To the Editor:

Alain Besançon’s important essay, “Forgotten Communism” [January], led me to recall a public-school teacher my wife worked with who proudly placed a bust of Lenin on his desk, and who viewed himself as an unrepentant Marxist. His only counterargument when presented with evidence of Communism’s practical failure and its untold cost in human suffering was that history had not witnessed “real” Communism.

But, as Mr. Besançon makes clear, the 20th century has witnessed real Communism, just as it has witnessed real Nazism. Western intellectuals still refuse to admit, however, that Marxism in power led to horrific consequences, not because of any falling away from the theory but as a result of seeds carried within it.

I fear, though, that I do not share Mr. Besançon’s guarded optimism that a full awareness of the evil of Communism may grow with time. Nevertheless, this is a brave article. Kudos to COMMENTARY for being daring—and imaginative—enough to see it into print.

Brian C. Anderson
City Journal
New York City

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To the Editor:

Thank you for the signal service COMMENTARY has rendered in publishing Alain Besançon’s magisterial “Forgotten Communism.” If I may presume, however, I would like to add to Mr. Besançon’s comparison of Soviet Communism and Nazism.

Let me begin by citing the historic “Declaration of Repentance” read by Bishop Olivier de Berranger last October, in which he and his confreres acknowledged that the Catholic Church in France, owing to the “silence” of “too many” of its pastors in the face of Nazi persecution of the Jews, “failed in her mission as teacher of consciences” during the Holocaust. The bishops admitted that centuries of Christian-Jewish animosity helped create a climate of opinion in which the brand of anti-Semitism preached by the Nazis could take root and flourish.

Turning now to that other great evil, Soviet Communism, one finds nothing even remotely paralleling the French Catholic episcopate’s public mea culpa. And yet in this instance there is all the more reason to seek such an admission from a host of religious figures and institutions of all denominations that share a responsibility—along with the Western political and cultural elites excoriated by Mr. Besançon—not only for their silence regarding the crimes of Soviet Communism and its minions, but also for their active endorsement of those dark deeds.

The anecdotal evidence for such a judgment is legion, running the gamut from theoretical infatuation with the Communist heresy by armchair theologians to active support for Soviet-inspired actions regardless of the consequences. The hallmark of the present century has been the evil wrought by totalitarianism, but when any history of the period is written, it must also record the monumental shame of those who should have known about this evil but remained silent.

Rev. John-Peter Pham
Acton Institute for the Study
of Religion and Liberty
Champaign, Illinois

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To the Editor:

I read with great interest and heartfelt approval Alain Besançon’s “Forgotten Communism,” all the more so because I have published two articles, one in National Review (“Soviet Terror, American Amnesia,” May 2, 1994), the other in Partisan Review (“Comparative Moral Reassessments of Nazism and Communism,” Fall 1995), that took up this same theme and reached similar conclusions.

My National Review article began:

It has been customary in our times to make reference to the Holocaust whenever we wish to allude to some unrivaled evil. . . . [W]ords like “Nazi,” “Auschwitz,” “Storm Troopers,” and “Gestapo” are reflexively appended to political or social phenomena one wishes to discredit conclusively.

By contrast, I observed:

Words like “Soviet,” “Soviet Communist,” “Kolyma,” or “KGB” are rarely used to discredit political movements and practices. It is doubtful that one in a thousand Americans . . . would recognize the name of a single Soviet concentration camp.

Among the factors accounting for the different responses to Nazism and Communism, I mentioned, as does Mr. Besançon, the relative paucity of photographic evidence in the Communist case. Like him, I also argued that the anti-Nazi alliance in World War II contributed to the tendency to ignore or deny Soviet atrocities; and I too addressed (and traced chronologically) the long record of evasion and the reluctance of those on the Left to acknowledge the moral comparability of the two evils, notwithstanding the uniqueness of the highly mechanized Nazi way of carrying out mass murder.

While it would have been pleasing to have some reference to my writings on the subject, I assume that Mr. Besançon is not a regular reader of the American publications where my articles appeared.

Paul Hollander
Northampton, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

Alain Besançon’s claim that the crimes of Communism have been forgotten is only partly true. People in the former Soviet satellites wanted to deal with the Communists in the same way the Nazis had been dealt with. But political activists, both Communist and non-Communist, tried in every way to dodge the issue. In my country, for example, the rank and file of the opposition political party harshly criticized their leaders and pressed them to launch a serious effort at de-Communization, but nothing was done. Why? In all the Soviet-bloc countries, the enormous secret-service apparatus was an essential part of the government. When we come to know how many non-Communist politicians were collaborators, we will find it much easier to understand why such people have not been eager to address the key issue of Communist crimes.

And why did not Western governments push East European countries to do something about the problem? I would guess that Western governments realized, quite correctly, that the transition was controlled by members of the former Communist establishment. To push them too hard at the beginning would have put the entire process at risk.

The reason, then, that Nazism and Communism received such unequal treatment is quite simple: Nazism was toppled from power. Nothing similar happened to the Communists. Communist elites, though they now operate under different labels, are still very powerful everywhere in the post-Communist world. Because they remain so influential, it has not been feasible to bring them to justice and eliminate them from public life. This is what makes Mr. Besançon’s article so important—its relevance to the present situation in Eastern Europe.

Vesselin Petkov
Sofia, Bulgaria

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To the Editor:

It is indeed a mystery why the crimes committed by Communist regimes in Russia and in its “fraternal republics” in Eastern Europe against their own people remain unaddressed and unpunished.

Perhaps, as Alain Besançon suggests, this is partly explained by memories of the Soviet Union as an ally against the evils of Nazism, or by the West’s mistaken notions of the harmlessness of the “left” side of the political spectrum. “Enlightened” liberal opinion had a lot to do with conditioning this response.

Equally confounding is the reaction of the citizens of the former Soviet Union or of the states of the former Soviet bloc to their recent past. Particularly telling is the reception given Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn upon his return to his homeland. History’s most prominent witness and chronicler of the horrors of the gulag was met with indifference, if not resentment.

In the summer of 1993, I crossed the former “Fatherland of the Workers,” traveling from Kiev to Khabarovsk, situated on the Amur River border with China. During the six weeks I spent in the crumbling Soviet empire, I did not encounter one anti-Communist. Most of those with whom I talked had suffered horribly, during and after the Stalin era, a condition shared by millions of their countrymen. Yet everyday concerns with the uncertainties of their daily lives made them incapable of focusing on the crimes committed against them or against their families during their own lifetime. There appeared to be no desire to hold anyone or even any political idea responsible for the nightmare that enveloped Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. It was quite surreal. Whether the time for reckoning will ever come is a matter of speculation.

My late father, whose youthful devotion to the cause of human liberation was repaid with imprisonment in the notorious Soviet prison camp of Vorkuta, wrote in his hour of deep despair: “Perhaps, some day, those responsible will be held to account.”

My poor father, perhaps not.

Nathan Shuster
North York, Ontario
Canada

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