to share
a single box. 119

For that reason the black market became essential to people's survival;
there they could obtain rice, particularly from cadres who kept the rations of
peasants whose deaths had not been reported. Foraging for food was officially
prohibited on the ground that because the Angkar acted for the good of the
people, the rations it provided should suffice. Nevertheless, foraging was tol-
erated, officially or unofficially, unless the food was considered to be stolen. 12 "
Nothing was safe from these starving people: not the communal goods such as
the paddy fields before or during the harvest, not the tiny strips of land that
people cultivated for themselves, or the chicken coops and domestic animals of
the peasants, or even the crabs, frogs, snails, lizards, and snakes so common in
the rice fields, or the red ants and large spiders that were eaten raw, or the
shoots, mushrooms, and forest roots that, when badly chosen or undercooked,
were the cause of many deaths. New depths were reached, even for a poor
country. People would steal food from pigs and feast on rats that they caught
in the fields. 121 Individual searching for food was always one of the main
pretexts for punishment. Such punishments ranged from a simple warning to
outright execution, if it was felt that the harvest was being threatened. 122

Chronic undernourishment and malnutrition promoted the spread of
diseases such as dysentery and made people sicker than they would have been
otherwise. There were also diseases and complaints specific to hunger; the
commonest of these was edema, which was brought on chiefly by the high salt
content in people's daily soup. Edema led to a relatively peaceful death — people
grew weaker until they fell into unconsciousness— an outcome that many,
especially the old, came to see as desirable. 121

This universe of death and decay — sometimes the sick and dying formed
the majority of a community 124 — seemed to have no effect on the Khmer Rouge
authorities. Anyone who fell ill was guilty of damaging the Angkar workforce. 123
Sick people were always suspected of malingering and were allowed to stop
work only if they actually went to the hospital or the infirmary, where food

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603

rations were only half the normal size and the risk of epidemics was even
higher. According to Henri Locard, "the purpose of the hospitals was more
to eliminate the population than to cure to it." 126 Pin Yathay lost several
members of his family within a few weeks in one hospital. There a group of
fifteen young people suffering from chicken pox were kept at work with no
medical attention and were obliged to sleep on the floor despite their sores.
Only one survived.

The Destruction of All Values

Hunger dehumanizes, causing one person to turn on another and to forget
everything except his own survival. How else can one explain cannibalism? It
was perhaps less widespread than in China during the Great Leap Forward,
and it seems to have been limited to the eating of people who were already
dead. Pin Yathay reports two examples: a former teacher who ate her sister, and
the inmates of a hospital ward who ate a young man. In both cases, punishment
for the "ogres" (a particularly bloodthirsty spirit in the Khmer tradition) was
death; the teacher was beaten to death in front of the assembled village and her
own daughter. 127 As in China, cannibalism also existed as an act of revenge: Ly
Heng tells of a Khmer Rouge deserter who was forced to eat his own ears
before being killed. 12 * There are also many stories about the eating of human
livers. This act was not confined to the Khmer Rouge: republican soldiers ate
the livers of their enemies during the 1970-1975 civil war. Similar traditions
can be found all across Southeast Asia. 12g Haing Ngor describes how in one
prison the fetus, liver, and breasts of a pregnant woman who had been executed
were treated; the child was simply thrown away (others had already been hung
from the ceiling to dry), and the rest was carried away with cries of "That's
enough meat for tonight! 1 ' Ken Khun tells of a cook in a cooperative who
prepared an eye remedy from human gall bladders (which he shared out quite
liberally to his bosses) and who praised the tastiness of human liver. m These
instances of cannibalism reflect the loss of all moral and cultural values, and
particularly the disappearance of the central Buddhist value of compassion.
Such was one of the paradoxes of the Khmer Rouge regime: it claimed that its
intention was to create an egalitarian society in which justice, fraternity, and
altruism would be the key values, yet like other Communist regimes it pro-
duced a tidal wave of selfishness, inequality, and irrationality. To survive,
people were forced to cheat, lie, steal, and turn their hearts to stone.

The loss of all human compassion and decency had long been the norm
at the highest level of power. After Pol Pot disappeared into the jungle in 1963
he did nothing to get back in touch with his family, even after 17 April 1975.
His two brothers and his sister-in-law were deported along with everyone else.

604 Communism in Asia

One of them died very quickly. Only much later did the two survivors realize,
thanks to an official portrait, who Pol Pot really was, and (probably quite
rightly) they never let on that they even knew him. U2 The regime did all it could
to break family ties, which it saw as a threat to the totalitarian project of making
each individual totally dependent on the Angkar. Work teams had their own
houses, which were often simply barracks or collections of hammocks or mats
for sleeping located near the village. It was very difficult to get permission to
leave these compounds, and husbands and wives were often separated for weeks
or longer. Children were kept from their extended families, and adolescents
sometimes went six months without seeing their parents. Mothers were encour-
aged to spend as little time as possible with their children. Because the postal
service had stopped altogether, it was sometimes months before people learned
of the death of a relative. i;i Here again the example came from above, as many
of the leaders lived apart from their wives or husbands. 114

The power of husbands over their wives and of parents over their children
was shattered. Men could be executed for striking their wives, denounced by
their children for hitting them, and forced to make a humiliating public con-
fession before the assembled village for any insult or injury. This policy can be
seen as an attempt by the state to ensure that it had a monopoly on violence,
and to destroy any relationship of authority in which it was not directly in-
volved. Kinship bonds were given the lowest possible priority: people were
separated, often permanently, simply because they had been unable to board
the same truck, or because the two handcarts they were pulling were ordered
to go in separate directions at a crossroads. The cadres cared little for old people
or children who found themselves alone: "Don't worry: the Angkar will take
care of them. Have you no faith in the Angkar? 1 ' was the typical response
received by those who begged for clemency and reunion with their loved
ones J

The switch from cremation of the dead to simple burial (there were
exceptions to the rule, but people had to right extremely hard for such excep-
tions, and these depended on the humanity of the cadres) was yet another
assault on traditional family values. Tor a Khmer, to leave a loved one in the
cold and the mud without going through the traditional rites was to show an
atrocious lack of respect, to compromise the possibility of" reincarnation, and
perhaps even to condemn the loved one to existence only as a ghost. By
contrast, possessing a few ashes was valued extremely highly, particularly be-
cause evacuation was so common. This was one of the main battlegrounds in
the svstematic attack on traditional Buddhist or pre-Buddhist values in Cam-
bodia, and no more respect was paid to the ''primitive" ceremonies specific to
the Khmer Loeu than to the old traditions that had come down from the
Angkor empire, regardless of whether these were popular traditions such as

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605

courtship rituals and jokes, or high art such as courtly dances, temple painting,
and sculpture. The 1976 plan, doubtless in imitation of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, allowed for no forms of expression other than revolutionary songs
and poems. 136

This denial of all status to the dead was the natural consequence of the
denial of the humanity of the living. "I am not a human being, I am an animal,"
one can read at the end of the confession by the former leader and minister Hu
Nim. n7 The implication was that a human life quite literally had no more value
than that of a beast. People were killed for losing cattle and tortured to death
for having struck a cow. UH Men were tied to plows and whipped mercilessly to
be shown unworthy of the cow they were supposed to be looking after. 139
Human life was worthless. u You have individualist tendencies . . . You must . . .
shed these illusions," Pin Yathay was told by one Khmer Rouge soldier when
he attempted to keep his wounded son by his side. Several days after his son's
death, Pin Yathay had to beg for permission from the authorities to go and see
his body. He was made to swear that even though he was ill this visit would not
waste his energy, which belonged to the Angkar. Neither did he have the right
to visit his sick wife in the hospital; he was simply told that u the Angkar is
looking after her." When he came to the assistance of a neighbor with two
children who was seriously ill, he was told by a Khmer Rouge soldier; "You
don't have a duty to help these people. On the contrary, that proves you still
have pity and feelings of friendship. You must renounce such sentiments and
wipe all such individualism from your mind. Go home." 140

This systematic denial of the humanity of the country's citizens did
occasionally backfire on the leaders. It meant that their victims no longer had
any scruples about lying, shirking, or stealing whenever the guards or informers
turned their backs. It was a question of life and death, given how small the
rations supplied by the Angkar were. Everyone, from children to old men, stole.
But the term "stealing" came to have little meaning, since absolutely everything
belonged to the state, and even picking a little wild fruit constituted a theft.
Everyone was caught in the trap. Those who didn't cheat and steal, died. This
lesson has had serious consequences in contemporary Cambodia, creating a
cynical and selfish generation and seriously compromising the country's
chances of development.

The Triumph of Brutality

There was another strange contradiction inherent in the regime: whereas in
theory the lives and thoughts of the people were supposed to be absolutely
transparent and public, almost nothing was known about the people in power.
Uniquely in the history of Communism, the existence of the Communist Party

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of Kampuchea was kept hidden for thirty months after the regime came
to power; it was officially declared only on 27 September 1977. The personality
of Pol Pot himself was also a closely guarded secret. He appeared in public
for the first time during the "elections" of March 1976, described as u a worker
from the Hevea plantations." In fact he had never worked there, any more
than he had on his parents' farm, as was claimed in an official biography
circulated during a visit to North Korea in October 1977. Western secret
services were the first to realize that Pol Pot and Saloth Sar, the militant
Communist who had fled Phnom Penh in 1963 and who, according to certain
CPK cadres, had died in the jungle, were one and the same person. Pol Pot's
desire to remain in the shadows, the better to exercise his omnipotence, was
such that there were never any official portraits, official statues, or even an
official biography. His photograph appeared only rarely, and there was never
an official collection of his thoughts for publication. No trace of a personality
cult ever existed, and it was only after January 1979 that many Cambodians
finally learned who their prime minister had been over the preceding years. 141
Pol Pot and the Angkar were one and the same. Everything happened as
though he were the supreme anonymous deity of the organization, at once
absent and present in every village, inspiring everyone who held the smallest
position of authority. Ignorance is the mother of terror, and no one ever felt
secure.

The slaves of the system had no control over their own lives. Each moment
was carefully planned and was part of a timetable that never gave a moment's
respite, in which food was all-important and self-criticism meetings were cru-
cial, since the tiniest error could bring about one's downfall. Each person's past
was also carefully monitored. 142 The slightest doubt about the veracity of one's
statements was followed by arrest and torture, through which the authorities
sought to extract a declaration about whatever the person might be hiding.
Everyone ran the risk of a denunciation following a chance encounter with an
old friend, colleague, or student; the future was always hanging by a thread,
dependent on the whim of those who pulled the strings. Nothing escaped the
vigilant eyes of the authorities, who according to one slogan had "as many eyes
as a pineapple." Everything was taken to have a political meaning, and the
smallest infringement of the regulations became an act of opposition and a
"counterrevolutionary crime." Even an involuntary slip brought disaster: in the
paranoid logic of the Khmer Rouge, accidents never happened, and one could
never blame chance or clumsiness; there was only treachery. Breaking a glass,
failing to control an ox, or plowing a crooked furrow was enough for people to
be brought before the court, which consisted of members of the cooperative,
often including friends and relatives. Someone would always be present to make
an accusation. People were forbidden to speak about the dead, who were either

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traitors who had been rightly punished or cowards who had robbed the Angkar
of the manpower it needed. Even words like "death" became taboo, leading
people to use circumlocutions and euphemisms such as bat kluon, "a body that
has disappeared."

Legal procedures were entirely absent. There were never any real trials,
and no police force worthy of the name existed. The army took over this role,
for which it was extremely badly prepared. The inefficiency of the repressive
machinery accounts for the relative ease of smuggling and stealing and of
talking freely in private. It also goes some way toward explaining the widespread
use of children and young adolescents as police auxiliaries. A number of them,
integrated into the Khmer Rouge and known as chhlop, were basically spies,
hiding under houses to listen in on private conversations and to hunt out
forbidden stores of food. Others, often the youngest members, would be given
the task of tracking the political views of their parents and relatives to denounce
them "for their own good" if they ever showed evidence of deviant thoughts.
For most Cambodians, anything that was not explicitly allowed was forbidden
or could be considered as such. Because prison, in practice, was a waiting room
for imminent death, minor crimes that were not repeated, and that were im-
mediately admitted and followed with a sufficiently humble, spontaneous act
of self-criticism, were either pardoned, punished with a job change (for in-
stance, as in China, being sent to work in a pigsty), or disciplined by a beating
administered in full view of the assembled village. There were many such
crimes. Families were forced to accept that they would not meet for months on
end even though their work teams might be only a few kilometers apart. Little
mistakes were common at work, since workers seldom had experience in per-
forming the tasks to which they had been assigned, and tools were usually
insufficient or old and worn. Few people could resist the temptation to hoard
a little food, when "hoarding" could mean simply hiding a banana.

Any of these "crimes" could bring imprisonment or death. 143 Everyone
committed such crimes; hence the most common received milder sanctions. But
everything was relative: whipping was a minor punishment for the young, but
for adults it sometimes resulted in death. Although the torturers were often
Khmer Rouge military personnel, it was most common to be beaten by one's
work colleagues, "75s," who would compete to be the most zealous in the
execution of the punishment, while knowing very well that they could be next.
As always, the key was to appear to be totally submissive. Any complaint or
protest would be interpreted as opposition to the punishment and hence to the
regime. The aim was to punish, but also to terrorize; hence there were also
occasional mock executions. 144

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Murder as a Means of Government

"All we need to build our country is a million good revolutionaries. No more
than that. And we would rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to live."
Such statements by the Khmer Rouge were commonplace at cooperative meet-
ings, 145 and indeed they put this genocidal logic into practice. Under Pol Pot,
death by violent means was far more common than death through disease or
old age. What is known elsewhere as u the supreme punishment" became banal
here because of its frequency and because of the trivial reasons for which it was
invoked. By a strange inversion, in the cases considered most serious people
received only prison sentences, even though in practice that merely meant a
stay of execution, for it was in prison that they were expected to confess the
details of their plot and the names of their accomplices. Although the reality of
the prison system was carefully hidden — and this was a mystery that made it
more frightening still — some deportees had a reasonable idea of how the sys-
tem worked: "Perhaps, I thought, there were two parallel systems of punish-
ment: first, a prison system that was part of a bureaucracy that needed to be fed
to justify its existence; and second, an informal system that gave the leader of
the cooperative freedom to hand out punishments, although the effect of each
on the prisoner was ultimately the same." ,4fl This description is backed up by
Henri Locard. 147 There was also a third way of putting people to death, which
was very common in the last year of the regime: the military purge, similar in
form to the events in the Vendee in France in 1793—1795. Teams of disgraced
local cadres, whole villages of "suspects," and even entire populations of areas
as large as the eastern zone were slaughtered en masse by government troops.
In these cases no charges were ever brought, no one was allowed to defend
himself, and the news of people's deaths was never passed on to relatives or
colleagues: "The Angkar kills but never explains." So went one of the new
proverbs that appeared during these years. H *

It is difficult to draw up a list of specific crimes that were punishable by
death. The problem is not that information is lacking, but that it is extremely
hard to find any crime that was clearly not punishable by capital punishment;
Khmer Rouge cadres were encouraged to interpret all deviant actions in the
most paranoid manner. What follows, then, is just a recapitulation of the main
reasons for which the death sentence was invoked, beginning with the most
common. Theft of food was without doubt at the top of the list. Given the
importance of rice in the local diet and the mystical significance that it had for
the regime, the death sentence was widely applied to anyone caught pilfering
in the fields or foraging supplies from kitchens or storage areas. People out
marauding were often beaten to death on the spot with pick-ax handles, then
left to rot where they died, to serve as an example. 149 People who stole vegetables

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or fruit had a greater chance of escaping with just a beating. But there were
exceptions: Khun relates an instance of the theft of a few bananas by a woman
who was nursing a starving child, and who was killed as a result. 150 In another
instance, a group of adolescents who had stolen some fruit from an orchard
were judged by their comrades (who had no option but to cooperate), con-
demned to death, and immediately shot in the back of the head. "We were
shaking. They said it should serve as a lesson to us." It was rarer for animals
to be killed in secret; poultry and pets quickly disappeared or were watched
very closely, and it was extremely difficult to dispose of a large carcass in secret
because of the cramped living conditions. But in some cases whole families were
killed for having shared out a cow. ,sl

Secret visits, even short ones, to family members were treated as deser-
tions and were thus extremely dangerous. If one repeated the offense, one's life
was clearly at risk, since one had thereby committed the cardinal crime of
missing work. Being overly close to one's family was also frowned upon, as was
arguing with them, or with anyone else for that matter, and one could pay for
such a crime with one's life (though in this case, too, death was rarely meted
out for a first offense). The atmosphere was extremely puritan; men and women
talking to each other were expected to stand at least three meters apart unless
they were close relatives. Any sexual relations outside marriage were system-
atically punished with death. Life was extremely difficult for young lovers, as
it was for lascivious cadres, many of whom were punished for crimes of the
flesh. 152 The consumption of alcoholic beverages, which generally consisted of
fermented palm juice, was another capital crime. 151 However, usually only
cadres and peasants were convicted of these offenses; New People had a hard
enough time just finding enough to eat. Religious practices were frowned upon
but were more or less tolerated, provided they were carried out discreetly and
on an individual basis (something that is possible in Buddhism but extremely
difficult in Islam). Any trance ceremonies, however, were punishable by
death.' 54 Insubordination meant immediate death. The few who in the early
days took advantage of the supposed freedom of speech that they were given
at meetings to criticize the insufficiency of the food they were given or the poor
quality of the clothes they were expected to wear "disappeared" very quickly,
as did one courageous group of teachers who, in November 1975, organized a
demonstration against the tiny food rations. Although their protest was not
actually stopped, all were deported soon afterward. 155 Defeatist remarks, calling
for the end of the regime or victory by the Vietnamese — which many Cambo-
dians desired by 1978 — or even admitting that one was hungry could have fatal
consequences. The task of the chhhp was to record, and even trap people into
making, such incriminating remarks.

Failure to complete the task one was assigned, for whatever reason, was

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an extremely serious matter. No one was safe from accidents, mishaps, or minor
errors, but all of these were potentially fatal, and it was mainly on grounds of
failure that many handicapped and mentally ill people were killed. Anyone who
failed to carry out his or her task was a saboteur, and even more useless than
the mass of New People. Anyone from the republican army who had been
wounded in the war or had lost a limb also disappeared. Especially at risk were
people who were unable to understand or carry out the instructions they were
given. A madman picking a manioc shoot (a root crop) or expressing his
discontent even in incoherent terms would usually be shot. l5h The Khmer
Communists were in effect practicing a de facto eugenics program.

The general level of violence in Democratic Kampuchea was staggering.
But for the majority of Cambodians, what was most terrifying was the myste-
rious and seemingly random nature of the disappearances, rather than the
spectacle of death. Death was usually discreet and hidden away. In that respect,
it accorded with the approach almost invariably taken by soldiers and CPK
cadres: "Their words were quite cordial and polite, even at the worst of times.
They could often go as far as murder without abandoning that tone. They
administered death with kind words . . . They could promise anything that we
wanted to hear to lull us into a false sense of security. But I knew that their soft
words followed or preceded terrible crimes. The Khmer Rouge were polite in
every possible case, even while they were slaughtering us like cattle." 157 The
first explanation for this behavior is inevitably a tactical one, as Yathay suggests,
to ensure that they always had surprise on their side and to discourage revolts.
A cultural explanation can also be made, based on the high prestige of self-dis-
cipline in Buddhism, and the accompanying loss of face for anyone who gives
in to emotion. Finally, there is the political explanation. As in the heyday of
Chinese Communism before the Cultural Revolution, lack of emotion served
to display the implacable rationality of the Party, in which nothing was ever a
matter of chance or the result of a momentary whim. The Party was shown to
be all-powerful under all circumstances. This discretion in executions might be
considered evidence that they were coordinated from the Center. Primitive and
spontaneous violence such as that of the pogroms had no qualms in showing
itself for what it really was. One afternoon, or one night, the soldiers simply
turned up and took you away for interrogation, study, or woodcutting detail.
Your arms were tied behind your back, and that was it. Sometimes they would
find your body later, left unburied in the woods, to instill fear in others; but
just as frequently the bodies were unidentifiable. In each of the provinces that
have been investigated, more than 1,000 burial grounds have been found; and
there are twenty provinces. 158 On occasion the Khmer Rouge really did put into
practice their constantly repeated threat to use human bodies as fertilizer for
the rice fields. 159 u Men and women were often killed to make fertilizer. They

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611

were buried in the mass graves located near the crop fields, particularly where
manioc was being grown. Often when you pulled out the manioc roots you
would pull up a human bone that the roots had grown down into." 160 It was
almost as though the country's leaders were convinced that there was no better
fertilizer for crops than human remains; 161 but what can also be discerned here
is the logical endpoint, together with the cannibalism practiced by the cadres,
of the denial of the humanity of anyone judged to be a class enemy.

The extreme savagery of the system would reappear at the moment of
execution. To save bullets, and also to satisfy the sadistic instincts of the
executioners, shooting was not the most common means of execution. 162 Ac-
cording to Sliwinski's research, only 29 percent of victims died that way. 161
Some 53 percent of victims died from blows to the head, inflicted with iron
bars, pick-ax handles, or agricultural implements; 6 percent were hanged or
asphyxiated with plastic bags; and 5 percent had their throats slit. All witness
statements agree that only 2 percent of all executions took place in public. Most
of these were intended to set an example, and involved cadres who had fallen
from favor. They were usually killed by particularly barbaric means that in one
way or another involved fire. Often these disgraced cadres were buried up to
their chest in a ditch filled with firebrands, or their heads were doused with
gasoline and set alight. m

The Prison Archipelago

In principle, Democratic Kampuchea had no prisons. According to Pol Pot,
speaking in August 1978, "We don't have prisons, and we don't even use the
word 'prison.' Bad elements in our society are simply given productive tasks to
do." 165 The Khmer Rouge were extremely proud of this, emphasizing the
double rupture with the political past and religious tradition, whereby punish-
ment was deferred and detention supplanted by Buddhist karma, in which sins
are paid for only in the next life. Under the Khmer Rouge, punishments were
to be carried out immediately. 166 There were, however, "reeducation centers"
(muniy operum), sometimes called "district police headquarters." The old colo-
nial prisons were deserted just like all the other buildings in the towns, and
were reoccupied only in a few small provincial towns, where as many as thirty
detainees would be crammed into a cell designed for two or three. The build-
ings that served as prisons under the new regime were often old school build-
ings, which were now useless, or temples. 167

There is no doubt that these were quite different from traditional prisons,
even from prisons with an extremely harsh regime. The least one can say is that
nothing was done to make the life of the prisoners any easier, or even to help
them survive. Food rations were minuscule — sometimes a single box of rice for

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forty prisoners. 168 There were no medical facilities, and overcrowding was
endemic. Prisoners were constantly kept in chains: one ankle for women and
the lighter categories of male prisoner, two for normal male prisoners, some-
times with elbows tied behind the back as well, and all chains tied to an iron
bar fixed to the floor (khnoh). There were no toilets and no possibility of
washing. Average life expectancy under these conditions was three months;
very few people survived. 169 One of the rare exceptions described his luck in
prison in the western zone: "They killed only about half of the prisoners or
fewer." 170 He was lucky enough to have been locked up in late 1975, when
freeing prisoners was still conceivable, as it was until 17 April. Until 1976,
between 20 percent and 30 percent of prisoners were set free, perhaps because
at that time people still took quite seriously the idea of reeducation through
exhausting physical work, which was central to the Sino- Vietnamese prison
system. Officials and even soldiers from the old regime had a real chance of
escaping alive provided they behaved themselves and worked hard. This was
still true even during the early days of the evacuation. 171 Thereafter the old
terminology was preserved but emptied of all meaning. Imprisonment was
often described as an invitation to a "study session," the Khmer term being
borrowed from the Chinese xuexi. The disappearance of all pedagogical inten-
tion (with the possible exception of the Bung Tra Beck camp, for Cambodians
who returned from abroad, most of whom were students, as described by
Y Phandara) is tacitly acknowledged in a note from one local headquarters
stipulating that all children should not be locked up with their mothers, regard-
less of their age, "to get rid of them all at a stroke." 172 This was the implemen-
tation of the slogan "When you pull up a weed, you have to dig up the roots
too," which was a radical formulation of the notion of "class heredity" among
Maoist extremists. 173 The fate of these children, left alone, not tied up but with
no one to look after them, was particularly poignant. Worse still was that of the
young delinquents, for whom there was no minimum age limit for confinement.
According to one former official,

What moved us most was the fate of twenty young children, most of
whom belonged to people who had been evacuated after 17 April 1975.
These children stole because they were too hungry. They had been
arrested not so that they could be punished, but so that they could be
put to death in an extremely savage manner:

- Prison guards hit them or kicked them to death.

• They made living toys out of them, tying up their feet, hanging

them from the roof, swinging them, then steadying them with

kicks.
■ Near the prison there was a pond; the executioners threw the

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613

children into it and held them down by their feet, and when they
started to thrash about they would let their heads up, and then
start the process all over again.

We, the other prisoners and myself, cried in secret about the fate of
these children, who were leaving this world in such an atrocious manner.
There were eight executioners and guards. Bun, the chief, and Lan
(these are the only two names I remember) were the worst, but they all
took part, competing to see who could make their compatriots suffer
most cruelly. 1 ' 4

The main division between the inmates was between those who had been
condemned to die slowly and those who were to be executed immediately. That
depended above all on the reason for which they had been locked up: whether
they had broken a law, had impure social origins, had openly shown dissatis-
faction with the regime, or had taken part in some sort of conspiracy. In the
last three cases, people were generally interrogated so that they would either
admit to previous employment in one of the proscribed categories or confess
their guilt and name their accomplices. If they put up any hint of resistance,
torture was used, and it was more widespread than in any other Communist
regime. The Khmer Rouge were particularly morbid and sadistically inventive
in this area. 17 ' One of the most common methods was partial asphyxiation by
use of a plastic bag. Many prisoners, already quite weak, failed to survive these
torture sessions; women above all suffered terribly. The executioner's excuse
was that the worst tortures brought the best results. One report stated that the
prisoner "was first questioned politely, without any violence at all. It was thus
impossible to know whether he was telling the truth or not." In the worst cases,
when admissions were particularly promising in regard to future convictions,
detainees were moved up to the next circle in the prison hell. One could thus
go from the local jail to the district facility, then to the main zone prison, and
end up in the central prison at Tuol Sleng. Regardless of the level attained, the
outcome was usually the same. Once the prisoner had no more information to
convey, having been pressed to the end by his torturers (and this could take
weeks or even months), he was simply executed. This was often done with a
knife or, as in Tramkak, with an iron bar. Loudspeakers would blare out
revolutionary music to disguise the death throes of prisoners who died in such
fashion.

One could also be imprisoned for some of the same offenses that could
lead to trouble or death in the cooperative, especially if these offenses were of
larger dimensions. The prisons housed many thieves who had organized large-
scale operations, often with accomplices. But there were also many people who
had had sexual relations outside marriage, and many more who had made

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"subversive" remarks: complaints about inadequate food or about Cambodia's
submission to China, statements about being fed up with an agricultural con-
text presented as a form of military operation, jokes about the hymn to the
revolution, the spreading of rumors about anti-Communist guerrillas, or ref-
erences to Buddhist predictions about an atheist topsy-turvy world that was
destined to be destroyed. One woman (who was a a, 70") was imprisoned for
having broken a spoon in a canteen after becoming enraged that, having already
lost four children to the famine, she was still not granted permission to stay
with her last one, who was dying in hospital.

In 1996 Kassie Neou, the director of the Cambodian Institute for Human
Rights, reported:

For the crime of speaking English, I was arrested by the Khmer Rouge
and dragged with a rope around my neck, hobbling and swaying, to the
Kach Roteh prison, near Battambang. This was only the beginning. I
was chained up with the other prisoners in irons that cut into my skin. 1
still have the scars on my ankles. I was tortured repeatedly for months.
My only respite came when I passed out.

Every night the guards would come into the cell and call out the
names of one, two, or three prisoners. They would be led away, and we
would never see them again. They were assassinated on orders from the
Khmer Rouge. As far as I know, Fm one of a very small number of
prisoners to have survived from Kach Roteh, which was really a torture
and extermination camp. I survived only because Em good at telling
Aesop's fables and the classic animal stories from Khmer mythology,
and I could thus entertain the adolescents and children who were our
guards.' 76

As well as these political cases, there were a good number of social cases:
people who had lied about their previous profession or concealed compromising
episodes in their past history such as a lengthy stay abroad in the West. There
were also a significant number of peasants in the prisons (although they were
very much in the minority), and even soldiers and Khmer Rouge officials. In
the Tramkak prison these accounted for 10 percent of all prisoners, or 46 out
of 477. They had shown signs of laziness or had "deserted," which in most
cases meant having tried to visit their loved ones. Middle- or higher-ranking
cadres were generally sent directly to a central prison such as Tuol Sleng.

To visit this old school building, which in the CPK era was known in code
simply as S-21, is to feel that one is plumbing the depths of horror. And yet
this is just one detention center among hundreds of others, and although it
claimed 20,000 victims, this was not an extraordinarily high number. Living
conditions were appalling, but were equally bad elsewhere. Only 2 percent of
all the people who died and perhaps 5 percent of all prisoners came through

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615

Tuol Sleng; thus there is no comparison with the central role of an Auschwitz
in the Nazi concentration-camp system. Nor was there a specific mode of
torture, other than the widespread use of electricity. Its only specific features
were that it was in a sense the "Central Committee" prison to which disgraced
cadres and fallen leaders were sent, and that it was a particularly powerful
"black hole" from which there was almost no chance of emerging alive; only
six or seven detainees survived. It is also unique in that it kept a complete list
of all inmates admitted to the prison between 1975 and mid-1978 (14,000
names), as well as a huge archive of confessions and interrogation reports,
including some concerning high-ranking figures in the regime. 177

Around four-fifths of the prisoners were themselves Khmer Rouge mem-
bers. Others were workers and technicians, many of Chinese origin, who had
been sent there in 1978. There were also a few foreigners (mostly sailors) who
had been unlucky enough to fall into the hands of the regime. 178 At any given
time there were between 1,000 and 1,500 detainees, but the turnover was truly
massive; the constantly growing entrance figures are about equivalent to the
annual number of victims. In 1975 there were barely 200, by 1976 there were
2,250, more than 6,330 in 1977, and 5,765 for the first quarter of 1978 alone.
Interrogators faced a dilemma: according to one notebook, "torture is consid-
ered absolutely necessary"; but the problem was that prisoners died too quickly,
before having confessed enough, which was a sort of defeat for the Party. Hence
there was a minimal amount of medical care available in the one place where
all the prisoners were certain to die. 17y Some detainees were easier cases than
others; the wives and children of prisoners (who often had been executed
already) were disposed of swiftly at prearranged times. Thus on 1 July 1977,
114 women (90 of whom were the wives of prisoners) were hanged; the next
day, 31 boys and 43 girls were killed, all of them the children of prisoners.
Fifteen had been moved there from a special children's home. Soon after the
proclamation of the CPK's existence the daily number of executions reached
its peak; on 15 October 1977, 418 were killed. 180 It is estimated that 1,200
children died at S-21. ,HI

Reasons for the Madness

As with the other mass crimes of the century, there is a temptation to seek an
ultimate explanation in the madness of one man or in the dazed enthrallment
of an entire people. But although there is no way to minimize the responsibility
of Pol Pot, neither should the national history of Cambodia, the impact of the
international Communist movement, and the influence of other countries
(principally of course China) be ignored. The Khmer Rouge dictatorship,

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Communism in Asia

though anchored in a specific geographic and temporal context, can be seen as
a distillation of the worst possible factors from each of these categories.

A Khmer Exception?

"The Khmer revolution has no predecessors. What we are trying to bring
about has never been accomplished at any time in history." As soon as the
Khmer Rouge freed themselves from their Vietnamese protectors, they were at
pains to underscore the unique nature of their experiment. Their official state-
ments hardly ever made reference to the outside world, except in extremely
negative ways; and they hardly ever quoted the founding fathers of Marxism-
Leninism or even Mao Zedong. To a large extent, their brand of nationalism
had the same stamp as that of their predecessors Sihanouk and Lon Nol — the
same mixture of self-pity and delusions of grandeur. Kampuchea, in this
depiction, was a victim, constantly oppressed by untrustworthy, cruel neigh-
bors who were determined to destroy the country to ensure their own survival.
Vietnam was first among these oppressors. At the same time the country was
portrayed as a sort of arcadia, beloved of the gods, with an impressive history
and a population like no other, whose mission it was to lead the way into a new
order for the entire planet. 182 Their triumphalism sometimes knew no bounds:
"We are making a unique revolution. Is there any other country that would
dare abolish money and markets the way we have? We are much better than the
Chinese, who look up to us. They are trying to imitate us, but they haven't
managed it yet. We are a good model for the whole world" — so went one
speech by an intellectual cadre who had been abroad. m Even after Pol Pot was
ousted, he continued to believe that 17 April 1975 was the greatest date in the
history of all revolutions, "with the exception of the Paris Commune in
1871." 1 * 4

The sad reality was that Cambodia was a provincial country that had
looked inward for too long, where (thanks to the French protectorate) some
curious conservative traditions remained in place, where several clans who were
constantly fighting for control invariably accepted any foreign offers of inter-
vention in their favor, and where the question of economic development had
never really been posed seriously. There was little business or industry, a tiny
middle class, few technicians, and a massive dependence on subsistence agri-
culture. The country was the "sick man" par excellence of Southeast Asia. iSb
The extent to which the country was out of step with reality undoubtedly
encouraged extreme solutions. The deadly combination of an almost paranoid
mistrust of its neighbors and a megalomaniacal exaggeration of its own capaci-
ties magnified its isolation and autarkic approach, while the weakness of the
economy, combined with the poverty of most inhabitants, increased the appeal

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617

of those who appeared to be the new heralds of progress. Cambodia was thus
a weak link, both economically and politically. The international context, and
above all the war in Vietnam, did the rest. The savagery of the Khmer Rouge
owes its origins in part to the contradiction between the huge ambitions of its
leaders and the tremendous obstacles they faced.

Some scholars also believe that a number of characteristics peculiar to the
Cambodian nation played a part in facilitating the murderous actions of the
Khmer Rouge. Buddhism, for example, played an ambiguous role: its indiffer-
ence to social contrasts and to the present in general, together with the idea
that retribution will come only in a future incarnation, abetted the implemen-
tation of the revolutionary ideal. Its anti-individualism was also answered in a
bizarre fashion by the Khmer Rouge's suppression of the individual personal-
ity. The idea that one particular existence is of limited value in the great wheel
of reincarnations led to fatalism in the face of what was perceived as inevitable
destiny and thus diminished resistance among Buddhists to the events sur-
rounding them. 1 *' 1

When Haing Ngor (who had told his captors that his name was Samnang)
emerged from prison, sick and suffering, one old woman voiced to him what
was in fact the opinion of many:

"Samnang, 1 ' she said, "maybe you did something bad in a previous life.
Perhaps you are being punished for it today."

"Yes," I said. "1 think my kama is not so good!" 1 " 7

Although Buddhists suffered violent repression, their religion did not
inspire any resistance comparable to that inspired by the Islam of the Cham.

Contemporary events often cause us to reconsider the past — not to alter the
facts, in the manner of the North Koreans, hut to change priorities and to
reinterpret events. For a long time Cambodia was seen as the peaceful country
of Sihanouk, an island of neutrality during the wars in Indochina, typified by
the "Khmer smile" of Apsara goddesses on the Angkor reliefs and by the
happy faces of an urbane monarch and his peaceful peasant people who con-
tentedly tended their rice crops and palm canes. But the events of the last three
decades have brought out the darker side of the Khmer past. Angkor is one of
the marvels of the world, but most of its miles of low-relief sculptures repre-
sent warlike scenes. 1 * 8 And such huge constructions, with even bigger water
reservoirs (haray), would have required massive deportations and enslave-
ments.

There are very few written records about the Angkor period, which lasted
from the eighth to the fourteenth century; but all the other Hindu and Buddhist
monarchies of the Southeast Asian peninsula (in Thailand, Laos, and Burma)

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were constituted along the same lines. Their rather violent history resembles
that of Cambodia: throughout the region repudiated concubines were trampled
to death by elephants, new dynasties began with the massacre of the previous
monarch's family, and conquered populations were deported to desert zones.
Absolute power was the norm in all these societies, and disobedience was
tantamount to sacrilege. The more enlightened despots did not abuse their
power, but administrative structures were invariably extremely weak and frag-
ile, and the situation was often volatile as a result. Everywhere the populations
seemed to have a tremendous capacity simply to accept things; unlike in China,
revolts against monarchic power were rare. Instead, people tended to flee to
other states, which were never far away, or simply to more remote regions. 189
Sihanouk's reign (from 1 94 1 , although the French protectorate lasted
until 1953) appears almost idyllic in comparison to the events that followed his
dethroning in March 1970. But he himself never hesitated to resort to violence,
particularly against his leftist opponents. There is a good deal of evidence that
in 1959 and 1960, when he was concerned with the growth in popularity of the
Communist left — which was highly critical of corruption within the regime —
he had the editor of the newspaper Prasheashun (The people) assassinated, and
had Khieu Samphan, the editor of the best-selling paper in the country, the
biweekly French language paper L'observateur, beaten up in the street. In Au-
gust 1960 eighteen people were thrown into prison, and all the main left-wing
papers were banned. In 1962, in conditions that are still unclear today, Tou
Samouth, the secretary general of the underground Communist Party of Kam-
puchea, was assassinated, most likely by the secret police, an event that facili-
tated Saloth Sar's ascension to the top of the hierarchy. In 1967 the Samlauth
revolt and the influence of the Cultural Revolution in some Chinese schools
brought the worst episodes of repression of Sihanouk's reign, leading to nu-
merous deaths, including those of the last Communists who were still out in
the open. One side effect of this was that about 100 intellectuals who were
sympathetic to the leftist cause then enlisted in the Khmer Rouge resistance
movement. 190 In Henri Locard's view "Polpotist violence grew out of the
brutality of the repression of the Sihanoukists." 191 From a strictly chronological
point of view, he is undoubtedly correct. Both the regal autocrat and the
marshal silenced anyone who was remotely critical of their inept regimes. In so
doing, they left the CPK as the only opposition with any credibility. But it is
harder to agree with Locard from the point of view of genealogy: the ideological
foundations and the political ends of the Khmer Rouge were never a reaction
to Sihanouk, but were instead part of the great tradition of Leninism found in
the successive figures of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh. Cambodia's
calamitous evolution after independence and its participation in the war facili-
tated the seizure of power by CPK extremists and lent some legitimacy to their

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619

unparalleled recourse to violence, but the radicalism itself cannot be explained
away by external circumstances.

1975: A Radical Break

It was much easier for the revolution in Cambodia to define what it opposed
than actually to announce a positive program. For the most part, the Khmer
Rouge sought revenge, and it was through this intention that they found most
of their popular support, which then gained new impetus through radical
collectivization. The revolution was also the revenge of the countryside against
the towns. In no time at all the peasants had taken everything from the New
People, either through the black market or by quite simply going through their
baggage. 1 '' 2 In the villages, the poorest peasants took revenge on the local
"capitalists," who were identified as anyone who had anything to sell or who
employed someone. But revenge was often personal, too, as old professional
and familial hierarchies were overturned. Eyewitness statements often empha-
size the surprising promotion of previously marginal characters, such as alco-
holics, to new positions of authority in the villages: "Often these people were
rehabilitated by the Angkar and given positions of authority because they
could kill their compatriots without showing any scruples or remorse." 191
Haing Ngor saw in this action the political sanctification of what he considered
to be the lowest part of the Khmer soul, known as kum, a murderous thirst for
revenge that time is powerless to assuage. Many suffered as a result: Ngor's
aunt, for instance, stayed behind in her native village, lost without the help of
her parents in the city. Ngor also met a nurse who had been promoted to the
position of doctor and who tried to have him killed even though he was a
newcomer. The nurse was then promoted to the position of ward leader, radi-
cally overturning the hierarchy he had helped support. 194 What exploded in
Cambodian society was thus a complex of tensions, only some of which could
be termed social in the strictest sense of the word.

Values were turned on their heads. Jobs that had been extremely low
status, such as chef or canteen cleaner, became the most sought after, as they
offered ready opportunities to steal food on the job. Degrees and qualifications
became useless bits of paper and a real liability if one ever attempted to use
them. Humility became the cardinal virtue: among cadres who came back to
the countryside, "strangely enough, the job they wanted most was toilet cleaner
. . . getting over one's repugnance for such things was proof of ideological
transformation." 195 The Angkar wanted a monopoly on familial relations, and
sought to be addressed by people in public as "mother-father." This typical
feature of Asiatic Communism caused considerable confusion between the
Party-state and the adult population. The whole of the post-1975 revolutionary

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period was known as samay pouk-me, "the era of fathers and mothers," and
military chiefs were known as "grandfathers." 1% Hatred and fear of the cities
were extreme: as a cosmopolitan city centered around consumerism and pleas-
ure, Phnom Penh was known to the Khmer Rouge as "the great prostitute on
the Mekong." 197 One of the reasons put forward for the evacuation of the capital
was that "a secret political military plan by the American CIA and the Lon Nol
regime" was aimed in particular at "corrupting our soldiers and softening their
combat spirit with women, alcohol, and money" after the "liberation." 198

Even more than the Chinese revolutionaries, Cambodians took seriously
Mao's famous adage: "It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are
written." 199 The aim was to get rid of everything that would not normally be
found in the house of a poor peasant. Cambodians returning to the country
had to get rid of almost all their baggage, including their books. Anything in
"imperialist writing" — that is, French or English — as well as anything in
Khmer ("relics of feudal culture") was destined for destruction; Haing Ngor
was told by ten-year-old Khmer Rouge soldiers: "No more capitalistic books
now! Capitalistic books are Lon Nol style, and Lon Nol betrayed the country!
Why do you have foreign books? Are you CIA? No more foreign books under
the Angkar." 200 It was a good idea to burn any certificates and even photo
albums along with one's identity papers, since revolution meant beginning from
zero. 201 Quite logically, it was people with no past who were most favored: "Only
the newborn baby is spotless," said one slogan. 202 Education was reduced to a
bare minimum: either there was no school at all, or there were a few classes for
reading, writing, and revolutionary songs for children aged ht to nine, lasting
no more than an hour a day and taught by teachers who themselves were often
barely literate. Practical knowledge was all-important. In contrast to useless
bookish culture, "our children in the rural zones have always had very useful
knowledge. They know a calm cow from a nervous one. They can stand both
ways on a buffalo. They are the masters of the herd. They are practically
masters of nature too. They know all the different varieties of rice like the back
of their hands . . . they know and they really understand . . . the sort of things
that correspond to the realities facing the nation today." 203

In Pol Pot's day it really was the children who were in charge. All witnesses
agree that the majority of soldiers were extraordinarily young. They were
signed up when they were twelve years old or less. Sihanouk had pre-adoles-
cents among his guards, who often amused themselves by torturing cats. 204 Ly
Heng remembers the last recruitment campaign immediately before the arrival
of the Vietnamese, which was extended to include the New People and was
aimed at boys and girls from thirteen to eighteen. Because there were by then
so few volunteers, the mobile brigades of young people were forced to move
from work into the army. 205 New recruits immediately lost touch with their

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621

family and usually also with their village. Living in camps and relatively isolated
from a population that feared them, yet well treated by the government, they
knew that they were all-powerful and much less at the mercy of purges than
the cadres. Beyond the revolutionary verbiage, the motivation of many, some-
times on their own admission, was that they "didn't have to work and could
kill people." 206 Those under fifteen were the most feared: "They were taken
very young, and the only thing they were taught was discipline. They learned
to obey orders, without asking for any justification. They didn't have any be-
lief in religion or in tradition, only in the orders of the Khmer Rouge. That's
why they killed their own people, including babies, the way you kill a mos-
quito." 207

Until 1978, only "'70s" were allowed to be soldiers. The children of
"75s," on the other hand, were often enlisted at the age of eight or nine as
spies; but the regime inspired so little faith that a tacit sort of complicity was
often established with the people they spied upon to discreetly make them
aware of the presence of the spies. 208 Following the massive purge of local
cadres, children scarcely any older than that were sometimes enrolled as "militia
children," helping the new cooperative chiefs in their daily business by search-
ing out and beating people who were feeding themselves. m The experience of
Laurence Picq at headquarters shows there was a clear intention of eventually
extending the "dictatorship of infants" to include a civic role. She describes
the accelerated training of one group of children from the countryside.

It was explained to them that the first generation of cadres had betrayed
the country and that the second generation had not been much better.
So they would have to take over quite quickly . . .

It was with this new generation that the child doctors appeared.
They were six girls aged between nine and thirteen. They could hardly
read, but the Party had given each of them a big box of syringes. It was
their job to give injections.

"Our children doctors," it was said, "are from peasant stock. They
are ready to serve their class. They are remarkably intelligent. If you tell
them that 'the red box contains vitamins/ they remember! Show them
how to sterilize a syringe, and they will remember that too!"

Of course the children were pure and innocent, but knowing how
to give an injection rather went to their heads. In no time at all they were
insolent and arrogant beyond belief. 210

Haing Ngor reports the tirade of a Khmer Rouge cadre at Tonle Bati in
the summer of 1975:

"In Democratic Kampuchea, under the glorious rule of Angkar," he
said, "we need to think about the future. We don't need to think about

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the past. You New People must forget about the pre-revolutionary
times. Forget about cognac, forget about fashionable clothes and hairsty-
les. Forget about Mercedes. Those things are useless now. What can you
do with a Mercedes now? You cannot barter for anything with it! You
cannot keep rice in a Mercedes, but you can keep rice in a box you make
yourself out of a palm leaf!"

"We don't need the technology of the capitalists,' 1 he went on. "We
don't need any of it at all. Under our new system we don't need to send
our children to school. Our school is the farm. We will write by plowing.
We don't need to give examinations or award certificates. Knowing how
to farm and how to dig canals — those are our certificates.

"We don't need doctors any more. They are not necessary. If some-
one needs to have their intestines removed I will do it." He made a
cutting motion with an imaginary knife against his stomach. "It is easy.
There is no need to learn how to do it by going to school.

"We don't need any of the capitalist professions! We don't need
doctors or engineers! We don't need professors telling us what to do.
They were all corrupted. We just need people to work hard on the farm!

"And yet, comrades," he said, looking around at our faces, "there
are some naysayers and troublemakers who do not show the proper
willingness to work hard and sacrifice! Such people do not have the
proper revolutionary mentality! Such people are our enemies! And,
comrades, some of them are right here in our midst!"

There was an uneasy shifting in the audience. Each of us hoped
that the speaker was talking about someone else.

"These people cling to capitalist ways of thinking," he said. "They
cling to the old capitalist fashions! We have some people among us who
still wear eyeglasses. And why do they use eyeglasses? Can't they see
me? If I move to slap your face" — he swung his open hand— "and you
flinch, then you can see well enough. People wear them to be handsome
in the capitalist style. They wear them because they are vain. We don't
need people like that any more. People who think they are handsome are
lazy! They are leeches sucking energy from others!"

I took off my glasses and put them in my pocket. Around me,
others with glasses did the same . . .

[A number of dances followed] At the end of the last dance all the
costumed cadres, male and female, formed a single line and shouted
"BLOOD AVENGES BLOOD!" at the top of their lungs. Both times
when they said the word "blood," they pounded their chests with their
clenched fists, and when they shouted "avenges" they brought their
arms out straight like a Nazi salute, except with a closed fist instead of
an open hand.

"BLOOD AVENGES BLOOD! BLOOD AVENGES BLOOD!
BLOOD AVENGES BLOOD!" the cadres repeated with fierce, deter-

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623

mined faces, thumping their fists on their hearts and raising their fists.
They shouted other revolutionary slogans and gave the salutes and
finally ended with "Long live the Cambodian revolution!" 211

The breakdown in social relations had much to do with the suppression
of religion and with the extremes of moralizing that went on in every domain
of life. Because there was no longer any place for anything outside the norm,
people with chronic diseases, mentally ill people, and the handicapped all
suffered. However, the system wound up operating against the official goal of
building a powerful and large population: the constraints imposed on sexuality
and marriage, together with chronic malnutrition, often killed off desire alto-
gether, causing the birth rate to plummet from 30 per 1,000 in 1970 to around
11 per 1,000 in 1978. 2 ' 2

The revolution's objective was to obliterate anything that could act even
involuntarily against the will of the CPK. An air of infallibility surrounded
even the least important of its decisions. As in China, the fact that one had been
arrested was proof enough that one was guilty. Later confessions would only
confirm what the Angkar already knew to be the truth. A case in point is that
of one man who was imprisoned in 1972. After surviving two years of inter-
rogation, he managed to clear himself of the accusation that he had been an
officer in the republican army; he was set free after a propaganda meeting at
which the Angkar boasted about its beneficence in allowing an honest and
sincere man to go free "even though he had been an officer in the army of Lon
Nol." 2L1 And that was even before the massive increase in repression that
followed the events of 17 April. Everything was arbitrary. The Party had no
obligation to justify its political choices, its choice of cadres, or its changes in
policy and personnel. Woe betide anyone who had failed to understand in time
that the Vietnamese were enemies, or that a certain leader had in fact been an
agent of the CIA. Pol Pot and his henchmen invariably imagined that the
economic and military disasters that increasingly dogged the regime were acts
of treachery or sabotage by the exploiting classes and their allies, a belief that
added ever more fuel to their campaigns of terror. 214

The system thus never progressed beyond its warlike origins, and hatred
always formed a crucial part of its ideology. This was often translated into a
morbid obsession with blood. The beginning of the national anthem, "The
Glorious Victory of 17 April," is revealing:

Bright red blood that covers towns and plains

Of Kampuchea, our motherland,

Sublime blood of workers and peasants,

Sublime blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!

The blood, changing into unrelenting hatred

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And resolute struggle

On 17 April, under the flag of revolution,

Frees us from slavery!

Long live, long live, Glorious 17 April,
Glorious victory, with greater significance
than the age of Angkor Wat! 215

Pol Pot once commented: u As you know, our national anthem was not written
by a poet. Its essence is the blood of our whole people, of everyone who fell in
the course of the past few centuries. It is the appeal of this blood that has been
incorporated into our national anthem. " 2Ul

There was even a lullaby that ended w r ith the words: "You should never
forget the class struggle." 217

The Marxist-Leninist Culmination

The exceptionally bloody nature of the Khmer Rouge experience inevitably
arouses a temptation to insist on its uniqueness as a phenomenon, similar to the
argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Other Communist regimes and
the people who defend them have led the way here, claiming that the Pol Pot
regime was an ultra-left-wing phenomenon or some sort of red fascism that
was thinly disguised as Communism. But two decades later it is clear that the
CPK was indeed a member of the family: it had its own peculiarities, but so did
Poland and Albania. And in the final analysis, Cambodian Communism was
closer to Chinese Communism than Chinese Communism was to the Russian
version.

Several possible influences on the Khmer Rouge have been singled out.
There has long been a theory that there was a considerable French influence,
since almost all the Khmer Rouge leaders were at some point students in
France, and most of them — including Pol Pot himself — were members of the
French Communist Party. 218 A number of the historical references they used
can be explained on that basis. As Suong Sikoeun, Ieng Sary's second-in-com-
mand, explained: "I was very influenced by the French Revolution, and in
particular by Robespierre. It was only a step from there to becoming a Com-
munist. Robespierre is my hero. Robespierre and Pol Pot: both of them share
the qualities of determination and integrity." 219 It is difficult to go beyond this
ideal of intransigence and find anything more substantial in the discourse or
practice of the CPK that might be described as clearly coming from France or
from French Communism. Khmer Rouge leaders were far more practical than
they were theoretical: what was genuinely of interest to them was carrying out
an experiment in "real socialism."

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625

In fact Vietnamese Communism had the greatest influence, particularly in
the founding days of the movement, although it also played an intimate role in
the movement's development right up to 1973. Initially the CPK was merely
one part of the Indochinese Communist Party, which was totally controlled by
the Vietnamese and was broken into three national branches (without actually
disappearing) by Ho Chi Minh and his comrades in 1951. Until the civil war
broke out, the CPK never showed any autonomy in relation to the Vietnamese
Communist Party in terms of its programs, its strategy (the armed actions of
Cambodian Communists were above all a means of putting pressure on Si-
hanouk during the war in Vietnam), or its tactics concerning armaments,
political alignment, or logistics. 22 " Even after the coup, it was the Vietnamese
who took over the administration of the "liberated zones" filled with new
Cambodian recruits. Only after the Paris agreement in 1973 did the gaps begin
to be filled. Hanoi's strategy brought the CPK to the negotiating table, but the
Khmer Rouge opposed a negotiated settlement because it might have resulted
in a central role for Sihanouk and revealed the organizational weaknesses of the
Khmer Rouge. For the first time they refused to take a subservient role, because
at last they had sufficient means to resist.

It is difficult to sum up the influence of Vietnamese Communism on the
CPK in simple terms. Many of the CPK's methods were actually Chinese. Even
from Phnom Penh it was sometimes hard to see what had come directly from
Beijing and what had passed through Hanoi. Certain aspects of the Khmer
Rouge's behavior are strongly reminiscent of Vietnam, including the obsession
with secrecy and dissimulation: Ho Chi Minh himself first appeared in public
in 1945 without making any reference to his rich past as a cadre in the Com-
munist International, where he had worked under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc;
several stages of his career became known only with the opening of the Soviet
archives. 221 The ICP declared its dissolution in November 1945 in order to make
way for the Viet Minh, then resurfaced in 1951 as the Workers' Party of
Vietnam, and took up the Communist label again only in 1976. In South
Vietnam, the People's Revolutionary Party was only one part of the National
Liberation Front. Yet all these organizations were in fact directed by the same
tiny group of Communist veterans. The same patterns can be discerned in Pol
Pot's life (including the reports of his retirement and death after the defeat of
1979), in the opacity of his leadership, and in the unclear relations between the
Angkar and the CPK, all of which have no equivalent in Communist history
outside Indochina.

A second trait in common, complementary to the first, is the exceptionally
widespread use of the united front. In 1945 the former emperor, Bao Dai, was
for a while an adviser to Ho Chi Minh, who also managed to gain support from
the Americans and in fact based his declaration of independence on that of the
United States. Similarly, in 1970 the Khmer Rouge were officially part of the

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Communism in Asia

royal government of national union, and they revived this strategy after their
fall. The Viet Minh, like the Angkar, never made any official reference to
Marxism-Leninism and made a great show of being a fiercely nationalist party,
so much so that this became one of the main tenets of the official ideology.
Finally, in these forms of "war Communism," which seem able to prosper only
in situations of armed conflict (consider, for example, the problems in Vietnam
after 1975), there is inevitably a strong military component. 222 In such cases,
the army often forms the backbone and perhaps even the raison d'etre of the
regime while also providing a model for the mobilization of its citizens, par-
ticularly in the economy

North Korea was also an influence in some measure. The typically Korean
image of the flying horse (chollima) was often used to illustrate the idea of
economic progress. 223 Pyongyang was one of the two foreign capitals most often
visited by Pol Pot as head of the government, and a number of North Korean
technicians were brought in to restart Cambodian industry. 224 From the par-
ticular philosophy of Kim II Sung, Pol Pot adopted above all the constant
purges and the widespread use of secret police and spies, while the discourse
about class struggle was shelved in favor of talk of a dialectic between the
people and a handful of traitors. In practice this meant that the entire society
suffered repression and that no social group could take over from the Party-
state. All these aspects were quite distant from Maoism, and much closer in
fact to Stalinism.

After breaking with Vietnam in 1973, the CPK decided to change its "Big
Brother." The obvious substitute was Mao Zedong's China, not only because
of its affirmed radicalism but also because of its capacity to pressure Vietnam
along their common border. The Cambodian dictator was triumphantly ac-
claimed in Beijing during his first official trip abroad in September 1977, and
the friendship between the two countries was officially described as "indestruc-
tible"; thus Cambodia was put on a par with Albania in the terminology used
to describe relationships with China. The first Chinese technicians arrived in
Phnom Penh in May 1975, and before long at least 4,000 (Kiernan's figure is
1 5,000) were stationed in Cambodia. At the same time, the Chinese government
promised a billion dollars in various kinds of aid. 225

The experience of the Chinese was most useful in the enormous campaign
to collectivize the whole country The Chinese popular commune, a vast struc-
ture with diverse fields of activity and a relatively autonomous structure that
was used to control and mobilize the workforce in a military fashion, was quite
clearly the prototype for the Cambodian cooperative. Even in tiny details, a
number of Chinese innovations made in 1958 were to be found in the coopera-
tive, including obligatory collective canteens, communal childcare programs,
huge hydraulic engineering projects that absorbed so much of the workforce,

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627

the collectivization of all useful tools and implements, an almost exclusive
concentration on one or two types of production (quite at odds with the rest
of the project), totally unrealistic production targets, an insistence that every-
thing be done at great speed, and a belief in the limitless possibilities of
well-organized manpower. Mao had once said: "With grain and steel, anything
is possible"; the Khmer Rouge echoed: "If we have plenty of rice, we have
plenty of everything." 226 The absence of steel in the Cambodian version is
striking. Their lack of contact with reality did not go so far as inventing
imaginary reserves of iron or coal, neither of which exists in Cambodia. On
the other hand, no one seems to have told Pol Pot how the Chinese Great Leap
Forward ended; 227 or perhaps he felt that it simply was not his problem. The
idea was central in a number of Khmer Rouge speeches, and the national
anthem ended with the words: "Let us build our fatherland so that it may take
a Great Leap Forward! An immense, glorious, prodigious Great Leap For-
ward!" 228

Democratic Kampuchea was faithful to the Chinese Great Leap Forward
beyond all hope and reason; and, as in China, it was rewarded with a huge,
murderous famine.

The Cultural Revolution, by contrast, had few echoes in Cambodia. Like
other Communist powers, the government in Phnom Penh had learned that
mobilizing the masses against a certain clan or section of the Party, regardless
of how clearly different from one another the targeted sections of the popula-
tion were, was always a risky business. And in any case the Cultural Revolution
had been a fundamentally urban movement, coming largely out of the teaching
establishments, and was therefore not transposable to the Cambodian peasant
revolution. Cambodia did of course share the anti-intellectual currents of
mid-1960s China, including the negation of culture symbolized by the "revo-
lutionary operas" of Jiang Qing (which appear to have been copied under Pol
Pot). 22t> It might even be claimed that the emptying of the towns was perhaps
inspired by the ruralization of millions of former Red Guards.

It looked as though the Khmer Rouge had been inspired more by the
theory or the slogans of the Maoists than by the actual practice of the Chinese
Communist Party. The Chinese countryside was a hotbed of revolution, and it
was there that a huge number of urban intellectuals were exiled, particularly
in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Even today the regime still uses
quite draconian measures to limit rural migration to the cities. Still, the big
cities always had a major role to play both before and after 1949, and it was
often the urban workers who were the most favored sons of the revolution. The
Chinese Communist Party never thought for a moment of emptying the towns
and deporting the populations of entire regions, abolishing money, destroying
the education system, or wiping out a whole class such as the intellectuals.

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Communism in Asia

Although Mao never passed up an opportunity to show his disdain for them,
in the final analysis he knew he could not do without such people. Many of the
Red Guards themselves came from the elite universities. Khieu Samphan was
using clearly Maoist rhetoric when he welcomed back to Cambodia intellectuals
who had returned from abroad to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime: "I
can tell you quite clearly, we don't need you: what we need is people who can
work the land, and that's all . . . Anyone who is politically aware and has
understood our regime can do anything at all, because technique comes after-
ward ... we don't need engineers to grow rice, plant corn, or raise pigs.""
Despite the rhetoric, denial of the value of expertise in such fashion was never
government policy in China. In any case, by a process of inertia over time, each
movement toward Utopian extremism and each wave of repression soon ended
in a return to more traditional and normal methods, with the impetus for the
return generally originating inside the Communist Party itself This was clearly
one reason for the stability of the Chinese regime. By contrast, the CPK came
close to liquidating itself.

Similar contradictions are discernible in the types of repression used. The
main influence here was clearly Chinese (or Sino-Vietnamese), with its obliga-
tory and interminable processes of criticism and self-criticism, all in a vaguely
educational or reeducational perspective. There were also the same obsessions
with biography and confessional accounts of the past, which were to be rewrit-
ten constantly without changes. One's position in the social hierarchy by birth
and employment determined one's place in the political hierarchy, which in
turn defined one's place in the legal system. Familial origins were always
extremely important. And as elsewhere in Asia, the demand that everyone
participate in politics in an extremely intense and committed fashion eroded
the boundary between society and the Party-state in an obviously totalitarian
fashion.

There are of course many features peculiar to the Cambodian experience,
but most of these are a sort of exaggeration or intensification of the original
model. The main difference, at least until the 1960s, was that Chinese and
Vietnamese Communists took reeducation quite seriously and went to great
lengths to demonstrate to prisoners, for example, that the state was right to
have imprisoned them. 231 As a result prisoners were often well treated, and
torture was banned or used rarely. In Cambodia, by contrast, torture was
systematic. The other consequence was the lack of even a hypothetical possi-
bility that good behavior could bring freedom and rehabilitation or at least a
shortened sentence. Hardly anyone ever left a Cambodian prison; in fact people
died there with incredible rapidity. In China and Vietnam massive repressions
came in waves and were followed by long periods of calm. Particular groups
were targeted, but they accounted for only a small segment of the population.

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629

In Cambodia, at the very least, all the "'75s" were suspects, and there was never
a moment's respite. When it came to putting repression into practice, the other
Communist Parties in Southeast Asia maintained a facade of organization,
efficiency, relative coherence, and a certain perverse intelligence. In Cambodia,
by contrast, simple brutality and arbitrariness predominated; the repressions
were invariably carried out according to local orders, although the general
principles clearly came from on high. Nowhere else in Asia were so many
murders and massacres carried out on the spot, except perhaps during periods
of agricultural reform (when the victims — the landowners and their associ-
ates — were clearly identified and restricted in number) and in the heyday of
the Cultural Revolution, though even then in a much more restricted and
limited fashion. In short, the Maoists on the Mekong were in many respects
far closer to a degenerate version of Stalinism than to Chinese Communism.

An Exemplary Tyrant

The personal imprint of Stalin and Mao was such that their deaths brought
considerable changes, particularly in the scale and scope of repression. What of
Pol Pot? The man born as Saloth Sar is present in the history of Communism
in Cambodia from the beginning to the end, and it is impossible to speak of
Communism without him. There is also no doubt that traits discernible in his
personality correlate with the bloodiest excesses of his regime. His distant past
was highly complex and bore little resemblance to the revolutionary legend he
attempted to erect in its place. He had a sister and cousin who were dancers and
concubines for King Monivong and a brother who was a palace official until
1975, and he himself had spent part of his childhood in the inner circle of that
archaic monarchy. One can easily imagine the guilty conscience that resulted
and the consequent desire to destroy the old world. Pol Pot seems to have sunk
ever deeper into an alternative reality, perhaps through an inability to come to
terms with his own story. An apparatchik, ambitious from an early age, more at
home in a small group than when faced with a crowd, he set out in 1963 to live
cut off from the world in jungle camps or in secret hideouts in the deserted
Phnom Penh, about which even today little is known. He seems to have become
increasingly paranoid with the passing of time. Even when he was all-powerful,
everyone who came to listen to him was searched. He constantly moved from
residence to residence, suspected his cooks of trying to poison him, and once
executed the electricians who were "guilty" of causing a power outage. 2 - 12

His obsessions are clear in a conversation he had with a journalist from
Swedish television in August 1978:

u Could His Excellency explain to the viewers what he considers to be the

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Communism in Asia

greatest achievement of Democratic Kampuchea over the last three and a half
years?"

"Our greatest achievement ... is having defeated all the plots and con-
spiracies, the sabotage, the attempted coups, and all the other acts of aggression
carried out by enemies of all types hostile to the regime. " m

This must surely be taken as a tremendous involuntary admission of the
failure of the regime.

There were undoubtedly two sides to Pol Pot. From the 1950s until the
1980s he was often described as a sensitive, timid man who loved reading
French poetry, was widely loved by his students, and was a warmhearted and
enthusiastic propagator of the revolution. But as a politician he had a number
of his old comrades-in-arms arrested, including several people who had be-
lieved that they were his close friends. He never answered their begging letters,
authorized the use of the worst possible tortures on them, and eventually then
had them killed. 214 His "expiatory" speech after his defeat, at a seminar for
cadres in 1981, was a model of hypocrisy:

He said he knows that many people in the country hate him and believe
he is responsible for the killings. He said he knows that many people
died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he
must accept responsibility because his policies were too far to the left,
and because he did not keep proper track of what was going on. He said
he was like the master in a house who did not know what the kids were
up to, and that he trusted people too much . . . They would tell him
things that were not true, that everything was fine, but that this or that
person was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major
problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese. 215

Another thought-provoking testimony is provided by one of his oldest
companions, his brother-in-law Ieng Sary, who later accused him of megalo-
mania: "Pol Pot thought he was an incomparable genius in military and eco-
nomic affairs, in hygiene, in song-writing, in music and dance, in cookery, in
fashion, and in everything else, even in the art of lying. Pol Pot thought that
he was above everyone else on the whole planet. He was a god on Earth. 1 ' 236
This portrait bears a remarkable similarity to certain portraits of Stalin. Could
this be simply a coincidence?

The Weight of Reality

Besides the nation's uneasy history and the influence of world Communism,
the violence of the Khmer Rouge was brought about by the specific spatial and
temporal context of the regime. In some ways the regime was almost the

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631

accidental product of a war that took place beyond the borders of Cambodia.
Once the war ended, the regime found itself weak and isolated in its country of
origin. Vietnam's hostility and China's stifling embrace did the rest.

The seventeenth of April came too late for a world that had already passed
it by Perhaps the greatest weakness of the Khmer Rouge was that they were a
historical anomaly They created "late Communism" in the sense in which one
speaks of "late antiquity" — that is, a state of affairs that persists while the rest
of the world has moved on. When Pol Pot came to power, Stalin was long dead
(1953), Ho Chi Minh was dead (1969), and Mao Zedong was very ill (he died
in September 1976). Only Kim II Sung remained, but North Korea was both
small and far away The great Chinese model was falling to pieces before the
eyes of the new dictator. The Gang of Four tried to relaunch the Cultural
Revolution in 1975, but without success. After Mao's death, the revolution was
swept away like a house of cards. The Khmer Rouge sought support among
those who refused to give up on Maoism, but the latter became too caught up
in a battle with Deng Xiaoping and his partisan reformers. Maoism officially
ended a year later, and the country entered the new era symbolized by the
Democracy Wall, whereas in Cambodia the killing was just beginning. In China,
the Great Leap Forward was over, and "revisionism" set in instead. The rest
of Asia, seen from Phnom Penh, was even more depressing: after the momen-
tary stimulus brought by the victory of the revolutionary forces in Indochina,
the Maoist guerrillas everywhere else — in Thailand, Malaysia, and Burma —
went into decline. Perhaps worst of all, the new Asian mercantile powers
emerging alongside Japan (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong)
were "little dragons" whose economic prosperity was matched only by their
hostility to Communist ideas, and they were managing to find their way without
the help of the West. Finally, the Khmer Rouge were bound to feel a little
confused, with Marxism seemingly on a steep decline. Was the march of history
in fact being reversed?

There were two possible responses to these changes: they could go along
with them and revise their doctrines, at the risk of losing their identity and
raison d'etre; or they could reaffirm their identity and follow the North Korean
way by becoming ever more radical in their goals and actions. Eurocommunism,
which was then in its heyday, or the Marxist terrorism of the Red Brigades
(Aldo Moro was assassinated in 1978) — such was the choice. As we now know,
both paths were dead ends, but one was considerably bloodier than the other.
It was as though this 1950s generation, which had studied in France, had
understood that unless they created their Utopia immediately, at any price, they
would inevitably be forced into a long series of compromises. Their only
possibility, unless they wanted to be swept away, was to impose "year zero" on
a population that would not be allowed to have any choice. China's Great Leap

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Communism in Asia

Forward had failed; so had the Cultural Revolution. The reason, in the Khmer
Rouge's view, must be that the Chinese had stopped at half-measures; they had
failed to sweep away every counterrevolutionary obstacle: the corrupt and
uncontrollable towns, intellectuals who were proud of their knowledge and
presumed to think for themselves, money and all financial transactions, the last
traces of capitalism, and "traitors who had infiltrated the heart of the Party."
This desire to create a new society filled with New Men was bound to fail under
the weight of reality despite (or because of) the docility of the Cambodians.
Unwilling to abandon its plans, the regime slid ever deeper into an ocean of
blood that was shed so that it could remain in power. The CPK wished to be
the glorious successor to Lenin and Mao, but instead it was the precursor to
other groups that have made a travesty of Marxism and used it as a license to
commit intolerable acts of violence, such as the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso
(Shining Path), the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the Kurdistan Workers'
Partv.

The Khmer Rouge constantly struggled against their own weakness. This was
long hidden behind a facade of triumphalist verbiage. In fact there had been
two reasons for the events of 17 April: the considerable military support of-
fered by North Vietnam, and the ineptitude of the Lon Nol regime, which had
been made worse by inconsistencies in U.S. foreign policy. Lenin, Mao, and
even Ho Chi Minh owed little to anyone for their military victories, and their
adversaries had been far from mediocre. Their parties and, for the last two,
their armed forces had been put together slowly and patiently and had been
quite considerable even before they finally came to power. The situation in
Cambodia was different. Until the middle of the civil war, the Khmer Rouge
were totally dependent on forces from Hanoi. In 1975 there were only about
60,(K)0 Khmer Rouge soldiers (less than 1 percent of the population), who were
able to overcome about 200,000 demoralized republican soldiers.

If the army was weak, so was the Party. No sources are wholly reliable,
but the figures we do have show a Party membership of 4,000 members in 1970
and 14,000 in 1975: growth from a large group into a small party. 2 " These
figures also imply a dearth of experienced cadres until the very end of the
regime, which made the purges all the more dramatic. The consequences are
clearly visible in the tales of the deportees: for every responsible and intelligent
cadre, there were dozens who were cruel, stupid, pretentious, and stubborn.
"All the peasants who had been promoted to positions as cadres were quite
ignorant. They constantly misunderstood and misapplied the principles of the
revolution. The madness of the Khmer Rouge regime was intensified by their
incompetence." 218 It was as though the real weakness of the regime, which went
quite unrecognized, and the consequent feeling of insecurity that it engendered

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633

could be compensated only by an increase in violence. This brought disaffec-
tion, leading to another increase in terror, and so the cycle continued. The
result was an atmosphere in which insecurity, generalized mistrust, and fear for
the future were the norm, traumatizing everyone who lived through it. It was
also a reflection of the isolation of the leaders, who believed that traitors were
lurking everywhere. The result was the blind repression implicit in Khmer
Rouge slogans such as "One can always make a mistake and arrest the wrong
person, but one should never let the wrong person go." 239 Pin Yathay acutely
analyzes the infernal circle that was at work: "In practice, what the Khmer
Rouge feared was the anger that might surface in their new people if they eased
up on repression. Because they were haunted by the possibility of revolt, they
decided to reproach us for our impassivity and to make us pay for it. Hence
their constant reign of terror. We were afraid of persecution; they were afraid
of insurrection. They were also afraid of the ideological and political maneu-
vering of their comrades-in-arms." 240 Were they justified in fearing popular
insurrection? There are few traces of any such movements, and all were speed-
ily suppressed with tremendous violence. 241 But whenever the opportunity did
present itself — for instance, whenever a local administration was wiped out by
a purge — the anger of the slaves became quite apparent, even if it brought a
commensurate increase in terror.

There were revolts born out of desperation, and others that began because
of senseless rumors. At the most modest level of resistance were the insults
that would float up through the darkness at a dam construction site to a Khmer
Rouge soldier sitting on a wall. 242 On the whole, statements from survivors show
that New People working together could take considerable liberties when ad-
dressing one another. There was much complicity when it came to petty theft
or secret breaks at work; relatively few people were denounced for such things,
and spies and informants met with little success on the whole. Hence the
division into "75s" and cadres. The preferred solution of the cadres was to
maintain a warlike atmosphere, and even the war itself, since this was a tried
and tested method. Some slogans attested the approach clearly: "One hand
holds the hoe, the other strikes the enemy;' or "With water we grow rice, with
rice we make war." 243 The Khmer Rouge were more correct than they realized.
They never had enough rice, and they lost the war.

A Genocide?

The crimes of the Khmer Rouge should be judged rigorously and objectively
so that the Cambodian experience can be compared to the other great horrors
of the century, and its proper weight assigned in the history of Communism.
There are also very strong legal reasons for such an approach, since a great

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Communism in Asia

number of CPK leaders are still alive and even active in official capacities.
Should they be allowed to move around freely? If not, what charges should be
laid against them? 244

It is unquestionable that Pol Pot and his cohorts are guilty of war crimes.
Prisoners from the republican army were systematically maltreated; many were
executed. Those who surrendered in 1975 were later persecuted without mercy.
It is equally clear that the Khmer Rouge also committed crimes against human-
ity. Entire social groups were found unworthy of living and were largely exter-
minated. Any political opposition, real or supposed, was punished by death.
The chief difficulty involves determining the crime of genocide. If one uses
the literal definition, the discussion risks falling into absurdity: genocide refers
only to the systematic extermination of national, ethnic, racial, and religious
groups. Because the Khmers as a whole were not targeted for extermination,
attention would then have to turn to ethnic minorities and eventually to the
Buddhist monks. But even taken as a whole they would represent only a small
proportion of the victims; and it is not easy to say that the Khmer Rouge did
specifically repress minorities — with the exception of the Vietnamese after
1977, when relatively few remained in the country. The Cham on the other
hand were targeted because of their Muslim faith, which was a serious cause
for resistance. Some authors have tried to resolve the problem by bringing in
the notion of polilkxde}^ which, broadly speaking, means genocide on a politi-
cal basis (one might also speak of sociocide, meaning genocide on a social basis).
But this fails to get to the heart of the matter. The real question is, should such
crimes be treated as seriously as genocide or not? And if the answer is yes, as
these authors seem to believe, why should the issue be clouded by the use of a
new term? It is perhaps worth recalling that during the discussions leading to
the adoption of the United Nations Convention on Genocide, it was the Soviet
Union that — for all too obvious reasons — opposed the inclusion of the word
"political" in the definition of the term. But it is above all the word "racial"
(which covers neither ethnicity nor nationality) that should provide an answer
here. "Race," a phantasm that recedes ever further as human knowledge in-
creases, exists only in the eyes of the beholder; in reality there is no more a
Jewish race than there is a bourgeois race. But for the Khmer Rouge, as for the
Chinese Communists, some social groups were criminal by nature, and this
criminality was seen as transmittable from husband to wife, as well as an
inherited trait. Here the ghost of Trofim Lysenko looms large. We can speak
of the raaalization of social groups, and the crime of genocide therefore can
be applied to their physical elimination. This elimination, as we have seen, was
pushed to its limits in Cambodia and was undoubtedly carried out deliberately.
Y Phandara was told by a Khmer Rouge worker that the "17 Aprils" were "the
city dwellers who supported the regime of the traitor Lon No! . . . There are

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635

a lot of traitors among them. The Communist Party quite cleverly eliminated
a good number of them. The ones who are still alive are now working out in
the countryside. Now they're too weak to rise up against us." 246

For millions of Cambodians today, the era of Pol Pot has left indelible
scars. In 1979, 42 percent of the country's children had lost at least one parent.
They were three times more likely to have lost their father than their mother.
Seven percent had lost both parents. In 1992 the isolation of adolescents was
the most dramatic: 64 percent had lost at least one parent. 247 An array of social
evils besets Cambodian society today, at rates that are exceptionally high for a
Southeast Asian country. Crime is widespread and often very violent since
firearms are easily obtained; corruption is everywhere; and most people show
little respect for one another and little sense of social solidarity. No one seems
to have a sense of the common good at any level. Hundreds of thousands of
refugees abroad (there are 150,000 in the United States alone) still feel terror-
ized because of what they lived through, with recurrent nightmares and the
highest rate of depression of any Indochinese national group. Many of the
female refugees came alone, and in general there are many more women than
men because so many men of that generation fell victim to assassinations. 248
Still, Cambodian society did not break down entirely. When the last vestiges of
collectivization were abandoned in 1985, increased production brought an al-
most immediate end to food shortages. m

It is easy to understand Cambodians' overwhelming desire to return to
normal life. But they should not be left to face the former leaders of the Khmer
Rouge dictatorship alone. The form of Communism that they faced was per-
haps the worst of all, and the liquidation of such a terrible past is an almost
intolerable burden. The rest of the world, which for so long showed such
complacency toward their executioners, should also make the drama of Cam-
bodia its own.

Conclusion

Cast Asia is nearly the only place on earth where Communists still
rule. But is there a specifically Asian brand of Communism, in the same way
that one can legitimately speak about a unique East European form of Commu-
nism? The answer to this question is not easy. In Europe, with the exception of
Albania and the former Yugoslavia, Communism had the same father, and all
the Communist governments there (even in Yugoslavia and Albania) finally fell
at more or less the same time, when it suddenly became clear that the system
was no longer functioning in its birthplace, the Soviet Union. In Asia, a similar
relationship is discernible only between Vietnam and Laos, whose destinies are
still organically linked. What is remarkable elsewhere in Asia is the distinct
nature of the process of conquest and consolidation of power in each country,
despite the strong resemblance that North Korea initially bore to the "people's
democracies" established by Stalin in Eastern Europe, and despite the great
impetus that the Viet Minh received when the Chinese army arrived on the
borders of Tonkin. There is not now and never really was a Communist bloc in
Asia, except in the minds of the leaders in Beijing. Economic cooperation was
lacking, high-ranking cadres seldom visited other countries, no one was ever
trained abroad, and the secret police and the military only rarely pooled their
information. The occasional attempts to do such things occurred on only a

Conclusion

Limited scale, and these efforts rarely lasted long except between Laos and its
u big brother," Vietnam. China and North Korea were close for a year after the
Korean conflict, and China and Vietnam were reasonably close during the
1950s. China was also quite close to Pol Pot's Cambodia, while Cambodia and
Vietnam were tightly linked in the 1980s. But Communism in Asia has in
general been a national affair, with national defense always the top priority
(except in Laos), even though at times Chinese or Soviet aid proved essential.
Asia after all has seen intense wars between Communist states, at the end of the
1970s between Vietnam and Cambodia, and then between Vietnam and China.
Where education, propaganda, and historiography are concerned, it is hard to
find more chauvinistic countries anywhere else, perhaps partly because all
these countries came into being as the result of a struggle against foreign
imperialism. That experience at least gives them something in common. The
problem is that the resulting nationalism has often been turned against their
neighbors.

On the other hand, similarities in the details of policies (particularly
policies of repression) are readily apparent, and many of them have been
adumbrated in the preceding chapters. Before reiterating them, we might pause
to consider the comparative chronology of the regimes studied here. In Europe,
the broad outlines of the history of each country are quite similar, with the
exception of Albania and to some extent Romania and Yugoslavia. In East Asia,
the points of origin arc disparate, stretching from 1945 to 1975, as are the
inception of agrarian reform and collectivization, especially in divided Viet-
nam. But in all cases the two stages tend to succeed each other quite soon after
the seizure of power (the maximum interval in the process is seven years, in
China). On the political plane, the Communist Party never acted openly during
the taking of power, and the appearance of some sort of united front was
maintained for some time after victory (eight years in China), even if it meant
not revealing the existence of the Party, as was the case in Cambodia before
1977. However, if many were deluded beforehand by the promise of a pluralist
democracy (and this often contributed to the success of the Communists,
particularly in Vietnam), the spell was usually broken soon* afterward. In one
Vietnamese camp for southerners, prisoners until 30 April 1975 were on the
whole quite well fed and well dressed, and were not forced to work. But the
moment the South was "liberated," rations were cut ruthlessly, discipline was
intensified, and forced labor was introduced. The camp chiefs justified their
actions as follows: "Until now, you have been treated as prisoners of war . . .
Now the whole country is free; we are the winners and you are the losers. You
should be happy you are still alive. After the 1917 revolution in Russia, all the
losers were exterminated!" 1 Social classes that had been treated very well in the

637

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638 Communism in Asia

days of the united front, such as intellectuals and national capitalists, suddenly
found themselves ostracized and subject to repression when Party dictatorship
took over.

A close examination reveals important differences within the chronologi-
cal similarities. North Korea developed at its own pace in the 1940s and 1950s,
and not long after that became quite isolated, a sort of living museum of
Stalinism. The Chinese Cultural Revolution had no imitators. Pol Pot tri-
umphed just as Jiang Qing fell, and his dream of a Great Leap Forward came
fourteen years too late. But wherever Communist parties were in power, the
Stalinist era was marked by purges and by tightened security. Although the
shock wave from the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress led to a burst of liber-
alization throughout Asia, this was generally short-lived and was followed by
extremist measures of one sort or another, such as the Great Leap Forward in
China, its Vietnamese incarnation, and the Korean Chollima. Everywhere but
in North Korea, the 1980s and 1990s were marked by a liberalization of the
economy. In Laos and South Vietnam this came hard on the heels of collectivi-
zation, which was never fully achieved. More quickly than is often acknowl-
edged, economic reform leads to a normalization of society and a disappearance
of repressive practices, even if the process is uneven, contradictory, and incom-
plete. Except in Pyongyang, mass terror and totalitarian attempts at controlling
consciousness are now only a memory, and political prisoners are a rarity. In
Laos, for example, according to figures from Amnesty International, the num-
ber of political prisoners fell from between 6,000 and 7,000 in 1985 to a mere
33 by March 1991. Vietnam has experienced a comparable drop, and China
somewhat less so. Clearly, the compulsion to mass murder is no more irresistible
in Asian Communism than it was in the European version. It seems possible to
conclude that terror has finally outlived its purpose. Even though the terror
went on for a long time (at least until 1980) and everywhere, invariably, led to
horrendous crimes, it has been replaced today by selective, dissuasive repres-
sion, and because of the increasingly widespread reeducation programs it is
seen more and more often for what it really was.

The key factor in many of these chronological similarities, which at the
end of the day are greater than the differences (at least after 1956), is more
often Beijing than Moscow. This focus on China is one of the lasting effects of
the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress, which came as a shock to Asian Com-
munists and was considered to be a serious threat by Mao Zedong, Ho Chi
Minh, and Kim II Sung (as well as Maurice Thorez). The fact of the surprise
alone demonstrates the bravery of Khrushchev's initiative. Since the days of
Yan'an, the Chinese government has played the role of a second Mecca for
Communists in Asia. However, the prestige of Stalin and the US.S.R. was still
immense, and Soviet economic and military might did the rest. The Chinese

Conclusion

639

intervention in Korea and then the size of its aid to the Viet Minh caused the
first disturbances in the Sino-Soviet relationship, but it was 1956 that made
Mao the leader of the "antirevisionist" camp that quickly came to include every
Communist country in Asia. The disaster of the Cultural Revolution did some
damage to Chinese hegemony, and Vietnam's military needs in the 1960s
pushed it closer to the Soviet camp. But this chronology on the whole is quite
trustworthy: initiatives regularly came from China, and were usually followed
with great dedication. There is an unmistakable similarity among all Commu-
nist regimes, but in East Asia the similarity sometimes seems to border on
cloning; the Vietnamese agrarian reform, for example, was almost a carbon copy
of the earlier Chinese version.

The u goulash Communism" so dear to Khrushchev found few proponents
in Asia until the 1980s, in part because the continent was still involved in so
many revolutionary wars, but also because ideology had such a major role to
play in these countries. In the Confucian tradition of "the rectification of
names" (and all these countries, with the exception of Cambodia, had a strong
tradition of Confucianism), it is reality that must adapt itself to language. In
the prison system, this meant that what mattered was not the act that had been
committed, but the verdict that had been passed and the label that had been
applied, both of which depended on many factors independent of the act itself.
Peace of mind came not from good deeds, but from saying the right word in
the right place. Accordingly, two major factors influenced Communism in Asia:
an overextension of ideology, and an overreliance on willpower. The first
functioned as a mania for classification and reorganization based on the com-
bination of Confucianism with a revolutionary vision through which the entire
society was to be remade. The second sought the transformation of the whole
world through reliance on the idea that the mind of every individual in society
can be completely filled with new, better ideas, and that the actions of these
individuals will thereafter be based on that new knowledge. Mention was made
above of the verbal jousts in which victory came to the person who made the
best use of quotations from Mao Zedong. In that sense, the Great Leap For-
ward was a feast of words. But even the Asians could not escape reality forever,
and when it intruded too far into language, this phenomenon did not escape
them. After the failure of so many words and the innumerable catastrophes that
such language had brought, all anyone wanted to hear was the profoundly
anti-ideological language of Deng Xiaoping: "Who cares if a cat is black or
gray, provided that he catches mice."

The great originality of East Asian Communism resided in the manner in
which it managed to transfer this ideology and belief in the will from the Party
to society as a whole. This happened in a more attenuated fashion in Stalin's
Russia, where it relied on different traditions. In Chinese Asia (and thus in

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Communism in Asia

Vietnam and Korea too) the Western divide between high and popular culture
has never existed, and Confucianism in particular was a way of life for all
classes, from the leaders in the center to the peasants in the most far-flung
regions. The same could be said of many other traditions and barbaric practices,
such as the binding of feet. Moreover, the state was never an institution set
apart from society, founded on complex laws. Contrary to the image that they
tried to present, Chinese monarchs, and leaders elsewhere who modeled them-
selves upon them, had almost none of the formal means of intervention that
most Western kings possessed by the end of the Middle Ages. 2 They could
survive and govern only with the consent of their subjects, consent obtained
not by any form of democratic consultation, or by institutionalized arbitration
between conflicting interests, but by the widespread acceptance of certain social
civic norms, founded on a complex familial and interpersonal system of mo-
rality, which Mao termed u the mass line." The moral (or ideological) state has
a long and rich history in eastern Asia. In itself, such a state is poor and weak,
but if it succeeds in persuading each group, family, and individual of the value
of its norms and ideals, its power is limitless. Its only bounds are those of nature
itself, which was the cause of Mao's undoing during the Great Leap Forward.
Asian Communism thus attempted — and for a short while it succeeded in its
objectives — to create profoundly holistic societies. Hence one comes across
cases such as that of the Vietnamese cell chief who was a prisoner himself but
felt obliged to shout at a recalcitrant detainee: "You are resisting the head of
cell nominated by the revolution — so you are resisting the revolution itself!" 3
Hence also the extraordinarily patient and relentless drive to make every pris-
oner, even French officers who had passed through Saint Cyr, 4 a bearer of the
Party's good news. Whereas the Russian Revolution never succeeded in de-
stroying the "us and them" mentality, the Cultural Revolution convinced the
entire population for a while that they were a part of the state and the Party.
In some cases, Red Guards who were not themselves Party members seemed
somehow to have the right to decide who was to be excluded from it. Commu-
nism in the West also had criticism and self-criticism, endless discussion meet-
ings, and its own selection of canonical texts. But such things were in general
reserved for Party members. In Asia, they became the norm for all people.

There were two main consequences for the form of repression. The most
obvious, which we have noted so often above, was the absence of even cursory
references to the mechanisms of law and justice: everything was political. In
each country, the introduction of a penal code generally marked the end of the
period of terror, as in China in 1979 or in Vietnam in 1986. The other conse-
quence was the nature of the waves of repression, which were more notable for
their wide sweep than for their intrinsically bloody nature. They focused on
society as a whole or on extremely large groups such as peasants, city dwellers,

Conclusion

641

and intellectuals- Deng Xiaoping's regime stated that the Cultural Revolution
had persecuted 100 million people, a figure that is unverifiable. At the same
time, it is unlikely that there were more than 1 million deaths. The ratio was
quite different in the Stalinist purges. But what use was killing, when the
leaders could terrorize so effectively? This form of repression also explains the
high number of suicides: the intensity of campaigns, backed up by friends,
colleagues, neighbors, and one's own family, brought tension that for many
individuals became intolerable, as there was literally nowhere to turn.

The exception that proves the rule is Cambodia (and, to a lesser extent,
Laos). Cambodia was never affected by Confucianism. In fact its political
tradition was much more Indian than Chinese. This fact may be one of the
main reasons that violence there was so widespread and bloody. It is possible
that what happened there was the effect of applying Sino-Vietnamese ideas to
a population that was fundamentally opposed to them. Much more work re-
mains to be done in this area to get a precise idea of the reasons for such a
terrible aberration.

This analysis of the specific nature of Communism in East Asia (at least
in Chinese Asia) affords a basis for comparisons with the entire history of
Communism, and in particular with the Soviet model. Many of the phenom-
ena, such as the obsession with notions of a tabula rasa and a fresh start, the
cult of youth, and the constant manipulation of the young, are clearly to be
found elsewhere. But the differences, too, are noteworthy; and the survival of
Communism in Asia, even after its collapse in Europe, requires serious analysis.

Select Bibliography for Asia

Cambodia

Becker, Elizabeth. When the War Was Over: The Voices of Camhodta s Revolution and Its
People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Chandler, David P. Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Boulder:
Westview Press, 1992.

The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Haing S. Ngor with Roger Warner. Surviving the Killing Fields: The Cambodian Odyssey
of HaingS. Ngor. London: Chatto and Windus, 1988.

Jackson, Karl D., ed. Cambodia 1975-1978: Rendezvous with Death. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1989.

Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Locard, Henri. Le petit livre rouge de Pol Pot. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996.

Martin, Marie-Alexandre. Cambodia: A Shattered Society, trans. Mark W. McLeod.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Picq, Laurence. Beyond the Horizon: Five Years with the Khmer Rouge, trans. Patricia
Norland. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Pin Yathay. Stay Alive, My Son. London: Bloomsbury, 1987.

Sliwinski, Marek. Le genocide Khmer rouge: Une analyse demographique. Paris: L'Har-
mattan, 1995.

Select Bibliography for Asia
China (including Tibet)

Becker, Jasper. Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine. London: John Murray, 1996.
Bergere, Marie-Claude. La Republique populaire de Chine de 1949 a nos jours. Paris:

Armand Colin, 1987.
Bergere, Marie-Claude, Lucien Bianco, and Jiirgen Domes, eds. La Chine au XXe siecle.

Vol. 1: Dune revolution a lautre 1895-1949; vol 2: De 1949 d aujourdnui, Paris:

Fayard, 1989 and 1990.
Cheng Nien. Life and Death in Shanghai. London: Macdonald, 1986,
Chevrier, Yves. Mao ei la revolution chinoise. Florence: Casterman/Giunti, 1993.
Domenach, Jean-Luc. Chine: Larchipel oublte. Paris: Fayard, 1992.
Donnet, Pierre-Antoine. Tibet: Survival in Question. London: Zed Books, 1994.
Fairbank, John K., and Albert Feuerwerker, eds. The Cambridge History of China. Vol.

13, Part 2: Republican China, 1912-1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1986.
Hinton, William. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1966.
Hua Linshan. Les annees rouges. Paris: Seuil, 1987.
Ling, Ken, Miriam London, and Ta-ling Lee. Red Guard: From Schoolboy to 'Little

General" in Mao's China. London: Macdonald, 1972.
MacFarquhar, Roderick, and John K. Fairbank, eds. The Cambridge History of China.

Vol. 14: The People's Republic, Part 1 (1949-1965); Vol 15, Part 2: Revolutions

within the Chinese Revolution, 1966-1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1987 and 1991.
Pasqualini, Jean, with Rudolf Chelminski. Prisoner of Mao. London: Andre Deutsch,

1973.
Roux, Alain. La Chine populaire, Vol. 1: 1949-1966; Vol. 2: 1966-1984. Paris: Editions

Sociales, 1983 and 1984.
Wei Jingsheng. The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and other Writings, trans.

Kristina M. Torgeson. London: Penguin, 1998.
Wu, Harry. Laogai: The Chinese Gulag. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992.
Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao. Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution, trans.

and ed. D. W. Y. Kwok. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996 (first publish-
ed in Chinese, 1986).

Laos

Stuart-Fox, Martin, and Mary Koogman. Historical Dictionary of Laos. Metuchen and
London: Scarecrow Press, 1992,

Vietnam

Boudarel, Georges. Cent fie urs ecloses dans la nutt du Vietnam: Communisme et dissidence
1945-1956. Paris: Jacques Bertoin, 1991.

643

642

644

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Boudarel, Georges, et al. La bureaucrats au Vietnam. Vietnam-Asie-Debat no. 1. Paris:

L'Harmattan, 1983.
Dalloz, Jacques. The War in fndo-China, 1945-1954, trans. Josephine Bacon. Savage,

Md.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1990.
Doan Van Toai. The Vietnamese Gulag, trans. Sylvie Romanowski and Francoise

Simon-Miller. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
Hemery, Daniel. Revolutionnaires vietnamiens et pouvoir colonial en Indochme, 1932-37.

Paris: Maspero, 1975.
Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.
Marr, David G. Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1995.
Ngo Van. Revolutionaries They Could Not Break: The Fight for the Fourth International

in Indochina, 1930-1945. London: Index Books, 1995.

The Third World

Pascal Fontaine, Yves Santamaria, and Sylvain Boulouque

Communism in Latin America

Pascal Fontaine

Cuba: interminable Totalitarianism in the Tropics

Since the beginning of the century, the biggest island in the Caribbean has had
a turbulent political history. In 1931-1933 an army clerk named Fulgencio
Batista took part in a revolt against the dictator Gerardo Machado. In 1933
Batista led a military coup against Cuba's provisional president, Carlos
Cespedes. Thereafter, as head of the army, Batista was the major powerbroker
for a succession of provisional and de facto governments. Throughout this
period and afterward, he remained fiercely opposed to the United States. In
1940, after Batista was elected president, he enacted a liberal constitution. In
1952 he returned to power through a military coup, disrupting the prospects of
democratization symbolized by the elections scheduled for the following year.
Batista continued to govern with the support of various political parties, in-
cluding the local Communist Party, which at that time was called the People's
Socialist Party (PSP).

The Cuban economy began to grow rapidly under Batista, but wealth
remained unevenly distributed, with a particularly marked contrast between
the countryside and the cities, with their impressive infrastructure. 1 The cities
also benefited from money brought in by the Italian-American mafia. In 1958
there were 1 1,500 prostitutes in Havana alone. The Batista era was notable for

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corruption and an obsession with short-term gain, and the middle classes
gradually distanced themselves from the regime. 2

On 26 July 1953 a group of students attacked the Moncada barracks in
Santiago de Cuba. Several of them were killed, and one of the leaders, Fidel
Castro, was arrested. Though initially sentenced to fifteen years in prison, he
was soon freed and fled to Mexico, where he set up a guerrilla group called the
26 July Movement (M-26), made up for the most part of young liberals. In
1957 this group entered Cuba and began a twenty-five-month armed conflict
with Batista's forces in the Sierra Maestra. At the same time, urban students
led by Jose Antonio Echevarria formed the Student Revolutionary Directorate,
whose armed wing attacked the presidential palace in March of that year. The
operation was a total failure: Echevarria was killed, leaving the student move-
ment without impetus and Castro's group as the only viable opposition to
Batista. During the ensuing conflict, violent repression by the regime claimed
thousands of victims. 3 The urban guerrilla network was especially heavily
affected, losing 80 percent of its members; the rural guerrilla groups in the
Sierra lost only 20 percent.

On 7 November 1958, at the head of a column of guerrillas, Ernesto
Guevara began a march on Havana. On 1 January 1959, Batista and the other
leading figures in the dictatorship fled. Rolando Masferrer, the head of the
sinister police apparatus known as "the Tigers," and Esteban Ventura, chief of
the secret police, both of whom had a penchant for torture, fled to Miami. The
leader of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC), Eusebio Mujal, who
had signed a number of agreements with Batista, took refuge in the Argentine
embassy. The guerrillas' easy victory overshadowed the role played by other
movements in Batista's downfall. In fact the guerrillas were involved in only a
few minor actions, and Batista was defeated mainly because he had lost control
of Havana to urban terrorism. The current U.S. arms embargo also worked
against him.

On 8 January 1959 Castro, Guevara, and their forces made a triumphant
entry into the capital. As soon as they had seized power, they began to conduct
mass executions inside the two main prisons, La Cabana and Santa Clara.
According to reports in the foreign press, 600 of Batista's supporters were
summarily executed during a five-month period. Extraordinary courts were
established for the sole purpose of sentencing these opponents of the new
regime. In the words of Jeannine Verdes-Laroux, "The form of the trials, and
the procedures by which they were conducted, were highly significant. The
totalitarian nature of the regime was inscribed there from the very beginning." 4
These travesties took place in a carnival-like atmosphere; a crowd of 18,000
people gathered at the Palace of Sports to "judge" the Batistan commandant

Communism in Latin America

649

Jesus Sosa Blanco, who was accused of carrying out assassinations, by giving
him the thumbs-down sign. As Sosa Blanco remarked before he was shot, the
scenes were "worthy of ancient Rome."

In 1957, while still in the Sierra, Castro gave an interview to Herbert
Matthews, a journalist from the New York Times, in which he declared: "Power
does not interest me. After victory I want to go back to my village and just be
a lawyer again." This statement was immediately contradicted by his policies.
After seizing power, the new revolutionary government immediately fell vic-
tim to serious in-fighting, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Jose
Miro Cardona on 15 February 1959. Castro, who was already commander in
chief of the army, replaced him. Although he initially promised to hold free
elections within eighteen months, by June he had decided to postpone the
elections indefinitely. Castro justified his decision in an address to the inhabi-
tants of Havana, saying: "Elections? What for?" thus renouncing one of the
fundamental points of the anti-Batista guerrilla program. In effect, he took over
the position vacated by the fallen dictator. He also suspended the 1940 consti-
tution and its guarantees of fundamental rights, governing by decree until 1976,
when he imposed a constitution modeled on that of the U.S.S.R. The new laws
53 and 54 (relating to freedom of association) were particularly important in
abrogating civil liberties by limiting the rights of citizens to meet in groups.

In the spring of 1959 Castro, who until then had collaborated closely with
his associates, changed course and began removing democrats from the gov-
ernment. He relied increasingly on his brother Raul (who was a member of the
People's Socialist Party) and on Guevara, who was a convinced supporter of
the Soviet Union. Agricultural reform was launched on 17 May 1959; by June
the opposition between liberals and radicals had begun to crystalize. The initial
plan, proposed by Agriculture Minister Humberto Sori Marin, had aimed at
establishing a program to reallocate land that belonged to bourgeois land-
owners. Castro, however, was supportive of the radical policies proposed by the
Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (National Institute for Agricultural
Reform), or INRA, which he had placed under the control of a group of
orthodox Marxists, and of which he was the head. With a stroke of the pen he
annulled the agriculture minister's program. In June 1959 Castro sought to
radicalize the agrarian reform by ordering the army to take control of 100
estates in Camaguey Province.

The gathering storm finally broke in July 1959 when President Manuel
Urrutia, a former magistrate who had courageously defended the rebels in
1956, resigned. Soon the minister of foreign affairs, Roberto Agramonte, was
replaced by Raul Roa, a staunch Castro supporter. Shortly afterward the min-
ister of social affairs also resigned to protest a verdict against several pilots

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The Third World

accused of crimes against civilians. 5 This pattern continued throughout 1960.
Rupo Lopez Fresquet, the finance minister since January 1959, broke with
Castro in March, joined the opposition, and then went into exile; Anres Suarez,
another member of the government, also left the country that year. The last
independent newspapers disappeared, and the rest were muzzled. On 20 Janu-
ary 1960 Jorge Zayas, who had been the editor of an anti-Batista newspaper
called Avarice, also went into exile; Miguel Angel Quevedo, the editor of Bohe-
mia, the weekly that in 1959 had published Castro's testimony from his 1953
trial for the attack on the Moncada barracks, left in July. The only newspapers
left were the Communist Granma (Grandma, named after a ship) and Hoy
(Today). In the fall of 1960 the last remaining political and military opposition
leaders, including William Morgan and Humberto Sori Marin, were arrested.
Morgan, a guerrilla leader in the Sierra, was shot the following year.

Soon thereafter the last democrats, including Manolo Ray, the minister
for public works, and Enrique Oltusky, the communications minister, were
removed from the government. 6 The first great wave of departures now began.
Nearly 50,000 people from the middle classes, many of whom had originally
supported the revolution, all took the road to exile. This exodus of doctors,
teachers, and lawyers did irreparable harm to Cuban society.

The workers were the next group to suffer repression. The labor unions
had resisted the new regime from its earliest days. One of the principal leaders
was the head of the Sugar Union, David Salvador. As a man of the left, he had
broken with the PSP over its refusal to take a stand against Batista. He had
organized strikes at the big sugar plants in 1955, had been arrested and tor-
tured, and had supported the April 1958 strike, which was masterminded by
Castro's 26 July Movement. After being democratically elected as secretary
general of the CTC in 1959, Salvador was made to work with two assistants
who were orthodox Communists appointed without a democratic mandate. He
tried to resist their influence and to put a brake on their activities, but after the
spring of 1960 he became increasingly marginalized. In June Salvador went
into hiding, but in August 1962 he was arrested and spent the next twelve years
in prison. Thus Castro forced off the stage another major figure in the anti-
Batista movement. As a final blow against the workers, Castro forbade their sole
remaining union, the CTC, to stage strikes. As a Party spokesman noted: "The
union must not be used for the wrong purposes."

After being arrested in 1953, Castro had been saved mainly through the
intervention of the archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, Monsignor Perez Seran-
tes. The clergy were happy to see Batista's departure; several priests had even
participated in the guerrilla organizations in the Sierra. Nevertheless, the
church protested the overhasty condemnation of Batista's supporters in the

Communism in Latin America

651

same way that it had protested the actions of Masferrer's Tigers. In 1959 the
church denounced Communist infiltration of parishes. Castro used the 1961
Bay of Pigs affair as a pretext to ban the periodical La quincena? Tn May all
religious colleges were closed and their buildings confiscated by the govern-
ment, including the Bethlehem Jesuit College, where Castro himself had been
educated. In full military dress, the u Lider Maximo" (Supreme Chief) de-
clared: "Let the Falangist priests start packing their bags!" This warning was
serious; on 17 September 131 priests were forced to leave the country. To
survive, the church had to scale back its operations considerably. The regime
continued to marginalize religious institutions and believers; though claiming
that it would allow all Cubans to profess their faith freely, it subjected those
who did to repressive measures, such as forbidding them access to university
education or to jobs in the civil service.

Repression was also felt in the world of the arts. In 1961 Castro had stated
that the position of the artist was at the very center of society. But a slogan
perfectly encapsulated his real views: "The revolution is all; everything else is
nothing." Heberto Paclilla, a distinguished poet, finally left Cuba in 1980 after
many years of persecution. Similarly, Reinaldo Arenas, after ten years of ostra-
cism, left the country in the Mariel exodus.

Like other Communist leaders, Fidel Castro loves comparisons to the French
Revolution; and just as Jacobin Paris had Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, revolu-
tionary Havana had Che Guevara, a Latin American version of Nechaev, the
nineteenth-century nihilist terrorist who inspired Dostoevsky's The Devils.

Ernesto Guevara was born into a well-off family in Buenos Aires in 1928,
and as a young man he traveled throughout South America. Because of chronic
asthma, his health was always fragile, but this did not prevent him from riding
a motorbike all the way from the pampas to the jungles of Central America
after finishing his medical studies. He came to hate the United States in the
early 1950s, when he encountered the misery that ensued in Guatemala after
the leftist regime of Jacobo Arbenz had been overthrown in a coup supported
by the Americans. As Guevara wrote to a friend in 1957: "My ideological
training means that 1 am one of those people who believe that the solution to
the world's problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain." One night in
1955 in Mexico he met a young Cuban lawyer in exile named Fidel Castro, who
was preparing to return to Cuba. Guevara decided to accompany Castro, and
they landed on the island in December 1956. In the resistance, Guevara soon
became commander of a detachment, quickly gaining a reputation for ruthless-
ness; a child in his guerrilla unit who had stolen a little food was immediately
shot without trial. Regis Debray, who was his companion in Bolivia, described

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The Third World

him as "an authoritarian through and through" who wanted to impose a revo-
lution of total Communism and sometimes found himself opposed to more
democratic Cuban guerrilla commanders. 8

In the autumn of 1958 Guevara opened a second front on the plains in
Las Villas Province, in the center of the island. He carried out a highly suc-
cessful action in Santa Clara, attacking a train of reinforcements sent there by
Batista. The soldiers fled, refusing to fight. After the rebel victory, Guevara was
assigned the post of state prosecutor, which gave him authority over pardons.
He worked in La Cabana prison, where a great number of people were exe-
cuted, including some of his former comrades-in-arms who refused to abandon
their democratic beliefs. U I can't be the friend of anyone who doesn't share my
ideas," he once said.

As minister of industry and head of the Central Bank, Guevara found
occasion to apply his own political beliefs, imposing the "Soviet model" on
Cuba. He was an avid disciple of Lenin, in whose honor he named his son
Vladimir. Though claiming to despise money, he lived in one of the rich, private
areas of Havana. Despite later serving as minister of the economy, he had no
notion of the most basic ideas of economics and ended up ruining the Central
Bank. Social issues were more his forte, and he introduced "voluntary work
Sundays" in emulation of the U.S.S.R. and China. He was a great admirer of
the Cultural Revolution. According to Regis Debray, "It was he and not Fidel
who in 1960 invented Cuba's first 'corrective work camp' (we would say 'forced
labor camp 1 )." 9

In his will, this graduate of the school of terror praised the "extremely
useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing
machines." 10 He was dogmatic, cold, and intolerant, and there was almost
nothing in him of the traditionally open and warm Cuban temperament. He
was the architect of the militarization of Cuban youth, sacrificing them to the
cult of the New Man.

His strongest desire was to spread the Cuban experiment far and wide. In
1963 he was in Algeria, and then in Dar es Salaam, then in the Congo, where
he crossed paths with the Marxist Laurent Kabila, who is now the president
of the Democratic Republic of Congo and who never hesitated to massacre
civilians. Filled with passionate hatred for the United States, in 1966 he took
his guerrilla forces on a crusade through South America, with a slogan encour-
aging the creation of "two, three, many Vietnams!"

Castro used Guevara for tactical purposes. Once their rupture was com-
plete, Guevara went to Bolivia. There he tried to apply his theory of the
guerrillayko (cell), taking no notice of the policies of the Bolivian Communist
Party. Not a single peasant joined his group there. Increasingly isolated and

Communism in Latin America

653

hunted by government forces, he was captured on 8 October 1967 and executed
the following day.

Castro even modified his rebel army. In July 1959 one of Castro's closest
advisers, the air force commander Diaz Lanz, resigned and fled to the United
States. The following month, a wave of arrests was organized on the pretext
that a coup was being planned.

Since 1956, Hubert Matos had helped the rebels in the Sierra, getting
support from Costa Rica, supplying them with arms and munitions in a private
plane, and liberating Santiago de Cuba, the country's second-largest city, at the
head of the 9th detachment, named after Antonio Guiteras. Soon after being
made governor of Camaguey Province, he found himself in profound disagree-
ment with the "Communization" of the regime and resigned from his post.
Castro believed that he was part of a conspiracy and had him arrested by
Camilo Cienfuegos, another guerrilla hero, on the grounds that he had dis-
played "anti-Communist" tendencies. With scant regard for Matos' previous
exemplary conduct as a freedom fighter, Castro subjected him to a Moscow-
style show-trial in Havana and intervened personally against his former ally.
Castro stood up in court and brought tremendous pressure to bear on the
judges, saying: "I'm telling you that you must choose: it's Matos or me!" He
also prevented witnesses for the defense from testifying. Matos received a
twenty-year sentence, which he served to the last day. Several people close to
him were also sent to prison.

Deprived of the means of expressing themselves, many of Castro's oppo-
nents went into hiding, where they were joined by people who had fought in
the anti-Batista urban guerrilla groups. In the early 1960s this underground
movement grew into a revolt based in the Escambray Mountains, the movement
rejected forced collectivization and dictatorship. Raul Castro sent in all the
military forces at his disposal, including armored vehicles, artillery, and hun-
dreds of infantry militia, to put down the rebellion. The families of rebel
peasants were moved out of the area to eliminate popular support. Hundreds
of people were forcibly moved to the tobacco plantations in Pinar del Rio
Province, hundreds of kilometers away in the west of the island. This was the
only occasion when Castro actually deported parts of the population.

Despite these measures, the fighting continued for five years. Over time,
however, as the rebels became increasingly isolated, they began to be captured.
Justice was harsh for them. Guevara took the opportunity to liquidate Jesus
Carreras, one of the leaders of the anti-Batista rebellion as a young man, who
had opposed Guevara's policies since 1958. Wounded in combat, Carreras was
dragged before a firing squad, where Guevara refused to grant him a stay of

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execution. Some 381 "bandits" were judged in similar fashion in the Santa
Clara prison. In La Loma de los Coches prison more than 1,000 "counterrevo-
lutionaries" were shot in the years between the triumph of 1959 and the final
liquidation of the Escambray protest movement.

After resigning from the Ministry of Agriculture, Humberto Sori Marin
tried to establish a foco in Cuba. He was soon arrested, court-martialed, and
sentenced to death. His mother begged Castro for mercy, reminding him that
he and Sori Marin had known each other since the 1950s. Castro promised that
his life would be spared, but Sori Marin was shot a few days later.

The revolt in the Escambray Mountains was folowed by periodic attempts
to land armed commando groups on Cuban soil. Many belonged to the Liber-
acion group, headed by Tony Cuesta, and to the Alpha 66 group, both formed
in the early 1960s. Most of these efforts, modeled on Castro's own return,
resulted in failure.

In 1960, in a move typical of all dictatorships, the judiciary was forced to
surrender its independence and was placed under the control of the central
government.

The universities were also affected. Pedro Luis Boitel was a young student
in civil engineering who put himself forward as a candidate for the presidency
of the Federation of University Students. He had previously opposed Batista
but was also a determined opponent of Fidel Castro. Another student named
Rolando Cubella was the prefered candidate of the regime, and it was he who
was elected with the help of the Castro brothers. Boitel was arrested soon
afterward and sentenced to ten years in Boniato, a particularly harsh prison.
Boitel went on hunger strike several times to protest the inhuman conditions
there. On 3 April 1972, as he began yet another, he said to one of the prison
governors: 'Tm going on strike for the same rights as other political prison-
ers — rights that you are happy to demand for prisoners in other South Ameri-
can dictatorships, but that you won't allow here!" Nothing came of his protests,
however. Boitel received no medical assistance and suffered terribly After
forty-five days his condition became critical; after forty-nine he slipped into a
coma. The authorities continued to refuse to intervene. At three in the morning
on 23 May 1972, 53 days after beginning his hunger strike, Boitel died. The
authorities refused to allow his mother to see the body.

Soon after taking power, Castro began to organize an extensive security and
intelligence service. As minister of defense, Raul Castro reinstituted military
tribunals, and soon the firing squad again became a judicial weapon. The first
formal security organization was called the Direccion General de Contra-
Inteligencia (State Security Department; DGCI). Popularly known as the Red
Gestapo, the DGCI began to evolve in 1959-1962, when its task was to infil-

Communism in Latin America

655

trate and destroy the various groups opposed to Castro. The DGCI violently
liquidated the Escambray guerrilla movement and oversaw the creation of
forced-labor camps. It was also the department that ran the prison system.

Inspired by the Soviet model, the DGCI was initially directed by Ramiro
Valdes, who had been one of Castro's closest advisers since their days in the
Sierra. As the years passed, the department played an ever-larger role and
gained a certain amount of autonomy. Information on its organizational struc-
ture comes from air force general Rafael Del Pino, who defected to Miami in
1987. In theory the DGCI is accountable to the Ministry of Internal Affairs
(Minit) and is divided into various sections. Certain sections are charged with
surveillance of officials in all other government departments. The Third Sec-
tion observes everyone who works in culture, sports, and artistic fields, includ-
ing writers and film directors. The Fourth Section oversees everyone who
works in economic organizations and the ministries of transport and commu-
nication. The Sixth Section, which has more than 1,000 agents, is in charge of
telephone wiretaps. The Eighth Section oversees the postal service; that is, it
screens mail. Other sections watch over the diplomatic corps and keep tabs on
visiting foreigners. The DGCI promotes the Castro regime's survival economi-
cally by using thousands of detainees as forced labor. Thus the department
constitutes a world of privilege, whose staff have almost unlimited powers and
a broad range of perquisites.

To control the population, the Direccion Special del Ministerio del Inte-
rior (DSMI) recruits chivatm (informers) by the thousand. The DSMI works
in three different fields: one section keeps a file on every Cuban citizen; another
keeps track of public opinion; the third, in charge of the "ideological line,"
keeps an eye on the church and its various congregations through infiltration.

Since 1967, Minit has had its own means of intervention, the Fuerzas
Especiales, which in 1995 consisted of 50,000 soldiers. These special shock
troops work quite closely with Direccion 5 and the Direccion de Seguridad
Personal (DSP), Castro's praetorian guard. The DSP is made up of three escort
units of approximately 100 men each, as well as a naval detachment consisting
of sailors and frogmen. According to a 1995 estimate, the DSP numbers several
thousand men. Its experts are constantly studying possible assassination sce-
narios; food tasters test Castro's food before he eats it, and a special medical
team is on alert around the clock.

Direccion 5 specializes in the elimination of opponents. Two famous
opponents of Batista who subsequently clashed with Castro fell victim to this
section: Elias de la Torriente was killed in Miami, and Aldo Vera, one of the
chiefs of the urban guerrilla group that fought against Batista, was killed in
Puerto Rico. Hubert Matos, who now lives in exile in Miami, is forced to
protect himself with armed bodyguards. Direccion 5 carries out its detentions

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and interrogations at a detention center in Villa Marista in Havana, a building
that previously belonged to a congregation of Marist monks. Far from prying
eyes and in conditions of extreme isolation, prisoners there are often subjected
to psychological and physical torture.

Another component of the secret police is the Direction General de la
Inteligencia, which is in many ways a typical state intelligence-gathering serv-
ice. It works above all in espionage, counterespionage, and the infiltration of
foreign governments and organizations of Cuban exiles.

During the repressions of the 1960s, between 7,000 and 10,000 people were
killed and 30,000 people imprisoned for political reasons. Thus the Castro
government quickly faced the problem of what to do with a large number of
prisoners, especially those from the Escambray rebellion and the failed Bay of
Pigs invasion.

The Military Unit of Production Assistance (MUPA), which existed from
1964 to 1967, was the first attempt to use prisoners as a labor force. Beginning
in November 1965, the MUPA organized concentration camps in which eve-
ryone who was considered a "potential danger to society," including religious
prisoners (Catholics, notably Monsignor Jaime Ortega, the bishop of Havana;
Protestants; and Jehovah's Witnesses), pimps, and homosexuals, was incarcer-
ated. The prisoners were forced to build their own shelters, particularly in
camps located in the Camagiiey region. "Socially deviant people 11 were sub-
jected to military discipline, which quickly degenerated into poor treatment,
undernourishment, and isolation. Many detainees mutilated themselves to es-
cape this hell; others emerged psychologically destroyed by their experiences.
One of the MUPA's functions was the "reeducation 11 of homosexuals. Even
before these camps were established, many homosexuals, and especially those
employed in the cultural sphere, had lost their jobs. The University of Havana
was the subject of anti homosexual purges, and it was common practice to
"judge" homosexuals in public at their place of work. They were forced to
admit their "vice," and had to vow to give it up or face dismissal and impris-
onment. Two years after their establishment, the MUPA camps were closed as
a result of widespread international protest. Nevertheless many sorts of harsh
treatment continue to be reserved for homosexuals. Sometimes they are kept
in a particular section of the prison, as is the case in East Havana's Nueva
Career a I.

After the MUPA was dissolved, the regime forcibly conscripted prisoners
into the military. First organized in 1967, the Centenary Youth Column (com-
memorating the 1868 revolt against the Spanish) became El Ejercito Juvenil de
Trabajo (the Young People's Work Army) in 1973. In this a paramilitary or-
ganization young people did agricultural and construction work, often under

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657

terrible conditions with hours that were almost intolerable, for a derisory wage
of 7 pesos, equivalent to 30 cents in 1997 dollars.

In 1964 a forced labor program known as the Camilo-Cienfuegos plan was
established on the Isle of Pines. The penal population was organized into
brigades divided into groups of forty, known as cuadrillas. Each group was
commanded by a sergeant or lieutenant and was assigned to agricultural and
mining work. Working conditions were extremely harsh, and prisoners worked
almost naked, wearing little more than undergarments. As a punishment,
"troublemakers 11 were forced to cut grass with their teeth or to sit in latrine
trenches for hours at a time.

The violence of the prison regime affected both political prisoners and
common criminals. Violence began with the interrogations conducted by the
Departamcnto Tecnico de Investigaciones (DTI). The DTI used solitary
confinement and played on the phobias of the detainees: one woman who was
afraid of insects was locked in a cell infested with cockroaches. The DTI also
used physical violence. Prisoners were forced to climb a staircase wearing shoes
filled with lead and were then thrown back down the stairs. Psychological
torture was also used, often observed by a medical team. The guards used
sodium pentathol and other drugs to keep prisoners awake. In the Mazzora
hospital, electric shock treatment was routinely used as a punishment without
any form of medical observation. The guards also used attack dogs and mock
executions; disciplinary cells had neither water nor electricity; and some de-
tainees were kept in total isolation.

Because responsibility in Cuba was generally considered to be collective,
punishment was also frequently collective. The regime exerted pressure on its
opponents by forcing their relatives to pay a social cost; the children of de-
tainees were banned from higher education, and spouses were often fired from
their jobs.

Sentences are often lengthened by the prison authorities. Anyone who
rebels has another stretch added. Similar penalties apply to prisoners who
refuse to wear the uniform of common criminals, who refuse to take part in
"rehabilitation plans," or who take part in a hunger strike. The courts view
such actions as attacks on the state and add another one or two years of
incarceration in a labor camp. Prisoners commonly serve an additional third or
half of their original sentence. Boitel, who was initially sentenced to ten years
in prison, ultimately served forty-two.

A distinction should be made between "normal" prisons and the high-security
prisons of the G-2, the secret police. Prison Kilo 5.5 is a high-security prison
situated 3.5 miles from the Pinar del Rio freeway. For a time, under the author-
ity of Captain Jorge Gonzalez, known as "El Nato," common criminals and

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political prisoners were routinely kept together. Cells originally intended for
two often contained as many as seven or eight prisoners, most of whom were
thus forced to sleep on the floor. The disciplinary cells were dubbed tostadoras
(toasters), because of their terrible heat in both winter and summer. A separate
section exists for women. Pinar del Rio, another high-security prison, contains
underground cells and interrogation rooms. Over the last few years, psycho-
logical torture has largely replaced physical torture; sleep deprivation, adopted
from the U.S.S.R., is a particularly common technique. Once the sleep pattern
is broken, the notion of time is lost. Prisoners are also told that their families
are under threat and that they will no longer be allowed family visits. The Kilo
7 prison, in Camaguey, is especially violent. In 1974, forty prisoners died in a
rebellion there.

The G-2 center in Santiago de Cuba, built in 1980, possesses cells with
extreme temperatures (both high and low). Prisoners are awakened every
twenty or thirty minutes. This sort of treatment may continue several months.
Kept naked and totally cut off from the outside world, many of the prisoners
who have undergone the terrible psychological tortures here emerge with ir-
reparably damaged psyches.

For many years La Cabana was the most infamous prison in Cuba, known
as the place where Sori Marin and Carreras were executed. As late as 1982,
nearly 100 prisoners were shot there. La Cabana specialized in holding its
prisoners in tiny cells known as ratoneras, or rat holes. It was finally closed in
1985. Elsewhere, however, executions have continued, including at Boniato, a
high-security prison known for extreme violence. Some political prisoners held
at Boniato have been known to smear themselves with excrement to avoid being
raped by other prisoners. Boniato houses all prisoners sentenced to death,
regardless of the category of their crime. It is known for its grillwork cells or
taptadas. Several writers — including the poets Jorge Vails, who was there for
7,340 days, and Ernesto Diaz Rodriguez, as well as a commanding officer, Eloy
Guttierrez Menoyo — have described the terrible conditions there. The food is
contaminated, and infectious diseases such as typhus and leptospirosis are
common. As a result, hundreds of prisoners have died from hunger and lack
of medical care. In August 1995 a hunger strike was launched jointly by the
political and common prisoners seeking to draw attention to the deplorable
conditions. The strike continued for almost a month but achieved no improve-
ment.

Iron cages are still used in some prisons. In the late 1960s the Tres Macios
del Oriente prison used cages originally intended for common criminals for
political prisoners as well. The cages were 1 meter wide, 1.8 meters high, and
about 10 meters long. Such closed quarters are extremely hard to bear, espe-
cially with no water or sanitation; yet prisoners of both types were kept here
for weeks or even months at a time.

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659

The 1960s also saw the invention of requisas (requisitionings) as a form of
repression. In the middle of the night, detainees would be awakened and
violently removed from their cells. They were then beaten, often while naked,
and forced to wait until the end of the inspection before being allowed to return
to their cells. Requisas might be carried out several times a month.

Visits by relatives provide another opportunity to humiliate prisoners. In
La Cabana prisoners were made to appear naked before their family, and
imprisoned husbands were forced to watch intimate body searches carried out
on their wives.

Female inmates in Cuban prisons are especially vulnerable to acts of
sadism by guards. More than 1,100 women have been sentenced as political
prisoners since 1959. In 1963 they were housed in the Guanajay prison. Nu-
merous eyewitness statements attest to beatings and other humiliations. For
instance, before showering, detainees were forced to undress in full view of the
guards, who then beat them. Havana's Nuevo Amanecer (New Dawn) prison
is the largest in the country. Dr. Martha Frayde, a long-standing friend of
Castro, who was the Cuban representative at UNESCO in the 1960s, described
this prison and its exceptionally harsh conditions:

My cell was six meters by five. There were twenty-two of us sleeping
there in bunk beds of two or three layers. Sometimes there were as many
as forty-two of us. Sanitation was dreadful. The basins we had to wash
in were filthy, and it became impossible to wash at all . . . We were often
short of water. It became impossible to empty the toilets, which filled up
and overflowed. A layer of excrement formed, invading our cells. Like
an irresistible wave it reached the corridor, then flowed down the stairs
and into the garden . . . The political prisoners . . . made such a fuss that
the prison authorities brought in a water truck ... We managed to
sweep away some of the excrement with the pressure hoses, but there
still wasn't enough water, and we had to live with this vile layer for
another few davs. ,1M

One of Cuba's largest concentration camps, El Manbu, in the Camaguey re-
gion, contained more than 3,000 people in the 1980s. At the camp at Siboney,
where living conditions and food are execrable, German shepherd dogs are
used to track escaped prisoners. Those who are caught are judged by a popular
tribunal inside the camp and sent on to a forced-labor camp, where a "severe
regime" operates. At these camps, consejos de trabajo de les pressos (prisoner
work councils) judge and punish their own companions.

In 1986 some 3,000 women were incarcereated in the Potosi camp, in
Victoria de las Tunas, mostly for juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and politi-
cal crimes. There are also special camps for children and adolescents. Situated

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near Santiago de las Vegas, the Arco Iris (Rainbow) camp was designed to hold
1,500 adolescents. The Nueva Vida (New Life) camp is in the southwestern
region. In the Palos zone is the Capitiolo, a special internment camp for
children up to age ten. The adolescents cut cane or make simple objects by
hand, which can then be sold by the government.

Although prisoners have no rights, they are subject to a rehabilitation program,
which is intended to prepare them for reintegration into the socialist society.
The program has three stages: the first, called the "period of maximal secu-
rity," takes place in prison; the second, called "medium security," takes place
on agranja (farm); the third, called "minimal security," is considered an "open
regime."

Detainees who are included in the program wear the blue uniform (azul)
of common criminals, as part of the regime's effort to blur the distinction
between the two types of prisoner. For a while, anyone who refused to follow
the program was forced to wear the yellow uniform (amarilh) of Batista's
army — a harsh punishment for those prisoners who had previously belonged
to guerrilla groups that fought against Batista. Prisoners who refused to wear
either uniform were forced by the authorities to wear nothing but their under-
wear for years on end and were banned from receiving visits. Hubert Matos
was one such prisoner. He later reported: "I lived for several months with no
uniform and no visits. I was cut off from the outside world simply because I
had refused to conform to the whims of the authorities ... I preferred being
naked, among other naked prisoners, even in those badly overcrowded condi-
tions."

The transition from one stage of the program to the next depended upon
the decision of a "reeducation officer." On the whole, the officer's intention
was to impose acceptance through physical and mental exhaustion. Carlos
Franqui, a former official in the regime, described the spirit of the system: "The
opponent of the regime is a patient, and the guard is a doctor. The prisoners
will be set free when the guard decides that the cure has been effective. Time
is of no account until the patient is cured."

The longest sentences were served out in the prisons. In 1974 La Cabana
had a special section (zone 2) reserved for civilian offenders and another for
military prisoners (zone 1). More than 1,000 men were housed in zone 2 in
galleries thirty meters long and six meters wide. Other prisons are run by the
G-2, the secret police.

People who receive relatively light sentences, between three and seven
years, are sent to granjas, an invention of the Castro era very similar to the
Soviet corrective labor camps. These "farms" consist of barracks surrounded
by rows of barbed-wire fences and several observation towers, manned by

Communism in Latin America

661

guards from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who are allowed to open fire on
anyone they believe is attempting to escape. 12 Each camp generally contains
between 500 and 700 prisoners, who are required to work for twelve to fifteen
hours a day. The guards are permitted to use any tactics, including clubbing
prisoners with their guns, to make them work faster.

The "open regime" is generally a construction site where prisoners live,
usually under the control of the military. The number of prisoners at each site
ranges from 50 to 200, depending on the size of the project. Detainees on the
granjas make the prefabricated elements that are assembled at the open-regime
sites. Here detainees are granted three-day furloughs at the end of each month.
Evidently, the food is not as bad at these sites as it is in the camps. Each site is
maintained as an independent entity; this strategy makes it easier to manage
the detainees, ensuring that not too many are ever together at the same time to
present united resistance. Some of the open-regime sites are in urban settings;
there were six operating in Havana during the late 1980s.

This type of system affords a clear economic benefit. 11 For example, all
detainees are mobilized to harvest the sugar crop, the zafra. The head of the
prisons in Oriente Province, Papito Struch, declared in 1974: "Detainees are
the island's main workforce." In 1974 the work they carried out was worth 348
million dollars. Many government departments make use of the prisoners.
About 60 percent of the labor force of the Department for Development of
Social and Agricultural Works is made up of detainees. The prisoners work on
dozens of farms in the Picadura valleys, which constitute the main showplace
for the work reeducation program. Among the many heads of state who have
been given tours of these sites are Leonid Brezhnev, Houari Boumediene, and
Francois Mitterrand.

All the provincial secondary schools were built by political prisoners with
minimal input from civilian society, usually consisting of no more than a
handful of civil engineers. In Oriente and Camaguey, detainees have built more
than twenty polytechnic schools. They have also built numerous sugar stores
throughout the island. A list in Bohemia of other projects built by penal labor
included dairies and livestock centers in Havana Province; carpentry workshops
and secondary schools in Pinar del Rio; a sty, dairy, and woodworking center
in Matanzas; and two secondary schools and ten dairies in Las Villas. The work
plans become more complex every year, requiring an ever larger prison work-
force.

In September I960 Castro formed the Committees for Defense of the
Revolution (CDRs), small neighborhood committees based around the cuadra
(block). The leader is charged with surveillance of "counterrevolutionary"
activities. The resulting social control is extremely tight. Members of the
committees attend all CDR meetings and patrol constantly to root out "enemy

662 The Third World

infiltration. 1 ' The surveillance and denunciation system is so rigorous that
family intimacy is almost nonexistent.

The purpose of the CDRs became all too apparent in March 1961 when,
at the instigation of Ramiro Valdes, the chief of the security forces, a huge raid
was organized and carried out in the space of a single weekend. On the basis
of lists drawn up by the CDRs, more than 100,000 people were questioned,
and several thousand were taken away to detention centers scattered across the
country.

The CDRs are responsible for organizing actus de repudio (acts of repu-
diation) designed to marginalize and break the resistance of opponents —
labeled gusanos (worms) — and their families. A crowd gathers in front of the
opponent's house to throw stones and attack the inhabitants. Castroist slogans
and insults are written on the walls. The police intervene only when they decide
that the "mass revolutionary action' 1 is becoming physically dangerous for the
victims. This quasi-lynching is designed to encourage reciprocal hatred be-
tween inhabitants of the small island. Actus de repudio destroy the links between
neighbors and damage the fabric of society to bolster the omnipotence of the
socialist state. The victim has no means of defending himself. Ricardo Bofill,
the president of the Cuban Human Rights Committee, was forced to undergo
one such act of repudiation in 1988. The liberation theologian Oswaldo Payas
Sardinas underwent the same treatment in 1991. But because Cubans by the
end of the 1980s were beginning to tire of this avalanche of social hatred, in
both of these cases the authorities were forced to bring in assailants from
elsewhere.

According to Article 16 of Cuba's constitution, the state "organizes, directs,
and controls all economic activity in accordance with the directives of the
single plan for social and economic development." This collectivist phraseol-
ogy hides a simple truth: inside their own country, Cubans are not free to work
where they want or to spend their money as they wish. In 1980 the country
experienced a wave of discontent and unrest, with factories and warehouses
being attacked and burned. The DGCI arrested 500 opponents of the regime
during a seventy-two-hour period. The security services then intervened in the
provinces to close the free peasant markets. Finally, a major campaign was
launched against the black market across the whole country.

Law 32, against absenteeism in the workplace, was passed in March 1971.
In 1978 a law was adopted to prevent criminality before it actually happened.
What this meant in practice was that any Cuban could be arrested on any
pretext if the authorities believed that he presented a danger to state security,
even if he had not committed any illegal act. In effect the law criminalized any

Communism in Latin America

663

thought that did not accord with the ideas of the regime, turning every Cuban
into a potential suspect.

In the 1960s Cubans began to u vote with their oars." The first large group to
leave were the fishermen, in 1961. The balseros were the Cuban equivalent of
the Southeast Asian boat people and were as much a part of the human
landscape of the island as the cane cutters. Exile was subtly used by Castro as a
means of regulating internal tensions. The phenomenon dates from the earliest
days of the regime and was used constantly until the mid 1970s. Many of the
exiled fled to Florida or the American base at Guantanamo,

The phenomenon first came to the world's attention in April 1980 with
the Mariel crisis. Thousands of Cubans mobbed the Peruvian embassy in
Havana, demanding exit visas to escape from an intolerable daily life. After
several weeks the authorities allowed 125,000 — out of a population of 10
million — to leave the country from the port of Mariel. Castro also took this
opportunity to get rid of a number of criminals and people who were mentally
ill. The massive exodus was a demonstration of the regime's failure, for many
of the Martelitos came from the poorest segments of society, for whom the
regime had always claimed to care above all others. People of every race and
age were fleeing Cuban socialism. After the Mariel episode numerous other
Cubans registered on lists of people seeking permission to leave the country.
Nearly twenty years later, most of them are still waiting.

In the summer of 1994, violent riots occurred in Havana for the first time
since 1959. A number of people who wanted to leave the country on the
makeshift rafts called balsas were prevented from doing so by the police. They
reacted by sacking and looting the Colombo quarter on the Malecon seafront.
By the time calm was restored, dozens of people had been arrested, and Castro
was again forced to authorize the departure of 25,000 people. Departures have
been constant ever since, and the American bases at Guantanamo and in Pan-
ama arc full of voluntary exiles. Castro has tried to prevent people from leaving
by sending helicopters to drop sandbags onto the balsas when they are at sea.
In the summer of 1994, 7,000 people lost their lives while attempting to flee.
It is estimated that approximately one-third of all balseros have died while at
sea. Over thirty years, approximately 100,000 have attempted the journey. The
result of this exodus is that out of 11 million inhabitants, 2 million now live in
exile. Exile has scattered many families among Havana, Miami, Spain, and
Puerto Rico.

From 1975 to 1989 Cuba was the major supporter of the Marxist-Leninist
regime of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA; see

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Chapter 26), which was engaged in a civil war with UNITA forces led by Jonas
Savimbi. In addition to sending innumerable "cooperators" and dozens of
technical advisers, Cuba sent an expeditionary force of 50,000 men. 14 The
Cuban army behaved in Africa as though it was a conquered territory, engaging
in systematic corruption and smuggling (of silver, ivory, and diamonds). When
an agreement signed in 1989 put an end to the conflict, the Cuban troops, most
of whom were black, were repatriated. Cuban fatalities in the war were esti-
mated at between 7,000 and 1 1 ,000.

This experience shook the convictions of many officers. General Arnaldo
Ochoa, the head of the expeditionary force in Angola and a member of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party, organized a plot to overthrow
Castro. He was arrested and brought before a military court on corruption
charges, together with a number of other high-ranking officers from the army
and the security services, including the de la Guardia brothers, Antonio and
Patricio. The de la Guardias had also been smuggling drugs for the MC
(Moneda Convertible) service, popularly known as the ''marijuana and cocaine"
service. Ochoa's involvement in smuggling was in fact quite limited; he had
returned from Angola with only a little ivory and a few diamonds. But Castro
used corruption as an excuse to rid himself of a potential rival, who, by virtue
of his prestige and high political office, could easily have channeled disaffection
into an anti-Castro movement. Ochoa's sentencing and execution were followed
by a purge in the army, causing further destabilization and trauma. Conscious
of the strong resentment that many officers felt toward the regime, Castro
appointed a trusted general minister of internal affairs. Henceforth the regime
could count on only the special forces for certain blind devotion.

In 1978 there were between 15,000 and 20,000 prisoners of conscience in
Cuba. Many came from M-26 or the student anti-Batista movements, or were
still in prison from the days of the Escambray resistance and the Bay of Pigs. 15
In 1986 some 12,000-15,000 political prisoners were kept in fifty regional
prisons throughout the island. Others were still at the many open-regime sites,
with their brigades of 50, 100, or 200 prisoners. Today the government admits
to holding between 400 and 500 political prisoners. In the spring of 1997 there
was another wave of arrests. According to Cuban human rights representatives,
many of whom are themselves former detainees, physical torture no longer
occurs in Cuban prisons. These sources, together with Amnesty International,
put the number of political prisoners in Cuba in 1997 at between 980 and 2,500
(including men, women, and children).

From 1959 through the late 1990s more than 100,000 Cubans experienced
life in one of the camps, prisons, or open-regime sites. Between 15,000 and
17,000 people were shot. "No bread without freedom, no freedom without

Communism in Latin America

665

bread," said the young lawyer Fidel Castro in 1959. But as one dissident said
before the start of the "special regime," when Soviet aid had come to an end:
"A prison where you eat well is still a prison."

Like a tyrant from a different age, faced with the failures of his regime
and the difficulties plaguing Cuba, Castro announced in 1994 that he "would
rather die than abandon the revolution." What price must the Cuban people
pay to satisfy his pride?

Nicaragua: The Failure of a Totalitarian Project

Nicaragua is a small country in Central America, sandwiched between Hondu-
ras and Costa Rica, with a tradition of bloody upheavals. Starting in the 1930s,
it was dominated by the Somoza family, whose most recent head, General
Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was "elected" president in February 1967. Little
by little, thanks to a formidable National Guard, the Somoza family took
control of 25 percent of all arable land and most of the tobacco, sugar, rice, and
coffee plantations, as well as a large number of the country's factories.

This situation led to the formation of several armed opposition move-
ments. Following the Cuban model, Carlos Fonseca Amador and Tomas Borge
founded the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) in 1961. The
group was named after Augusto Cesar Sandino, a leftist army general who had
led a guerrilla war from the 1920s until his assassination by the Somoza gov-
ernment in 1934. Despite several catastrophic failures, the FSLN survived with
some assistance from Cuba and North Korea. In 1967 riots broke out in
Managua and were put down by the National Guard; the death of at least 200
people in the streets of the capital helped to stimulate popular support for the
FSLN. After the assassination in 1978 of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the owner
of the liberal newspaper La prensa and one of the leaders of the anti-Somoza
opposition, the Sandinistas resumed their guerrilla activities. A genuine civil
war then began between the FSLN and Somoza's National Guard. On 21
February 1978 the town of Masaya rose up, In August a guerrilla leader named
Eden Pastora captured the Somoza presidential palace in Managua, taking
1,200 hostages; the government freed several FSLN leaders in exchange for
them. In September the National Guard, in an effort to retake Esteli after a
Sandinista assault, bombed the town with napalm and massacred a number of
civilians in violent street fighting. More than 160,000 people fled Nicaragua for
neighboring Costa Rica. In April 1979 the towns of Esteli and Leon rose up
again, as did the city of Granada. The rebels were better organized than they
had been the previous year, and they were further aided by the rapidly growing
popular revulsion toward the Somocistas. Throughout June the Sandinistas
took over more and more of the countryside, gradually approaching the out-

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skirts of Managua. On 17 July 1979 the dictator, who had lost all international
support, was obliged to leave the country. Between 25,000 and 30,000 people
died in the cjvil war and the repression, although the Sandinistas claimed that
the figure was 50,000. Whatever the total losses were, the population of
3 million had paid an extremely high price.

The Revolutionary Careers of Ortega and Pastora

As young men, both Eden Pastora and Daniel Ortega had experience of the
prisons of the Somoza regime. Pastora was from a landed middle-class family
and was about twenty at the time of Castro's triumph in Cuba. Ortega, born in
1945 into a more modest family, was already taking part in the anti-Somoza
youth organizations in the early 1960s.

The Frente Sandinista de Liberation National, created by Fonseca and
Borge, brought together people of various political tendencies. The two foun-
ders themselves had different political views: Fonseca was an admirer of Castro,
Borge of Mao Zedong. Over the years, three currents became discernible in the
group. The "prolonged people's war" faction was a Maoist group that assigned
the highest priority to the struggle in the countryside. The Marxist-Leninist
or "proletarian" faction, led by Fonseca and Jaime Wheelock, sought support
from the embryonic proletariat. The tercemta (third- way) faction, led by Marx-
ist dissidents and democrats, sought to foment mass insurrection by creating
an urban guerrilla network through alliances with non-Marxists. Pastora be-
longed to this group, as did Ortega initially, although he soon switched to the
Marxist-Leninist proletarians. Ortega joined the revolution out of a sense of
political commitment; for Pastora the revolution was an opportunity to avenge
his father, who had been a democratic opponent of the regime and had been
killed by the Somocistas. After the violent strikes that followed the rigged
presidential elections of 1967, Pastora was arrested and tortured (first bled,
then forced to drink his own blood). After his release he launched a punitive
campaign against his torturers. The two guerrillas who accompanied him were
Daniel and Humberto Ortega. Later Daniel Ortega fell into the hands of
Somoza's police, who kept him in prison until 1974. Meanwhile Pastora con-
tinued to build the guerrilla movement; he was received by Fidel Castro,
reiterated his allegiance to parliamentary democracy, and established links with
other Central American democrats such Jose Maria Fugueres in Costa Rica and
Omar Torrijos in Panama. Ortega was freed in 1974 in exchange for a Somo-
cista dignitary who had been taken hostage; he soon flew to Havana. Pastora
remained with the guerrillas.

In October 1977 an uprising was organized in several Nicaraguan cities.
Harried by the National Guard and pounded by the Somoza air force, Pastora

Communism in Latin America

667

and Ortega took refuge in the jungle. In January 1978 the revolt spread
throughout the country. Pastora assaulted the Chamber of Deputies in the
National Palace and liberated Tomas Borge and all other political prisoners.
While Ortega was dividing his time between Havana and the northern front in
Nicaragua, one of his brothers, Camilo, died during an attack on Masaya.
Supported by Cuban military advisers, the uprising continued to gain ground.
FSLN cadres who had been in hiding in Cuba returned to Nicaragua, while
Pastora and his guerrillas fought hard against the elite units of the National
Guard in southern Nicaragua.

When the Sandinistas triumphed in July 1979, Pastora became deputy
minister of internal affairs; Ortega was elected president. Ortega openly
aligned himself with Cuba, allowing military advisers and Cuban "internation-
alists" to flock to Managua. Pastora, commited to parliamentary democracy,
became increasingly isolated. In June 1981 he resigned and began to organize
armed resistance in the south of the country.

Following their victory, the Sandinistas immediately formed a Junta de Recon-
struction Nacional, which included socialists, Communists, democrats, and
moderates. The Junta proposed a fifteen-point program that envisaged a demo-
cratic regime based on universal suffrage and the freedom to establish multiple
political parties. In the meantime, executive power was to remain in the hands
of the Junta, which the Sandinistas soon controlled.

The Junta acknowledged special ties to Cuba but did not exclude the
possibility of Western participation in the reconstruction of Nicaragua; 16 the
civil war had caused about 800 million dollars' worth of damage to property
and infrastructure. However, the democrats were quickly marginalized . In April
1980 both Alfonso Robelo and Violeta Chamorro, the widow of Pedro Joaquin
Chamorro, resigned from the Junta. Among the reasons they gave for their
resignation was their disapproval of the way in which the FSLN had taken
control of the State Council.

During this early period of political crisis, the Junta, which was now firmly
under the control of the Sandinistas, established a secret police force. The
Sandinistas transformed the 6,000 guerrillas of 1979 into an army, which over
the next decade expanded to 75,000 troops. After 1980 military service became
obligatory; all men aged seventeen to thirty-five were mobilized and obliged to
report to military tribunals that had been created in December 1980. Students
could pursue their education only after undergoing military training. The
Sandinistas sought to use the army to help guerrilla groups throughout Central
America, beginning with El Salvador, In January 1981 the Salvadoran authori-
ties publicly announced that Sandinista patrols were encroaching on their
territory.

The Third World

In line with the Sandinistas' leftist views, the regime enacted a centrally
planned economy and pursued rapid nationalization; the state soon controlled
more than 50 percent of all the means of production. The whole country was
forced to accept the social model imposed by the FSLN. Following the Cuban
model, the Sandinista government covered the country with mass organiza-
tions. Each neighborhood had a Comite de Defensa Sandinista (Sandinista
Defense Committee), or CDS, with the same role as that of the Cuban CDRs:
to divide up the country and watch over its inhabitants. Children, who had
much more access to schooling than they had under the Somoza regime,
belonged to scouting and pioneer organizations known as Camilitos, after
Camilo Ortega. Women, workers, and peasants were drafted into associations
and brigades that were closely controlled by the FSLN. Political parties had no
real freedom. The press was quickly gagged, and journalists worked under
pervasive censorship. Gilles Bataillon correctly characterized these conditions
when he wrote that the Sandinistas wanted "to occupy the whole social and
political space of the country."' 7

The Sandinistas and the Indians

Roughly 150,000 Indians live on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua: the Miskito,
Sumo, and Rama tribal groups, as well as Creoles and Ladinos (those of mixed
Spanish and Mayan ethnic background). Under previous regimes these groups
had enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy and were excused from paying taxes
and from military service. Soon after coming to power, the Sandinistas began
to attack the Indian communities, which were determined to hold onto their
land and their language. Lyster Athders, the leader of the Alliance for Progress
of the Miskitos and Sumo (Alpromisu), was arrested in August 1979 and killed
two months later. Early in 1981 the national leaders of the Misurasata, a
political organization that united several tribes, were arrested. On 21 February
1981 the armed forces killed seven Miskito Indians and wounded seventeen
others. On 23 December 1981 in Leimus, the Sandinista army massacred
seventy-five miners who had demanded payment of back wages. Another
thirty-five miners suffered the same fate the next day.

The Sandinistas also carried out forcible displacements of native popula-
tions on the pretext of protecting them against "armed incursions of Somocista
guards" operating out of Honduras. In 1982 the Sandinista army forcibly
moved nearly 10,000 Indians inland. Hunger became a formidable weapon: the
Indians in the interior received a plentiful supply of food from the government,
while those who remained on the coast were allowed to suffer. During these
operations the army committed a number of atrocities. Thousands of Indians
(estimates at the time ranged from 7,000 to 15,000) took refuge in Honduras;
thousands more (perhaps as many as 14,000) were imprisoned in Nicaragua.

Communism in Latin America

The Sandinistas regularly opened fire on people attempting to flee across the
Coco River. These three factors — massacres, displacements of the population,
and exile abroad— led the anthropologist Gilles Bataillon to speak of "a politics
of ethnocide" in Nicaragua.

The Indians turned against the Managua administration and formed two
guerrilla groups, the Misura and Misurasata, which contained people from the
Sumo, Rama, and Miskito tribes. Although these tribes had very different life
styles, they were united in their opposition to the government's assimilationist
policies.

Scandalized by the repressive policies, Eden Pastora exclaimed in the
Council of Ministers that "even that tyrant Somoza left them alone! He might
have exploited them a bit, but you want to turn them into proletarians by force!"
Tomas Borge, the Maoist minister of the interior, replied that "the revolution
could tolerate no exceptions."

The government had made its decision, and the Sandinistas opted for
forced assimilation. A state of siege, declared in March 1982, lasted until 1987.
The first years of Sandinista power were thus characterized on the Atlantic
coast by abuses of power, flagrant violations of human rights, and the system-
atic destruction of Indian villages.

From north to south, the country quickly rose up against the dictatorial regime
in Managua and its totalitarian tendencies. A new civil war began, affecting
numerous zones in the regions of Jinotega, Esteli, and Nueva Segovia in the
north, Matagalpa and Boaco in the center, and Zelaya and Rio San Juan in the
south. On 9 July 1981 Pastora broke publicly with the FSLN and left Nicara-
gua. Resistance against the Sandinistas — wrongly labeled "Contra," that is,
"counterrevolutionary" by the outside world — became more organized. Oper-
ating in the north was the Fuer/a Democratica Nicaraguense (Nicaraguan
Democratic Force; FDN), which was made up of both former Somoza sup-
porters and genuine freedom fighters. In southern Nicaragua, resistance was
organized bv former Sandinistas and reinforced by peasants who rejected col-
lectivization of the land and Indians who had fled to Honduras or Costa Rica.
Together, these groups formed the Alianza Revolucionaria Democratica (ARDE),
with Alfonso Robelo as political leader and Eden Pastora as military leader.

The new civil war spread quickly. The most violent confrontations took place
in the northern and southern parts of the country between 1982 and 1987, with
atrocities committed by both sides. The Nicaraguan conflict turned into a
confrontation between East and West. Fidel Castro played the role of mentor
to the new regime. Cubans were present in all units of the Sandinista army and
advised the Council of Ministers in Managua. While Eden Pastora was still in
the government, during a visit to Havana he saw the entire Sandinista cabinet

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assembled in Castro's office to receive his advice on how to manage agriculture,
defense, internal affairs, and other branches of government. For a while the
Cuban military advisers were led by General Arnaldo Ochoa. The population
transfers of the Indian population were assisted by Bulgarian, East German,
and even Palestinian advisers.

In 1984 the government attempted to restore its credibility by presenting
a democratic facade through organized presidential elections. A May 1984
speech by Bayardo Arce, one of the nine members of the leadership council of
the FSLN, is particularly revealing of the Sandinistas 1 intentions: u We believe
that these elections should be used to vote for Sandinism, because it has been
called into question and stigmatized by imperialism. It should allow us to
demonstrate that whatever happens, the people of Nicaragua support totali-
tarianism and Marxism-Leninism ... We should now agree to do away with
pluralism and the existence of a Socialist Party, a Communist Party, a Christian
Democratic Party, and a Social Democratic Party. All of that has been useful
up to now, but it has had its day, and we should do away with it." Arce then
invited his listeners (who were members of the pro-Soviet Nicaraguan Socialist
Party) to establish a single party for all. 1 *

The conservative candidate Arturo Cruz withdrew from the campaign
because of the violence caused by the turbas, the thugs of the Sandinista party.
It thus came as no surprise when Daniel Ortega won, although this outcome
failed to curb the tension and unrest in the country. In 1984 and 1985 the
government organized several major offensives against the anti-Sandinista re-
sistance. In 1985 and 1986, troops from Managua attacked opposition forces
along the Costa Rican border. Despite continuing popular support, Eden Pas-
tora gave up the fight in 1986 and withdrew with his troops into Costa Rica.
Outmaneuvered by Sandinista commandos, the Miskito Indians offered only
sporadic resistance to the government after 1985. The Contra forces and the
anti-Sandinista resistance also suffered but continued fighting.

The government used the Contra attacks to justify the suspension of
numerous individual and political freedoms and to excuse the country's poor
economic performance. Nearly 50 percent of the budget was devoted to military
spending. The economy was further devastated by the trade embargo imposed
by the United States on 1 May 1985 with the support of most Western Euro-
pean countries. The coffee plantations, one of the main sources of export
income, were ravaged by the war. The country's external debt soared and
inflation peaked at 36,000 percent in 1989. At that point the government
introduced rationing, but acute shortages of milk and meat persisted.

The Sandinista government frequently used repressive measures to deal with
its opponents. Soon after coming to power, it established special courts to try

Communism in Latin America

671

political opponents. Decree No. 185, dated 5 December 1979, created special
tribunals to pass judgment on former members of the National Guard and
civilian Somoza supporters, in much the same way that the Castro regime had
judged Batista's supporters. Although detainees were judged according to the
penal code in place at the time the offenses were committed, the appeals
process had to go through these same extraordinary courts. This strategy
allowed the Sandinistas to establish a special legal mechanism outside the
normal justice system. Trials were marked by many procedural irregularities.
Sometimes crimes were considered to have been proved even when no concrete
evidence had been produced. Judges operated without the presumption of
innocence, and sentences often rested on notions of collective responsibility
rather than on any proof of individual guilt.

On 15 March 1982 the Junta declared a state of siege, which allowed it to
close independent radio stations, suspend the right of association, and limit the
freedom of trade unions, which had been hostile to the Sandinistas and had
resisted attempts to transform them into extensions of the central government.
There were also campaigns against religious groups, including the Moravians
and Jehovah's Witnesses. In June 1982 Amnesty International estimated that
more than 4,000 former Somoza national guardsmen were imprisoned by the
Junta, as well as several hundred prisoners of conscience. One year later, the
number of political prisoners had soared to 20,000. At the end of 1982 the
United Nations Human Rights Commission drew attention to two even more
worrying phenomena, the number of "disappeared" among people who had
been arrested as counterrevolutionaries and the number of people who had died
"while attempting to escape."

To combat the opposition groups, the Sandinistas in April 1983 estab-
lished Tribunals Populares Anti-Somocista (Popular Anti-Somoza Tribunals;
TPAs) to pass judgment on anyone who belonged to a Contra group or par-
ticipated in other military activity. Any act of rebellion or sabotage meant an
appearance before the TPA. Members of the TPA were nominated by the
government and came from organizations closely associated with the FSLN.
Lawyers, some of whom had not even completed rheir training, carried out the
legal formalities. The TPAs often accepted any extrajudicial admission of guilt
as proof, regardless of its provenance. The TPAs were finally dissolved in 1988.

Waves of arrests began in rural zones in 1984. Carlos Nueves Tellos, an
FSLN delegate, defended the prolonged periods of preventive detention, ar-
guing that they were "a necessity imposed by the difficulties inherent in having
to carry out hundreds of interrogations in the rural zones." Members of
opposition parties — liberals, Social Democrats, and Christian Democrats — and
unionists were arrested for "activities favorable to the enemy." There was no
possible means of appeal. The secret police force, which had a reputation for

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extreme violence, could detain any suspect indefinitely without bringing
charges. The police could also use whatever sort of detention they deemed
necessary and were authorized to keep prisoners from making contact with their
lawyers or families. Some detainees never managed to contact their lawyers
at all.

The Sandinistas quickly created an effective mechanism of repression.
The country was put under the control of 15,000 special troops from the
Ministry of Internal Affairs. One service in particular, the Direccion General
de Seguridad del Estado (DGSE), was responsible for surveillance and special
operations. Trained by Cuban agents from the G-2, the DGSE answered
directly to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The DGSE was in charge of the
arrest and interrogation of political prisoners and practiced what is known as
u clean torture,' 1 adopted from Cuban and East German experts. Most interro-
gations took place in the El Chipote detention center in the German-Pomares
military complex on the slopes of the Loma de Tiscapa volcano, just behind
the Managua Intercontinental Hotel. Two members of the Christian Socialist
Party, Jose Rodriguez and Juana Blandon, confirm that when they were inter-
rogated there, they were deprived of sleep and their families were threatened.
The security forces also used much more degrading methods. Detainees were
kept in dark cubicles with a surface area of less than one square meter, known
as chiquitas (little ones). It was impossible to sit in them; they were totally dark
and had little ventilation and no sanitation. Prisoners were sometimes kept
there for more than a week. Interrogations were carried out at any time of day
or night, sometimes at gunpoint and amid death threats and simulated execu-
tions. Some prisoners were deprived of food and water. After being detained
for a few days, physically exhausted, many of them agreed to sign self-incrimi-
nating false confessions. In distant rural regions, units from the regular army
often arrested and detained suspect civilians for several days in military camps
before handing them over to the DGSE.

Some of the DGSE prisons were notorious for their harsh conditions. At
Las Tejas, for example, prisoners were forced to stand without bending their
arms or legs. All prisons were constructed on the same model: the minuscule
cells had beds set into the concrete walls. There was no electicity or sanitation.
Nor were there windows; the only illumination came from a tiny ray of light
that slipped through the ventilation grill situated above the steel door. In times
of crisis, prisoners were kept in such cells for several months. After a campaign
by human-rights organizations, the chiquitas were abolished in 1989.

According to Amnesty International, only a few people actually died in
the DGSE centers. Danilo Rosalcs and Salomon Tellevia officially died of
"heart attacks." In 1985 Jose Angel Vilchis Tijerino, who himself had been
beaten with a rifle butt, saw one of his companions die from the ill treatment

Communism in Latin America

673

he received. Amnesty International and other nongovernmental organizations
denounced similar abuses in rural zones. One detainee from the Rio Blanco
prison in Matagalpa stated that he was locked up with twenty other prisoners
in a cell so small that they all had to sleep standing up. Another was deprived
of food and water for five days and had to drink his own urine to survive. The
use of electric batons was common.

The penitentiary system was closely modeled on that of Cuba. The clem-
ency law of 2 November 1981, based on Cuban texts, allowed the prisoner's
attitude and behavior to be taken into account in decisions on eventual libera-
tion. The limitations of the law quickly became apparent. Although hundreds
of prisoners sentenced by the exceptional courts were pardoned, no systematic
revision of those sentences was ever undertaken.

People were arrested for "Somocista crimes," a notion that signified noth-
ing concrete. In 1989 only 39 of the 1,640 people arrested for "counterrevolu-
tionary crimes" had actually been members of Somoxa's entourage. Members
of Somoza's guards never accounted for more than 20 percent of the Contras,
yet the threat of rebellion by Somoza's supporters was the key argument used
by the Sandinistas to lock up their opponents. More than 6(H) were imprisoned
for this reason in the Carcel Modelo. The early years of the Sandinista regime
were characterized above all by the falsification of evidence and by the invention
of spurious charges against opponents.

By 1987 there were more than 3,700 political prisoners in Nicaraguan
prisons. On 19 August 1987 in El Chipote, about a dozen detainees were beaten
by their guards. Prisoners also reported the use of electric batons by their
guards. In February 1989, as a protest against the harshness of the conditions
they faced, 90 prisoners in the Carcel Modelo, twenty kilometers outside Ma-
nagua, began a hunger strike. Thirty of the strikers were transferred to El
Chipote, where as punishment they were all kept naked in one cell for two days.
In other prisons as well, detainees were kept naked, handcuffed, and deprived
of water.

In 1989 there were 630 prisoners in the Carcel Modelo. Thirty-eight
former Somoza guardsmen were also serving their sentences there, in a separate
block. Political prisoners were kept in the regional prisons in Esteli, La Granja,
and Granada. For ideological reasons, a number of prisoners, particularly in
the Carcel Modelo, refused to do the work they were assigned; they suffered
violent reprisals. Amnesty International also reported ill treatment of prisoners
after protests and hunger strikes.

Some prisoners were eligible for a program of reeducation through work.
There were five categories of imprisonment. Those declared unfit for the work
program for reasons of security were kept in a high security compound. They
saw their families only every forty-five days and could leave their cells for only

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six hours a week. Prisoners who were integrated into the readaptation programs
were allowed to carry out paid work. They were permitted one conjugal visit
per month and a visit by another close relative every two weeks. People who
satisfied the demands of the work program had the right to request transfer to
a work farm, where a "semi-open" regime was in operation, and they could
eventually pass to an open regime.

The offensives and counteroffensives of the two sides in the civil war make
the calculation of losses difficult, but there is no doubt that hundreds of
opponents were executed in the rural zones, where the fighting was particularly
violent. The massacres appear to have been carried out by army combat units
and by special troops from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which were ac-
countable to Tomas Borge, the minister. These troops were the Nicaraguan
equivalent of the Cuban Minit special forces.

Executions of villagers were reported in the Zelaya region, although no
precise figures on casualties are available. Bodies were often mutilated and men
emasculated. The massacred peasants were suspected of having either assisted
or belonged to the Contra movement. The suspects' houses were destroyed,
and survivors were forcibly deported. These actions were carried out by troops
from the regular army. The intention of the government was to impose its
policies by terror and through this terror to deprive the enemy of its bases.
Unable to catch the resistance fighters, the army took revenge on their relatives.
In February 1989 Amnesty International reported dozens of extrajudicial exe-
cutions, particularly in the provinces of Matagalpa and Jinotega. The mutilated
bodies of the victims were found by their families near their homes. Through-
out the war there were numerous reports of "disappearances" carried out by
groups from the DGSE. Furthermore, the minister of internal affairs rarely
hesitated to shoot political prisoners in Managua. The total human cost of the
war was between 45,000 and 50,000 people, most of them civilians. At least
400,000 Nicaraguans fled to Costa Rica, Honduras, or the United States, par-
ticularly to Miami and California.

The treaties signed in Esquipulas, Guatemala, in August 1987 relaunched
the peace process, and in September 1987 the opposition daily La prensa was
authorized to reappear. On 7 October a unilateral cease-fire was signed for the
provinces of Segovia, Jinotega, and Zelaya. More than 2,000 political prisoners
were freed, although another 1,200 remained in prison as of February 1990. In
March 1988 direct negotiations began between the government and the oppo-
sition in Sapoa, Costa Rica. In June 1989, eight months before the presidential
elections, most of the 12,000 anti-Sandinista guerrillas returned to their bases
in Honduras.

Unable to impose their ideology by force, under attack by both internal

Communism in Latin America

675

and foreign forces, bereft of support from their erstwhile Eastern-bloc patrons,
and weakened by internal quarrels, the Sandinistas took the country to the polls
again. On 25 February 1990 the democrat Violeta Chamorro was elected presi-
dent, winning 54,7 percent of the vote. For the first time in 160 years of
independence, a peaceful transfer of political power took place in the country.
The desire for peace seems to have triumphed over the permanent state of war.
For whatever reason — perhaps they finally understood the need for democracy
or perhaps they simply bowed to the inevitable as their support ebbed away —
the Sandinistas did not resort to the extremes of terror used by Communists
elsewhere in attempts to cling to power. But in their attempt to impose their
point of view and apply their policies without regard to the political realities
facing the country, they led a genuine revolution astray, provoked a second civil
war that delayed the coming of democracy to Nicaragua, and caused the loss
of many lives.

Peru: The Long Bloody March of the Sendero Luminoso

On 17 May 1980, the day of presidential elections, Peru witnessed the first
armed action by a Maoist guerrilla group calling itself the Sendero Luminoso
(Shining Path). To announce the start of a "people's war," young militants
seized and set fire to voting booths in Chuschi. Nobody took much notice. A
few weeks later, the inhabitants of the capital, Lima, found dogs hanging from
lampposts with signs around their necks bearing the name Deng Xiaoping. The
"revisionist" Chinese leader was accused of betraying the Cultural Revolution.
Who had resorted to such macabre practices?

The late 1970s were a particularly turbulent time for Peru. Six general
strikes took place in 1977-1979, all preceded by large demonstrations in the
main provincial towns of Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cuzeo, Huancayo, and Pucallpa.
They were accompanied by the emergence of massive "defense fronts" struc-
tured around the demands of the protestors. These fronts became the backbone
of the Sendero Luminoso. In Ayacucho the defense front had already been in
existence for some time. In Quechua, Ayacucho means "the dead area," and in
truth it was long one of the most deprived areas in the country. Here less than
5 percent of the land could be cultivated, the average annual per-capita income
was less than 100 U.S. dollars, and life expectancy was only about forty-five
years. Infant mortality was approximately 20 percent, whereas the national
average was 11 percent. It was in this region, plagued by social problems, that
the Sendero Luminoso first came into being.

Ayacucho has also had an active university center since 1959, which spe-
cialized in pediatrics, applied anthropology, and rural engineering. A revolu-

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The Third World

tionary student front developed there and played an important role at the
university. Initially, orthodox Communists, supporters of Che Guevara, and
Maoists all vied for control, but beginning in the early 1960s a young Maoist
and philosophy teacher named Abimael Guzman assumed a dominant role,

Born in Lima on 6 December 1934, Guzman started out a taciturn young
man and a brilliant student. In 1958 he had joined the Communist Party, where
he soon gained notice through his rhetorical talent, developed after his student
days. In 1965 he helped found the Communist group Bandera Roja (Red Flag),
which was a product of a schism inside the Peruvian Communist Party follow-
ing the Sino-Soviet split. According to some accounts, Guzman visited China. 19
In 1966 the government closed the university in the wake of insurrectionist
riots. At this time the Maoists of the Bandera Roja, led by Guzman, set up the
Front for Defense of the Population of Ayacucho, beginning their armed
struggle the following year. In June 1969 Guzman took part in the kidnapping
of the assistant prefect Octavio Cabrera Rocha in Huerta, in the north of
Ayacucho Province. He was imprisoned in 1970 for attacking state security, but
was freed a few months later. At the Fourth Conference of the Bandera Roja,
in 1971, another schism resulted in the formation of a new Communist group
calling itself the Sendero Luminoso. The name is taken from Jose Carlos
Mariategui's claim that "Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path toward
the revolution." 20 The hero of the militants, Guzman is known as the "fourth
sword of Marxism" (after Marx, Lenin, and Mao). The novelist Mario Vargas
Llosa analyzed Guzman's revolutionary project as follows: "In his eyes, the
Peru that Mariategui described in the 1920s is essentially identical with the
reality of China as described by Mao at that time — 4 a semifeudal, scmicolonial
society' that can be liberated by following a strategy identical with that of the
Chinese revolution: a prolonged people's war waged on the towns and based in
the countryside . . . The socialist model he claims to follow is that of the Russia
of Stalin, the Cultural Revolution of the Gang of Four, and the Pol Pot regime
of Cambodia." 21

From 1972 to 1979 the Sendero seemed to content itself with taking
control of student organizations. It received the support of students in the
Technical University of San Martin de Torres in Lima and also infiltrated the
union of primary school teachers. Many of Sendero's rural guerrilla networks
were headed by teachers. In late 1977 Guzman went into hiding and began
preparing the organization to embark on armed struggle, a course that was
formally ratified by party members on 17 March 1980. Sendero troops were
reinforced by Trotskyites led by Carlos Mezzich and by Maoist dissidents from
the Pukallacta group. The hour of the armed struggle had come, and the
Chuschi operation, followed on 23 December 1980 bv the assassination of a

Communism in Latin America

677

landowner called Benigno Medina, was the first case of "popular justice."
Although the Sendero in these early days had no more than 200 to 300 men at
its disposal, it quickly began methodically eliminating the middle and upper
classes and members of the country's security forces.

In 1981 the police stations in Totos, San Jose de Secce, and Quinca were
attacked. In August 1982 the Senderistas stormed the police headquarters in
Viecahuaman, killing six antiguerrilla policemen (sinchis, the Quechua word for
"brave" or "courageous"); fifteen others either took flight or were taken pris-
oner. Because the guerrillas had no outside assistance, they took arms from
police stocks and explosives from the mines, not hesitating to attack the miners
if they put up any resistance. The stick of dynamite thrown as a maraka, a
traditional act of resistance, quickly became the Sendero's favorite weapon. In
addition to these attacks, the guerrillas carried out a multitude of assaults on
public buildings, power lines, and bridges. 22 With a firm foothold in Ayacucho,
the commandos invaded the city in March 1982, freeing 297 political prisoners
and common criminals. The careful planning of the attack, the infiltration of
the town, and the simultaneous actions against several different police targets
all revealed a long and careful apprenticeship in subversion.

To establish a countrywide network of "people's communes," the Sendero
Luminoso set about destroying all government installations and infrastructure.
In August 1982 a Sendero commando group destroyed the Center for Agricul-
tural Research and Experimentation in Allpahaca, slaughtering animals and
setting fire to machinery. A year later, the Institute for Technical Research on
Camelidae (llamas, guanacos, and alpacas) went up in smoke. Engineers and
technicians, who were considered to be vectors of capitalist corruption, were
also massacred. Tino Alansaya, the head of the project, was murdered and his
body dynamited. In justifying this act, the Senderistas claimed that he was "an
agent of the feudal and bureaucratic state." Over the next eight years, sixty
engineers were killed in rural areas. Nongovernmental operatives were not
spared either: in 1988 an American citizen working for the U.S. Agency for
International Development, Constantin Gregory, was killed by the Sendero;
two French aid workers were killed on 4 December of the same year.

Guzman had predicted that "the triumph of the revolution will cost a
million lives" — at a time when the population of Peru was only 19 million.
Following that principle, the Sendero Luminoso set about eliminating all sym-
bols of the hated political and social order. In January 1982 they executed two
teachers in front of their students. A few months later, sixty-seven "traitors"
were killed in public, ostensibly on the basis of a "people's verdict." In the early
days, the peasants had not been too concerned by the murder of a few land-
owners and state officials, in part because taxes were high and borrowing rates

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extortionate. But the targeting of traders and members of the middle class
deprived peasants of some key benefits, including loans at affordable rates,
work, and aid of various kinds. As part of a "revolutionary purity" campaign
and an effort to consolidate the Sendero's hold, the guerrillas also attacked the
groups of abigeos (cattle thieves) who lived on the high plains. This campaign
against delinquency was purely tactical, since from 1983 onward the Sendero
collaborated with the drug smugglers in Huanuco.

In regions plagued by ethnic conflicts, the Senderistas did all they could
to stir up hatred of the central government in Lima, which, in the words of
"President Gonzalo" (Abimael Guzman's nom de guerre), was an outdated
colonial relic. Sendero claimed to defend the Indians in the same manner that
Pol Pot had sought to reclaim the Khmer purity of the Angkor dynasty period.
As a result, the guerrillas initially received the backing of a number of Indian
tribes. Before long, however, almost all the Indian and peasant leaders grew
disaffected with the Sendero's graphic violence and coercive tactics. In 1989 in
Upper Amazonia, the Ashaninkas were forced to enlist in the Sendero or face
reprisals. Nearly 25,000 of them lived in the jungle before being placed under
the protection of the army.

By the late 1980s the Ayacucho region was entirely under the control of
the Sendero Luminoso, which attempted to set up a new social order in the
province. Prostitutes had their heads shaved, unfaithful and drunken husbands
were whipped, and anyone who showed any sign of resistance had a hammer
and sickle shaved into his hair. Any celebration judged to be "unhealthy" was
banned. Communities were controlled by "people's committees,' 1 each run by-
five "political commissars," in a pyramidal structure that echoed the political
and military organization of the Sendero itself. Committees were organized
into small cells that reported to the main "column" for the area, which typically-
had seven to eleven members. Attached to the political commissars were assis-
tants whose task was to promote rural organization and production and who
were in charge of collective work in the "liberated zones." Insubordination or
a refusal to cooperate was immediately punished by death. Because the Sendero
wanted the rural village zones to be autarkic and isolated, the guerrillas began
blowing up bridges, a policy that sparked strong opposition from the peasants.
The Sendero frequently enlisted children by force to maintain its control of
the population.

The government's initial response to the terrorism was to send in special
commando groups (sinchis) and marines, but this effort met with little success.
In 1983 and 1984, the "people's war" was intensified. In April 1983, fifty
Sendero guerrillas took control in Luconamanca, using axes and knives to
massacre thirty-two "traitors" and a number of other people who were caught

Communism in Latin America

679

fleeing. Sixty-seven people died, including four children. This massacre was
intended to show the authorities that the Sendero was without mercy. In 1984
and 1985 the group expanded its offensive to members of the government, a
policy that had begun in November 1983 with the assassination of the mayor
in the mining center Cerro de Pesco. Sensing that the authorities had aban-
doned them, several mayors and deputy mayors resigned; priests also fled.

In 1982 the war cost 200 lives. Ten times that number died the following
year. In 1984 alone the terrorists carried out more than 2,600 actions, and more
than 400 soldiers and policemen died in these operations. The army launched
reprisals. When militants mutinied in three prisons in Lima in June 1986,
government repressions were ferocious, resulting in more than 200 deaths. The
Senderistas failed to gain any significant footholds in the well-structured min-
ing unions and in the barrios, where a strong social support network already
existed. To maintain credibility, they concentrated their efforts on the majority
party in power, the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American
Revolutionary Popular Alliance; APRA). 21 In 1985 seven Aprists were killed
and mutilated in the manner reserved for police informers, with their ears,
tongues, and eyes cut out. The Sendero also opened a new front in Puno that
year. Several zones in La Libertad and the provinces of Huanuco, La Mar, and
Upper Amazonia were also affected by guerrilla action. Plastic explosive attacks
were carried out on the electricity generating centers in Cuzco and Arequipa.
In June 1984 the guerrillas derailed a train carrying concentrated lead, and
shortly afterward they did the same to a train carrying copper.

The army responded with ever-greater repression. In 1984 a state of
emergency was declared in 10 of Peru's 146 provinces. The army announced
that mass killings were justified if three people out of every sixty killed turned
out to be guerrillas; there were widespread massacres of peasants in Ayacucho.
Not surprisingly, undecided peasants began to look more favorably upon the
Sendero Luminoso. But in the early 1990s the government changed its strategy,
declaring that it would consider the peasants partners instead of enemies. The
military hierarchy was reorganized, and better methods of recruitment resulted
in closer collaboration with the peasants. The Sendero also began to change its
tactics, splitting into separate units at its third conference. Autonomous units
were put in charge of guerrilla warfare, sabotage, terrorism, and psychological
warfare.

To punish anyone who betrayed the "forces of the people," the Sendero
set up labor camps in Amazonia. Since 1983, enslaved peasants had been trying
to leave the zones controlled by the guerrillas, who had forced them to work
the land and the coca fields to meet the Sendero's own needs. Many children
born on the high plains died there^ and anyone who was caught attempting to

680

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escape was executed immediately. Trapped in the camps and forced to attend
study sessions where they read the works of President Gonzalo, the prisoners
suffered greatly from hunger and deprivation. This was the case for the 500
detainees in the camp in the Convencion region. In December 1987, 300
starving men, women, and children managed to escape from the ''Peruvian
gulag" and arrived in Belem, on the edge of the jungle.

Revolted by the cruelty of the Sendero, which had proved itself incapable
of improving the lot of the lower classes, the vast majority of peasants gradually-
abandoned the Guzman revolution. The Sendero also found itself in competi-
tion with other political groups. The United Left, strongly supported by the
unions, had successfully resisted infiltration by the Sendero, which had shown
itself to be more at home carrying out bloody repressions than organizing
community projects. In 1988 and 1989 the Sendero targeted Lima and Cuzco,
especially the surrounding shantytowns, which were hotbeds of revolutionary
culture. The Sendero began to set up cells there, and resistance was quickly
eliminated. Militants also infiltrated several charities, including Peruvian Popu-
lar Aid. The Senderistas systematically attempted to eliminate all the classic
Marxist organizations and to take control of the unions, but this latter effort
again met with failure. The Sendero also clashed with the Movimiento Revolu-
cionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA) terrorist group, resulting in significant casu-
alties on both sides and among civilians. In 1990, for example, 1,584 civilians
and 1,542 rebels died. Outmaneuvred by the MRTA and harried by the army,
the Sendero began to decline. The process had been hastened by brief internal
dissidence in the late 1980s, followed by executions of some key figures as
"traitors following the bourgeois line. 1 '

In September 1983 the Peruvian police achieved their first major victory
against the rebels by arresting Carlos Mezzich, one of Guzman's closest asso-
ciates. Nearly a decade passed, however, before the government made further
progress in eliminating the leadership of the Shining Path. On 12 and 13
September 1992, Guzman and his companion Elena Iparraguire were arrested.
A few weeks later the organization's third in command, Oscar Albert Ramirez,
fell into the hands of the police. On 2 March 1993 the Sendero's military leader,
Margot Dominguez (code name Edith), was also arrested. Finally, in March
1995 a group of thirty guerrillas with Margie Clavo Peralta at its head was
uncovered by the security forces. Despite this progress in eliminating the
group's leadership, a downturn in Peru's economy led to an increase in popular
support: in the middle and late 1990s the Sendero Luminoso still had about
25,000 members, including between 3,000 and 5,000 regulars.

The cost of the conflict in Peru has been estimated at 20 billion dollars.
According to some sources, the Shining Path has been responsible for between
25,000 and 30,000 deaths. Children in the countryside have paid a particularly

Communism in Latin America

681

heavy toll in the Sendero's violent campaign; between 1980 and 1991 more than
1,000 died in terrorist actions, and another 3,000 were seriously wounded. The
breakup of families in war zones has also left some 50,000 children abandoned
or orphaned.

Select Bibliography

General

Lowy, Michael, ed. Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present; An Anthology,

trans. Michael Pearlman. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992.
Mcrcier-Vega, Louis. Guerrillas in Latin America: The Technique of Counter-State,
trans. Daniel Weissbort. New York: Praeger, 1969.

- La revolution par I eta I: Une nouvelle classe dingeante en Amerique latine. Paris:
Payor, 1978.

— Roads to Power in Latin America, trans. Roberr Rowland. New York: Praeger,
1969.
Publications of La Documentation Francaise, Amerique Latine series.

Cuba

Clark, Juan. Cuba, mito y realidad: Testimonios de un pueblo, Miami: Saeta Edieiones,

1992.
Franqui, Carlos. Diary of the Cuban Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1980.
Valladares, Armando. Against All Hope: The Prison Memoirs. New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1986.
Vails, Jorge. Mori ennemi, man frere. Paris: GaJlimard, L'Arpenteur, 1989.
Verdes-Leroux, Jeannine. La lune et le caudiilo: Le reve des inlellectuels et le regime cub am

(195 ( ^ 1971). Paris: Gallimard, L'Arpenteur, 1989.

Nicaragua

Bataillon, Gilles. "Communistes et sociodemoerates dans la revolution." Communism?,
no. 13, 1987.

"Nicaragua; De la tyrannic a la dictature totalitaire." Esprit, October 1983,

special issue: "Ameriques latines a la une."

"Nicaragua: Des elections a I'etat d'urgence." Esprit, January 1986.

"Le Nicaragua et les indiens de la cote atlantique. 11 Esprit, July 1983.

"Le Nicaragua et les indiens Miskiro." Esprit, July-August 1982.

"[.'opposition nicaraguayenne a la recherche d'une strategic' 1 Esprit, June

1987.

— "Paysage apres la bataille (Nicaragua).' 1 Esprit, January 1986.

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Berreby, Genevieve, and Elie-Georges Berreby. Commandant Zero. Paris: Robert Laf-

font, 1987.
Caroit, J. M., and V. Soule. Le Nicaragua, le modele sandimste. Paris: Le Sycomore,

1981.
Dumont, Rene. Finis les lendematns qui chantent. Paris: Seuil, 1982.
Nicaragua: Colonialism? et revolution. Paris: Inti, 1982.

Peru

Hertoghe, Alain, and Alain Labrousse. Le sentier lumineux: Un nouvel integnsme dans le
Tiers-Monde. Paris: La Decouverte, 1989,

Afrocommunism: Ethiopia, Angola, and
Mozambique

Yves Santamaria

Even before the Cold War was fully under way, France sought to
establish a linkage between the international Communist movement and anti-
colonial struggles. Under pressure from the United States to relinquish over-
seas colonies, the French Fourth Republic tried to make Washington believe
that any surrender to nationalist movements in the colonies was automatically
an invitation for Moscow to take over. Time and again, Lenin's old adage was
trotted out in support of this view: from the East, he had said, the road to Paris
passed through Algeria. This strange mixture of the exotic and the familiar, of
Africa and Communism, did not really coalesce until a vacuum emerged after
the American defeat in Vietnam, when pro-Soviet regimes took hold in what
had been the Portuguese part of Africa and in Ethiopia. For the first time it
seemed that these countries were not merely pawns in a geopolitical game.
Although the constant threat of socialist control over sectors judged vital by
the West still existed, what seemed even more worrying was Communism's
apparent success in offering the Third World an illusory remedy for under-
development. On top of all the suffering that these countries had already
experienced, their leaders seemed to believe that the force of history was to
make them the final inheritors of the glorious October Revolution.

683

684

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Communism African Style

In 1989, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tutsis of the Rwandan
Patriotic Front found themselves labeled the "black Khmers" for their sus-
pected sympathies with Pol Pot. At the same time, their US. -educated leader,
Paul Kagame, was labeled "American" by the French, who have always been
wary of possible Anglo-Saxon interventions in Francophone Africa. 1 Politics in
the Great Lakes region are extremely complex, and the region is a good indica-
tor of the difficulties faced by observers of the African political scene. The
West has always projected its political fantasies onto the "Dark Continent. "
Therefore, one might think it would be difficult to talk about "African Com-
munism" without falling into ethnocentricity. But in reality, debates about the
authenticity of African states' role in the Communist universe take exactly the
same form as debates about other forms of Communism throughout the world.
Even the president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, readily admitted, as
Communism began to crumble in Eastern Europe, that "the history of Marx-
ism was beginning to pose serious problems for us." 2 General Charles de
Gaulle always perceived the US.S.R. as first and foremost a Russian state, so
why should the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) not
be viewed as the Marxist-Leninist expression of the country's Creole, Indian,
and Mbundu ethnic patchwork? People have often denied Mengistu Haile
Mariam the label "Communist" in the same way it was denied to Stalin himself
by the extreme Marxist left and by the Trotskyites in particular.

Nevertheless these African movements made serious reference to Marx,
Bolshevism, and the US.S.R. throughout the period 1974-1991, and these
references were taken seriously by the protagonists and their supporters in the
Soviet Union and the Communist International. Actual membership in Com-
munist Party organizations was certainly limited to a minority: Soviet estimates
of the number of Communist Party members in the whole of Africa were only
around 5,000 in 1939, increasing to 60,000 by the early 1970s. 3 But numerous
examples of Communist states, especially in Europe, demonstrate that in Len-
inist logic, societal power relations and the vanguard party's ideological adher-
ence to Marxism are much more important than the impregnation of society
with a Communist ethos. As soon as the new leaders were in power, they
symbolically divided up the landscape, carefully making a significant break with
the "African socialism" of the first independence movements in the 1950s and
1960s. The lessons to be learned from the first wave of failures were quite clear.
If the policy of communal agriculture (ujatnaa) carried out in Tanzania by
Julius Nyerere had not brought the desired results, this was because, as noted
by Frelimo — the Mozambique National Liberation Front — and by Ethiopian
experts, the Tanganyika African National Union/Afro Shirazi Partv had not

Afrocommunism

685

been sufficiently Marxist-Leninist. The adoption of a "scientific socialist"
framework enabled the new elites to avoid the dangers of tribalism, which they
considered to be the major risk facing their countries and which would naturally
have resulted from traditional bonds of solidarity among the peasants. It was
accepted in advance that the role of the state was to build the nation, just as it
had been in Europe in earlier times. The new Marxist leaders hoped that as a
result of this state-building process they would be accepted into the interna-
tional community. No one who landed at the airport in Maputo, the capital of
Mozambique, could ignore the placard announcing that he was entering one of
"the free zones of humanity." 4

Rather than an invitation to ignore human rights, the slogan illuminating
the airport facade was an illustration of two different aspects of the Communist
project: anti-imperialism, in opposition to racist South Africa; and enrollment
in the Communist world order, alongside the other socialist states. Like
Mozambique, Angola and Ethiopia joined the ranks of countries with a "so-
cialist orientation." Soviet analysts had refined their terminology since the days
of Khrushchev, and the emergence of new progressive states required the
invention of a new vocabulary to describe countries that had broken with
capitalism but that (unlike Cuba or Vietnam) could not really be labeled "so-
cialist." 5 The socialist label was a guarantee of economic aid from the Soviet
Union, but this was not always forthcoming in the case of African states. Most
of those with a socialist orientation had to rely on their own resources and on
financial aid from the West for their development. On the other hand, the
military aspect of cooperation was part of the long tradition of "Red imperi-
alism" that had existed since the earliest days of the Communist International,
establishing an absolute duty to aid the international proletariat. 6 Although
Soviet weaponry was supplied to many parts of Africa, the three states dis-
cussed here were the main recipients of Soviet military aid. These states
benefited from a whole galaxy of resources provided by the worldwide Com-
munist network. In addition to the 8,850 Soviet advisers to be found all across
the African continent, there were 53,900 Cubans and a large contingent of East
German specialists in many African countries in the middle and late 1980s. The
East Germans and Cubans specialized in assisting the local security services. 7

It is certainly possible to find, in the adoption of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric
by the MPLA in Angola, by the Frelimo in Mozambique, and by the Dergue/
Ethiopian Workers' Party in Ethiopia, the process known to historians of
antiquity as "interpretation," through which, for example, the pagan gods of
Gaul long survived in Roman form. This "instrumentalization" was not a
one-way process, as is evident from the way the imperial Ethiopian bureaucracy
used the real centralizing potential of the Communist model to consolidate its
own control. Nonetheless, however powerful that explanatory model might be,

686

The Third World

several common and distinct features of African Communist policy can be
identified. Taken individually, many of them, including the rejection of plural-
ism and the idea that only the party in power represents the real vanguard, can
also be found in other African states. But Moscow gave the label of a "vanguard
party relying on revolutionary theory" only to the MPLA Workers' Party in
Angola, the Frelimo in Mozambique, the Congo Workers' Party, and, after its
founding in 1984, the Ethiopian Workers' Party. Another feature found else-
where in Africa was the Mafia-like "politics of hunger," an arrangement that
arose because the absence of a middle class meant that individuals could get
rich only through the state. 8 State control of all appointments was, of course,
a practice not unique to Africa. Still, the chief underlying aim of these three
regimes, identical in form and rhetorical presentation, can be defined very
simply: to create a "new man," authorizing the Ministry of Truth to decide
what should be retained or eradicated from ancestral folklore.

One might still wonder why, in the ideological bazaar of the twentieth
century, these African states decided to follow Marxism-Leninism rather than
some other theory. 9 One element of the debate here might be the fascination
exerted by the vertiginous use of violence by previous proponents of the
doctrine. Just as it is becoming apparent to researchers in the West that there
is a link between totalitarianism and the "war culture" that prevailed in Europe
from 1914 to 1945, it might well be that the Communist era in the history of
Africa is related to the continent's long history of violence. However, the study
of this matter is only just beginning to emerge from its focus on three
Manichean oppositions: precolonial harmony versus barbarism, colonial order
versus oppression, and the chaos that followed independence versus the ex-
cesses of neocolonialism. 10 Communist Africa was by no means the only center
of violence on the continent: both the Biafran civil war in Nigeria and the Hutu
genocide in Rwanda gave the people in those countries ample reason to despair.
But quarrels about numbers aside, the violent actions in Ethiopia, Angola, and
Mozambique still have a unique criminal specificity, if only in the state's
attempts to remodel the fabric of society through enforced "villagization" of
the traditional countryside and in the use of hunger as an instrument of
government policy. Such tactics are familiar to historians of Communism who
have no special knowledge of Africa. Equally familiar are the Party purges and
the liquidation of all rivals, whether leftist groups or nationalist, partisan,
religious, or ethnic opposition forces.

Although mass murder is more difficult to conceal than it was in the past,
several large-scale atrocities have been carried out in Africa. For commentators
not burdened with the need to observe events with impartiality, these initiatives
by Marxist-Leninist states appear to be merely a measured reply to counter-
revolutionary forces. This quarrel over the legitimacy of state-sponsored vio-

Afrocommunism

687

lence first appeared during the Terror of the French Revolution, and was
revived by the Bolshevik Revolution. Other commentators, attempting impar-
tiality, often invoke the "tyranny of circumstances." In that respect the polemic
in the West about these three countries — which includes no comparison with
other African countries with socialist tendencies — justifies their being singled
out for special attention here. 11 In Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Angola, aside
from the traditional twin evils of the legacy of the past and imperialist inter-
ventionism, Communist officials have often emphasized that there are other
natural forces at work, particularly the endless danger of drought. But besides
variations in rainfall and ethnic factors, there has always been the temptation
simply to blame some sort of African soul. Such societies are of course as much
a product of their time as they are of their heritage, and it is for that reason
that totalitarian bloodletting was perhaps inevitable.

The Red Empire: Ethiopia

The Revolution and the Rise of Mengistu Haile Mariam

When the empire ruled by Haile Selassie I, then aged eighty-two, suddenly
crumbled on 12 September 1974, the reasons seemed quite obvious. Made
fragile by the uncertainty surrounding his successor, the worldwide oil crisis of
the previous year, border wars, food shortages, and the discontent of a middle
class that was growing fast as a result of social modernization, the regime
disappeared without putting up much resistance. The army, which had been
created to achieve the geopolitical ambitions of the exiled sovereign during
Italy's colonization of the country in 1936-1941, and which had distinguished
itself fighting alongside the Americans in Korea in 1950, decided to take over.
The new government, called the Provisional Military Administrative Commit-
tee or Dergue, was made up of 108 officers. Initially, ideological disagreements
within the Dergue seemed inconsequential as the entire group rallied around
the slogan "Ethiopia iikdem"— "Ethiopia first " But this honeymoon was short-
lived, and General Aman Andom, of Eritrean origin and a hero of the war
against Somalia who had been made the head of state, came into conflict with
the Dergue and was killed trying to resist arrest during the night of 22-23
November 1974. A few hours later, 59 others were also executed. As is so often
the case, liberal politicians met the same fate as traditionalists with links to the
previous regime. The fate of the Dergue was henceforth linked to that of
Mengistu Haile Mariam, who had been elected its first deputy chairman in July
and who on 21 December 1974 made the public announcement that the coun-
try would henceforth be a socialist regime.

The definitive biography of Mengistu has yet to be written. 12 He enjoyed

The Third World

playing the role of a pariah, making the most of his dark skin and his short
stature (although he often wore platform soles to disguise this) to pose as a
hariah, or slave, opposed to the Amhara ethnic group, which had been at the
heart of the imperial regime. Despite this underdog role, Mengistu had links
to the circles of privilege through his mother, who was a genuine aristocrat. He
was born out of wedlock (his father was an illiterate corporal), and he benefited
from the protection of an uncle who, as a minister in the Selassie regime, set
him on the fast track in his military career. Mengistu's education was very
limited, and it was with no qualifications at all that he entered the military
school in Holetta, which was reserved for people from disadvantaged back-
grounds. As the commander of a mechanized brigade, his leadership qualities
twice earned him a place in a training program at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
He had no ideological baggage, but he did have a strong appetite for power.
After the revolution, it took him three years to displace his rivals. The first step
was the elimination of Major Jamor Sisay Habte, for right-wing tendencies in
July 1976. After growing conflict between Mengistu and the more moderate
faction led by General Teferi Bante, Mengistu ordered members of his security
force to open fire with machine guns at a Dergue meeting on 3 February 1977,
killing Bante and seven of his supporters. He then set out to eliminate his
civilian political rivals.

The "Ethiopian way" proposed in December 1974 by the provisional
committee took shape in January 1975, when the Dergue nationalized banks
and insurance companies together with most of the manufacturing sec-
tor. Above all, the abolition of land ownership in March 1975 and the intro-
duction of a one-per-family limit on property ownership demonstrated the
radical nature of the regime. To expedite land reform in rural areas, the gov-
ernment dispatched over 50,000 high school and university students to set
up peasant associations and assist in rural reform in what became known as
the zemacha (cooperation) campaign. Because of the Dergue's opposition to
student efforts to create Maoist peasant communes, most students quickly be-
came hostile to the military government and sought to mobilize the peasants
against it.

When the students returned, they formed two rival Marxist-Leninist
organizations called the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and
the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement, or Meison. The population in general
was unimpressed, and the rivalry between the two movements was largely a
result of their ethnic makeup: the EPRP consisted predominantly of Amhara,
whereas the Meison, was largely Oromo. Although they were extremely close
in ideology and on most policy questions, the Meison initially was allied with
the Dergue while the EPRP opposed the military government from the start.
The two organizations also differed on the question of Eritrea, with the EPRP

Afrocommunism

accepting secession, whereas the Meison wanted to crush the secessionist
movement. Playing up the armed confrontations between the two organiza-
tions, and decrying the "white terror" (the terror committed by the EPRP),
Mengistu successively destroyed both movements. He first launched a cam-
paign of u red terror" against the EPRP and its sympathizers in the autumn of
1976. The terror reached its peak in the spring of 1977, after Mengistu, in a
public speech on 17 April, called on the people to attack the "enemies of the
revolution." Backing up his words with dramatic actions, he broke open three
flasks of what was supposed to be blood, which represented imperialism, feu-
dalism, and bureaucratic capitalism. Much of the terror campaign was carried
out by 293 kebele, urban militia groups established by the Dergue on the model
of the Parisian "sections" of the French Revolution; 13 the army had provided
these groups with training and equipment. The Meison supported this opera-
tion, which resulted in the destruction of the EPRP in Addis Ababa. Next the
Dergue turned on the Meison and its allies in the Political Bureau, blaming
them for the excesses of the red terror. After the execution on 11 November
of their principal supporter in the Dergue, Lt. Colonel Atnafu Abate (who had
been especially fierce in the repression of the EPRP), the noose began to tighten
around the Meison, and that organization, too, fell victim to the death squads
of the security forces, who were instantly recognizable in their infamous white
Peugeot 504s. H

The new supreme leader of Ethiopia took up residence in the Great
Palace, built by Menelik II after the founding of Addis Ababa in 1886. 15 His
implacable style of leadership, publicized by an extremely elaborate system of
communications, failed to surprise a nation that had grown accustomed to the
previous "king of kings." Mengistu's legitimacy was uncontested in socialist
countries, which saw in him a stable long-term partner. The coup in February
1977 had been preceded by Mengistu's visit to Moscow the previous December.
In April 1977 Ethiopia broke off military relations with the United States. The
Cubans and the Soviet Union stepped in with massive aid, including both
personnel and equipment, which proved decisive in defeating the Eritrean
independence movement and the Somalian offensive of July 1977 in Ogaden. 16
Soviet leaders appreciated the new regime's attempts at Sovietization, some-
times in imitation of the process that was taking place in Somalia, which was
another Soviet ally at the time.

Moscow pushed all the harder for the creation of what it considered to be
the only instrument that would enable a society to cross a decisive threshold: a
full-fledged Communist Party. Not until 1979, however, was a Commission for
the Organization of the Ethiopian Workers 1 Party set up. The results of its
second congress in January 1983 were judged sufficiently fruitful by the Soviet
Union for the Ethiopian Workers 1 Party (EWP) to be created in 1984 in cele-

690 The Third World

bration of the tenth anniversary of the revolution. Calling itself the heir of the
"great October Revolution," the EWP was accorded complete integration into
the system of world Communism through inter-Party agreements. The only
cloud on this success was the Soviet refusal to grant Ethiopia the status of a
"people's democracy 1 ' because of the country's multiethnic fragmentation and
its continued economic dependence on the West. 17

The speed with which the Party grew resulted in an "improper 11 socio-
logical composition. Despite initial all-out efforts to show that anyone could
join the Party, workers stayed away in droves, making up less than one-fourth
of the membership. Over three-fourths of the members consisted of soldiers
and civil servants, representing the reality of social relations inside the country.
Although peasants were 87 percent of the total population, they accounted for
a mere 3 percent of Party members. tx The vast majority of leaders were from
the army. Most of the EWP Politburo was made up of former Dergue members.
The intelligentsia constituted only a small proportion of the Party, since many
of their organizations had been broken up.

The Consequences of the Terror

At present there is no way to know exactly how many people fell victim to the
terror. For the period February 1977-June 1978 the figure of 10,000 political
assassinations in the capital alone was cited during trials in Addis Ababa in
May 1995. ,y It is perhaps rather out of place to try to divide the victims into
categories (pro-Chinese, Jewish Falashas massacred in 1979, and so on). As
Karcl Bartosek remarked about Czechoslovakia, the days when we looked for a
satanic figure hovering in the background, devouring his own children, are
gone. 20 The Dergue killed and buried everyone indiscriminately, as Stalin did,
attaching a perfunctory label such as ''reactionary, 1 ' ''counter revolutionary, 11 or
"antipeople subversive anarchists from the EPRP" only after the fact. As is the
case in the former Soviet Union, mass graves are still being discovered, graves
in which many of the "disappeared'' recorded by Amnesty International arc to
be found. As was the case in China, families were even asked to pay the state for
the cost of the execution. The nylon rope, or "Mengistu bowtie, 11 was one of
the most widely used and distinctive methods, practiced in particular by Colo-
nel Teka Tulu, who was known as "the Hyena" and was one of the most hated
chiefs of the state security forces. It was also the method used one night in
August 1975 on the fallen emperor (though it was claimed officially that he had
died during a surgical operation) and on his granddaughter, Princess Ijcgayehu
Asfa.

Assistance from the East German state security forces, the Stasi, and from
the Soviet KGB was provided through many channels. In several cases the

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691

Soviet security forces handed over Ethiopian students in Moscow to Ethiopian
security personnel. In Addis Ababa, Sergeant Legesse Asfaw acted as an inter-
mediary between Eastern European and Soviet specialists and their Ethiopian
counterparts. It was common practice to expose the victims of torture on the
pavements of the capital. On 17 May 1977 the Swedish general secretary of the
Save the Children Fund lamented that "1,000 children have been killed, and
their bodies are left in the streets and are being eaten by wild hyenas . . . You
can see the heaped-up bodies of murdered children, most of them aged eleven
to thirteen, lying in the gutter, as you drive out of Addis Ababa." 21

Most of the 1,823 cases that went to trial after 1991 under the justice
system of the new president, Meles Zenawi, concerned well-known figures in
the cities; 22 but the terror extended throughout the 1 .22 million square kilome-
ters of the country and affected the whole population of over 30 million. Welo,
where the EPRP had a relatively firm foothold, suffered badly. In May 1997,
Colonel Fantaye Yhdego, Lieutenant Haile Gebeyahu, and Colonel Alemu
Ambachew were brought before the criminal bench of the High Court in Addis
Ababa to answer for their actions, which included the gassing of twenty-four
members of the EPRP in February 1977 in Dese and Kombalcha. 23 Outside the
central province of Shewa, the best-known situation is that of Eritrea, where
the nationalist opposition, which was extremely well organized and had solid
support among other Third World Marxist groups, succeeded in gathering and
spreading information to discredit the Addis Ababa regime in the eyes of the
international community. 24 On 20 December 1974 the regime had reaffirmed
the indivisibility of the nation, pointing out that any secession by the former
Italian colony and British protectorate would cut the country off from its Red
Sea coast. 25

In the southeast, near the Indian Ocean, conflict was provoked by So-
malia's demands for Ogaden, a region of Ethiopia inhabited mainly by Somalis.
From 1969 on, the Somali leader Mohammed Siad Barre had officially em-
braced Marxism-Leninism, and relations between Moscow and Mogadishu had
grown ever closer after the signing of a friendship treaty in 1974. The Soviet
Union was forced to make a choice between two clients, and after vainly trying
to convince Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Yemen to form a federation, Moscow
chose the Addis Ababa regime. Thereafter Mengistu could draw on the fire-
power and the naval and aerial logistical support of the Soviet army, as well as
the Cuban expeditionary force, to repulse the guerrilla offensives of the (also
Marxist-Leninist) Popular Front for the Liberation of Eritrea and incursions
by the Somalian army from June 1977 to January 1978.

Mengistu's actions were so effective that at the thirty-ninth meeting of
the Worldwide Unionist Federation Bureau, held in Addis Ababa on 28-30
March 1988, the organization presented him with a gold medal a for his con-

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tribution to the struggle for peace and the security of nations, and for their
national and economic independence." In June 1988, shortly after the meeting
ended, some 2,500 inhabitants of Hawzen, in Tigre Province, died in a bombing
raid. As in Guernica during the Spanish civil war, it had been market day when
the attack occurred. Whether during a colonial war or during antinationalist
repression, the peripheral areas of the old empire (Eritrea, Tigre, Oromo,
Ogaden, Welega, Welo) were often shaken by revolts led by "popular fronts,"
whose cadres used the same Marxist-Leninist rhetoric as their adversaries. 26
Various military resources were deployed to deal with these situations, and
certain far-left and pro-Chinese factions were at pains to point out that some
of the atrocities perpetrated during the revolts had the backing of the United
States, the Soviet Union, and Israel. 27

A "Permanent Tribunal of the International League for the Rights and
Liberation of Peoples, 11 which modeled itself on the movement against Ameri-
can intervention in Vietnam, went into session in Milan in May 1980 and
focused on atrocities committed in Eritrea. Its report was published in 1981 by
the Belgian Committee for Aid to Eritrea, and its opinions largely reflected
those of the Entrean Popular Liberation Front. 28 Some of the information it
gathered (backed up by Amnesty International reports) bears comparison with
atrocities committed by the Nazis; the French observer at the session drew a
comparison with Oradour-sur-Glane, where groups of people had been herded
into churches that were then burned down. The brochure published by the
"Permanent Tribunal 1 ' cites the example of the village of Wokiduba, where, in
the summer of 1975, 110 people were massacred inside the Orthodox church,
Instead of the white Peugeots of Addis Ababa, the death squads in Wokiduba
drove brown Volkswagen vans, which whisked bodies away to dump them
in mass graves. There was also a concentration camp in Adi Qualla, near
Men defer a.

It is still unclear how many died in the "total war" that Mengistu declared
in August 1977 on the Entrean secessionists. An estimate of 80,000 civilians
and military personnel for 1978-1980 includes victims of the massive air raids
that were used as reprisals, but does not include those who must have died as
a result of the government's subsequent systematic disruption of the traditional
way of life. 2y Whereas the urban centers had a reasonable supply network and
benefited from the presence of salaried military personnel who ensured a
reasonably stable economy, agricultural areas suffered badly from destruction
of livestock — often by air force personnel, who especially enjoyed bombing
camels — minefields, deforestation, and the disrupting effects of authoritarian
control. Women, who had traditionally played a major role in agriculture, were
subjected to systematic rape by soldiers, whose presence also led to a permanent

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climate of insecurity that did little to encourage trade and commerce with other
regions. 10

It is perhaps going too far to say that the main reason for the massive
displacement of the population during the famines of 1982-1985 was an inten-
tion to cut the guerrillas off from their civilian bases, but there were significant
local demographic movements. Although Eritrea was barely altered, Welo was
sharply affected. Of the 525,000 people moved between November 1984 and
August 1985, 310,000 (8.5 percent of the population of the province) came
from Welo. 31 Some border regions such as Godar were emptied of a significant
proportion of their population (30^-0 percent), many of whom took refuge in
camps controlled by opposition groups in Sudan. 12 Despite the vast publicity
that the famine received in the West, it was not a countrywide or unprecedented
phenomenon. Although the famine was extremely serious, it was no more than
a regional crisis affecting 25 percent of the population, and was one of a series
of famines stretching back centuries. (The most recent famine, in 1972-73, had
been a major factor in the downfall of the previous regime.) The effects of the
famine were made worse by the impoverishment of millions of peasants who
had been forced to give up their food reserves to meet the delivery quotas
demanded by the state. The peasants were already taxed very heavily and had
to buy grain at extremely inflated prices on the black market, only to be forced
to sell it back to the state at a fixed price. Many of them were also forced to
dispose of their livestock, and were thus acutely short of food at the worst
moment. When the famine began in 1982, it was the result of a genuine
drought, but the crisis was made considerably worse by the virtual cessation of
trade, stemming partly from the rigid persecution of traders and partly from a
widespread feeling of insecurity.

By controlling aid and displacing the population, the hunger weapon was
used by the authorities to help realize their objectives, which naturally included
the silencing of dissidents and the improved "scientific" use of space by the
Party-state. 11 The ban on intervention by nongovernmental organizations in
regions other than Welo and the diversion of aid intended for Tigre forced the
rural population to flee from areas that were under guerrilla control and to flock
to the zones held by Mengistu's forces. These forced transfers, often facilitated
by an announcement that food was on the way, were presented as the demo-
graphic redeployment of people from the dry north to the more humid and
fertile south. For the most part, the transfers affected not the victims of the
famine, but sections of the population that were under military control, regard-
less of their situation regarding food and their geographic location. Inhabitants
of regions in which conflict was raging between the Dergue forces and the
Tigre Liberation Front were a case in point. Although in theory people had

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the option of staying, in practice the size of the exodus meant there was little
point in remaining. This accommodating despotism was what the authorities
called bego teseno, "well-meaning coercion" or "coercion for the good of others."
The policy was introduced in 1980, before the famine, to find "volunteers" in
the big cities to work on the state farms, where living conditions were so bad
that they attracted the attention of Anglo-American antislavery organizations.^

The "villagization" policy, aimed at nomadic populations, met with stiff
and sometimes bloody resistance from the tribes in question, and in many ways
was typical of the peasant wars under Communist regimes. As was the case in
Mozambique, the intention was to group rural communities into associations
that could more easily be controlled by the Party, encouraging the peasants to
"change their way of thinking and their way of life, and open a new chapter in
the creation of a new modern society in rural zones, and thus help build
socialism." 35 As with the population transfer program, the aim was both the
extension of the state farm sector and the creation of "new men." As the
geographer Michel Foucher pointed out, "the effects of the famine went far
beyond the areas affected by the drought and the climatic crisis inasmuch as it
was used as a pretext for a significant spatial reorganization of the country." 16
Although some operations were a considerable success, the human cost of these
operations is extremely difficult to calculate. The 14 percent death rate in
certain transit camps, such as Ambassel and Welo, was even higher than that
recorded in the pockets of famine. 37 The 200,000 to 300,000 victims of this
incompetence were supplemented by an equivalent number of people sacrificed
during the accelerated passage from "feudalism" to "socialism," who were
deliberately deprived of international aid, killed in raids or while trying to
escape, suffocated or frozen in the depressurized holds of Antonov airplanes
taking them to the promised Eden, or simply abandoned with insufficient
reserves of food to the whims of the (sometimes murderous) first group to find
them.

The famine generally brought mixed results for the regime. Mengistu at
first tried to hide the scale of the problem, but then counterattacked, using to
his own advantage the shocking pictures of starving victims that appeared in
the West in the autumn of 1984. On 16 November 1984, when emotion was
running at its highest, he announced his decision to transfer 2.5 million people
and, despite the hostility of the Reagan administration to the idea, managed to
enlist the support of the international community in the enterprise. Reactions
were somewhat muted in France, where familiarity with the culture of Com-
munism among French intellectuals was perhaps one reason behind the deci-
sion of Medecins sans Frontieres to protest the forced resettlement. As a result
of this decision, members of the organization were declared persona non grata
by the Mengistu regime on 2 December 1985. On a wider level, the exemplary

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695

management of images and support from United Nations experts enabled the
regime to build up food stocks — most of which went to the military — and to
reap the benefits of an unprecedented wave of human solidarity created by a
variety of rock stars who sang the anthem "We Are the World." This song may
well be the only trace left by the Ethiopian drama on the consciousness of
millions of people who were adolescents in the early 1980s.

Mengistu's declining fortunes after 1988 coincided in part with the fate
of Communism in the Soviet Union. The departure of Soviet military advisers
from the combat zones was announced in March 1990. By this time, the balance
of power was already beginning to swing to the other side. On all fronts the
army was in retreat from the Popular Fronts for the Liberation of Eritrea and
Tigre, and the regime was giving out distress signals to the international
community. The halting of the resettlement policy and the ostentatious an-
nouncement of measures to liberalize the economy coincided with a final purge
of the army following an abortive coup attempt on 16 May 1989. The plotters
had been infiltrated by the secret services, and reprisals were extremely bloody.
On 21 June 1990 Mengistu decreed a general mobilization, which in theory
applied to people age eighteen and over but in practice included fourteen- to
sixteen-year-olds who were picked up in football stadiums or at schools. In 1991
higher-education establishments were closed, and all students were ordered to
take part in the war effort. When the vise continued to tighten on Addis Ababa,
Mengistu on 19 April 1991 announced his intention of forming a conscript
army as large as Iraq's, with more than 1 million soldiers. At that moment his
army already numbered 450,000 (compared to 50,000 in 1974) and was the
largest in the sub-Saharan region by a considerable margin. As the Ethiopian
army continued to suffer major defeats, Mengistu began to lose control. On 21
May 1991 he fled via Kenya to Harare, Zimbabwe, where he was granted
sanctuary by Robert Mugabe, the hero of the struggle against the white Rho-
desian colonizers. In the autumn of 1994, when Mengistu was summoned to
appear for trial in Addis Ababa to take responsibility for the Ethiopian tragedy,
Zimbabwe refused to extradite the man whom East German reporters had once
quoted in the Ethiopian Herald as saying: "We will liquidate the satanic heritage
of the past and place nature itself under our control!"™

Lusophone Violence: Angola and Mozambique

Portugal had maintained a presence on the African coast since the fifteenth
century, but it was a latecomer in colonizing a vast empire (twenty-five times its
own size), which it had been granted when the European powers divided up
Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85. This belated and superficial colo-
nization prevented a feeling of unity from developing among the various colo-

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nized peoples. As a result, the groups that launched armed struggles in the
early 1960s were forced to rely on anticolonial sentiments, which were consid-
erably more powerful than any putative nationalist aspirations. 39 Conscious of
the obstacles to their extremist viewpoint, after independence the nationalist
groups focused on the mimtgo tnterno, the "enemy within," by which they
meant traditional chiefs, people who had collaborated with the colonizers, and
political dissidents, all of whom were accused of endangering the country.
Such were the characteristic traits of a political culture torn between Stalin and
the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar, which had few incentives to build
representative democracies despite the hasty departure of the Portuguese colo-
nial power.

The People's Republic of Angola

At the very moment when, to the fury of the white colonial population, the
officers who took power in Lisbon in 1974 pronounced themselves to be in
favor of independence for the colonies, the Portuguese army was still firmly
in charge of Angola. The swift withdrawal of the army after July 1974 opened
the way for a coalition government, consisting of the three organizations that
had fought for independence since the 1960s: the Movimento Popular de
Libertacao de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola;
MPLA), the Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola (National Front for the
Liberation of Angola; FNLA), and the Uniao Nacional para a Independencia
Total de Angola (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola;
UNITA). On 15 January 1975, when the independence treaty was signed in
Alvor, the new Portuguese republic recognized these organizations as "the only
legitimate representatives of the people of Angola." The timetable looked
promising: elections were to be held for a Constituent Assembly within nine
months, and full independence was to be proclaimed on 11 November 1975.
But after the departure of 400,000 Portuguese in February-June 1975 and the
emergence of tensions among the three groups, the coalition government (in
which the MPLA had charge of the information, justice, and finance minis-
tries) rapidly ceased to be viable. Bloody incidents became more and more
common, and the Nakuru cease-fire of 14 June was simply used as a truce by
all sides to strengthen their reserves and prepare for intervention by their
foreign allies.

From October 1974 onward the Soviet Union significantly increased its
financial and military assistance to the MPLA, which also received support
from the left wing of the Portuguese army, the so-called Armed Forces Move-
ment, and from the "Red admiral" Antonio Rosa Coutinho, who was based in
Luanda and had been charged by the Portuguese government with overseeing

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697

the Angolan transition to independence. In March 1975 the first Cuban and
Soviet advisers landed in the country. Fidel Castro later described this decision
in the following terms: "Africa is today a weak link in the imperialist chain. It
is there that the best hopes exist of passing from tribalism to socialism without
passing through the different stages that other parts of the world have been
obliged to experience." 4 * 1 After the collapse of the coalition government on 14
August 1975, the Vietnam Herotco docked in Luanda, with several hundred
(mostly black) Cuban soldiers on board. By the time South Africa intervened
on the side of UNITA on 23 October, the Soviet and Cuban advisers numbered
7,000. UNITA was not taken very seriously by the MPLA and its patrons;
Pravda described it as "a farcical army, filled with mercenaries from China and
the CIA and aided by racist South Africans and Rhodesians." 41 There was some
truth in this description. Originally a Maoist organization, UNITA was forever
signing pacts with the devil. Its heterogeneous organization and allies reflected
the bitter realism of the Leninist and Stalinist approach, and the fact that Jonas
Savimbi sat at the same table as Pik Botha should not surprise those who
remember Stalin's pact with Hitler.

Soviet and Cuban air support proved decisive for the survival of the
regime. On 1 1 November 1975 the MPLA and UNITA declared the country's
independence separately, 42 while maps of what had been the jewel among
Portugal's colonies were redrawn. The MPLA held the coastline, including not
only the ports but also the oil reserves and the diamonds, while its rivals (among
whom UNITA was soon the most important) held the north and the central
plains.

After the interventions by South Africa and the Communist bloc, it be-
came easier for the Western powers and for other leaders in southern Africa to
sort out the different groups. For the Mozambican leader Samora Machel, the
relentless nature of the struggle was clear from the alignment of the forces: "In
Angola, two parties arc facing each other: imperialism, with its allies and
puppets, and the progressive forces which support the MPLA. It is that sim-
ple." 41 The uncontested leader of the MPLA, Agostinho Neto, was an assimi-
lated black who came from a line of Protestant pastors and had been a member
of the pro-Soviet Portuguese Communist Party since the 1950s. The MPLA
had been founded in 1956, and many of its cadres, such as J. Mateus Paulo and
A. Domingos-Van Dunem, had been trained in the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s and
were well versed in the prevailing Marxist-Leninist theories. In addition to this
training in scientific socialism, some of them, like J. Njamba Yemina, had also
received military training while abroad, either in the Soviet Union or in the
guerrilla schools of Cuba.

After taking power, the MPLA decided at the Congress of Luanda (on
4-11 December 1977) that it was time to move from a popular-front type of

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699

movement to a vanguard party structured along Bolshevik lines. Only such a
party, MPLA leaders realized, would be allowed to join the international Com-
munist movement. The new MPLA Workers 1 Party was immediately recog-
nized by Raul Castro, who was present at the congress, as the only possible
means by which "the interests of working people could be correctly expressed."

The idea of the state as "the only instrument capable of applying the
decisions made by the single Party" implied extreme vigilance against rival
parties, which presumably were masking their counterrevolutionary nature
behind left-wing phraseology. Not surprisingly a number of the "antideviation-
ist" practices that until then had been the preserve of Communist regimes in
the Northern Hemisphere began to emerge in Angola. Even before Bolshevism
was officially installed as the new faith in Angola, Neto had gained considerable
experience in that area. When in February 1975 (with the help of Portuguese
troops) he attacked the "Eastern Revolt" faction, led by the Ovimbundu cadre
Daniel Chipenda, Chipenda claimed that the episode was only the latest in a
series of liquidations of MPLA dissidents since 1967. Bearing that in mind,
we can understand more clearly the MPLA communique, issued in February
1974, that claimed to have "uncovered and neutralized" an internal counter-
revolutionary plot aimed at "the physical elimination of the president and
several his cadres." 44

Nito Alves, the minister of internal affairs and one of Neto's main rivals,
had been present in Luanda during the events of 25 April 1974, which had
sounded the death knell of the colonial regime. In the absence of the other
leaders, he managed to win over a sizable proportion of the urban black popu-
lation by denying Angolan nationality to whites unless they could prove sig-
nificant anticolonial behavior. Alves had the support of a network of
neighborhood committees thanks to what he termed poder popular (popular
power), which he had gained by not hesitating to use what were quite clearly
Stalinist practices. These practices were not surprising to the victims, most of
whom had been brought up in the Maoist tradition. 45 Trusting in the promises
of support he had received from the Soviet Union, the Cubans, and the Por-
tuguese Communists, he attempted a coup on 27 May 1977 to prevent a purge
of his partisans that had just been getting under way. When it became clear
that the operation failed (partly because of the hesitancy of Alves' foreign
advisers), Neto said in a radio broadcast: "I am sure that the people will
understand why we will be forced to act somewhat harshly toward the people
involved in these events." Accused of "racism, tribalism, and regionalism," the
conspirators suffered a radical purge. The membership of the Central Com-
mittee and of the major offices of state was entirely changed, 4 '' there were
bloody confrontations in the capital, and the repression reached deep into the

provinces. In Ngunza (South Kuanza) 204 deviationists were killed during the
night of 6-7 August; 47 this figure lends credibility to those put forward after
1991 by survivors, who reported that the MPLA was definitively purged of
several thousand members on that occasion. Many of the political commissars
in the armed forces were liquidated in Luena (Moxico) by Anibal Sapilinia, a
member of the MPLA Central Committee. 4 *

Before the attempted coup, Nito Alves was popular because of his columns
in the newspaper Diana de Luanda and his commentaries on two radio pro-
grams, "Kudibanguela" and "Povo em armas," which constantly denounced
the country's poor living conditions. These items confirmed the existence of
severe food shortages (his supporters went so far as to speak of famine) in
certain regions. They also highlighted the exhaustion of urban salaried workers
who were forced to work for the regime. A law introduced in November 1975
and a decree in March 1976 tightened discipline in the manufacturing sector
through the criminalization of "extra-union" (that is, anti-Party) strikes and
the creation of a political climate filled with slogans such as "Produce and
resist." New forms of protest, which went beyond the usual denunciations of
the war and of the chaos after white rule, began to appear. The Angolan
economy had prospered in the 1960s, but it crumbled in 1975, and despite state
control of the system, the government found it harder and harder to deny that
the economy was gradually being dollarized. A governing class largely indif-
ferent to the living conditions of ordinary people began to emerge, partly as a
result of the MPLA's monopoly on power and partly because of the difficulty
of procuring foreign currency, which changed hands on the black market at
fifty times its official price. For more than a decade it was impossible to get even
a reasonable idea of what conditions inside the country were really like. The
government succeeded in separating the urban market- -supported by oil ex-
ports — from local producers, and the state more or less abandoned the war-torn
countryside to its fate. Forced conscription was practiced in rural areas by both
sides in the conflict. The term "famine" was carefully avoided in official circles,
but was used in a warning in 1985 by the World Food Organization. With the
advent of pereslroika in the Soviet Union, the Angolan government began
publicly to admit the gravity of the situation, leading to an announcement by
UNICEF in early 1987 that tens of thousands of children had died of famine
in Angola over the previous year.

Despite the wealth created in the oil-producing region of Cabinda, the
state's administrative and military resources were quite limited, and the regime
made few attempts at collectivization and rural reorganization. 4g Nevertheless,
there was considerable resentment toward the government in the countryside.
Problems in tax collection, a lack of investment in infrastructure, barriers to

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commerce, and the disappearance of the urban market meant that the country-
side often was left to fend for itself. Thirteen years after independence, the
Angolan state published an official report based on the findings of the agrono-
mist Rene Dumont, who sharply criticized the trading conditions in Angola
because they failed to recognize the true worth of the peasants' contribution. 50
The situation led to increasing hostility toward the coastline, which was domi-
nated by the Marxist culture of the creole or mixed-race assimilados, many of
whom held positions in the MPLA.

It was among the rural population, many of whom also hated foreigners,
that Jonas Savimbi's UNITA Party found a growing number of supporters
outside the Ovimbundu territories where it had its origins. UNITA's support
grew even though Savimbi made the same demands on the population that the
government did. The ensuing conflict, rather than a Stalinist war led by the
MPLA against the peasantry, was in effect a war in which the peasants were
often in conflict with one another. Supported by the Reagan administration,
but taking most of their ideas from Maoism, UNITA leaders were always eager
to play up the conflict between town and country; they often denounced the
creole aristocracy of the MPLA in the name of the "African people." 51 None-
theless, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which the peasantry rallied to
Savimbi's cause before upheavals engulfed the Soviet bloc. When the South
Africans and Cubans finally withdrew after peace accords were signed in New
York on 22 December 1988, the MPLA's conversion to Western ideas produced
the expected results. In July 1990 the MPLA leadership accepted the necessity
of a market economy and political pluralism, a change that proved to be the
undoing of UNITA, which suffered a heavy defeat in the elections of 1992.

The undeniable changes undergone by the MPLA during fifteen years of
independence were essentially the result of a massive popular rejection of the
idea of an MPLA Party-state and of the traumatic experience of fifteen years
of economic instability, forced conscription, and massive population move-
ments.

The transitional period in the evolution toward a multiparty democracy
was clearly not the time to begin the search for those in charge of the secret
police or responsible for the violation of human rights. As in the Soviet Union,
many of those responsible were members of ethnic minorities and have never
been forced to answer for their previous activities, not least because of the
essential continuity inside the government. With the exception of a few small
groups of people who survived the purges, none of the major parties has asked
for an investigation into the disappearance of the tens of thousands of victims
whose fate, as the carefully worded Amnesty International reports put it, did
not "conform to internationally recognized standards of equity."

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701

Mozambique

On 25 December 1974, when Portuguese army officers established a multiparty
democracy in Lisbon, they entrusted the destiny of Mozambique to one party,
the Frente de Libertacao do Mozambique (Mozambique National Liberation
Front), or Frelimo. 52 The Front, founded in June 1962 under the leadership of
Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, a doctor of anthropology, managed to win the
sympathy of the international community and had the military support of both
China and the Soviet Union. Unlike in Angola, Frelimo managed on the eve of
the Portuguese revolution of 25 April 1974 to cause serious problems for the
colonial troops, most of whom were African in origin. 51 Because Frelimo had
already won over a significant proportion of the nationalist intellectual elite,
the Front mirrored the different ideological tendencies among intellectuals. By
1974, however, it was clear that Marxism-Leninism predominated among Fre-
limo's leadership. After Frelimo's second congress in 1968, the significance of
the anti-imperialist struggle, as formulated by Samora Machel in accordance
with the Chinese notion of "liberated zones," gradually took the shape pro-
posed by Mondlane shortly before his death in 1969: "I conclude today that
Frelimo is more socialist, revolutionary, and progressive than ever, and that our
line is now firmly oriented toward Marxist-Leninist Socialism. 11 To explain
this evolution, he added: "With living conditions the way they are in Mozam-
bique, our enemy leaves us no choice."

In the immediate aftermath of independence, this "enemy" seemed to give
some respite to the new rulers of the country. The white, mixed-race, and
Indian assimilado elements who played a dominant role in the new system
launched a major reorganization of the country. In the belief that the essentially
rural Mozambique could take shape only as a party-state, they sought to control
the country though a process called "villagization." 54 This policy was first
implemented in the early 1970s in the "liberated zones," where it had met with
varying degrees of success. Frelimo decided to extend it systematically
throughout the territory. All peasants (80 percent of the population) were
expected to abandon their traditional homes and to regroup in new villages. In
the initial enthusiasm of independence, the population responded quite favor-
ably to the government's requests, creating collective farms and sometimes
cooperating in the construction of communal buildings, although they gener-
ally refused to inhabit them and soon abandoned the communal fields. On paper
it appeared that the country was under the careful control of a hierarchical
administration though a network of Communist cells.

In 1977 the Frelimo leaders had openly proclaimed their allegiance to the
Bolshevik ideal, calling for extended collectivization and closer links with the

702 The Third World

international Communist movement. Various treaties were signed with the
countries of the Soviet bloc, which provided arms and military instructors in
exchange for close support of the Rhodesian nationalists of the Zimbabwe
African National Union (ZANU).

While Mozambique was busy signing accords with the Eastern bloc
(which soon came to dominate the country), white Rhodesians led by Ian Smith
sought to retaliate by supporting the resistance movement that was beginning
to emerge in the countryside, Under the leadership of Alfonso Dhlakama, the
Resistencia Nacional Mocambicana (National Resistance of Mozambique), or
Renamo, benefited from the support of the Rhodesian special services until
Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980. At that point the South African
government took over responsibility for providing logistical support to
Renamo. To the surprise of numerous observers, the population of the villages
rallied to the resistance movement despite the barbarism of Renamo's methods,
which had frightened even the Rhodesians. Some of Renamo's supporters were
people who had escaped from the "reeducation camps" of the Servico Nacional
de Seguranca Popular (National Service for the Security of the People), or
SNASP, which had become ubiquitous after 1975. S5 The SNASP had assumed
that even if most people could not be won over, they could at least be kept
under control. Control of the population was of vital consequence for both
parties. The few studies carried out on the ground confirm the the scale and
seriousness of the violence committed by both sides against the civilian popu-
lation.^ The actions of Renamo, on the whole, were considerably less system-
atic than the state violence perpetrated by Frelimo, and the support that
Renamo received demonstrated just how hated the regime had become. Frelimo
justified its actions in terms of a struggle against tribalism, against antiquated
and outdated religious practices, and against the deep-seated belief in lineage
and ancestral fiefdom, which the Front had rejected at independence, dispar-
aging it as "feudalism." 57

The prerogatives of the SNASP had been considerably expanded even
before the authorities in Maputo realized the extent of the danger presented
by Renamo. Established in 1975, the SNASP was responsible for arresting or
detaining anyone suspected of being a threat to state security on either political
or economic grounds. The SNASP was supposed to follow normal judicial
procedure and did its own prosecuting, but it also had the right to send people
directly to "reeducation camps." This practice was facilitated by Article 1 15 of
the penal code, which eliminated the right of detainees to habeas corpus (al-
though the extent to which it had ever existed under the Salazar regime was
quite limited). The first large-scale attack by the resistance was on the reedu-
cation camp at Sacuze in 1977. The ofensivas pela legalidade (offensives for
legality) that were periodically championed by Samora Machel did not remove

Afrocommunism

the SNASP's prerogatives. Instead, these campaigns were aimed at bringing
the law into line with the de facto situation. This was the logic behind Law
No. 2/79 of 28 February 1979, regarding crimes against national security of
the people and the people's state. This law also reintroduced the death penalty,
which had been abolished in both Portugal and its colonies in 1867. The death
penalty, however, was not systematically used, except in the elimination of
Frelimo dissidents. Such was the fate, for instance, of Lazaro Nkavandame,
Joana Simaiao, and Uria Simango, who were liquidated while in detention in
1983, and whose deaths were kept secret until the formal ending of the Party's
Marxist-Leninist period. 5 * In 1983 the Eduardo Mondlane law faculty at the
University of Maputo was closed. This was perhaps no great loss; according
to government legal reports, the function of the institution was not to prepare
lawyers to defend the interests of the people, but to train those who exploited
them. 59

The intelligentsia rapidly became disenchanted with the movement, al-
though they did show considerable sympathy with an organization that in
theory protected their interests, the Associacao dos Escritores Mocambicanos
(Association of Mozambican Writers). They also forged secret links with or-
ganizations such as the CIA, the KGB, and the SNASP itself. 60 Rather rarer
were those who, like the poet Jorge Viegas, paid for their dissidence with
enforced stays in psychiatric hospitals and exile.

A hardening of the political line, following the logic of the early years of
the Soviet system, went hand in hand with an opening of the economy. Invest-
ment had always come in from abroad, and continued to do so under Frelimo,
as befitted a country that the U.S.S.R. had barred from entering the Council
for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). 61 After Frelimo's Fourth Party
Congress in 1983, the organization turned its attention to the rural population,
putting a halt to the policy of collectivization that had had such disastrous
consequences. In a typical condemnation, Samora Machel did not mince his
words: " We tend to forget that our country is made up mostly of peasants. We
keep on talking about the working classes and relegating the vast majority of
the country to the background." 62 Every time the government militia had
burned another haystack to try to ensure the villagization quota, it had in-
creased Renamo's support. The severe damage done to traditional systems of
agriculture, together with the wildly erratic exchange rates for consumer goods
versus foodstuffs, had led to severe problems with the food supply.

Neither the government nor Renamo appears to have used the weapon of
hunger in a systematic fashion. But control of the food supply was a vital tool
for Frelimo when moving populations from areas that were in dispute between
the two sides. Separating farmers from their land was also a disastrous policy
that contributed in no small measure to the food shortages in the country.

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According to Human Rights Watch, in the period 1975-1985 food shortages
caused more deaths than did armed violence. 63 This view is shared by UNICEF,
which calculated that 600,000 died of hunger during this period, a loss of life
comparable to that caused by famine in Ethiopia. International aid was a major
factor in helping the affected population to survive. In January 1987 the U.S.
ambassador in Maputo reported to the State Department that as many as 3.5
million Mozambicans were at risk from hunger, 64 prompting an immediate
response from Washington and several international organizations. Despite this
effort, the most exposed regions fell victim to a terrible famine whose scale has
never been fully appreciated. In the Memba region alone, humanitarian organi-
zations report that 8,000 died of hunger in the spring of 1989. 6S Market forces
soon took over in the regions that received support from abroad. Such was one
of the lessons drawn in a European Community report in 1991, which revealed
that only 25 percent of food aid was sold at the agreed rate, while the other 75
percent remained in the hands of the authorities, who, after the usual pilfering,
sold it on the black market. 66 The Mozambican "new man" whom Samora
Machel and his associates had been so zealous to foster revealed himself to be
a the deeply pathological product of compromises inside each individual, which
take the form of dishonor, deception, and schizophrenic madness. The indi-
vidual wants to live, but he must split in two to do it, and live a double life, a
hidden, true life and a false public life, the second protecting the first, and he
must constantly lie to have a tiny parcel of truth for himself." 67

The sudden collapse of the Communist states in Eastern Europe led
people to realize how fragile these regimes were and how resistant civil society
could be. Even if, during the fifteen years covered here, the public charac-
terization of African Communism as "modern political legitimation" might
have had painful consequences for a university lecturer from the region, that
perception does have a certain explanatory power. 68 The brief nature of the
African experiment with Communism, together with the dominant perception
of Africa as doomed to violence by its very nature, risks blurring the contours
of the project as it was outlined at the outset. To resist this temptation, we
should perhaps invert the perspective. Although it may be difficult to see the
specific nature of violence in these Marxist-Leninist states themselves, as
Achille Mbembe suggests, it is likely the case that the famines and massacres
of civilians occurred because the African countries, "having been colonized and
led into independence by the Western powers, chose to take the Soviet-style
regimes as their model." This pattern ensured that efforts to promote democ-
ratization would do little to change the deeply Leninist nature of most African
states.

Communism in Afghanistan

Sylvain Boulouque

/Afghanistan has a surface area of 640,000 square kilometers and is
thus slightly bigger than France. 1 Until 1991 the country was neatly tucked
amid four other states: the Soviet Union to the north, Iran to the west, Pakistan
to the east and south, and, for a few dozen kilometers, China to the east. More
than one-third of the country is mountainous, with several peaks exceeding
22,900 feet. In 1979 the population of 15 million was divided among a variety
of ethnic groups. The dominant group, numbering more than 6 million and
living mainly in the south, are the mostly Sunni Pushtuns, who speak their own
language. The more than 4 million Tajiks, who live primarily in the eastern
part of the country, arc also Sunni Muslims but speak the Dari dialect of
Persian. Approximately 1.5 million Uzbeks, who are also Sunni and speak a
Turkic language, live in the north. The 1.5 million Hazaras are mostly Shiite
and live in the center of the country. Other ethnic groups, including Turk-
mens, Kirgiz, Baluchis, Aymaqs, Kohistanis, and Nuristans, are scattered
through the territory and account for the remaining 10 percent of the popula-
tion of Afghanistan.

Traditionally, Afghanistan has been held together primarily by its Muslim
faith. Ninety-nine percent of the population is Muslim; 80 percent are Sunnis,
and the rest are Shiite. There are also Sikh and Hindu minorities and a tiny
Jewish community. The Afghan version of Islam was traditionally quite mod-

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erate in both urban and rural areas. It was closely integrated into the traditional
tribal structure, in which village chiefs served as the community leaders. Most
of the population lived in rural areas; in 1979 the only large city was the capital,
Kabul, situated in the east and home to 500,000 people. Smaller cities included
Herat in the west, Kandahar in the south, and Mazar-i-SharTf and Kunduz in
the north, each with a population of less than 200,000. The Afghans had a long
tradition of resisting invasions, especially those by the Mongols and the Rus-
sians. Afghanistan was under the protection of the British from the mid nine-
teenth century until just after World War I, in 1919. While England and Russia
(later the Soviet Union) were engaged in a series of conflicts with the people
of Central Asia, the Afghan monarchy always succeeded in maintaining inde-
pendence by playing off the two great powers against each other. When King
Zahir Shah came to power in 1963, he accelerated the drive toward cultural,
economic, and political modernization. After 1959 women were no longer
obliged to wear veils and were granted access to schools and universities. Once
the king had decided in 1965 that something akin to democracy was the way
forward, the country began to develop a parliamentary system with full-fledged
political parties and free elections. The Communist coup in April 1978 and the
subsequent Soviet intervention destroyed the political equilibrium in the coun-
try and undid the process of modernization that by then was well under way.

Afghanistan and the U.S.S.R. from 1917 to 1973

Links between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union went back a long way In
April 1919, Khan Amanullah established diplomatic relations with the new
government in Moscow, allowing the Bolsheviks to open five consulates in the
country. On 28 February 1921 a treaty of peace and economic cooperation was
signed. As a result of this treaty, the Soviet Union assisted in the construction
of a new telegraph line and agreed to pay the king 500,000 dollars annually.
This was partly an attempt by the Soviet government to show its goodwill and
to counterbalance the still-dominant British influence in the country, 2 but it
was also an attempt to spread the revolution to countries that were still under
colonial influence. At the Congress of Eastern Peoples, held in Baku in Sep-
tember 1920, the heads of the Communist International concluded that anti-
colonialist and anti-imperialist slogans might attract nations under European
colonial influence to the Communist camp. The Comintern soon issued a
number of proclamations in which the term "class struggle" was replaced by
the term jihad (holy war). It appears that three Afghans were present at the
congress: Agazade, of the Afghan Communists; Azim, who represented people
with no particular party attachment; and Kara Tadjiev, another representative
of those with no clear party alignment. 3 In a similar vein, the resolutions of the

Communism in Afghanistan

707

Fourth Congress of the Communist International, which opened on 7 Novem-
ber 1922, sought to weaken the imperialist powers by creating and organizing
"unified anti-imperialist fronts."

In September 1920, just before these events, Soviet troops led by Mikhail
Frunze, one of the leaders of the Red Army who had also taken part in the
repression of Nestor Makhno's Ukrainian anarchist movement, annexed the
Bukhara Khanate, which for a time had been part of the Afghan kingdom.
Several reprisal operations were carried out against the peasants and basmachis,
the resistance fighters labeled "brigands" by Soviet officials. The basmachis
fought against Russian and later Soviet domination of the region. The methods
used by Soviet army personnel in Afghanistan were analogous to those used
against rebellious peasants in Russia. The region was definitively annexed in
1924, although some righting continued into the 1930s, and more than a million
basmachis took refuge in Afghanistan. Basmachi resistance was not definitively
crushed by the Soviet Red Army until 1933. The Communists soon began to
exert influence on the leadership in Afghanistan, and a number of Afghan
officers left for training in the U.S.S.R. At the same time, Soviet diplomats
carried out a variety of underground activities, causing one attache and several
engineers to be expelled from the country for espionage.^ There is also evidence
that GPU agents were present in the country, most notably Georgy Agabekov,
who had been a member of the Cheka since 1920 and was a member of its
foreign section. Agabekov was in charge of the Afghan operation while living
illegally first in Kabul and then in Istanbul, before he finally broke with the
GPU in 1930. 5

In 1929 Khan Amanullah introduced a policy of agricultural reform but
simultaneously began an antireligious campaign. The new antireligious laws
were modeled on the Turkish reforms of Kemal Ataturk and provoked a
peasant uprising led by Bacha-i Saqqao ("Son of the Water Carrier"), who
succeeded in overthrowing the regime. 6 Initially this uprising was interpreted
by the Communist International as anticapitalist, but Soviet officials later
changed their mind and sought to help the troops of the old regime under the
command of Gulam-Nabi Khan, the Afghan ambassador in Moscow, to return
to Afghanistan. Soviet troops (the best units from Tashkent, with the assistance
of the Soviet air force) penetrated Afghanistan while disguised in Afghan
uniforms. Five thousand Afghans righting for the government were killed. Any
villagers whom the Red Army encountered were immediately executed. 7 De-
spite some battlefield successes, Gulam-Nabi's forces retreated north after
receiving word that Amanullah had abdicated and fled abroad. At this point
Soviet support for the anti-Saqqao forces ceased. The fight was taken up by
Nadir Shah, a noble with close ties to Great Britain who returned from his exile
in France and took over the leadership of the Afghan army. He was quickly

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proclaimed king by the nobility and tribal leaders. Bacha-i Saqqao found him-
self without a disciplined army and on the verge of defeat, but soon after he
went into hiding he was arrested and executed. Nadir Shah tried to come to an
arrangement with both the British and the Soviet Union. He was recognized
and accepted in Moscow on condition that he withdraw Afghan support for the
basmachis. After Nadir Shah agreed to this condition, the leader of the basma-
chis, Ibrahim Bek, was forced by the Afghan army to retreat into Soviet terri-
tory, where he was arrested and executed. 8 A new treaty of nonaggression with
the Soviet Union was signed on 24 June 1931. Nadir Shah was assassinated by
a student in 1933, and his son, Zahir Shah, became king in his place, although
actual power remained in the hands of the king's uncles and cousins.

After 1945 there were several more waves of modernization, which were
particularly notable in the capital, where five- and seven-year development
plans were enacted. Further treaties of friendship and cooperation were signed
with the Soviet Union, including a 1955 treaty providing for noninterference
in internal affairs. A number of Soviet advisers were welcomed into the country,
mainly to help modernize the Afghan army.

From 1953 to 1963 Prince Mohammed Daoud, a cousin of the king, served
as prime minister and was responsible for governing the country. Despite
Daoud's role in helping to create the nonaligned movement, Soviet influence
in the country became more and more pronounced as time passed, and Soviet
officials were gradually assigned to key positions in the Afghan army and civil
service. Economic accords were almost invariably slanted in favor of the Soviet
Union, despite efforts by Prince Daoud to move closer to the United States. In
1963 Daoud was sidelined by Zahir Shah, who over the next ten years
attempted to transform Afghanistan into a constitutional monarchy. Political
parties were legalized, and the first free elections took place in 1965. A second
round of elections followed in 1969. On both occasions the results favored the
local nobility and groups supporting the government. Afghanistan was slowly
becoming westernized and more modern, although the country was not yet
close to a true democracy. As Michael Barry noted, "The regime was far
from perfect: it was high-handed, privileged, and often corrupt. But it was
a long way from being the barbarous regime that the Afghan Communists
claimed it had been. The royal family had outlawed torture back in 1905,
and even the corporal punishments normal under Koranic law had fallen
into disuse. In that respect, the Communist regime represented a serious step
backward." 9

The Afghan Communists

Zahir Shah's democratization allowed the Afghan Communist Party, which
had long been an underground organization, finally to come into the open. The

Communism in Afghanistan

709

Communists took part in elections in the 1960s under the name of the Demo-
cratic Party of the People of Afghanistan (DPPA). The DPPA held a congress
in early 1965 at which the Soviet-backed candidate, Nur-Mohammed Taraki,
was elected secretary general. However, serious tribal divisions and personal
rivalries swirled behind the facade of Party unity. One DPPA founder, Babrak
Karmal, was an aristocrat from the royal family: "Karmal" was a pseudonym
meaning "friend of the workers"; his real name was Mohammed Hussein
Khan. According to a KGB defector, Karmal was for many years a KGB
informer. 10 Nur-Mohammed Taraki, the other founder of the Party, was the
son of a wealthy peasant from a village in the province of Ghazni. He was a
Pushtun who had gained high government office thanks to his knowledge of
English. Hafizullah Amin was also a Pushtun, but born in the suburbs of
Kabul into a family of civil servants. 11 In the 1965 election Babrak Karmal and
two other Communists won seats in the parliament. In 1969 Karmal was
reelected and was joined in parliament by Amin.

The DPPA was made up of two factions, the Khalq (the People) and the
Parcham (the Flag), each of which was named after its respective newspaper.
Khalq was the paper of the Pushtuns from the southeast, while Parcham was
read primarily by middle-class Persian speakers, whose project was to put into
practice the theory of the united front. Both groups were orthodox Commu-
nists and hewed very closely to Soviet policy, although the Parcham were
perhaps slightly closer to the Soviet line. The schism between the two groups
lasted from 1966 to 1976, with both sides claiming the right to be known as the
Afghan Communist Party and to act on behalf of the entire DPPA. In 1976
they reunited at Moscow's behest. The Party never had more than 4,000-6,000
members. 12 In addition to these factions of the DPPA, there were several groups
whose ideologies were oriented toward Marxism. The Shola-i-Javaid (Eternal
Flame) was a Maoist group founded in the early 1970s, which recruited most
of its members among Shiites and students. It later divided into several fac-
tions, all of which joined the anti-Soviet resistance.

From 1965 to 1973 all Afghan Communist groups systematically deni-
grated the government and the monarchy. Demonstrations became more and
more common, as did disruptions in parliament. The DPPA also began to
recruit more widely, particularly among the political elite.

The Coup of Mohammed Daoud

Daoud, who had been sidelined by Zahir in 1963, carried out a coup in 1973
with the help of a number of Communist army officers. Outside observers have
offered various interpretations of these events. Some are convinced that the
strings were being pulled by Moscow; 11 others believe that Daoud was manipu-
lating the Communists. Wherever the truth may lie, seven members of the

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Parcham faction entered the Daoud government as ministers. After the coup,
constitutional liberties were suspended, and, at the instigation of the Commu-
nists, the government unleashed a wave of repression. As one analyst noted,
"The nationalist leader Hashim Maiwandwal (who had been a liberal prime
minister of the country in 1965-1967) was arrested along with about forty
others for conspiring to overthrow the government; four of them were exe-
cuted. The official version was that Maiwandal 'committed suicide' in prison.
The widely held belief was that Daoud had him assassinated because he was
one of the few non-Communist opponents who presented the country with any
real alternative" 14 Torture and terror became commonplace, and the sinister
Pol-e-Charki prison was opened in 1974.

In 1975, however, Daoud got rid of the Communists and signed new
commercial agreements not only with Eastern-bloc countries, but also with Iran
and India. Relations with the US.S.R. deteriorated, and during an official visit
to the US.S.R., Daoud quarreled with Brezhnev and began openly promoting
the economic independence of his country. Thereafter his days were numbered,
and he was toppled in a coup on 27 April 1978. Barry describes the situation
in the country on the eve of the coup as follows: u Pre-1978 Afghanistan was a
secular state, with little time for Muslim extremism, officially neutral, accom-
modating toward the Soviet Union, and not questioning either its borders or
its relations with other Muslim states ... To say that the US.S.R. acted to
block the rise of Muslim extremism is simply not true: by overthrowing Daoud,
the US.S.R. instead aided the rise of Muslim extremists, whose strength it had
perhaps rather underestimated. Quite clearly the Soviets aided the Communist
coup d'etat to ensure that Afghanistan did not escape their clutches at the last
minute/

"15

The April 1978 Coup, or "Saour Revolution"

The incident that provoked the Communist coup d'etat was the assassination
of Mir-Akbar Khaybar, one of the founders of the DPPA, on 17 April 1978 in
circumstances that remain mysterious. One theory put forward after the Par-
cham had seized power is that he was eliminated by agents from the Khalq led
by Hafizullah Amin. Another theory is that it was the work of Mohammed
Najibullah, the future leader of the Afghan secret service, with help from the
Soviet secret services. 16 The immediate result of the assassination was the
staging of a large Communist demonstration, followed by the overthrow of
Daoud's government. The seizure of power does appear to have been premedi-
tated. Amin, head of the Khalqs, who were particularly well represented in the
military, was planning a coup that was to take place in April 1980. ,7 The spread
of Communism in Afghanistan had been brought about through the methods

Communism in Afghanistan

711

developed in Spain and then used in other ''people's democracies." First, Party
members sought high-ranking positions in industry, the army, and the civil
service. This infiltration was followed by the actual seizure of power in the
"Saour [Bull] Revolution" of April 1978. Daoud's attempts to outmaneuver
the Communists, together with the assassination of Mir-Akbar Khaybar,
merely accelerated the process. Shortly after the assassination, Communist
demonstrations became more and more widespread. Daoud ordered the main
Communist leaders to be arrested or kept under close watch. Amin was also
placed under house arrest, but he was secretly aided by the policemen sent to
guard him, who apparently were members of the DPPA. As a result, he was
able to organize the whole coup from his home. 18

The presidential palace was attacked with tanks and planes on 27 April
1978. Daoud, his family, and the presidential guard refused to surrender. The
president and seventeen members of his family were killed the following day.
The first purge of non-Communist members of the military took place on 29
April. In the coup's aftermath, repressions of the old regime's supporters led
to the death of about 10,000 people and the imprisonment of between 14,000
and 20,000 for political reasons. |y

The new government was proclaimed on 30 April. Nur-Mohammed
Taraki, a Khalq, was named president of the Democratic Republic of Afghani-
stan; Babrak Karmal, of the Parcham faction, was named vice president and
deputy prime minister; and Hafizullah Amin, a Khalq, was named second vice
president and foreign minister. The Soviet Union was the first state to recog-
nize the new government, 20 and a treaty of cooperation and mutual assistance
was quickly signed. Taraki proposed a series of reforms that, according to
observers, broke with the traditional ways of Afghan society. Rural debt and
mortgages on land were abolished, school attendance became obligatory for all
children, and antireligious propaganda began to appear. Taraki was proclaimed
the "guide and father of the April Revolution." The spate of reforms led to
widespread discontent, and by July 1978 the first revolts had broken out in
Asmar, in the southeast. Political violence became widespread. On 14 February
1979 the U.S., ambassador Adolph Dubs, was kidnapped by the Maoist Group
Setem-i-Milli (Oppression of the Nation), which demanded the release of one
of their leaders, Barrudem Bahes. Bahes, however, had already been executed
by the KHAD, the Afghan security service, which was under the control of the
Soviet KGB. Officers from the KHAD tried to intervene, but ended up killing
both the ambassador and his kidnappers. 21 According to Etienne Gille, "Some
say that this operation was carried out in secret to compromise the diplomatic
situation of the Khalq regime." 22 In any case, no witnesses of the events
survived.

Shortly afterward the government began an antireligious crusade. The

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Koran was burned in public, and imams and other religious leaders were
arrested and killed. On the night of 6 January 1979 all 130 men in the Mo-
jaddedi clan, a leading Shiite group, were massacred. 23 All religious practices
were banned, even for the tiny 5,000-strong Jewish community living in Kabul
and Herat, who responded by fleeing to Israel.

The rebellion began to grow, although it lacked any real structure. It
spread fastest in the cities and from there into the country. According to Eric
Bachelier, "In every tribe and every ethnic group with its own traditions,
networks of resistance began to spring up. The resistance was the result of a
multitude of groups in permanent contact with the population, and the com-
mon link was invariably Islam.' 124 Faced with this widespread resistance, the
Afghan Communists and their Soviet advisers began to practice terror on a
large scale. Michael Barry describes one such incident;

In March 1979 the village of Kerala became the Oradour-sur-Glane of
Afghanistan; 1,700 adults and children, the entire male population of
the village, were all assembled in the town square and machine-gunned
at point-blank range. The dead and dying were thrown into three mass
graves and buried with a bulldozer. For a while afterward the women
could still see the earth move slightly as the wounded struggled to
escape, but soon all movement stopped. All the women fled to Pakistan.
They were labeled "feudal counterrevolutionaries who had sold them-
selves to American and Chinese interests" by the Afghan leaders, and
they told these stories crying with anguish in the refugee shelters. 2 "

The Afghan Communists were constantly asking for more assistance from
the US.S.R. In March 1979, severeal MiG fighters based in Soviet territory
bombed the small city of Herat, which had just fallen into the hands of
anti-Communist rebels. The army then entered the city to mop up the remain-
ing resistance. The ensuing bombardment, together with the repression that
followed the town's recapture, claimed between 5,000 and 25,000 lives out of
a total population of 200,000. There is not currently, and may never be, any
way to tell exactly how many died in the repression. 26 After this action, the
rebellion spread throughout the country, forcing the Communists once again
to ask the Soviet Union for aid. In this instance, the dissident Vladimir Bu-
kovsky reports, Soviet assistance included "special supplies, for 53 million
rubles, of 140 artillery pieces, 90 armored vehicles (including 50 ambulances),
48,000 guns and rifles, nearly 1,000 grenade launchers, and 680 aerial bombs
... As an immediate response [the Soviet Union] sent 100 stocks of incendiary
gas and 150 cases of bombs, but were unable to meet the Afghan request for
chemical weapons and bombs filled with poisonous gas. They were also unable
to send pilots for the helicopter teams." 27 At the same time, terror reigned in
Kabul. The Pol-e-Charki prison, on the eastern outskirts of the city, became a

Communism in Afghanistan

713

concentration camp, 27 As Sayyed Abdullah, the director of the prison, ex-
plained to the prisoners: "You're here to be turned into a heap of rubbish."
Torture was common; the worst form entailed live burial in the latrines. Hun-
dreds of prisoners were killed every night, and the dead and dying were buried
by bulldozers. Stalin's method of punishing entire ethnic groups for the actions
of some of its members was adopted, leading to the arrest on 15 August 1979
of 300 people from the Hazaras ethnic group who were suspected of supporting
the resistance. "One hundred fifty of them were buried alive by the bulldozers,
and the rest were doused with gasoline and burned alive." In September 1979
the prison authorities admitted that 12,000 prisoners had been eliminated. The
director of Pol-e-Charki told anyone who would listen: "We'll leave only 1 mil-
lion Afghans alive- -that's all we need to build socialism." 28

While the country was being transformed into a giant prison, the struggles
between the Khalq and the Parcham continued inside the DPPA, with the
Khalq gradually gaining the upper hand. As Parcham leaders were steadily
removed from positions of power, they were sent as ambassadors to countries
behind the Iron Curtain, Babrak Karmal was sent to Czechoslovakia at the
express request of the Soviet Union. Conflicts occurred within the ruling
Khalq as well. On 10 September 1979, Amin overthrew Taraki, becoming
prime minister and secretary general of the DPPA. He quickly eliminated his
opponents within the Khalq and had Taraki assassinated, although the official
newspapers stated that Taraki had died as the result of a long illness. Foreign
observers noted the presence of 5,000 Soviet advisers in Afghanistan at the
time, as well as a special visit by General Ivan Grigorievich Pavlovsky, the
commander in chief of Soviet ground forces. 2 ''

One year after the Communist coup, the situation in the country was
terrifying. As Shah Bazgar explains:

Babrak Karmal claimed that 15,000 people had died in the purges car-
ried out by his two predecessors, Taraki and Amin. The real number
was at least 40,000. Among them, alas, were two of my maternal cousins,
who died in Pol-e-Charki. One of them, Selab Safay, was a well-known
man of letters, whose poems used to be read on the radio and television.
I was extremely fond of him. My other cousin, his brother, was a
teacher. The whole elite of the country was purged. The few who sur-
vived all told of terrible Communist atrocities. The doors of the cells
would be opened, and, lists in hand, soldiers would call out the names of
the detainees. They would slowly get up. A few minutes later muffled
machine-gun fire would be heard." 10

These casualty figures include only Kabul and the other cities. Executions in
the countryside, where the Communists sought to wipe out the resistance
through a genuine reign of terror, including a bombing campaign, led to the

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death of approximately 100,000 additional people. The number of Afghan
refugees who fled these massacres en masse has been estimated at more than
50O,0O0. 31

The Soviet Intervention

Afghanistan by the fall of 1979 was deep into civil war. Despite the repressions,
the Communists were unable to enforce their authority in the country and were
compelled once more to seek assistance from the Soviet Union. This assistance
proved to be greater than Amin's government had expected. Amin had been
starting to shy away from Moscow, increasing contacts with countries not
directly under Soviet influence and even with the Americans (as a young man
he had studied in the United States). Soviet leaders decided to intervene to
reassert control. The decision was approved by the Soviet Politburo on 12
December 1979. On 25 December Operation Storm 333 was launched, and
Soviet troops crossed the borders into Afghanistan. Ostensibly they were hon-
oring the treaty of friendship and cooperation and were offering "fraternal"
assistance to the authorities in Kabul. According to a former KGB officer, U A
commando assault team from the KGB led by Colonel [Grigory] Boyarinov . . .
attacked the palace, assassinating Amin and any witnesses who could have
reported on the events.'^ 2 Before his death, Amin was given the opportunity to
retire and accept a generous pension. When he refused, he was killed and
replaced by Babrak Karmal. The new government was proclaimed in a radio
broadcast from the Soviet Union before Amin was executed. 11

There are numerous hypotheses concerning the Soviet intervention. Some
commentators view it as an attempt by Moscow to expand to the south. Others
see it as part of a project to bring stability to a region in which the expansion
of radical Islam posed a clear threat. The intervention might also be seen simply
as a case of Soviet imperialism, a further expression of the messianic character
of Marxist regimes desiring all peoples to be Communist. Another possibility
is that the Soviet government felt a genuine desire to defend another Commu-
nist state that was under attack from "agents of imperialism." 14

The first Soviet troops arrived in Afghanistan on 27 December 1979; by
early 1980 there were nearly 100,000 on the ground. The war fell into four
distinct phases. In the first phase, in 1979-1982, Soviet troops occupied the
country. The second, most difficult phase was the "total war" of 1982-1986.
Soviet retreat in 1987-1989 marked the third phase. The final phase, lasting
until 1992, began after the Soviet Army's withdrawal on 15 February 1989,
when Mohammed Najibullah became the head of state and initiated an effort
to create national unity and reform in a manner akin to Gorbachev. In 1989 the
Soviet government sent aid in the form of military technology worth 2.5 billion

Communism in Afghanistan

715

rubles. Another 1 .4 billion rubles' worth of weaponry was provided the follow-
ing year. The Najibullah government fell when military assistance ceased in
1992 after the Soviet Union's collapse. 35

Throughout this time the country was caught between two different
modes of terror: the Soviet Army practiced a form of total war and a scorched-
earth policy, while in areas not under direct Soviet attack Afghans experienced
traditional methods of terror at the hands of the Communist regime. The
systematic elimination of real or imaginary opponents took place in the special
prisons of the AGSA (Organization for the Protection of Afghan Interests).
The AGSA quickly went through various incarnations, becoming the KHAD
(State Information Service) and then the WAD (Ministry of State Security).
By 1986 the secret police organs were directly dependent on the KGB for both
finances and advisers. This method of government by terror theoretically lasted
until 1989, when the Soviet troops left the country In practice, however, it
lasted until the fall of Mohammed Najibullah's government in 1992.

Throughout rhe nine years of the war, the Soviet Army and the Afghan
Communists never fully controlled more than 20 percent of the country. They
contented themselves with the main centers of power, such as the cities, the
grain-producing areas, and the areas with gas and oil reserves — which were of
course inevitably destined for the U.S.S.R. "The extraction of resources and
the development of Afghanistan were carried out in a typically colonial fashion.
The colony produced the primary resources and provided a market for the
industrial products of the metropolis, keeping its industry going ... In line
with the well-established Russian technique, the occupying forces made the
country itself pay for the cost of the war. The armies, tanks, and bombing of
villages were invoiced and paid for with gas, cotton, and, later, copper and
electricity." 1 ' 1 During these years the Soviet Union, with the aid of the Afghan
army, carried out what was in practice a total war. Meanwhile the Afghan army
suffered massive losses from desertions, falling in strength from 80,000 in 1989
to barely 30,000 two years later. In 1982 all reserves were called up, and in
March of the following year general mobilization was decreed for all men aged
eighteen and over. Children were also forcibly conscripted at age fifteen.

Aside from elite units of special operations (Spetsnaz) forces, the Soviet
soldiers sent to Afghanistan were primarily from the western peripheral repub-
lics, including Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. They replaced the
contingents of troops based in Central Asia, whom the Soviet government may
have seen as potentially susceptible to a radical form of Islam. More than
600,000 troops were sent to the country, and 14,751 of them died in the war. n
Their bodies were rarely returned to their families, and many were not even
brought back to the U.S.S.R. The sealed, lead-lined coffins that were sent to the
families usually held nothing but sand or sometimes the bodies of unidentified

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soldiers.^ 8 Demoralized by this war that had no name, countless soldiers fell
prey to alcoholism and drug abuse involving hashish, opium, and heroin. Some
of these drugs were supplied by the KGB. Profits from drug production in
Afghanistan were even greater than those of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle.
To be sent home, many soldiers mutilated themselves. Upon their return they
were generally abandoned to their fate, and some were sent to psychiatric
hospitals. 39 Many others drifted into a life of crime. The war also gave birth to
a number of right-wing nationalist groups, most notably the ultra right-wing
and antisemitic Pamyat group, to which the KGB turned a blind eye. 40

The Afghan resistance gathered strength in the face of the Soviet invasion,
growing to between 60,000 and 200,000 fighters. With support from a majority
of the population, the Afghan resistance consisted of seven Sunni parties,
whose headquarters were in Pakistan, and eight Shiite groups, with bases in
Iran. 41 All claimed some basis in radical or moderate Islam. The resistance also
had the support of the US. government, which supplied the guerrillas with
arms, including surface-to-air Stinger missiles, which deterred low-level aerial
attacks by Soviet bombers, thus foiling one of the key elements in the Soviet
war effort. Other than aerial bombardment, the Soviet Army's main strategy
had been simply one of terror. Any person or village suspected of assisting the
resistance in the smallest degree suffered immediate reprisals. Repression was
constant and omnipresent.

The atrocities committed were those to be found in all large-scale wars,
and the violence born of total war and constant attrition spread throughout the
country. 42 The Afghan resistance also carried out atrocities, likewise barbaric
and inexcusable. Unlike other conflicts, notably the war in Vietnam, to which
Afghanistan was often compared, the war received very little attention from the
world press, and very few pictures of the conflict were ever released. The
Afghan resistance was in fact waging a general insurrection in response to both
the Communist coup d'etat and the invasion from abroad. The powers who
supported the resistance fighters paid scant attention to the extent of their
respect for human rights and on occasion supported some extremely unsavory
groups. But on the whole, responsibility for the origins of the conflict must rest
with the Communists and their Soviet allies. Government by mass terror and
the system of coercion established by the Communists in Afghanistan were
constants in the history of the Communist movement.

The Scale of Repression

The Refugee Problem

The number of refugees grew constantly. At the end of 1980, it was estimated
that more than I million refugees had fled Afghanistan. Eighty percent of the

Communism in Afghanistan

717

intellectuals had left by mid-1982. Early in 1983 there were more than 3 mil-
lion refugees out of a total prewar population of 15.5 million. In 1984 the
number passed 4 million, 41 and it reached 5 million in the early 1990s. In
addition to those who had left the country, there were 2 million internal refu-
gees who were forced to leave their villages to escape the war and repression.
According to Amnesty International, the refugees who left Afghanistan were
"the largest refugee group in the world." 44 More than two-thirds of all refugees
fled to Pakistan; most of the rest went to Iran; a tiny number reached Western
Europe or the United States. Michael Barry recalled that "in the autumn of
1985, during a secret mission on horseback in four provinces in eastern and
central Afghanistan on behalf of the International Federation for the Rights of
Man, the Swedish doctor Johann Lagerfelt and I made a survey of twenty-
three villages and found that 56.3 percent of the population had been dis-
placed." 45 Over the whole territory, more than half the population was forced
to move as a direct consequence of the politics of terror deployed by the Soviet
Army and its Afghan assistants.

War Crimes and the Destruction of Villages

From the outset, Soviet attacks were concentrated in four areas: along the
border; in the Panjshir valley; in the Kandahar region, in the south of the
country; and in Herat, in the east; the last two zones were occupied in February
1982. The totaFwar strategy pursued by the Soviet army received swift con-
demnation in 1981 from the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal in Stockholm and
London, heir to the "Russell Tribunals" (the International War Crimes Tribu-
nals) that had been ''inspired directly by the Nuremberg tribunals, of which
they are a legal offshoot." 46 The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal began an inves-
tigation into one case of mass killing. It was entrusted to Michael Barry, a
specialist in Afghan affairs; to a legal expert, Ricardo Fraile; and to a photogra-
pher, Michel Baret. The investigation confirmed that on 13 September 1982 in
Padkhwab-e Shana (south of Kabul, in Logar Province), 105 villagers who
were hiding in an underground irrigation canal were burned alive by Soviet
troops. The investigators determined that the Soviet troops had killed the
Afghans with a combination of gasoline, pentrite, and dinitrotoluene (a highly
combustible substance) from pipes plugged into tankers that they had brought
in. This crime received official condemnation at a session of the Peoples'
Tribunal held at the Sorbonne on 2D December 1982. The representative of
the Afghan government in Paris claimed that the tribunal was an instrument of
imperialism and denied the crime, arguing that "the ceilings inside the Afghan
kdriz [water pipes] are only a few centimeters high, and it would be impossible
for humans to fit inside," 47

In the village of Khasham Kala, also in Logar Province, 100 civilians, who

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had put up no resistance at all, died in the same manner. 48 Whenever the Soviet
troops entered a village, they brought terror with them, as one observer de-
scribed: "The convoy stops within sight of a village. After an artillery barrage,
all the exits are blocked; then the soldiers enter the village in armored vehicles
looking for 'enemies.' All too often, and there are innumerable reports of this,
the searching of villages is accompanied by acts of blind barbarism, with
women and old men killed if they show any sign of fear. Soldiers, Afghans as
well as Soviets, steal radios and carpets, and tear jewelry off the women." War
crimes and acts of savagery recurred with monotonous regularity: "Soviet
soldiers poured kerosene over the arms of one boy and set fire to him in front
of his parents to punish them for refusing to hand over any information.
Villagers were forced to stand barefoot in the snow in freezing temperatures to
force them to talk." One soldier explained: a We never took prisoners of war,
not a single one. We just killed the prisoners wherever we found them ... If
we were on a punitive expedition, we didn't shoot the women and children with
bullets. We just locked them in a room and threw in a few grenades." 49

The intention was to sow terror, to cow the population into submission,
and to prevent Afghan civilians from helping the resistance. Reprisal operations
were always carried out in the same spirit. Women were thrown naked from
helicopters, and entire villages were destroyed to avenge the death of one Soviet
soldier. Observers recalled that "after an attack on a convoy near the village of
Muchkizai in the region of Kandahar, the population of the villages of
Kolchabad, Muchkizai, and Timur Qalacha was massacred on 13 October 1983
in a reprisal operation. There were 126 dead in total: 40 in Timur Qalacha (i.e.,
the entire village), 51 in Kolchabad, and 35 in Muchkizai. Most of the victims
were women and children — 50 women aged twenty to thirty-two, and 26 chil-
dren. All the young men had left the villages as soon as the convoys arrived, to
avoid conscription." 50 Villages were also systematically bombed to prevent the
resistance forces from launching any sort of counterattack. On 17 April 1985,
for instance, Soviet troops destroyed villages to wipe out resistance bases in
Laghman Province, killing nearly 1,000 people. On 28 May 1985, having
"cleansed" the villages, the Soviet Army left the Laghman-Kounar zone. 51

International conventions were systematically violated. All evidence sug-
gests that poison gases of various types were used regularly against the civilian
population. There are numerous reports of the use of toxic gases, tear gas, and
asphyxiants. Napalm and phosphor gas were used intensively during the bom-
bardment of the Afghan countryside by the Soviet air force. 52 On 1 December
1982 neurotoxic gases were allegedly used against the Afghan resistance, result-
ing in an unknown number of victims. 5 ^ In 1982 the U.S. State Department
reported the use of mycotoxin, a biological weapon. The periodical La nouvelles
(['Afghanistan noted in December 1986 that "the Soviets this summer have used

Communism in Afghanistan

719

a chemical weapon in Kandahar," and Le point on 6 October 1986 noted that
deadly chemical weapons had been used in Paghman. In addition, the Soviet
army was known to have poisoned water supplies, causing the deaths of both
people and cattle. 54 The Soviet high command ordered the bombing of villages
known to shelter deserters to discourage the Afghans from showing them any
hospitality. 55 The Soviet army also used Afghan soldiers as front-line troops in
mine-clearing operations, and sent them out to test the ground ahead of Soviet
troops. In late 1988, Soviet forces used Scud and Hurricane missiles to clear
the main routes for their withdrawal. In 1989 Soviet troops retraced the route
taken ten years earlier, making sure they controlled all the access roads to
prevent attacks from the resistance.

Before withdrawing, the Soviet Union had begun a new strategy of killing
refugees. Amnesty International remarked that

groups of men, women, and children fleeing their villages have been
subjected by the Soviets to intense bombardments as reprisals for guer-
rilla attacks. Among the cases cited is one group of 100 families from the
village of Sherkhudo, in Faryab Province, in the extreme northwest of
the country, who were attacked twice during their 500-kilometer flight
toward the border with Pakistan. In the first attack, in October 1987,
government forces encircled them, killing nineteen people, including
seven children under six years of age. Two weeks later, helicopters again
opened fire on the group, killing five men. 56

Several times, refugee villages in Pakistan that were suspected of harboring
resistance bases were relentlessly bombed, including the Matasangar camp on
27 February 1987. 57

Observers also noted the extensive use of antipersonnel mines. Some 20
million mines were laid, mainly around security zones. These mines were used
to protect Soviet troops and the industrial complexes that supplied products to
the Soviet Union. Mines were also dropped from helicopters into agricultural
areas to render the land useless. Antipersonnel mines have so far maimed at
least 700,000 people and are still a major hazard today. During the height of
the war, Soviet troops also deliberately targeted children, dropping booby-
trapped toys from airplanes. 58 Shah Bazgar described the systematic destruc-
tion of villages: "The Soviets attacked every single house, looting and raping
the women. The barbarism was worse than instinctive, and appeared to have
been planned. They knew that in carrying out such acts they were destroying
the very foundation of our society." 5tJ

The scorched-earth and total-war policies were accompanied by the sys-
tematic destruction of Afghanistan's cultural heritage. Kabul had been a cos-
mopolitan city in which "the Kabuli spirit was alive, with good humor verging

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on the risque, and a generally relaxed air toward morals and social mores far
removed from the norm in the countryside." 60 These cultural characteristics
disappeared as a result of the war and the Soviet occupation. The small city of
Herat suffered terribly from repeated Soviet bombardments and reprisals for
the general uprising that had taken place in the west of the country in March
1979. All the monuments in the town, including a twelfth-century mosque, and
the old town, which dated back to the sixteenth century, were seriously dam-
aged. Their reconstruction was stymied by the continuing Soviet presence/' 1

Political Terror

The war not only was directed against the civil population, but was accompa-
nied by political terror in the zones controlled by the Afghan Communists,
with the support of the Soviet forces. Soviet-occupied Afghanistan was effec-
tively transformed into a giant concentration camp. Prison and torture were
systematically applied against anyone who opposed the regime.

Political terror was the province of the KHAD, the Afghan secret police,
which was the equivalent of the KGB. The KHAD controlled all detention
centers and practiced torture and murder on a grand scale. Although the secret
police were officially controlled by Mohammed Najibullah, "Vatanshah, a So-
viet Tajik aged around forty . . . took charge of the torture and interrogation
service in the KHAD headquarters after Soviet troops moved into the coun-
try." 62 The Pol-e-Charki prison had been emptied after the amnesty declared
by Babrak Karrnal upon coming to power. It did not stay empty for long. In
February 1980, after Karmal imposed martial law, the prisons quickly filled
once more. Bernard Dupaigne described Poi-e-Charki:

The prison is made up of eight wings laid out like the spokes of a wheel
. . . Block 1 is reserved for people whose interrogation is completed but
who have not yet been judged. Block 2 holds the most important prison-
ers, particularly survivors of the group of Communist officials from the
faction that has lost favor . . . Block 4 holds prisoners of great impor-
tance . . . Block 3 is feared most because it is between the others and
receives no direct sunlight. It is here that the most obstreperous prison-
ers are kept. Its cells are so small that the prisoners can neither stand nor
stretch out. Overcrowding is common . . . The size of the prison was
increased in the spring of 1982 by the creation of underground cells.
These are probably what prisoners are referring to when they speak with
such fear of "the tunnels" . . . Between 12,000 and 15,000 people are
imprisoned in Pol-e-Charki. To that number we should add at least
5,000 political prisoners in the eight other detention centers and in the
other prisons in Kabul. 1161

Communism in Afghanistan

721

In early 1985 a United Nations report on the human-rights situation in
Afghanistan accused the KHAD of being an immense torture machine. The
report indicated that the KHAD controlled seven detention centers in Kabul:
"(1) Bureau 5 of the KHAD, known as Khad-i-Panj; (2) the KHAD headquar-
ters in the Shasharak district; (3) the Ministry of Internal Affairs building; (4)
the Central Interrogation Bureau, known as the Sedarat; (5) the offices of the
military branch of the KHAD, known as the Khad-i-Nezami, with two private
houses near the Sedarat building; (6) the Ahmad Shah Khan house; and (7) the
Wasir Akbar Khan house, the KHAD offices in the Howzai Bankat district." 64
The KHAD had also requisitioned 200 individual houses around the capital,
in addition to its prisons and military outposts in the major towns. 65

The UN report continued:

With regard to the nature of the tortures practiced [by the Afghan
government], the reporter's attention has been drawn to a wide range of
techniques. In his statement, a former security police officer listed eight
different types of torture: electric shocks applied to the genitals of men
and the breasts of women; tearing out fingernails, combined with elec-
tric shock; removing all toilet facilities from the prisoners' cells, so that
after a certain time they are obliged to perform such functions in full
view of their cellmates; the introduction of wooden objects into the
anus, a practice used in particular with aged or respected prisoners;
pulling out the beards of prisoners, particularly if they are old or relig-
ious figures; strangulation of prisoners to force open their mouths,
which are then urinated into; the use of police dogs against prisoners;
hanging by the feet for an indefinite period; the rape of women, with
their hands and feet tied, and the introduction of a variety of objects
into the vagina. 66

To these physical tortures should be added an array of psychological tortures,
including mock executions, the rape of a member of the prisoner's family in
his presence, and the pretense that the prisoner was to be freed. 67 Soviet
advisers took part in interrogations and assisted the executioners. 68

Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky maintain that "the KGB reen-
acted some of the horrors of the Stalinist period on Afghan territory." 69 The
KHAD employed 70,000 Afghans, including 30,000 civilians, and was con-
trolled by 1,500 KGB officers. 70

Despite the politics of terror that immediately followed the Communist
coup, resistance groups proliferated, and bombs rained down on Communist
centers. Demonstrations also took place. Students went on strike on 27 April
1980 to celebrate the coup d'etat in their own fashion. Their initial demonstra-
tion was repressed, and sixty students, including six young girls, were killed. 71
The strike lasted for one month, ending in the imprisonment of numerous

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students both male and female, many of whom were subsequently tortured.
"The lucky ones were merely expelled from their schools, on a temporary or
permanent basis." 72 Non-Communists found many opportunities barred to
them, and repression of students and teachers became ever more severe. a To
frighten the schoolgirls, the executioners would take them to visit the chamber
of horrors where resistance fighters were tortured: Farida Ahmadi saw severed
limbs scattered around one room in the KHAD building . . . These selected
victims from the student milieu were then released back into the community
to spread panic among their comrades, so that their experiences might serve as
a lesson to the others." 73

In the autumn of 1983 Amnesty International published a report and
launched an appeal to obtain the release of a number of prisoners. Professor
Hassan Kakar, who was the head of a history department specializing in the
history of Afghanistan, and who had earlier taught at Harvard, was arrested
for having helped members of the Parcham faction (even though he was not a
member of the DPPA) and for having given shelter to several others. His trial
took place in camera, with no lawyer permitted to defend him. He was accused
of counterrevolutionary activities and sentenced to eight years in prison. Two
of his colleagues, who were also professors, were sentenced to eight and ten
years in prison, respectively. Mohammed Yunis Akbari, the only nuclear physi-
cist of any renown in Afghanistan, was relieved of his duties in 1983 and
simultaneously arrested and detained without charge. Having already been
arrested on two previous occasions, in 1981 and 1983, he was sentenced to death
in 1984 and finally executed in 1990. 74 Intellectuals who belonged to research
and discussion groups whose aim was to find an end to the conflict were
systematically imprisoned. A similar fate was in store for anyone who was
deemed to present any sort of threat to the regime.

Information was strictly controlled throughout the Communist era. For-
eigners not accredited by the government were considered personae non gratae,
as were journalists and medical personnel. When arrested, they were taken to
the central prison and interrogated. They were not physically tortured because
humanitarian organizations were invariably aware of their presence in the
country and would immediately demand their release. But when they were tried
and it became clear that the prosecution's case was based on falsified evidence,
they were often forced to admit that they had been spying for foreign govern-
ments and had taken part in resistance forces, despite their presence there in a
purely humanitarian capacity. 75

Although foreigners were a nuisance, they were neither tortured nor
killed. 76 By contrast, Afghan suspects who were arrested were often tortured
and killed. Militants from Afghan Mellat, for instance, the social democratic
Pushtun party founded in 1966, were arrested on 18 May 1983 despite lack of

Communism in Afghanistan

723

proof that they had supported resistance activity. Amnesty International pub-
lished a list — to which more names were added later — of eighteen members of
Afghan Mellat who had been arrested for allegedly making public statements
in support of the rebels. Officially, between 8 June 1980 and 22 April 1982, the
government announced more than fifty death sentences for counterrevolution-
ary activity. Another seventy-seven were announced in 1984, and forty more in
1985. 77

In the summer of 1986 Shah Bazgar put together a list of more than
52,000 prisoners in Kabul and 13,000 in Jelalabad. According to his figures,
there were more than 100,000 prisoners in all. 78 On 19 April 1992 the Pol-e-
Charki prison was captured by the resistance, which freed 4,000 prisoners. In
May 1992 a mass grave was discovered nearby, containing the remains of 12,000
people.™

When Babrak Karma] was dismissed in 1986, he was replaced by Moham-
med Najibullah, a president who closely resembled Gorbachev and who usually
called himself "Comrade Najib" to avoid all reference to Allah. After assuming
power, he restored his last name in the interests of national unity. Najibullah
was a member of the Parcham and a retired physician who had been a diplomat
in Iran and was extremely close to Moscow. He had been the head of the KHAD
from 1980 to 1986 and had been praised for his work there by Yuri Andropov,
the longtime head of the Soviet KGB who went on to become general secretary
of the Soviet Communist Party. Najibullah was called u the ox" by his brother
Seddiqullah Rahi, who once compared him to Lavrcnti Beria, and claimed that
he had signed execution orders for 90,000 people in the space of six years.*'* In
addition to being the head of the secret services, Najibullah was responsible for
personally torturing countless people. One of the rare survivors had the fol-
lowing to say: "Because I had denied the accusations several times, Najibullah
approached me and dealt me several blows to the stomach and the face. I fell
to the ground. On the ground, half-conscious, I remember receiving more kicks
in the face and in the back. Blood was pouring out of my mouth and my nose.
I did not regain consciousness until a few hours later, when I was back in my
cell."

Frequently blind chance had a major role to play in the repressions. One
merchant, who had been a deputy in parliament during Zahir's reign, was
arrested by mistake, tortured, and subsequently released.

My arrest took place at about 9:30 in the evening ... I was put into a cell
with two other prisoners, a builder from Kalahan, to the north of Kabul,
and an official from Nangarhar Province who worked in the Ministry of
Agriculture. It was clear that the builder had been very badly beaten
already. His clothes were covered in blood, and his arms were badly

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bruised ... I was taken away for interrogation. I was told that in the last
few weeks I had visited Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar, and that the
purpose of my visit had been to sow discontent with the government
among the populace there ... In reality, I hadn't left Kabul for more
than six months. I protested my innocence, but as soon as I did that the
blows started to rain down ... An old-fashioned telephone was con-
nected to my toes, and they used it to give me electric shocks ... I
wasn't interrogated any more after that. Two days later one of the
KHAD men who had taken part in the interrogation came into my cell
and told me I was to be released. He said that the KHAD was satisfied
that my arrest had been a mistake. 81

Terror was also used on Afghan children. They were picked up and sent
to the Soviet Union, where they were trained as child spies to be sent to
infiltrate the resistance. Children were drugged in order to limit their inde-
pendence, and the older ones were offered the services of prostitutes. One boy,
Nairn, told Shah Bazgar:

I come from Herat. When I was eight, I was taken out of school and
placed in the Sazman [the Afghan Communist Youth organization] and
then sent to the U.S.S.R. for nine months. My father was a Communist,
and he was in favor of this. My mother had died by then, and my father
had remarried. At home, apart from one brother and one sister, every-
one was a Khalq. My father sold me to the Soviets. For several months
he got money like that . . . Our task was to be spies.

When Bazgar asked Nairn whether he had ever seen a child die, the boy
answered: "Several times. Once by electricity. The child's body sprang about a
meter up into the air and then fell to the ground. The child had refused to work
as a spy. On another occasion a child was brought before us. He was accused
of not having told on one of his comrades who had apparently placed a bomb
underneath a Russian armored car. We watched as they strung him up from a
tree. They shouted out: 'This is what happens if you don't do what you're
told!'" 82 More than 30,000 children between the ages of six and fourteen were
sent to the Soviet Union. If the parents dared to protest, they were labeled
resistance fighters and thrown into prison.

The terror touched the whole population. Every age group fell victim to this
total war and the government's repressive policies. The Soviet occupying
forces tried to stamp out the resistance by every possible means, including the
use of indiscriminate terror, the bombing of civilians, massacres of entire
villages, and the sending of countless people into exile. Hand in hand with the

Communism in Afghanistan

725

civil terror came the political terror. All the large towns had special prisons
where detainees were tortured and then usually killed.

The Consequences of the Intervention

The Communist coup d'etat and the subsequent intervention by the Soviet
army had tragic consequences for Afghanistan. In the 1960s the country was on
the road to prosperity, modernization, and democracy; Daoud's coup, which
was supported by the Communists, ended economic development and plunged
Afghanistan deep into civil war. The country was forced to make do with a war
economy, which was oriented heavily in favor of the Soviet Union. Smuggling
(of drugs, guns, and other goods) became common, and the economy rapidly
fell into ruins. The scale of the disaster is still hard to measure today. Out of a
population of approximately 15.5 million, more than 5 million inhabitants have
left for Pakistan and Iran, where they now live in miserable conditions. The
number of dead is extremely hard to determine, but most observers agree that
the war took between 1 .5 million and 2 million lives, 90 percent of whom were
civilians. Between 2 million and 4 million were wounded. The direct and
indirect role played by Communism in the growth of extremist Islamic move-
ments, and in the reawakening of tension between different ethnic groups, is
undeniable, although it may be hard to quantify. Afghanistan was once on the
path to modernity, but it has become a country in which war and violence seem
to have become the central reference points in society.

Conclusion: Why?

Stephane Courtois

The blue eyes of the revolution burn with cruel necessity.
Louis Aragon, Le front rouge

I his book has attempted to look beyond blind spots, partisan pas-
sions, and voluntary amnesia to paint a true picture of all the criminal aspects
of the Communist world, from individual assassinations to mass murder. It is
part of a more general process of reflection on the phenomenon of Commu-
nism in the twentieth century, and it is only one stage, but it comes at a key
moment, with the internal collapse of the system in Moscow in 1991 and the
consequent availability of rich new sources of information that until recently
had been inaccessible. Better knowledge of the events is indispensable, but no
matter how sophisticated our knowledge may become, it will never on its own
satisfy either our intellectual curiosity or our conscience. The fundamental
question remains: Why? Why did modern Communism, when it appeared in
1917, almost immediately turn into a system of bloody dictatorship and into a
criminal regime? Was it really the case that its aims could be attained only
through such extreme violence? How can one explain how these crimes came to
be thought of as part of normal procedure and remained such for so many
decades?

Soviet Russia was the first Communist regime. It became the heart and
engine of a worldwide system that at first established itself slowly, and then
expanded rapidly after 1945. The Leninist and Stalinist U.S.S.R. was the cradle
of all modern Communism. The fact that it became a criminal regime so

727

728

Conclusion

quickly is extremely surprising, particularly given the manner in which the
socialist movement had developed until then.

Throughout the nineteenth century, theories about revolutionary violence were
dominated by the founding experience of the French Revolution. In 1793-94
the French Revolution went through a period of extreme violence that took
three distinct forms. The most savage were the "September massacres," during
which 1,000 people were spontaneously killed by rioters in Paris, with no
intervention by the government, and no instructions from any party. The
best-known form of violence was carried out by revolutionary tribunals, sur-
veillance committees, and the guillotine, accounting for the death of 2,625
people in Paris and 16,600 in the provinces. Long hidden was the terror
practiced by the "infernal columns" of the Republic, whose task was to put
down the insurrection in the Vendee, and who killed tens of thousands of
innocent and unarmed people in that region. But these months of terror,
bloody though they were, were only one episode in the long history of the
country's revolution, which ultimately resulted in the creation of a democratic
republic with a constitution, an elected assembly, and genuine political debate.
As soon as the Convention regained its courage, Robespierre was deposed and
the terror ceased.

Francois Furet has demonstrated how a particular idea of revolution was
then born. This concept was inseparable from extreme actions: "The Terror
was government by fear, which Robespierre theorized as government by virtue.
Invented to destroy the aristocracy, it soon became the means to dispose of the
wicked and to combat crime. It became an integral part of revolution and
appeared to be the only means of forming the future citizens of the republic
... If the republic of free citizens was not yet a possibility, it must be because
certain individuals, corrupted by their past history, were not yet pure enough.
Terror became the means by which revolution, the history yet to be created,
would forge the new human beings of the future." 1

In several respects, the Terror prefigured a number of Bolshevik practices.
The Jacobin faction's clever manipulation of social tensions, and its political
and ideological extremism, were later echoed by the Bolsheviks. Also, for the
first time an attempt was made in France to eliminate a particular section of
the peasantry. Robespierre laid the first stones on the road that spurred Lenin
to terror. As the French revolutionary declared to the Convention during the
vote on the Prairial Laws: "To punish the enemies of the fatherland, we must
find out who they are: but we do not want to punish them; we want to destroy
them." 2

Yet this founding moment of terror did not inspire any other followers
among the main revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century. Marx him-

Why?

729

self accorded it relatively little attention. Admittedly, he emphasized and de-
fended the "role of violence in history," but he saw it more as a general
proposition than as a systematic program of violence against particular people-
There were of course ambiguities in Marx's writings that were seized on by a
number of believers in terror to justify the violent resolution of social conflict.
At the same time, Marx was extremely critical of the disastrous experience of
the Paris Commune and the resulting bloody repressions, in which more than
20,000 workers died. During the early debates in the First International, which
saw Marx opposed to the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, it was clear that
Marx came out on top. Hence on the eve of World War I, debate within the
socialist and workers 1 movements about terrorist violence seemed nearly closed.

In parallel to these events, the rapid development of parliamentary de-
mocracy in Europe and the United States represented a new and fundamental
factor for socialist strategists. Parliamentary practice enabled socialists to be-
come a genuine force within the political system. In the elections of 1910, the
French Section of the Workers 1 International obtained 74 seats. An additional
30 independent socialists were also elected, including their leader, Etienne
Millerand, who had entered a "bourgeois" government for the first time in
1899. Jean Jaures was another figure who managed to combine revolutionary
rhetoric and reforming democratic action in everyday matters. The best-organ-
ized and most powerful socialists were undoubtedly the Germans. On the eve
of World War I they had more than 1 million members, 110 deputies, 220
provincial Landtag representatives, 12,000 municipal councillors, and 89 other
delegates. The British Labour movement was also numerous and well-organ-
ized, with strong support from powerful unions. The Social Democratic Party
rapidly gained strength in Scandinavia, where it was highly active, influential
in reforms, and well represented in parliament. In general, socialists hoped that
they would soon have an absolute parliamentary majority in many different
countries, which would allow them to implement fundamental social reforms
peacefully in the near future.

This evolution found its theorist in Eduard Bernstein, one of the most
influential Marxist thinkers of the late nineteenth century, who, together with
Karl Kautsky, was one of the great interpreters of Marx. He argued that
capitalism was not showing the signs of collapse that Marx had predicted, and
that what was required was a progressive and peaceful move toward socialism,
with the working classes slowly learning the processes of democracy and liberty.
In 1872 Marx had expressed hope that the revolution could take a peaceful form
in America, England, and Holland. This view was developed further by his
friend and disciple Friedrich Engels in the preface to the second edition of
Marx's Class Struggles in France, published in 1895.

Socialists often had an ambivalent attitude toward democracy. When the

730

Conclusion

Dreyfus affair erupted in France at the turn of the century, they took some
contradictory positions: Jaures came out in favor of Dreyfus, whereas Jules
Guesde, who was the central figure in French Marxism at the time, declared
with disdain that the proletariat would do well to keep out of the internal
squabbles of the French bourgeoisie. The left in Europe was far from united,
and some currents within it — particularly anarchists, syndicalists, and support-
ers of Louis Auguste Blanqui — were still strongly inclined to reject all aspects
of the parliamentary process, often through violent means. Nonetheless, on the
eve of the 1914 war, the Second International, which was officially Marxist,
endorsed a series of peaceful solutions, relying on mobilization of the masses
and universal suffrage.

The extremist wing of the International, which had coalesced around the turn
of the century, included the most hard-line Russian socialists — Lenin's
Bolsheviks. Although the Bolsheviks were clearly descended from the Euro-
pean Marxist tradition, they also had strong roots in the revolutionary Russian
land movement. Throughout the nineteenth century one section of this
revolutionary movement was linked to violent activity. The most radical propo-
nent of violence within the movement was Sergei Nechaev, whom Dostoevsky
used as a model for the revolutionary protagonist of The Devils. In 1869
Nechaev published a Revolutionary Catechism in which he defined a revolution-
ary as

a man who is already lost. He has no particular interest, no private
business, no feelings, no personal attachments, and no property; he does
not even have a name. Everything in him is absorbed by one interest to
the exclusion of all others, by a single thought, a single passion . . .
revolution. In the depths of his being, not simply in words but in his
actions as well, he has broken all links with society and the world of
civilization, with its laws and conventions, with its social etiquette and
its moral code. The revolutionary is an implacable enemy, and he carries
on living only so that he can ensure the destruction of society-

Nechaev then set out his objectives: "The revolutionary never enters the
political or social world, the so-called educated world, and he lives with faith
only in its swift and total destruction. No one who feels pity for anything can
truly be called a revolutionary." His plan of action argued that "this whole sick
society must be divided into several categories. In the first category are the
people who are to be killed immediately . . . The second should include indi-
viduals who are to be allowed to continue living for a while, so that by their
monstrous acts they merely accelerate the inevitable uprising of the people." 4

Nechaev had several imitators. On 1 March 1887 an attempt was made on

Why?

731

the life of Tsar Aleksandr III; it failed, but the perpetrators were arrested.
Among them was Aleksandr Ilich Ulyanov, Lenin's older brother, who was
hanged together with his four accomplices. Lenin's hatred for the regime was
thus deep-seated, leading him personally to decide and to organize the massacre
of the imperial Romanov family in 1918 without the knowledge of the rest of
the Politburo.

For Martin Malia, this violent action by one faction of the intelligentsia
represented "a fantasy reenaetment of the French revolution [that] was the
beginning of political terrorism (as opposed to isolated acts of assassination) as
a systematic tactic in the modern world. Thus, the populist strategy of mass
insurrection from below, in conjunction with that of elite terror from above,
combined in Russia to lend further legitimacy to political violence over and
above the initial legitimation provided by the Western revolutionary tradition
from 1789 to 1871/ vs

This political violence on the margins of society was fueled by the violence
that for centuries had been a common feature of life in Russia, as Helene
Carriere d'Encausse emphasizes in her study The Russian Syndrome: "This
country, in its unparalleled misfortune, remains an enigma for students of its
history. In trying to shed light on the underlying causes of this age-old tragedy,
a specific — and always damaging — link has emerged between the seizure or
maintenance of power and the practice of political murder, be it individual or
mass, real or symbolic . . . This long tradition of murder has doubtless created
a collective consciousness that has little hope for a pacified political world. ,>f)

Tsar Ivan IV, known to posterity as Ivan the Terrible, was only thirteen
when in 1 543 he had his prime minister, Prince Chuisky, devoured by dogs. In
1560 his wife's death threw him into a murderous rage, leading him to suspect
everyone of being a potential traitor and to exterminate his real or imagined
enemies in ever-widening circles. He created a new guard with sweeping pow-
ers, called the Oprichnina, which set about sowing terror among the populace.
In 1572 he liquidated the members of the Oprichnina and then killed his own
son and heir. Peter the Great was scarcely more compassionate toward Russia's
enemies, the aristocracy, or the people, and he also killed his own son with his
own hands.

From Ivan to Peter, a solid tradition arose that linked progress under
absolute power to the enslavement of the people and the elite to the dictatorial
and terrorist state. As Vasily Grossman noted regarding the end of serfdom in
1861: "This act, as the following century showed, was more genuinely revolu-
tionary than the October Revolution. Emancipation shook the millennial foun-
dations of Russian life, as neither Peter nor Lenin could shake them: the
subjection of progress to slavery. " 7 And as always, the slavery had been held in
place for centuries through a high level of permanent violence.

732

Conclusion

Tomas Masaryk, a great statesman and the founder in 1918 of Czecho-
slovakia, who visited Russia frequently during the revolution and consequently
knew the country well, was quick to draw a link between tsarist and Bolshevik
violence. He wrote in 1924:

The Russians, including the Bolsheviks, are all sons of tsarism: this has
been their culture and their education for centuries. They got rid of the
tsar, but they cannot get rid of tsarism overnight. They still wear the
uniform of tsarism, even if it is back-to-front . . . The Bolsheviks were
not ready for a positive, administrative revolution. What they wanted
was a negative revolution whose doctrinal fanaticism, meanness of
spirit, and general lack of culture they could use as a pretext for any
number of acts of destruction. One thing I hold against them above all
is the pleasure they took in murder, just like the tsars before them.*

The culture of violence was not uniquely the preserve of the powerful.
When the peasant masses began to revolt, they engaged in massacres of the
nobility and truly savage terror of their own. Two such revolts that left a deep
imprint on the Russian consciousness were the Stenka Razin revolt of 1667-
1670 and the Pugachev rebellion of 1773-1775, which spread quickly and
posed a serious threat to the reign of Catherine the Great, leaving a long and
bloody scar all across the Volga region. After his capture, Emelyan Pugachev
was executed in an atrocious manner— quartered, cut into pieces, and fed to
dogs.

Maksim Gorky was a great interpreter of pre-1917 Russian culture, and
if he is to be believed, the violence emanated from society itself. He disapproved
of the Bolsheviks' methods, and in 1922 he wrote a long, almost visionary text:

Cruelty has stupefied and tormented me all my life. What are the roots
of human cruelty? I have thought much about this and I still do not
understand it in the slightest . . . But now, after the terrible madness of
the European war and the bloody events of the revolution ... I am
forced to remark that Russian cruelty appears not to have evolved at all;
its forms have remained the same. A chronicler from the turn of the
seventeenth century recorded that in his day the following tortures were
practiced: "The mouth was filled with gunpowder, and then set alight;
others have their nether regions filled with powder. Holes were made in
women's breasts and ropes passed through the wounds, and the women
were suspended by the ropes." In 1918 and 1919 the same practices were
used in the Don and the Urals; men had dynamite placed in their rear
and blown up. I think the Russians have a unique sense of particular
cruelty in the same way that the English have a unique sense of humor:
a cold sort of cruelty that seeks to explore the limits of human resistance
to suffering and to study the persistence and stability of life. One can

Why?

733

sense a diabolical refinement in Russian cruelty; there is something quite
subtle and refined about it. This quality cannot fully be explained by
words like "psychosis" or "sadism," words that in essence explain noth-
ing at all . . . If such acts of cruelty were the expression of the perverse
psychology of a few individuals, they would not concern us here; they
would be material for the psychiatrist rather than for the moralist. But I
am concerned here with human suffering as a collective entertainment
Who are the more cruel, the Whites or the Reds? They are probably
equal, as they are both Russians. In any case, history answers quite
clearly — the most cruel is the most active. ''

Despite this tradition of violence, Russia by the mid-nineteenth century
seemed to have adopted a more moderate, Western, and democratic course. In
1861 Tsar Aleksandr III abolished serfdom and established zemstvos, which
were local centers of power. In 1864 he approved judicial independence as the
first step toward the rule of law. The universities, the arts, and the press all
flourished. A civilizing current flowed through society, and violence decreased
everywhere. Even the failed revolution of 1905 had the result of stirring up the
democratic fervor of society. Paradoxically, it was precisely at the moment when
reform seemed to have conquered violence, obscurantism, and old-fashioned
ways that the process was interrupted by the outbreak of the worst mass
violence ever seen in Europe, on 1 August 1914.

As Martin Malia has written, "The burden of Aeschylus' Oresteia is that
crime begets crime, and violence violence, until the first crime in the chain, the
original sin of the genus, is expiated through accumulated suffering. In similar
fashion, it was the blood of August 1914, acting like some curse of the Atreidae
on the house of modern Europe, that generated the chain of international and
social violence that has dominated the modern age. For the violence and car-
nage of the war were incommensurate with any conceivable gain, and for any
party. The war itself produced the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik
seizure of power." 10 Lenin would not have rejected this analysis. From 1914 on
he constantly called for the transformation of "the imperialist war into civil
war," prophesying that the socialist revolution would emerge from the capitalist
war.

The violence of the world war was extreme and went on for four years, a
continuous massacre that seemed totally insoluble, leading to the death of 8.5
million soldiers. It was a new type of war, which General Ludendorff labeled
"total war," bringing death not only to soldiers but also to civilians. Yet the
violence, which reached a level never before seen in the history of the world,
remained constrained by a whole series of laws and international conventions.

The daily slaughter, often under terrible conditions — gas, men buried
alive under earth thrown up by explosions, the long agony between the lines—

734

Conclusion

weighed heavily on the consciousness of everyone concerned and weakened the
psychological defenses of the men who faced death every day. Many people
were completely desensitized by these events. Karl Kautsky, the main leader
and theorist of German socialism, returned to that theme in 1920:

The real cause of the change . . . into a development toward brutality is
attributable to the world war . . . When, therefore, the war broke out and
dragged in its train for four years practically the whole of the healthy
male population, the coarsening tendencies of militarism sank to the
very depths of brutality, and to a lack of human feeling and sentiment.
Even the proletariat could no longer escape its influence. They were to a
very high degree infected by militarism and, when they returned home
again, were in every way brutalized. Habituated to war, the man who
had come back from the front was only too often in a state of mind and
feeling that made him ready, even in peacetime and among his own
people, to enforce his claims and interests by deeds of violence and
bloodshed. That became, as it were, an element of the civil war. 11

None of the Bolshevik leaders actually took part in the war, either because,
like Lenin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev, they were in exile or because they had been
sent to Siberia, as was the case with Stalin and Kamenev. Most of them were
inclined to work in the bureaucracy or to make speeches at mass rallies. Most
had no military experience, and they had never really seen combat or the deaths
that it involved. Until they took power, all they knew was the ideological and
political war of words. Theirs was a purely abstract vision of death, massacre,
and human catastrophe.

This personal ignorance of the horrors of war was perhaps a factor that
itself engendered more brutality. The Bolsheviks developed a largely theoretical
analysis of class, which ignored the profoundly national, not to say nationalistic,
aspects of the conflict. They made capitalism the scapegoat and sanctioned
revolutionary violence against it in advance. By hastening the end of capitalism,
the revolution would put an end to massacres, even if it meant disposing of a
certain number of the capitalist leaders. This was a macabre gamble, based on
the theory that evil should be fought with evil. But in the 1920s, a certain degree
of pacifism arising from revulsion toward the war was often strongly influential
in converting people to Communism.

It is still the case, however, as Francois Furet emphasizes in The Passing
of an Illusion, that

war is waged by regimented civilian masses, who have gone from the
autonomy of citizenship to military obedience for a time of unknown
duration, and who are plunged into a raging inferno where staying alive
rather than being intelligent or courageous is the main objective, and

Why?

735

where even victory is a distant abstraction. Military service can rarely
have seemed less noble than it did to the millions of men plucked from
civilian life and trapped in the trenches . . . War is the political state
furthest removed from normal civilian life ... It is a purely instinctive
business totally removed from other interests and intellectual pursuits
... An army at war is a social order in which individuals no longer exist,
and whose inhumanity creates a sort of inertia that is almost impossible
to break. 12

The war gave a new legitimacy to violence and cheapened the value of human
life; it weakened the previously burgeoning democratic culture and gave new
life to the culture of servitude.

In the early years of the twentieth century the Russian economy entered
a period of vigorous growth, and society gradually became more autonomous.
But the exceptional constraints imposed on people and on the means of pro-
duction by the war suddenly highlighted the limitations of a political regime
that clearly lacked the energy and foresight required to save the situation. The
revolution of February 1917 was a response to a catastrophic situation and put
society on a classic course: a "bourgeois" democratic revolution with the elec-
tion of a constituent assembly, combined with a social revolution among work-
ers and peasants. Everything changed with the Bolshevik coup of 7 November
1917, which was followed by a considerably more violent phase. The question
that remains is why, of all the countries in Europe, did the cataclysm take place
in Russia?

The world war and the tradition of violence in Russia are undoubtedly
factors that allow some understanding of the context in which the Bolsheviks
seized power; but they do not explain the Bolsheviks' propensity for extreme
violence. This violence was apparent from the outset, all the more so in com-
parison with the largely peaceful and democratic February revolution. This
violence was imposed on the Party by Lenin himself as soon as it seized power.

Lenin established a dictatorship that quickly revealed itself to be both
bloody and terrorist in nature. Revolutionary violence no longer appeared to be
a reactive defense mechanism against tsarist forces, since the latter had disap-
peared months before, but an active process that reawakened the old Russian
culture of brutality and cruelty, sparking the latent violence of social revolution.
Although the Red Terror was not officially inaugurated until 2 September 1918,
it existed in practice from November 1917. Lenin employed it despite the
absence of any genuine manifestation of overt opposition from other parties
and social movements. For example, on 4 January 1918 he broke up the first
Constituent Assembly, which had been elected by universal suffrage, and
opened fire on anyone who protested in the streets.

The first phase of the terror was immediately and forcefully denounced

736

Conclusion

by a leading Russian socialist, Yuri Martov, the head of the Mensheviks, who
wrote in August 1918:

From the first day of their coming into power, having proclaimed the
abolition of the death penalty, the Bolsheviks began to kill. They killed
prisoners captured in the battles of the civil war. They killed enemies
who surrendered on the condition that their lives would be spared . . .
These wholesale murders, organized at the instigation of the Bolsheviks,
were followed by murders at the direct behest of the Bolshevik govern-
ment . . . Having assassinated tens of thousands of men without trial,
the Bolsheviks started their executions by verdicts of the courts. They
established a supreme revolutionary tribunal to convict enemies of the
Soviet regime. ]}

Martov had a dark premonition:

The beast has licked hot human blood. The man-killing machine is
brought into motion. Messrs. Medvedev, Bruno, Peterson, Veselovsky,
and Karelin [the judges of the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal] have
turned up their sleeves and set to work as butchers . . . But blood breeds
blood. The reign of terror established by the Bolsheviks since October
1917 has filled the air of Russian fields with vapors of human blood. We
witness the growth of the bitterness of the civil war, the growing besti-
ality of men engaged in it. The great principles of true humanity that
formed the basis of socialist teachings have sunk into oblivion.

Martov then went on to attack Karl Radek and Christian Rakovsky, two social-
ists who had joined the Bolsheviks, one of whom was a Polish Jew, the other a
mixture of Romanian and Bulgarian: u You came to us to cultivate our ancestral
barbarism, long nurtured by the tsars, and to place offerings on the antique
Russian altar to murder, to elevate disdain for the life of others to a degree the
like of which has never been seen; you came to bring the rule of the execution-
ers throughout the country . . . The executioner is now again the chief figure
in Russia!"

Unlike the terror of the French Revolution, which with the exception of
the Vendee touched only a small section of the population, terror under Lenin
was directed at all political parties and at all the layers of society: nobles, the
bourgeoisie, soldiers, policemen, Constitutional Democrats, Mensheviks, So-
cialist Revolutionaries, and the entire mass of the population, including peas-
ants and workers. Intellectuals were treated especially badly. On 6 September
1919, after the arrest of several dozen members of the intelligentsia, Gorky
sent a furious letter to Lenin: "For me, the richness of a country, the power of
a people is to be measured by the quantity and quality of its intellectual
development. Revolution is a useful enterprise only if it favors such develop-

Why?

737

ment. Scholars should be treated with care and respect. But in trying to save
our own skins, we are decapitating the people, destroying our own brain." 14

The brutality of Lenin's response matched the lucidity of Gorky's letter:
"We would be wrong to equate the Intellectual strength of the people' with the
strength of the bourgeois intelligentsia . . . The intellectual strength of workers
and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their aco-
lytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism who think they
are the brain of the nation. They are not the brain of the nation. They're shit."
This response on the subject of intellectuals is one of the first indicators of the
profound disdain that Lenin felt for his contemporaries, even the most eminent
among them. And he quickly passed from disdain to murder.

Lenin's primary objective was to maintain his hold on power for as long as
possible. After ten weeks, he had ruled longer than the Paris Commune, and he
began to dream about never letting go of the reins. The course of history was
beginning to change, and the Russian Revolution, under the direction of the
Bolsheviks, was to take humanity down a previously untraveled path.

Why should maintaining power have been so important that it justified all
means and led to the abandonment of the most elementary moral principles?
The answer must be that it was the only way for Lenin to put his ideas into
practice and "build socialism." The real motivation for the terror thus becomes
apparent: it stemmed from Leninist ideology and the Utopian will to apply to
society a doctrine totally out of step with reality.

In that respect one may well ask exactly how much pre-1914 Marxism
there was to be found in pre-1914 or post-1917 Leninism. Lenin of course used
a number of Marxist axioms as the basis for his theories, including the class
struggle, the necessity of violence in history, and the importance of the prole-
tariat as the class that brought meaning to history. But in 1902, in his famous
address What Is to Be Done? he proposed a new conception of a revolutionary
party made up of professionals linked in an underground structure of almost
military discipline. For this purpose, he adopted and further developed
Nechaev's model, which was quite different from the great socialist organiza-
tions in Germany, England, and France.

In 1914 Lenin made a definitive break with the Second International. At
the moment when almost all socialist parties, brutally confronted with the
power of nationalist sentiments, rallied around their respective governments,
Lenin set off on an almost purely theoretical path, prophesying the "transfor-
mation of the imperialist war into civil war." Cold reason led him to conclude
that the socialist movement was not yet powerful enough to counter national-
ism, and that after the inevitable war he would be called on to regroup his forces
to prevent a return to warfare. This belief was an act of faith, a gamble that

738

Conclusion

raised the stakes of the game to all or nothing. For two years his prophecy
seemed sterile and empty, until suddenly it came true and Russia entered a
revolutionary phase. Lenin was sure that the events of this period were the
confirmation of all his beliefs. Nechaev's voluntarism seemed to have prevailed
over Marxist determinism.

If the prediction that power was there to be seized was correct, the idea
that Russia was ready to plunge into socialism, making progress at lightning
speed, was radically wrong. And this was one of the most profound causes of
the terror, the gap between a Russia that wanted more than anything to be free
and Lenin's desire for absolute power to apply an experimental doctrine.

In 1920 Trotsky predicted the turn that events were to take: "It is quite
clear that if our problem is the abolition of private property in the means of
production, the only road to its solution lies through the concentration of state
power in its entirety in the hands of the proletariat, and the setting up for the
transitional period of an extraordinary regime . . . Dictatorship is necessary
because this is a case not of partial changes, but of the very existence of the
bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this basis. Only force can be the
deciding factor . . . Whoever aims at the end cannot reject the means." 15

Caught between the will to apply his doctrine and the necessity of retain-
ing his grip on power, Lenin created the myth of a worldwide Bolshevik
revolution. In November 1917 he wanted to believe that the revolutionary fire
was going to engulf all countries involved in the war, and Germany above all
others. But a worldwide revolution did not come about, and after Germany's
defeat in November 1918, a new European order emerged that seemed to care
little for the abortive revolutions in Hungary, Bavaria, and Berlin. This was
already obvious when the Red Army was defeated in Warsaw in 1920, but it
was not admitted until 1923, after the failure of the German October. The
failure of the Leninist theory of European and worldwide revolution left the
Bolsheviks quite isolated and in a head-to-head conflict with an increasingly
anarchic Russia. In a desperate attempt to hold onto power, the Bolsheviks
made terror an everyday part of their policies, seeking to remodel society in the
image of their theory, and to silence those who, either through their actions or
by their very social, economic, or intellectual existence, pointed to the gaping
holes in the theory. Once in power, the Bolsheviks made Utopia an extremely
bloody business.

This double gap — a gap both between Marxism and Leninism and be-
tween Leninist theory and reality — led to one of the first fundamental debates
about the meaning of the Russian and Bolshevik revolution. Kautsky was quite
clear about it in August 1918: "In no case need we anticipate that in Western
Europe the course of the great French Revolution will be repeated. If present-
day Russia exhibits so much likeness to the France of 1793, this shows only

Why?

739

how near it stands to the stage of middle-class revolution." 16 Kautsky saw 1917
not as the first socialist revolution, but as the last bourgeois revolution.

Following the Bolshevik seizure of power, the status of ideology within the
socialist movement changed radically. Before 1917 Lenin had already demon-
strated his adamant conviction that he was the only one who truly understood
the doctrine of socialism and who could decode the "true meaning of history."
The outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power
appeared to Lenin as portents from above and as an incontestable confirmation
that his ideology and his analyses were infallibly correct. 17 After 1917 his
policies and the theoretical elaboration that accompanied them became gospel.
Ideology was transformed into dogma and absolute, universal truth. This con-
version of ideology into sacred writ had immediate consequences, which were
noted by Cornelius Castoriadis: "If there is one true theory in history, if there
is a rationality at work in things, then it is clear that its development should be
entrusted to specialists in that theory and technicians of that particular ration-
ale. The absolute power of the Party ... has a philosophical status; its founda-
tion is a function of the materialist conception of history ... If that concept is
true, power should be absolute, and democracy is a concession to the human
fallibility of the leaders, or a pedagogical procedure that they alone can meas-
ure out in the correct dosages." 18

This transformation of ideology and politics into absolute, "scientific"
truth is the basis of the totalitarian dimension of Communism. The Party
answered only to science. Science also justified the terror by requiring that all
aspects of social and individual life be transformed.

Lenin affirmed the verity of his ideology when proclaiming himself to be
the representative of the numerically weak Russian proletariat, a social group
he never refrained from crushing whenever it revolted. This appropriation of
the symbol of the proletariat was one of the great deceptions of Leninism, and
in 1922 it provoked the following outburst from Aleksandr Shlyapnikov, one
of the few Bolshevik leaders who really did have proletarian origins. At the
Eleventh Party Congress he addressed Lenin directly: "Vladimir Tlich affirmed
yesterday that the proletariat as a class in the Marxist sense does not exist in
Russia. Allow me to congratulate you for managing to exercise dictatorship on
behalf of a class that does not actually exist!" This manipulation of the symbol
of the proletariat was common to all Communist regimes in Europe and the
Third World, as well as in China and Cuba.

The manipulation of language was one of the most salient characteristics
of Leninism, particularly in the decoupling of words from the reality they were
supposed to represent, as part of an abstract vision of society in which people
lost their real weight and presence and were treated as no more than pieces in

740

Conclusion

a social and historical erector set. This process of abstraction, closely linked to
ideology, is another key factor in the birth of the terror. It was not human beings
who were being killed, but a the bourgeoisie," "capitalists," or "enemies of the
people." It was not Nicholas II and his family who were killed, but "the
representatives of feudalism," "bloodsuckers," "parasites," or "lice."

This transformation of ideology gained considerable weight thanks to the
Bolsheviks' swift seizure of power, which immediately brought legitimacy,
prestige, and the necessary means for taking action. In the name of Marxist
ideology, the Bolsheviks passed from symbolic violence to real violence while
establishing a system of absolute and arbitrary power that they called "the
dictatorship of the proletariat," reusing an expression Marx had once used in
a somewhat offhanded manner in his correspondence. They also began a for-
midable process of proselytism, which brought new hope and seemed to purify
their revolutionary message. That message of hope quickly resonated among
those driven by a desire for revenge at the end of the war, and among those
who dreamed of a reactivation of the revolutionary myth. Bolshevism quickly
acquired a universal relevance and attracted imitators throughout the world.
Socialism had come to a crossroads: democracy or dictatorship.

In his book The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, written during the summer
of 1918, Kautsky turned the knife in the wound. Although the Bolsheviks had
been in power for only six months and there had been only a few hints of the
dreadful massacres that were to follow, Kautsky already saw what was at stake:

The antagonism of the two socialist movements ... is the clashing of
two fundamentally distinct methods: that of democracy and that of
dictatorship. Both movements have the same end in view: to free the
proletariat, and with it humanity, through socialism. But the view taken
by one is held by the other to be erroneous and likely to lead to destruc-
tion . . . We place ourselves, of course, by asking for the fullest discus-
sion, firmly on the side of democracy. Dictatorship does not ask for the
refutation of contrary views, but the forcible suppression of their utter-
ance. Thus, the two methods of democracy and dictatorship are already
irreconcilably opposed before the discussion has started. The one de-
mands, the other forbids it. ,y

Putting democracy at the center of his argument, Kautsky continued:

A minority dictatorship always finds its most powerful support in an
obedient army, but the more it substitutes this for majority support, the
more it drives the opposition to seek a remedy by an appeal to the
bayonet, instead of an appeal to the vote that is denied them. Civil war
becomes a method of adjusting political and social antagonisms. Where
complete political and social apathy or dejection does not prevail, the

Why?

741

minority dictatorship is always threatened by armed attack or constant
guerrilla warfare . . . The dictatorship is then involved in civil war, and
lives in constant danger of being overthrown. There is no greater obsta-
cle to the building of a socialist society than internal war ... In a civil
war, each party fights for its existence, and the vanquished are threat-
ened with complete destruction. The consciousness of this fact is why
civil wars arc so terrible. 20

This prophetic analysis demanded a response, and Lenin wrote an angry
rejoinder that became famous in its own right, The Proletarian Revolution and
the Renegade Kautsky. The title was a fair indication of the tone of the discus-
sion therein, or, as Kautsky argued, the refusal to conduct a discussion. Citing
Engels, Lenin made clear what was at the center of his thought and his actions:
"In reality the state is nothing but a machine for the suppression of one class
by another." This reductive concept of the function of the state was accompa-
nied by an analysis of the essence of dictatorship: "Dictatorship is rule based
directly on force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship
of the proletariat is rule won and maintained through the use of violence by
the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws." 21

Faced with the central question of democracy, Lenin evaded it with an
intellectual pirouette: "Proletarian democracy, of which Soviet government is
one of the forms, has brought a development and expansion of democracy
hitherto unprecedented in the world, precisely for the vast majority of the
population, for the exploited and toiling people." 22 The expression "proletarian
democracy," it should be remembered, was used for decades afterward to cover
up a large number of terrible crimes.

The quarrel between Kautsky and Lenin highlights exactly what was at
stake in the Bolshevik revolution. The quarrel was between Marxism, which
claimed to be the codification of "the inevitable laws of history," and an activist
subjectivism that was willing to use anything to promote revolutionary action.
The underlying tension in Marx's writings between the messianic rhetoric of
the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and the clinical analysis of social movements
to be found in Das Kapital was transformed by the triple influence of the world
war, the February revolution, and the October Revolution into a profound and
irreparable split between socialists and Communists that brought them into
conflict throughout the twentieth century. The choices underlying the quarrel
were no less important: democracy or dictatorship, humanity or terror.

Completely in thrall to revolutionary fervor and confronted by a whirlwind of
events, Lenin and Trotsky, the two main actors in this first phase of the
Bolshevik Revolution, theorized their actions extensively. Or, rather, they
transformed conjecture into ideological conclusions. They invented the idea of

742

Conclusion

a "permanent revolution," which they based on the Russian case, in which the
bourgeois February revolution supposedly led straight into the proletarian
October Revolution. They dressed up this situation in ideological terms as the
transformation of a "permanent revolution" into "permanent civil war."

The importance of the war can be gauged by the impact it had on the
revolutionaries. As Trotsky wrote, "Kautsky sees one of the reasons for the
extremely bloody character of the revolution in the war and in its hardening
influence on manners." But Trotsky and Kautsky did not come to the same
conclusion: The German socialist, faced with the weight of militarism, was ever
more open to the question of democracy and the defense of the rights of the
individual. For Trotsky, "the development of bourgeois society itself, out of
which contemporary democracy grew, in no way represents the process of
gradual democratization that figured before the war in the dreams of the
greatest socialist illusionist of democracy — Jean Jaures — and now in those of
the most learned of pedants, Karl Kautsky." 23

Generalizing from this, Trotsky went on to speak about the "unpitying
civil war that is unfolding the world over." He believed that the world was
entering an era in which "political struggle is rapidly turning into civil war"
between "two forces: the revolutionary proletariat under the leadership of the
Communists, and counterrevolutionary democracy headed by generals and
admirals." There was a double error of perspective at work here. On the one
hand, subsequent events demonstrated that the desire for representative de-
mocracy and its realization was a worldwide phenomenon, reaching even the
U.S.S.R. in 199 1 . On the other hand, Trotsky, like Lenin, had a strong tendency
to develop general conclusions based on the Russian experience, which in any
case was often exaggerated in his interpretation. The Bolsheviks were con-
vinced that once the civil war had begun in Russia — largely because of their
own efforts — it would spread to Europe and the rest of the world. These two
major errors would serve as the justification for Soviet terror for decades to
come.

Trotsky drew definitive conclusions from these premises:

It could, and must, be explained that in the civil war we destroyed White
Guards so that they would not destroy the workers. Consequently, our
problem is not the destruction of human life, but its preservation , . .
The enemy must be made harmless, and in wartime this means that he
must be destroyed. The problem of revolution, as of war, lies in break-
ing the will of the foe, forcing him to capitulate and to accept the
conditions of the conqueror . . . The question about who will rule the
country — that is, about the life or death of the bourgeoisie — will be
decided on either side not by reference to the paragraphs of the consti-
tution, but by the employment of all forms of violence. 24

Why'

743

Trotsky's rhetoric uses many of the same expressions that are found in Luden-
dorff s explanation of the concept of total war. The Bolsheviks, who believed
themselves to be such great innovators, were in fact very much a product of
their time and of the highly militarized atmosphere that surrounded them.

Trotsky's remarks about freedom of the press demonstrate the pervasive-
ness of a war mentality:

During war all institutions and organs of the state and of public opinion
become, directly or indirectly, weapons of war. This is particularly true
of the press. No government waging a serious war will allow publica-
tions to exist on its territory that, openly or indirectly, support the
enemy. Still more so in a civil war. The nature of the latter is such that
each of the struggling sides has in the rear of its armies considerable
circles of the population who support the enemy. In war, where both
success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate
into the rear are subject to execution. This is inhumane, but no one
ever considered war^or, all the more, civil war— to be a school of
humanity. 2S

The Bolsheviks were not the only group implicated in the civil war that
broke out in Russia in the spring and summer of 1918, beginning a four-year-
long orgy of killing by all sides, with people crucified, impaled, cut into pieces,
and burned alive. But they were the only group to theorize civil war, and to
seek it openly. Under the joint influence of their doctrine and the new modes
of behavior created by the world war, civil war became for them a permanent form
of political struggle. The civil war between Whites and Reds hid a different war
of far greater significance: the war of the Reds against the majority of the
working population and a large part of the peasantry, who after the summer of
1918 began to rebel against the Bolshevik yoke. The war was not a traditional
confrontation between two opposing political groups, but a conflict between
the government and the majority of the population. Under Stalin, the war put
the Party-state in opposition to society as a whole. This was a new phenomenon,
which could exist only because of the ability of the totalitarian system, backed
by mass terror, to control all spheres of activity in society.

Recent studies based on the newly opened archives show that the "dirty
war" (the expression is taken from Nicolas Werth) of 1918-1921 was the
founding moment of the Soviet regime, the crucible in which the people who
would develop and continue the revolution were formed. It was an infernal
caldron in which the mentality peculiar to Leninism and Stalinism originated,
with its unique melange of idealist exaltation, cynicism, and inhuman cruelty.
The Bolsheviks hoped that the civil war would spread across the country and
throughout the world and would last as long as it took for socialism to conquer

744

Conclusion

the planet. The war installed cruelty as the normal means by which people were
to relate to one another. It broke down traditional barriers of restraint, replac-
ing them with absolute, fundamental violence.

From the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution, the issues raised by
Kautsky were a thorn in the side of the revolutionaries. Isaac Steinberg, a left
Socialist Revolutionary allied to the Bolsheviks, who was the people's commis-
sar for justice from December 1917 to May 1918, spoke in 1923 about a
"methodical system of state terror 1 ' used by the Bolsheviks. He posed the
central question about the limits of violence in the revolution:

The overturning of the old world, and its replacement by a new life in
which the same old evils are kept in place, a life that is contaminated by
the same old principles, means that socialism is forced to make a crucial
choice during the decisive struggle about whether to use the old-
fashioned violence of the tsars and the bourgeoisie, or to resort instead
to revolutionary violence . . . Old-fashioned violence is merely a protec-
tion against slavery, while the new violence is the painful path toward
emancipation . . . That is what should be decisive in our choice: We
should take violence into our own hands to be sure that we bring about
the end of violence. For there is no other means of fighting against it.
Such is the gaping moral wound of the revolution. Therein lies the
central paradox, the contradiction that will be the inevitable source of
much conflict and suffering.

He added: "Like terror, violence (considered both as a means of constraint and
as deception) will always contaminate the soul of the conquered first, before
affecting the victor and the rest of society." 26

Steinberg was well aware that this experiment represented a huge risk for
"universal morals" and "natural law." Gorky clearly felt the same way when he
wrote to the French novelist Romain Rolland on 21 April 1923: "I have not the
slightest desire to return to Russia. I would not be able to write a thing if I had
to spend the whole time returning to the theme of 'Thou shalt not kill' time
and again." 27 The scruples of non-Bolshevik revolutionaries and the last con-
cerns of the Bolsheviks themselves were all swept away by Lenin's and Stalin's
enthusiasm. On 2 November 1930 Gorky, who had just aligned himself with
the "genius leader" himself, again wrote to Romain Rolland:

It seems to me, Rolland, that you would judge events inside the Soviet
Union more evenhandedly if you admitted one simple fact: that the
Soviet regime, together with the avant-garde of the 1 workers, is locked in
a civil war, which takes the form of a class war. The enemies they
fight — and must fight — are the intelligentsia, who are desperately at-
tempting to bring back the bourgeois regime, and the rich peasants, who
are desperate to look after their own interests in the traditional capitalist

Why?

745

manner and are preventing the advance of collectivization. They are also
using terror, killing collectivists, burning collective goods, and the like.
War is all about killing. 28

was

Russia then entered a third revolutionary phase, which until 1953
incarnated in Stalin. It was characterized by widespread terror, which found
its strongest expression in the Great Purge of 1937 and 1938. Thereafter Stalin
found ever more groups to eliminate, targeting not only society as a whole, but
also the state and Party apparatus. This terror had no need of the exceptional
circumstances of a war to start it rolling; it came about in a time of peace.

Hitler rarely played a personal role in repression, leaving these ignoble
tasks to trusted subordinates such as Himmler, By contrast, Stalin always took
a strong personal interest in such matters and played a central role in the
process. He personally signed lists of thousands of names of people to be shot
and forced other members of the Politburo to do the same. During the Great
Terror, in fourteen months of 1937 and 1938, 1.8 million people were arrested
in forty-two huge, minutely prepared operations. Nearly 690,000 of them were
killed. The climate of civil war varied considerably, but it remained a fixture
of everyday life. The expression "class war," often used in place of "class
struggle," had nothing metaphorical about it. The political enemy was not a
named opponent or even an enemy class: it was society as a whole.

It was inevitable that the terror, whose aim was the destruction of society,
would ultimately, in a process of contagion, reach the countersociety formed
by the Party itself. Although it is true that under Lenin, beginning in 1921,
anyone who deviated from the Party line suffered punishment, the main ene-
mies had always been people who were not actually Party members. Under
Stalin, Party members themselves became potential enemies. The Kirov assas-
sination provided Stalin with the excuse he needed to begin applying capital
punishment inside the Party. In doing so he moved closer to Nechaev, whom
Bakunin had addressed at the time of their break with the following warning:
"The basis of our activity should be simple ideals like truth, honesty, and trust
among revolutionary brothers. Lying, cheating, mystification, and — of neces-
sity — violence should be employed only against the enemy . . . Whereas you,
my friend — and this is where you are most gravely mistaken — you have fallen
under the spell of the systems of Loyola and Machiavelli . . . You are enamored
of police tactics and Jesuitical methods, and you are using such ideas to run
your organization ... so you end up treating your own friends as though they
were enemies." 24

Under Stalin, the executioners eventually became victims. Bukharin, after
the execution of his old Party comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev, publicly de-
clared: U J am so happy that they have been shot like dogs." 11 Less than two

746

Conclusion

years later, Bukharin himself was shot like a dog. This characteristic of
Stalinism was to become widespread in Communist states throughout the
world.

Before exterminating his enemies, Stalin had them displayed in public in
a show-trial. Lenin had introduced this strategy in 1922, with the show-trial
of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Stalin merely improved on the formula and
made it a permanent feature of his apparatus of repression, applying it widely
in Eastern Europe after 1948.

Annie Kriegel has shown how these trials served as a terrible mechanism
of social cleansing and how, in an atheist state, the trials came to replace the
hell that religion had traditionally promised.-* 1 They also served to reinforce
class hatred and publicly to stigmatize the enemy. Asian Communism took this
procedure to its logical extreme, going so far as to organize u hate days."

Stalin added mystery to the pedagogy of hatred: total secrecy shrouded
the arrests, sentences, and fates of the victims. Mystery and secrecy, closely
linked to terror, brought terrible anguish to the entire population.

Considering themselves to be at war, the Bolsheviks installed a vocabulary of
"the enemy" such as "enemy agents" and "populations lending support to the
enemy." In accordance with the war model, politics reverted to simplistic
terms. The binary "friend/foe" opposition was applied across the board as part
of a relentless "us versus them" mentality 12 and the military term "camp"
turned up repeatedly: the revolutionary camp was opposed to the counterrevo-
lutionary camp. Everyone was forced to choose his camp, on pain of death. The
Bolsheviks thus returned to an archaic form of politics, destroying fifty years
of democracy and bourgeois individualism.

How was the enemy to be defined? Politics was reduced to a civil war in
which two opposing forces, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, were in conflict,
and the former had to exterminate the latter by any means necessary The
enemy was no longer the ancien regime, the aristocrats, the bourgeoisie, and the
military officers, but anyone opposed to Bolshevik policy. Those who expressed
opposition were immediately designated "bourgeois" and treated accordingly.
To the Bolshevik mind, an "enemy" was anyone, regardless of social category,
who presented an obstacle to the Bolsheviks' absolute power. This phenomenon
appeared immediately, even earlier than terror, in the electoral assemblies of
the Soviets. Kautsky foresaw this development when he wrote in 1918 that the
only people allowed to elect deputies to the Soviets were to be those

"who procure their sustenance by useful or productive work." What is
"useful and productive work"? This is a very elastic term. No less elastic
is the definition of those who are excluded from the franchise. They

Why?

747

include any who employ wage laborers for profit . . . One sees how little
it takes, according to the Constitution of the Soviet Republic, to be
labeled a capitalist, and to lose the vote. The elasticity of the definition
of the franchise, which opens the door to the greatest arbitrariness, is
due to the subject of this definition, and not to its framers. A juridical
definition of the proletariat that is distinct and precise is impossible to
formulate. 11

The word "proletarian" played the same role here that the term "patriot"
had for Robespierre. "Enemy" was also a totally elastic category that expanded
or contracted to meet the political needs of the moment, becoming a key
element in Communist thought and practice. As Tzvetan Todorov put it,

The enemy is the great justification for terror, and the totalitarian state
needs enemies to survive. If it lacks them, it invents them. Once they
have been identified, they are treated without mercy . . . Being an enemy
is a hereditary stain that cannot be removed ... As has often been
pointed out, Jews are persecuted not for what they have done but for
what they are, and Communism is no different. It demands the repres-
sion (or in moments of crisis, the elimination) of the bourgeoisie as a
class. Belonging to the class is enough: there is no need actually to have
done anything at all." 17

One essential question remains: Why should the enemy be exterminated? The
traditional role of repression, in Foucaults terminology, is to "discipline and
punish." Was the time of discipline and punishment over? Had class enemies
become "unredeemable"? Solzhenitsyn provides one response by showing that
in the Gulag common criminals were systematically treated better than politi-
cal prisoners. This was the case not solely for practical reasons — that they
helped run the camps — but also for theoretical reasons. One of the aims of the
Soviet regime was to build new men, and doing this implied the reeducation
of the most hardened criminals. It was also a key propaganda issue in the
Soviet Union under Stalin, as well as in China under Mao and in Cuba under
Castro.

But why should the enemy be killed? The identification of enemies has
always played an important role in politics. Even the gospel says: "He who is
not with me is against me." What was new was Lenin's insistence not only that
those not with him were against him, but also that those who were against him
were to die. Furthermore, he extended this principle outside the domain of
politics into the wider sphere of society as a whole.

Terror involves a double mutation. The adversary is first labeled an enemy,
and then declared a criminal, which leads to his exclusion from society. Exclu-

748

Conclusion

sion very quickly turns into extermination. The friend/foe dialectic no longer
suffices to solve the fundamental problem of totalitarianism: the search for a
reunified humanity that is purified and no longer antagonistic, conducted
through the messianic dimension of the Marxist project to reunify humanity
via the proletariat. That ideal is used to prop up a forcible unification — of the
Party, of society, of the entire empire — and to weed out anyone who fails to fit
into the new world. After a relatively short period, society passes from the logic
of political struggle to the process of exclusion, then to the ideology of elimi-
nation, and finally to the extermination of impure elements. At the end of the
line, there are crimes against humanity.

The attitude of Communists in Asia — in China and Vietnam — was some-
times a little different. Because of the Confucian tradition, greater allowance
was made for the possibility of reeducation. The Chinese iaogai was run on the
expectation that prisoners — described as "students 1 ' or "pupils" — would re-
form their thinking under the instruction of their guard-teachers. But in the
final analysis such thinking was even more hypocritical than straightforward
assassination. Forcing one's enemies to change their ways and submit to the
discourse of their executioners might well be worse than simply killing them.
The Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, from the outset adopted a radical policy.
Believing that the reeducation of an entire section of the population was an
impossible task (since these enemies were already too corrupt), they sought to
change the people. To this end, they carried out a massive extermination of
intellectuals and the urban population, seeking to destroy their enemies psy-
chologically by breaking up their personalities and by imposing on them a
constant process of self-criticism, which forced them to suffer acute dishonor
while still in all likelihood being subject to the supreme punishment.

The leaders of totalitarian regimes saw themselves as the moral guardians
of society and were proud of their right to send anyone they chose to his death.
The fundamental justification was always the same: necessity with a scientific
basis. Tzvetan Todorov, reflecting on the origins of totalitarianism, writes: "It
was scientism and not humanism that helped establish the ideological bases of
totalitarianism . . . The relation between scientism and totalitarianism is not
limited to the justification of acts through so-called scientific necessity (biologi-
cal or historical): one must already be a practitioner of scientism, even if it is
'wild' scientism, to believe in the perfect transparency of society and thus in
the possibility of transforming society by revolutionary means to conform with
an ideal.' 115

Trotsky provided a clear illustration of this "scientific" approach in 1919.
In his Defense of Terrorism he claimed: "The violent revolution has become a
necessity precisely because the imminent requirements of history are unable to
find a road through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy." In support of
this claim he advanced "proofs":

Why?

749

The proletariat is the historically rising class . . . The bourgeoisie [by
contrast] today is a falling class. It no longer plays an essential part in
production and by its imperialist methods of appropriation is destroying
the economic structure of the world and human culture generally.
Nevertheless, the historical tenacity of the bourgeoisie is colossal. It
holds to power, and does not wish to abandon it. It thereby threatens to
drag after it into the abyss the whole of society. We arc forced to tear
off this class and chop it away. The Red Terror is a weapon used against
a class that, despite being doomed to destruction, does not wish to
perish. ih

Trotsky thereby made history into a divine force to which everything must be
sacrificed, and he displayed the incurable naivete of a revolutionary who imag-
ines that a more just and humane society will emerge out of a dialectical
process, despite the criminal nature of the methods employed. Twelve years
later, Gorky was considerably more brutal: "Against us is a whole outmoded
society that has had its day, and that should allow us to think of ourselves as
still being in a civil war. So quite naturally we can conclude that if the enemies
do not surrender, it is up to us to exterminate them."- 17 That same year found
Aragon writing lines of poetry such as "The blue eyes of the Revolution burn
with cruel necessity."

Unlike these writers, Kautsky in 1918 faced the issue squarely, with cour-
age and honesty Refusing to be taken in by the revolutionary rhetoric, he wrote:
"To be exact, however, our goal is not socialism as such, which is the abolition
of every kind of exploitation and oppression, be it directed against a class, a
party, a sex, or a race . . . Should it be proved to us that . . . somehow the
emancipation of the proletariat and of humanity could be achieved solely on
the basis of private property, we would discard socialism without in any way
giving up our objective. On the contrary, this would be conducive to our
objective."™ Kautsky, though one of the most eminent advocates of Marxism,
put his humanism before his Marxist belief in science.

Putting people to death required a certain amount of study. Relatively few
people actively desire the death of their fellow human beings, so a method of
facilitating this had to be found. The most effective means was the denial of
the victim's humanity through a process of dehumanization. As Alain Brossat
notes: "The barbarian ritual of the purge, and the idea of the extermination
machine in top gear are closely linked in the discourse and practice of perse-
cution to the animali/ation of the Other, to the reduction of real or imaginary
enemies to a zoological state "^

There were many examples of this process. During the great trials in
Moscow, the procurator Andrei Vyshinsky, who was an intellectual with a
traditional classical training, threw himself into a veritable frenzy of animali-
zation:

750

Conclusion

Shoot these rabid dogs! Death to this gang who hide their ferocious
teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trot-
sky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great
ideals of Marxism! Let's put these liars out of harm's way, these miser-
able pygmies who dance around rotting carcasses! Down with these
abject animals! Let's put an end once and for all to these miserable
hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let their horrible
squeals finally come to an end! Let's exterminate the mad dogs of
capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet
nation! Let's push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down
their own throats!

Jean-Paul Sartre also crudely remarked in 1952 that "any anti-Communist is a
dog!" This demonizing animal rhetoric seems to support Annie Kriegel's re-
marks about the public instructive function of the rigged show-trials. As in
medieval mystery plays, everything was arranged so that the good people were
in no doubt about the real identity of the bad Trotskyite heretics or "cosmo-
politan Zionists": they represented the devil incarnate.

Alain Brossat recalls that European shivarees and carnivals had begun a
long tradition of the animalization of the other, which resurfaced in the political
caricatures of the eighteenth century. This metaphoric rite allowed all sorts of
hidden crises and latent conflicts to be expressed. In Moscow in the 1930s, there
were no metaphors at all. The animalized adversary really was treated like a
prey to be hunted, before being shot in the head. Stalin systematized these
methods and was the first to use them on a large scale, and they were adopted
by his heirs in Cambodia, China, and elsewhere. But Stalin himself did not
invent these methods. The blame should probably rest on Lenin's shoulders.
After he took power, he often described his enemies as "harmful insects," "lice,"
"scorpions," and "bloodsuckers."

During the rigged spectacle known as the "Industrial Party trial," the
League for the Rights of Man sent a protest petition signed by, among others,
Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. Gorky responded with an open letter: "In
my opinion the execution was entirely legitimate. It is quite natural that a
worker-and-peasant regime should stamp out its enemies like lice." 40

Brossat draws the following conclusions about this process of animaliza-
tion:

As always, the poets and butchers of totalitarianism reveal themselves
first of all by the vocabulary they use. The "liquidation" of the Musco-
vite executioners, a close relative of the "treatment" carried out by the
Nazi assassins, is a linguistic microcosm of an irreparable mental and
cultural catastrophe that was in full view on the Soviet stage. The value
of human life collapsed, and thinking in categories ("enemies of the

Why?

751

people," "traitors," "untrustworthy elements," etc.) replaced ethical
thought ... In the discourse and practice of the Nazi exterminators, the
animalization of the Other, which could not be dissociated from the
obsession with cleanliness and contagion, was closely linked to the ideol-
ogy of race. It was conceived in the implacably hierarchical racial terms
of "subhumans" and "supermen" . . . but in Moscow in 1937, the dis-
course about race and the totalitarian measures associated with it were
quite different. What mattered instead was the total animalization of the
Other, so that a policy under which absolutely anything was possible
could come into practice. 41

Some, however, did not hesitate to cross the ideological barrier and move
from social to racial concerns. In a 1932 letter, Gorky (who it should be
remembered was a personal friend of Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the GPU,
an organization for which his son also worked) wrote: "Class hatred should be
cultivated by an organic revulsion as far as the enemy is concerned. Enemies
must be seen as inferior. I believe quite profoundly that the enemy is our
inferior, and is a degenerate not only on the physical plane but also in the moral
sense." 42

Taking these ideas to their logical extreme, he favored the creation of the
U.S.S.R. Institute of Experimental Medicine. Early in 1933, he wrote that

the time is nearing when science will imperiously address normal people
and say, would you like all diseases, handicaps, imperfections, senility,
and premature death of the organism to be studied minutely and pre-
cisely? Such study cannot be carried out solely with experiments on
dogs, rabbits, and guinea pigs. Experiments on human beings are indis-
pensable, for what must be studied are the human mechanisms of the
functioning of the organism, intracellular processes, hematopoiesis,
neurochemistry, and all the processes that go on inside the organism.
Hundreds of human guinea pigs are required. This will be a true service
to humanity, which will be far more important and useful than the
extermination of tens of millions of healthy beings for the comfort of a
miserable, physically, psychologically, and morally degenerate class of
predators and parasites/ 1

The worst aspects of sociohistorical scientism thus rejoined those of biological
scientism.

This biological or zoological strain of thinking enables us to understand
better why so many of the crimes of Communism were crimes against human-
ity, and how Marxist-Leninist ideology managed to justify these crimes to its
followers. Considering legal decisions about recent discoveries in biology,
Bruno Gravier writes: "Legal texts about bioethics ... act as signposts about
some of the more insidious threats linked to the progress of science, whose role

752

Conclusion

in the birth of ideologies linked to terror (J. Asher's Maw of the movement 1 )
has yet to be fully recognized. The fundamentally eugenic thrust of work by
well-known doctors such as [Charles] Richet and [Alexis] Carrel clearly paved
the way for Nazi extermination and the wayward actions of Nazi doctors. ,M4

In Communism there exists a sociopolitical eugenics, a form of social
Darwinism. In the words of Dominic Colas, "As master of the knowledge of
the evolution of social species, Lenin decided who should disappear by virtue
of having been condemned to the dustbin of history." 45 From the moment that
a decision had been made on a "scientific 11 basis (that is, based in political and
historical ideology, as well as in Marxism-Leninism) that the bourgeoisie rep-
resented a stage of humanity that had been surpassed, its liquidation as a class
and the liquidation of the individuals who actually or supposedly belonged to
it could be justified.

Marcel Colin, speaking of Nazism, refers to "classifications, segregation,
exclusions, and purely biological criteria that are brought in by this criminal
ideology. We are thinking of scientific ideas (heredity, hybridization, racial
purity) and the fantastic, mitlenarian, or apocalyptic aspects that are clearly also
the product of a particular historical moment." 4 * The application of scientific
presuppositions to history and society — such as the idea that the proletariat is
the bearer of the meaning of history — is easily traceable to a millenarian
cosmological phantasmagoria, and is omnipresent in the Communist experi-
ence. It is these presuppositions that lie behind so much of the criminal ideol-
ogy in which purely ideological categories determine arbitrary separations, like
the division of humanity into bourgeoisie and proletariat, and into classifica-
tions such as petit- and grand-bourgeois or rich or poor peasant. By reifying
these categories, as though they had long existed and were utterly immutable,
Marxism-Leninism deified the system itself, so that categories and abstractions
were far more important than any human reality. Individuals and groups were
seen as the archetypes of some sort of primary, disembodied sociology. This
made crime much easier: The informer, the torturer, and the NKVD execu-
tioner did not denounce, cause suffering, or kill people; they merely eliminated
some sort of abstraction that was not beneficial to the common good.

The doctrine became a criminal ideology by the simple act of denying a
fundamental fact: the unity of what Robert Antelme calls the "human species,"
or what the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights described
in 1948 as "the human family." The roots of Marxist-Leninism are perhaps
not to be found in Marx at all, but in a deviant version of Darwinism, applied
to social questions with the same catastrophic results that occur when such
ideas are applied to racial issues. One thing is certain: Crimes against humanity
are the product of an ideology that reduces people not to a universal but to a

Why?

753

particular condition, be it biological, racial, or sociohistoricah By means of
propaganda, the Communists succeeded in making people believe that their
conduct had universal implications, relevant to humanity as a whole. Critics
have often tried to make a distinction between Nazism and Communism by
arguing that the Nazi project had a particular aim, which was nationalist and
racist in the extreme, whereas Lenin's project was universal. This is entirely
wrong. In both theory and practice, Lenin and his successors excluded from
humanity all capitalists, the bourgeoisie, counterrevolutionaries, and others,
turning them into absolute enemies in their sociological and political discourse.
Kautsky noted as early as 1918 that these terms were entirely elastic, allowing
those in power to exclude whomever they wanted from humanity whenever
they so wished. These were the terms that led directly to crimes against
humanity.

In discussing biologists such as Henri Atlan, who "recognize that the
notion of humanity extends beyond the biological approach, and that biology
'has little to say about the human person,'" Mireille Del mas-Marty concedes:
"It is true that it is perfectly possible to consider the human species an animal
species like any other, a species that man is learning to make himself, as he
already makes other animal and vegetable species." 47 But is this not in fact what
Communism tried to do? Is the idea of a "new man" not at the heart of the
Communist project? Did Communism not have a series of megalomaniacs such
as Trofim Lysenko who tried to create not merely new species of tomato or
corn but also a new human species?

The scientific mentality of the late nineteenth century, which emerged at
the time of the triumph of medicine, inspired the following remarks by Vasily
Grossman concerning the Bolshevik leaders: "This sort of person behaves
among other people as a surgeon docs in the wards of a hospital . . . His soul
is really in his knife. And the essence of these people lies in their fanatical faith
in the surgeon's knife. The surgeon's knife — that is the great theoretician, the
archphilosopher of the twentieth century." 4 * The idea was taken to its furthest
extreme by Pol Pot, who with a terrifying stroke of the knife excised the
gangrenous part of the social body — the "New People"- -while retaining the
"healthy" peasant part. As insane as this idea was, it was not exactly new.
Already in the 1870s, Pyotr Tkachev, a Russian revolutionary and worthy heir
of Nechaev, proposed the extermination of all Russians over twenty-five years
old, whom he considered incapable of carrying out his revolutionary ideal. In
a letter to Nechaev, Bakunin objected to this insane idea: "Our people are not
a blank sheet of paper on which any secret society can write whatever it wants,
like your Communist program, for instance." 49 The International demanded
that the slate of the past be wiped clean, and Mao famously compared himself

754

Conclusion

to a poetic genius writing on a blank sheet of paper, as though he genuinely
believed that thousands of years of history could simply be ignored.

Most of the mechanisms of terror discussed above originated in the
U.S.S.R. under Lenin and Stalin, but some of their features are to be found,
with differing degrees of intensity, in all regimes claiming to be Marxist in
origin. Every Communist country or Party has its own specific history and its
own particular regional and local variations, but a linkage can always be traced
to the pattern elaborated in Moscow in November 1917. This linkage forms a
sort of genetic code of Communism.

How can we possibly understand the people who took part in this terrify-
ing system? Did they have specific psychological features? Every totalitarian
regime seems to find a segment of the population that has a special calling for
such behavior, and it actively seeks them out and promotes them within its
ranks. Stalin's own case is representative. In terms of strategy, he was a worthy
heir of Lenin, capable of expediting business with ease on either a local or a
global scale. To the eyes of history he might well appear as one of the great
men of the century, transforming the weak Soviet Union of 1922 into one of
the two world superpowers, and for decades causing Communism to appear to
be the only real alternative to capitalism.

But he was also one of the greatest criminals in a century in which great
criminals have been all too easy to find. As far back as 1953 Boris Suvarin and
Boris Nikolaevsky labeled Stalin the century's Caligula, and Trotsky always
believed that he was a paranoid maniac. But more than that, Stalin was an
extraordinary fanatic with a particular talent for politics, and a man with no
belief in democracy. Stalin was the logical result of the movement begun by
Lenin and dreamed of by Nechaev: a man using extremist means to implement
extremist policies.

The fact that Stalin so deliberately engaged in crimes against humanity
as a means of governance returns us to the specifically Russian aspects of his
personality. A native of the Caucasus, he was surrounded during his childhood
and adolescence by tales of brigands with hearts of gold, and of abreks, moun-
tain dwellers who had been expelled from their clan or who had solemnly sworn
bloody vengeance — stories, in short, of men filled with despairing courage. He
used the pseudonym Koba, which was the name of one such mythical brigand
prince, a local Robin Hood figure who came to the assistance of widows and
orphans. Bakunin, in his letter disavowing Nechaev, wrote:

Do you remember how angry with me you became when I called you an
abrek, and described your beliefs as a sort of abrekt catechism? You said
that all men should be made so, and that the abandonment of the self
and the renunciation of personal needs and desires, all feelings, attach-

Why?

755

ments, and links should be a normal state, the everyday condition of all
humanity. Out of that cruel renunciation and extreme fanaticism you
now want to make a general principle applicable to the whole commu-
nity. You want crazy things, impossible things, the total negation of
nature, man, and society! 5 "

Despite his total commitment to the ideal, as early as 1870 Bakunin had under-
stood that even revolutionary action had to submit itself to a number of funda-
mental moral constraints.

Communist terror has often been compared to the great Catholic Inqui-
sition. Here novelists are probably of more use than historians. In his mag-
nificent novel La (unique dtnjhmte, Michel del Castillo remarks: "The purpose
is not to torture or to burn the victim: the aim is to ask the right question. No
terror without truth, which is its foundation. Without truth, how can error be
recognized? ... If one is certain that one possesses the truth, how can one leave
one's neighbor in error?" 51

The Church promised the remission of original sin, and salvation or
eternal damnation in another world. Marx had a redemptive belief in the
Promethean destiny of mankind. This was the messianic dream of the Great
Evening. But for Leszek Kolakowski, "the idea that the world we see is so totally
corrupt that it is beyond improvement, and that accordingly the world that will
follow will bring plenitude, perfection, and ultimate liberation is one of the
most monstrous aberrations of the human spirit ... Of course this aberration
is not an invention of our own time, but we should recognize that religious
thought, which opposes all temporal values to the force of supernatural grace,
is much less abominable than doctrines that tell us we can assure our salvation
by jumping from the edge of the abyss to the glorious heights of the heavens." 52

Ernest Renan was probably quite correct when he claimed in his Philo-
sophical Dialogues that the sure way to guarantee oneself absolute power in an
atheist society was not to threaten people with some mythological inferno, but
to institute a real hell — a concentration camp to punish insurgents and to
frighten all others, with a special police force made up of beings devoid of
conscience and entirely devoted to the government in power — "obedient
machines, unencumbered by moral scruples and prepared for every sort of
cruelty." 51

After the liberation of most of the prisoners in the Gulag in 1953, and even
after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, when some
forms of terror seemed to have disappeared, the principle of terror retained its
function and continued to be extremely effective. The memory of the terror
lived on and paralyzed people's wills, as Aino Kuusinen recalled: "The mem-

756

Conclusion

ory of the terror weighed on people's minds; no one could believe that Stalin
had really gone for good. There was scarcely a family in Moscow that had not
suffered in some way from persecution, yet no one ever talked about it. I, for
instance, would never talk about my experiences in the camps in front of my
friends. And they never asked about it. The fear was too deep-rooted in every-
one's minds." 54 If the victims carried their memories of the terror wherever
they went, their executioners were just as dependent on those memories. In the
middle of the Brezhnev period, the Soviet Union brought out a postage stamp
to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Cheka, and published a book in
homage to its memory"

In conclusion, the last word should go to Gorky and his homage to Lenin
in 1924:

One of my old friends, a worker from Sormov, a kind-hearted man,
complained that it was hard to work for the Cheka. I answered him: "It
seems to me that it's not for you. It's just not in your character 1 ' He
agreed, sadly "No, not at all." But after thinking for a moment, he
added, "But when I think about it, I'm sure Ilich often also has to hold
his sou! back by its wings and that makes mc ashamed of my weakness"
. . . Did Lenin really have to "hold his soul back by its wings"? He paid
so Little attention to himself that he never talked about himself with
others; he was better than anyone at never revealing the storms that blew
inside his mind. But he told me once as he was stroking some children,
"Their lives will be better than ours: they'll be spared many of the
things we have been forced to live through. Their lives will be less
cruel." He stared off into the distance, and added dreamily: "Mind you,
I don't envy them. Our generation will have carried out a task of tre-
mendous historical importance. The cruelty of our lives, imposed by
circumstances, will be understood and pardoned. Everything will be
understood, everything!" 56

We are beginning to understand it, but not quite in the manner that Lenin
imagined. What remains today of this "task of tremendous historical impor-
tance"? Not the illusory "building of socialism," but an immense tragedy that
still weighs on the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and that will mark
the entry into the third millennium. Vasily Grossman, the war correspondent
from Stalingrad, the writer who saw the manuscript of his magnum opus
confiscated by the KGB and who died a broken man as a result, still drew an
optimistic lesson from his experiences that is well worth repeating:

Our century is the century of the greatest violence ever committed
against human beings by the state. But it is precisely here that the
strength and hope of humanity lie. It is the twentieth century that has at
last shaken the Hegelian concept of the historical process whereby

Why?

757

"everything real is rational." It was this concept, violently debated for
decades, that Russian thinkers of the past century finally accepted. But
now, at the height of the state's triumph over individual freedom, Rus-
sian thinkers wearing padded camp jackets have dethroned and cast
down the old Hegelian law and proclaimed their new, supreme, guiding
principle of world history: "Everything inhuman is senseless and worth-
less" . . . Amid the total triumph of inhumanity, it has become self-
evident that everything effected by violence is senseless and worthless,
and that it has no future and will disappear without a trace. 57

Notes

Foreword

An earlier version of the Foreword appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 27
March 1998.

1. For the development of American historical writing on Russia and the Soviet
Union see Martin Malia, "Clio in Tauris: American Historiography on Russia," in
Contemporary Historiography in America, ed. Gordon Wood and Anthony Mohlo
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), For recent American scholarship on
Soviet history see Stephen Kotkin, "1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Con-
ceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks," Journal of Modem History, 70, no. 2 (June
1998).

2. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharm and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography,
1888-1938 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); and Moshe Lewin, The Political Under-
currents of Soviet Economic Debates; From Bukharm to the Modern Reformers (Princeton:
Princeton Univeristy Press, 1974).

3. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988), especially the editor's introduction, and her Russian
Revolution 1917-1932, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, trans. John O'Neil (Boston: Bea-
con Press, 1969).

5. Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism, trans. Valence Ionescu (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968); and Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea
of Communism tn the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

760

Notes to Pages xv-12

6. For example, Aleksander Wat, My Century; The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual,
ed. and trans. Richard Lourie, with a foreword by Czeslaw Milosz (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988); and Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler
(New York: Harper and Row, 1985).

7. Alain Besancon, Le malheur du Steele: Sur le communisme, le nazisme, et Funic ite de
la Shoah (Paris: Fayard, 1998).

8. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately, eds,, Accusatory Practices: Denuncia-
tion in Modern European History, 1 789-1989 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997).

9. For the ideological delusions of the time see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French
Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Oliver
Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, rrans. Benjamin Ivry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
The great classic of political philosophy to emerge from this debate is Raymond Aron,
The Opium of the Intellectuals, trans. Terence Kilmartin (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday,
1957, first published in French, 1995),

Introduction

1 . Raymond Queneau, Line histoire modele (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 9.

2. Quoted in Kostas Papaionannou, Marx et les marxtstes, rev. ed. (Paris: Flam-
marion, 1972).

3. Andre Frossard, Le crime conire Vhumamte (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987).

4. Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Har-
per & Row, 1972), p. 247.

5. Quoted in Jacques Baynac, La terreur sous Lenine (Paris: Le Sagittaire, 1975),
p. 75.

6. Gracchus Babeuf, La guerre de Vendee et le systeme de depopulation (Paris: Tallan-
dier, 1987).

7. Jean-Pierre Azema, "Auschwitz," in J. -P. Azema and F. Bedarida, Dtctwnnaire
des anneesde tourmente (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 777.

8. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Reflexions sur le genocide (Paris: La Decouverte, 1995),
p. 268. Moreover, Vidal-Naquet wrote, "There has been discussion of Katyn and the
massacre in 1940 of Polish officers who were held as prisoners by the Soviets. Katyn
dovetails perfectly with the definition of Nuremberg."

9. Denis Szabo and Alain Joffe, "La repression des crimes contre Thumanite et des
crimes de guerre au Canada,' 1 in Marcel Colin, Le crime contre Thumanite (Paris: Eres,
1996), p 655.

10. See the analysis by Jean-Noel Darde, Le ministere de la vente: Histoire dun
genocide dans le journal (Paris: L'Humanite, Le Seuil, 1984).

11. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the 'Thirties, rev. ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

12. Louis Aragon, Prelude au temps des cerises (Paris: Minuit, 1944).

13. Quoted in Joseph Berger, Shipwreck of a Generation: The Memoirs of Joseph
Berger (London: Harvill Press, 1971), p. 247.

Notes to Pages 12-54

761

14. Ibid.

15. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991
(New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 4.

16. Tzvctan Todorov, /. homme depayse (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), p. 36.

17. Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hess,
trans. Constantine FitzGibbon (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1959), p. 180.

18. Grossman, Forever Flowing, pp. 142, 144, and 155.

19. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, rev. ed. (Chicago: Quadran-
gle Books, 1967).

20. Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans, and ed. Strobe Talbott (Bos-
ton: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 345-348.

21. Grossman, Forever Flowing.

22. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties toward
Mankind, rrans. Arthur Wills (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), p. 125.

23. Tzvetan Todorov, "La morale de Phistorien," paper presented at the colloquium
"L'homme, la langue, les camps," Paris lV-Sorbonne, May 1997, p. 13.

24. See Pierre Nora, "Gaullistes et Communistes," in Les lieux de mernotre, vol. 2
(Paris: Gallimard, 1997).

25. Witold Gombrowicz, Testament: Entretiens avec Dominique de Roux (Paris: Folio,
1996), p 109.

26. See Piorr Pigorov,7i// quitte ma pa trie (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1952); or Michel
Koryakoff, Je me mets hors la lot (Paris: Editions du Monde Nouveau, 1947).

27. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 347-349,

28. Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twen-
tieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 501.

29. See Pierre Rigolout, Les Francais au goulag (Paris: Fayard, 1984); and esp.
Jacques Rossi, Le Goulag de A a /(Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1997).

30. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (New York: W. W. Norton,
1980); Pin Yathay with John Man, Stay Alive, My Son (London: Bloomsbury, 1987).

31. Paul Barton (pseud.), Dnstitution amcentratwnnaire en Russie, 193(J~l 957 (Paris:
Plon, 1959).

32. Bernard Chapuis, Le monde, 3 July 1975.

33. See, e.g., Ludo Martens, Un autre regard sur Sta line (Paris: EPO, 1994); and, in a
less fawning style, Lilly Marcou, Staline, vie privee (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1996).

34. Francois-Rene Chateaubriand, Memoirs of Chateaubriand, trans, and ed. Robert
Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 218.

2. The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

1. Until 1 February 1918 Russia used the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days
behind the Gregorian system. Thus what for Russia was 25 October 1917 was 7
November 1917 in the rest of Europe.

2. A. Z. Okorokov, Oklyabr' i krakh russkoi burzhuaznoi pressy (October and the
destruction of the Russian bourgeois press) (Moscow: MysP, 1971); Vladimir N.

762

Notes to Pages 55-63

Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik
Dictatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

3. G. A. Belov, Iz istorii Vserossnskot Chrezvychainoi Komtsstt, 1917-1921: Sbornik
dokumentov (From the history of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, 1917-
1921: A collection of documents) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958), p. 66;
George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin s Political Police (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1981), pp. 13-15.

4. Belov, Iz istorii VChK, pp. 54-55.

5. Ibid., p. 67.

6. D. I. Kurskii, Izbrannye stat't i rechi (Selected articles and speeches) (Moscow:
Gos. izd-vo iurid. lit-ry, 1958), p. 67.

7. E. A. Finn, "Antisovetskaya pechat' na skam'e podsudimykh" (Anti-Soviet
press in the dock of the accused), Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 2 (1967), 71-72.

8. S. A. Pavlyuchenkov, Krestyanskii Brest (The peasants' Brest) (Moscow: Russkoe
knigoizd. tov., 1996), pp. 25-26,

9. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 7.

10. V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, Na boevykh postakh fevralskoi i oktyabrskoi revolyutsii (At
combat posts in the February and October Revolutions) (Moscow: "Federatsiia,' 1 1930),
p. 191.

11. Ibid., p. 197.

12. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 16.

13. Lenin t VChK: Sbornik dokumentov 1917-1922 (Lenin and the Cheka: A collec-
tion of documents, 1917-1922) (Moscow: Politizlat, 1975), pp. 36-7; full text in the
State Archives of the Russian Federation, Moscow (hereafter GARF), 130/2/134/26-
27.

14. Delo naroda, 3 December 1917.

1 5. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Gos.
izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958-1966), 35: 311.

16. GARF, "Prague Archives," files 1-195. For the period in question see files 1, 2,
and 27.

17. Quoted in Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), p. 379.

18. u Polozhenie o ChK na mestakh" (The state of the Cheka in localities), 1 1 June
1918, B. I. Nikolaevsky Archives, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.

19. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 29-40.

20. M. I. Latsis, Dva goda borby na vnutrennom front e (Two years of struggle on the
internal front) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo, 1920), p. 6.

21. Isaac Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution (New York: Rinehart, 1953),
p. 155.

22. Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in
the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917-1922 (London: London School of Economics and
Political Science, 1955), pp. 84-86; Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October, pp. 46-47
and 59-63.

Notes to Pages 63-73

763

23. E. Berard, "Pourquoi les bolcheviks ont-ils quitte Petrograd?" Cahiers du monde
russe et sovietique, 34 (October-December 1993), 507-528.

24. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 35: 31 1.

25. Russian Center for the Conservation and Study of Historic Documents, Mos-
cow (henceforth RTsKhlDNI), J58ll10; Pavlyuchenkov, Krestyanskii Brest, p. 29.

26. Dekrety sovetskot vlasti (Decrees of the Soviet regime) (Moscow: Gos izd-vo
polit. lit-ry, 1957-), 1:490-491.

27. P. G. Sofinov, Ocherki Istorii vserossiiskot chrezvychainoi komissii (Outline of the
history of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit.
lit-ry, 1960), pp. 43-44; Leggett, The Cheka, p. 35.

28. Belov, Iz istorii VChK, pp. 1 12-113.

29. Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October, p. 159.

30. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii^ 36: 265.

31. Protokoly zasedan'u VSIK 4-sozyva, Stenograficheskii otchet (Protocols of the
sessions of the CEC in the fourth phase: Stenographic account) (Moscow, 1918),
pp. 250, 389.

32. Karl Radek, u Puti russkoi revoyiutsii" (The paths of the Russian Revolution),
Krasnaya, no. 4 (November 1921), 188.

33. Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917-
1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996),
p. 18.

34. Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October, pp. 220-225.

35. RTsKhlDNI, 17638497-98.

36. Novaya zhizn 1 June 1918, p. 4.

37. N. Bernstam, Ural i Prikamie, noyabr* 1917-yanvar' 1919 (The Ural and Kama
regions, November 1917-January 1919) (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982).

38. "Instruktsii-Chrezvychainym Komissiyam" (Instructions to local Chekas),
1 December 1918, Nikolaevsky Archives, Hoover Institution, quoted in Leggett, The
Cheka, pp. 39-40.

39. L. Trotsky, O Lemne (On Lenin) (Moscow: 1924), p. 101.

40. Novaya zhizn 16, 26, 27, 28 June 1918; Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October,
pp. 243-249; S. Rosenberg, "Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power," Slavic Review 44
(Summer 1985), 233 ff.

41. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 50: 106.

3. The Red Terror

1. L. M. Spirin, Klassy i Partii v grazhdanskoy voine v Rossti (Classes and parties in
the civil war in Russia) (Moscow: MysP, 1968), pp. 180 ^.

2. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Gos.
izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958-1966), 50: 142.

3. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/6/898.

4. GARF, 130/2/98a/26~32.

764

Notes to Pages 73-80

5. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/22.

6. Leninsky sbornik (A Lenin collection), vol. 18 (1931), pp. 145-146, quoted in
Dmitry Volkogonov, Lenin, politicheskii poriret: v dvukh knigakh (Lenin, a political
portrait) (Moscow: Novosti, 1994), p. 248.

7. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochtnenii, 50: 143.

8. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/22/3.

9. Izvestiya, 23 August 1918; George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenm's Political Police
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 104.

10. S. Lyandres, "The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: A New Look at the
Evidence," Slavic Review 48 (1989), 432-448.

1 1. Izvestiya, 4 September 1918.

12. Raphael Abramovich, The Soviet Revolution, 1917-1939 (London: Allen & Un-
win, 1962), p. 312,

13. Severnaya Kommuna, no. 109 (19 September 1918), 2, quoted in Leggett, The
Cheka, p. 114.

14. Izvestiya, 10 September 1918.

15. G. A. Belov, Iz istorn Vserossnskoi Chrezvchamot Komtssu, 1917-1921: Sborntk
dokumentov (From the history of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, 1917-
1921: A collection of documents) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958), pp. 197-
198.

16. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 111.

17. Utro Moskvy, no. 21, 4 November 1918.

18. Ezhenedeimk VChK, 22 September-27 October 1918.

19. M. I. Latsis, Dva goda borby na vnut rennom fronte (Two years of struggle on the
internal front) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo, 1920), p. 25.

20. Yu. Martov to A. Stein, 25 October 1918, quoted in V. I. Brovkin, Behind the
Front Lines of the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 283.

21. N. Bernstam, Ural t Prikamie, noyabr' 1917-yanuar 7 1919 (The Ural and Kama
regions, November 1917-January 1919) (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982), p. 129.

22. M. N. Gernet, Protiv smertnot kazni (Against the death penalty) (Moscow: Tip.
I. D. Sufina, 1907), pp. 385^23; N. S. Tagantsev, Smertnaya kazn (The death penalty)
(St. Petersburg: Gos. tip., 1913). Similar figures are arrived at by K. Liebnecht (5,735
condemned to death, 3,741 executed between 1906 and 1910; 625 condemned to death
and 191 executed between 1825 and 1905), in Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of
February /977(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 483.

23. RTsKhlDNI, 5/1/2558.

24. Lenm i VChK: Sborntk dokumentov 1917-1922 (Lenin and the Cheka: A collec-
tion of documents, 1917-1922) (Moscow: Politizlat, 1975), p. 122.

25. Leggett, The Cheka, pp. 204-237.

26. GARF, 393/89/ 10a.

27. VlasF Sovetov, nos. 1-2 (1922), 41; L. D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin's
Russia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), pp. 149 fl; Leggett, The Cheka,
p. 178; GARF, 393/89/182; 393/89/295.

28. GARF, 393/89/182; 393/89/231; 393/89/295.

Notes to Pages 83-92

765

4. The Dirty War

1 . L. G. Gorelik, ed., Goneniya na anarkhism v Sovietskoi Rossii (The persecution of
anarchism in Soviet Russia) (Berlin, 1922), pp. 27-63.

2. Izvestiya, 18 March 1919, L. D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lemins Russia
(Philadelphia: Tample University Press, 1976), pp. 151-152; G. Leggett, The Cheka:
Lenin's Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 31 1-316.

3. V. I. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social
Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 54.

4. G. A. Belov, Iz istorii Vserossnskoi Chrezvchainoi Komissn, 1917-1921: Sborntk
dokumentov (From the history of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, 1917-
1921: A collection of documents) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958), p. 354;
CRCEDHC 5/1/2615.

5. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 252-257.

6. Tsirkulyarnoe pis'mo VChK (Cheka circular), pp. 267-268, B. I. Nikolaevsky Ar-
chives, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif,

7. RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/43/2-4.

8. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 69; RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/43.

9. Leggett, The Cheka, p. 313; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 71; Petrograd-
skaya pravda, 13 April 1919, p. 3.

It). RTsKhlDNI, 17/66/68/2-5; 17/6/351.

11. Ibid., 17/6/197/105; 17/66/68.

12. Ibid., 17/6/351; Izvestiya TsKa RKP(b) (News from the Central Committee of
the Russian Communist Party), no. 3 (4 July 1919), RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/24095; GARF,
1.30/3/363.

13. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 82-85; S. P. Melgunov, The Red Terror
in Russia (London: Dent, 1925), pp. 58-60; P. Silin, u Astrakhanskie rasstrely"
(The shootings in Astrakhan), in Cheka: Materialy po deyatelnosii Chrezvuhamoi
Komissti (Cheka: Materials on the activities of the Extraordinary Commission), ed.
V. Chernov (Berlin: Izd. TSentr. biuro Partii sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov, 1922),
pp. 248-255.

14. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/11957.

15. The Trotsky Papers, 1917-1922, ed. Jan M. Meijer (The Hague: Mouton, 1964—
1971), 2:22.

16. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 289.

17. Trotsky Papers, 2: 20.

18. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 297 ff.

19. Ibid., pp. 292-296.

20. Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917-
1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996).

21. S. A. Pavlyuchenkov, Krestyanskii Brest (The peasants' Brest Treaty) (Moscow:
Russkoe knigoizd. tov., 1996), pp. 188-240.

22. Orlando Figes, "The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil
War, 1918-1920," Past and Present, no. 129 (November 1990), 199-200.

766

Notes to Pages 93-106

23. Dekrety sovietskot vlasti (Decrees of the Soviet regime) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo
polit. lit-ry, 1957-), 4: 167.

24. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p, 318.

25. Russian State Military Archives, Moscow, 33987/3/32.

26. A collection of these reports, assembled by a team of Russian, French, and
Italian historians, under the direction of V. P. Danilov, appeared in Russian at the end
of 1997,

27. M. S. Frenkin, Tragedia krestyansktkh vosstamy v Rossii, 1918-1921 (Tragedy of
peasant uprisings in Russia, 1918-1921) (Jerusalem: Leksikon, 1987); Orlando Figes,
Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in the Revolution (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989); Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines.

28. Taros Hunczak, ed., The Ukraine, 1917-1921: A Study in Revolution (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and Harvard University Press,
1977).

29. Volin (V. M. Eikhenbaum), The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921, trans. Holley
Cantine (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974), pp. 509-626; Alexandre Skirda, Les
Cossaques de la liberie (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1985); Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshe-
vik Regime, 1919-1924 (London: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 106-108.

30. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, pp. 105-131 .

31. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, pp. 333 ff; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines,
pp. 323-325.

32. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/109.

33. V. L. Genis, "Raskazachivanie v Sovietskoi Rossii" (The de-Cossackization in
Soviet Russia), Voprosy tstoru (Problems of history), no. 1 (1994), 42-55.

34. Izvesttya TsKPSS, no. 6(1989), 177-178.

35. RTsKhlDNI, 5/2/106/7.

36. Genis, "Raskazachivanie v Sovietskoi Rossii," pp. 42-55.

37. RTsKhlDNI, 17/6/83.

38. Genis, "Raskazachivanie v Sovietskoi Rossii,' 1 p. 50; RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/75.

39. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, p. 77; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines,
p. 346.

40. RTsKhlDNI, 17/84/75/28.

41. Ibid., 17/84/75/59.

42. Quoted in Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 353.

43. RTsKhlDNI, 85/11/131/11.

44. Ibid., 85/1 1/123/15.

45. Krasnyi mech (Red sword), no. 1 (18 August 1919), 1.

46. RTsKhlDNI, 5/1/2159/35-38.

47. ibid., 76/3/70/20.

48. Ibid., 17/6/384/62.

49. Ibid., 17/66/66.

50. Izvestiya Odesskogo Sovieta rahochtkh deputatov, no. 36, p. 1, quoted in Brovkin,
Behind the Front Lines, p. 121.

51. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, pp. 61-77; Leggett, The Cheka, pp. 199-

Notesto Pages 106-117

767

200; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, pp. 122-125; GARF, Denikin Commission files,
nos. 134 (Kharkiv), 157 (Odessa), 194, 195 (Kyiv).

52. Chernov, Cheka: Materialy.

53. Estimates based on Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, p. 77; and on Socialist
Revolutionary sources from Kharkiv in May 1921.

54. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sohrame sochinemi (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Gos.
izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958-1966), 42: 74.

55. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, p. 81 .

5. From Tambov to the Great Famine

1. V. Danilov and T Shanin, Krestyanskoe vosstanie v Tamhovskoi gubermi v 191 ( /~
1921 (The peasant revolt in Tambov Province, 1919-1921) (Tambov: Intertsentr: Ark-
hivnyi otdel administratsii Tambovskoi obi., 1994), pp. 38-40.

2. RTsKhlDNI, 17/86/103/4; S. Singleton, "The Tambov Revolt;' Slavic Review
26 (1966), 49&-512; Oliver Radkey, The Unknown Civtl War in Russia: A Study of the
Green Movement in the Tambov Region (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press,
Stanford University, 1976); Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Coun-
tryside in the Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

3. Danilov and Shanin, Krestyanskoe vosstanie, pp. 63-64; Radkey, The Unknown
Civil War, pp. 122-126.

4. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobrante sochmenii (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Gos,
izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958-1966), 51: 310.

5. M. Bogdanov, Razgrom zapadno-silnrskogo kttlachko-eserovskogo myatezha ([De-
struction of the west Siberian kulak-SR rebellion) (Tyumen: Polit Tyum, 1961).

6. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/208/12.

7. Ibid, 76/3/166/3.

8. V. I. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social
Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 392.

9. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/167/23.

10. P. Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp.
153-183.

11. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/167.

12. "Kronstadt, 1921," in Dokumenty (Moscow, 1997), p. 15.

13. George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin s Political Police (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1981), p. 328.

14. S. A. Malsagov, An Island Hell: A Soviet Prison in the Far North, trans. K H.
Lyon (London: A. M. Philpot, 1926), pp. 45^46.

15. "Kronstadt, 1921," p. 367.

16. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, p. 400.

17. Andrea Graziosi, "At the Roots of Soviet Industrial Relations and Practices —
Piatokov's Donbass in 1921," Cahiers du monde russe 36 (1995), 95-138.

18. Danilov and Shanin, Krestyanskoe vosstanie, pp. 179-180.

19. Ibid., pp. 178-179.

768

Notes to Pages 117-134

20. Ibid., pp. 226-227.

21. Ibid., p. 218.

22. GARF, 393/89/182; 393/89/295.

23. RTsKhlDNI, 5/2/244/1.

24. Ibid., 17/87/164; 76/3/237.

25. Ibid., 17/87/296/35-36.

26. Pravda, 21 July 1921; Mikhail Heller, "Premier avertissement: Un coupde fouet.
L'histoire de Texpulsion des personnalites culturelles hors de PUnion sovietique en
1922," Cahters du monde russe et sovietique, 20 (April-June 1979), 131-172.

27. GARF, 1064/1/1/33.

28. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/26847.

29. Heller, "Premier avertissement," p. 141.

30. Ibid., p. 143.

31. Ibid., pp. 148-149.

32. Ibid., p. 151.

33. S. Adamets, "Catastrophes demographiques en Russie sovietique en 1918-1923"
(Doctoral thesis, EHESS, December 1995), p. 191.

34. A. Beliakov, Yunost vozhdya (The adolescence of the leader) (Moscow: Molodaya
gvardiia, 1958), pp. 80-82, quoted in Heller, "Premier avertissement," p. 134.

35. RTsKhlDNI, 2/1/22947/1-4.

36. Russkaya Pravoslavnaya tserkva i kommumsticheskoe gosudarstvo, 19/ 7-1941 (The
Russian Orthodox Church and the Communist state, 1917-1941) (Moscow: Terra,
1996), p. 69.

37. Dmitry Volkogonov, Lenm: politicheskii portret; v dvukh knigakh (Lenin: A politi-
cal portrait) (Moscow: Novosti, 1994), p. 346.

38. Ibid.

39. Helene Carrere d'Encausse, The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Po-
litical Murder (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1992), p. 400.

40. Lenin, Polnoe sohranie sochinemi, 54: 189.

41. Ibid., p. 198.

42. Ibid., pp. 265-266.

43. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/303.

44. Ibid., 2/2/1338.

6. From the Truce to the Great Turning Point

1. A. Livshin, '"Lettres de rinterieur' a Tepoque de la NEP: Les campagnes russes
et Tautorite locale," Commumsme, nos. 42^14 (1995), 45-56; V. Izmozik, "Voices from
the Twenties: Private Correspondence Intercepted by the OGPU," Russian Review 55
(April 1996), 287-308.

2. Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec Rapports secrets soviet iques, 192 1- 199 1: La
soctete russe dans les documents confidentiels (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 36.

3. Ibid, p. 105.

4. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/307/4-15.

5. Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 1 1 (1988), 42-43.

Notes to Pages 134-148

769

6. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/362/1-6.

7. Ibid, 76/3/306. In a letter to Mekhlis, Dzerzhinsky noted the execution of 650
people by his services in 1924 for the republic of Russia alone (ibid, 76/3/362/7-1 1).

8. Istortya sovetskogo gosudarstva i prava (History of the Soviet state and law) (Mos-
cow, 1968), 2: 580-590.

9. RTsKhlDNI, 76/3/390/3-4.

10. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New
York: Harper and Row, 1974); Varlam Shalamov, Gram, no. 77 (1972), 42-44; A. Mel-
nik et al, "Materialy k istoriko-geografic heskomu atlasu Solokov" (Documents for a
historical-political atlas of the Solovetski), Zvenya 1 (1991), 301-330.

11. Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lermercier-Quelquejay, Les Musulmans
oublies, Llslam en Union sovietique (Paris: Maspero, 1981), pp. 55-59.

12. Ibid, pp. 53-54.

13. Markus Wehner, "Le soulevement georgien de 1924 et la reaction des Bolshe-
viks," Commumsme, nos. 42^4(1995), 155-170.

14. "Dokumenty o sobytiakh v Chechnye, 1925" (Documents concerning the events
in Chechnya, 1925), Isiochmk, no. 1 (1995), 140-151.

15. Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917-
1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996),
p. 44.

16. Ibid, pp. 44-45.

17. Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectiviza-
tion, trans. Irene Nove (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968); E. H. Carr
and R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy (London: Pelican, 1974), 1: 71-
112.

18. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, pp. 610-642.

19. Sovetskaya yustitsia, nos. 24-25 (1930), 2.

20. Werth and Moullec, Rapports secrets sovtettques, p. 355.

21. O. Khlevnyuk, Polithyuro: Mekhamzmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (The
Politburo: Mechanisms of political power in the 1930s) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996),
pp. 38-40.

7. Forced Collectivization and Dekulakization

1. N. A. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiya i raskulachwante (Collectivization and dekulaki-
zation) (Moscow: Izd-vo Magistr, 1996), pp. 32^19.

2. Ibid, pp. 49-69.

3. Andrea Graziosi, "At the Roots of Soviet Industrial Relations and Practices —
Piatokov's Donbass in 1921," Cahters du monde russe 36 (1995), 449.

4. M. Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989),
pp. 271-277; R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agri-
culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 243-251.

5. V. P. Danilov and Alexis Berelovich, "Les documents de la VCK — OGPU —
NKVD sur la campagne sovietique, 1918-1937," Cahiers du monde russe 35 (1994),
671-676.

770

Notes to Pages 149-161

6. Ibid., p. 674; Andrea Graziosi, "Collectivisation, revokes paysannes, et poli-
tiques gouvernmentales a travers les rapports du GPU d'Ukraine de fevrier-mars
1930," Cahters du monde russe 35 (1994), 437-632.

7. Danilov and Berelovich, "Les documents," pp. 674—676,

8. L. Viola, u Babii bunty" (Peasant women riots), Russian Review 45 (1986), 23^2.

9. Graziosi, "Soviet Industrial Relations."

10. Ibid., p. 462; V. P. Popov, "Gosudarstvennyi terror v Sovetskoi Rossii, 1923-
1953" (State terror in Soviet Russia, 1923-1953), Otechestvennye arkhtvy, no. 2 (1992),
28.

1 1. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatstya i raskulachtvanie, p. 106.

12. Danilov and Berelovich, "Les documents," pp. 665-666.

1 3. Oleg KhJevnyuk, Politbyuro: Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (The
Politburo: Mechanisms of political power in the 1930s) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996),
p. 37.

14. V. N. Zemskov, "Kulatskaya ssylka v 30-ye gody" (The deportation of the kulaks
in the 1930s), Sotsiologicheskie tssledovania y no. 10 (1991), 3-20.

15. Nicolas Werth, "'Deplaces speciaux' et 'colons du travail* dans la societe
stalinienne," XXe Steele, no. 54 (April-June 1997), 34-50.

16. Ivnitskii, Kollekiivizatstya i raskulachtvanie, p. 124.

17. Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, Rapports secrets sovietiques, 1921-1991: La
societe russe dans les documents confidentiels (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 1 40.

18. V. P. Danilov and S. A. Krasilnikov, Spetspereselentsy v Zapadnoi Sibm (Special
deportees in western Siberia), 3 vols. (Novosibirsk: "EKOR," 1993, 1994), 1: 57-58.

19. Ibid., p. 167.

20. Ibid, 3: 89-99.

21. Zemskov, "Kulatskaya ssylka," pp, 4-5.

22. GARF, 9414/1/1943/56-61, in Werth and Moullec, Rapports secrets sovietiques,
pp. 142-145.

23. Danilov and Krasilnikov, Spetspereselentsy v Zapadnoi Sibirt, 2: 81-83; GARF,
9479/1/7/5-12; Werth and Moullec, Rapports secrets sovietiques, pp. 363-374.

24. GARF, 9414/1/1943/52.

25. GARF, 1235/2/776/83-86.

26. Danilov and Krasilnikov, Spetspereselentsy v Zapadnoi Sibiri, 3: 244-245.

27. GARF,374/28s/4055/l-12.

8. The Great Famine

1. A. Blum, Naitre, vtvre et mourir en URSS 1917-1991 (Paris: Plon, 1994), p. 99.

2. Quoted in F. Kupferman, Au pays des Soviets: Le voyage francats en Union
sovtettque 1917-1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 88.

3. Andrea Graziosi, "Lettres de Kharkov; La famine en Ukraine et dans le Caucase
du Nord a travers les rapports des diplomates italiens, 1932-1934," Cahiers du monde
russe et sovtetique 30 (1989), 5-106.

4. Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (London: Methuen, 1985),
pp. 206-237.

Notes to Pages 162-172

771

5. GARF, 1235/2/1521/71-78; Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, Rapports secrets
sovietiques, 1921-1991: La societe russe dans les documents confidentiels (Paris: Gallimard,
1994), pp. 152-155.

6. GARF, 3316/2/1254/4-7.

7. N. A. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiya t raskulachivame (Collectivization and dekulali-
zation) (Mosco: Izd-vo Magistr, 1996), pp. 192-193.

8. Ibid., pp. 198-206.

9. V. N. Zemskov, "Kulatskaya ssylka v 30-ye gody" (The deportation of kulaks in
the 1930s), Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, no. 10 (1991), 4-5.

10. Graziosi, "Lettres de Kharkov," p. 51.

11. Ivnitskii, Kollecktivizatsia i raskulachivame, pp. 198-199.

12. Ibid., p. 204.

13. Graziosi, "Lettres de Kharkov," pp. 59-60.

14. Ibid., p. 79. Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), pp. 267-296.

15. Presidential Archives of the Russian Federation, Moscow, 45/1/827/7-22.

16. Ibid., 3/61/549/194.

17. N. Aralovets, "Poteri naseleniya v 30-ye gody" (Demographic losses in the
1930s), Otechestvennaya tstonya, no. 1 (1995), 135-145; N. Osokina, "Zhertvy goloda
1933 — Skolko ikh?" (The victims of the famine of 1933 — How many were there?),
Otechestvennaya Istorta, no. 5 (1995), 18-26; V. Tsaplin, "Statistika zhertv stalinizma"
(Statistics of the victims of Stalinism), Voprosy istorit, no. 4 (1989), 175-181.

18. S. Merl, "Golod 1932-1933 — Genotsid Ukraintsev dlya osushchestvleniya poli-
tiki russifikatsii?" (The famine of 1932-1 933: Genocide of the Ukrainians for the reali-
zation of the policy of Russification?), Otechestvennaya tstonya, no. 1 (1995), 49-61.

9. Socially Foreign Elements and Cycles of Repression

1. Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (London: Methuen, 1995),
pp. 330-334.

2. Oleg Khlevnyuk, Politbyuro: Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (The
Politburo: Mechanisms of political power in the 1930s) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996),
pp. 40-50.

3. Ibid., p. 49.

4. Ptsma I. V. Stalina V. M. Molotovu (Letter from J. Stalin to V. Molotov) (Mos-
cow: "Rossiia molodaia," 1995), pp. 193-194.

5. S. Ikonnikov, Sozdame t deyatelnost obedmennykh organov TsKK-RKI v 1923-
1934 (The creation and the activity of the bureaus of the CCC Worker and Peasant
Inspectorate, 1923-1934) (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), pp. 212-214.

6. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 213-217.

7. N. Timasheff, Religion in Soviet Russia (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942), p. 64.

8. Nicolas Werth, "Le pouvoir sovietique et TEglise orthodoxe de la collectivisation
a la Constitution de 1936," Revue deludes comparatives Est-Ouest nos. 3-4 (1993),
41-49.

772

Notes to Pages 173-186

9. GARF, 374/28/145/13-26.

10. W. C. Fletcher, The Russian Orthodox Church Underground, 1917-1970 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

11. Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, Rapports secrets sovietiques 1921-1991: La
societe russe dans les documents confidentieh (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 291-304.

12. A. I. Dobkin, "Lishentsy, 1918-1936" (Those deprived of their civil rights),
Zvenya, 2 (1992), 600-620.

13. Lewin, Making of the Soviet System, pp. 3 1 1 -3 1 7.

14. GARF, 1235/2/1650/27-54.

15. Ibid.

16. GARF, 9479/1/19/7; Werth and Moullec, Rapports secrets sovietiques, pp. 43-44.

17. GARF, 9479/1/19/19.

18. V. Danilov and S. A. Krasilnikov, Spetspereselentsy v Zapadnoi Sibiri, vol. 3:
1933-1938 (Novosibirsk: "EKOR," 1993), pp. 96-99.

19. RTsKhlDNI, 17/120/94/133-136.

20. Khlevnyuk, Politbyuro: Mekhanizmy, pp. 154-156.

21. GARF, 1235/2/2032/15-29.

22. J. A. Getty, G. T. Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov, u Les victimes de la repression
penale dans PURSS d'avant-guerre," Revue des etudes slaves 65 (1993), 641 .

23. Andrea Graziosi, "Lettres de Kharkov: La famine en Ukraine et dans le Caucase
du Nord a travers les rapports des diplomates italiens, 1932-1934," Cahters du monde
russe etsovietique 30 (1989), 77.

24. RTsKhlDNI, 17/3/922/56-58.

25. V. P. Popov, "Gosudarstvenniy terror v Sovetskoi Rossii, 1923-1953" (State
terror in Soviet Russia, 1923-1953), Otechestvennye archivy, no. 2 (1992), 28.

26. Alia Kirilina, Lassassinat de Kinlon Destin dun stalimen 1888-1934 (Paris: Seuil,
1995).

27. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalms Purge of the Thirties, rev. ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 429-430.

28. Khlevnyuk, Politbyuro: Mekhanizmy, pp. 150-154.

29. Ibid., p. 158.

30. Ibid., pp. 156-159- On this campaign see also J, A. Getty, Origins of the Great
Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985); RTsKhlDNI, 17/120/240.

31. RTsKhlDNI, 17/162/17; Khlevnyuk, Politbyuro: Mekhanizmy, p. 154; Werth
and Moullec, Rapports secrets sovietiques, pp. 376-377.

10. The Great Terror (1936-1938)

1. Quoted in Nicolas Werth, Les proces de Moscou 1936-1938 (Brussels: Complexe,
1987), p. 61.

2. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, rev. ed. (New
York; Oxford University Press, 1990).

3. J. A. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsid-

Notes to Pages 186-201

773

ered, 1933-1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); G. Rittersporn, Sta-
linist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in
the USSR, 1933-1953 (New York: Harwood Academic, 1991); J. A. Getty and R. T.
Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).

4. Stalmskoe Politburo v 30-ye gody (The Stalinist Politburo in the 1930s), a collec-
tion of documents assembled by O. V. Khlevnyuk, A. V Kvashonkin, L. P. Kosheleva,
and L. A. Rogovaya (Moscow: AIRD, 1995); O. V. Khlevnyuk, L. P. Kosheleva,
J. Howlett, and L. Rogovaya, u Les sources archivistiques des organes dirigeants du
PC(b)R," Commumsme, nos. 42-44(1995), 15-34.

5. Trud, 4 June 1992.

6. GARF, 9479/1/978/32.

7. Trud, 4 June 1992.

8. Oleg Khlevnyuk, Politbyuro: Mekhanizmy polittcheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (The
Politburo: Mechanisms of political power in the 1930s) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996),
pp. 208-210.

9. Ibid., p. 212.

10. Reabilitatsiya. Polituheskie protsessy 30-50 go do v (Rehabilitation: The political
trials of the years 1930-1950) (Moscow: Navka, 1991), p. 39; Istochmk, no. 1 (1995),
117-130.

11. Izvestiya, 10 June 1992, p. 2.

12. Stalin's work diary and the list of his visitors at the Kremlin for 1936 and 1937
were published in Istoncheskn arkhiv, no. 4 (1995), 15-73.

13. Istochmk, no. 1 (1995), 117-132; V. P. Popov, ^Gosudarstvenniy terror v Sovet-
skoi Rossii, 1923-1953" (State terror in Soviet Russia, 1923-1953), Otechestvennye
arkhwy, no. 2(1992), 20-31.

14. J. A. Getty, G. T Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov, "Les victimes de la repression
penale dans TURSS d'avant-guerre," Revue des etudes slaves 65 (1993), 631-663,

15. Ibid., p. 655.

16. V. N. Zemskov, "Gulag," Sotsialogicheskie issledovamya, no. 6 (1991), 14-15.

17. Leningradsky marttrolog 1937-1938 (List of Leningrad martyrs, 1937-1938) (St.
Petersburg: Akademiya, 1995). For statistics on executions see pp. 3-50.

18. RTsKhlDNI, 17/120/285/24-37.

19. Conquest, The Great Terror, pp. 918-921.

20. Ibid., pp. 886-912.

21. Volia, nos. 2-3 (1994), 45-46.

22. A. Cristiani and V. Mikhaleva, eds., Le represswm degh anm trenta nelVArmata
rossa, a collection of documents (Naples: Istituto universitario orientale, 1996).

23. Ibid, pp. 20 ff.

24. Conquest, The Great Terror, pp. 749-772; Vital ii Shentalinskii, The KGB's Liter-
ary Archive (London: Harvill Press, 1995).

25. M. J. Odinsov, Na putt k svobode sovestt (On the path to freedom of conscience)
(Moscow: Progress, 1989), pp. 53-54.

26. GARF, 3316/2/1615/116-149.

774

Notes to Pages 203-219

11. The Empire of the Camps

1. J. A. Getty, G. T. Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov, "Les victimes de la repression
penale dans FURSS d'avant-guerre," Revue des etudes slaves 65 (1993), 631-663; Nico-
las Werth, "Goulag, les vrais chiffres"; Alec Nove, "Victims of Stalinism, How Many?"
in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. A. Getty and R. T. Manning (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).

2. See V. P. Popov, "Gosudarstvenniy terror v Sovetkoi Rossii, 1923-1953" (State
terror in Soviet Russia, 1923-1953), Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 2 (1992), 20-31.

3. V. N. Zemskov, "Gulag," Sotsiologicheskte issledovamya, no. 6 (1991), 1 1.

4. Oleg Khlevnyuk, "Prinuditelniy trud v ekonomike SSSR, 1929-1941" (Forced
labor in the US.S.R. economy), Svobodnata my si, no. 13 (1992), 78-92.

5. Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, Rapports secrets sovtetiques, 1921-1991:
La societe russe dans les documents confidentiels (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 345-379.

6. Zemskov, "Gulag," pp. 1 1-15.

7. Khlevnyuk, "Prinuditelniy trud," pp. 88-89.

8. Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, "Les victimes de la repression," pp. 650-657.

9. These calculations are based principally on the works quoted above, notably
Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, "Les victimes de la repression"; Zemskov, "Gulag";
Werth, "Goulag, les vrais chiffres"; Popov, "Gosudarstvenniy terror"; Khlevnyuk,
"Prinuditelniy trud," Istochmk, no. 1 (1995), 1 17-130; A. Blum, Nattre, vivre, et mourn
en URSS 1917-1991 (Paris: Plon, 1994).

10. Keith Sword, Deportation and Exile: Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939-1948 (Bas-
ingstoke: Macmiilan Press in association with School of Slavonic and East European
Studies, University of London, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), p. 7.

11. V. N. Zemskov, "Massivnoe osvobozhdenie spetzposelentsev i ssylnykh" (The
large-scale freeing of special dispaced and exiled people), Sotsiologicheskte issledovamya,
no. 1 (1991), 5.

12. Z. S. Siemaszko, W sowteckim osaczemu (In Soviet surroundings) (London: Pol-
ska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1991); Wladyslaw Wielhorski, Los Polakow w Niewolt
Sowieckiej (The fate of Poles in Soviet captivity) (London, 1956).

13. Sword, Deportation and Exile, pp. 15-23.

14. GARF, 9401/1/4475.

15. Zemskov, "Gulag," p. 19.

16. GARF, 9492/2/42/125.

17. GARF, 9492/2/42.

18. Werth and Moullec, Rapports secrets sovtetiques, p. 229.

19. Isiochnik, no. 3 (1994), 107-112.

20. Moskva voennaya: Memuary t arkhivnye dokumenty (Moscow at war: Memoirs
and archive documents) (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo ob'edineniya Mosgorarkhiv, 1995).

21. RTsKhlDNI, 17/88/45.

12. The Other Side of Victory
L N. F. Bugai, L. Bena-I. Stalinu, 'Soglasno vashemu ukazaniu" (L. Beria to

Notes to Pages 219-231

775

J. Stalin, "In accordance with your instructions") (Moscow: AIRO XX, 1995), pp. 27-
55; idem, 40-ye gody: "Avtonomiu Nemtsev Povolzhe likvidtrovat" (The 1940s: "Liqui-
date the Autonomous Territory of Volga Germans"), Istortya SSSR, no. 2 (1991),
172-182; J.-J. Marie, Les peuples depones dVnion soviitique (Brussels: Complexe, 1995),
pp. 35-56.

2. Bugai, L. Berta-L Stalinu, pp. 56-220; V. N. Zemskov, "Gulag," Sotsiologicheskte
issledovamya, no. 6 (1991), 8-17; M. Guboglo and A. Kuznetsov, eds., Deportatsh naro-
dov SSSR 1930ye-1950yegody (The deportation of the peoples of the US.S.R., 1930s-
1950s) (Moscow: Rossiya molodaya, 1992); Marie, Les peuples depones, pp. 57-128.

3. Bugai, L. Beria-I. Stalinu, p. 153.

4. Marie, Les peuples deportes, pp. 81-82.

5. Ibid., p. 103.

6. Ibid., p. 66.

7. Ibid., pp. 64-65.

8. Zemskov, "Gulag," p. 9.

9. Quoted in Bugai, L. Beria-1. Stalinu, pp. 153-156.

10. Marie, Les peuples depones, pp. 107-108.

11. Zemskov, "Gulag," p. 9.

12. V. N. Zemskov, "Kulatskaya ssylka nakanune i v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi
voiny" (The kulak deportations on the eve of and during the Great Patriotic War),
Sotsiologicheskte issledovamya, no. 2 (1992), 3-26.

13. GARF, 9414/1/330/56-62.

14. Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, Rapports secrets sovtetiques, 1921-1991: La
societe russe dans les documents confidentiels (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 379-391; Edwin
Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin s Porced Labor System in the Light of the Archives
(Basingstoke: Macmiilan in association with the Centre for Russian and East European
Studies, University of Birmingham, 1994).

15. Zemskov, "Gulag," pp. 14-15.

16. The passage is underlined in pencil, and in the margin is written: "Why were
they also brought to the destination?"

17. Section 10 of Article 58, which punished all "counterrevolutionary crimes,"
referred to "propaganda or incitement calling for destruction or the weakening of the
Soviet regime." In cases of "group propaganda," which were extremely common,
punishments ranged from three years' imprisonment to the death sentence.

18. Another passage underlined in pencil, with a note in the margin: "These people
must be tried again, or sent before the OS" (the NKVD Special Board, an extrajudicial
body whose task was to deal with "counterrevolutionary crimes").

19. Bacon, The Gulag at War.

20. J. Rossi, Spravochmk po Gulag (The Gulag handbook) (Moscow: "Prosvet,"
1991); see the articles on special camps and convict prisons.

21. GARF, 94141681-61, quoted in Istoricheskn arkhiv, no. 3 (1994), 61-86.

22. GARF,9414l33056-62.

23. Zemskov, "Gulag," p. 4.

24. Sotsiologicheskte issledovamya, no. 7 (1991), 4-5.

25. Guboglo and Kuznetsov, Deport atsit narodov, p. 162.

776

Notes to Pages 233-243

13. Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System

1. Elena Zubkova, Okhchestvo i reformy, 1945-1964 (Society and reforms, 1945-
1964) (Moscow; Rossiya molodaya, 1993), pp. 16-44.

2. V. F. Zima, "Poslevoennoe obshchestvo: Prestupnost i golod, 1946-1947" (Post-
war society: Crime and famine, 1946-1947), Otechestvennaya istonya, no. 5 (1995),
45-58.

3. V. P. Popov, "Golod i gosudarstvennaya politika, 1946-1947" (Famine and state
policy, 1946-1947), Otechestvennye arkhwy, no,6 (1992), 36-60; Nicolas Werth and Gael
Moullec, Rapports secrets sovietiques, J 92 1-1 99 J; La soaete russe dans les documents
confidentiels (Paris: Gallimard. 1994), pp. 162-165.

4. V. P. Popov, "Gosudarstvennyi terror v Sovetskoi Rossii, 1923-1953" (State
terror in Soviet Russia, 1923-1953), Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 2 (1992), 27.

5. V. N. Zemskov, "Gulag," Sotsialoguheskie issledovama, no. 6 (1991), 10-11.

6. Popov, "Gosudarstvennyi terror,' 1 p. 27.

7. Zemskov, "Gulag,' 1 p. 1 1 .

8. Zima, "Poslevoennoe obshchestvo," pp. 45-58; Zubkova, Obshchestvo t reformy,
pp. 63-69.

9. J.-J. Marie, Les peuples deportes dVmon soviet ique (Brussels: Complexc, 1995),
p. 124.

10. Ibid., pp. 122-126.

11. N. F. Bugai, L. Beria-J. Staltnu, "Soglasno vashemu ukazaniu" (L. Beria to
J. Stalin, a In accordance with your instructions") (Moscow: AIRO XX, 1995), p. 232.

12. VI. Tsaranov, u O likvidatsii kulachestva v Moldavii letom 1949" (On the liqui-
dation of kulaks in Moldavia in the summer of 1949), Otechestvennaya istonya, no. 2
(1996), 71-79; Marie, Les peuples deportes, pp. 127-128.

13. Yaroslav Bilinsky, The Second Soviet Republic: The Ukraine after World War II
(New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1960), pp. 132-135.

14. O. L Milova et al., eds., Deportatsn narodov SSSR 1930ye~/9S0ye gody (The
deportation of the peoples of the U.S.S.R., 1930s-! 950s) (Moscow; Rossiya molodaya
1992), p. 160.

15. GARF, 9414/ls/1391-1392.

16. M. Craveri and N. Formozov, "La resistance au Goulag. Greves, revokes, eva-
sions dans les camps de travail sovietiques de 1920 a 1956," Communisms nos. 42^44
(1995), 197-209.

17. GARF,9414/ls/513/185.

18. GARF, 9414/ls/642/60-91; Nicolas Werth, "L'cnsemble concentrationnaire de
Norilsk en 1951," XXe Steele, no. 47 (July-September 1994), 88-100.

19. M. Craveri and O. Khlevnyuk, "Krizis ekonomiki MVD" (The economic crisis
of the MVD), Cahiers du monde russe 36 (1995), 179-190.

14. The Last Conspiracy

1. Gennadii Kostyrchenko and Shimon Redlikh, Evreiskii Antifashistskii Komxiet v
SSSR: Sbornik dokumentov (The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the U.S.S.R.: A

Notes to Pages 243-258

777

collection of documents) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1996); Gennadii
Kostyrchenko, V plenu u krasnogo faraona (Inside the prisons of the Red pharaohs)
(Moscow, 1994); Amy Knight, Beria, Stalin s First Lieutenant (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993); J.-J. Marie, Les derniers complots de Staline: L affaire de$ Blouses
blanches (Brussels: Complexe, 1993).

2. Kostyrchenko, V plenu u krasnogo faraona, pp. 45-47.

3. Ibid.

4. Izvestiya KPSS, 12 (1989), 37.

5. Kostyrchenko and Redlikh, Evreiskti Antifashtstkii Komitet, pp. 326-384.

6. Marie, Les derniers complots de Staline, pp. 60-61.

7. Kostyrchenko, V plenu u krasnogo faraona, pp. 136-137.

8. V I. Demidov and V A. Kutuzov, Lemngradskoie Delo (The Leningrad Affair)
(Leningrad, 1990), pp. 38-90.

9. Ibid., pp. 139-151; Marie, Les derniers complots de Staline, pp. 77-99.

10. Marie, Les derniers complots de Staline, pp. 90-91 .

11. Knight, Beria, pp. 239-247.

12. Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoly Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an
Unwanted Witness, A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994) pp. 385^434;
Kostyrchenko, V plenu u krasnogo faraona, pp. 289-314.

13. V. P. Naumov, ed., Nepravednyi sud. Stenogramma sudebnogo protsessa nad chle-
namx Evreiskogo Antifashistskogo Komiteta: Posledm stalinskn — rasstrel (Court of Injus-
tice: The final Stalinist execution — stenogram of the trial of members of the Jewish
Anti-Fascist Committee) (Moscow: u Nauka," 1994).

14. Marie, Les derniers complots de Stalme, p. 159; Sudoplatov and Sudoplatov, Spe-
cial Tasks, pp. 424-426.

15. Yakov Rapoport, Souvenirs du proces des Blouses blanches (Paris: Alinea, 1989),
pp. 140-141.

1 5. The Exit from Stalinism

1. Istochmk, no. 1 (1994), 106-111; Izvestiya TsK, no. 1 (1991), 139-214; no. 2 (1991),
141-208.

2. Amy Knight, Beria, Stalin's First Lieutenant (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993), p. 276.

3. M. Craveri and N. Formozov, "La resistance au Goulag," Communisme, nos.
42-44(1995), 197-209.

4. V. N. Zemskov, u Massivnoe osvobozhdenie spetzposelentsev i ssylnykh" (The
mass release of specially displaced and exiled people), Sotsialoguheskie issledovaniya, no.
1 (1991), 5-26.

5. J.-J. Marie, Les derniers complots de Staline: L affaire des Blouses blanches (Brus-
sels: Complexe, 1993), pp. 120 ff.

6. Zemskov, "Massivnoe osvobozhdenie," p. 14.

7. Nicolas Werth and Gael Moullec, Rapports secrets sovietiques, 1921-1991 : La
societe russe dans les documents confidentiels (Paris: Gallilmard, 1994), pp. 501-503.

8. Liudmila Alexeeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Reltg-

778

Notes to Pages 272-286

wus, and Human Rights (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985). This is
the most complete synthesis of dissident movements, and the source of most of the data
provided here.

16. The Comintern in Action

1. In his last article in Die Rote Fahne (The Red flag) Liebknecht gave full vent to
his lyrical revolutionary fervor: "To the thunder of the economic collapse that is
coming, the still sleeping army of the proletariat will awake as though in answer to the
trumpets of the Last Judgment, and the bodies of the fallen will arise again . . ."

2. Arthur Koestler saw in this one of the main reasons for the success of the
Hungarian Commune, which according to him "was the direct consequence of the
policies pursued by the West, when the great democracies turned their backs on their
liberal allies"; La corde raide (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994), p. 78.

3. Ibid.

4. Miklos Molnar, From Bela Kun to Jdnos Kdddr: Seventy Years of Hungarian
Communism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990); Arpad Szepal, Les 133 jours de Bela
Kun (Paris: Fayard, 1959).

5. Jan Valtin, Sans pa trie m frontieres (Paris: Self, 1947). See also Eric Wollenberg,
Der Apparat. S t alms fun fte Kolonne (Bonn: Bundesministerium fur Gesamtdeutsche
Fragen, 1951).

6. Quoted in Henri de Chambon, La Republique dEstonte (Paris: Editions de la
Revue Parlementaire, 1936).

7. Joseph Berger, Shipwreck of a Generation: The Memoirs of Joseph Berger (Lon-
don: Harvi II Press, 1971).

8. Viktor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901-1941, trans. Peter Sedgewick
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Arkadi Vaksberg, Hotel Lux (Paris: Fayard,
1993).

9. Margaret Buber-Neumann, La revolution mondiale (Paris: Casterman, 1971),
chap. 17, "La soulevement de Canton."

10. Chao-Iuy, La Commune de Canton (Moscow: Politizdat, 1929).

1 1. On this see Valtin, Sans patne (heavily abridged by Babel in 1 996), esp. chap. 1 7.

12. In the book the Tallinn insurrection was analyzed by General Josif Unshlikht,
the Hamburg uprisings by Hans Kippenberger, the Canton and Shanghai uprisings by
General Vasily Blucher and Ho Chi Minh, who also wrote about peasant uprisings.
There were also two chapters on military theory by Marshal Tukhachevsky.

13. Roger Faligot and Remi Kauffer, The Chinese Secret Service, trans, Christine
Donougher (London: Headline, 1989).

14. See Le contrat social no. 4 (July-August 1966), 253.

15. Roger Faligot and Remi Kauffer, Histoire mondiale du renseignement, vol. 1 : 1870-
1939 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1993).

16. Un crime sovietique devant la cour d assises de la Seine (5-14 decembre 1938):
L enlevement du general Miller par le general Sklobltne. Le proces de la Plevitzkaia. Plat-
dome de Me Maurice Ribet (Paris: Imprimerie du Palais, 1939); Marina Grey, Le general
meurt a minuit (Paris: Plon, 1981); Marina Gorboff, La Russte fantome: L emigration

Notes to Pages 286-301

779

russe de 1920 a 1950 (Paris: L'Age d'Homme, 1995); Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoly
Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, a Soviet Spymaster
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1994).

17. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete collected works) (Moscow: Poli-
tizdat, 1957), 17: 137-138.

18. Aino Kuusinen, The Rings of Destiny: Inside Soviet Russia from Lenin to Brezh-
nev, trans. Paul Stevenson (New York: Morrow, 1974).

19. Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in
the Soviet State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955); and Pierre Broue,
Le Parti bolchevique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977).

20. See Ante Ciliga, Dix ans au pays du mensonge deconcertant (Paris: Champ Libre,
1977); Philippe Bourrinet, Ante Ciliga 1898-1992, Nazionalisme e communismo in Ju-
goslavia (Genoa: Graphos, 1996).

21. Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma (London: Routledge and Sons, 1940), pp. 167,
168.

22. Jose Bullejos, La Comintern en Espana (Mexico: Impresiones Modernas, 1972),
p. 206.

23. Quoted in Jean Malaquais, Le nomme Aragon ou le patriote professionel, supple-
ment to Masses, February 1947.

24. Guillaume Bourgeois, "Comment Stalin dirigeait le PC," Le nouvel ohservateur,
5-1 1 August 1993, Vaksberg, Hotel Lux, pp. 62-64; Annie Kriegel and Stephane Cour-
tois, Eugen Fried. Le grand secret du PCF (Paris: Seuil, 1997), chap. 13.

25. Elizaveta Poretskaya, Les twtres, 2d ed. (Paris: Denoe], 1995).

26. Inventory no. 1 of blacklists 1-8, n.d,

27. Quoted in Vaksberg, Hotel Lux, p. 32. In a letter to the Russian Opposition in
November 1927 Boris Suvarin had tried to draw attention to this phenomenon and its
consequences, See Boris Souvarine, A contre-courant: Ecrits, 1925-1939 (Paris: Denoel,
1984), pp. 138-147.

28. Kriegel and Courtois, Eugen Fried, p. 293.

29. Quoted in Vaksberg, Hotel Lux, pp. 46-47.

30. Alia Kirilina, Ldssasstnut de Kirov: Destin dun stalimen, 1888-1934 (Paris: Seuil,
1995).

31. Berger, Shipwreck, pp. 97-98.

32. Cahiers Leon Trotskt, no. 53 (April 1994).

33. Le contrat social, no. 6 (November-December 1965).

34. Alfred Burmeister, Dissolution and Aftermath of the Comintern: Experiences and
Observations, 1937 1947 (New York: NYU Press, 1995), pp. 4^8.

35. Mikhail Panteleev, "La terreur stalinienne au Komintern en 1937-1938: Les
chiffrcs et les causes," Commumsme, nos. 40-41 (1995).

36. Francois Fejto, "Comment Staline liquida Bela Kun," France ohservateur, 9 April
1959. Fejto bases this account on the memoirs of Arvo Tuominen, The Bells of the
Kremlin: An Experience in Communism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New Eng-
land, 1983).

37. Panteleev, "La terreur stalinienne," p. 48.

38. La correspondance Internationale, no. 15(12 March 1938).

780

Notes to Pages 301-312

39. In der fangen des NKWD. Deutscher Opfer des Stalinist chen Terrors in des UdSSR
(Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991).

40. Margaret Buber-Neumann, Under Two Dictators, trans. Edward Fitzgerald
(New York; Dodd, Mead, 1950).

41. Alexander Weissberg, The Accused, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1951).

42. Margaret Buber-Neumann, "Deposition au proces ICravchenko contre Les lettres
francatses 14e audience, 23 fevrier 1949. Compte rendu stenographique," La jeune
par que, 1949.

43. Mario Kessler, u Der Stalinische Terror gegen judische Kommunisten," in Kom-
mumsten verfolgen Kommumsten: Staltntscher Terror und il Sduberungen"tn den kommunis-
ttschen Parleien Europas sett des dreisstger Jahren (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993),
pp. 87-102. For the full history of Birobidzhan, see Henri Sloves, Letat juif de TUniort
sovietique (Paris: Les Presses d'Aujourd'hui, 1982).

44. On the Reiss affair, see the memoirs of his wife, Elizaveta Poretskaya, Les notres;
and Peter Hubr and Daniel Kunzi, "L'assassinat d'Ignaz Reiss," Communisme, nos.
26-27(1990).

45. Jan Van Heijenoort, De Pnnktpo a Coyoacan: Sept ans aupres de L. Trotskt (Paris:
Maurice Nadeau, 1978), p. 172.

46. See Pierre Broue, Leon Sedov t fils de Trotskt, vtctime de Staline (Paris: Les Edi-
tions Ouvrieres, 1993); and Sudoplatov and Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, pp. 1 15—1 16.

47. Sudoplatov and Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, pp. 99-100.

48. Leon Trotsky, Oeuvres completes, vol. 24 (Paris: Institut Leon-Trotski, 1987),
pp. 79-82.

49. Leon Trotsky, "L'attentat du 24 mai et le Parti communiste mexicain, lc {Comin-
tern et le GPU," ibid., pp. 310-361.

50. For the details of the operation, see Sudoplatov and Sudoplatov, Special Tasks,
pp. 97-120.

51. Julian Gorkin and General Sanchez Salazar, Amsi fut assasstne Trotskt (Paris:
Self, 1948).

52. Rene Dazy, Fusillez les chiens enrages! Le genocide collectif des trotskistes (Paris:
Olivier Orban, 1981), p. 248.

53. Recently Pierre Broue and Raymond Vacheron, Meurtres au maquxs (Paris: Gras-
set, 1997), put forward the somewhat dubious idea that Demaziere's involuntary escape
was the main reason for the execution of his companions, thus excusing the behavior of
the French Communists who were behind the killings.

54. Dazy, Fusillez les chiens enrages! pp. 238-244.

55. Rodolphe Prager, "Les trotskistes de Buchenwald," Critique communiste, no. 25
(November 1978).

56. Dazy, Fusillez les chtens enrages! pp. 266-274.

57. Panagiotis Noutsos, "'Sauberugen' innerhalb der griechischer KP (1931 bis
1956)," in Kommumsten verfolgen Kommumsten, pp. 487-494.

58. Ho Chi Minh, letter of 10 May 1939, Cahters Leon Trotskt, no. 46 (July 1991).

59. Action, 19-25 June 1950.

60. Kuusinen, Rings of Destiny, pp. 94-97.

Notes to Pages 312-326

781

61. Tuominen, The Bells of the Kremlin, quoted in B. Lazich, "Le martyrologe du
Komintern," Le contrat social, no. 6 (November-December 1965).

62. Armand Maloumian, Les fils du Goulag (Paris: Presses de la Cite, 1976).

63. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (London: Collins Harvill, 1985), p. 301.

64. Romolo Caccavale, Communisti italiani in Untone sovietica: Proscntti da Mussolini
soppressi da Stalin (Rome: Mursia, 1995).

65. Charles Jacquier, "L'affaire Francesco Ghezzi: La vie et la mort d'un anarcho-
syndicaliste italien en URSS," La nouvelle alternative, no. 34 (June 1994). See also
Emilio Guaraschelli, Une petite pierre. Lexil, la deportation et la mort dun ouvrter com-
muniste italien in URSS 1933-1939 (Maspero, 1979); Etienne Manach, Emilio: Reat a
voix basse (Paris: Plon, 1990).

66. Hans Schafranek, Zwtschen NKVD und Gestapo: Die Auslieferung deutscher und
osterreichischer Anttfaschisten aus der Sowjetunion an N azideutschland 1 937- 1 94 1 (Frank-
furt am Main: ISP Verlag, 1990).

67. Les syndicats de TUnion sovietique (Paris: Editions du Secours Ouvrier Interna-
tional, 1935).

68. Schafranek, Z wise hen NKVD und Gestapo.

69. Karlo Stajner, 7,000 jours en Sibene (Paris: Gallimard, 1983).

70. Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution, trans. C. M. Woodhouse (Chicago:
H. Regnery, 1958).

71 . Bozidar Maslaric, Moskva-Madrid-Moskva (Zagreb: Tidens, 1952).

72. Gustaw Herling, Un monde apart (Paris: Denoel, 1985).

73. Sylvestre Mora and Pierre Zwierniak, La justice sovietique (Rome: Magi-
Spinetti, 1945), pp. 161-162.

74. Israel Joshua Singer, Camrade Nachman (Paris: Stock, 1985).

75. Jules Margoline, La condition mhumame: Cinq ans dans les camps de concentration
soviettques (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1949), pp. 42—43.

76. Ibid., pp. 149-150.

77. Lukasz Hirszowicz, "NKVD Documents Shed New Light on Fate of Erlich and
Alter," East European Jewish Affairs, no. 2 (Winter 1992).

78. Jacques Vat, Jewish Daily Forward, 30 June and 7 July 1946.

79. Quoted in Georges Coudry, Les camps soviettques en France: Les 'Russes" livres d
Staline en 1945 (Paris; Albin Michel, 1997).

80. "Nous reclamons le droit d'asile pour les emigres sovietiques," Masses, nos. 9-10
(June-July 1947).

81. Nicholas Bethcll, The Last Secret: The Delivery to Stalin of Over Two Million
Russians by Britain and the United States (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Nikolai
Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977).

82. Pierre Rigoulet, La tragedie de Malgre-nous: Tambov le camp des Francais (Paris:
Denoel, 1990).

83. Vladimir Dedijer, Tito (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953).

84. Milovan Djilas, Wartime, trans. Michael Petrovich (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1977), p. 168.

85. Paul Garde, Vie et mort de la Yougoslavie (Paris: Fayard, 1992).

86. Djilas, Wartime, pp. 452-453.

782

Notes to Pages 326-336

87. Dobrica Cosic's huge novel, Le temps du mal, 2 vols. (Paris: L'Age d'Homme,
1990), gives a good idea of the extraordinary complexity of the situation in Yugoslavia.

88. Christophe Chiclet, Les Communistes grecs dans la guerre. Histoire du Parti commu-
ntste de Grece de 1941 a 1949 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1987).

89. The ELAS falsely accused the EDES of having signed an agreement with the
Germans.

90. Quoted in Evangelos Averoff Tossizza, By Fire and Axe: The Communist Party
and the Civil Warm Greece, 1944-1949, trans. Sarah Arnold Rigos (New Rochelle, N.Y.:
Caratzas Brothers, 1978). The author seems to have known the leader well, from his
student days to his time as a lawyer in Athens.

91. In April the Democratic Army numbered 16,000 freedom fighters.

92. Irene Lagani, "Les Communistes des Balkans et la guerre civile grecque," Com-
munisme, no. 9 (1986).

93. Nikos Marantzidis, "La deuxieme mort de Nikos Zachariadis: L'itineraire d'un
chef communiste," Communtsme, nos. 29-31, (1992).

94. UN Special Commission on the Balkans, The Greek Question at the UN General
Assembly (New York: United Nations, 1950).

95. Philippe Buton, "L'entretien entre Maurice Thorez et Joseph Staline du 19
novembre 1994: Methodologie et historiographie de la strategic communiste a la
Liberation," Commumsme, nos. 45-46 (1996).

96. Torgrim Titlestad, / Staltns skygge: Om korleis em politisk leiar byggjer og
taper makt—Peder Furubotn, NKP og SVKP, 1945-1948 (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget,
1997).

97. Federigo Argentieri, "Quando il PCI comdamno a morte Nagy," Micromega, no.
4(1992).

17. The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain

L These statistics, from the General Directorate of the Security Services, were
given to the Spanish parliament by Miguel Maura, the former minister of internal
affairs, in the autumn of 1934; see Joaquin Maurin, Revolution et contre-revolutwn en
Espagne (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1937). For the relative strengths of the parties, see
Gerald Brenan, Le labyrinthe espagnoi Ongines soaales et polittques de la guerre civile
(Paris: Champ Libre, 1984).

2. Leon Blum signed this pact much against his will, under pressure from Britain
and from French radicals who feared war with Germany. Blum almost resigned over the
affair but was dissuaded from doing so by the Spanish ambassador.

3. M. Ercoli (Palmiro Togliatti), The Spanish Revolution (New York: Workers 1
Library, 1936).

4. Dolores Ibarruri, Speeches and Articles, 1936-1938 (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1938).

5. Jef Last, Lettres dEspagne (Paris: Gallimard, 1939).

6. Julian Gorkin, Espaita, primer ensayo de democracia popular (Buenos Aires,
1961).

7. Antonio Elorza, "Le Front populaire espagnoi a travers les archives du Komin-

Notes to Pages 337-346

783

tern," in line histoire en revolution? Du ton usage des archives, de Moscou et dailleurs
(Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 1996), pp. 253-278.

8. His son, a historian, declared on Catalan television that "most of the people
who were posted to Spain — soldiers, generals, advisers, pilots, and others — were
NKVD agents." See the 1992 film by Llibert Ferri and Dolores Genoves, Operation
Nikolai

9. "Spain was a sort of children's playground, where we perfected many of our
later espionage techniques"; Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoly Sudoplatov, Special Tasks:
The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, a Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), p. 59.

10. Patrik von zur Miihlen, Spanien war ihre Hojfnung. Die deutsche Lmke im spanies-
chen Biirgerkneg, 1936 bis 1939 (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1983).

11. Julian Gorkin, Les Communistes contre la revolution espagnole (Paris: Belfond,
1978), pp. 18-19,81-82.

12. Elorza, "Le Front populaire," p. 265.

13. See especially L'humamte, 24 January 1937.

14. Elorza, "Le Front populaire," p. 266.

15. Gorkin, Les Communistes, p. 96.

16. See also the film by Llibert Ferri and Dolores Genoves, Operation Nikolai.

17. Quoted in Gorkin, Les Communistes, p. 181.

18. Los antros del terror stalimsta, a clandestine brochure put out by the POUM,
quoted in Gorkin, Les Communistes.

19. Gorkin, Les Communistes, p. 205.

20. Katia Landau, Le Stalimsme bourreau de la revolution espagnole (Paris: Spartacus,
1938), p. 8.

21. Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Revolution: The Left and the Struggle for Power
during the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 506.

22. Cezar M. Lorenzo, Les anarchistes espagnols et le pouvoir, 1869-1969 (Paris: Seuil,
1969). Lorenzo indicates that the freedom fighters were also assassinated by the hun-
dreds at the front.

23. Pierre Broue, Le Parti bolchevique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), p. 178.

24. Landau, Le Stalinisme. When confronted by militants whose sincerity he could
not contest, von Ranke was suddenly filled with doubts, broke with the Servicio Alfredo
Hertz, and fled to France, where he lived in secret to escape his previous colleagues. He
fought in the resistance during World War II.

25. Indalecio Prieto, Comment et pourquoije suis sortt du mimstere de la defense (Paris:
Imprimerie Nouvelle [Association Ouvriere], 1939). Ramon Rufat, in Espwns de la
Repuhlique (Paris: Allia, 1990), summarizes the role of the SIM: "Contrary to the initial
intention, its mission had nothing to do with work within the rebel zone. Its real
purpose was surveillance and counterespionage in the Republican zone, behind the lines."

26. Gorkin, Les Communistes, p. 170.

27. Peter Huber, "Die Ermordung des Ignaz Reiss in der Schweiz (1937) und die
Verhastung dissidenter Schweizer Spanienkampfer durch den Geheimapparat der
Komintern," in Kommunisten verfolgen Kommunisten: Stalimscher Terror und "Sauberun-
gen"m den Kommunistischen Parteien Europas sett des dreissiger Jahren (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1993), pp. 68-86.

784

Notes to Pages 346-357

28. Letter from Karl Brauning, quoted in von zur Muhlen, Spanien war ihre
Hoffnung.

29. Quoted in "La Terreur communiste en Espagne," La revolution proletanenne, no.
263 (25 January 1938).

30. On 8 February 1938 in Uhumanite, Marcel Cachin reported on the opening of
the trial of Bukharin and his colleagues: "And if the crime is proved, and admitted, let
no one be surprised by the severity of the judges . . . The idea instead should be to
imitate the vigilance of Soviet judges against saboteurs and traitors to the fatherland.
No doubt our Spanish friends understand the implications here."

31. In February 1938 Jef Last wrote: "The place where the Communist Party was
strongest of all was in the International Brigades, where almost all officers and political
commissars were Communists"; Lettres dEspagne, p. 39. Recent studies by other histo-
rians have confirmed this view.

32. Huber, "Die Ermordung des Ignaz Reiss."

33. El Campesino, Jusqu a la mort: Memotres (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978).

34. Gustav Regler, Le glaive et le fourreau (Paris: Plon, 1960).

35. RTsKhlDNI, 545/6/1034, quoted in R. Skoutelsky, "Andre Marty et les Bri-
gades Internationales," Cahiers d'histotre, 2d trimester, 1997.

36. Ute Bonnen and Gerald Endres, Internationale Brigaden: Fretwilltge im spanis-
chen Burgerkrieg, SDR/ Arte, Vienna, 1996).

37. Gorkin, Les Communistes, p. 82.

38. La revolution proletarienne, 25 October 1937.

39. Rolf Reventlow, Spanien in dtesem Jarhundert (Vienna: Europa-Verlag, 1969).

40. Broue, Le Parti bolchevique, pp. 180, 185; and Gorkin, Les Communistes, p. 175.

41. General "El Campesino," La vie et la mort en URSS (1939-1949) (Paris: Les
Uesd'Or, 1950).

42. David W. Pike notes that some 6,000 Spaniards came to Russia, including 2,000
children and 102 teachers; "Les republicans espagnols incarceres en URSS dans les
annees quarante," Mate'riaux pour Inistoire de notre temps, nos. 4—5 (1985).

43. According to El Campesino, Lister, while drunk, raped five young girls.

44. Jesus Hernandez, La grande trahtson (Paris: Fasquelle, 1953).

45. Gorkin, Les Communistes, p. 192; Rene Dazy, Fusillez ces chiens enrages! (Paris:
O. Orban, 1981), pp. 247-249. 1944, Les Dossiers noirs dune certame resistance . . . Tra-
jectoire du fascisms rouge (Perpignan: Edition du CES, 1984), describes the Communists'
liquidation of the National Spanish Union of Anti-Fascists, which had taken refuge in
France.

18. Communism and Terrorism

1. Pierre Marion, Mission impossible (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1991).

2. This text, extracts of which have been made public by Paul Quinn-Judge of the
Boston Globe, was published in its entirety in French in Les nouvelles de Moscou, no. 25
(23 June 1992).

3. Pierre Pean, Lextremiste (Paris: Fayard, 1996).

Notes to Pages 359-395

785

4. John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (New York: Reader's
Digest Press, 1974), with a foreword by Robert Conquest.

19. Poland, the "Enemy Nation"

27.

1. Quoted by N. Petrov, "^Operation polonaise du NKVD, 1 ' Karta, no. 11 (1993),

2. Stanislaw Swianiewicz, W ciemu Katynia (In the Shadow of Katyh) (Paris: In-
stytut Literaki, 1976), pp. 110-111.

3. See K. Popinski, A. Kokurin, and A. Gurjanov, Routes de la mort. L evacuation
des prisons soviet iques des "confins" de I Est de la He Republtque en jutn et juillet 1 94 1
(Warsaw, 1995), pp. 96 ff.

4. Quoted in Marian Papihski, Tryptyk Kazachstanski: Wspomtenta y Zeslama (The
Kazakhstan tryptych: Memoirs in exile) (Warsaw: Wydaw. Adam Marszalek, 1992).

5. Volksdeutsche were Polish citizens who declared themselves to be of German
origin and consequently members of the German nation.

6. This term was used to refer to Poles in the territories annexed by the Third
Reich who were forced to register as being "close to German culture" and who served
in the Wehrmacht.

7. Central MSW Archives, Warsaw, sygn. 17/IX/36, vol. 2.

8. Kazimierz Moczarski, Conversations with an Executioner (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1981).

9. Cahiers histonques, no. 53 (1980).

10. Several theories have been put forward to explain this, including the ideas that
Boleslaw Bierut, Gomulka's successor, adroitly opposed the directives from Moscow, or
that Stalin himself opposed the proposals he received from Warsaw. There is as yet no
proof to back up either of these theories.

11. From Danuta Suchorowska, Wielka edukacja: Wspomiema wieznow polity cznych
PRL, 1945-1956 (A great education: Memoirs of political prisoners in the People's
Republic of Poland, 1945-1956) (Warsaw: Agencja Omnipress, 1990).

12. Before the war, Wlodzimierz Lechowicz had been a civilian employee of the
military counterespionage organization and a GRU collaborator. During the German
occupation he worked inside the Polish government-in-exile in London while still
belonging to the Communist Party counterespionage network. His boss was Marian
Spychalski.

13. Central MSW Archives, sygn. 17/IX/268, vol. 7.

14. The KGB had had offices in Poland since 1956. After 1986 the Stasi also estab-
lished offices in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, but it had fewer agents there
than in Poland.

20. Central and Southeastern Europe
1. See Tamas Stark, "Hungarian Prisoners in the Soviet Union (1941-1955),"

786

Notes to Pages 396-428

J 945: Consequences and Sequels of the Second World War (bulletin of the Comite Interna-
tional d'Histoire de la Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale, Paris), nos. 27-28 (1995), 203-213.

2. See Fredy Foscolo, "Epurations; passe et present," La nouvelle alternative, spe-
cial issue, u Poids et enjeux des epurations," no. 21 (1991), 8-9.

3. Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Au nom du peuple (Paris: L'Aube, 1992), pp. 52-53.

4. Cristina Boico, "Les hommes qui ont porte Ceau§escu au pouvoir," Sources —
Travaux histonques, no. 20 (1990).

5. Quoted in Francois Fejto, History of the People's Democracies: Eastern Europe
since Stalin, trans. Daniel Weissbort (London: Pall Mall Press, 1971), p. 99.

6. Miklos Molnar, From Bela Kun to Jdnos Kdddr: Seventy Years of Hungarian
Communism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), p. 164.

7. Paul Wergent and Jean Bernard -Derosne, LAffaire Petkov (Paris: Self, 1948),
pp. 188-192.

8. Klement Gottwald, Vybrane spisy (Selected works), vol. 1 (Prague: SNPL, 1954),
p. 139.

9. Claude Roy, Nous (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), pp. 389-390.

10. Lubomir Sochor, "Peut-on parler de la 'societe civile 1 dans les pays du bloc
sovietique?" Communisme, no. 8 (1985), 84.

1 1 . "Ich habe den Tod verdient: Schauprocesse und politische Verfolgung in Mittel-
und Osteuropa, 1945-1956," in Archiv 1991. Jahrbuch des Vereins fur Geschichte der
ArbeUerbewegung, ed. Wolfgang Maderthaner, Hans Schafranek, and Berthold Unfried
(Berlin: Akademie, 1991).

12. These represented 65 percent of all primary schools, 50 percent of secondary
schools for boys, and 78 percent of secondary schools for girls.

13. Frantisek Miklosko, Nebudete ich mod rozvratit (You will never have the power to
destroy them) (Bratislava: Archa, 1991), pp. 272-273.

14. Catherine Durandin, Histotre des Roumains (Paris: Fayard, 1995), pp. 72-73.

15. Bulgarian Commission for Aid to Anti-Fascists, Les Bulgares parlent au monde
(Paris:BCAA, 1949).

16. Quoted in Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe (New York: Pantheon, 1989), p. 139.

17. For a detailed analysis of these laws and of the regime that operated in these
camps, see Paul Barton and Albert Weil, Salariat et contrainte en Tchecoslovaquie (Paris:
Librairie Marcel Riviere, 1956).

18. Virgil Ierunca, Pitestu laboratotre concentratwnnaire (1949-1952) (Paris: Micha-
lon, 1996), p. 59

19. Ibid., p. 152.

20. Ibid., pp. 59-61.

2 1 . Todorov, Au nom du peuple, p. 38.

22. At the request of the Hungarians, backed up by Soviet advisers, Noel Field was
arrested in Prague. He was never tried and was set free in October 1954 with his wife,
Herta (who was arrested in Czechoslovakia and set free on 28 August 1949 in Buda-
pest), and his brother Hermann (who was arrested in August 1949 by a collaborative
effort of the Czechoslovak and Polish security services).

23. AUV KSC, Barnabitky Commission, letter to T. Balaz, in Karel Kaplan, Zprdva

Notes to Pages 423-459

787

o zavrazdeni generalniho tajemnika (Report on the assassination of the General Secre-
tary) (Prague: Mlada Fronta, 1992), p. 68.

24. Jindfich Madry, "La periode de l'armement et rearmement," Soudobe dejtny
(Contemporary history), nos. 4-5 (1994).

25. Kaplan, Zprdva o zavrazdeni

26. Molnar, From Bela Kun to Jdnos Kdddr, p. 187.

27. Kaplan, Zprdva o zavrazdeni.

28. See Mikhail Agurski, "La bataille au sein de la Securite d'etat," Le monde, 2-3
October 1983.

29. Kaplan, Zprdva o zavrazdeni, p. 141.

30. On the activity of the Cominform and the formation of the Soviet bloc, see the
work of Leonid J. Gibianskii, e.g., "Problemy mezhdunarodno-politicheskogo struk-
turirovaniya Vostochnoi Europy v period formirovaniya sovetskogo bloka 1940-e gody,"
Kholodnaya voina: Novye podkhody, novye dokumenty (The Cold War: New approaches,
new documents), ed. I. V Gaidak et al. (Moscow: Otvet, 1995), pp. 99-126. For a
revised version in English, see "The Soviet-Yugoslav Split and the Cominform," in The
Establishment of Communist regimes m Eastern Europe, 1944-/949, ed. Norman M.
Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 231-312. Gibian-
skii draws on Russian, Polish, Czech, and Yugoslav archives.

31. Dieter Staritz, Geschichte der DDR (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkampf, 1996).

32. Details here come from the study published by researchers at the Institute for
the History of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 in Budapest, Csaba Bekes, Janos M.
Rainer, and Pal Germuska, in Soudobe dtjiny, no. 4 (1997).

33. Comminisme, nos. 26-27 (1990).

34. For the events surrounding the first anniversary of the occupation of Czechoslo-
vakia, see a collection of documents edited by Oldrich Tuma, Srpen b8 (August 1968)
(Prague: USD-Maxdorf, 1996).

35. Raina Foscolo and Alfredo Foscolo, "Prisonniers a Sofia," La nouvelle alternative
no. 47 (September 1997).

36. La nouvelle alternative, no. 7 (September 1987).

37. Gyorgy Dalos, "Liberte sans paroles," Le munde-HbeK no. 6 (December 1990).

38. Maria Ferretti, La memoria muttlata: La Russia ricorda (Mutilated memory:
Russia remembers) (Milan: Corbaccio, 1993).

39. La nouvelle alternative, no. 46 (June 1997). The Czech legal system, like many
others, distinguishes between crimes with statutory limitation — those that must be
prosecuted within a certain period after the offense is committed— and those without
stautory limitation.

40. Dzienmk ustaw Rzeczypospolttej polskiej (Law Digest of the Polish Republic), no.
45 (Warsaw, 29 May 1991).

Introduction to Part IV

1. American editors note: This is an inaccurate description of the archival situation
in Moscow. At least three archives in Moscow that have been open since 1992 — the

788

Notes to Pages 463-467

Russian Center for the Storage and Study of Documents from Recent History
(RTsKhlDNI), the Center for Storage of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD),
and the Foreign Ministry archive — contain large holdings about Soviet relations with
the East Asian countries after World War II. Although access to documents in these
archives (especially TsKhSD) is often problematic, a good deal of valuable material is
available. It is true that several key archives in Moscow, such as the Presidential Archive
and the foreign intelligence archive, have never been opened, but their inaccessibility
should not cause researchers to overlook declassified items that are available in some of
the open (or partly open) repositories.

21. China

1 . Mao Zedong, "Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Central Committee
of the Seventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, 5 March 1949," in Selected
Works, vol. 4 (Beijing: Foreign Language Editions, 1962). A fragment is reprinted in
the Little Red Book, in the chapter "Class and Class Struggle," During the Cultural
Revolution, this quotation was often read out to prisoners before interrogation began.

2. In these pages, Chinese characters are transcribed in accordance with the pinyin
style imposed by China, which is now almost universally accepted. Thus, Mao Tse-
tung is written as Mao Zedong. The only exceptions are names from before 1949.

3. See Roger Faligot and Remi Kauffer, The Chinese Secret Service (1927-1987),
trans. Christine Donougher (London: Headline, 1989).

4. Kim II Sung, Works, vol. 30, p. 498, quoted in Oh Il-whan, "La propagande et le
controle de pensee: Les facteurs de resistance du systeme communiste nord-coreen"
(thesis, University of Paris X, 1994), p. 209.

5. Hoang Van Hoan, Une goutte deau dans le grand ocean — Souvenirs revolution-
naires (Paris: Dentu, 1989).

6. The daily Nhan Dan, 7 May 1964, quoted in "Revolutionnaires d'Indochine,"
Cahiers Leon Trotskt, no. 40 (December 1989), 119-120.

7. Ibid., p. 119.

8. Georges Boudarel, "L'ideocratie importee au Vietnam avec le Maoisme," in La
bureaucratie au Vtetnam—Vietnam-Asie-Debat no.l (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1983), pp. 31-
106.

9. Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal
Physician (New York: Random House, 1994).

10. This idea and the discussion that follows owe much to Richard Shek, "Sectarian
Eschatology and Violence," in Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture,
ed. Jonathan N. Lipman and Stevan Harrell (New York: State University of New York
Press, 1990), pp. 87-109.

11. Ibid, p. 101.

12. Ibid,pp. 105, 106.

13. Quoted in Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambhala,
1988), p. 38.

14. Ibid, pp. 103, 108, 105.

Notes to Pages 468-474

789

15. Danielle Elisseeff and Vadime Elisseeff, La civilisation de la Chine classique
(Paris: Arthaud, 1981), p. 296.

16. John K. Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1987).

17. Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1973).

18. Marie-Claire Bergere, Lucien Bianco, and Jiirgen Domes, eds. La Chine au XXe
Steele, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1989, 1990), 1: 125.

19. Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, eds. The Cambridge History of
China, vol. 14: The People's Republic, Part I (1949-1965) (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), p. 371.

20. John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker, eds. The Cambridge History of China,
vol. 13: Republican China, 1912-1949, part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), pp. 605-606.

21. Ibid, p. 292.

22. Ibid, pp. 291 and 293.

23. Ibid, pp. 294-297 and 312-314.

24. Legal treatise Souet-chou, quoted in Elisseeff and Elisseeff, Chine classique,
p. 264.

25. Fairbank and Feuerwerker, Republican China, pp. 307-322.

26. Roland Lew, 1949: Mao prend le pouvoir (Brussels: Complexe, 1980).

27. Jean-Luc Domenach, Chine: Larchipel ouhlie (Pans: Fayard, 1992), p. 47.

28. Gregor Benton, "Under Arms and Umbrellas: Perspectives on Chinese Com-
munism in Defeat," in New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution, ed. Tony
Saich and Hans Van de Ven (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 131-133.

29. Chen Yung-fa, "The Blooming Poppy under the Red Sun: The Yan'an Way and
the Opium Trade," ibid, pp. 263-298.

30. Quoted in Yves Chevrier, Mao et la revolution chinotse (Florence: Casterman/
Giuntim, 1993), p. 65.

3 1 . Francois Godemont, "La tourmente du vent communiste ( 1 955-1 965)," in Ber-
gere, Bianco, and Domes, La Chtne au XXe Steele, 2; 58.

32. This vague term is used to designate whoever in the Party was exercising power.
It corresponds in part to official practice, as decision-making practices were often quite
fluid, and certain members could easily find themselves in a marginal position. The
converse was also true; thus it was possible for someone who had technically retired,
such as Deng Xiaoping, to remain the de facto leader for more than a decade.

33. Benton, "Under Arms and Umbrellas"; and Lucien Bianco, "Peasant Responses
to CCP Mobilization Policies, 1937-1945," in Saich and Van de Ven, New Perspectives,
pp. 175-187.

34. Stephen C. Averill, "The Origins of the Futian Incident," ibid, pp. 218-219.

35. David Apter, "Discourse as Power: Yan'an and the Chinese Revolution," ibid,
pp. 218-219.

36. Vladimirov (Comintern representative in Yan'an), in Boudarel, "L'ideocratie
importee," pp. 55-56.

790

Notes to Pages 475-482

37. Idem in ibid., p. 56.

38. Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, "From a Leninist to a Charismatic Party:
The CCP's Changing Leadership, 1937-1945/' in Saich and Van de Ven, New Perspec-
tives , p. 372.

39. Ibid., p. 373.

40. Ibid., pp. 370-375; Apter, "Discourse as Power"; Faligot and Kauffer, Chinese
Secret Service, pp. 153-170.

41. During three months in 1940 in a small part of Hebei, more than 3,600 were
killed; Domenach, Chtne, p. 48.

42. Ye Fei, interview in 1983, in Benton, "Under Arms and Umbrellas," p. 138.

43. Domenach, Chine, pp. 44-52,

44. Ibid., pp. 52-55.

45. Despite many indications to the contrary in his work, this was, for example, the
thesis of Jack Belden in one of the earliest reports on the Chinese Revolution, China
Shakes the World (949; reprint, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973).

46. William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (1967;
reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

47. Alan Roux, La Chtne populaire, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1983, 1984),
1:81.

48. Bianco, "Peasant Responses."

49. Hinton, Fanshen, pp. 581-583.

50. Lynn T. White III, Policies of Chaos: The Organizational Causes of Violence in
China s Cultural Revolution (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 82.

51. A. Doak Barnett and Ezra Vogel, Cadres, Bureaucracy, and Political Power in
Communist China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 228; Domenach,
Chine, p. 71; Claude Aubert, "Economie et societe rurales, 1 ' in Bergere, Bianco, and
Domes, La Chine au XXe Steele, 2: 1 50.

52. Domenach, Chine, pp. 70-72.

53. Hinton, Fanshen, p. 285. Hinton, though on the whole very favorably disposed
toward Chinese Communism, is a remarkable witness and a farmer himself (in the
United States).

54. He Liyi with Claire Anne Chik, Mr. China's Son — A Villagers Life (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1993), pp. 52-54.

55. Richard Masden, "The Politics of Revenge in Rural China during the Cultural
Revolution," in Lipman and Harrell, Violence in China, p. 186.

56. Werner Meissner, "La voie orthodoxe (1949-1955)," in Bergere, Bianco, and
Domes, La Chine au XXe siecle, 2: 19.

57. In "Comments on the Repression and Liquidation of Counterrevolutionary
Elements," quoted in MacFarquhar and Fairbank, Cambridge History of China, 14: 89.

58. Roux, La Chine populaire, p. 164.

59. Domenach, Chine, pp. 67 and 80.

60. Meissner, "La voie orthodoxe," p. 25.

61 . White, Policies of Chaos, pp. 93-101.

Notes to Pages 482-490

791

62. Roux, La Chine populaire, p. 170.

63. Domenach, Chine, pp. 77-79.

64. "Quinze ans de persecution contre les catholiques en Chine communiste" Est et
ouest, 16-30 September 1966, pp. 4-9; Domenach, Chine, p. 504.

65. Domenach, Chine, pp. 80-81.

66. Quoted in MacFarquhar and Fairbank, Cambridge History of China, 14: 88.

67. White, Policies of Chaos, pp. 104-124.

68. Jacques Andrieu, "Le mouvement des idees" in Bergere, Bianco, and Domes, La
Chtne au XXe siecle, 2: 268-269.

69. Domenach, Chtne, p. 118.

70. Some rectification movements even occurred inside prisons. See Jean Pasqualini
with Rudolf Chelminski, Prisoner of Mao (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973).

71. Domenach, Chine, pp. 121-126.

72. Jean-Luc Domenach, The Origins of the Great Leap Forward: The Case of One
Chinese Province (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), p. 154.

73. Ten years later these children would become Red Guards. The verb "to fight" in
Chinese, when employed transitively as here, meant to denounce collectively, to extract
an act of contrition, or, lacking one, to call for condemnation. It was a very special kind
of "fight," since it was impossible for victims to defend themselves even in words. In
principle it was known in advance whether there would simply be shouting or whether
there would also be blows, and, if the latter, whether the blows might eventually lead to
death. Death was quite common during the agrarian reforms and the Cultural Revolu-
tion, but quite rare between them.

74. He, Mr. China s Son, pp. 3-8.

75. The figure 5 percent seemed to have an almost mystical value, so often was it
mentioned during the campaigns. But it meant the bare minimum. It also recurred
frequently in the speeches of Pol Pot.

76. MacFarquhar and Fairbank, Cambridge History of China, 14: 257.

77. Hinton, Fanshen, p. 484.

78. Justin Yifu Lin, "Collectivization and China's Agricultural Crisis in 1959-
%," Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990), 1 228-50.

79. Domenach, Chine, p. 152.

80. William Hinton, Shenfan (New York: Random House, 1983).

81. Domenach, Origins of Great Leap Forward, p. 152.

82. Mao, a secret speech, in The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao, ed. Roderick
MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek, and Eugene Wu (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East
Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1989),

83. MacFarquhar and Fairbank, Cambridge History of China, 14: 380.

84. Ibid., p. 369.

85. Domenach, Origins of Great Leap Forward, p. 160.

86. Much of this information is taken from Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Chinas
Secret Famine (London: John Murray, 1996). This is the only book we know of that
gives a good overall picture of the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward.

792

Notes to Pages 490-500

87. Ibid., p. 133.

88. Roux, La Chine populaire, pp. 295-296.

89. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, p, 283.

90. MacFarquhar and Fairbank, Cambridge History of China, 14: 370 and 383.

91. Ibid., pp. 376-377.

92. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, p. 113.

93. Ibid., p. 146.

94. Ibid., p. 139.

95. Domenach, Origins of Great Leap Forward, p. 157.

96. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, pp. 112-149.

97. Wei Jingsheng, u Mon evolution intellectuelle entre seize et vingt-neuf ans," in
La Cinquieme Modernisation et autres ecrits du "Printemps de Peking trans, and ed.
Huang San and Angel Pino (Paris: Christian Bourgois-Bibliotheque Asiarique, 1997),
pp. 244-246.

98. A celebrated formula used to describe Mao Zedong by Lin Biao in a speech on
18 September 1966.

99. Roux, La Chine populaire, pp. 296-297.

100. Ibid., pp. 213-216.

101. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, pp. 248, 238-239.

102. Lin, "Collectivization"; Becker, Hungry Ghosts, pp. 270-273.

103. MacFarquhar and Fairbank, Cambridge History of China, 14: 370-372.

104. Ibid., pp. 372-386, for these and most other figures regarding the Great Leap
Forward .

105. Ibid., p. 381.

106. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, pp. 235-254.

107. Domenach, Chine, p. 154.

108. Lin, "Collectivization"; Aubert, "Economic et societe rurales,' 1 pp. 166-168.

109. Hua Linshan, Les annees rouges (Paris: Seuil, 1987), p. 202.

1 10. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, p. 243.

111. Harry Wu, Laogai: The Chinese Gulag, trans. Ted Slingerland (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1994), pp. 1 17, 178.

1 12. Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), p. 164.

113. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, p. 172.

114. Ibid, p. 248.

115. Wu, Laogai, p. 38.

116. Domenach, Chine, p. 242; Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, p. 318.

117. Domenach, Chine, pp. 318, 512.

118. On this subject see Wu, Laogai, pp. 23-39; Domenach, Chine, pp. 139-226.

1 19. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, p. 97.

120. Domenach, Chine, p. 541.

121. Wu, Laogai, p. 30.

122. Wu prefers "retraining."

123. Ibid., pp. 142-143.

Notes to Pages 500-514

793

124. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, p. 266.

125. Domenach, Chine, p. 162.

126. Wu, Laogai, pp. 49 and 55.

127. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, p. 196.

128. Wu, Laogai, p. 50.

129. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, pp. 32, 48.

130. Ibid, p. 50.

131. Ibid, pp. 253-254.

132. Ibid, pp. 51-56, 110-115, 249.

133. Ibid, pp. 45-46.

134. Ibid, pp. 36,73.

135. Ibid, p. 298.

136. Ibid, p. 147.

137. Ibid, p. 81.

138. Albert Stihle, Le pretre et le commissaire (Paris: Grasset, 1971).

139. Domenach, Chine, p. 170.

140. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, pp. 219, 231.

141. Ibid, p. 32.

142. Domenach, Chine, p. 168.

143. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, p. 42

144. Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (London: Macdonald, 1986), pp. 224-
226.

145. Ibid, pp. 298-299.

146. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, p. 72.

147. Nien, Life and Death, part 3.

148. Domenach, Chine, pp. 170 and 185.

149. Nien, Life and Death, p. 318.

150. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, pp. 39^K).

151. Domenach, Chine, p. 211.

152. Ibid, p. 213.

153. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, pp. 178-181.

154. Ibid, p. 187.

155. See, e.g., Fairbank, Great Chinese Revolution, p. 449; Anne F Thurston, "Ur-
ban Violence during the Cultural Revolution: Who Is to Blame?" in Lipman and
Harrell, Violence in China, p. 149; Domenach, Chine, p. 211.

156. This committee was formed at an extraordinary Politburo meeting on 16 May
1966 and answered only to its permanent committee — that is, to Mao. It removed
control of the Cultural Revolution's direction from Peng Zhen and from the Secretariat
of the Central Committee, led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The CRG was
dominated by Maoist extremists such as Jiang Qing ("Madam Mao"), Chen Boda, and
Zhang Chunqiao; Kang Sheng was its leading adviser. It worked very closely with Mao
and, after 1968, replaced both the Central Committee and the Politburo as the funda-
mental decision-making body.

157. Harry Harding, "The Chinese State in Crisis," in The Cambridge History of

794

Notes to Pages 514-520

China, ed. Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, vol. 15, Part 2: Revolutions
within the Chinese Revolution, 1966-1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), p. 209.

158. Domenach, Chine, p. 259.

159. Yves Chevrier, "L'empire distendu, esquisse du politique en Chine des Qing a
Deng Xiaoping/ 1 in La grejfe de Vetat — Trajectoires du politique 2, ed. Jean-Francois
Bayart (Paris: Karthala, 1996), pp. 383 and 375.

160. Wei, u Mon evolution," p. 227.

161. See Frederick C. Tiewes and Warren Sun, The Tragedy of Lin Biao: Riding the
Tiger during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1971 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1966).

1 62. Hua, Annies rouges, p. 25 1 .

163. See in particular the fascinating memoirs of Ni Yuxian, who was a student in
the naval academy in Shanghai, collected in Anne F. Thurston, A Chinese Odyssey: The
Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991).

164. White, Policies of Chaos, p. 203.

165. In contrast, the Red Guards' discovery, on goodwill visits and exchanges or
during the forced ruralization of 1968, of the widespread misery in the countryside
accelerated their distancing from the regime, as described by Wei Jingsheng,

166. Mao Zedong, Little Red Book; song quoted in Zhai Zhenhua, Red Flower of
China (New York: Soho, 1992), p. 81.

167. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, p. 294.

168. Harding, "The Chinese State in Crisis, 1 ' p. 150. Anyone who had been in
prison, however, was forbidden to take part in political activity; Hinton, Shenfan,
p. 529.

169. White, Policies of Chaos, pp. 245-247.

170. This led to some spectacular reversals of fortune. For example, the moderate
Henan chief Pan Fusheng, who had been sacked at the instigation of the ultra-Maoist
Wu Zhipu just before the Great Leap Forward, took up office again in 1966 as part of
the ultraleft clan of Chen Boda. Meanwhile, Wu was arrested and probably killed in
1967 by the Red Guards in Canton. See Domenach, Origins of Great Leap Forward,
p. 167.

171. See on this point the fascinating picture drawn by one former Red Guard who
became a university lecturer in the United States: Wang Shaoguang, Failure of Cha-
risma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995),
pp. 95-113, and 161-209.

172. Roux., La Chine popul aire, 2: 45-46.

173. Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, pp. 152-166 and 197-228.

174. Ibid., p. 28.

175. Ibid., p. 210.

176. Quoted in Thurston, "Urban Violence."

177. Quoted in Marie-Claude Bergere, La Republique populaire de Chine de 1949 d
nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1987), p. 133.

Notes to Pages 520-528

795

178. Belden, China Shakes the World, p. 228.

179. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, p. 218; Wu, Laogai, p. 46.

180. Ling, Red Guard, pp. 174-183; Zhai, Red Flower, pp. 84-90. Seeing Mao close
up was often a disappointment: "He was older than I thought, and more than half of his
hair was white. His face was that of an old man, and it really didn't shine like it should
have. His movements were slow. He was like a senile old man"; Zhai, p. 87.

181. Thurston, "Urban Violence/ 1 p. 149.

182. Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, p. 76.

183. Nien, Life and Death, p. 69.

184. Pasqualini, Prisoner of Mao, p. 184.

185. Zhai, Red Flower, p. 62.

186. Douwe Fokkema, "Creativity and Politics," in MacFarquhar and Fairbank,
Cambridge History of China, 15: 600; Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, p. 79.

187. Statement by a Red Guard, in Roux, La Chine populaire, 2: 37.

188. Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, p. 70.

189. Ling, Red Guard, p. 49; Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, p. 71.

190. Nien, Life and Death, p. 76.

191. Ibid., p. 56.

192. Some chose "Comrade Norman Bethune is a member of the Canadian Com-
munist Party." Were they joking?

193. See, for example, Zhai, Red Flower, pp. 92-100.

194. Ibid., p. 100.

195. Wang, Failure of Charisma, p. 72.

196. Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, p. 77.

197. Domenach, Chine, pp. 273-274 and 284-285.

198. Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, p. 212; these figures, which are not entirely
reliable, are those used in the trial of the Gang of Four in 1981.

199. Nien, Life and Death, p. 443.

200. Roux, La Chine populaire, 2: 50.

201. ICen Ling, Miriam London, and Lee Ta-ling, Red Guard: From Schoolboy to
"Little General" in Maos China (London: Macdonald, 1972), pp. 18-21.

202. For an exception see the pioneering works of Simon Leys, which are still
valuable both for their chronological precision and for their ideological decoding of
the Cultural Revolution: The Chairman's New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolu-
tion (New York: Alison and Busby, 1981) and Chinese Shadows (New York: Penguin,
1981).

203. Five such changes occurred in the space of five months at the top of General
Workers' Headquarters in Wuhan; Wang, Failure of Charisma, p. 89.

204. Ling, Red Guard, pp. 260-262.

205. See in particular Ling, Red Guard.

206. Harding, "The Chinese State in Crisis," p. 168.

207. Hua, Annees rouges, p. 31 1.

208. Ling, Red Guard, p. 31.

796

Notes to Pages 528-535

209. Keith Forster, "Spontaneous and Institutional Rebellion in the Cultural Revo-
lution: the Extraordinary Case of Weng Senhe," Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs,
no. 27 (1992), 38-75.

210. Domenach, Chine, pp. 278-286.

211. "The students used to say: 'Once we control the Central Bureau for Public
Security, we can arrest whomever we like 111 ; Ling, Red Guard, p. 252.

212. See the essential texts in Hector Mandares et al., Revo cul dam la Chine pop:
Anthologte de la presse des Gardes rouges (mat 1966-janvier 1968) (Paris: Bibliotheque
Asiatique, 1974), pp. 353-427.

213. Mao did nothing to explain his thinking, for that would have meant taking sides
in the struggle; he never made a single speech about the Cultural Revolution.

214. Ling, Red Guard, p. 115; Nien, Life and Death, p. 370.

215. "What the two of us had in common was our belief that violence should solve
our problems: force replaced propaganda 11 ; Ling, Red Guard, p. 193.

216. See, for example, Hua, Annies rouges, p. 328.

217. Zhai, Red Flower, p. 81.

218. Ibid.

219. Ibid., p. 105.

220. Ling, Red Guard, p. 42.

221. Hua, Annees rouges, p. 106.

222. Ibid., p. 108.

223. Nien, Life and Death, p. 363.

224. There was a basic difference between the students and the workers: the stu-
dents wanted power, while the workers wanted money; Ling, Red Guard, p. 243.

225. Wang, Failure of Charisma, p. 118.

226. Ibid., p. 158.

227. Hinton, Shenfan, p. 521.

228. Wang, Failure of Charisma, p. 66.

229. Ibid, p. 94.

230. Ibid, pp. 143-208.

231. Ling, Red Guard, p. 83.

232. White, Policies of Chaos, p. 325.

233. Hinton, Shenfan, pp. 519 and 527-528.

234. See esp. Hua, Annees rouges.

235. Bergere, La Republique, p. 133.

236. Thurston, "Urban Violence, 11 pp. 158-159.

237. Roux, La Chtne populaire, 2: 54-55.

238. Thurston gives the figure 12 million, Fairbank 14 million, and Bergere (La
Republique) 20 million.

239. White, Policies of Chaos, p. 294.

240. Harding, 'The Chinese State in Crisis," p. 212.

241 . Hua, Annees rouges, pp. 345-346.

242. Domenach, Origins of Great Leap Forward, p. 284.

243. Hua, Annees rouges, pp. 338 and 341-342.

Notes to Pages 536-545

797

244. White, Policies of Chaos, p. 260.

245. Ibid, p. 277.

246. Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, pp. 266-267.

247. Faligot and Kauffer, Chinese Secret Service, p. 407; Harding, "The Chinese
State in Crisis, 11 p. 214.

248. Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, pp. 252-265.

249. Nien, Life and Death, pp. 274-276.

250. Hua, Annees rouges, p. 365.

251. Domenach, Chtne, p. 279.

252. Quoted in Mandares et al, Revo cul dans le Chine pop, p. 50.

253. Sebastian Hellmann, "The Suppression of the April 5th Movement and the
Persecution of 'Counter-Revolutionaries 1 in 1976," Issues and Studies 30 (January 1994),
37-64.

254. Wei, "Mon evolution," p. 226.

255. For the complete text (with various other relevant texts), see Wei, La Cmqmeme
Modernisation.

256. Angel Pino, "Postface," ibid, pp. 261-347. [n the wake of Jiang Zemin's visit to
the United States in November 1997, Wei Jingsheng was released from prison and
forced to leave the country.

257. Jurgen Domes, "La societe politique," in Bergere, Bianco, and Domes, La
Chine au XXe Steele, p. 251 .

258. Domenach, Chtne, pp. 335-345, 415, 491.

259. Jean-Pierre Cabestan, "Chine: Un etat de lois sans etat de droit, 1 ' Revue Tiers
Monde 37 (July-September 1996), 649-668.

260. Quoted in Wu, Laogai, p. 186.

261. Cabestan, "Chine," pp. 662-663.

262. Andrew Scobell, "The Death Penalty in Post-Mao China," China Quarterly,
no. 123 (September 1990), 503-520.

263. Ibid.

264. Domenach, Chtne, pp. 365-378.

265. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, p. 171.

266. Vania Kewley, Tibet: Behind the Ice Curtain (London: Grafton Books, 1990), p. 25 1 .

267. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, p. 166.

268. Ibid, p. 171.

269. Pierre- Antoine Donnet, Tibet — Survival in Question (London: Zed Books,
1994), pp. 41-42.

270. Ibid, pp. 128-129.

271. Kewley, Tibet, pp. 269-270.

272. Quoted in Donnet, Tibet, p. 63.

273. Kewley, Tibet, p. 165.

274. Donnet, Tibet, pp. 54-60, 127.

275. Kewley, Tibet, p. 255.

276. Ibid, pp. 122-124, 291, and 314-318.

277. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, pp. 173-176.

798

Notes to Pages 545-565

278. Donnet, Tibet, pp. 126-127.

279. Becker, Hungry Ghosts, p. 181.

22. Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea

1 . V. Charles MarteJ and Georges Perruche, u Prisonniers francais en Coree," Les
cahiers dhistoire sociaie, no. 3 (October 1994).

2. Kim Hyun Hee, The Tears of My Sou! (New York: William Morrow, 1993); and
an interview with the author in February 1997.

3. Asia Watch, Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (Wash-
ington, 1988).

4. Tibor Meray, "Wilfred Burchett en Coree," Les cahiers dhistoire sociaie, no. 7
(Fall-Winter 1996), 87.

5. Interview with the author, Seoul, February 1997.

6. Another foreigner, a Frenchman named Jacques Sedillot, was arrested at the
same time. He had also come to work in the Department of Foreign-Language Publica-
tions in Pyongyang. Like Lameda he received a twenty-year sentence, but as "an agent
of French imperialism." He was set free in 1975 in a state of such physical deterioration
that he died a few months later, without ever being able to return to France.

7. Interview with the author, Seoul, February 1977.

8. See Martel and Perruche, "Prisonniers francais," for the statements made by
the diplomats; Asia Watch, Human Rights, for the American sailors.

9. Long extracts from this testimony were published in Coreana, the bulletin of
the Societe d'Etudes Coreennes, no. 1 (March 1995).

10. The Third Bureau is the subsection of the National Security Agency in charge
of border security.

11. Estimates of the total camp population vary from 1 50,000 to 400,000.

12. Jean-Pierre Brule, La Coree du Nord de Kim II Sung (Paris: Editions Barre-
Dayez, 1992).

13. La lettre de Coree, nos. 4 and 5, June and August 1997.

14. Le Figaro magazine, 8 March 1997.

15. Ibid.

16. Marc Epstein, L express, 14 August 1997.

17. Lemonde, 10 October 1997.

1 8. Interview with Catherine Bertini, La croix, 8 October 1 997. By way of compari-
son, a study by the World Bank in the early 1990s showed that 43 percent of children in
India showed some traces of malnutrition.

23. Vietnam and Laos

Epigraph: quoted in Doan Van Toai, The Vietnamese Gulag, trans. Sylvie Roman-
owski and Francoise Simon-Miller (New York: Simon And Schuster, 1986), p. 17. Le Duan
visited the prison on the island of Con Son after the 'liberation" of South Vietnam in 1975.

Notes to Pages 566-571

799

1. Although most of its members were Vietnamese, who totally controlled the
Party, the ICP aimed at extending the revolution throughout French Indochina, includ-
ing Laos and Cambodia. It formally dissolved itself as an organization in 1945 but
continued to function until 1951, when it spawned three closely linked parties that no
longer had official Communist status (see Chapter 24).

2. Ngo Van, Vietnam 1920-1945: Revolution et centre-revolution sous la domination
coloniale (Paris: Llnsomniaque, 1996), pp. 128-129.

3. David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), pp. 234-237, 403, 409, 415-416.

4. Ibid., pp. 434-435.

5. Ngo, Vietnam, p. 341.

6. Marr, Vietnam 1945, p. 518.

7. Ngo, Vietnam, pp. 352 and 358-361.

8. Ibid., pp. 338, 341, and 350.

9. Marr, Vietnam 1945, pp. 517 and 519-520.

10. See, e.g., Albert Stihle, Le pretre et le commissaire (Paris: Grasset, 1971).

11. L'histoire, no. 149 (May 1991). According to estimates by the French Army in
1954, 15,500 out of 36,900 prisoners (including Vietnamese allies of France) were set
free either before or after the cessation of hostilities. Both studies agree that the
proportion of losses was around 60 percent. Cf. Colonel Robert Bonnafous, "Les
prisonniers francais des camps Viet-minh" (Thesis, Centre d'Histoire Militaire et
d'Etudes de Defense Nationale, Universite Paul-Valery Montpellier, 1985), p. 217, By
way of comparison, it should be noted that according to a letter dated March 1955 from
General Beaufort, who was head of the French mission at the International Commis-
sion established to oversee the implementation of the Geneva peace accord, 9,000 of the
63,000 Viet Minh prisoners of war died in captivity.

12. Georges Boudarel, Cent Jleurs ecloses dans la nuit du Vietnam: Commumsme et
dissidence 1954-1956 (Paris: Jacques Bertoin, 1991), p. 177.

13. Ibid., pp. 174-175, 176.

14. Ibid., pp. 171, 191, 170,177-178.

15. Ibid., p. 190.

16. Ngo, Vietnam, p. 375.

17. Quoted in Boudarel, Cent Jleurs, p. 200; see also pp. 199-202.

18. Georges Boudarel, "L'ideocratie importee au Vietnam avec le maoisme," in La
bureaucratie au Vietnam — Vietnam- Asie-Debat no. I (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1983), pp. 61,
63.

19. Boudarel, Cent fleurs, pp. 183-184.

20. Quoted in Ngo, Vietnam, p. 404.

21. Georges Boudarel, "1954: Les dilemmes de rindependanee," in Hanoi I93&-
1996: Du drapeau rouge au billet vert, ed. Georges Boudarel and Nguyen Van Ky (Paris:
Autrement, 1997), p. 141.

22. Ngo, Vietnam, p. 404.

23. Boudarel, Cent Jleurs, p. 150.

800

Notes to Pages 571-579

24. Gerard Tongas, J ai vecu dans lenfer communiste au Nord Vietnam (Paris: Nou-
velles Editions Debresse, I960), pp. 231-232.

25. Daniel Hemery, interview, Paris, October 1997; Georges Boudarel, "1965-1975:
Guerre ou paix?" in Boudarel and Nguyen, Hanoi 1936-19%, p. 154.

26. Doan, The Vietnamese Gulag, pp. 199-200.

27. The term "Viet Cong," which originated in the South, means "Communist
Vietnamese."

28. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (Harmondsworth; Penguin Books, 1984),
pp. 530-531.

29. Doan, The Vietnamese Galag, pp. 170-171.

30. Interview with a former Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh City, 1996.

31. See, e.g., Communaute Vietnamienne, Les prisonniers politique* (Paris: Sudesta-
sie, 1974).

32. Doan, The Vietnamese Gulag.

33. Quoted in ibid.

34. Most of this information comes from Martin Stuart-Fox, Contemporary Laos:
Studies in the Politics and the Society of the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic (St. Lucia;
University of Queensland Press, 1982); Martin Stuart-Fox and Mary Koogman, His-
torical Dictionary of Laos (London: Scarecrow Press, 1992); and an interview with
Christian Culas, whom I thank most warmly.

24. Cambodia

Epigraph: quoted in Michael Vickery, Cambodia 1975-1982 (Boston: South End,
1984), p. 148.

1 . The name Khmer Rouge which they always rejected, was bestowed by Sihanouk,
who used it to describe the first guerrilla groups in the late 1960s. We prefer this term
to the name "Polpotists," which is more common in Cambodia but which overperson-
alizes a movement that was not led by Pol Pot alone. Use of this latter term has also
allowed leaders such as Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan to dissociate themselves from
previous events. The fact that they escaped the purges of 1975-1979 implies that they
must have gone along with and abetted some monstrous crimes.

2. The term "Cambodian" is used here to refer to anything connected with Cambo-
dia, and "Khmer" is used to describe the major ethnic group in a country in which
other minorities made up 15 percent of the population until 1970. Influenced by ethnic
nationalism, recent governments in Phnom Penh have tended to substitute "Khmer"
for "Cambodian." "Kampuchea," which was the official name of the country from 1975
to 1991, was simply the Khmer pronunciation of the French name for the country,
"Cambodge." The word originates in Sanskrit.

3. Curiously, it was thus the Communists themselves who first began to talk about
genocide within a Communist regime, before commentators in the West latched onto
the term.

4. More recent events, however, such as the July 1997 coup d'etat by the second

Notes to Pages 579-583

801

prime minister, Hun Sen, against Prince Ranariddh, who won the 1993 elections, have
brought renewed instability.

5. Francois Ponchaud, Cambodia, Year Zero (New York: Penguin, 1978).

6. There were also counterattacks, reassuring and filled with lies. See, e.g., Jerome
Steinbach and Jocelyne Steinbach, Cambodge, I autre sourire (Paris: Editions Sociales,
1976).

7. Pin Yathay with John Man, Stay Alive My Son (London: Bloomsbury, 1987),
p. 384.

8. The best recent history of Democratic Kampuchea (the official name of the
Khmer Rouge state) is David P. Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics,
War, and Revolution since 194S (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); see also
Marie-Alexandrine Martin, Cambodia, a Shattered Society (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994).

9. David P. Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Boul-
der: Westview Press, 1992); and Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and
Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996), pp. 20-25.

10. See, e.g., Haing S. Ngor and Roger Warner, Surviving the Killing Fields: The
Cambodian Odyssey of Haing S. Ngor (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), p. 71.

1 1 . Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 308, n. 28; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 108.

12. Henri Locard, "Tramkak District in the Grip of the Khmer Rouge," paper
presented at the conference "Cambodia: Power, Myth, and Memory," Monash Univer-
sity, December 1996, pp. 26-33.

13. Because of their obsession with secrecy, the Khmer Rouge always carried out
executions at night.

14. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 167.

15. The other leaders were Hou Youn, Hu Nim, and Khieu Samphan, all of whom
were the legal front of the Communist Party in Phnom Penh until 1967 and were
former government ministers. Others, intermittently fighting as rebels since 1963,
included Nuon Chea, Sao Phim, Son Sen, Vorn Vet, leng Sary and his wife, the wife of
Saloth Sar (aka Pol Pot), Ieng Thirith, and Khieu Ponnary. The last two were sisters.
All of this group belonged to the same generation, having been born in the late 1920s.

16. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p 108.

17. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 63-64.

18. Serge Thion, "Chronology of Khmer Communism, 1940—1982," in Revolution
and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays, ed. David P. Chandler and Ben Kiernan
(New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1983), pp. 301-302.

19. The measure apparently was decided in January 1975, at the same time as the
abolition of money directly after the printing of a new currency The only leader to
oppose the move, the influential Hou Youn, a former minister in the Sihanouk regime
and a founding member of the KCP, disappeared in the following months in the first of
a series of high-level purges.

20. The Khmer Rouge immediately abolished the Khmer currency. One unforeseen
consequence was that the dollar immediately became the (illegal) means of exchange.

802

Notes to Pages 583-588

21. Marek Sliwinski, Le genocide Khmer rouge: line analyze demography que (Paris:
L'Harmattan, 1995), p. 30.

22. This would explain why some people left with very few belongings, and in
particular without any articles that could be exchanged on the black market, which
proved to be the key means of survival over rhe following months and years.

23. The only explanation for this is the dogmatic hostility to anything written down
that was not revolutionary by nature. Books were destroyed and abandoned, as at the
National Library, or they were transformed into cigarette paper.

24. See Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 62, 68; Haing Ngor, Surviving the
Killing Fields, p. 130.

25. Statement by Channo, Phnom Penh Post (hereafter PPP), 1 April 1995, p. 5.

26. See, e.g., Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 59, 97, 221-223.

27. Usha Welaratna, Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in
America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 78.

28. See the general discussion about relations between the peasants and the New
People in Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 210-215.

29. Ibid., p. 219.

30. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 93.

31 . Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 97.

32. Pin Yathay cites several instances of planned flights or revolts that were foiled by
sudden forced movements of the population.

33. People often ended up possessing nothing more than a bowl and a spoon. See
Charles H. Twining, "The Economy," in Cambodia 1975-1978: Rendezvous with Death,
ed. Karl D.Jackson, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 121.

34. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 124.

35. According to Julio Jeldres, one of Sihanouk's advisers, in PPP, 20 September
1996.

36. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 205-209.

37. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 333.

38. Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 298.

39. Each zone was composed of several such departments.

40. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 207, 209; idem, Tragedy of Cambodian His-
tory, p. 295.

41. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 418.

42. Ben Kiernan, "Wild Chickens, Farm Chickens, and Cormorants; Kampuchea's
Eastern Zone under Pol Pot," in Chandler and Kiernan, Revolution and Its Aftermath,
pp. 191-197.

43. Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, pp. 296-297; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime,
pp. 392-411.

44. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 144.

45. Several reports agree (see esp. Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 276)
that a number of people were sent back to Cambodia, sometimes in exchange for cattle,
even after the fighting had begun. It is probable that such people were being sent back
to certain death.

Notes to Pages 588-592

803

46. See, e.g., Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 368-413.

47. Y Phandara, Retour a Phnom Penh: Le Cambodge du genocide a la colonisation
(Paris: A. M. Metailie, 1982), p. 228.

48. Quoted in Henri Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge (University of Lyon II, De-
partment of Languages, 1995), p. 17, reprinted in Commumsme, nos. 47-48 (1996),
127-161.

49. Quoted in Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 265.

50. Ibid., p. 322.

51 . Quoted in Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge, pp. 8-9.

52. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime; Vickery, Cambodia, 1975-1982. Vickery seriously un-
derestimates the original size of the population. Kiernan's figure is an extrapolation
from several microstudies of different sectors of the population: 25 percent losses in the
families of refugees; 35 percent, 41 percent, and 53 percent losses in three villages; 42
percent in one neighborhood in Phnom Penh (of whom only 25 percent died of hunger
or disease); and 36 percent losses, almost all by assassination, in a group of 350 inhabi-
tants in the eastern zone.

53. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 456-460; Stephen R. Heder, Kampuchean Occupa-
tion and Resistance (Bankok: Institute of Asian Studies, 1980).

54. Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 261.

55. Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea (Boulder:
Wcstview, 1984), p. 148.

56. Leo Mong Hai, president of the Khmer Institute for Democracy, interview with
the author, December 1996.

57. Sliwinski, Le genocide, pp. 49-67.

58. Welaratna, Beyond the Killing Fields, pp. xix and 2.

59. An idea that underlies the otherwise informative and important study by Wil-
liam Shawcross, Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Destruction of Cambodia (London:
Deutsch, 1979); see also Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 20 and 24.

60. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 13 and 163.

61 . Sliwinksi, Le genocide, pp. 42-48.

62. Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge, p. 10.

63. Etcheson, Rise and De mtse, p. 148.

64. Sliwinski, Le genocide, p. 82.

65. Munthit, PPP, 1 April 1995, p. 6.

66. See, e.g., Kenneth M. Quinn, "The Pattern and Scope of Violence," in Jackson,
Cambodia 1975-1978, p. 190.

67. Interview with the author, December 1996.

68. PPP, 7 April 1995, p. 7.

69. David Hawk, u The Photographic Record," in Jackson, Cambodia 1975-1978,
p. 212.

70. PPP, 7 April 1995, p. 6.

71. It was enough to have gone to secondary school, or sometimes even simply to be
literate, to be classified as an intellectual.

72. Charles H. Twining, "The Economy," in Jackson, Cambodia 1975-1978, p. 134.

Notes to Pages 593-598

Notes to Pages 598-605

805

73. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 178.

74. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 295, who quotes Stephen Heder's in-depth study,
Kampuchean Occupation and Resistance.

75. Sliwinski, Le genocide, pp. 76, 77.

76. Francois Ponchaud, "Social Change in the Vortex of Revolution," in Jackson,
Cambodia 1975-1978, p. 153.

77. Pin Yathay mentions a number of Chinese who died of hunger after having to
exchange their gold savings for a few boxes of rice; Stay Alive, My Son, p. 243.

78. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 297.

79. Sliwinski, Le genocide, p. 76.

80. Quoted in Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: Voices of Cambodia's
Revolution and Its People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 240.

81. See the statement by Niseth, who was moved to a Pnong village, in Welaratna,
Beyond the Killing Fields, p. 180.

82. Most of the information here concerning the Cham is drawn from Kiernan, Pol
Pot Regime, pp. 252-288.

83. Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 246.

84. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 428-431.

85. Sliwinski, Le genocide, p. 76.

86. Ibid., p. 57.

87. See Michael Vickery, "Democratic Kampuchea: Themes and Variations" in
Chandler and Kiernan, Revolution and Its Aftermath, pp. 99-135.

88. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 217, 264.

89. Unlike the leaders of other Communist countries, Khmer Rouge leaders rarely
traveled around the country, perhaps because of their paranoia. No eyewitness state-
ments mention visits from the leaders.

90. See, e.g., Ly Heng and Franchise Demeure, Cambodge: Le sourire bdillonne,
(Xonrupt-Longemer: Anako, 1994), pp. 105, 150-151, and 172-173.

91. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 90, 292-293, 341-343.

92. The picture was immediately much darker for people deported to mountainous
or jungle zones where the land was to be cleared.

93. Quoted in Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 271.

94. Twining, u The Economy," p. 143.

95. PPP, 7 April 1995, p. 5; Sliwinski, Le genocide, p. 65, backs up this version of
events.

96. Quinn, a Pattern and Scope of Violence," pp. 201-202.

97. Sliwinski, Le genocide, pp. 64-65; Twining, "The Economy," pp. 143-145.

98. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 317.

99. See, e.g., Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 195; Heng and Demeure, Cambodge,
p. 100.

100. Haing Ngor was in a Khmer Rouge pharmacy one day when he overheard one
nurse ask another whether she had "fed the war slaves yet"; Surviving the Killing Fields,
p. 202.

101. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 67.

102. Ibid., p. 263.

103. Pin Yathay paid a huge price for a tiny map.

104. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 159.

105. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 191-193 and 197-198. The section of the
plan devoted to heavy industry is the longest.

106. Ibid., p. 223.

107. This was the same figure announced by the deputy prime minister of China,
Hua Guofeng, at the National Conference on the Example of Dazhai, in 1975.

108. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 193-194; Karl D. Jackson, "The Ideology
of Total Revolution" in Jackson, Cambodia 1975-1978, p. 60.

1 09 - Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My S<m, pp. 1 1 1 , 1 52, 1 60; Twining, "The Economy," p. 1 30.

110. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 235.

111. Laurence Picq, Beyond the Horizon: Five Years with the Khmer Rouge, trans.
Patricia Norland (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp. 147-148.

112. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 178-179.

113. Ibid., p. 210.

114. 1 wining, "The Economy," p. 122.

115. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 302.

1 16. This sort of military vocabulary was a constant feature of the regime.

1 17. Picq, Beyond the Horizon; Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 175, 197, 208.

118. PPP, 1 April 1995, p. 5.

119. See esp. Twining, "The Economy," pp. 149-150; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime,
p. 240; Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 147.

120. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, p. 240; Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 325.

121. Heng and Demeure, Cambodge, pp. 139-140; PPP, 7 April 1995, p. 7.

122. Haing Ngor relates the story of a child who took four days to die, tied to a pole
in front of his parents; Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 272.

123. Ibid., pp. 135-136; Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 278.

124. See, e.g., Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 145.

125. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 184.

126. Locard, Le goulag khmer rouge, p. 6.

127. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 221-239.

128. Heng and Demeure, Cambodge, pp. 172-173.

129. Ponchaud, "Social Change," p. 160.

130. Haing Ngor, Surving the Killing Fields, pp. 174 and 193-194.

131. Ken Khun, De la dictature des Khmers rouges d I occupation vietnamienne: Cam-
bodge, 1975-1979 (Paris: LTIarmattan, 1994), p. 94. The gall-bladder remedy was com-
mon among the Khmer Loeu; see Ponchaud, "Social Change," p. 160.

132. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 174-175.

133. Interview with author, Cambodia, December 1996.

134. Picq, Beyond the Horizon,

135. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 101, 140.

136. Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 202; Henri Locard, "Les chants revolution-
naires khmers rouges et la tradition culturelte carnbodgienne, ou la revolution triom-

806

Notes to Pages 605-611

phante," paper presented at a conference on the Khmer Rouge, Phnom Penh, August
1996.

137. Franchise Correze and Alain Forest, Le Cambodge a deux voix (Paris: Editions
L'Harmattan, 1984).

138. Heng and Demeure, Cambodge, p. 132.

139. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 166.

140. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 242-247, 336; similar episodes abound in
all the statements made by people who survived and escaped.

141. PPP, 1 April 1995, p. 7; Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 185-186, 227, 245,
and 265.

142. In some cases people were required to write an autobiography every month, and
if there was ever the slightest variation among versions, the punishment was death;
Welaratna, Beyond the Killing Fields, p. 125.

143. Seng Kimseang tells of a young adolescent who was beaten unconscious for
stealing rice, and who later disappeared at the hands of the Angkar; PPP, 1 April 1995,
p. 7.

144. Heng and Demeure, Cambodge, p. 185.

145. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 248.

146. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 228-229.

147. Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge.

148. Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 260.

149. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 300.

150. Ken Khun, De la dictature des Khmers rouges, p. 96; in that case the woman was
also raped by the soldiers before being killed; the cadre responsible died shortly after-
wards in a purge.

151. PPP, 1 April 1995, pp. 6,7.

152. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 337; Heng and Demeure, Cambodge, p. 107.

153. By contrast, everyone smoked tobacco, even the youngest Khmer Rouge sol-
diers. Drug-taking, though less widespread, was not specifically prohibited.

154. Ponchaud, "Social Change," p. 169; PPP, 1 April 1995, p. 7.

155. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 172-175, 201-202.

156. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 236; Welaratna, Beyond the Killing
Fields, p. 53.

157. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 174, 402.

158. Lemonde, 18 June 1997, p. 16.

159. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 319.

160. Statement by a medical student, quoted in Ken Khun, De la dictature des
Khmers rouges, p. 123. Manioc is one of the staples of the Cambodian diet.

161. Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge, pp. 12-13.

1 62. See, e.g., Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 230.

163. Sliwinski, Le genocide, p. 78; 1 am rounding up his numbers, since they have
only a notional value.

1 64. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 338; Heng and Demeure, Cambodge,
p. 109. This recalls the perhaps apocryphal torture that was inflicted on Khmers during

Notes to Pages 611-619

807

the Vietnamese occupation in the first half of the nineteenth century, when tea kettles
were brought to a boil on their burning heads.

165. Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge, p. 18.

166. See Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 321.

167. Information about the prisons comes from the two excellent studies by Locard,
Le goulag khmer rouge, and "Tramkak District in the Grip of the Khmer Rouge.' 1

168. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 245.

169. For example, of the eighty prisoners in one prison described by Pin Yathay
(Stay Alive, My Son, p. 240), there were three survivors.

170. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 345, n. 169.

171. PPP,1 April 1995, p. 5.

172. Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge, p. 6.

173. Ibid, p. 11.

174. Quoted in Ken Khun, De la dictature des Khmers rouges, p. 131.

175. See, e.g., Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, pp. 220-222, 239-250, 302-
308; Heng and Demeure, Cambodge, pp. 144-149.

176. PPP, 20 September 1996, p. 8.

177. Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, pp. 285-302.

178. Quinn, "Pattern and Scope of Violence," p. 198; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime,
pp. 432-433.

179. Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 374, n. 27; Quinn, "Pattern and
Scope of Violence," p. 210.

180. Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, pp. 353-354.

181. Quinn, "Pattern and Scope of Violence," p. 198.

182. For more on this unhappy mix, see Jean-Claude Pomonti, "Angoisses
khmeres," Lemonde, 10 March 1995.

183. Phandara, Retour a Phnom Penh, p. 88.

184. This view reflected the infiuence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; the
"Shanghai Commune" of 1967 was modeled on the Paris revolution.

185. Two other countries are in a similar position today: Laos and Burma. But the
first has existed as a unified political entity only since 1945, and the second, which was
remarkably prosperous as a British colony, is not quite as weak in relation to its neigh-
bors.

186. Ponchaud, "Social Change," pp. 170-175.

187. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 227. Kama is the Cambodian ver-
sion of karma.

188. Unlike, for example, the temples of Java, such as Borobudur, which date from
more or less the same period.

1 89. Several ethnographers have shown that in Cambodia there is a very weak link to
the land and to ancestors, unusual for this part of the world.

190. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 101, 105-106, and 135; Raoul Marc Jennar,
Cambodge: line presse sous presswn (Paris: Reporters Sans Frontieres, 1997), p. 23.

191 . Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge, p. 1 5.

192. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 208.

Notes to Pages 61 S-626

Notes to Pages 626-640

809

193. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, pp. 101-103. Similar tactics were used by the
Chinese Communist Party when they were seizing power.

194. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, pp. 143, 161, and 298-300.

195. Picq, Beyond the Horizon, p. 22.

196. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 284; Ponchaud, "Social Change," p. 164.

197. Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 247.

198. Ieng Sary, in Newsweek, 4 September 1975.

199. Red Flag (Beijing), 1 June 1958.

200. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, p. 68; Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 130.

201. Picq, Beyond the Horion, p. 21; Phandara, Retour a Phnom Penh, p. 91.

202. Locard, PPP, 20 May 1994, p. 16.

203. Radio Phnom Penh, 18 April 1977, quoted in Jackson, Cambodia 1975-1978,
p. 74.

204. Norodom Sihanouk, Prisonnier des Khmers rouges (Paris: Hachette, 1986).

205. Hengand Demeure, Cambodge, pp. 189-190.

206. Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 243.

207. Dith Pran (on whom the film The Killing Fields was based), quoted in Sidney
Schanberg, "The Death and Life of Dith Pran," New York Times Magazine, 20 January
1980.

208. Heng and Demeure, Cambodge, p. 112.

209. Khun, De la dictature des Khmers rouges, pp. 97-98.

210. Picq, Beyond the Horizon.

211. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, pp. 139-140.

212. Sliwinski, Le genocide, p. 67.

213. Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge , p. 28.

214. See, e.g., Chandler, Brother Number One, p. 214.

215. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 203.

216. Speech on 27 September 1977, quoted in Jackson, Cambodia 1975-1978, p. 73.

217. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 193.

218. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 63 and 72-73.

219. An interview after the partisans had rallied to Ieng Sary, PPP, 15 November
1996, p. 6. For other ideas about links between Jacobinism and Communism see
Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion; The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

220. Even the Samlaut uprising in 1967, which was officially the beginning of the
armed resistance, was a reaction to Lon Nol's decision to reduce the amount of Cambo-
dian rice given to the North Vietnamese army.

221. Sophia Quinn-Judge, "Ho Chi Minh: New Perspectives from the Comintern
Files," in Viet Nam: Sources et approches, ed. Philippe Le Failler and Jean-Marie
Mancini (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de TUniversite de Provence, 1996), pp. 171-186.

222. Discernible in China during the short reign of Marshal Lin Biao (1967-1971).

223. Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, p. 276.

224. Twining, "The Economy," p. 132.

225. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 176, 225-226; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime,
p. 379.

226. Radio Phnom Penh, 25 July 1975, in Jackson, "Ideology," p. 60.

227. Sihanouk claims that Zhou Enlai warned the Cambodian leadership in 1975
that they should not follow the Chinese example.

228. Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge, p. 17.

229. See Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 335.

230. Quoted in Martin, Le mal cambodgien, p. 193.

231. After 1960 there was a considerable drop in the prison population, particularly
in the number of political prisoners, especially in China.

232. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 216-217.

233. Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge, p. 19.

234. Chandler, Brother Number One, pp. 210-211.

235. From an account by a participant, ibid., pp. 171-172.

236. PPP, 20 September 1996, p. 7. Sihanouk claims that it was Pol Pot who com-
posed the Angkar anthem.

237. Timothy Carney, "The Organization of Power," in Jackson, Cambodia 1975-
1978, p. 95.

238. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 320.

239. Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge, p. 19.

240. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son, p. 299.

241 . The best summary of these is found in Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime.

242. Haing Ngor, Surviving the Killing Fields, p. 286.

243. Locard, Le goulag Khmer rouge, p. 19; Kiernan, Pol Pot Regime, p. 247.

244. Many of the following arguments are taken from Craig Etcheson, "Genocide:
By the Laws, Not by Emotion," PPP, 1 1 August 1995, p. 20.

245. Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr, "Towards an Empirical Definition of
Genocides and Politicidcs," International Studies Quarterly, no. 32 (1988).

246. Phandara, Retour a Phnom Penh, pp. 72-73.

247. Sliwinski, Le genocide, p. 128.

248. Welaratna, Beyond the Killing Fields, p. 128.

249. Sliwinski, Le genocide, p. 153.

Part IV Conclusion

1. Doan Van Toai, The Vietnamese Gulag, trans. Sylvie Romanowski and
Francoise Simon-Miller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).

2. See Yves Chevrier, "L'empire distend u: Esquisse du politique en Chine des
Qing a Deng Xiaoping," in La grejfe de Vetat — trajectoires du politique 2, ed. Jean-
Francois Bayart (Paris: Karthala, 1996).

3. Doan, The Vietnamese Gulag, p. 100.

4. The French equivalent of West Point.

810

Notes to Pages 647-668

25. Communism in Latin America

1. In 1952 Cuba was ranked third among the twenty Latin American countries in
terms of per-capita gross domestic product. Thirty years later, after more than twenty
years of Castroism, Cuba had dropped to fifteenth, ahead of Nicaragua, Guatemala, El
Salvador, Bolivia, and Haiti. See Jeannine Verdes-Leroux, La iune et la caudillo (Paris:
Gallimard, 1998), p. 16.

2. Although there are many reasons to be critical of the Batista regime, the new
Castro regime significantly exaggerated the country's poverty to increase Castro's
credibility and to gain sympathy from Western intellectuals. For instance, Castro stated
that 50 percent of the population was illiterate, while the actual figure in 1958 was 22
percent, at a time when the world average was about 44 percent.

3. Jeannine Verdes-Leroux has concluded that the figure of 20,000 dead, the num-
ber cited by the Castro regime and repeated by left-wing intellectuals in the West, was
in fact false. After close analysis of the sources, she proposes a figure of 2,000.

4. Verdes-Laroux, La lune et la caudillo, pp. 179-189.

5. During the pilots' trial, in February 1959, the defense minister acted as prosecu-
tor. After the pilots were acquitted, Castro intervened to have them condemned in a
second trial in March, showing that the law was at the service of the dictator.

6. Manolo Ray launched a new armed movement, the People's Revolutionary
Movement, which was very active in 1960 and 1961.

7. The Bay of Pigs operation, an unsuccessful attempt to land anti-Castro guerril-
las in Cuba, was organized by the CIA during the Eisenhower administration and
carried out under Kennedy.

8. Regis Debray, Louis soient nos seigneurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 186.

9. Ibid., p. 185.

10. Ibid., p. 186.

11. Martha Frayde, Ecoute Fidel (Paris: Denoel, 1987).

12. Alfredo Carrion was shot at point-blank range by a guard known as "Jaguey
Grande" for attempting to escape from the Melena 2 Farm.

13. The government weekly Bohemia acknowledged the value of this labor force in
April 1973, when it spoke of "the use of counterrevolutionary prisoners for tasks in the
public interest."

14. Castro consistently supported revolution abroad until the late 1980s. In 1979 and
1980 he sent 600 military advisers to Grenada to prop up the pro-Soviet regime of
Maurice Bishop. When U.S. forces invaded in 1983, they took prisoner 750 Cubans.

15. At the same time, an additional 35,000 young people were enrolled in the Patri-
otic Military Service, where they were forcibly engaged in heavy work as a penal or
disciplinary measure.

16. The links to Cuba were attested by the presence of 500 Nicaraguan military
personnel among the Cuban forces in Angola. The Sandinistas' political alignment was
also made clear by their opposition to the United Nations resolution condemning
Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

17. Gilles Bataillon, "Nicaragua: De la tyrannie a la dictature totalitaire," Esprit,
October 1983.

Notes to Pages 670-687

811

18. Bayardo Arce, "De la strategic revolutionnaire et de la construction du social-
isme," Esprit, January 1986.

19. Cf. Mario Vargas Llosa, "Breviare d'un massacre," Esprit, October 1983: "Un-
like the case of other leaders of the Sendero Luminoso, we don't know whether he ever
visited China, or whether in fact he has ever left Peru."

20. Jose Carlos Mariategui (1895-1930) was the author of the famous Seven Essays
on the Reality of Peru. His politics were halfway between Marxism and populism,
allowing both the Communists and the Aprists to claim him as their predecessor,

21 . Vargas Llosa, "Breviare d'un massacre."

22. In August 1982 the Sendero claimed to have carried out 2,900 such actions.

23. APRA was established by the Peruvian Victor Raul Haya de la Torre in 1924.
Although it initially had ambitions for the whole continent, it had gradually limited
itself to Peru.

26. Afrocommunism

1. Eric Fottorino, "Dans le piege rwandais," Le tnonde, 25 July 1997.

2. Interview, Lisbon Expresso, 12 May 1990, quoted in M. Cahen, "Le socialisme,
c'est les Soviets plus I'ethnicite," Politique africame, June 1991.

3. Marina and David Ottway, Afrocommunism (New York: Holmes and Meier,
1986), pp. 30-35. The word "Afrocommunism" used in the title of this chapter is
borrowed from these authors. This borrowing is purely lexical and is not intended to
have connotations similar to those of the term "Eurocommunism" as used in the 1970s.
Eurocommunism implied the relationships among the Communist parties of Italy,
France, and Spain and the hopes on the left for "socialism with a human face" that
avoided mistakes made by the Soviet Union.

4. Christian Geffray, "Fragments d'un discours du pouvoir (1975-1985): Du bon
usage d'une meconnaissanee scientifique," Politique afncaine, no. 29 (March 1988).

5. Marie Mendras, "La strategic oblique en Afrique subsaharienne," in Group for
Research and Study of Soviet Strategy, "L'URSS et le tiers-monde; Une strategic
oblique, 11 Cahiers de la Fondatwn pour les etudes de defense nationale, no. 32 (1984).

6. Bukharin made explicit statements on this point at the Fourth Comintern Con-
gress on 18 November 1922; see the supplement to La correspondance Internationale,
4January 1923.

7. Gareth M. Winrow, The Foreign Policy of the CDR in Africa (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1990).

8. Jean-Francois Bayart, "L'etat," in Christian Coulon and Denis-Constant Mar-
tin, Les Afriques politique* (Paris: La Decouverte, 1991), p. 219.

9. This question must be addressed if one is take African adherence to Commu-
nism seriously, as is pointed out by Michael Walter in his editorial in Journal of
Communist Studies, nos. 3^ (September-December 1985), a special issue on Marxist
military regimes in Africa.

10. See esp. Rene Lemarchand, "La violence politique," in Coulon and Martin, Les
Afriques polttiques, which also contains a sizable bibliography on the question.

1 1. In 1985, just before the start of the Gorbachev era, in addition to these three

812

Notes to Pages 687-692

countries the Soviet Union regarded Algeria, Benin, Cape Verde, the Congo, Guinea,
Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Sao Tome and Principe, and Tanzania as allies.

12. See the portrait by Jacques deBarrin in Le monde, 23 May 1991.

13. Haile Fida, one of the leaders of MEISON and a member of the Dergue's
Political Bureau, had acquired his Marxist-Leninist tendencies while studying in
France. He was arrested in August 1977 and disappeared after being detained for
several months.

14. Patrice Piquard, "L'Ethiopie juge Mengistu, le boucher rouge/ 1 Levenement du
Jendi, 22-28 December 1994.

1 5. See Paul B. Henze, "Communism and Ethiopia," Problems of Communism, May-
June 1981.

16. American sources estimate that 15,000 Cuban personnel were stationed there.

17. Christopher Clapham, "The Workers' Party of Ethiopia," Journal of Communist
Studies, no. 1 (March 1985).

18. Ogla Kapeliouk, "Quand le paysan est tenu a Pecart des decisions politiques," Le
monde diplomatique, April 1984.

19. Bertrand Le Gendre, "Ethiopie: Le proces de la Terreur rouge," Le monde, 13
May 1995. In 1997 the secretary general of the Federation of Ethiopian Teachers
suggested a figure of 30,000 political murders since 1974; Amnesty International,
Human Rights Violations in Ethiopia (London, 1978), p. 16.

20. Karel Bartosek, Les aveux des archives, Prague— Pans— Prague, 1948-1956
(Paris: Seuil, 1996).

21. See Amnesty International, Human Rights Violations m Ethiopia, pp. 9-11, 14-15,

22. Zenawi became president immediately after Mengistu fled. The trial of the
leaders of the Mengistu regime, who were accused of genocide and crimes against
humanity, was adjourned in December 1994 and resumed on 13 May 1995 with further
pretrial proceedings. The prosecution's case began in early 1996, and the trials of 71
former senior officials (including 25 being tried in absentsia) continued slowly over the
next few years- The most recent indictment came in January 1998, when Major Melaku
Tefera, the former head of the Dergue's powerful Revolutionary Campaign Coordi-
nating Committee, was charged with the killings of 1,100 people.

23. Ethiopian Herald, 13 May 1997.

24. Eritrea was by no means united in the face of an oppressor. The region has many
ethnic minorities, and bloodshed among the various groups was common.

25. Eritrea had been occupied by Italy in 1882 and was annexed by Haile Selassie in
1962.

26. There were also a number of more heterogeneous armed groups that existed on
a regional level: the Ethiopian Democratic Union included monarchists, people who
had lost their land in the 1974 revolution, and others who had suffered under the
Dergue. This group fought alongside Beni Amaer and Afar groups in specific actions
and generally added to the climate of insecurity in the country.

27. When Gorbachev began to withdraw support from Africa there was an immedi-
ate rapprochement between Addis Ababa and Tel Aviv, which was worried by the
prospect of the weakening of an anti-Islamic power in the region.

Notes to Pages 692-699

813

28. The Eritrean Popular Liberation Front was basically a Marxist organization that
recruited among the Christian population. The EPLF emerged from a schism with the
more conservative Eritrean Liberation Front, which thereafter remained a largely Mus-
lim organization. See Alain Fenet, u Le programme du FPLE, nation et revolution," in
La Come de I Afrique. Questions natwnales et politique Internationale (Paris: L'Harmattan,
1986).

29. Africa Watch, Evil Days: Thirty Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia (New York,
1991), p. 117.

30. Ibid., p. 127.

31. Georges Lecomte, "Utopisme politique et transfert de population en Ethiopie,"
£j/>n"/, June 1986.

32. Jean Gallais, "Secheresse, famine, etat en Ethiopie," Herodote, no. 39 (October-
December 1985).

33. Michel Fouchcr, "L'Ethiopie: A qui sert la famine?" Herodote, no, 39 (October-
December 1985).

34. Anti-Slavery Society, Forced Labour in Humera: Intervention on behalf of the
Anti-Slavery Society, a report presented to UNESCO's Human Rights Commission,
Working Party on Slavery (Geneva, August 1981). See Africa Watch, Evil Days, p. 167.

35. Report from President Haile Mariam Mengistu to the Central Committee of the
Ethiopian Workers' Party, 14 April 1986.

36. Foucher, "L'Ethiopie," p. 112.

37. Cultural Survival, Ethiopia: More Light on Resettlement (London: Survival Inter-
national, 1991).

38. Quoted in Le Gendre, "Ethiopie."

39. On this point, see the work of Michel Cahen, especially his disagreements with
Elisto M. Macamo in Lusotopie, 1996, pp. 365-378.

40. Interview, Afrique Asie, 16 May 1977, quoted in Angola, bilan dun socialisme de
guerre, ed. Pierre Beaudet (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992).

41. Pravda, 5 November 1975, quoted in Branko Lazitch and Pierre Rigoulot, "An-
gola 1974-1988: Un echec du communisme en Afrique," supplement to Est et ouest, no.
54 (May 1988).

42. To the name People's Republic of Angola, the only one recognized by Portugal
in February 1976, UNITA and the FNLA added the adjective "democratic."

43. Quoted in Lazitch and Rigoulot, "Angola 1974-1988," p. 33.

44. Liberation- Afrique, no. 9 (March 1974).

45. See an informed Trotskyite point of view in Claude Gabriel, Angola, le tournant
africam? (Paris: La Breche, 1978).

46. Of thirty members of the Central Committee, five were shot (including Nito
Alves), three disappeared in mysterious circumstances, and two were expelled; Lazitch
and Rigoulot, "Angola 1974-1988," p. 21.

47. The Portuguese Trotskyite review Accao comumsta, quoted in Gabriel, Angola,
p. 329.

48. Ibid.

49. Cabinda was annexed to Angola in 1956 by the Portuguese, but it is separated

814

Notes to Pages 700-704

from the rest of the country by the mouth of the Congo River. Its Bacongo people have
long dreamed of independence, which would allow them to keep the profits from their
oil reserves for themselves. Since 1975 the presence of 10,000 Angolan troops and 2,000
Cubans has prevented this.

50. Republica Popular de Angola, Sintese do piano de recuperacao economica a nivel
global para o bteno 1989-90, (Luanda, 1988).

51. Christine Messiant, "Angola, les vois de Pethnisation et de la decomposition,"
Lusotopie, 1994.

52. Frelimo was basically the result of a merger of various nationalist organizations
made up of emigre Mozambicans in Tanganyka, Rhodesia, and Nyassaland. See Luis
de Brito, "Une relecture necessaire; La genese du parti-Etat Frelimo," Politique afri-
caine, no. 29 (March 1988).

53. On the weaknesses of Mozambican nationalism, see Claude Cahen, u Sur
quelques mythes et quelques realites de la colonisation et de la decolonisation por-
tugaises," paper presented at the conference "Decolonisations comparees," Aix-en-
Provence, 30 September-3 October 1993.

54. Christian Geffray, La cause des armes an Mozambique. Anthropologie dune guerre
civile (Paris: Karthala, 1990), p. 27.

55. One of the biggest camps, at Milange, near the frontier with Malawi, contained
10,000 Jehovah's Witnesses.

56. Human Rights Watch, Conspicuous Destruction: War, Famine, and the Reform
Process in Mozambique (New York, 1992).

57. Michel Cahen, "Check on Socialism in Mozambique: What Check? What So-
cialism?" Review of African Political Economy, no. 57 (1993), 54.

58. At the Fifth Frelimo Congress, July 1989.

59. Amnesty International, Mozambique: Independence and Human Rights (London,
1990), p. 24.

60. Michel Laban, "Ecrivains et pouvoir politique au Mozambique apres Tindepen-
dance," Lusotopie, 1995.

61. See Michel Cahen, Mozambique, la revolution implosee, (Paris: L'Harmattan,
1987), pp. 152-154.

62. Speech by President Samora Machel at the December 1985 session of the Popu-
lar Assembly, quoted in M. Cahen, Mozambique, p. 163.

63. Human Rights Watch, Conspicuous Destruction, p. 4. UNICEF calculated that
600,000 people died from starvation over that ten-year period; the same number died of
hunger in Ethiopia in 1984-85.

64. Jean-Francois Revel, u Au Mozambique aussi, le marxisme-leninisme engendre
la famine," Est et ouest, no. 40 (March 1987).

65. Geffray, La cause des armes, p. 209.

66. H. Gebaver, u The Subsidized Food Distribution System in Mozambique and Its
Socio-Economic Impact," Technical Assistance, EC Food Security Department,
Maputo, 1991, quoted in Human Rights Watch, Conspicuous Destruction, p. 120.

67. Alain Besancon, "La normalite du communisme selon Zinoviev," Pouvoirs, no,
21 (1982).

68. The term is that of Jean Leca, quoted in M. Cahen, Mozambique, p. 161.

Notes to Pages 705-711

815

27. Communism in Afghanistan

1. For the history of Afghanistan, see Mike Barry, La resistance afghane du Grand
Moghol d I invasion sovietique (Paris: Flammarion, 1989) (an earlier version appeared in
1984 under the title Le royaume de Itnsoience); Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in
Afghanistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Assem Akram, Histoire de
la guerre dAfghamstan (Paris: Balland, 1996); Pierre Centlivres and Michele Centlivres,
eds., Afghanistan, la colonisation impossible (Paris: Le Cerf, 1984); Jacques Levesque,
LVRSS en Afghanistan (Brussels: Complexe, 1990); Eric Bachelier, LAfghanistan en
guerre. La fin du grand jeu sovietique (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1992); and
Andre Brigot and Olivier Roy, The War tn Afghanistan: An Account and Analysis of the
Country, Its People, Soviet Intervention, and the Resistance, trans. Mary Bottomore and
Tom Bottomore (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988). See also Les nouvelles d Af-
ghanistan, which since 1980 has provided regular information of extremely high quality.
For ease of reading, proper names are transcribed according to European conventions.

2. See Louis Fisher, The Soviets in World Affairs: A History of the Relations between
the Soviet Union and the Rest of the World, 1917-1929 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1951), esp. chaps. 13 and 29.

3. Nicholas Tandler, '"Disinformation 1 a propos de T Afghanistan," Est et ouest, no.
616 (1-15 June 1978), 19-20.

4. Ibid,, p. 20.

5. Georgi Agabekov, OGPU: The Russian Secret Terror (New York: Brentano's,
1931).

6. Ludwig Adamec, "Le fils du porteur d'eau," Les nouvelles (T Afghanistan, no. 48
(July 1990), 16-17.

7. Marc Lazarevitch, "L'intervention sovietique en Afghanistan de 1929," Les ca-
hiers d'histoire sociale, no. 1 (1993), 158. For more on this uprising see Roy, Islam and
Resistance, pp. 83-84.

8. Barry, La resistance afghane, p. 241.

9. Ibid., p. 253.

10. Christopher Andrew and OLeg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign
Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 569.

1 1 . For more details on these leaders, see Barry, La resistance afghane, pp. 294—297.

12. Etienne Gille, "L'accession au pouvoir des communistes prosovietiques" in
Centlivres and Centlivres, Afghanistan, p. 184; Levesque, LVRSS en Afghanistan, p. 35.

13. Olivier Roy, "De 1'instauration de la Republique a ('invasion sovietique," in
Brigot and Roy, The War m Afghanistan, pp. 29-30.

14. Ibid., p. 30.

15. Barry, La resistance afghane, p. 252.

16. Ibid., p. 301; and Akram, Histoire de la guerre d'Afghanistan, p. 93-95. Akram
produces testimony by Mohammed Najibullah as evidence for this theory.

17. Barry, La resistance afghane, p. 300.

18. Ibid., p. 302.

19. Amnesty International, Annual Report, 1979, covering the year 1978 (London,
1979), p. 101.

816

Notes to Pages 711-715

20. Barry, La resistance afghane, p. 304.

21. Remi Kauffer and Roger Faligot, Les maitres espwns. Histoire mondiale du ren-
seignement, vol. 2; De la guerre frotde a nos jours (Paris; Robert Laffont, 1994), p. 391. See
also Patrice Franceschi, lis oni chotst la liberie (Grenoble: Arthaud, 1981), pp. 41—^2;
and Gille, "L'accession au pouvoir," pp. 199-200.

22. Gille, "L'accession au pouvoir," p. 199.

23. Akram, Histoire de la guerre dAfghamstan, p. 516; and Marie Broxup and Chantal
Lemercier-Quelquejay, "Les experiences sovietiques de guerres musulmanes" in Brigot
and Roy, The War in Afghanistan, p. 41 .

24. Bachelier, LAfghanistan, p. 50.

25. Barry, La resistance afghane, p. 314. For the Kerala widows see also Les nouvelles
dAfghanistan, nos. 35-36 (December 1987), 33. Barry also points out that five Soviet
officers were in charge of the operation.

26. Levesque, LVRSS en Afghanistan, p. 48; Gille, "L'accession au pouvoir,"
p. 200. See also Amnesty Internationa], "Violations of Human Rights and Fundamental
Liberties in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan," 11 April 1979. This report,
which draws only on official cases, mentions cases of children in detention.

27. Vladimir Bukovsky, Reckoning with Moscow: A Dissident tn the Kremlin s Archives
(London: John Murray, 1998), pp. 380-382. The author reproduces excerpts from
discussions between Aleksei Kosygin and Nur-Mohammed Taraki, who was asking for
aid from the Soviet Union. The initial response from Moscow was not particularly
favorable. An English translation of the full transcript was published in the Cold War
International History Project Bulletin, nos. 8-9 (Winter 1996-97), 146-150.

28. Barry, La resistance afghane, pp. 306-307.

29. Kauffer and Faligot, Les maitres esptons, p. 390.

30. Shah Bazgar, Afghanistan, la resistance au coeur (Paris: Denoel, 1987), pp. 65-66.
Shah Bazgar died on 23 November 1989 in an ambush while researching a report on
irrigation systems. The only weapon he had was a camera. See Gilles Rossignol and
Etienne Gille, "Un temoin: Shah Bazgar," Les nouvelles dAfghanistan, no. 45 (Decem-
ber 1989), 6.

31 . Roy, Islam and Resistance, p. 125; Gille, "L'accession au pouvoir, 11 p. 199.

32. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 570-571. The authors note that Boyarinov
was killed by his own men when he was mistaken for an Afghan.

33. Politburo archives, quoted in Akram, Histoire de la guerre dAfghamstan, pp. 149-
150; and Bukovsky, Reckoning with Moscow, pp. 385-386.

34. Akram, Histoire de la guerre dAfghamstan, pp. 150-154, explores the various
possibilities concerning Soviet expansionism.

35. Bukovsky, Reckoning with Moscow, pp. 493-^94. Christophe de Ponfilly and
Frederic Laffont report in Poussteres de guerre (Paris: Robert LafTont, 1990), p. 91 : "The
Russians used the most modern weapons they had at their disposal, and planes like the
Su-25 dropped their bombs from more than 32,000 feet."

36. Les nouvelles dAfghamstan, no. 7 (November 1981), 9. A survey titled "Interets
economiques sovietiques en Afghanistan," detailing the extent to which the Soviet
Union pillaged the natural resources of the country, can be found in the same issue.

Notes to Pages 715-719

817

37. G. F Krivosheev, Grtf sekretnosti sniat: Poteri Vooruzhennykh sil v voinakh, bo-
evykh detstviyakh, i voennykh konfliktakh (The stamp of secrecy lifted: Losses of the
armed forces in wars, combat operations, and military conflicts) (Moscow: Voenizdat,
1983), p. 407.

38. S. Jenis, "Un bonjour d' Afghanistan," Lalternattve, no. 19 (November-Decem-
ber 1982), 43. See also Svetlana Aleksievitch, Les cercueils de zinc (Paris: Christian
Bourgois, 1991).

39. De Ponfilly and Laffont, Poussteres de guerre, p. 175.

40. See Bukovsky, Reckoning with Moscow, pp. 263, 460; and Francoise Thorn, "Le
KGB et les Juifs," Pardes, nos. 19-20 (1994), 7-24.

41. Bachelier, LAfghamstan, p. 52. On the various resistance groups, see also Roy,
Islam; and Akram, Histoire de la guerre dAfghamstan, chap. 8.

42. On the pattern of mass suffering under total war and the way that civilization
seems to disappear, see Annette Becker and Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, "Violence et
consentement: La culture de guerre du Premier conflit mondial," in Pour une histoire
culturelle, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-Francois Sirinelli (Paris: Le Seuil, 1997),
pp. 251-271; and Francois Furet, 77?^ Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism tn
the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chaps. 2 and 3.

43. Olivier Roy, "Les limites de la pacification sovietique en Afghanistan," Laiterna-
ttve, no. 31 (January-February 1985), 14.

44. Amnesty International, Annual Report, 1989, covering the year 1988 (London,
1989), p. 172. See also "Les refugies afghans," Les nouvelles dAfghamstan, nos. 35-36
(December 1987).

45. Barry, La resistance afghane, p. 18.

46. Marina Isenburg, "Les origines du Tribunal permanent des peuples," Bulletin
dmformatton el de liaison du Bureau international afghamstan. La Lettre du BIA, special
issue, "Afghanistan, Tribunal dcs pcuples. Stockholm: 1981 — Paris: 1982, compte
rendu des travaux," p. 3.

47. Quoted in Barry, La resistance afghane, p. 80. On the massacre in the village of
Padkhwab-e Shana, see Bulletin dmformatton and Barry, chap. 1.

48. Amnesty International, Annual Report, 1983, covering the year 1982 (London,
1983), p. 227; and Bernard Dupaigne, "L'armee sovietique en Afghanistan/ 1 L alterna-
tive, no. 31 (January- February 1985), 8-9.

49. Dupaigne, "L'armee sovietique en Afghanistan," pp. 8-9.

50. Quoted in Roy, "Les limites de la pacification sovietique," p. 13. Amnesty Inter-
national, Annual Report, 1984, p. 240, also noted the murder of twenty-three civilians in
the village of Raudza, in Ghazni Province. Similar reports of villages destroyed were
published in every Amnesty report for the period in question.

51 . Akram, Histoire de la guerre dAfghamstan, p. 523; Amnesty International, Annual
Report, 1986, p. 222.

52. B u lie tin d 'information, p. 1 5 .

53. Pierre Gentelle, "Chronologie 1747-1984," Problemes polttiques et sociaux, 15
December 1984, p. 14.

54. Akram, Histoire de la guerre dAfghamstan, p. 523. Gennadii Bocharov reports a

818

Notes to Pages 719—722

similar practice; cattle were then systematically slaughtered; La roulette russe (Paris:
Denoel, 1990), p. 30.

55. Bukovsky, Reckoning with Moscow, p. 534.

56. " Afghanistan, assassinats et refugies," La chronique (V Amnesty International, no.
19 bis (June 1988), 10. Amnesty repeated the claim in a press communique dated 4 May
1988, Amnesty International Archives, London, Afghanistan file for 1988.

57. Les nouvelles dAfghamstan, nos. 35-36 (December 1987), 17.

58. Akram, Histoire de la guerre d 'Afghanistan, pp. 178-179; and Anne Guerin, "Une
sanglante lassitude," La chronique d Amnesty International, no. 2 (December 1986), 9.

59. Bazgar, Afghanistan, la resistance au coeur, pp. 101-102.

60. Olivier Roy, "Kabul, la sinistree," in Villes en guerre, ed. Eric Sarner (Paris:
Autrement, 1986), p. 74.

61. Les nouvelles d "Afghanistan published a special issue on the town, "Herat ou Tart
meurtri," nos. 4M2 (March 1989), 40.

62. Barry, La resistance afghane, p. 308.

63. Bernard Dupaigne, "Les droits de Phomme en Afghanistan/' Les nouvelles d Af-
ghanistan, nos. 24-25 (October 1985), 8-9.

64. Report by Felix Ermacora, a special rapporteur for the United Nations, in
application of Resolution 1985/88 of the UN Human Rights Commission, Report on
the Situation of Human Rights in Afghanistan, UN Document No. E/CN.4/ 1985/21
(New York, 19 February 1985). Ermacora prepared updates on this report (under the
same title) twice a year over the next four years.

65. Amnesty International, press communique, 2 November 1983, Amnesty Inter-
national Archives, Afghanistan file for 1983.

66. Ermacora, Report on the Situation, p. 11, quoted in Ba/gar, Afghanistan, la resis-
tance au coeur, p. 132.

67. Amnesty International, Afghanistan: Torture of Political Prisoners (London,
1986), pp. 19-26; and Cristina L'Homme, u Les sovietiques interrogent, les Afghans
torturent," La chronique d'Amnesty International, no. 2 (December 1986), 6-8.

68. Statement by Tajwar Kakar, quoted in Doris Lessing, The Wind Blows Away Our
Words and Other Documents Relating to the Afghan Resistance (New York: Vintage, 1987),
pp. 193-204.

69. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 572.

70. Kauffer and Faligot, Les maitres espwns, p. 392.

71 . Amnesty International, Annual Report, 1981, p. 225; and Les nouvelles d'Afghant-
sian, "Les manifestations etudiantes d'avril 1980," no. 48 (July 1990), 18-20.

72. Akram, Histoire de la guerre d Afghanistan, p. 169.

73. Barry, La resistance afghane, p. 308.

74. Amnesty International, "Afghanistan," External Document, SF/83/E/162 —
ASA 11/13/83, 11 October 1983, pp. 6-7; idem, Afghanistan; Torture; idem, annual
reports for 1983-1991. The exact date of the execution is uncertain, according to the
1991 report, p. 20.

75. See esp. Alain Guillo, Un gram dans la machine (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989);

Notes to Pages 722-738

819

Philippe Augoyard, La prison pour delit despoir. Medecin en Afghanistan (Paris: Flam-
marion, 1985); and Jacques Abouchar, Dans la cage de POurs (Paris: Balland, 1985).

76. Francois Missen, La nuit afghane (Paris: Ramsay, 1990), reports that he was
arrested together with his cameraman, Antoine Darnaud, and his guide, Osman Barai.
The latter was never released.

77. Amnesty International, "Afghanistan," p. 8; for Afghan Mellat see the 1989
annual report, for the release of twenty-three of the thirty imprisoned party activists.

78. Bazgar, Afghanistan, la resistance au coeur, pp. 227-229.

79. Bachelier, L Afghanistan, p. 62; and Akram, Histoire de la guerre d Afghanistan,
pp. 207-208.

80. Seddiqoullah Rahi, Connaissez-vous NajihouIIah? quoted in Akram, Histoire de la
guerre d Afghanistan, p. 210.

81. Amnesty International, "Afghanistan, 11 p. 13. For obvious reasons, the witness
statements quoted are usually anonymous.

82. Statement by Nairn, age ten, in Bazgar, Afghanistan, la resistance au coeur, pp. 25-
28.

Conclusion

1 . Francois Furet, "Terror," in Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. F. Furet and
Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1989).

2. Quoted in Jacques Baynac, La terreur sous Lemne (Paris: Sagittaire, 1975), p. 75.

3. Quoted in Michael Confino, Violence dans la violence. Le dehat Bakoumne-
Netcha lev (Paris: Maspero, 1973).

4. Ibid., p. 102.

5. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 63-64.

6. Helene Carriere d'Encausse, The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of
Political Murder (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992), pp. xvii, 6.

7. Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 214.

8. Tomas G. Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations, 1914-
1918 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927), p. 201.

9. Maksim Gorky, O Russkom Krestyanstve (On the Russian peasantry) (Berlin:
Izdatelstvo Ladyzhnikova, 1922), pp. 16-19.

10. Malia, Soviet Tragedy, p. 3.

1 1 . Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History
of Revolution, trans. W. H. Kerridge (London: Allen and Unwin, 1920), pp. 149, 152.

12. Francois F'uret, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twen-
tieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 67-68.

13. Yuli Martov, Down with Executions, pamphlet from 1918 reprinted in The Oppo-
sition: At Home and Abroad, vol. 1 (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1975), p. 5.

14. Quoted in Arkadi Vaksberg, Le mystere Gorki (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), p. 111.

15. Leon Trotsky, The Defence of Terrorism, trans. H. N. Brailsford (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1921), pp. 21-22.

820

Notes to Pages 739-753

16. Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, trans. H. J. Stenning (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), p. 55.

17. See the portrait by Nicolas Valentinov in Met recontres avec Lenme (Paris: Plon,
1964).

18. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1998).

19. Kautsky, Dictatorship of the Proletariat, pp. 1-3.

20. Ibid, pp. 51-53.

21. V. I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (Moscow: For-
eign Languages Publishing House, 1952), pp. 32-33, 20.

22. Ibid., p. 37.

23. Trotsky, Defence of Terrorism, p. 83, 86.

24. Ibid., pp. 51-52.

25. Ibid., p. 56.

26. Isaac Steinberg, L aspect ethique de la revolution (Berlin: Skify, 1923), quoted in
Baynac, La terreur, p. 370.

27. Quoted in Vaksberg, Le mystere Gorki, p. 183.

28. Ibid., p. 264.

29. Confino, Violence, p. 137.

30. Quoted in Alain Brossat, Un Communisme insupportable (Paris: L'Harmattan,
1997), p. 266.

31 . Annie Kriegel, Les grands proces dans les systemes communistes (Paris: Gallimard,
1972).

32. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996).

33. Kautsky, Dictatorship of the Proletariat, pp. 81-82.

34. Tzvetan Todorov, L'homme depayse (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995), p. 33.

35. Idem, On Human Diversity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993),
p. 170.

36. Trotsky, Defence of terrorism, pp. 35, 60.

37. Vaksberg, Le mystere Gorki.

38. Kautsky, Dictatorship of the Proletariat, pp. 4—5.

39. Brossat, Un Communisme insupportable, p. 265.

40. Vaksberg, Le mystere Gorki, p. 262.

41. Brossat, Un Communisme insupportable, p. 268.

42. Vaksberg, Le mystere Gorki, pp. 286-287.

43. Ibid., p. 312.

44. Bruno Gravier, "Une actualite toujours plus cruciale," in La crime contre Thu-
manite, ed. Marcel Colin (Ramon-Ville Saint-Agen: Eres, 1996), p. 10.

45. Dominique Colas, Lenme et le lemntsme (Paris: Presses Universitaires Francaises,
1987), p. 101. See also his doctoral dissertation, Le lemntsme (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires Francaises, 1982).

46. Colin, La crime contre Thumanite, p. 14.

47. Mireille Delmas-Marty, "L'interdit et le respect: Comment definir le crime
contre Thumanite?" in Colin, La crime contre Thumanite, p. 26.

Notes to Pages 753-757

821

48. Grossman, Forever Flowing, p. 200.

49. Confino, Violence, p. 120.

50. Quoted in ibid., p. 112.

51. Michel del Castillo, La tunique dmfamie (Paris: Fayard, 1997), p. 25.

52. Leszek Kolakowski, L esprit revoluttonnaire (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1978),
p. 22.

53. Todorov, On Human Diversity, p. 165.

54. Aino Kuusinen, The Rings of Destiny: Inside Soviet Russia from Lenin to Brezhnev
(New York: William Morrow, 1974), p. 227.

55. The text has been analyzed by Michel Heller in "Lenine et la Vetcheka," Libre,
no. 2(1971), 19.

56. Maksim Gorky, Lenin: A Biographical Essay (London: Morrison & Gibb, 1967),
pp. 29-32.

57. Grossman, Forever Flowing, pp. 239-240.

Index

Abakumov, Viktor, 244, 245, 246, 247, 435

Abate, Atnafu, 689

Abdullah, Sayyed, 713

Abensour, Miguel, 394

Abramovich, Rafael, 75, 345

Abul Aoun, Rifaat, 357

Add 1S Ababa, 689, 690,691,692

Adi Qualla camp, 692

Administration for Special Resettlements, 223

Adolf, Alfred, 347

Afghan Communist Party, 708-709

Afghanistan, 4, 5, 705-725

Afghan Mellat, 722-723

Afghans, 6

Africa, 4, 9, 683-684, 695-696. See also indi-
vidual countries

Agabekov, Georgy, 707

Agazade, 706

Agitprop (Agitation and Propaganda) Depart-
ment, 244

Agramontt, Roberto, 649

Agrarian Party, 279

Agrarian Union Party (Bulgaria), 401, 449

Agronov, Yakov, 1 29

Ahmadi, Farida, 722

Ahn Sung Un, 562

AK. See Armia Krajowa

Akbari, Yunis, 722

Akhlursk, 226

A I an say a, Tino, 677

Albacere, 348, 349

Albania, 310-311, 324, 328, 329, 359, 397,

409, 418, 425^26, 438, 444, 449, 454, 637
Albanian Communist Party, 310-31 1, 444, 449
Alcala de Henares, 348
Ateksandr III, 731, 733
Ateksandrov, 161
Atekseev, Mikhail, 60
Alexander I, 279, 305
Alexandra, Tsarina, 43
Algeria, 353-354, 683
Algerian Communist Party, 354
Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana

(APRA), 679
Alianza Revolucionaria Democratica (ARDE),

669
Alikhanov, Gevork, 197, 293
Allamvedelmi Osztaly (AVO), 398
All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (Meison),

688-689
Alliance for Progress of the Miskitos and

Sumo (Alpromisu), 668

824

Index

Allies, 5, 22, 230, 231, 320, 326, 327, 331
Allpahaca, 677

All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Starv-
ing, 122
Ail-Russian Congress of Soviets, 50-51, 69
All-Russian Ecclesiastical Committee for Aid

to the Hungry, 122
All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to
Combat the Counterrevolution, Specula-
tion, and Sabotage. See Cheka
Alma-Ata, 141,289
Alpha 66 group, 654
Alpromisu (Alliance for Progress of the

Miskitos and Sumo), 668
Alsace-Lorraine, 26, 323
Altai, 213,218,219,237
Alter, Viktor, 31 8-3 19
Alushta, 61

Alvarez del Vayo, Juan, 334, 339
Alves, Nito, 698-699
Alvor treaty, 696
Amanullah, Khan, 706, 707
Amazonia, 679
Ambachew, Alemu, 691
Ambassel camp, 694
Amdo, 542-543

American Joint Distribution Committee, 242
American Relief Association (ARA), 122,

123
Amhara ethnic group, 688
Amin, Hafizullah, 709, 710, 711, 713, 714
Amnesty International, 553, 562, 638, 664,

671-673, 690, 692, 700, 717, 719, 722, 723
Amtorg, 312

Anders, Ladislav, 317, 379
Andom, Aman, 687
Andrade, Juan, 341, 346
Andreev, Andrei, 142, 177, 189, 190, 233
Andreev, V., 156
Andrew, Christopher, 721
Andrianov, Andrei, 247
Andropov, Yuri, 723

Angkar Padevat (Revolutionary Organiza-
tion), 597, 599, 602, 604-608, 619-623
Angkor, 599, 617-618
Angkor Wat, 4

Angola, 663^664, 685, 686, 696-700
Anhui, 490, 492
An MyungChul, 556-557
Antelme, Robert, 752

Anti-Fascist Resistance Group of October

First (GRAPO), 359
Antirightist movement, 476, 485-486, 504
Antonescu, Ion, 416, 452
Antonov, Aleksandr Stepanovich, 1 10, 1 16
Antonov-Ovseenko, Aleksandr, 53, 97, 116,

194
Antonov-Ovseenko, Vladimir, 337
Anvelt,Jan,279,298,299
APR A (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria

Americana), 679
April Revolution, 710-714
Aracheva, Raina, 445-446
Arafat, Yasser, 355, 358
Aragon, 343

Aragon, Louis, 11,18, 292, 340, 749
Araquistain, Luis, 339
Arbenz, Jacobo, 651
Arce, Bayardo, 670
Archeo-Marxists, 310
Arco Iris (Rainbow) camp, 660
ARDE (Alianza Revolucionaria Demoeratica),

669
Arenas, Reinaldo, 651
Arkhangelsk, 114, 118, 136-137, 151, 153,

187,209,331
Armavir, 106

Armed Forces Movement, 696
Armee de Liberation Nationale, 353
Armenia, 138,184, 189,218,312
Armenians, 52, 219, 223, 224, 237, 312-313
Armia Krajowa (AK), 372-375, 379
Arquer, Jordi, 341, 346, 347
Ascaso, Joaquin, 343
Asfa, Ijegayehu, 691
Asfaw, Legesse, 691
Ashaninka ethnic group, 678
Asher,J.,752
Asia Watch, 553

Assault Assassination Committee, 567
Assault Troops, 338, 343
Assembly of Workers' Representatives, 70
Associacao dos Escritores Mocambicanos, 703
Astrakhan, 86, 87-88, 111,289
Asturias, 334

Atarbekov, Georgy, 103, 104, 106
Ataturk, Kemal, 707
Athders, Lyster, 668
Atlan, Henri, 753
Augursky, Samuel, 304

Index

825

Auschwitz, 9, 15,302,379

Austrian Communist Party (K.PO), 302, 315

Austro-Hungarian empire, 271, 365, 419

Averbuch, Wolf, 304

AVH (Allamvedelmi Hatosag), 398, 439

AVNOJ (Yugoslav National Anti-Fascist

Council for Liberation), 325
AVO (Allamvedelmi Osztaly), 398
Ayacucho, 675-676, 677, 678, 679
Aymacs, 705
Azarta, Manuel, 339
Azema, Jean-Pierre, 10
Azerbaijan, 138,218
Azerbaijanis, 52
Azev, Evno, 285
Azher camp, 227
Azul division, 323

Baader, Andreas, 359

Baader Meinhof gang, 358-359

Babel, Isaac, 97, 200, 247

Babeuf, Gracchus, 9, 21

Baccala, Vicen/.o, 314

Bachelier, Eric, 712

Bacilek, Karol, 435

Badaev, Aleksei, 246

Bancs, Barrudem, 711

Baikal-Amur-Magistral (BAM), 204

Baku, 60, 706

Bakunin, Mikhail, 729, 745, 754-755

Balachevo prison, 161

Balkans, 412

Balkars, 219,221,256

Balluku, Beqir, 449

Baltic states, 5, 1 5, 52, 208-213, 227, 228,
229-230, 236, 264. See also individual coun-
tries

Baltic-White Sea canal, 151, 203-204

Baits, 6, 10, 62, 229-230, 236, 238-239, 254,
256, 258. See also individual nationalities

Baluchis, 705

BAM (Baikal-Amur Magistral), 204

Bamlag camp, 204

Bandera Roja (Red Flag), 676

Bandera units, 396

Bangkok, 600

Bante, Teferi, 688

BaoDai,625

Bao Ruo-wang(Jean Pasqualini), 498

Baptists, 258

Barabas, Francise, 447

Barak, Rudolf, 449

Barbieri, Francesco, 340

Barbusse, Henri, 20

Barcelona, 337, 340-341, 346-347

Baret, Michael, 717

Barnaul, 217,289

Barry, Michael, 708, 710, 712, 717

Barton, Paul (Jiri Veltrusly), 26-27

Bartoselt, Karel, 411,690

Bartziotas, Vasilis, 310

Bashkiria, 189, 224

Bashkirs, 97

Bashtakov, Ivan L., 211, 369

Basov, M. V, 246

Bataillon, Giles, 668, 669

Batista, Fulgencio, 647, 648, 650, 655,

660
Battambang, 602
Battek, Rudolf, 444
Batumi, 331
Bay of Pigs, 651, 656
Bazgar, Shah, 713, 719, 723
Beaufrere, Marcel, 310
Beauregard camp, 321
Becker, Jasper, 543
Beida University, 519
Beijing, 469, 482, 491, 519, 523, 530, 533,

542; Prison No. 1, 499; University, 536
Beimler, Hans, 349-350
Bek, Ibrahim, 708
Belene Island camp, 418, 449
Beleshova, Liri, 449

Belgian Committee for Aid to Eritrea, 692
Belo Pole camp, 416
Beloretsk, 68
Belorussia, 184, 198, 199, 208-212, 228, 229,

364, 365, 367-368, 370, 374
Benda, Vaclav, 455
Benjamin, Metropolitan, 126
Ben Sue, 3 1 1
Be ran, Josef, 410
Berdyaev, Nikolai, 129
Berezniki, 204
Bergen-Belsen, 31
Berger, Joseph, 11-12,304
Beria, Lavrenti, 20, 139, 140, 190, 205-206,

209-213, 217, 21 8, 220-229 passim, 240,

241-254 passim, 296, 307, 319, 368, 370,

374, 436

826

Index

Berlin Conference, 695
Berling, Zygmunt, 373
Berlin Wall, 28, 408, 446, 449
Berman, Rudolf, 186
Berneri, Camillo, 340
Bernstein, Eduard, 729

Berzin, Ian, 337

Bessarabia, 5, 208, 231, 370, 395

Bessarabians, 10

Bethlehem Jesuit College, 651

Bezpielca (Polish security service), 375-377,
379, 380-384, 385, 386, 390

Biafra, 686

Bibo, Istvan, 450

Bierut, Bolestaw, 381, 384, 438

Birobidzhan, 243, 249, 304

Black Eagle, 97, 98

Black Earth territories, 41, 47, 142, 149, 167,
168

Black Hundreds, 91, 113, 125

Black Khmers, 684

Black Shawls, 396

Blagoeva, Stella, 296

Blandon, Juana, 672

Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 730

Bloch, 303

Bloch, Gerard, 309

Bloch, Jean-Richard, 309

Bloch, Michel, 309

Blucher, Vasily, 198

Blue Shirts, 284

Blum, Leon, 335, 339

BobovDol, 417, 449

Bodniras, Emil, 398

Bofill, Ricardo, 662

Bogdanov Dol, 417

Bogomolov, Aleksandr, 194

Bogoslovka, 1 17

Boguchachinsk Railway, 151

Bohemia, 403, 408

Boico, Cristina, 398

Boitel, Pedro Luis, 654

Bolivia, 652-653

Bolivian Communist Party, 652

Bolshevik Party, 48-52, 79, 82-83, 1 12, 197,
263, 272, 288, 289-290; Central Commit-
tee, 50, 51, 54, 99, 140, 143, 145, 146, 164,
173, 179, 181,248,287,299,366,372;
Cheka and, 77, 79, 86, 103; Great Terror

and, 189, 192, 201; gulags and, 227, 232;
Central Executive Committee, 53, 54, 58,
64,65,84, 116, 125, 161; Third Congress,
276; Ninth Congress, 88; Tenth Congress,
109, 286-287; Eleventh Congress, 288, 739;
Thirteenth Congress, 288; Fifteenth Con-
ress, 281; Sixteenth Congress, 145; Seven-
teenth Congress, 192, 194,201; Eighteenth
Congress, 248; Nineteenth Congress, 248.
See also CPSU

Bolsheviks, 2, 8, 13-14, 25, 40-140 passim,
231, 264, 265, 271, 275-278, 297, 313, 398-
399, 414-415, 687, 706, 728-746 passim

Bolshevik Terror. See Red Terror

Bolshevism, 40, 45-46, 48, 271, 471^72

Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir, 57

Bonet, Pedro, 342, 346

Boniato prison, 654, 658

Borbely, I., 448

Borge, Tomas, 665, 666, 667, 669, 674

Boris III, 395

Borodin, Mikhail, 280

Borowski, Jan (Ludwig Komorovsky), 298

Bosnia, 10, 325

Botha, Pik, 697

Boujun, 560

Boumediene, Houari, 661

Boyarinov, Grigory, 714

Boyarsky, Vladimir, 436

Brandler, Heinrich, 277

Brankov, Lazar, 426

Bra§ov, 395, 447

Britianu, Vintila, 402

Br&tianu family, 400

Bratislava, 428

Brauning, Karl, 346

Brecht, Berrolt, 23

Brener, Mikhail, 83

Bressler, Moritz, 344

Brest Litovsk, 63, 64, 65, 195, 303, 318

Breton, Andre, 31 1

Brezhnev, Leonid Ilich, 27, 193, 237, 356,
710,756

Brichman, Karl, 299

Britain, 207-208, 320, 328, 329, 354-355,
375, 706

Brno, 404-405, 411,413,430

Brossat, Alain, 749, 750-751

Broue, Pierre, 350

Index

827

Broz, Josip. See Tito

Bruguiere, Jean-Louis, 357

Bruno, Judge, 736

Brusilov, Aleksei, 45-46

Bryansk, 87, 90

Bryukhanov, Aleksandr, 171

Buber-Neumann, Margaret, 19, 303

Bucharest, 3, 447

Buchenwald, 294, 310, 417

Buehholz, Mathieu, 310

Budapest, 439

Buddhists, 545, 546,609, 617

Bugai, N„ 262

Bugan, Ion, 447

Bui, Aleksei, 173

Bui Quang Chieu, 566

Bukhara, 138-139

Bukhara Khanate, 707

Bukharin, Nikolai, 79, 134, 140, 142, 144,

159, 170, 184, 198,263,289,746
Bukharinites, 193
Bukhovo, 418
Bukovina, 5

Bukovsky, Vladimir, 19,27,712
Bulgakov, Sergei, 129
Bulganin, Nikolai, 77, 249, 250
Bulgaria, 279-280, 329, 330, 395-402, 416,

417-418, 427, 442, 445-446, 449, 453-454,

670
Bulgarian Communist Party, 279-280, 426
Bulgars, 219, 223, 224
Huli, Petro, 444
Bui lejos, Jose, 291

Bund (Jewish Socialist Workers 1 Party), 318
Bung Tra Beck camp, 612
Bureau for Documentation and Inquiry into

the Crimes of Communism, 455
Bureau for State Protection (UOP), 391
Burillo, Ricardo, 342
Burma, 550
Burtsev, Vladimir, 285
Bydgoszcz, 388

Cabinda, 699

Cabrera Rocha, Octavio, 676

Caceavalc, Romolo, 313

Calligaris, Luigi, 314

Calvinists, 410

Camaguey, 649, 653, 656, 658, 659, 661

Cambodia, 4, 10, 27, 28, 459, 465, 546, 571,

577^635,637,641,753
Cambodian Genocide Program, 579
Cambodian Institute for Human Rights, 613
Camilitos, 668
Camilo-Cienfuegos plan, 65
"Campaign against Spiritual Pollution," 542
"Campaign of Salvation," 474-475
Campanella, Tommaso, 2
Canada, criminal code of, 1 1
Canton, 281,282, 533
Capitolio, 660
Carcel Modelo, 673
Cardona, Jose Miro, 649
Carlos (Ilyich Ramirez-Sanchez), 356-358
Carrel, Alexis, 752
Carreras, Jesus, 653-654, 658
Carrere dTncausse, Helene, 127, 731
Cartel for the Defense of Revolutionary Pris-
oners in Republican Spain, 346
Carton, Martinez, 351

Castillo, Michel del, 755

Castoriadis, Cornelius, 739

Castro, Fidel, 2, 3, 20, 26, 309, 648-655 pas-
sim, 661-669 passim, 697

Castro, Raul, 649, 653, 654, 698

Catalonia, 335, 337-340, 349-350

Catherine II, 216

Catholic Church, 29, 364-365, 382, 409, 410-
412,482,650-651

Catholics, 258, 570, 593-594

Caucasus, 16,52,60, 101, 106, 118, 142, 146-
147, 149, 160, 162, 164, 167, 189, 217, 218,
219,220,223,224,364

CDS (Comite de Defensa Sandinista), 668

Ceausescu, Nicolae, 3, 423, 447, 453, 561

Celor, Pierre, 291-292

Centenary Youth Column, 656

Central Asia, 60, 106, 138, 168, 259, 706

Central Commission for Help to the Hungry,
123, 124

Central Committee for Independent Social
Democracy, 400

Central Executive Committee of the Soviets,
113, 120

Cepicka, Alexej, 436

Cerqueeti, L., 314

Cerro de Pesco, 679

Ccspedes, Carlos, 647

828

Index

Challayc, Felicien, 346

Cham," 592, 594-595

Chami, Djemal, 311

Chamorro, Pedro Joaquin, 665, 667

Chamorro, Violeta, 667, 675

Chandler, David, 589, 590

Chao Shu-li, 522

Charter 77, 450

Chayanov, Andrei, 170

Chechens, 10, 101,219,220,221,256,264,
456

Chechnya, 139, 140

Chechnya-Ingushetia, 220

Cheka, 8, 15, 53-69 passim, 72-78 passim, 82-
107 passim, 1 10-121 passim, 128, 134, 137,
138, 139, 262, 280, 293, 294, 342, 707, 756;
Order No. 171,1 16-118. See also GPU;
KGB; NKVD; OGPU; Troops for the In-
ternal Defense of the Republic

Chelyabinsk, 111, 189,219

Chemnitz, 277

Chen Duxiu, 31 1

Chen Ku-teh, 525-526

Chenla-II, 581

Chen Yi, 519

Chen Yun, 284

Cherkassy, 96

Chcrnihiv, 96

Chernomordik, Moisei, 293

Chernov, Viktor, 85

Chernyshev, Vasily V., 369

Chetniks, 324, 325, 326

Chiang Kai-shek, 280-281, 469, 471, 476

Chiatura, 139-140

Chi Hoa prison, 574

Children's Home No. 6, 315-316

Chimczak, Eugeniusz, 378

China, 280-282, 284-285, IW.See also Peo-
ple's Republic of China

Chinese Communist Party, 25-26, 280-281,
284, 311, 463, 464-465, 471-473, 484, 486,
515,540,627-628

Chinese Revolution, 1 1, 476-477

Chipenda, Daniel, 698

Chipote detention center, 672

Chissano, Joaquim, 684

ChoIlMyung, 551

Cho Man Sik, 549

Chongjin, 555

Chow Chingwen, 483

Christians, 482-483, See a/so individual
churches, denominations

Chubar, Anatoly, 192

Chukovskaya, Lidia, 256

Churchill, Winston, 320, 325

Chuschi, 675, 676

Chuya, 124-126

CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency), 545,
575,581,587,589,703

Cichovvski, Kazimierz, 305

Cienfuegos, Camilo, 653

Ciliga, Ante, 290-291,305

"Class War" group, 310

Clavo Peralta, Margie, 680

dementis, Vladimir, 430

CNT. See National Confederation of Labor

Coco River, 669

Codou, Roger, 349

Codovilla, Vittorio, 336-337

Colas, Dominic, 752

Colin, Marcel, 752

Combat Groups, 278

COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic
Assistance), 703

Cominform (Communist Information Bu-
reau), 329, 330, 399, 424, 437-438

Comintern (Communist International), 11,
194-195, 197, 271-332 passim, 334, 335,
336, 339, 347, 437, 625, 684, 685, 706, 707

Comite de Defensa Sandinista (CDS), 668

Commission for Constitutional Responsibil-
ity, 391

Commission of Special Inquiry into Bolshe-
vik Crimes, 104

Commission to Find the Truth about Stalin's
Crimes, 26

Commission to Investigate Bolshevik Crimes,
60-61

Committee for Aid to the Hungry, 122

Committee for State Security. See KGB

Committee for the Liquidation of the Tula
Conspiracy, 91

Committee of National Liberation, 376

Committees for Defense of the Revolution
(CDRs), 661-662

Communist 5th Regiment, 337

Communist Information Bureau. See Comin-
form

Communist International. See Comintern

Communist Party (Cuba), 647, 649, 650, 664

Index

829

Communist Party of Ireland, 354
Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), 579,

582-590 passim, 594, 605-606, 618, 624,

625,631-632
Communist Party of the Soviet Union. See

CPSU
Communist University of the Workers of the

East (KUTV), 280
Communist University of Western National

Minorities (KUMN2), 298, 305
Communist Youth International (KIM), 298,

306
"Community" group, 399
Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC),

648, 650
Confederation of the Million Heroes, 531-532
Conference on Security and Cooperation in

Europe, 259
Confino, Michael, 132
Confucianism, 466, 467, 639
Congo Workers 1 Party, 686
Congress of Collectives, 343
Congress of Delegate Peasants, Workers, and

Rebels of Gulyai-Pole, 96
Congress of Eastern Peoples, 706
Congress of Luanda, 697-698
Conquest, Robert, 11, 185-186
Constantinides, 330
Constituent Assembly, 58, 62-63, 84, 85,

735
Constitutional Democrats, 43, 44, 55, 58, 77,

84, 736
Contras, 669
Copic, F. I., 349
Copic, Vladimir, 195, 349
Cortina, Jorge, 350

Cossacks, 8-9, 10, 44, 45, 60, 61, 71, 83, 98-
102, 105, 108, 114, 137, 162-163, 168, 188,

266, 456
Costa, Carlo, 314
Costa Rica, 666, 669, 670
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

(COMECON), 703
Council for National Unity, 374
Council of Workers 1 Delegates of Odessa, 105
Coutinho, Antonio Rosa, 696-697
CPK. See Communist Party of Kampuchea
CPSU: Nineteenth Congress, 248; Twentieth
Congress, 18, 23-24, 180, 185, 192, 251,
254, 255, 256, 304, 384, 421, 438, 485, 570,

638, 755; Twenty-second Congress, 24,
185, 190, 251; Twenty-third Congress, 259

Crimea, 15,60,61, 100, 105, 106, 107, 111,
135,217,218,219,243,258

Crimean Tatars. See Tatars

Croatia, 324

Croce, Benedetto, 453

Cruz, Arturo, 670

Csati, Jozsef, 410

CTC (Confederation of Cuban Workers),
648, 650

Cuba, 7, 28, 29, 354, 647-665, 670, 673, 685,
697; Ministry of Internal Affairs (Minit),
655, 661, 674; Council of Ministers, 669—
670; penal laws, 662-663

Cuban Human Rights Committee, 662

Cubella, Rolando, 654

Cuerpo de Investigation y Vigilancia, 338

Cuesta, Tony, 654

Cultural Revolution, 4, 1 1 , 459, 470-543 pas-
sim, 618, 627, 629, 631, 638, 652, 674

Cultural Revolution Group (CRG), 513, 520,
527,531

Cuno, Wilhelm, 277

Curzon Line, 373

Cusin, Gaston, 335

Cuzco, 679

Czech Legion, 71

Czechoslovak Communist Party, 248, 311-
312, 403-405, 409, 410-41 1 , 428-430, 431,

436, 443, 444

Czechoslovakia, 26, 28, 237, 277, 311-312,
330, 354, 379, 389, 394, 397, 398, 403, 405,
408-419 passim, 427^29, 430, 433, 436,

437, 441^44, 446, 448, 454-456; penal
laws, 419

"Czech Rajk" trial, 428-429, 434
Czech Republic, 453-456
Czechs, 23, 443
Czerny, Jozsef, 273-274

Dachau, 328,349,410,411
Daesuk camp, 354
Dagestan, 138, 139
Dahl, Harry, 358
Dai Viet, 566
Dalai Lama, 543, 544, 545
Dallag, 370
Dalos, Gyorgy, 451
Dalstroi, 205

830

Index

Dan, Fedor, 73, 115

Daniel, Odile, 418

Daniel, Yuri, 259

Danilov, V. P., 262

Danube-Black Sea canal, 417, 421

Daoud, Mohammed, 708, 709-710, 711

David, Hans Walter, 302-303

Deat, Marcel, 27

Debray, Regis, 651-652

Declaration of the 22, 287

Declaration of the 46, 288

Declaration of the Supreme Soviet (1989),
216

Dedic, V, 305

Dedijer, Vladimir, 425

de Gaulle, Charles, 20, 22, 684

Dekanozov, Vladimir, 212

Delage, Jean, 285

de la Guardia, Antonio, 664

de la Guardia, Patricio, 664

Deletant, Dennis, 419

Delmas-Marty, Mireille, 753

Del Pino, Rafael, 655

Demaziere, Albert, 309

Demeny, Pal, 423

Democracy Wall, 515, 539, 631

Democratic and Popular Front for the Libera-
tion of Palestine (DPFLP), 355

Democratic Army (AD) (Greece), 329-330

Democratic Centralists, 181, 286, 289, 300

Democratic-Liberal Party, 404

Democratic Party (Czechoslovakia), 403

Democratic Party of the People of Afghani-
stan (DPPA), 709, 710, 71 1, 713

Democratic Republic of Congo, 652

Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV),
567

Deng Xiaoping, 359, 464, 486, 496, 515, 516,
519,539,542,631,639,641

Denikin, Anton, 60, 61, 7], 81, 82, 87, 97, 104

Departamento Tecnico de Investigaciones
(DTI), 657

Department 10, 383, 384

Department for International Relations
(OMS), 299

Dergue, 685, 687-688, 689, 693-694

Dese, 691

Deutch, Gustt, 315

Dezire, Georges, 294

Dhlakama, Alfonso, 702

Diaocha Tongzhi, 284

Diaz, Jose, 341,350

Diaz Rodriguez, Ernesto, 658

Dien Bien Phu, 465

Dimitriu, Anton, 400

Dimitrov, Georgi, 247, 280, 295, 298, 300,

427, 437, 438
Ding Ling, 474, 540
DingMocun, 284, 285
Direccion 5, 655-656

Direccion de Seguridad Personal (DSP), 655
Direccion General de Contra-Inteligencia

(DGCI), 654-655, 662
Direccion General de Inteligencia (DGI),

354, 656
Direccion General de Seguridad del Estado

(DGSE), 672
Direccion Special del Ministerio (DSMI),

655
Directorate for Special Camps in the North-
ern Region (USLON), 138
Division 64, 374
Djilas, Milovan, 325, 326, 449
Dmitlagcamp, 204
Dnepropetrovsk, 143, 163
Doan Van Toai, 573
Dobsa, Ladislas, 273
Doctors' Plot, 242-249, 253
Dolgikh, Ivan, 239-240
Dollfuss, Engelbert, 315
Dombrowski Brigade, 305
Domenach, Jean-Luc, 492, 498, 501, 513
Domenech, Jose, 351
Domingos-Van Dunem, A., 697
Dominguez, Margot (Edith), 680
Donath, Gyorgy, 399
Donbass, 115-116, 143, 171, 189, 374
Donetsk, 102,237,372,374
Don Ey, 595
Donggu base, 473
Don region, 10, 60, 71, 95, 98, 99-100, 102,

167, 168
Dora camp, 310
Doriot, Jacques, 27, 294
Dornbach, Alajos, 441
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 13, 346, 730
DPFLP (Democratic and Popular Front for

the Liberation of Palestine), 355
Dragic, A„ 305
Dro, E., 224

Index

831

Dromedar, 224

Drtina, Prokop, 404

Dubcek, Alexander, 438, 443

Dubi, Lydia, 299

Dubno, 225

Dubs, Adolph, 711

Duclos, Jacques, 2, 283, 291, 307, 311, 337

Du Gard, Roger Martin, 347

Duhamel, Georges, 347

Duma, 43, 44

Dumitreasa, Gheorghiu Calciu, 447

Dumont, Rene, 700

Dupaigne, Bernard, 720

Durzhavna Sigurnost, 398, 402, 445

Dusza, Jozef, 378

Duvignaud, Jean, 406

Dvina River, 114

Dzerzhinsky, Feliks, 17, 53-69 passim, 73-76
passim, 79, 84-92 passim, 98, 103, 104,
110, 114, 119, 126, 128, 129-130, 134, 135-
137, 140, 141, 197, 286, 288, 301, 359, 365

Dziurzynska-Suchon, Lucyna, 371

EAM (Ethniko Apelevtheriko Metopo), 310,
326-329

''Eastern Revolt" faction, 698

East Germany. See German Democratic Re-
public

East Wind group, 533

Eberlein, Hugo, 194-195

Eberling,G,305

Echevarria, Jose Antonio, 648

Eden, Anthony, 320, 339

EDES (Ethnikos Demokratikos Ellinikos Syn-
desmos), 327, 328

EEAM (Ergatiko Ethniko Apelevtheriko Me-
topo), 326

Egorov, Aleksandr, 77, 198

Egypt, 354

Ehrenburg, Ilya, 232, 243

Eideman, Robert, 198

Eiduk, A. V,,67

Eikhe, Robert, 151-152, 192

Einstein, Albert, 406

Eitingon, Leonid, 337

Eitingon, Naum, 247, 308, 309

Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), 68

Ekaterinburg province, 1 1 1

Ekaterinodar, 100, 106

Ekaterinoslav, 103, 105

EKKA (Ethniki Kai Koiniki Apelevtherosis),

327
Elan prison, 161
ELAS (Ellinikos Laikos Apelevtherotikos),

310,326-327,328
El Campesino. See Gonzalez, Valentin
El Chipote, 673

El Ejercito Juvenil de Trabajo (Young Peo-
ple's Work Army), 656-657
El Escorial, 348
El Fatah, 355, 358
Elista, 220
Ellenstein, Jean, 13

Ellinikos Laikos Apelevtherotikos. See ELAS
El Manbu camp, 659
Elorza, Antonio, 336
El Salvador, 667
Eluard, Paul, 311-312
Engels, Friedrich, 729,741
EPRP (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary

Party), 688-689, 690
Epstein, Grigory, 243
Ercoli, Mario (PalmiroTogliatti), 195, 300-

301,332,335,337,350
Ergatiko Ethniko Apelevtheriko Metopo. See

EEAM
Eritrea, 688-689, 691, 692-693
Erlich, Henryk, 318-319
Ermolovskaya, 101
Escambray guerrilla movement, 653, 654,

655, 656
Escuder, Jose, 346
Esquipulas treaties, 674
Esteli, 665, 669
Ester, Jose, 351

Estonia, 208, 2 1 1, 236, 278-279, 372
Estonian Communist Party, 279
Estonians, 236

Eternal Flame (Shola-i-Javaid), 709
Ethiopia, 1, 3, 9, 683, 685-690, 704
Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party

(EPRP), 688-689, 690
Ethiopian Workers 1 Party (EWP), 689-690
Ethniki Kai Koiniki Apelevtherosis (EKKA),

327
Ethniko Apelevtheriko Metopo (EAM), 310,

326-329
Ethnikos Demokratikos Ellinikos Syndesmos.

See EDES
Etinger, Jacob, 247

832

index

Euijo, 560

Evpatoria, 60

Evreiskaya sektsiya (Russian Party), 304

Evsk, 72

EWP (Ethiopian Workers' Party), 689-690

Extraordinary Commission for Food and

Transport, 63,381-382
Ezhov, Nikolai, 17, 182, 184-198 passim, 205,

299,301,308,366
Ezhovshchina. See Great Terror

FAI (Federation of Iberian Anarchists), 333,
343

Falange faction, 334

Faryab, 719

FDN (Fuerza Democratica Nicaragiiense),
669

February revolution, 45, 48-49

Federation of Foreign Communist Groups,
272

Federation of Iberian Anarchists. See FAI

Federation of Jewish Unions, 318

Federation of University Students, 654

Fefer, Isaac, 243

Fejgin, Anatol, 378

Feldbin, L. (Aleksandr Orlov), 337, 338, 341,
342

Feldman, Fred, 198

Feliks Dzerzhinsky region, 365

Fengyang (Anhui) province, 490, 492

Fergana valley, 138-139

Ferretti, Maria, 453

Ferro, Marc, 40

Field, Noel, 426

Fitiatre, Roland, 310

Finland, 5,44,50,60, 114,208,312

Finnish Communist Party, 312

Finns, 52, 182, 188,218,312

First International, 729

Fischer, Ruth, 349

Fischl, Otto, 429-430

"Five Ami" movement, 482

Five-Year Plan, 144, 145, 169

Flieg, Leo, 194

FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale), 353,
354, 355

Florin, Wilhelm, 298, 301

FNLA (Frente National de Libertacao de An-
gola), 696

Fomichev, 161

Fonseca Amador, Carlos, 665, 666

Fori§, $tefan, 423

Foscolo, Alfredo, 445-446

Foucher, Michel, 694

Fourier, Jules, 294

Four Old-Fashioned Things, 522, 527

Four- Year Plan, 599

Fraile, Ricardo, 717

France, 6, 11,21,26,28, 159-160,207-208,

212, 283, 314, 321, 323, 456, 631, 683, 684,

694, 727-729; criminal code, 7, 8
Franco, Francisco, 21, 29, 333
Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), 309
Frank, Josef, 429
Frank, Robert, 452
Frank, Semyon, 129
Franqui, Carlos, 660
Franquistas, 337
Fran/, Horse, 358
FRAP (Revolutionary Anti-Fascist Patriotic

Front), 359
Frayde, Martha, 659
Free French, 323
Free Union of Romanian Workers

(SLOMAR),447
Free Youth of Catalonia movement, 340
Frei, Rudolf, 345-346
Frejka, Ludvik, 430

Frelimo (Frenre de Libertacao do Mozam-
bique), 684, 685, 701-704
French Communist Party (FCP), 25, 283-

284, 288, 291-295, 307, 310, 331, 624
French Guyana, 576
French Revolution, 9, 44, 57, 59, 624, 651,

687,728,731,736
French Workers' and Peasants' Party (POPF),

294
Frente dc Libertacao do Mozambique. See

Frelimo
Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola

(FNLA), 696
Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional.

See FSLN
Freund, Hans, 340
Fried, Eugen, 295
Frommelt, Erich, 348-349
Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), 353,

354,355
Front for Defense of the Population of

Ayacucho, 676
Front for National Unity, 388
Frossard, Andre, 8

Index

833

Frukina, Maria J., 305

Frunze, Mikhail, 707

Frunze Military Academy, 350

FSLN (FYente Sandinista de Liberacion Na-
cional), 7, 665-675

Fucik, Bedrich, 411-412

Fuerza Democratica Nicaragiiense (FDN),
669

Fuerzas Especiales, 655

Fugueres, Jose Maria, 666

Fujian province, 469, 489, 533

Fu Lei, 522

Furet, Francois, 22, 25, 228, 250, 728, 734-
735

Furubotn, Peder, 332

G-2 (secret police), 657-658, 660, 672

Gagarin, Yuri, 494

Gaggi, Otello, 314

Galati, 447

Galkin, 196

Gang of Four, 526, 532, 536,631

Gasso, Joan Farre, 352

Gebeyahu, Haile, 691

Gega, Liri, 444

Geminder, Bedrich, 429, 434, 436

General Commissariat for Public Order, 337,

338
General Richer (Manfred Stern), 284
General Military Union (ROYS), 285
General Studies Commission, 474 — 475
General Workers' Union (Spain), 333
Geneva Convention, 322, 465, 567-568,

582
Genoud, Francois, 357
Georgia, 20, 138, 139, 140, 184, 217, 218, 224,

237, 247
Georgian Communist Parry, 247
Georgians, 52
Georgiev, Kosta, 279
German Communist Party (KPD), 194-195,

272, 277, 278, 282, 284, 301-303, 310, 349
German Democratic Republic, 357-358, 359,

388, 389, 400, 408, 417, 419, 442, 446, 448,

670, 685, 690
German-Pomares military complex, 672
Germans, 6, 14, 23, 182, 188, 216-219, 224,

255, 258, 264, 301, 322, 374, 396-397;

Volga, 10,216-219,301
German-Soviet pact (1939), 22, 195, 207-208,

213,231,294,302,317,318,323,430

Germany, 6, 21, 160, 198-199, 207-208, 212,
214-21 5, 223, 271, 272, 276-277, 327-328,
365, 738. See also Nazism
Gerfl, Erno, 337, 338, 342, 344
Gestapo, 195, 302, 303, 310, 317, 318, 379,

428
Gheorghescu, Teohari, 435
Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe, 425, 435, 444-445
Ghezzi, Francesco, 314-315
Gide, Andre, 335, 347
Gille, Eticnne, 71 1
Gimes, Miklos, 440
Gironella, Pascal, 346
Gitton, Marcel, 294
Gjini, Fran, 409
Glavnoe razvedyvatePnoe upravlenie (GRU),

283
Glavnoe upravlenie gosudarstvennoi bezopas-

nosti (GUGB), 300
Glavnoe upravlenie po delam voenno-plen-

nykh (GUVP), 368
Godech, 279
Goldberg, Aleksandr, 83

Goldman, Mikhail, 73

Gotikov, Filip, 230

Goli Otok camp, 424, 425

Golok, 543

Goma, Paul, 450

Gombrowicz, Witold, 22

Gomel, 87

Gomez Emperador, Mariano, 337, 345

Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 305, 332, 380-381, 385,
386-387, 438

Gonda Voda camp, 401, 416

Gonzalez, Jorge (El Nato), 657-658

Gonzalez, Valentin (El Campesino), 344, 348,
350,351

Gopner, Serahna, 103

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 438, 714

Gorbatov, Aleksandr, 198

Gorbatyuk, V, 284

Gordievsky, Oleg, 721

Gorelli, Aldo, 314

Gorev, Vladimir, 336

Gorkic, Milan, 195, 306

Gorkin, Julian, 308, 336, 338-339, 341, 343,
344, 346, 349

Gorky (Nizhni Novgorod), 19, 218, 315

Gorky, Maksim, 20, 59-60, 121, 732-733,
736-737, 744-745, 749, 750, 756

Gornfeld,A.G., 130

834

Index

Gosplan (State Planning Administration),
170

Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie.
See GPU

Gots, Avraham, 127

Gottwald, Klement, 300, 403, 427, 428, 429,
430, 436, 438

GOU/ 1/87654, 442

GPU (Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe
upravlenie), 15,62,64, 128, 133, 134, 135,
138-145 passim, 707; dekulakization and,
147-157 passim; great famine and, 160,
162, 164, 165, 168; repression and, 170,
171, 179; Great Terror and, 187, 203-204,
206; Comintern and, 28-314 passim. See
also Cheka

Granada (Nicaragua), 665

Grandi, Dino, 339

GRAPO (Anti-Fascist Resistance Group of
October First), 359

Grass Mist Lane, 504-505

Gravier, Bruno, 751

Graziosi, Andrea, 66, 141, 160, 262

Great Leap Forward, 1 1, 31, 459, 464, 465,
488-496, 498, 510, 513, 516, 545, 603, 627,
639, 640

Great Patriotic War, 21 5, 2 J 6, 225, 246,
264

Great Terror, 10, 11, 73, 75-78, 82, 100-101,
102, 132, 133, 167, 179, 180, 183, 184-202,
214, 242, 243, 264, 265, 266, 472, 735-736,
745, 749; Comintern and, 298-301, 313

"Great Trotsky ite Council," 431

Grechko, Andrei, 442

Greece, 21, 28, 310, 324, 326-330

Greek Catholic Church, 41 1

Greek Catholic Uniate Church, 410, 412

Greek Communist Party (KKE), 310, 326-
331

Greeks, 188, 219, 223-224, 237, 330-331

Green Band, 284

Greens, 81,91,92,93,94, 98, 100, 101

Gregory, Constantin, 677

Grgur, 425

Grigorcnko, Petro, 259

Groman, Vladimir, 170

Gromyko, Andrei Andreevicli, 193, 356

Grossman, Vastly, 8, 16, 19, 243, 256, 313,

731,753,756-757
Grosz, Jozsef, 410
Group D, 390

Group of Five, 429

Grozny, 101,256

GRU (Glavnoe razvedyvatePnoe upravlenie),
283-284, 293

Grupo de Informacion, 337, 344

Guanajay prison, 659

Guangdong, 470, 480, 540

Guang Huian, 284

Guangxi, 533, 534

Guangzhou, 482, 483

Guatemala, 651, 674

Guernica, 692

Guesde, Jules, 730

Guevara, Ernesto (Che), 3, 21, 648, 651-654,
676

GUGB (Glavnoe upravlenie gosudarstvennoi
hezopasnosti), 300

Guilds, Emil, 243

Guilin, 534

Guireras, Antonio, 653

Gulag Administration/gulags, 6, 18, 19, 20,
26,31,73, 118, 136, 138, 163, 186, 190,
191, 203-207, 209, 213-214, 222, 225-227,
229-231, 234, 238-241, 245, 251, 253, 257-
258, 264-265, 267, 313, 322, 323, 755

Gulam-Nabi Khan, 707

Guralsky, August, 277

Gurev region, 139, 224

Gurvich, Abram, 244

Guseila, Ion, 448

Gu Shunzhang, 284

Guttierrez Menoyo, Eloy, 658

GUVP (Glavnoe upravlenie po delam voenno-
plennykh), 368

Guzman, Ahimael, 359, 676, 677, 678, 680

Gypsies, 14, 176,324,416

GZI (Main Intelligence Directorate) (Po-
land), 380-381

I labash, George, 355

Habte, Jamor Sisay, 688

Haddad, Wadi, 355-356, 357

Hadji, Uzun, 139

Hague Convention (1907), 5-6

Haile Selassie I, 687

Hai-Lu-Feng, 470, 477

l-laing Ngor, 617, 619, 620, 621-623

Haiias, A., 331

Hajdu, Vavro, 430

I lamburg, 278, 284

Han dv nasty, 468

Index

835

Haubrich, Jozsef, 274

Havana (city), 669

Havana (province), 661

Havel, Vaclav, 450,451

Hawarmeh, Nayef, 355

Hawzen, 692

Hazaras, 705

HCP See Hungarian Communist Party

Heeler, Stephen, 589

I leijenoort, Jan Van, 307

Heimwehren (Patriotic Guard), 315

Hejiaxing, 284

Hejihua, 284

Helfferich, Karl, 71

HeLiyi, 479

I lelsinki Accords, 259-260, 446

1 le Mengxiong, 284

Henan, 489, 490, 492, 494

Herat, 706, 712, 717, 719

I lernandcz, Jesus, 334, 351

Herriot, Edouard, 159-160

Hertz, Alfredo, 338, 344, 345

Hess, Rudolf, 15

Hie, Marcel, 310

I linton, William, 477

I lirsch, Werner, 194

Hitler, Adolf, 301,324, 379, 745

I Imong, 575, 576

Unuti revolucniho mladeze (Revolutionary

Youth Movement), 443-444
I loa 1 ho, 566
I loang Van 1 loan, 465
Ho Chi Minn, 2, 3, 17, 311, 565, 566, 569,

571, 572,625,631,638
Ho Chi Mmh City, 573-574
1 loirvong, 555, 556
I lo Kai, 552

Holocaust, 19,23,26,244,435,580
Honduras, 669, 674
Honel, Charles, 285
I lonel, Maurice, 285
Hong Kong, 483
Horakova, Milada, 405-406
florthy, Mikl6s, 440
House of Writers and Thinkers, 130
Hou Youn, 586
I loxha, Enver, 311, 330, 397, 409, 444, 449,

454
Hny t 650

I Iryhorenko, Petro, 19
I Iryhoryiv, Mykola, 95, 96

Hua Guofeng, 515, 534, 538-539

Hua Linshan, 528, 530, 534-535

Huanuco, 678, 679

Hubei,281,523

1-lu Peng, 484-485, 571

IIuHak-Bong, 552

Human Rights Watch, 704

Runner, Adam, 454

Hunan, 281,282,469

Hundred Flowers Campaign, 485, 486, 504,

569
Hungarian Workers 1 (Communist) Party
(1 ICP), 195, 272-274, 296, 332, 398, 400,
418

1 lungary, 272-274, 330, 337, 394-400, 409-
410, 417-419, 435-442 passim, 449, 452,
454

Husak, Gustav, 431,443

Hussein, King, 355

Huta, Nuri, 426

Hut us, 686

Hu Yaobang, 546

Huynh Phu So, 566

I iwangjang Ynp, 561

Hwasong, 555

Hyon Chun 1 lyok, 548

Ibarruri, Dolores (aka Fa Pasionaria), }}5,

343
Ibso'k camp, 554

ICP. See Indochinese (Communist Party
Ieng Sary, 624, 630
lerunca, Virgil, 420
Ignatiev, Sergei, 249
Immigrant Manpower (MOI), 294
Independence Party (Hungary), 401)
Independent Labour Party, 343, 346
Independent Social Democratic Party, 400
Indians, 668-669,670
Indochina, 31 1
Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), 311,

566, 569, 583, 625
Indochinese war (1946-1954), 580
Industrial Party, 170, 171,750
Ingush, 10,219,220,221,256
Ino, 114

Inostrannyi Otdef (INO), 293
INRA (Instituto Nacional de Reforma

Agraria), 649
"In Spite of Ourselves' 1 (Malgre-nous), 26,

323

836

Index

Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria
(INRA), 649

Internal Security Corps. See KBW

International Brigades, 195, 284, .105, 309,
311, 344, 347-350, 399, 428, 430, 431

Internationa] Commission on the Concentra-
tion Camp System, 26

Internationa] Communist League, 311

Internationa] Federation for the Rights of
Man, 717

Internationalist Workers' Party, 310

International Leninist School, 298, 305, 345

Internationa] Military Tribunal, 5

International of Socialist Workers, 275

International War Crimes Tribunals, 717

International Youth Organization, 305

Iparraguire, Elena, 680

Iranians, 237

Irish Republican Army (IRA), 354^355

Irkutsk group, 548

Iron Guard, 396

Isaev, Pyotr, 163

Isgoev, Aleksandr, 129, 130

Isle of Pines, 657

Israel, 386,434, 692

Italian anti-Fascists, 313-314

Italian Communist Party, 195, 309, 313-314

Etalian-Soviet trade agreement, 160

Italian Trade Union, 314

Italy, 1, 28, 313-314, 321, 322, 324, 687

Iuga, Dimitru, 448

Ivano-Frankivsk, 258

Ivanovo, 124, 126, 189,215

Ivanovo Voznesensk, 77, 86, 108, 1 12

ivdel, 316

Izhevsk, 90

Jachymov region, 41 8

Jacket, Giinther, 358

Jankowska, L,, 299

Japan, 311, 469-470, 477, 548, 554-555, 561-

562,631
Japanese, 188, 193, 323,475-476,478, 555
Japanese Red Army (JRA), 356-357, 550
Jaria, 594

Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 389, 391, 454
Jauresjean, 729,730, 742
Jehovah's Witnesses, 237, 382, 671
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, 243-246,

247-248

Jewish Socialist Workers' Party (Bund), 318
Jewish Workers' Committee of the United

States, 319
Jews, 7, 14-15, 17, 19, 86, 95-96, 99, 214,

242-246, 265, 274, 294, 302-304, 317, 318,

324, 37 1 , 386, 394, 395, 4 1 5, 434-435, 580,

712
Jiang Qing, 515, 516, 519, 521, 526, 536, 627,

638
Jiangsu, 470
Jiangxi,471,472,475
Jingzhou Industrial Dye Works, 497
Jinotega, 669, 674
Jiu valley, 447, 450
Johansen, Strand, 332
Jokhang monastery, 543-544
Jordinis, J., 331

Julian Marchlewski region, 365
Junta de Reconstruction Nacional, 667, 671
Justus, Pal, 426

Kabardino-Balkaria, 220

Kabila, Laurent, 652

Kabul, 705, 706, 719-720

KachRoteh, 613

Kaczmarek, Czeslaw, 382

Kadar, Janos, 332, 438, 440

Kaeshong, 555

Kagame, Paul, 684

Kaganovich, Lazar, 18, 162, 177, 189, 194,

201,250,300,369
Kakar, Hassan, 722
Kalandra, Zavis, 311-312
Kalinin, Mikhail, 113, 120, 125, 300, 369
Kalinovskaya, 101
Kalmykia, 220, 223
Kalmyks, 220-223, 256, 264
Kalocsa, 410
Kaluga, 67, 351
Kamchatka camp, 368
Kamenev, Lev, 50, 63, 79, 86, 121, 129, 141,

142, 181,184,247,288,289,734,745
Kameninsky, 222
Kampuchea, 578
Kandahar, 706, 717,718
Kandal, 591
KangChul Hwan, 555
KangKoo Chin, 552

Kang Sheng, 284, 285, 463, 474-475, 519, 527
Kapalanz, Seppl, 344

Index

837

Kapitza, Pyotr, 243

Kaplan, Fanny, 74

Kaplan, Karel, 405, 4 15, 435

Kapustin, Ya. F, 246

Karachaevo-Cherkness, 220

Karachai, 219,220, 221,256

Karaganda region, 182, 204, 219, 254

Kareevka, 117

Karelia, 151, 182,204,312

Karelin, Judge, 736

Karikas, Frigycs, 296

u Karl Marx 11 Division, 344

"Karl Marx" Regiment, 315

Karmal, Babrak (Mohammed Hussein Khan),
709,711,713,714,720,723

Karolyi, Mihaly, 273

Karsavin, Lev, 129

Kaskiewicz, Jerzy, 378

Katyn,6, 22, 211,369, 372

Kaunas, 212

Kautsky, Karl, 729-753 passim

Kazakhstan, 123, 149, 151, 155, 160-168 pas-
sim, 182, 191,204,209,213,217,218,222,
223, 224, 225, 231, 235, 237, 254, 313, 318,
331,371

Kazan, 67, 94, 97

KBW (Internal Security Corps), 376, 377

Kedrov, Mikhail, 114

Kelcmen, Justus, 400

Kern, I3X

Kemerovo, 219, 224

Kem-Ukhra road, 151

Kengir, 254

Keo Meas, 586

Keppert, A, 435

Ke Qingshi, 284

Kerekes, Jozsef, 274

Kerensky, Aleksandr, 47, 69

Kevic, Stefan, 428

KGH(Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopas-
nosti), 26, 64, 254-255, 258, 332, 355, 356,
359, 375, 376, 388, 690, 703, 715, 716, 756
Khad-i-Nezami, 721
Khad-i-Panj, 721
KHAD (State Information Service), 711,715,

720-724
Khalq, 709,710, 713
Khampa guerrillas, 544, 545
Khan, Mohammed Hussein (aka Babrak Kar-
mal), 709, 71 1, 713, 714, 720, 723

Kharbin, 188, 193

Kharkiv, 97, 98, 105, 106, 130, 160, 164-165,

167, 175, 179,316
KhashamKala, 717-718
Khataevich, Mikhail, 163-164
Khaybar, Mir-Akbar, 710,711
Khemshins, 219, 224,225
Kherson, 96

Khieu Samphan, 618, 627
Khitrovo, 109-110
Khlevnyuk, O., 262
Khmer Loeu, 584, 592, 594, 595, 604
Khmer Rouge, 16, 465, 470, 546, 569, 572,

577-635, 748
Kholmogory camp, 114, 118, 137
Khrushchev, Nikita, 189, 190, 250, 251, 252,
300, 421, 436, 438, 638, 685; "Secret
Speech," 18, 23-25, 26, 180, 185, 192, 255
Khun, Ken, 603, 609
Khvostov, N., 76
Kiangsi, 282
Kiernan, Ben, 589, 595
Kiesewetter, Aleksandr, 129
Kilo 7 prison, 658
KIM. See Communist Youth International

Kim Du Bong, 552

Kim dynasty, 559

Kim Hyuon-hee, 359

Kim 11 Sung, 3, 10, 464, 465, 548, 549, 555,
558, 559, 565,626,631,638

Kimjong II, 558, 559

Kim Kwang Hyup, 552

Kim Seung-il, 359

Kirgiz, 138,705

Kirgizstan, 219, 222, 225,331,499

Kirilina, Alia, 180

Kirov, Sergei, 88, 168, 180, 181, 182, 192,
247,255,297,305,745

Kirov akan, 312

Kirsanov, 1 10

Kislovodsk, 101

Kissinger, Henry, 569

Kiszczak, Czeslaw, 391

KKE (Greek Communist Party), 310, 326-331

Klaras, Thanassis. See Velouchiotes, Ares

Kleber, General, 284

Klement, Rudolf, 307

Klyuev, Nikolai, 200

Knight, Amy, 253

Knorin, Wilhelm, 197,300,306

Index

839

Kobulov, Bogdan, 211, 221, 229, 369

Koeci, Vasco, 426

Koestler, Arthur, 274

Kogenman, 227

Kohistanis, 705

Koh Young Hwan, 560, 561

Kolakowski, Leszek, 755

Kolchabad, 718

Kolchak, Aleksandr Vasiliyevich, 81, 84, 87,

95, 285
Kollontai, Aleksandra, 249, 286, 288
Kolomenskaya, 196
Kolpino, 68

Koltsov, Mikhail, 337, 340
Kolyma, 27, 205, 227, 235, 297, 313, 314, 370,

499
Komarov, Vladimir, 296
Kombalcha, 691
Komi, 331
Komitet gosudarstvcnnoi bezopasnosti. See

KGB
Komorovsky, Ludwig {aka Jan Borowski), 298
Kompong Cham, 582, 595
Komsomol, 145, 161, 192, 194
Kondratyev, Nikolai, 121, 170
Konev, Ivan, 336
Kopp, Pascale, 358
Koppensteiner, Fritz, 315
KOR (Workers 1 Defense Committee), 387
Korea. See North Korea; South Korea
Koreans, 191,264
Korean war, 422, 433, 464, 687
Korean Workers' (Communist) Party, 548,

550-552, 555, 557-558
Koritschoner, Franz, 302
Kork, Avgust, 198
Kornilov, Lavr, 47, 50, 60
Korolev, Sergei, 199
Koroshenko, Mikhail, 189
Kossior, Stanislas, 142, 163, 192
Kostopoulos, G., 327
Kostov, Traicho, 402, 427
Kostroma, 67, 84
Kostrzewa, Wera, 304
Kosygin, Aleksei Nikolaevich, 193, 356
Kotlas, 152,204,219
Kou-oup camp, 554
Kovacs, Bcla, 399-400
Kovago, Jozsef, 400
Kovalev, Sergei, 557
Kowel,318

Kozielsk camp, 368, 369

Kozma Street prison, 441

KPD. See German Communist Party

KPO (Austrian Communist Party), 302,

315
KPP. See Polish Communist Party
Krajewski, Anton, (Wladyslaw Stein), 293,

299
Krasin, Leonid, 124
Krasnodar, 167,217,218
Krasnov, Ataman, 71, 84, 98
Krasnoyarsk, 217, 229, 235, 236
Kratie, 582, 593
Kravchenko, Viktor, 18
Krebs, Richard, 278
Krenz, Egon, 454
Krestinsky, Nikolai, 184, 194
Kriegel, Annie, 12, 193, 434, 746, 750
Kristo, Pandi, 426
Krivitsky, Walter, 337
Kronstadt, 49, 51, 55, 76, 85, 88, 108, 1 12,

263; revolt, 113-114, 137,263,276,

286
Kruglov, Sergei, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240
Krylenko, Nikolai, 119, 134
Kuban, 60, 95, 98, 99, 100, 102, 106, 160,

167, 168
Kudryukovskaya, 1 17
Kuibyshev, 241
kulaks, 9, 10, 16,46,51,60,72,82, 135, 140,

144, 146-158 passim, 172-173, 237-238,

266
KUMNZ (Communist University of Western

National Minorities), 298, 305
Kun, Attila, 448
Kun, Bela, 195, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276,

300
Kunduz, 706
Kuomintang, 280-281,284-285, 468, 471,

473,475,477,481
Kurds, 219, 224, 225
Kurdyuki, 117
Kuron Jacek, 386, 388
Kursk, 233

Kursky, Dmitry, 55, 127, 129
Kuskova, Ekaterina, 121, 122, 129
Kutepov, Aleksandr, 285
Kutsian camp, 417-418
KUTV (Communist University of the Work-
ers of the East), 280
Kuusinen, Aino, 287, 312, 756

Kuusinen, Otto, 197, 300
Kuzbass, 157
Kuzbassugol, 204
Kuznetsk, 151, 226
Kuznetsov, Nikolai, 246
Kyiv, 96, 97, 102, 105, 106, 1 19, 175, 176,
198,260,364

Labor Reeducation Center No. 7, 497

La Cabana prison, 648, 652, 658, 659, 660

Ladinos, 668

Lagerfelt, Johann, 717

Lagers, 416

Laghman, 718

Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra, 453

La Libertad, 679

La Loma de los Coches prison, 654

La Mar, 679

Lameda,Ali, 553-554

Lancanic, Rudolf, 428

Landau, Katia, 340-341,343

Landau, Kurt, 340, 344

Lander, Karl, 100,101

Langevin, Paul, 296

Langumier, Adrien, 294

Lanz, Diaz, 653

Lanzhou, 533-534

laogai, 31, 460-461, 497-513, 541, 748

laopao, 498, 499, 500

Laos, 28, 459, 575-576, 636, 637, 638

Lao She, 522
Lao Tsu, 466

La Pasionaria (Dolores Ibarruri), 335, 343

Largo Caballero, Francisco, 334, 338-339,
341

Larin, Yuri, 289

Larisch, Emil, 301

Last, Jef, 335

Las Tejas prison, 671

Las Villas, 652

Latsis, Martin, 8, 62, 74, 78, 100, 105

Latvia, 208, 211,212, 236,372

Latvians, 188,236

Laurencic, P. (aka SSI 29), 345

Laval, Pierre, 27

Lazarevich, Nikolai, 314

Lazich, Branko, 298

Lazimir, Aleksandr, 53

Lazutin, P G., 246

League for the Independence of Vietnam. See
Viet Minh

League for the Rights of Man, 750
League of the Militant Godless, 172
Lebyazhenski, 166
Lechowicz, Wlodzimierz, 384
Le Due Tho, 569
Left Bloc, 413

Legal Committee for Socialist Life, 558
Lei Feng, 502
Leimus, 668

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich (V I. Ulyanov), 2, 5-25
passim, 31, 48-51, 57-58, 62-69 passim,
72, 73, 79, 85-98 passim, 107, 110, 112,
113, 115, 121-131 passim, 132,262,273,
275, 277, 286, 287, 304, 364, 652, 683, 728-
756 passim
Leningrad, 153-154, 174, 175, 176, 182, 189,

192, 193,217,218,245,260,364
Leningrad Affair, 235, 245, 246-247
Leningrad Communist Party, 180, 246-247
Leninism, 10, 16, 24, 27, 30, 48, 738-740
"Lenin's Boys," 273-275
Leniton, Achille Grigorevich, 245
Lenski, Julian, 305
Leon, 665

Leonhard, Wolfgang, 315

Levi, Paul, 276, 277

Levine, Eugen, 272

Levit, Solomon, 200

Levy, Yves, 343

Lewin, Moshe, 253

Leys, Simon, 579

Lhasa, 543, 544, 545, 546

Li Baozhang, 281

Liberacion group, 654

Liberberg, Iosef, 304

Li Dazhao, 472

Liebknecht, Karl, 272

Likhachev, Mikhail, 428, 434

Lima, 674, 678

Lin Biao, 459,490, 502, 515,516, 519, 521,
522, 526, 536-537, 538

Ling, 528

Linz, 315

Li Shiqun, 284, 285

Lister, Enrique, 344, 348, 351

Li Sun Ok, Mrs., 553

Lithuania, 208, 211, 229, 235-236, 258, 370,
372

Lithuanians, 188, 236

Litoiu, Nicolae, 448

Litom^fice, 411

840

Index

Little Swords, 470

Litvan, Gyorgy, 452

Litvinov, Maksim, 198, 302

Liu Ching, 522

Liu Shaoqi, 494, 496, 497, 513, 516, 517, 519,

524, 527, 543
Liu Zhidan, 473
Li Yong Mu, 552
Lobl, Evzen, 428, 430
Locard, Henri, 582, 591, 603, 608, 618
Lodz, 317
Logar, 717-718
Lominadze, Vissarion, 281
London, Artur, 430
Long Bow (Shanxi), 477, 478, 482, 486, 488,

533
Long March, 464, 469, 519, 545
Longo, Luigi, 349
Lon Nol, 581, 582, 589, 591, 592, 596, 616,

620, 623, 632, 635
Lopez Fresquet, Rupo, 650
Lorenzo, Cesar M., 344
Loski, Nikolai, 129
Losonczy, Geza, 440, 441
Lovech camp, 421-422
Luanda, 697-698
Lublin, 303

Lubyanka, 64, 69, 300, 314, 318, 350, 374, 375
Luca, Vasile, 435
Luchaire, Jean, 294
Lu clan, 533
Luconamanca, 678-679
LudendorfT, Erich Friedrich Wilhelm, 394,

733, 743
Lula, Anas taste, 310-311
Lulchev, Kosta, 400
LuoRuiqing, 519
Lu Sung Yop, 551
Lutherans, 410
Lutovinov, Yuri* 286
Lutsk, 225
Luxembourg, 322
Luxemburg, Rosa, 272, 304
LuXun.471,484
Lviv, 225-226, 258, 373
Lvov, Prince, 44
Ly Heng, 620
Lysenko, Trofim, 200, 489, 634, 753

M-26 (26 July Movement), 648, 650, 664
Ma, 520

Maari, Gurgen, 200

MacArthur, Douglas, 549

Macciochi, Maria Antonietta, 20

Macedonia, 329

MacGovern, John, 346

Machado, Gerardo, 647

Machel, Samora, 697, 701-704

Madry,Jindrich, 433

Magadan, 205, 297

Magnitogorsk, 157-158, 176, 316

Maikop, 100

Main Intelligence Directorate. See GZI

Maisky, Ivan, 249

Maitreya, 466

Maiwandwal, Hashim, 710

Majdanek camp, 303

Makarov, Nikolai, 170

Makhno, Nestor, 83, 92, 95, 96, 98, 108, 707

Makhnovists, 96

Malenkov, Georgy, 200, 218, 249, 250, 251,

436
Maleter, Pal, 440
Malgre-nous ( u ln Spite of Ourselves"), 26,

323
Malia, Martin, 12, 251,731,733
Malraux, Andre, 296, 469
Managua, 665, 667, 669
Manchuria, 284, 511,548
Mandelstam, Osip, 200
Maniu, Iuliu, 400, 402
Mantecon, Jose Ignacio, 344
Mantsev, Vasily, 129
Mantsev-Messing commission, 130
Manuilsky, Dmitry, 197, 291, 298, 299, 300,

437
Mao Zedong, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 17, 20, 21, 25-

26, 280, 282, 311, 463^74 passim, 480-

496 passim, 501-532 passim, 543, 545, 593,

616, 620, 627-628, 631, 638, 639, 640, 676,

754
M-Apparat (Military Apparatus), 278, 282,

284
Maputo, 685
March Action, 276
Marchais, Georges, 2
Marchak, Samuel, 243
Margoline, Jules, 318
Margolius, Rudolf, 429
Mariategui, Jose Carlos, 676
Mariel crisis, 663
Marinskoe, 226-227

Index

841

Marion, Pierre, 355
Markevic, Sima, 306
Markin, 72

Markish, Peretz, 243, 244
Markov, Georgi, 19, 450
Marr, Nikolai, 200
Marshall Plan, 399
Martin, Robert, 349
Martin, Stinescu, 415
Martinez, Alfredo, 340
Martov, Yuri, 73, 78, 736
Marty, Andre, 295, 296, 348, 349
Marx, Karl, 728-729, 740, 741
Marxism, 40, 729-730, 737, 740, 741
Marxism-Leninism, 10, 49, 67, 399, 464, 501,
559, 560, 616, 618, 626, 666, 670, 684-686,
691,692,701,751-753
Marxist Workers' Unification Party. See

POUM
Masaryk, Tomas, 731
Masaya, 665

Masferrer, Rolando, 648, 651

Maslaric, Bozidar, 316

Maslow, Arkady, 349

Mastiliak,Jan, 410

Matagalpa, 669, 674

Matos, Hubert, 653, 655-656, 660

Matthews, Herbert, 341, 649

Matusov, Yakov, 3(X)

Matveev, I. M., 177

Mauriac, Francois, 347

Maurin, Joaquin, 333, 343

Maurin, Manuel, 343

Mauthausen, 294, 411

Mazar-i-SharTf, 706

Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 391, 451

Mazzora hospital, 657

Mbembe, Achille, 704

MBP. See Poland: Ministry of Public Security

Mecsek Mountains, 439

Medecins sans Frontieres, 694

Medina, Benigno, 677

Medvedev, G., 288, 736

Meinhof, Ulrike, 359

Meisel, Paul, 302

Meison (All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement),
688-689

Mekong River, 575

Melgunov, Sergei, 8, 60-61, 104, 106

Meligala, 328

Mella, Julio Antonio, 337

Mcmba, 704

Mendefera, 692

Menelik II, 689

Mengistu Haile Mariam, 3, 684, 687-688,

689,691-692,693,695
Mensheviks, 44, 47, 48, 62, 65-78 passim, 84,
85,87, 112, 114-115, 127, 130, 137, 139,
140,201,235,262,736
Menthon, Francois de, 6, 7
Menzhinsky, Vyacheslav Rudolfovich, 62, 129,

140, 144, 197
Meray, Tibor, 551
Mercader, Caridad, 309
Mercader del Rio, Jaime Ramon, 308, 309
Merker, Paul, 449

Merkulov, Vsevolod, 211,212, 369, 371
Mertens (Stanislaw Skulski), 299
Meskhetians, 219, 224,225
Messing, Stanislav, 62
Metaxas, Joannes, 324
Mexican Communist Party, 307-308
Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 200, 247
Mezzich, Carlos, 676, 680
Mielke, Erich, 357, 358
Mif, Pavel, 284
Mihailovic, Draza, 324-326
Mihalache, Ion, 402
Mikhailovskaya, 101
Mikhocls, Solomon, 243, 244
Mikoladze, E., 200
Mikoyan, Anastas, 142, 189, 222, 246, 251,

369
Mikoyan-Shakar, 220
Milev, Nikolas, 279

Military Investigation Commission, 56
Military Unit of Production Assistance

(MUPA) (Cuba), 656
Miller, E. K., 285-286
Millerand, Eticnne, 729
Milstein, Solomon, 221
Mindszenty, Joszef, 410
Minev, Stepan (Stepanov), 337
Mingrelians, 237, 247
Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit. See Stasi
Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del. See MVD
Ministry of Internal Affairs (Soviet Union),

See MVD
Ministry of State Security (Soviet Union),

243, 247, 248
Minit (Ministry of Internal Affairs) (Cuba),
655,661,674

842

Index

Minkov, Ivan, 279

Minsk, 175, 364

Mirov-Abramov, V. A., 197

Miskito Indians, 668, 669, 670

Misura, 669

Misurasata, 668, 669

Mirrojorgji, Vango, 426

Mitterrand, Danielle, 20

Moczarski, Kazimierz, 377-378

Modzielewski, Karol, 386

Mogadishu, 691

MOI (Immigrant Manpower), 294

Mojaddediclan, 712

Moldavia, 212, 213, 229, 395

Moldavian Communist Party, 237

Moldavians, 236-237

Moldovans, 10

Molnar, Miklos,435, 437

Molotov, 224

Molotov, Vyacheslav, 121, 146, 147, 162, 163-

164, 171, 189, 207, 213, 218, 245, 249, 250,

251,322,369
Monatte, Pierre, 288
Moncada barracks, 648, 650
Mondlane, Eduardo Chivambo, 701, 703
Mongolia, 536
Mongols, 706
Monivong, King, 629
MOPR (Red Aid), 298, 300
Moravia, 404, 408, 411,414, 418, 430, 442
Moravians, 671
More, Thomas, 2
Morgan, William, 650
Mornard, Jacques, 309
Mom, Aldo, 631
Moroz, Grigory, 62
Mortsy, 161
Moscow, 2, 25, 83, 95-96, 108, 111, 112, 126,

153-154, 174, 175,176,184,217,218,259,

260, 305, 364
Moscow-Kursk railway line, 90
Moscow- Volga canal, 204
Moskvin, Mikhail. See Trilisser, Meir
Mo Ti, 467
Motovilikha, 78
Morru valley, 447

Movement for Socialist Education, 516
Movement for the Defense of Human and

Civil Rights (ROPCIO), 387
Movimento de Action Revolucionaria
(MAR), 359

Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola
(MPLA), 663-664, 684-686, 696-700

Movimento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru
(MRTA), 680

Mozambique, 9, 684, 685, 694, 701-704; pe-
nal code, 702

Mozambique National Liberation Front, 684

MPLA. See Movimento Popular de Liber-
tacao de Angola

MPLA Workers' Party, 698

MRTA (Movimento Revolucionario Tupac
Amaru), 680

MSW. See Poland: Ministry of Internal Af-
fairs

Muchkizai, 718

Mu Chong, 552

Mugabe, Robert, 695

Mujal, Eusebio, 648

Miiller, Boris (Melnikov), 299

Munch-Petcrson, A,, 299

Munich agreement, 395

Munich Commune, 272

MUPA (Military Unit of Production Assis-
tance), 656

Murmansk, 246, 318

Murnau, 379

Murom, 72

Muscovy, 71

Muslims, 139, 220, 609, 705-706, 710, 71 1-
712, 716; Cham, 592,594-595

Mussolini, Benito, 1, 160, 324, 326

MVD(Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del), 64,
136, 144, 236, 237, 243, 247, 251, 252, 253,
254, 256, 323, 368. See a/so NKVD

Myakotin, Aleksandr, 130

Myasnikov, Aleksandr, 139

Myasnikov, Gavriil, 286, 287

Nadir Shah, 707-708
Nagy, Ferenc, 400
Nagy, Imre, 332, 440-441, 443
Nairn, 724

Najibullah, Mohammed, 3, 710, 714, 720, 723
Nakshbandis, 139
Nakuru cease-fire, 696
Nalchik, 220
Nam Ngum Islands, 576
Nanjing, 471,472
Napolovski, 166

Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del. See
NKVD

Index

843

Narvich, Lev, 340

Narym, 144, 153, 155,176-177

Nasedkin, Ivan, 225

Nastasescu, Gheorghiu, 448

National Confederation of Labor (CNT),

333,339,340,341,344
National Front, 309
National Front for the Liberation of Angola

(FNLA), 696
National Greek Democratic Union (EDES),

327, 328
Nationalist Party (China). See Kuomintang
National Liberation Front (Greece). See EAM
National Liberation Front of South Vietnam,

572, 625
National Peasant Party (Romania), 400, 402,

447
National Socialist Party (Germany). See Na-
zism
National Socialist Party (Moravia), 404
National Social Liberation Movement

(EKKA), 327
National Union for the Total Independence

of Angola. See UNITA
National Workers' Front for Liberation

(EEAM), 326
Nazino, 154-155, 176

Nazism, 1-10 passim, 14-17, 21, 22, 23, 26,
31, 198-199, 216-230 passim, 243, 244,
255-256, 282, 298, 301, 302, 303, 323-324,
372, 394, 397, 410, 418, 438, 442, 692, 751-
753
Nazi-Soviet pact. See German-Soviet pact
Ndreu, Dale, 444

Nechaev, Sergei, 730, 737, 738, 745, 753, 754
Neehev, Nikolai, 427
Nechiporenko, Oleg Maksimovich, 359
Nedkov, A., 445
Negrinjuan, 334, 341,347
Neou, Kassic, 613
NEP .SVe* New Economic Policy
Neto, Agostinho, 3, 697-698
Neumann, Heinz, 194, 281, 300, 303
New Economic Policy (NEP), 109, 114-1 15,
119, 122, 136, 137, 138, 143, 145, 160, 174,
262, 263, 265
New People, 584-585, 587, 589, 592, 595,

598,599,610,619,633,753
NgoDinhDiem, 571
N gun/a (South Kuanza), 699
Nguyen Ai Quoc. See Ho Chi Minh

Nguyen Van Linh, 574

Nguyen Van Thieu, 565

Nicaragua, 7, 665-675

Nicholas, Grand Duke, 285

Nicholas II, 43, 76, 77, 740

Nicod, Rene, 294

Nidal, Abu, 358

Nien Ching, 507-508, 509, 523, 527, 528,

530, 536-538
Niepodleglosc, 379
Nie Yuanzi, 519
Nigeria, 686
Nikolaev, 96

Nikolaev, Leonid, 180, 181
Nikolaevsky, Boris, 115, 754
Nikolski, Alexandru, 420
Nin, Andreu, 333,339,341
Nixdorf, Kurt, 301,302
Nizhni Novgorod (later Gorky), 72, 77,

105
Nizhni Tagil, 68
Nkavandame, Lazaro, 703
NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh
del), 12, 16, 20, 62, 64, 176-182 passim,
184^194 passim, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209-
214, 217-231 passim, 234, 235, 236, 244,
280, 291-294, 297, 299, 300, 303, 306-307,
308, 316-318, 321, 337-338, 344-346, 365,
368-375 passim, 394, 436, 475; operational
orders, 187-188, 366-367, 368, 373, 374.
5«a/5oCheka;GPU;KGB
Norilsk camps, 205, 239, 254
Northern Song dynasty, 467
North Korea, 3, 4, 5, 28, 29, 356-357, 359,
459, 464, 547-564, 575, 626, 631, 636, 638,
665. See a/so South Korea
North Vietnam. See Vietnam
Norwegian Communist Party, 332
Novgorod, 119
Novokhopersk, 94
Novo-Matryonskaya, 103
Novonikolaevsk. See Novosibirsk
Novorossiisk, 100, 160, 163
Novosibirsk, 1 19, 153, 213, 217, 218, 226, 235
Novotny, Antonin, 434
Novozhilov, Vladimir, 176
Nueva Carceral prison, 656
Nueva Segovia, 669
Nueva Vida camp, 660
Nuevo Amanecer prison, 659
Nuremberg Tribunal, 5, 6, 7, 10, 14, 22, 27, 31

844

Index

Nuristans, 705
Nyerere, Julius, 684
Nyeste, Imre, 418

Ochoa, Arnaldo, 664, 670

October Revolution, 39-41, 46, 51-52, 86,
233,277,301,731,741-742

Odessa, 96, 105, 106, 160, 175, 314

Ogaden, 689, 692

OGPU, 64, 363, 365

Okhrana, 57, 68, 285

Okulicki, Leopold, 375

Olesha, Yuri, 200

Olminsky, Aleksandr, 79

Oltusky, Enrique, 650

OMS (Department for International Rela-
tions) (Comintern), 299

Omsk, 84, 111, 119, 152,217,218

Operation Barbarossa, 2 1 3

Operation Burza, 373-374

Operation K, 382

Operation Spring, 235-236

Operation Storm 333, 714

Operation Wisla, 377

Opposition, Left or Trotsky ite, 141, 289, 297,
300, 304, 305, 307

Oprichnina, 731

Oranienburg, 189,193,289,311

Order of Lenin, 242, 309

Order of the Red Flag, 280, 306

Ordzhonikidze, 217, 218

Ordzhonikidze, Sergo, 20, 98, 101, 139-140,
168, 170,247

Orel, 47, 67, 87, 118,233

Organization for Armed Struggle for Arab
Liberation, 358

Organization for the Protection of Afghan In-
terests (AGSA), 715

Organization for the Protection of the Popu-
lar Struggle (OPLA), 310

Organization of Prisoners with Communist
Beliefs (OPCB), 420

Organization of the International Brigades,
195

Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
(OUN), 229, 237, 258

Oriente, 661

Orlov, Aleksandr (aka L. Feldbin), 337, 338,
341,342

Oromo, 692

Oromo ethnic group, 688

Ortega, Antonio, 341

Ortega, Camilo, 667, 668

Ortega, Daniel, 666-667, 670

Ortega, Humberto, 666

Ortega, Jaime, 656

Orthodox Church, 46, 109, 122, 124, 137,
172-174,229,258,364,410,412

Osinsky, Nikolai, 118-119

Osoboe Soveshchanie (OSO), 370

Ossinovki, 117, 118

Ossorgin, Mikhail, 129

Ostaszkow camp, 368

Ostrava, 418

Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 194

Oudong, 582

OUN. See Organization of Ukrainian Nation-
alists

Outrat, Edward, 431

Ovchinnikov, 165-166

Ovimbundu, 698

Ozerov, Vasily, 130

Paczkowski, Andrzej, 452

Padilla, Heberto, 651

Padkhwab-e Shana, 717

Paik Hyung Bok, 551

PakHon Yong, 551-552

Pakistan, 719

Pak Kum Chul, 552

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),

355,358
Palestinian Communist Party (PCP), 303-

304
Pampuch-Bronska, Wanda, 298
Panama, 666
Panchen Lama, 545
Pan Hannian, 284
Panjshir valley, 717
Pankrac prison, 429
Panmunjon armistice, 550, 559
Pan-Russian Korean Communist Party,

548
PanteJeev, Mikhail, 298, 300
Pan-Turkic movement, 220
Papandreou, Georges, 328
Parcham, 709-710, 71 1,713, 723
Paris peace treaty, 571, 625
Party congresses. See under individual parties
Pascal, Pierre, 314

Index

845

Pasha, Enver, 139

Pasqualini, Jean, 494, 498, 501, 502-507, 510,

517,522
Pastora, Eden, 665, 666-667, 669-670
Pat, Jacques, 319
Pathet Lao, 575
PStrSscanu, Lucretiu, 425
Patriotic Front, 401
Pauker, Ana, 136, 435
Paulo, J. Mateus, 697
Pavel, Gheorghiu, 448
Pavelic, Ante, 324, 325
Pavlik, Charlotte, 428
Pavlik, Gejza, 428
Pavlov, Nikolai, 427
Pavlovsky, Ivan Grigorievich, 713
Payas Sardinas, Oswaldo, 662
PCE. See Spanish Communist Party
PCF. See French Communist Party
PCP. See Palestinian Communist Party
Pean, Pierre, 357
Peasant Workers' Party, 170, 171
Pechekhonov, Andrei, 130
Pechora, 138,204,297
Peloponnese, 328
Peluso, Edmundo, 314
Penal code, Soviet, 135-136; article 58, 172,

191, 206, 228, 319, 322, 368; article 59,

290; article 70, 257-258; article 107, 142;

article 1 1 5, 702; article 190, 257; article

193,319-320
Penchev, Dimitar, 449
Peng Dehuai, 490, 494, 519, 520
P'engP'ai, 470, 471,472, 476
Pen Sovan, 589
Pentecostal Church, 258
Penza, 47, 72, 73, 84, 95, 97
People's Army for National Liberation

(Greece). See ELAS
People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. See

NKVD
People's Democratic Party (Hungary), 400
People's Democratic Republic of Korea, 547-

564
People's Liberation Army (PLA) (China),

31 1, 465, 476, 477-478, 486, 513, 515, 516,

517,528,531-533,543
People's Militia (Czechoslovakia), 443
People's Party (Czechoslovakia), 405
People's Party of Inner Mongolia, 536

People's Republic of China, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 19,
28, 29, 359, 438, 449, 459-462, 463-546,
568, 626-628, 636-640, 676, 701, 748;
Eighth Army, 552
People's Revolutionary Party (South Viet-
nam), 589
People's Revolutionary Party of Kampuchea

(PRPK), 589
People's Socialist Party (PSP), 647, 649, 650
Perm, 77, 105

Permanent Tribunal of the International
League for the Rights and Liberation of
Peoples, 692, 717
Pertaminsk camp, 137
Pertovsky, N., 74-75
Peru, 675-681

Peruvian Communist Party, 676
Petain, Henri Philippe, 452
Peter, Gabor, 435
Petermanns, 300
Peters, Jan, 62, 74, 75, 76, 138
Peterson, Judge, 736
Petkov, Dimitri, 402
Petkov, Nikolai, 401-402, 449
Petkov, Petko, 402
Petlyura, Simon, 82, 95
Petrescu, Constantin Titel, 400
Petrishchev, N,, 130

Petrograd, 43, 49, 50, 56, 62, 64, 66, 68-70,
74,85-86,89, 108, 111, 112-113, 126, 130-
131,278
Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee

(PRMC), 51,53-55,62,70
Petrograd Soviet, 44, 49, 51, 70
Petropavlovskaya, 94
Petrovsky, N., 74-75, 79
Peyrefitte, Alain, 20
Pfeifter, Wilhelm, 301,302
PFLP. See Popular Front for the Liberation

of Palestine
Pham Quynh, 566
Pham Van Dong, 572
Phnom Penh, 3, 581, 583, 587, 592, 593, 595,

620
Picadura valleys, 661
Picelli, Guido, 341
Picq, Laurence, 600, 621
Pieck, Wilhelm, 300, 301
Pika, Heliodor, 404
Pilecki, Witold, 379

846

Index

Pilnyak, Boris, 200

Pilsudski, Jozef, 363, 365

Pinar del Rio, 653, 658

Pindus Mountains, 327

Pineau, Christian, 313

Pin Yathay, 26, 27, 580, 585-586, 588, 595,
603, 605, 633

Pinyug, 151

Pipa, Mustafa, 409

Pitchfork Rebellion, 97

Pitesti, 420-421, 447

Pius XI, 29

PLA. See People's Liberation Army

Plaka agreement, 327

Plenipotentiary Workers' Assembly, 112

Plevitskaya, Nadya, 285

PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization),
355, 358

Plocek, Evzen, 443

Plotkin, 166

Plyushch, Leonid, 19

Plzen, 414

Poarta Alba, 417

Podgorny, Nikolai, 356

Podsednik, Josef, 404^*05

Pokrovsky, Mikhail, 199

Poland, 5, 15, 20, 22-23, 28, 42, 44, 107, 149,
208-209, 229, 237, 264, 294, 302, 317, 330-
331, 363-393, 394, 438, 442, 455, 456; Min-
istry of Internal Affairs (MSW), 383, 384,
385-386, 388, 389, 391; Ministry of Public
Security (MBP), 374, 376, 377, 380-381,
383-384

Pol-e-Charki prison, 710, 712-713, 720,
723

Poles, 10, 23, 52, 61, 62, 91, 164, 182, 188,
209-211

Poliopolos, Pandelis, 310

Polish Communist Party (KPP), 197, 304-
305, 365-366, 379-381

Polish Military Organization (POW), 304,
365-367

Polish Peasant Party (PSL), 376, 377, 379

Polish Security Service. See Bezpieka

Polish Socialist Party, 365

Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), 385,
386, 388, 389

Polish Workers' Party (PPR), 305, 367, 380.
See also Polish Communist Party

Politburo (Bolshevik Party/CPSU), 116, 124,
125, 126, 141, 142, 147, 162-164, 171, 177,

180, 186, 187-188, 189, 194,211,246,368,

382, 384, 745
Pol Pot, 3, 4, 10, 11, 16, 26, 28, 459, 471, 577,

582, 587-635 passim, 638, 684, 753
Poltava province, 96
Pomerania, 374, 397
Ponchaud, Francois, 579
POPF (French Workers' and Peasants' Party),

294
Popieluszko, jerzy, 390
Popkov, Pyotr, 246
Popular Front, 333, 335
Popular Front for the Liberation of Eritrea,

691,692,695
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

(PFLP), 355-356, 357
Popular Movement for the Liberation of An-
gola. See MPLA
Popular Patriotic Front (Bulgaria), 395
Poretskaya, Elizaveta, 293
Poretsky, Nathan (aka lgnaz Reiss), 306-

307
Portugal, 28,695,696, 701
Portuguese Communist Party, 697
Poskrebyshev, Aleksandr, 245
Postyshev, Pavel, 142, 192, 199
Potala temple, 543, 545
Potosi camp, 659
Potresov, Aleksandr, 73, 130
POUM (Marxist Workers' Unification Party),

333, 336, 339-342, 346
POW. See Polish Military Organization
Poznah, 384—385
PPR. See Polish Workers 1 Party
Prager, Rodolphe, 310
Prague, 26, 429, 436, 444, 445
Pravda, 222
Predushi, Vincent, 409
Premtaj,Sadik,311

President Gonzalo. See Guzman, Abimael
Prieto, Indalecio, 345
Primakov, Vitaly, 198
Principal Commission for Research into the

Crimes of Hitler, 456
Prison Kilo 5.5, 657
Prison No. 3 (Hubei province), 497
PRMC. See Petrograd Revolutionary Military

Committee
Profintern (Red Trade Union International),

298,302,314
Prokopovich, Sergei, 121, 122, 129

Index

847

Proletarian Party (PSUC) (Catalonia), 244,
335

Provisional Military Administrative Commit-
tee, See Dergue

PRPK. See People's Revolutionary Party of
Kampuchea

Pruszkow, 374

Przemyk, Grzegor/,, 390

Psarros, Colonel, 327

Pskov, 54, 119,238

PSL. See Polish Peasant Party

PSP (People's Socialist Party), 647, 649,
650

PSUC See Proletarian Party

Pueblo, 555

Pugachev, Emelyan, 732

Pugaehev rebellion, 732

Puiu, Ion, 447

Pukallacta group, 676

Puno, 679

Pushtuns, 705

Putilov factories, 86

Putna, Vitvot, 198

Pu/itsky, N., 156

Puzitsky, Sergei, 285

Pyatakov, Georgy, 115, 171, 184

Pyatigorsk, 100-101

Pyatishatki, 369

Pyatmtsky, Osip (aka Tarchis), 299, 300, 306

Pyongyang, 548-549, 559, 560, 626, 638

Pyonjon camp, 554

Pyurvccv, D. P., 223

PZPR. See Polish United Workers' Party

Qi Benyu, 519
Qin dynasty, 467
Qinghai, 542, 543
Qinghai (amp No. 2, 499
Qin Shi, 468
Quang Ngai, 567
Quevedo, Miguel Angel, 650
Quinca, 677

Rada, 71

Radchenko, Lyuhov Nikolaevna, 130

Radck, Karl, 63, 65-66, 86, 141, 184, 197,

287, 736
Radical Party (France), 159
Radio Free Europe, 383, 386
Radkiewiez, Stanisiaw, 376
RAF. See Rote Armee Frakiion

Raikhman, Leonid, 247

Rajk, Laszlo, 381, 399, 426, 428-^29, 434, 435

Rajnai, Sandor, 441

Rakosi, Matyas, 273, 277, 398, 400, 426, 428,
435, 438

Rakovsky, Christian, 141, 289, 736

Rakvere, 278

Rama Indians, 668, 669

Ramirez, Oscar Albert, 680

Ramirez-Sanchez, Ilyich (aka Carlos), 356-
358

Ramoehe temple, 545

Ramzin, Aleksandr, 170

Ravasz, Laszlo, 410

Ravensbriick, 303

Ray, Manolo, 650

Reagan administration, 694

Rebouljean, 309, 346

"Rectification," 475, 476

Red Aid (MOPR), 298, 300

Red Army (China), 473

Red Army (Germany), 272

Red Army (Soviet Union), 6, 15, 22, 66, 69,
91,92, 108, 111, 117, 139, 140,208,217,
218-219, 220, 223, 228-230, 244, 263, 337,
707, 738; Red Terror and, 72, 79-89; civil
war and, 94-99 passim, 105; Great Terror
and, 197-199; Comintern and, 274, 275,
277, 278, 279, 282, 283, 320; Poland and,
372-379 passim; Eastern Europe and, 394,
395, 398, 399

Red Bases, 471

Red Brigades, 631

Red Cross, 122, 123, 314, 330, 372, 562

Red Flag group, 533

Red Flag villages, 470

Red Gestapo. See Direccion General de Con-
tra-Inteligencia

Red Guards (China), 4, 281 , 284, 471 , 486,
514, 515, 516-528, 530-536 passim, 543-
544, 546, 627, 640

Red Guards (Soviet Union), 44, 45, 49, 51,
52,56,61,68

Red Lances, 469

Red Terror: in Soviet Union, 73, 75-78, 82-
83, 100-101, 102, 104, 133, 265, 482, 735-
736, 749; in China, 523

Red Trade Union International. See Profin-
tern

Referat Ochrony (Protection Squads), 381,
385

848

Index

Regler, Gustav, 348, 349

Reicher, Gustav, 305

Reicin, Bedrich, 404, 430

Rein, Marc, 345

Reingold,Isaac,98,99

Reiss, Ignaz (Nathan Poretsky), 306-307

Remmel, Hermann, 194

Renamo (Resistencia Nacional Mocambi-

cana), 702
Renan, Ernest, 755
Resistencia Nacional Moeambicana

(Renamo), 702
Reventlow, Max, 349
Revolucionaria Democratica (ARDE), 669
Revolutionary Anti-Fascist Patriotic Front

(FRAP), 359
Revolutionary Institute for Foreign Lan-
guages, 552
Revolutionary Organization. See Angkar

Padevat
Revolutionary Youth Movement (Hnuti

revolucniho mladeze), 443^444
Rey, David, 347
Rhodesia. See Zimbabwe
Richet, Charles, 752
Rieger, Max, 342
Riga, 212

Riga, Treaty of, 208, 364
Rigoulot, Pierre, 323
Rio San Juan, 669
Rivet, Paul, 347
Roa, Raul, 649
Robelo, Alfonso, 667,669
Robotti, Paolo, 195,314
Rodionov, Ml., 246
Rodriguez, Jose, 672
Rokossovsky, Konstantin, 198
Rolland, Romain, 296, 314, 744
Romania, 149, 213, 274, 322, 330, 358, 395,

398, 399, 400, 414-420 passim, 435, 438,

446-^50, 453, 637
Romanian Communist Party, 423, 425
Romanians, 188
Romanov, Pantcleimon, 200
Romanovskaya, 101
Romkowski, Roman, 378
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 20
ROPCIO (Movement for the Defense of

Human and Civil Rights), 387
Rosales, Daniel, 672

Rosenberg, Marsel Israelovich, 334

Rosental, N., 103

Rostov, 152,218,233

Rostov-on-Don, 106, 162, 175, 220

Rote Armee Frakiion (RAF), 358-359

Rote Front, 282, 283

Rousset, David, 18-19,26

Roux, Alain, 482

Rovira, Jose, 346

ROVS (General Military Union), 285

Rozanov, Dr., 130

Rozanski, Jozef, 378

Rozhkov,N. A., 130

Ruch (Movement), 386

Rudolph, Hans, 349

Rudzutakjan, 192

Russell Tribunals, 717

Russia, 28, 39-52 passim, 1 1 1, 1 18, 123, 142,

217. See also Soviet Union
Russian Council of Ministers, 246
Russian Federation, 557
Russian Liberation Army, 320, 322
Russian National Committee, 231
Russian Party (Evreiskaya sektsiya), 304
Russian Presidential Archive, 188, 249
Russian Revolution, 27, 39-40, 57, 59, 733,

735, 737, 739
Rwanda, 10, 13,684,686
Ryazan, 47, 67, 119
Ryazan-Ural Railway, 90
Rybinsk, 72

Rychetsky, Pavel, 455-456
Rykov, Aleksei, 86, 142, 144, 170, 184
Ryumin, Martemyam, 249
Ryutin, Mikhail, 295

Saadi, Yacef, 354
Sabata, Jaroslav, 444
Sachsenhausen, 417
Sadek, Abraham, 309
Sadyrin, Andrei, 170
St. Petersburg Soviet, 44
Saint Anastasia (Bulgaria), 416
Sakharov, Andrei, 19, 168
Sala, Victorio, 338, 345
Salakayev, S., 196
Salas, Rodriguez, 340
Salazar, Antonio, 29, 696
Salini, Pierre, 309
Saloth Sar. See Pol Pot

Index

849

Salvador, David, 650

Samachinskaya, 101

Samara, 71,84, 94,95,97, 108, 111, 120, 123

Samarkand, 222

Sambor, 395

Samsonov, Timofei, 83

Sandinistas, 7, 665-675

Sandino, Augusto Cesar, 665

San Jose de Secce, 677

Santa Clara prison, 648, 652, 654

Santa Ursula camp, 342-343

Santiago de Cuba, 653

Sao Phim, 587

Saour Revolution, 710-714

Sapilinia, Anibal, 699

Sapoa, 674

Sapronov, Timofei, 286

Saqqao, Bacha-i, 707-708

Sarahs, Stefanos, 327

Sarajevo, 2

Saratov, 47, 67, 95,97, 108, 111,217,316,

318
Sarma, 316

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 550, 750
Save the Children Fund, 691
Savimbi, Jonas, 664, 697
Savinkov, Boris, 72, 285
Saxony, 277

SB. See Sluzba be/.pieczenstwa
Scarioli, Nazareno, 313-314
Scarselii, Tito, 314
Schacht, Hjalmar, 339
Schleyer, Hans Martin, 359
Schlusselburg fortress, 86
Schubert, Hermann, 194,300
Schulte, Fritz, 194
Schutzbund, 302, 315, 316
Sebezhsk, 77

Second International, 275, 730, 737
Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia,

358
Secret Polish Army, 379
Securitate (Romania), 420
Sedarat, 721
Sedov, Lev, 307

SED See Socialist Unity Party
Sefay, Selab, 713
Segovia, 674
Sejko, Temo, 449
Semprum, Jorge, 302

Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), 359, 632,

675-681
"Separat," 357, 358
September massacres, 76, 728
Serantes, Perez, 650
Serbia, 324

Serge, Viktor, 279, 289, 339
Sergei, Metropolitan, 172, 173
Serman, Ilya Zeilkovich, 245
Serov, Ivan, 212, 217, 221, 255, 374, 375
Servicio Alfredo Hertz, 338, 345
Servicio de Investigacion Militar (SIM), 345-

346, 347, 348
Servicio Extranjero, 337-338
Servico Nacional de Seguranca Popular

(SNASP), 702-703
Setem-i-Milli (Oppression of the Nation),

711
Sevastopol, 61, 106-107
Seventh-Day Adventists, 258
Severodonetsk, 165
Sevvostlag camps, 205
Shaanxi base, 472
Shakhty, 143, 169, 172
Shalamov, Varlam, 26, 27, 137, 205
Shanghai, 281, 284, 469, 481, 484, 510, 517,

523, 524, 530, 533, 535-536
Shanghai Four, 515
Shanxi (Long Bow), 477, 478, 482, 486, 488,

533
Shchastnyi, A., 69
Shcheglovitov, I., 76
Shcheptytsky, Andrei, 229
Shcherbakov, Aleksandr, 242
Shehu, Mehmet, 311
Sheinin, Lev, 247
Shen clan, 533
Shengwulian group, 528
Sherkhudo,719
Shevchenko Institute, 199
Shimanov, N,, 285

Shining Path. See Sendero Luminoso
Shkiryatov, 166

Shlyapnikov, Aleksandr, 48, 286, 288, 739
Shola-i-Javaid (Eternal Flame), 709
Sholokhov, Mikhail, 165-166
Shukhovich, Roman, 229
Shvartzman, Lev, 247
Shvernik, Nikolai, 190
Siad Barre, Mohammed, 691

850

Index

Siantos, Giorgis, 327

Siberia, 9, 108,111, 118,119, 134, 142,144,
151-155 passim, 182, 189, 204, 209, 217,
219, 222, 223, 231, 237, 289, 314, 331, 364,
372,410

Sihlag camps, 226-227

Siboney camp, 659

Sichuan province, 492, 540, 543, 545

Sidorov, Vasily Klementovich, 195-197

Sierra de los Organos, 648

Sighet Marmapel, 395,400

Sihanouk, Prince, 580-581, 584, 590, 616,
618,620,625

Silesia, 397, 408

Silone, Ignazio, 2

Silva, Arnaldo, 314

Simaiao,Joana, 703

Simango, Uria, 703

Simbirsk province, 95, 97, 108

Simbirsk (Ulyanovsk), 90, 95

Simferopol, 61, 220, 224

Simone, Andre, 430

Sinclair, Betty, 354

Singer, Israel Joshua, 317

Sinyavsky, Andrei, 259

Sivers, Rudolf, 60

Six-Day War, 386

16 May Regiment, 536

Sklobewski, Aleksander (aka Gorev), 277

Skoblin, Nikolai, 285, 286

Skolnik,J6zsef, 423

Skulski, Stanislaw (aka Mertens), 299

Sladek, Alfred, 316

Sladek, Frau, 316

Sladek, Josef, 316

Sladek, Victor, 316

Slansky, Rudolf, 248, 409, 429-131, 432, 434,
436, 441

Sling, Otto, 405, 430

Sliwinski, Marek, 589, 591, 593, 595, 596, 611

SLOMAR (Free Union of Romanian Work-
ers), 447

SLON (Special Camps of Solovetski), 137-
138

Slovak Communist Party, 431

Slovak Democratic Party, 403^04

Slovakia, 396, 403, 410, 41 1 , 41 3-414, 415,
416,428

Slovaks, 23, 403, 443

Slovenia, 326

Slovenian White Guards, 325-326

Sluzba bezpieczehstwa (SB), 385, 386, 387,
389

Smallholders 1 Party (Hungary), 399-400

SMERSH (Death to Spies), 230, 373, 374,
394

Smilie, Bob, 343

Smirnov, Vladimir, 90, 103,291

Smith, Ian, 702

Smolensk, 84, 126, 148,189

Smolny, 181

SNK. See Soviet Council of People's Com-
missars

Snow, Edgar, 473

Sochor, Lubomir, 407

Social Committee for the Fight against Fam-
ine, 121, 128, 129

Social Democrats: in Russia, 2, 43, 55; in Po-
land, 197; in Hungary, 272-273, 400; in
Germany, 272, 277; in Austria, 302, 315; in
Spain, 338; in Slovakia, 404, 431; in Nicara-
gua, 670; in Scandinavia, 729

Socialist Party: in Spain, 333, 334; in Czecho-
slovakia, 405; in Nicaragua, 670

Socialist Revolutionaries, 44, 47, 51, 53, 55,
58, 62-77 passim, 83-85, 87, 93, 104, 106,
109,110, 112, 113, 114-115, 126-127, 130,
131, 133, 134, 135, 137, 143, 201, 235, 285,
289, 736, 744, 746

Socialist Unity Party (SED), 301, 408, 446.
See also German Communist Party

Socialist Workers 1 International, 318

Sofia, 279, 353, 428

So Hwan Hi, 552

Sokol (Falcon) Club, 408-409

Sokolnikov, Grigory, 98, 194

Solidarity, 331, 388-390

Solikamsk, 204, 316

Sol Jang Sik, 551

Solovetski camps, 20, 114, 136-138, 144, 151,
204

Soloviev, K., 246

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 19, 24, 26, 27, 199,
239, 259, 747

Somalia, 687,689, 691

Somocistas, 666

Somoza Debayle, Anastasio, 665-666, 673

Song Binbin, 521

Song dynasty, 468

Song Yaowu, 521

Index

851

Son Tay, 566

Sori Marin, Humberto, 649, 650, 654, 658

Sormovo, 68, 86

Sosa Blanco, Jesus, 649

Souei dynasty, 47 1

Souphanouvong, Prince, 575

South Korea, 5, 547, 549-550, 559, 561-562.
See also North Korea

South Vietnam, 570, 572, 581, 625, 637, 638.
See also Vietnam

South Yemen, 691

Souvanna Phouma, 575

Soviet Council of People's Commissars
(SNK), 51, 53,57,367,371,372

Soviet-German pact. See German-Soviet pact

Soviet Union, 4, 727-728; penal code, 135-
136, 142, 172, 191, 206, 228, 257-258, 290,
319, 322, 368; Council of Ministers, 236,
334, constitution, 313, Spain and, 334-335;
Europe and, 432-433, 437; Korea and, 548,
549, 552; Asia and, 636, 639; Africa and,
685, 686, 689, 690-691, 696, 701, Afghani-
stan and, 706-708, 712, 714-719, 724. See
also Great Terror; October Revolution;
Red Terror; individual institutions

Spain, 21,28, 333-352

Spanish Communist Party (PCK), 291, 333-
336,348,350

Sparonov, Timofei, 286

Spartakus group, 272

Special Commission lor the Fight against
Economic Abuses and Sabotage, 381, 383-
384

Spetsnaz, 284

Spiegelglass, Sergei, 308

Spindonova, Maria, 83-84, 85, 86

Spychalski, Marian, 384

SS, 29, 303, 310, 313

SSI 29 (P. Laurencic), 345

Stajner, Karlo, 315

Stakhanov, Andrei, 183

Stakhanovite movement, 183

Stalin, Josif, 2, 3-9 passim, 11, 12, 13, 15-17,
20, 23, 27, 31, 79, 130, 134, 224, 233, 250,
251, 263, 288, 549, 629, 630, 639, 734, 745,
746, 750, 754; GPU and, 140-145 passim;
dekulaki/.ation and, 148-152 passim; great
famine and, 159, 163, 164, 166-168; repres-
sion and, 170-171, 173, 180-183; Great
Terror and, 185-202 passim; camps and,

212, 215; Doctors' Plot and, 243-249 pas-
sim; Comintern and, 277-307 passim, 319,
330, 331; Spain and, 335-337; Poland and,
363, 364, 369, 373; Europe and, 397, 399,
433, 436, 438

Stalingrad, 217,240,241

Stamboliski, Aleksandr, 279

Stanislwow, 225

Stara Zagora prison, 445

Starobielsk camp, 368, 369

Stasi (Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit), 357-
358, 359, 388, 456, 690

Staszek, And re j, 383

Staszewski, Artur, 337

State Information Service (Afghanistan). See
KHAD

State Planning Administration (Gosplan), 170

State Security Department (DGCI) (Cuba),
654

Statni bezpecnost (StB), 403, 431

Stavropol, 167, 217

Stcfanov, Ivan, 427

Stein, Wladyslaw (aka Anton Krajcwski), 293,
299

Steinberg, Isaac, 62, 744

Stenka Razin revolt, 732

Stepan, Miroslav, 454

Steplag camps, 204, 254

Stepun, Fyodor, 129

Stern, Antonia, 349

Stern, (Manfred (General Klebcr), 284

Stojadinovie, Milan, 324

Stolypin, Pyotr, 42, 46

Stresemann, Gustav, 277

Stroop, Jiirgen, 377

Struch, Papito, 661

Student Revolutionary Directorate (Cuba),
648

Suarez, Anres, 650

Sudan, 693

Sudoplatov, Pavel, 307-308, 309, 337

Sulotto, Egidio, 314

Sumo Indians, 668, 669

Sun Tzu, 467

Sun Yat-sen University, 280

Suong Sikoeun, 624

Suslov, Mikhail, 246, 249, 356

Susskind, Heinrich, 194

Suvarin, Boris, 288, 295-296, 298

Suzdal, 234, 291,314

852

Index

Svab, FCarel, 428, 430

Sverdlov, Yakov, 79

Sverdlov Communist University, 305

Sverdlovsk, 152,224

Svermova, Marie, 431

Svirlag camps, 204

Svoboda, Ludvik, 398

Swianiewicz, Stanislaw, 369

Swiatlo, Jozef, 383

Swiecieki, J., 305

Syrtsov, Sergei, 98, 170

Sysolk, 151

Syzran, 103

Szalai, Andras, 426

Szamuely, Tibor, 274, 275

Szilagyi, Jozsef, 440, 441

Szolnok, 274

Szbnyi, Tibor, 426

Tabidze, Titsian, 200

Tadjicv, Kara, 706

Taganrog, 60

Taiginsk, 227

Taiping revolt, 468

Taittinger, Jean, 283

Taiwan, 483

Tajikistan, 189,238,288

Tajiks, 705

Taken province, 582

Tallinn, 212,278

Tambov, 47, 67, 80, 93, 94, 95, 97, 103, 108-
111, 114, 116-117, 121, 126, 137,233,
323

Tanganyika African National Union/ Afro
Srurazi Party, 6H+-685

Tang dynasty, 467-468

Tanzania, 684

Taoism, 466

Taraki, Nur-Mohammed, 709, 711, 713

Tarchis (Osip Pyatnitsky), 299, 300, 306

Tartu peace accord, 278

Tashkent, 60, 330

Tashko, Koco, 449

Tatars, 10, 97, 216, 219-224 passim, 256, 258-
259, 264

Tatarstan, 189

Ta Tu Thau, 311, 567

Technical University of San Martin de Tor-
res, 676

Tcllevia, Salomon, 672

Tel Ins, Carlos Nueves, 671

Temnikovo camps, 204

Teng To, 522

Terezin camp, 410, 41 1

Terioki, 1 14

Ternopil, 258

Teruel, 336, 349

Tet offensive, 572

Thaci, Gaspar, 409

Thailand, 575, 576

Thalmann battalion, 348

Thilo, Arthur, 301, 302

Third International. See Comintern

Thorez, Maurice, 2, 20, 331, 332, 403, 638

"Three Ami" movement, 482

Thuringia, 277

Tiananmen Square, 442, 464, 539, 541, 542

Tibet, 464, 503, 542-546

Tibetans, 10, 463

''Tigers," 648, 651

Tigre Liberation Front, 693-694, 695

Tigre province, 692, 693

Tijerino, Jose Angel Vilchi, 672-673

Tikhon, 122, 124, 125, 126, 172

Tildy, Zoltan, 400

Timashuk, Lydia, 242

Timi^oara, 395

Timur Qalacha, 718

Tirgiu Jiu camp, 416

Tirgoviste, 447

Tiso, Jozef, 452

Tito (Josip Broz), 247, 306, 324-325, 330,

331-332, 380, 397-398, 424, 426, 432
Tkachev, Pyotr, 753
Tobolsk, 1 1 1

Todorov, Tzvctan, 12-13, 21, 422, 747, 748
Togliam, Palmiro (aka Mario Ercoli), 195,

247,300-301,332,335,337,350
To Huu, 570
Tomsk region, 152-153
Tomsk), Mikhail, 7
Torriente, Llias de la, 655
Torrijos, Omar, 666
Totos, 677
Totu, Victor, 448
Tou Samouth, 618
Touvier, Paul, 10
Tramkak prison, 613, 614
TranhDau, 311
Transcaucasia, 138, 139, 140
Trans-Siberian Railway, 71, 111, 204
Transylvania, 272

Index

853

Tran Van Giau, 567

Treint, Albert, 283

Tres Marios del Oriente prison, 658

Tresso, Pictro, 309

Trctyakov, Nikolaevich, 285

Tribunals Popu lares Ami-Somocista (TPAs),
671-672

Trilisser, Meir (aka Mikhail Moskvin), 62,
280, 293, 298, 299, 300

Triolet, Klsa, 340

Trochta, Stepan, 41 1

Troops for the Internal Defense of the Repub-
lic, 79-80, 82, 91,97,98, 111,373

Trotsky, Leon, 21, 31, 59,63, 65, 73, 79, 86,
88,89,92, 115, 125, 140, 141, 185, 192,
193, 247, 277, 283, 288, 289, 290, 307-309,
339, 364, 734, 738, 741-743, 748-749, 754

Trotskvites, 26, 30, 140-141, 145, 181, 182,
184, 190, 192, 227, 235, 247, 293, 294, 297-
298, 299, 300, 306-312, 566-567, 676

IVubetskoi, Sergei, 129

True Orthodox Christians, 238

Tsankov, Aleksandr, 279

Tsaritsvn,77, 95, 97, 108, HI

Tsyurupa, Aleksandr, 63, 73

Tukhachcvsky, Mikhail, 113-114, 116, 117,
170, 190, 197-198, 199,247,364

Tula, 47, 68, 84, 86,87, 108, 118, 133,218,
262

I'ulaikov, Nikolai, 2(H)

lulu, Teku, 690

Iuol Sleng, 587, 5M, 613

I'uominen, Arvo, 300, 312

Tupolcv, Andrei, 199

Turcanu, Kugen, 420-421

Turkestan, 138, 140

Turkey, 224-225,247

Turkmcnia, 19]

Turkmenistan, 188-189, 191,241

Turkmens, 138, 705.

Turks, 188, 219, 224-225,237

Tutev, Ivan, 427

Tutsis, 684

Tver, 67, 77, 119

26 July Movement (M-26), 648, 650, 664

Twining, Charles, 597

Tyumen, 1 1 1

Uborevich, Jerome, 140, 198
Ufa, 94,97
Chi, Petr, 444

Ukhta, 151,204

Ukhro-Pechora camp, 297

Ukhtpechlag camps, 204

Ukraine, 9, 16, 24, 47, 52, 60, 71, 81, 82, 92,
94-98, 100, 105-106, Ml, 118, 142-143,
148, 149, 150, 159-168 passim, 182, 184,
189, 192, 199, 208-213, 217, 225-229, 235,
237-238, 258, 364-374 passim, 395

Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 199

Ukrainian Communist Party, 18, 163, 192

Ukrainian Marxist-Leninist Institute, 199

Ukrainians, 6, 7, 9, 10, 52, 238, 258, 320, 376-
377

Ulyanov, Aleksandr Mich, 731

Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilich. See Lenin

Ulyanovsk (Simbirsk), 90, 95

Uniao Nacional para a Independeneia 'Total
dc Angola. .SVr UNITA

Uniare Churches, 229, 409, 410, 412

UN1CLF,699, 704

Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, 334, 337-
338

Unified Socialist Youth Group, 334

Union for the Defense of the Fatherland, 72

Union of Working Peasants, 1 10

UNITA (Uniao Nacional para a Inde-
pendeneia 'Total de Angola), 664, 696-697

United Nations, 244, 549, 563, 579, 694; Con-
vention on the Prevention and Punishment
of Genocide, 7-8, 634; Special Commis-
sion on the Balkans, 329-330; Security
Council, 329; General Assembly, 330, 437;
World Food Program, 562 563; Human
Rights Commission, 671; World Food Or-
ganization, 699

United States, 375, 494, 547, 549-550, 562,
581,590,600,651,652,670,689

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 437,
752

University of Maputo, 703

University of Xiamen (Fujian), 522

Unshlikhtjosif, 62, 123, 129, 140, 197

UOP (Bureau for State Protection), 391

UPA, 229, 237

Upper Amazonia province, 679

Upper Silesia, 374

Ural, 105

Urals, 77, 90, 106, LSI, 152, 156,204,224,
232,289,316,372,416

Uralsk, 68

Uribe, Vincent, 334

854

Index

Uritsky, M. S., 74, 76

Urrutia, Manuel, 649

Ursiny, Jan, 403-404

Urzad Bezpieczenstwa (UB), 454

U.S. Agency for International Development,

677
US. Central Intelligence Agency. See CIA
Uskonin, M.V., 118
USLON (Directorate for Special Camps in

the Northern Region), 138
U.S.S.R. See Soviet Union
U.S.S.R. Institute of Experimental Medicine,

751
U.S. State Department, 718
Ust, 151
Ustashas, 324
Ustinov, Dmitry, 193

Uzbekistan, 189, 191,219,222,223,330, 331
Uzbeks, 138,705

Vackova, Ruzena, 41 1

Variadis, Markos, 329

Vailland, Roger, 406

Vaksberg, Arkady, 297

Valdes, Ramiro, 655, 662

Vails, Jorge, 658

VaLrin, Jan, 278

Varga, Bela, 400

Varga, Eugen, 273

Vargas Llosa, Mario, 676

Varkiza, 328

Vatanshah, 720

Vatican, 409,410

VavilinJ.N., 120

Vavilov, Nikolai, 200

Vayo, Astorga, 343

VChK. .S^Cheka

Vechenski, 165

Vechinkin, 285

Velchev, Damian, 398

Vclouchiotes, Ares (Thanassis Klaras), 310,

326, 328
Velrrusky, Jiri (aka Paul Barton), 26-27
Ventura, Esteban, 648
Vera, A I do, 655
Verbitsky, 246

Verdes-Uaroux, Jeannine, 648
Verkhne-Uralsk, 290-291
Versailles, Treaty of, 277
Vesel, Jindrich, 436

Veselovsky, Judge, 736

Veshenskaya, 99

Vichera camps, 151

Vichy camps, 309

Vickery, Michael, 589

Vidali, Vittorio, 337, 342

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 10

Viecahuaman, 677

Viegas, Jorge, 703

Vienna, 315

Viet Cong, 572

Viet Minh, 311, 506, 566-568, 580, 625, 636,

639
Vietnam, 4, 26, 28, 459, 465, 565-575, 581,

593,625-626,631,637-639,748
Vietnamese Communist Party, 465, 565-566,

568-569,571,581,586,625
Vietnamese National Party (VNQDD), 567,

569
Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD), 567,

569
Vigdorshik, MiguloP, 130
Villa Marista, 656
Vilnius, 260, 368, 373
Vinogradova, K.., 176-177
Violet, Bernard, 357-358
Vistula River, 373
Vladimir, 234
Vladivostok, 175
Vlascianu, Florin, 448
Vlasov, Andrei, 231, 320
VNQDD {Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang), 567,

569
Voigt, Helmut, 358
Voikin, Nikolai Vasilievich, 177
Volaz, Gjergj, 409
Volga-Don canal, 241
Volga German Republic, 216-218
Volga Germans, 10,216-219,301
Volga provinces, 81,94,97, 108, 111, 118,

119, 123, 147, 161,732
Volga River, 87, 88, 95
Volhynia, 373
Volodarsky, V.,69,70, 169
Vologda, 67, 152,204
von der Schulenberg, Werner, 302
Vo Nguyen Giap, 465
Von Ranke, Hubert, 344
Von Ribbentrop, August, 208
Vorkuta, 204, 219, 227, 254, 297, 315, 410

Index

855

Voronezh, 47, 67, 84, 94, 97, 99, 118, 173, 217
Voroshilov, Kliment, 189, 197, 251, 252, 300,

369
Voznesensky, Ivan, 246
Vserossiiskaya chrezvychainaya komissiya po

bor'be s kontrrevolyutsiei i sabotazhem. See

Cheka
Vujovic, Gregor, 306
Vujovic, Radomir, 306
Vujovic, Voja, 306
Vyatka, 77
Vyborg, 49, 114
Vynnytsa, 226
Vyshinsky, Andrei, 180, 212, 247, 300, 749-

750

Walecki, Henryk, 304

Walesa, Lech, 388

Walter, Elena, 298

Walther, Otto, 302

Wandurski, Witold, 365

Wang Guangmei, 519

Wang Hongwen, 535-536

Wang Ming, 473-474

Wang Shiwei, 474

Wankowicz, Melchior, 386

War Communism, 66, 133, 142, 143, 626

Warsaw, 317, 318, 373

Warsky, Adolf, 304

Wedemeyer, Albert Coady, 470

Wehner, Herbert, 301

Wei dynasty, 466

Wei Jingsheng, 492-494, 515, 539

Weil, Simone, 20-21

Weinrich, Johannes, 357, 358

Weissberg, Alexander, 303

Welega, 692

Welo, 691, 692, 693,694

Weng Senhe, 528

Werth, Nicolas, 434, 436-437, 743

Wesenburg, 278

Western Bohemia, 403

West Germany, 358-359

West Vym, 204

Wheelock, Amador, 666

Wheelock, Jaime, 666

White Army, 15, 60, 66, 71, 81-82, 91, 95-

101 passim, 106,108,112, 174,263
White Guards, 72, 73, 76, 77, 84, 85, 88, 123,

129, 135, 176, 181, 182, 187, 235, 285, 742

White Guards (Slovenia), 325

White Sea camps, 136, 138, 151, 204

White Terror, 82

Wichajerzy, 385

Wieviorka, Annette, 416

WIN. See Wolnosc i Niezawislosc

"Wodli" maquis, 309

Wokiduba, 692

Wolf, Erwin, 299, 340, 344

Wollweber, Ernst, 354

Wolnosc i Niezawislosc (WIN), 378

Wonka, Pavel, 449

Workers' and Peasants' Party (POUM)

(France), 294
Workers' Defense Committee (KOR), 387
Workers' International, 729
Workers' Opposition, 249, 286-287, 289
Workers' Party (Vietnam), 465, 625
World Conference of Communist Parties, 332
World Vision, 562
Worldwide Unionist Federation Bureau, 691-

692
Wrangel, Pyotr, 97, 100, 106, 107, 111,

275
Wu, Harry, 498, 520
Wu Han, 522
Wuhan, 523,531,532
Wutai Mountain, 522-523
Wuzhou, 534
Wybot, Roger, 321
Wyszynski, Stefan, 382

Xiamen, 524-526, 533
Xie Fuzhi, 521
Xinyang, 492
Xoxe, Koci, 426

Yagoda, Genrikh, 17, 62, 136, 144, 150, 156,

162, 176,190,337,751
Yakir, Jonas, 198
Yalta, 20, 61

Yalta accord, 20, 230, 320, 374-375
Yan'an, 464, 465, 473, 474, 476, 540, 638
Yanata, A., 200
Yan Fengying, 536
Yang, Emperor, 471
Yankov, Kosta, 279
Yaroslavl, 67, 68, 72-73, 94, 189
Yaroslavsky, Emelyan, 172
YCP See Yugoslav Communist Party

856

Index

Yellow River, 468

Yeltsin, Boris, 211

Yemina, J. Njamba, 697

Yenan group, 552

Yenbai mutiny, 567

Yhdego, Fantaye, 691

Yingde Tea Plantation, 497

Yodok camp, 555-556, 561

YofTe, Adolf, 63

Yongpyang camp, 554

YPhandara, 612, 634-635

Yuan Shih-kai, 468

Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP), 195, 290,

305-306, 324-325, 329
Yugoslavia, 28, 324-325, 329-330, 354, 380,

397-398, 424, 438, 452, 637
Yugoslav National Ami- Fascist Council for

Liberation (AVNOJ), 325
Yugoslavs, 316-317
Yunnan, 536
Yuon group, 593
Yurenev, Konstantin, 194
Yuzovsky, Josif, 244

Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 200

Zachariadis, Nikos, 326, 328-329

Zahir Shah, 706, 708

Zajic, Jan, 442

Zakovsky, Andrei, 103, 192

ZANU {Zimbabwe African National Union),

702
Zaporizhzhia, 218, 258
Zapotocky, Antonin, 434
Zaraysky, 129
Zavodsky , Osvald, 43 1

Zayas, Jorge, 650

Zborowski, Mark, 307

Zegvos, Iannis, 328

Zela, Stanislav, 411

Zelaya, 669, 674

Zeleny, 95, 96

Zemskov, V. N., 262

Zenawi, Meles, 691

Zerabulak, 222

Zervas, Napoleon, 327

Zevina, Rulf Alexandrovna, 245

Zhai Zhenhua, 530

Zhang Chunqiao, 536

Zhang Shaosong, 545

Zhdanov, Andrei, 189, 192, 193, 194, 212,

218,242
Zhelyaev, Andrei, 200
Zhemchuzhina, Paulina, 245
Zhivkov, Todor, 453^54
Zhou Enlai, 281, 474, 515, 516, 519, 522, 536,

539, 543
Zhukov, Georgy, 336
Zhytomyr, 226
Zimbabwe, 695, 702
Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU),

702
Zinoviev, Aleksandr, 19
Zinoviev, Grigory, 1 1, 50, 70, 75-76, 86, 1 12,

113, 141, 181, 184, 192, 247, 277, 279, 288-

289, 734, 745
Zinovievites, 140-141, 181, 182, 184, 190, 247
Zionism, 386, 434-435
Zlatoust, 68
Zverev, Nikolai, 239-240

About the Authors

Stephane Courtois is a director of research at the Centre National de la Re-
cherche Scientifique (CNRS) and editor of the review Communisme. His publications
include Le PCF dans la guerre (1980); Qui savatt quoi? Lex termination desjutfs, 1941-
1945 (1987); Le Communisme (1987, with M. Lazar); Le sang de Vitranger. Les tmmtgres
de la MOI dans la Resistance (1989); Cinquante ans dune passion francaise. De Gaulle et les
commumstes (1991, with M. Lazar); Rigueur et passion. Hommage a Anme Kriegel (1994,
with A. Wievorka); Htstotre du Parti commumste francais (1995, with M. Lazar); and
Eugen Fried. Le grand secret du PCF (1997 , with A. Kriegel).

Nicolas Werth is a researcher at the Institut d'Histoire du Temps Present, special-
izing in the history of the Soviet Union. He is the author of Eire commumste en URSS
sous St aline (1981); La vie quotidienne des pay sans russes de la Revolution a la collectivisa-
tion, 1917-1939 (1984); Htstotre de IVmon sovtetique, de VEmptre russe a la CE1 (1992);
Rapports secrets sovietiques. La societe russe dans ses rapports confidence Is, ] 92 1-1991
(1995, with Gael Moullec).

Jean-Louis Panne is a specialist on the international Communist movement and
the author of L'Enterprise sociale, le pari autogestionnaire de Solidarnosc (1987) and Boris
Souvarine, le premier desenchante du communisme (1993). He also collaborated on the
Dtctionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais (1914-1939).

858 About the Authors

Andrzej Paczkowski is the deputy director of the Institute for Political Studies <>t
the Polish Academy of Sciences and a member of the archival commission for the
Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs. He is the author of Stanislaw Mikolajczyk (czyli
kl(ska realitfy: Zarys btograftj polttycznej (1991); Aparat bezpieczentwa w latach, 1944
/956 (1994, 1996); and Pol wieku dziejow Poiski, 1939 7^9 (1995), which won the Clin
prize in 1996 for the best history book.

Karli. BartoSek is a historian from the Czech Republic and the editor of La
nouvelle alternative, He is the author of The Prague Uprising (1965) and Les aveux </<■<
archives. Prague-Paris-Prague. 1948-1 %8 (1996).

Jf.AN-I.ouis Marc; 01. in is a lecturer at the University of Provence and a researcher
at the Research Institute on Southeast Asia, CNRS. He is the author of Stngapout.
/95 ( /-/W>7, Gemse dun twuveau pays mdustnei (1989).

Syt vain Bol L.oi Qt'h is a research associate at GEODE, Universite Paris X.

Pascal Font a inf. is a journalist with special knowledge of Latin America.

Rkmi Kalti-kr is a specialist in the history of intelligence, terrorism, and clandestine
operations. He is the coauthor with Roger Faligot of Service B (1985), KGB objitit
Preform (1986), and The Chinese Secret Sendee (1927-1987) (1987; English cdiii.m
1989).

Pikrrk RiGOfi.KT is a researcher at the Institut d'Histoire Sociale and editor-in
thief of Cahiers dhstotre sociale. His books include Des Francan au Gouiag (1984), L*i
tragedie des Matgre-nvus (1990), and Les paupteres Inurdes, Les Francais face au Goula..
(1991).

Vvks Santa Maria is a historian and the coauthor (with Brigitte Waehe) ol />«-
pnntemps des peuples d la societe des nations (1996).

Foreign LanguagesCambodia, China, Communism, genealogy, Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Politics, Russia, U.S.S.R, United Soviet Socialist Republic, Vladimir Lenin

Freedom Initiative

争取自由民主中国

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

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