Generally speaking, Ginsburg is absolutely right to suggest that the US Constitution is not an ideal model for every foreign nation. There are lots of ways in which our institutions might be inappropriate for other nations in different circumstances. For example, the US presidency concentrates enormous power in the hands of one person. That might be very dangerous in a society that has only recently emerged from dictatorship. Countries such as Switzerland have done fairly well with a plural executive. A small country that wages few wars has less need of a powerful, unitary executive than a global superpower. Similarly, the US system of federalism might not be the best model for the many societies where the main purpose of federalism is to mitigate ethnic conflict by giving minority groups subnational governments that they control. And a few provisions of the US Constitution are simply outright mistakes by the Founding Fathers that no one would want to imitate.

That said, I am much less sympathetic to Ginsburg’s specific reasons for preferring other models over the US Constitution. She would “look at the constitution of South Africa,” because it “was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights.” Obviously the US Constitution embraces many “basic human rights” as well. The rights present in the South African Constitution that are absent from ours are mostly “positive” rights to welfare state services, such as government guarantees of housing and employment. In many countries that have constitutions with such positive rights, the rights in question are not legally enforceable, so they have little actual impact. Where they do have an effect, the result is usually to increase government control over the economy and society, an outcome that I deplore for reasons I summarized here. In theory, of course, these positive rights provisions could be used to strike down harmful government actions, such as restrictive zoning laws that price the poor out of urban housing markets, and labor regulations that increase unemployment among unskilled workers. In practice, however, positive rights guarantees are rarely applied in ways that constrain government power rather than expand it.

As for Scalia’s statement, if he really believes that that Soviet Constitution’s individual rights provisions are “much better” than ours, he may not have read the former very carefully. Chapter 7 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution did indeed guarantee numerous individual rights. But many of them are socialist “positive rights” that I doubt Scalia would approve of. In addition, Article 52 gives, atheists, but not theists the right to engage in “propaganda” on behalf of their views on religion. Religious believers were (at least on paper) guaranteed freedom of worship, but, unlike atheists, could be banned from proselytizing. I doubt that Scalia would approve of this double standard.

More importantly, Article 59 emphasizes that “Citizens’ exercise of their rights and freedoms is inseparable from the performance of their duties and obligations,” and those duties include “comply[ing] with standards of socialist conduct” (Article 59) and “safeguard[ing] the interests of the Soviet state, and …. enhanc[ing] its power and prestige” (Article 62). Thus, the individual rights in the Soviet Constitution could be overriden in any cases where they conflict with “standards of socialist conduct” or somehow threaten the interests of the Soviet state or its “power and prestige.” All of this should also be read in light of Article 6, which guaranteed the Communist Party a monopoly of political power. That, presumably, is one of the “interests of the Soviet state” that can be used to limit individual rights. A careful reading of the Soviet Constitution – or even just the individual rights sections – leaves little doubt that it was written for a totalitarian communist state.

Obviously, Scalia was absolutely right to note that the Soviet government was perfectly capable of ignoring its own laws whenever it suited them to do so. At the same time, they did try to maintain a veneer of legality when possible and the Soviet Constitution was designed to help them do that. There is often a closer connection between the text of a constitution and the true nature of a nation’s political system than Scalia implies.

I briefly summarized my own thoughts on Havel’s life and legacy here.

To its credit, CNN went on to publish a piece by John Sifton of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division that takes a more realistic view of the reasons why North Koreans express support for their brutal government:

Since Kim Jong Il’s death was announced…., many people have marveled at the mourning scenes featured on North Korean state television, made viral on the Internet: North Koreans prostrate, weeping, hitting the ground. Many have asked whether the anguish is genuine. How could citizens mourn the passing of a totalitarian, such a gross abuser of human rights?

The answer may be found in the human rights abuses themselves.

It is a lamentable characteristic of totalitarian regimes that they often demand acts of deceit from those they oppress. Often it is a matter of simple survival. Those who hate the regime are obliged to demonstrate patriotism. To fail is to risk persecution. The only alternative is to flee, a choice made by tens of thousands of North Koreans in the past two decades.

North Korea is unambiguously a totalitarian state. An estimated 200,000 North Koreans are held under brutal conditions in remote forced labor camps called kwan-li-so. Citizens are deprived of the freedom to speak, to dissent, to assemble, to seek remedies for grievances. Perhaps worst of all, there is no freedom from fear — knowing that one can be imprisoned and tortured for minor trifles, sent to a kwan-li-so for being related to someone who displeased the state, or face a kangaroo court trial and possible public execution for a long list of political or economic “crimes.”

The great Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, who died on the same day as Kim Jong Il, wrote about the phenomenon of coerced expressions of public support for totalitarian regimes in his classic book The Power of the Powerless. Enforced conformity is even more draconian in North Korea than it was in the USSR and Eastern Europe.

As I noted in my previous post on this issue, the fact that many North Koreans expressed support for Kim Jong Il out of fear does not prove that he didn’t have any genuine supporters. Some people really do love Big Brother, especially after decades of indoctrination. However, expressions of popular support for totalitarian rulers should not be taken at face value.

With the demise of the USSR, we were spared a regime that slaughtered millions both within and outside its borders, inflicted numerous other human rights violations, and created a threat of nuclear annihilation that hung over the entire world. Compared to that, the very real dangers of the post-Cold War world seem minor by comparison. I recognize, of course, that the USSR in the last years of Gorbachev’s reign was much less dangerous and oppressive than it had been previously. But had the regime survived, it is far from clear that Gorby’s reforms would not have been reversed. Previous episodes of Soviet liberalization in the 1920s and 1956-64 had been followed by waves of repression at home and expansionism abroad. Moreover, Gorbachev himself was not as much of a liberal democrat as he is often portrayed in the West. He used force to try to suppress the independence movement in the Baltics, and otherwise sought to preserve the Soviet regime, not end it. He was certainly much less ruthless and repressive than his predecessors. But that is judging him by a very low standard of comparison. Nonetheless, it is fortunate that Gorbachev’s efforts at limited liberalization spun out of his control and led to a beneficial outcome that he did not intend.

Regarded as one of the world’s most-repressive leaders, Kim Jong Il always cut a slightly bizarre figure. His diminutive stature and characteristically bouffant hair have been parodied by some in the West….

But for the citizens of his Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim was well regarded….

Analysts say it is easy for outsiders to demonize Kim Jong Il, a dictator who spent an estimated 25% or more of his country’s gross national product on the military while many in his country went hungry.

But in North Korea, closed off from outside influences, fearful of threats from its neighbors, and subjected to decades of political socialization on top of a long tradition of a strict hierarchical system, Kim Jong Il is viewed positively by most people, said Han Park of the Center for Study of Global Issues.

“The level of reverence for Kim Jong Il in North Korea is quite underestimated by the outside,” Park said. “He is regarded by many as not only a superior leader but a decent person, a man of high morality.

How do CNN and Han Park know that North Koreans “revere” the late “Dear Leader”? It’s true, as the article notes, that many North Koreans routinely say they revere him, and recently publicly lamented his death. But any North Korean who fails to express such support for the regime (or, worse, expresses even the slightest criticism) is likely to end up in a concentration camp or worse. So such expressions of support cannot be taken at face value.

There is actually plenty of evidence suggesting that most North Koreans do not in fact support their regime, or revere the Dear Leader who subjected them to starvation and mass murder. The fact that hundreds of thousands risk their lives trying to escape to China, Russia, or South Korea is a powerful data point, just as in the similar case of Cuba. It’s a safe bet that people who risk their lives to flee a regime probably don’t revere its leaders. No doubt many more would flee if not for the fact that the regime kills or imprisons any would-be refugees who are caught.

The fact that the government maintains a police state even more repressive than the USSR is an indication that the regime’s leaders themselves do not believe they have broad popular support regardless of what they may say in public. If they did, they wouldn’t feel as much of a need to resort to repression to keep themselves in power.

It’s difficult to say how much genuine popular support the North Korean government enjoys. But if I had to bet, I would guess that the majority of the population would be more than happy to rid themselves of the Kims and their cronies at the first opportunity. Indeed, I doubt that North Koreans are much different in this respect from the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many Western observers took the latter’s statements of support for communism at face value too, and were therefore surprised when communism collapsed in a wave of popular unrest after the shackles of repression were loosened in 1989-91.

This is not to deny that there are North Koreans who genuinely revere the Kim dynasty. Every regime has at least some beneficiaries, and decades of indoctrination have surely had an impact. Some people really do love Big Brother. But a great many others are only pretending to do so for the sake of self-preservation.

Unfortunately, it is all too common for Western observers to take professions of loyalty to repressive regimes at face value. In previous posts, I discussed cases involving Cuba and Iran. The latter was a 2007 study that came just two years before a large-scale popular protest movement against the regime revealed that the regime was far less popular than surface appearances suggested.

UPDATE: In the original version of this post, I forgot to link the CNN article that inspired it. The problem has been fixed.

UPDATE #2: This more recent CNN video describes some of the North Korean government’s mechanisms of repression and social control. Perhaps the author of the first article should watch the video and consider its implications for his own piece.

The history of the system I live in has demonstrated persuasively that without a plurality of economic initiatives, and of people who participate in them, without competition, without a marketplace and its institutional guarantees, an economy will stagnate and decline….

When he can no longer participate with relative autonomy in economic life, man loses some of his social and human individuality, and part of his hope of creating his own human story.

I mention this now because although the standardizing and therefore nihilizing impact of political and intellectual centralization is clear, the analogous impact of economic centralization-as one of the indirect methods of manipulating life in general-is far from being so obvious. And that is what makes it more dangerous.

Where there is no natural plurality of economic initiatives, the interplay of competing producers and their entrepreneurial ideas disappears, along with the interplay of supply and demand, the labor and commodity markets, and voluntary employer-employee relations. Gone too are the stimuli to creativity and its attendant risks, the drama of economic success and failure. Man as a producer ceases to be a participant or a creator in the economic story, and becomes an instrument. Everyone is an employee of the state, which is the one proprietor of economic truth and power. Everyone is buried in the anonymity of the collective economic “non-story.”

When economic plurality disappears, the motives for competition in the marketplace of consumer goods disappear with it. The central power may talk all it wants about “satisfying differentiated needs” but the pressures of a nonpluralistic economy compel it to do exactly the opposite: to integrate production, standardize goods, and narrow the range of choice. In this artificial economic world, diversity is merely a complication.

Not only do consumers have to depend (as all who live in modern industrial societies do) almost exclusively on commodities they have not produced themselves; they do not have a choice of different commodities, and cannot express their individuality even in this limited way. All they have is what has been allocated by the monopoly producer: the same things that have been allocated to everyone.

Havel was no libertarian, and he favored a much larger economic role for the state than I would. But because of his experiences under communism, he understood the importance of economic liberty much better than most Westerners.

Another of my favorite Havel works is his 1990 speech delivered soon after becoming first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia:

For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers’ state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available. …

We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all – though naturally to differing extents – responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators….

If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts.

In the effort to rectify matters of common concern, we have something to lean on. The recent period – and in particular the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution – has shown the enormous human, moral and spiritual potential, and the civic culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is unwise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake the totalitarian yoke from their shoulders in several weeks, and in a decent and peaceful way…..

We had to pay, however, for our present freedom. Many citizens perished in jails in the 1950s, many were executed, thousands of human lives were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of talented people were forced to leave the country. Those who defended the honor of our nations during the Second World War, those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another….

We must also bear in mind that other nations have paid even more dearly for their present freedom, and that indirectly they have also paid for ours. The rivers of blood that have flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany and recently in such a horrific manner in Romania, as well as the sea of blood shed by the nations of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten. First of all because all human suffering concerns every other human being. But more than this, they must also not be forgotten because it is these great sacrifices that form the tragic background of today’s freedom or the gradual emancipation of the nations of the Soviet Bloc, and thus the background of our own newfound freedom.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, many of the links to individual items on the Havel website don’t seem to be working properly. However, you can find these works yourself simply by going to the site yourself and looking for them.

Kim presided over the world’s most repressive regime, the closest ever to a real-life version of Orwell’s 1984. Even Soviet communism was relatively mild by comparison. He was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, many of them as a result of the politically-created famine of the 1990s, which he facilitated in order to reinforce the regime’s power. He was also known for various strange obsessions, such as his plan to solve North Korea’s government-created food shortages by breeding giant rabbits. This literally hare-brained scheme was cut short when the “Dear Leader” ate the first few giant rabbits imported from Germany at his birthday party.

The interesting question for the immediate future is whether the North Korean government will survive Kim’s death relatively unchanged. Kim tried to install his son as his successor, just as his father Kim Il Sung did with him. Hopefully, things will not go as the Dear Leader planned.

The New York Times has a detailed obituary here. A variety of tributes are pouring in from all over the world. No one could be more deserving of them than Havel.

UPDATE: In this 2009 post, I discussed Havel’s powerful critique of the UN Human Rights Council.

It’s also interesting to note that Orwell’s portrayal of democracy at Animal Farm was actually far more positive than the Soviet history he based the novel on. Unlike Animal Farm, the USSR was a brutal totalitarian state from the start and was never democratic. Opposition parties (including even left-wing socialist ones) were suppressed from the beginning, and there were never any free elections or any direct democracy of the kind Orwell depicts.

I’m not sure whether Orwell deviated from Soviet history on this point in order to make a statement about democracy or because he was in thrall to the view (common among anti-Stalinist Western leftists in his day) that the Soviet experiment only went awry under Stalin. His modestly favorable portrayal of Snowball – the pig who serves as an analogue to Trotsky – is compatible with the latter idea, though Snowball is not a completely positive figure in the novel. Some degree of rot is evident even in the “pre-Stalinist” era at Animal Farm, though the animals are described as “happy as they had never conceived it possible to be” during this period. In reality, large-scale totalitarian repression began under Lenin, not Stalin. And the real Trotsky was almost as bad as his rival, in some ways even a little worse.

I agree with most of Krajewski’s analysis. It cannot be denied that Jews were disproportionately represented among early Eastern European communists. Several prominent early communist leaders were Jewish, most notably Leon Trotsky. At the same time, Krajewski is also right to emphasize that the vast majority of early 20th century Jews were not communists, and that most communists were not Jewish. Overrepresentation of a group in a political movement does not prove either that the movement was “dominated” by that group or that it primarily serves that group’s interests. The idea that communist oppression was somehow Jewish in nature is belied by the record of communist regimes in countries like China, North Korea, and Cambodia, where the Jewish presence was and is miniscule.

At the same time, I am not entirely convinced by Krajewski’s claim that Jewish communists “became communists because of general social trends” rather than because of any distinctively Jewish factors. Obviously, such general trends played a role. But the overrepresentation of Jews in the movement was also caused by at least two specifically Jewish factors. First, communism disproportionately appealed to intellectuals generally. They liked its utopian nature and its seeming logical rigor. While the vast majority of Jews are not professional intellectuals, Jews are disproportionately represented in that group. Any movement that appeals to intellectuals will also tend to have a relatively high proportion of Jewish members.

Second, Jews’ status as an oppressed minority in early 20th century Eastern Europe also played a major role. The government of the Russian Empire (which ruled over most of Eastern Europe’s Jews until World War I) was highly anti-Semitic and oppressed Jews in innumerable ways. It also encouraged anti-Jewish violence, such as pogroms. Krajewski briefly mentions employment discrimination against early 20th century Jews; but that was only one small part of the prevailing anti-Semitism.

Because of this persecution, Jews were more likely to be attracted to radical anti-regime movements than most other groups. A movement that seeks to overthrow the government that oppresses you and promises ethnic and racial equality has obvious appeal to persecuted minorities. Obviously, the communists were far from the only opposition movement in early 20th century Russia that was attractive to Jews. Many of the others also had disproportionate Jewish representation. For example, the Constitutional Democratic Party, which sought to transform Russia into a Western-style liberal democracy, had a number of Jewish leaders, including the majority of Jews elected to the Russian parliament. Before 1917, there were many more Jewish Kadets than Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia.

The fact that many Jewish communists joined the movement in part because of anti-Semitism does not excuse them. There were far more constructive ways to oppose anti-Semitism than by joining a brutal totalitarian party. It does, however, help explain their actions, even if it does not justify them.

Although Jews were disproportionately represented among early communists, they were also (as Krajewski points out) disproportionately represented among the victims of communist regimes once the latter seized power. Unfortunately, Krajewski neglected to mention that in the 1970s and 80s, Jews were also disproportionately represented among the anti-communist dissidents in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Several of them played key roles in the eventual overthrow of communist rule (e.g. – Adam Michnik, one of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland). Ironically, Jews were disproportionately represented among anti-communist dissidents for much the same reasons as an earlier generation had been disproportionately represented among communists: the dissident movement appealed to intellectuals, and it opposed highly anti-Semitic regimes.

Sweden owes its Baltic neighbours a “debt of honour” for turning a blind eye to post-war Soviet occupation, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt told his counterparts on Monday. During a ceremony in Stockholm attended by the prime ministers of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, Reinfeldt spoke of “a dark moment” in his country’s history.

“Sweden was among the first countries to recognise the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries” in 1944, he said at a celebration marking the 20th anniversary of the three countries’ independence….

“For decades, Sweden did not acknowledge Baltic suffering,” the conservative prime minister said.

“I hold in my hand a Swedish school book used during the 1980s. It makes no mention at all of the destiny of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after the Second World War. Not one word,” Reinfeldt said.

“In fact, it is hard to find any reference to the fact that there had ever been any Baltic countries. This was the reality when I went to school,” the 46-year-old leader said.

“Sweden has a debt of honour to the people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. We owe it to ourselves — and we owe it to the Baltic peoples — to remember the past, but also to build a common future,” he added.

Soviet repression in the Baltic states went far beyond merely ending their independence. For example, they killed some 3% of Estonia’s population and imprisoned or deported several times that number. Latvia and Lithuania didn’t fare much better. The Swedish government deserves credit for recognizing its errors and striving to correct them. Unfortunately, this is just one small step towards rectifying the broader neglect of communist crimes that still persists in many countries.

In several ways, the Wall and its collapse are fitting symbols of communism. They demonstrate several truths about that system that we would be wise not to lose sight of.

First and foremost, Cold War-era Berlin was the most visible demonstration of the superiority of capitalism and democracy over communism and dictatorship. Despite the fact that East Germany had one of the highest standards of living in the Soviet bloc, it had to build a wall to keep its people from fleeing to the capitalist West. By contrast, West Germans and other westerners were free to move to the communist world anytime they wanted. Yet only a tiny handful ever did so. Decisions to “vote with your feet” are often even better indicators of peoples’ true preferences than ballot box voting, since foot voters have better incentives to become well-informed about the alternatives before them. Even more powerful evidence is the reality that many East Germans and others fled from communism even when doing so meant risking their lives.

Second, the Berlin Wall was an important symbol of the way in which communist governments violated the human right to freedom of movement, one of the most important attributes of a free society. If people are forcibly trapped under the rule of the government in whose territory they happen to be born, they are not truly free; rather, they are hostages of their rulers.

Finally, the sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 vividly demonstrated the extent to which communist totalitarianism relied on coercion to maintain its rule. Some Western scholars and leftists contended that most Russians and Eastern Europeans actually supported communism or at least preferred it to the available alternatives. The events of 1989 gave the lie to this notion, though a few writers still defend it today…..

Despite all of the above, I am somewhat conflicted about the status of the Berlin Wall as the symbol of communist oppression in the popular imagination. My reservations have to do with the underappreciated fact that the Wall was actually one of communism’s smaller crimes. Between 1961 and 1989, about 100 East Germans were killed trying to escape to the West through Wall. The Wall also trapped several million more Germans in a repressive totalitarian society. These are grave atrocities. But they pale in comparison to the millions slaughtered in gulags, deliberately created famines in the USSR, China, and Ethiopia, and mass executions of kulaks and “class enemies.” The Berlin Wall wasn’t even the worst communist atrocity in East Germany…..

It is important to remember the Berlin Wall and the lessons it teaches. But doing so is only one small part of the task of rectifying the longstanding neglect of communist crimes.

UPDATE: I have corrected a few formatting errors in this post.

Yelena Bonner, a rights activist and widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, has died, her daughter said Sunday. She was 88….

Bonner grew famous through her marriage to Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s leading dissident, but she carved out her own reputation as a tireless human rights campaigner in the face of relentless hostility from Soviet authorities….

Both suffered constant harassment, and Soviet officialdom regularly made caustic, personal attacks against Bonner, accusing her of being a foreign agent who bullied her husband, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb [actually hydrogen bomb - IS], into turning against his country.

But the attacks only seemed to strengthen their resolve, and neither ever stopped calling for greater personal freedom for Soviet citizens despite the huge personal cost.,,,

After Sakharov died in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, Bonner continued to champion human rights, but was less and less visible, and her health began to deteriorate…..

Nonetheless, she edited her husband’s memoirs, which were released in 1997, and still occasionally spoke out against President Boris Yeltsin’s government, denouncing Russia’s bungled war in Chechnya and the shortcomings of the country’s young democracy.

In recent years, Bonner lent the weight of her voice to those opposing the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who has restored many of the Soviet-era powers of the security services. In March 2010, hers was the first signature on a petition calling for Putin to go.

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day….

The main alternative to May 1 is November 7, the anniversary of the communist coup in Russia. However, choosing that date might be interpreted as focusing exclusively on the Soviet Union, while ignoring the equally horrendous communist mass murders in China, Camobodia, and elsewhere. So May 1 is the best choice.

In this post, I explained why the longstanding relative neglect of communist crimes is deplorable — not just from the standpoint of understanding the past, but also that of doing justice in the here and now and ensuring a better future. For a good summary of the extent of communist crimes, see this 2005 May Day post by political scientist Rudolph Rummel, a leading academic expert on mass murder.

Since my last May Day post, new evidence has emerged suggesting that the communist mass murders in China were on an even larger scale than previously thought, and greater than those in the Soviet Union. This strengthens the case for an international rather than Russia-centric date for Victims of Communism Day.

Much debate has focused on the question of whether communist mass murders qualify as genocide. In my view, some of them do qualify as such, but the entire distinction between genocide and mass murder has been vastly overblown. The mass murder of innocent people is equally evil regardless of whether it was committed out of racial, religious, ideological or other motives. I discussed this point in detail in this series of posts.

2011 is also the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, one of communism’s most notorious crimes, though ironically also one of its comparatively smaller ones. For my thoughts on the Wall, see here.

Suppose that in 2012, after the Republican Convention, a Democrat denounced the Republican Convention as consisting of “Sarah Palin Republicans.” The denunciation would bring to mind a wide variety of issues and themes. Now suppose that in 2040, a historian told you that the denunciation of “Sarah Palin Republicans” was understood by everyone as a criticism of the hunting of wolves. For some animal rights activists, Governor Palin’s greatest sin is allowing aerial wolf hunting. These activists, when they heard the phrase “Sarah Palin Republicans,” might immediately think of wolf hunting. But most people–including the audience of anti-Palin swing voters to whom the 2012 speaker was appealing–would not think first of wolves. Even if wolf hunting might happen to be among the dozens of things they loathed about Sarah Palin.

Similarly, in 1984, the term “San Francisco Democrats” raised numerous issues which were far more important to swing voters than were gay rights; this was especially so for the target audience–the voters who would become known as Reagan Democrats.

Beginning in the late 1960s, there had been an intense struggle within the Democratic party. On the one side were the heirs of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. They strongly believed in a powerful and affirmative federal government, and they were hawkish and staunchly anti-communist. This was the traditional party of Big Labor, the big city mayors, and the Democratic machine. Challenging them, as insurgents, were dovish anti-war activists, women’s rights advocates, and others on the cultural left. The overwhelming issue in the divide was the Vietnam War. The challengers fell short in 1968, when Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey defeated the Minnesota poet and Senator Eugene McCarthy.  Humphrey narrowly lost to former Vice Preisdent Richard Nixon in the general election.

1n 1972, George McGovern out-organized everyone else, and ran a brilliant insurgent campaign which captured the nomination. He defeated candidates from the traditional wing of the party, such as Humphrey and the very hawkish Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. McGovern’s insurgency became the textbook model of how to beat the party establishment, and was closely studied by Jimmy Carter. But in the general election, McGovern lost to incumbent Richard Nixon 61-38, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

The Democratic party swiftly retreated from what it saw as the unappealing (to swing voters) excesses of McGovernism. McGovern’s party chair, Jean Westwood (the first female to lead the Democratic National Committee) was removed at the first opportunity. In 1976, the party nominated a southern governor, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, who at the time had the impressive skill of convincing liberals that he was a liberal, moderates that he was moderate, and conservatives that he was conservative.

Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980, and then in 1984, his Vice President, Walter Mondale, won the Democratic nomination, at a convention held in San Francisco. Mondale had a long and solid track record with the entire Democratic base. Organized labor and the big-city mayors loved him; the civil rights groups knew him as a long-time champion. Women’s groups had by then become a core part of the Democratic establishment, and were strongly behind Mondale. By voting record, he had been the most liberal United States Senator, and so he was a broadly acceptable choice to the San Francisco Democratic Convention, including to the delegates who had supported his main challengers, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson. The Democratic divisions over Vietnam were over; since the 1960s, the party’s center of gravity on foreign policy had moved substantially to the left, and so had Mondale. 

The Democrats were quite conscious of avoiding the appearance of McGovernism, so when Mondale delivered his acceptance speech, the hall and the delegates were bedecked in red, white, and blue–a change from previous conventions, in which there had not been such attention to patriotic appearance.

 Among the purposes of the Republican Convention was to divide the Democratic base. And so for the keynote address, the Republicans chose Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Formerly a Georgetown professor, she had worked closely with Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson. She described herself as an “an AFL-CIO Democrat.” As an increasingly influential public intellectual in the 1970s, she criticized not only what she saw as President Jimmy Carter’s soft and naive stance on communism, but also the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger “detente” policy of accomodating to the Soviets as a rising power.

Ronald Reagan brought Kirkpatrick into his campaign, as he did with with many Democratic hawks who were dismayed with Carter’s foreign policy and the dovish position of mainstream Democrats. (Reagan almost won the endorsement of Dem. Senator Scoop Jackson, although Jackson ultimately demurred because he could not accept Reagan’s hard line on states’ rights.) In 1981, Kirkpatrick, remaining a Democrat, became Reagan’s Ambassador to the United Nations.

And so for the first time since 1952, the 1984 Republican National Convention chose a keynote speaker who was not a Republican. Kirkpatrick delivered a blistering speech, dealing exclusively with foreign policy. She ran through a litany of recent foreign policy contoversies: Grenada, Lebanon, the Soviet walk-out from arms negotiations, and Central America. On every topic, said Kirkpatrick, the Democrats “always blame America first.” For example: “When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies. They blame United States policies of one hundred years ago. But then they always blame America first.”

As Kirkpatrick made clear, it was not all Democrats she was criticizing; she reminded the audience that she was still a Democrat. Rather, her point was that the 1984 Mondale Democrats were not Hubert Humphrey Democrats, or Scoop Jackson Democrats. San Francisco Democrats were McGovern Democrats.

The 1984 Republican keynote was a speech entirely about foreign policy, delivered by a speaker who was known to the public exclusively for foreign policy, and whose obvious appeal was to national security Democrats.

Was the “San Francisco Democrats” line a dog whistle to people concerned about culture wars? One could make the argument, and perhaps there’s no way to be sure. But even if it were a dog whistle, it was, by definition, something recognized only by a subset of already-committed Republican activists who were especially keen on the culture war. Jeanne Kirkpatrick was not picked to deliver the keynote in order to rev up hardcore religious conservatives; they were not her people, and the religious conservatives had already been addressed by several other speakers at the convention. Kirkpatrick’s people were AFL-CIO Democrats who were terrified that if the American President did not understand the mortal danger of the Soviet threat, then nothing else mattered. Many of those voters had deserted McGovern in 1972, voted for Carter in 1976 (when Carter ran, in some respects, as more anti-communist than Gerald Ford), and abandoned Carter in 1980. The Kirkpatrick speech aimed to keep those Democratic voters on Reagan’s side in 1984–however much they might disagree with him on economic or cultural issues.

To describe the “San Francisco Democrats” line as mainly about gay rights or culture wars is akin to claiming that the central issue in King Lear is tax policy–as if “I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,” were a complaint about unkind taxes, and the King’s central concern were just taxation. In 1984, there were some people who worried that homosexuals were the greatest threat to America, but there were many tens of millions more who worried the aggressive totalitarian Soviet slave empire was the greatest threat. It was to these voters, including Democrats and independents, that the Republican keynote appealed, and this was the appeal that helped Ronald Reagan win re-election with 49 states and 59% of the popular vote–a Democratic defeat exceeded only by George McGovern in 1972.

The fall of the USSR led to the establishment of numerous successful liberal democracies, including Poland, the the Czech Republic, the Baltic States, and others. Some of these were established before the USSR fully collapsed. But communist regimes in Eastern Europe would not have fallen were not the USSR itself already close to collapse, as it was in 1989-90.

Even the more authoritarian post-communist successor states are all far freer than their communist predecessors were. For example, all of them have vastly greater freedom of speech, freedom of religion, protection for property rights, and freedom of internal and external mobility (nearly all communist governments forbade emigration for most of its citizens, and most also severely restricted internal movement). I am no fan of the quasi-authoritarian government of ex-KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, but it’s a lot less repressive than the USSR was by any conceivable measure. For example, my relatives living in Russia feel free to openly criticize the government and vote for opposition parties. Even under Gorbachev, public criticism of the government was severely circumscribed and opposition parties were banned until just before the regime fell.

On the economic front, after a difficult transition in the mid-1990s, there have been massive increases in incomes and standards of living. For example, per capita GDP in Eastern Europe (including Russia and Ukraine) rose from 33% of Western European levels in 1992 to 45% in 2008. Those countries that adopted free market policies most rapidly and completely (e.g. – Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic) had the highest growth rates and least painful transitions. These figures greatly understate the true amount of economic progress because much of the 1992 GDP consisted of military spending (at least 20% of Soviet GDP at the time) and shoddy communist products many of which did not meet any real consumer demand.

Finally, the fall of the USSR lifted the specter of global nuclear war arising from a confrontation between the two superpowers. Although US-Russian relations are sometimes tense today, there is no realistic chance that the two nations will go to war.

What can Leiter stack against these massive improvements? The following:

[W]hether the collapse of the Soviet Union should be considered a good thing is a separate question. Certainly everyone (except the despots) welcomes the end of totalitarian regimes, though some of the former Soviet republics have remained thoroughly undemocratic, and Russia itself has moved strongly back in that direction. Then, of course, there was the enormous human cost to the collapse (increased mortality, a decline in longevity, and massive economic and thus human dislocation and suffering). Finally, certain other world-historic crimes, such as the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq, are unlikely to have occurred if the Soviet Union had remained intact.

I have covered the points about economic well-being and political freedom above. The evidence of huge improvements in both is overwhelming, even though some of the post-Soviet successor states are far from admirable.

What about life expectancy? It is true that life expectancy in Russia and Eastern Europe fell in the early 1990s. But as this German Max Planck Institute study describes, life expectancy in those countries began falling in the mid-1960s, with a brief acceleration in the early 1990s, that was soon reversed. One can’t blame the fall of the USSR for a trend that long predated it. The same study also shows that life expectancy in Eastern Europe (and to a lesser extent Russia) began to rise again in the late 1990s, possibly because of increased economic growth and improvements in standards of living. Moreover, most of the fall in Russian life expectancy in the 1990s predated privatization of the economy and was probably caused by rising alcoholism (due in large part to falling vodka prices) rather than by economic shocks.

In this context, it’s important to remember that communist-era health statistics and economic data are extremely unreliable and in many cases falsified for propaganda purposes. For example, official East German data absurdly claimed that East Germany had higher per capita income than Italy by 1970 and had nearly equaled Britain. Thus, the above data probably underestimate the extent of post-Soviet progress because they likely overestimate life expectancy and living standards in the Soviet era.

Finally, we have Leiter’s claim that the survival of the USSR might have averted “world-historic crimes” such as the US invasion of Iraq. Without getting into the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War, I think it’s not at all obvious that it counts as a “world-historic crime.” Although the war may not have been worth its cost from a US point of view and was often badly conducted, the replacement of a mass-murdering despot by a relatively democratic government is very likely a net gain for Iraqis themselves. It’s also worth noting that the Cold War era was far from free of bloody proxy wars, many of which had worse outcomes than Iraq. Such conflicts would likely have continued had the USSR survived.

Perhaps more to the point, the USSR had a tendency to commit “world-historic crimes” of its own, such as the mass murder of millions of its own people and – most recently – the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, which ended up killing over 1 million people. Had the USSR survived the 1980s, it is very likely that such atrocities would have recurred. Previously in Soviet history, periods of liberalization (e.g. the mid-1920s and early 1960s) were followed by periods of heightened repression at home and expansionism abroad (e.g. – the Stalin and Brezhnev eras). Had Gorbachev’s reforms fizzled out or been reversed, the same pattern would likely have recurred as more hardline communist leaders returned to power and tried to suppress liberal tendencies.

We cannot know exactly how history would have unfolded if the USSR had survived to the present day. But the overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that the world is far better off without it.

UPDATE: I recognize that Leiter wasn’t suggesting that the fall of the USSR was necessarily bad, merely that the issue is a close call. But even the latter claim isn’t defensible.

I should add, of course, that whether the collapse of the Soviet Union should be considered a good thing is a separate question. Certainly everyone (except the despots) welcomes the end of totalitarian regimes, though some of the former Soviet republics have remained thoroughly undemocratic, and Russia itself has moved strongly back in that direction. Then, of course, there was the enormous human cost to the collapse (increased mortality, a decline in longevity, and massive economic and thus human dislocation and suffering). Finally, certain other world-historic crimes, such as the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq, are unlikely to have occurred if the Soviet Union had remained intact.

The fact that it took Hollywood 70 years to make its first Gulag movie is itself a telling indication of our longstanding neglect of communist crimes. After all, the Gulag system was an episode of mass murder that took as many lives as the Holocaust and possibly even more. And we are still waiting for the first Hollywood movie about the even larger Soviet mass murder of the forced famines of the 1930s, to say nothing of the Chinese communists’ repetition of this atrocity, probably the biggest mass murder in all of world history. Scott Johnson of Powerline notes two previous Gulag films. But one of them was a little-known 1970 Swedish film, and another a low-budget 1980s HBO TV movie. For obvious reasons, neither had anywhere near the impact that a full-scale Hollywood production might have.

Interestingly, one of the three main characters in the film is an American Gulag prisoner. Quite possibly, he was included in order to give American filmgoers a character they could identify with. However, it is in fact true that several thousand Americans were imprisoned in the Gulag system, most of them dying there. These people were skilled workers lured in by the Soviet government in the early 1930s with promises of high wages, along with some leftists who moved to the Soviet Union for ideological reasons. Within a few years, most of them were arrested and sent to the Gulags (or in some cases just executed) on trumped up charges of being spies or “enemies of the people.” Historian Tim Tzouliadis tells their story in his fascinating 2008 book, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia.

To me, the most surprising part of Tzouliadis’ book was not that several thousand Americans ended up in the Gulag. That fact has long been known from Gulag survivor memoirs and work by previous scholars (though Tzouliadis tells the story in much greater detail). The real surprise was Tzouliadis’ meticulous documentation of the State Department’s near-criminal indifference to the issue over a period of some twenty years, even though officials in both Washington and the US embassy in Moscow knew very well what was going on. With very rare exceptions, they refused to even raise the problem with the Soviets, even during periods when the USSR’s need for good relations with the US gave the State Department substantial leverage with Stalin.

Tzouliadis points out that a few diplomats representing much less powerful Western states did successfully lobby the Soviets to release their own nationals who were caught up in Stalin’s purges under similar circumstances. The State Department could have achieved at least comparable results had they tried. In many cases recounted by Tzouliadis, they actually turned away desperate Americans who showed up at the US embassy seeking help. As Tzouliadis explains, a few of the diplomats chose to ignore the issue because they were ideologically sympathetic to communism. In most cases, however, their neglect seems to have been primarily the result of bureaucratic inertia and incompetence. Being a libertarian, I’m not easily surprised by tales of inefficient or callous government bureaucrats. This example, however, shocked even me. The Stalin-era US embassy in Moscow makes even the worst DMV office seem like a shining paragon of devotion to duty by comparison. Their superiors in Washington also deserved a hefty share of blame.

Again and again I find myself wondering to what extent it’s true that Jewish refugees/emigres from Soviet totalitarianism (and their offspring) tend to have a libertarian and/or conservative political orientation. Does anyone know whether this has been studied? Are Eugene, Sasha, and Ilya typical in this regard, or atypical?

There is actually survey data on this, which reveals that some 75% of Russian Jewish immigrants vote Republican, as compared to only about 20% of native-born American Jews. The same pattern is evident among other refugees from communism, such as Cubans and Vietnamese. The reasons are not hard to figure out. The experience of living under communism makes these refugee groups hostile to anything that smacks of socialism and also to those political parties and ideologies that they perceive (with some justice) as having been soft on communism during the latter part of the Cold War. This in turn leads them to be more “right-wing” than they might have been otherwise. As I discuss in my immigration memoir, I probably would have become a liberal or leftist had I been born in the US and had the same interests and personality.

The overwhelming majority of Russian Jews in legal and social science academia tend to be conservative or libertarian (more often the latter), which is in sharp contrast to the generally left-wing orientation of the vast majority of other US academics. My impression is that rank and file Russian Jewish immigrants also tend to be on the right, more libertarian-leaning than conservative (e.g. – most are pro-choice and favor fairly strong separation of church and state). Obviously, most are not nearly as self-conscious or consistent in their libertarian leanings as academics such as Sasha and myself. And the term “libertarian” is probably not familiar to most of them, just as it isn’t to the majority of the 10-15% of other Americans who hold generally libertarian views.

For example, it is indeed true (and in retrospect, very interesting) that the campaign united many ideologically disparate groups in the US. When I worked for Action for Soviet Jewry in the late 1980s, we had important assistance from political leaders as disparate as Barney Frank and Jesse Helms. It is also true, and and already well-known, that Henry Kissinger was negative about the whole deal, as he was about human rights in general. Recent Nixon tapes revelations about Kissinger’s attitude confirm that.

At the same time, I do have a few disagreements with Sasha and Beckerman’s analysis. Sasha is correct to suggest that much of the more severe repression described in the book “might not have applied to Soviet Jews who kept their heads low and didn’t try to leave.” But of course such people still had to endure the serious ordinary oppression of life in the USSR, including (but far from limited to) widespread official anti-Semitism. I briefly described some of this in the first part of my own immigration memoir. The most important weakness of Beckerman’s book is that he gives very little description of the lives of ordinary Soviet Jews who were not activists or dissidents, and therefore doesn’t clearly explain why so many wanted to leave. The increased repression of the late Brezhnev and Andropov periods had a ripple effect on non-dissidents as well, since they had to be even more careful to avoid offending the authorities than before.

I also have some reservations about Sasha’s and Beckerman’s discussion of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. It is true that the amendment was never waived until 1990. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that its economic sanctions had no effect. The hope of getting it waived or repealed was likely one of the factors that motivated the Soviets to allow increased Jewish (and also German, Armenian, and evangelical Christian) emigration in the 1970s, and later under Gorbachev. Certainly, Soviet officials repeatedly lobbied for a waiver throughout that time, pointing to the increased emigration numbers as justification. The waiver was never granted because the amendment called for fully free emigration (as opposed to mere increases in numbers within a system in which the government retained discretionary power to reject emigration applications at will), which the Soviets did not concede until the late Gorbachev era. But the Soviets, of course, did not know that in advance. Moreover, as Sasha and Beckerman partly recognize, the ongoing battle over the amendment was one of the factors that focused Western public attention on the issue, and thereby gave the Soviets further incentives to liberalize emigration policy, even aside from the trade restrictions themselves. It is actually very difficult to disentangle the impact of Jackson-Vanik from other factors influencing Soviet calculations, and Beckerman doesn’t really succeed in doing so. The debate over the amendment’s effect is part of the much broader debate about the extent to which economic sanctions can influence human rights policy in oppressive regimes, which is similarly contentious.

Another small but annoying flaw of Beckerman’s book is his tendency to describe any right of center activist or organization as “neoconservative” even in cases where the term is clearly inaccurate (e.g. – in the case of the Heritage Foundation, which, especially during the period covered in the book, was led by more traditional conservatives who were on the right long before there were any neoconservatives, and believed that the neocons were far too liberal and too supportive of the welfare state).

Despite these reservations, Beckerman’s book is by far the most thorough account of the political battle over Soviet Jewish emigration so far. Anyone interested in the issue should certainly read it.

UPDATE: I blogged about the ethics of imposing trade restrictions on socialist states in this 2007 post:

Libertarianism is generally seen as requiring free trade. Certainly, libertarian thinkers from Adam Smith to the present have strongly condemned protectionism. How then can a libertarian endorse trade restrictions such as the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied free trade to totalitarian states that refused to allow their citizens to emigrate freely?….

Libertarianism does indeed imply free trade between private individuals and firms. But trade with socialist governments is very different. When two private individuals trade with each other, it is reasonable to assume that both legitimately own the goods they exchange. Thus, at least as far as libertarians are concerned, the law should not restrict their transactions unless there is specific proof that one or both are trading in stolen or otherwise illicitly acquired goods. By contrast, a socialist state engaging in international trade is usually exchanging goods that it forcibly acquired from its citizens. The socialist state’s goods are either confiscated from former private owners or produced by compelling workers to work for the state (which they generally must do whether they want to or not, because there is no competitive employment market). Socialist states also make extensive use of out and out forced labor…. Just as in the domestic context libertarianism is perfectly consistent with forbidding trade in stolen goods, in the international context it is consistent with forbidding trade with socialist governments…..

Restrictions on trade with socialist states may or may not be good policy. Sometimes trade with such states can serve important strategic interests (as with US trade with the Soviet Union when the two nations were allied during World War II). Critics of trade sanctions claim that they fail to achieve their goals and may even be counterproductive. Be that as it may, restricting trade with socialist states does not violate any libertarian principles.

The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere, was the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962, and to this day the ruling Communist Party has not fully acknowledged the degree to which it was a direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the “Great Leap Forward” that Mao Zedong launched in 1958.

To this day, the party attempts to cover up the disaster, usually by blaming the weather. Yet detailed records of the horror exist in the party’s own national and local archives…..

Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the world’s worst famines. Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that some 20 to 30 million people died.

But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate…..

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction….

The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.

Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside, some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.

At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”

Even the previous estimates of 20 to 30 million dead qualify the Great Leap Forward as the biggest single case of mass murder in world history. If Dikötter’s revised figure of 45 million withstands scrutiny, Mao will have definitively surpassed Joseph Stalin’s overall record as a mass murderer (Stalin’s death toll was more evenly spread between several different episodes of mass murder than Mao’s).

Even if the earlier figures turn out to be more accurate than Dikotter’s, it is still inexcusable that the mass murders inflicted by Chinese communism remain so little known in the West. As I noted in my earlier post on the subject, Dikotter’s study is not the first to describe these events. Nonetheless, few Western intellectuals are aware of the scale of these atrocities, and they have had almost no impact on popular consciousness.

This is part of the more general problem of the neglect of communist crimes. But Chinese communist atrocities are little-known even by comparison to those inflicted by communists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, possibly because the Chinese are more culturally distant from Westerners than are Eastern Europeans or the German victims of the Berlin Wall. Ironically, the Wall (one of communism’s relatively smaller crimes) is vastly better known than the Great Leap Forward – the largest mass murder in all of world history.

Hopefully, Dikötter’s important work will help change that.

UPDATE: In this series of posts, I described the similar terror famine that occurred in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and its implications for international law; see also this post on whether Stalin’s crimes qualify as genocide.

In some ways, Mao was an even worse oppressor than any of the Soviet communist leaders. He combined Lenin’s role as the founder of a totalitarian state with Stalin’s role as the implementer of its largest-scale atrocities. Having a larger population to work with, he also (if Dikotter’s figures are correct) managed to kill more people than all the Soviet leaders and Adolf Hitler combined. There’s no one quite like him in all of world history. Let’s hope there never will be again.

Back in 2008, I blogged about the debate over the question of whether the Soviet terror famine of the early 1930s (in which some 6 to 10 million people died) was a case of genocide or mass murder (see here and here). Many Ukrainians and some Western scholars argue that this was a case of genocide because Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin specifically targeted Ukrainian peasants for extermination. By contrast, the Russian government claims that Stalin was an equal opportunity mass murderer. The distinction matters because international law defines mass murder as genocide only if it was the result of an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.” It also matters because of the ongoing debate over whether communist mass murders deserve as much opprobrium as those of the Nazis.

Naimark concludes that both the terror famine and various other Stalinist atrocities qualify as genocide. His book is the most thorough and compelling study of the subject so far. In the end, however, I am not so much persuaded that Stalin committed genocide as reaffirmed in my view that the genocide-mass murder distinction isn’t a morally meaningful one. Moreover, Naimark overstates Stalin’s personal role in the mass murders committed by his regime and understates the impact of the communist system.

I. Was it Genocide and Should it Matter if it Was?

There is no doubt that at least some of Stalin’s crimes were genocides. The deportation and partial extermination of ethnic groups such as the Crimean Tatars surely qualifies. These indisputably genocidal crimes, however, accounted for only a small fraction of Stalin’s victims. Naimark’s main objective is to prove that Stalin’s much greater mass murders – the terror famine, the killing of millions in Gulag slave labor camps, and the “Great Terror” of 1937-38 – should also be considered genocidal.

Here, Naimark runs into the problem that most of the people killed in these mass murders were targeted not on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, but because of economic class or political background – or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As he points out, the Soviet Union and its allies successfully worked to exclude “political” murder from the international law definition of genocide; they did so to insulate their own crimes from potential condemnation. This is one of the most blatant examples of the extent to which international human rights law has been perverted by the influence of nondemocratic and totalitarian governments . In effect, Naimark argues that the international law definition of genocide should be read to cover precisely the kinds of crimes that it was deliberately crafted to exclude. In legal terms, the text, original meaning, and legislative history of the international law definition are all against Naimark.

In the case of the early 1930s terror famine, Naimark also argues that Stalin intended to target the Ukrainians as an ethnic group. If so, then this counts as genocide even under the traditional view of international law. Naimark notes that the impact of the famine was greater in Ukraine than in most other parts of the USSR, and that the region was treated with special harshness. On the other hand, it is also true that the main goal of the famine was to exterminate the independent peasantry regardless of ethnicity and carry out the forced collectivization of agriculture. Ukraine may have been targeted as much because it was the USSR’s most important agricultural region as because it was populated by Ukrainians. Moreover Ukraine had large minority populations, including millions of ethnic Russians (my own grandmother, was one of the many non-Ukrainians living in the region during the famine). Many of these people also died in the famine. Stalin’s motives were probably mixed. His main goal was to crush the peasants and collectivize agriculture. But he was also happy to deal a preemptive blow to Ukrainian nationalist aspirations (which he feared because they were the USSR’s largest minority group).

Ultimately, the distinction between genocide and “mere” mass murder should not matter. For reasons I explained here and here, it doesn’t make any difference whether the Soviet regime killed millions of innocent people because they were “kulaks” and “class enemies,” because they were Ukrainian, or for some combination of both reasons. In all three scenarios, innocent people were slaughtered for no good reason, in most cases on the basis of immutable characteristics that they could not change (“kulak” status was determined primarily by family background).

II. The Role of Stalin.

Naimark’s book is also interesting in so far as he blames Stalin personally for most of the crimes committed by the Soviet government during his rule. Absent Stalin’s malign influence, Naimark contends, the regime probably would not have committed mass murder or genocide on such a large scale. There is little doubt that Stalin’s paranoia and sadism influenced Soviet policy. Nonetheless, I think Naimark overstates the importance of Stalin’s personal role. Most of the major repressive policies and institutions – including the secret police and the Gulag slave labor camps – of the Soviet state were begun by Lenin, not Stalin. As historians such as Richard Pipes have shown, even the terror famine was a reprise of the first Soviet effort to collectivize agriculture in 1918-21 (which also led to a famine in which millions died). Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s main rival for power after Lenin’s death, attacked Stalin on the grounds that his policies were too generous to “bourgeois” elements and otherwise not repressive enough. Had Trotsky defeated Stalin, life for most Soviet citizens might have been just as bad or even slightly worse. One of the very few ways in which Stalin was harsher than Trotsky was in his much greater willingness to kill and imprison members of the Communist Party elite. Here, Stalin’s extreme paranoia about possible rivals for power really did make a big difference. Under Trotsky, the party comrades would have suffered a lot less; the rest of the population would not have been so fortunate.

More generally, Stalin’s policies were far from unique in the communist world. Almost every other communist regime engaged in very similar mass murders, including in countries like China and Cuba where the rulers had a high degree of autonomy from Soviet control.

In sum, evidence from both the Soviet Union and elsewhere suggests that Stalin’s deranged personality was probably only a secondary factor in explaining the crimes of his regime. “Without Stalin,” Naimark writes, “it is hard to imagine the genocidal [Soviet] actions of the 1930s.” By contrast, I find it all too easy to imagine communist mass murder even with a less maniacal leader at the helm. In fact, not a lot of imagination is necessary, since the same policies were promoted by Lenin, Trotsky, and other communist leaders with very different personalities.

Despite these reservations, Naimark’s book is a great analysis of both Stalin’s crimes and the debate over the meaning of genocide under international law. Anyone interested in the subject should definitely check it out.

Thank you for posting your memoir. I really enjoyed reading it. I can completely identify with your experiences, as my family also had to make its escape from a Communist country, China. My parents are professors who came to this country with nothing, and worked their way up by taking 2-3 menial labor jobs. Your anecdote about how adults never criticized the government in front of you had me nodding my head; my mother told me one of the big reasons why she wanted to leave the country was the ever-present tension between telling me the truth and risk me getting into trouble in school and not saying anything and watching me be brainwashed.

My parents have made similar statements to me, noting that telling me the truth in the USSR was even more dangerous than with most other children because I was never one to keep my opinions to myself.

This, of course, is not the first time that people have noticed parallels between the Russian and Chinese experiences with communism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn made the same comparison many years ago, as did various others. The two regimes adopted very similar policies and institutions: a one party state, government ownership of the economy, a vast network of secret police, collectivization of agriculture, and stultifying censorship and political repression, among others.

At the macro level, this led to massive death and suffering, with Mao Zedong possibly exceeding the world record for mass murder previously set by Stalin. At the micro level the similarity is reflected in stories like the above. Two small incidents from my own family history further illustrate the point:

In the 1950s, when the two big communist powers were still allies, my grandfather had some Chinese students at the scientific research center where he worked. After relations between the two regimes soured in the 1960s, he learned that at least one of the students had spent years in a brutal “reeducation camp” during the Cultural Revolution, in part because he had previously been in the USSR. China’s reeducation camps were of course largely based on Soviet models.

In the late 1970s, my father was required to run a political education session at his workplace. By this time, he had become disillusioned with communism and had already applied to emigrate. So he picked as his subject the “errors” of the “dogmatic” Chinese communists. He saw it as an indirect way of criticizing the USSR’s own very similar rulers without running afoul of the authorities.

Unfortunately, the technology of the HIAS site isn’t yet quite able to handle some of the formatting in my document. So for the moment I have posted it here. It tells the story of my experience as an immigrant from roughly the age of 5 to 18 (1978-91). We plan to transfer it to the HIAS site later.

Memoir writing isn’t one of my strong suits. But some aspects of the story might be of interest to VC readers. For example, I describe how I first became a libertarian (pp. 22-24), and how the immigration experience influenced my later research agenda as a scholar (40-42).

There are also cameo appearances by world-famous political philosopher John Rawls, whom I encountered when I was fifteen (24-26), and financier/Obama transition team economic policy adviser Anjan Mukherjee, who was my high school debate teammate and closest friend at the time (various places, esp. 30-33, where I describe the interesting parallels between our two immigrant experiences). Those of you who are former high school debaters yourselves might also be interested in the parts where famous debate coaches Les Phillips (my coach at Lexington HS in Massachusetts), Richard Sodikow (Bronx High School of Science), and Tim Averill (Manchester, MA) figure in the story. Obviously, I also describe my family’s life in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, and the reasons why my parents chose to emigrate (1-7).

I would like to thank Anjan, my parents, and others for reading over the memoir and helping me correct some factual and stylistic errors. Undoubtedly, there are some mistakes that remain, for which I alone am responsible.

Enjoy… or not, as the case may be.

UPDATE: I have fixed the flawed link to the HIAS site.

Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

….Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing “one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known”.

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years…

Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. “It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century…. It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot’s genocide multiplied 20 times over,” he said.

If Dikotter’s figures are correct, this makes Mao by far the greatest mass murderer in world history, surpassing the death tolls “achieved” by Stalin and Hitler. Previous estimates of Mao’s death toll still numbered in the tens of millions, but were “low” enough to make it difficult to tell whether or not he had killed more people than Stalin.

The deaths caused by the Great Leap Forward were even less defensible than those inflicted by Lenin and Stalin’s earlier collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union, on which Mao’s policy was modeled. The first (abortive) Soviet effort at collectivization in the early 1920s led to several million deaths, while Stalin’s successful resumption of the effort in the early 1930s caused 7 to 14 million more, according to Robert Conquest’s study. The previous Soviet experience made the consequences of going down this road clear, and thereby ensured that the Chinese leaders could not have had any reasonable doubts about the likely effects of their actions.

The Independent is wrong to suggest that the mass murders of the Great Leap Forward have “until now remained hidden.” Although Dikotter’s estimate of the death toll is higher than that of previous scholars, the Great Leap was covered in some detail in earlier works such as Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts and the Black Book of Communism.

Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the Great Leap Forward has made very little impression on public consciousness and that most Westerners (including even most otherwise knowledgeable intellectuals) are largely unaware of it. Certainly, it has not received even a tiny fraction of the attention accorded to the Holocaust or even the smaller mass murder of the Armenians by the Turks (which has been the subject of extensive debate in Congress and elsewhere).

This widespread ignorance of history’s biggest mass murder is part of the more general neglect of communist crimes that continues to this day. Hopefully, Dikotter’s book will help to remedy that neglect.

UPDATE: In this related series of posts, I discussed Stalin’s terror famine in the USSR and its implications for the legal distinction between genocide and mass murder.

I think that the rationale I offered for turning May Day into Victims of Communism Day in my first post on the subject still holds true:

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day….

The main alternative to May 1 is November 7, the anniversary of the communist coup in Russia. However, choosing that date might be interpreted as focusing exclusively on the Soviet Union, while ignoring the equally horrendous communist mass murders in China, Camobodia, and elsewhere. So May 1 is the best choice.

In this November 2009 post, I explained in some detail why the longstanding relative neglect of communist crimes is deplorable – not just from the standpoint of understanding the past, but also that of doing justice in the here and now and ensuring a better future.

In recent decades, the question of acknowledging communist crimes has become something of a left-right issue in many quarters. That situation is deeply unfortunate, but far from inevitable. Among those who fully recognized the evils of communism in the past were liberals such as Harry Truman and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and leftists such as George Orwell. In Eastern Europe, some of the most important leaders of the anti-communist dissident movement were social democrats such as Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov. It is not too late for today’s noncommunist left to follow their example.

Efforts to downplay or ignore communist crimes are also common among Russian and Chinese nationalists. But if a committed Russian nationalist such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn once took the lead in exposing those crimes, it may be possible for his ideological heirs today to take the same view.

UPDATE: Bryan Caplan has an interesting post related to this subject here. Wilde will be posting relevant links throughout the day at Distributed Republic. Stay tuned!

UPDATE #2: Political scientist Rudolph Rummel, a leading academic expert on mass murder, wrote a helpful post entitled “The Red Plague” summarizing the massive death toll of communism for May Day commemoration back in 2005. Jonathan Wilde has links to posts by various bloggers for this year’s commemoration here. And here is a link to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, one of the leading nonprofit organizations working on these issues.

The classic argument against socialism is that it gives people bad incentives. What’s the point of working, conserving, saving, quality control, and/or taking out the garbage if they don’t pay? The classic socialist reply is that capitalism creates the selfishness it purports to benevolently channel. Socialism will give birth to a “New Socialist Man” who loves his neighbor as himself….

I’ve always considered the New Socialist Man position to be not just weak, but absurd. Ever heard of Darwin? People are selfish because of billions of years of evolution, not capitalism. End of story…

I take hindsight bias seriously. Many mistakes really are hard to see until you actually make them. But socialism wasn’t one of them.

If the possibility of radically altering human nature were the only rationale for socialism, Bryan’s point would be compelling. As he notes, early critics of socialism quickly pointed out many of the perverse incentives it would create. You don’t have to be a sophisticated economist to realize that most people are self-interested most of the time, and that they are unlikely to work hard if there is no reward for doing so. However, the theory of the “new socialist man” was never the only version of socialism, and not always the most influential.

Democratic socialism was a crucial alternative rationale for state ownership of the economy. Even if people remain selfish, bringing the economy under the control of a democratic government could still greatly improve the lot of the working class. Unlike capitalists who pursue only their own profit, democratically elected politicians have to serve the interests of the majority of voters – even if the politicos are power-hungry weasels who only care about their self-interest. If they don’t serve the needs of the people, the people will vote them out. And elected leaders can in turn create good incentives for the bureaucrats, workers, and lower-ranking officials who actually run government-owned industries. Again, if they fail to do this, the people will throw the bums out.

There are many, many problems with the theory of democratic socialism. But notice that it doesn’t assume any reduction in human selfishness. To the contrary, it holds that selfish voters vote for policies that benefit them, and selfish politicians will have to do their bidding. Something like this idea was espoused by mainstream socialist parties in early 20th century Britain, Germany, and elsewhere (though they also occasionally claimed that socialism would reduce selfishness as well). Even totalitarian communist regimes paid some lip service to the theory, which is why they all constantly claimed to be “democratic” and held ritualistic elections where only government-approved candidates could run.

I’m not going to give a detailed critique of democratic socialism here. Suffice to say that it is vulnerable to the sorts of criticisms that I outlined in this post: voters have incentives to be rationally ignorant about policy; even a democratic government won’t be able to acquire the information it needs to efficiently run large parts of the economy; interest groups can easily “capture” the government and use its power to benefit themselves at the expense of the general public. There are other compelling objections to it as well.

The key point for present purposes is that most of these objections are relatively nonobvious, especially to the vast majority of voters who haven’t studied basic economics. Even many otherwise sophisticated intellectuals have a weak understanding of economics as well, and that was probably even more true during the heyday of socialism’s popularity than today.

It’s easy to assume that the debate over democratic socialism is of only historical interest. Even on the political left, very few people still claim that the democratic socialist argument justifies government control of the entire economy. I see that as genuine progress, even though the debate over socialism is not completely over.

But we still have a long way to go. While few today use the democratic socialist argument as a justification for full-blown socialism, many on both the left and the right use very similar arguments to justify central planning of large parts the economy and society, include vast sectors such as education and health care. Every politically aware person has probably heard something like it used as a justification for all sorts of government interventions.

If the democratic socialist argument is a poor rationale for government control over 80 to 90% of the economy, we should consider the possibility that it’s an almost equally weak justification for government control of the 35-60% of GDP that the state spends in most democratic societies today.

UPDATE: Commenter “JR” perceptively points out that my criticisms of democratic socialism “sound more like critiques of democratic theory in general than democratic socialism in particular.” He’s right. The democratic socialist argument is an extension of the more general standard argument for democracy, which is part of its appeal. The main rationale for democracy is that it gives government strong incentives to serve the interests of the people. The democratic socialist argument is that the economy should be controlled by a democratic government, because that will ensure that it will be structured to benefit the majority of voters rather than a small class of capitalists. Thus, the main shortcomings of democratic socialism are likely to be especially severe forms of the flaws of democracy as such. For reasons I discussed here, these flaws become much more severe if the size and scope of government is large.

How resilient is the ghost of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary who ably assisted the Castro brothers’ sadly successful mission to turn Cuba into an island hellhole? His legend survives even a lackluster, long-winded biopic released in 2008 and now just out on DVD.

More important, Che’s legend survives the facts of his own life. Born in 1928 and gunned down in 1967 by drunken Bolivian soldiers, Che rarely missed an opportunity to make life miserable for those who opposed him. During the fight against the Batista regime, Che ordered the summary executions of dozens of real and suspected enemies, becoming the very thing he said revolutionaries must be: a “cold-blooded killing machine.” As a leader in post-Revolution Cuba, Che became known as the “butcher of La Cabaña” prison, where he oversaw hundreds of murders of political prisoners and “counter-revolutionaries.”

When he became the effective czar of the Cuban economy and attempted to create a “new man and woman,” or workers fueled by revolutionary ideals rather than conventional workplace incentives, his plans failed catastrophically and helped make Cuba the economic basket case it remains to this day. Along the way, Che did more than his share to help ban rock and jazz music as “imperialist” forms of expression….

Increasingly, one hopes, Che’s image is becoming openly mocked as the ugly reality of his life outlasts the shiny revolutionary veneer. As Alvaro Vargas Llosa reported five years ago, young Argentines have taken to sporting shirts emblazoned with the putdown, “I have a Che T-Shirt and I don’t know why.” The Australian band The Clap sings of the “Che Guevara T-Shirt Wearer” who has “no idea” of who he is. The Cuban punk band, Porno para Ricardo, which has been arrested for “social dangerousness,” openly declaims the Castro regime and its heroes such as Guevara.

Karl Marx, of all people, once remarked that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Marx argued that history was the key to understanding the real world, and history is certainly no friend to Che Guevara. If his younger admirers study the historical Che–the one reputed to have declared “I feel my nostrils dilate savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood of the enemy”–they will understand that Che’s original influence was indeed tragic, not just for Cubans but for many others as well. And they just might skip the farce phase, out of deference to the many victims of the butcher of La Cabaña.

I hope Nick is right. But I want to see more evidence before I am convinced that Che worship is really declining. Che wasn’t that important in and of himself. He was a second-rate functionary in a second-rate communist regime and later a fourth-rate guerrilla leader and terrorist who failed dismally in his efforts to spread communism beyond Cuba. Had Che never lived, Cuban communism would have been only marginally less oppressive than it actually was. Ultimately, the Cult of Che is deplorable less because of what it says about attitudes towards him than because it is the most blatant manifestation of our much broader tendency to ignore or downplay communist crimes.

As described by Demick, life in North Korea is similar to that in other communist dictatorships. There is the same type of secret police, censorship, gulag-style concentration camps, massive personality cults glorifying the dictator, poverty, and starvation. But each of these miseries is noticeably worse than even in the USSR. For example, the North Korean government has rigid family categorizations that hold people responsible for the supposed “class origins” of their family far more comprehensively than even in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In the USSR, dissidents were often sent to prison or Gulags, or incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals; but, at least after Stalin, some of them could survive long enough to attract attention in the West. Not so in North Korea, where the squelching of any sign of dissent is even swifter and more thorough. And even Stalin didn’t have a personality cult that went as far as that of “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung and his son and successor, “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il.

One story in Demick’s book particularly struck me as illustrating the way in which North Korean repression went beyond that in the USSR. A North Korean college student who later defected and told his story to Demick was admitted to an elite university in Pyongyang. Because he was one of the best and most trusted students at the school, he was allowed access to certain foreign books in the library that were off limits to ordinary people. One of those books (which made a great impression on him) was Gone with the Wind. The Soviet Union also had a long list of books that were restricted to a small elite. Indeed, the North Koreans probably copied this institution from their Soviet teachers. Gone with the Wind, however, was freely available in the USSR (in Russian translation). My late grandmother recalled reading it back in the 1950s, even before the limited liberalization of the “Khrushchev Thaw.” It’s possible that the Soviet censors simply made a mistake, and accidentally overlooked the fact that Margaret Mitchell’s view of the Civil War was very different from the Marxist account endorsed by the Communist Party. Even so, it’s telling that they were less through in this regard than their North Korean counterparts.

This is just one small example of the scope of North Korean repressiveness, even compared to other communist states. But as Demick describes, it has parallels in almost every other aspect of North Korean society. It isn’t easy to surpass Lenin and Stalin in the field of totalitarian oppression. But the Great Leader and Dear Leader managed to pull it off.

NOTE: I should perhaps mention that I am not endorsing the the views Mitchell advocated in Gone with the Wind, many of which I think are abhorrent. I actually spent a good deal of time discussing the book with my grandmother, and explaining that Mitchell’s account of noble slaveowners and contented slaves was far from accurate.

I credit that feeling to two things.  One was that I was working in a Manhattan law firm, and completely buried in learning international tax.  The other was that I had spent the previous several years putting in large amounts of time with Human Rights Watch, both its Americas division and its Helsinki division.  I had done many missions in Yugoslavia, watching the Soviet empire fall apart while watching Yugoslavia fall apart very much upclose, at the village level, and watching it lead to war, affected how I saw the Soviet Union.  I had a huge anxiety that war would break out in the Warsaw Pact; or that it would be a repeat of 1968 – especially a fear of a repeat of the end of Prague Spring, that fear more than anything – or something that I didn’t know, but bad, would happen.

I was also perhaps lulled into a sense of passivity that was somewhat Bush senior’s approach – looking backwards, it had important advantages by treating it as a matter of course – but for me, at least, it felt a little like events were unfolding, not so much as Frank Fukuyama would later say, but more as people like Adam Michnik and the Eastern Europeans intellectuals I knew said it would, if only the US and Western Europe would stay the course.  In Yugoslavia, it was a very different sense; the intellectual elites of Yugoslavia understood very well that the end of the Cold War undercut the existential position of Yugoslavia and so it did.  I had a sense of trepidation, not of liberation and freedom. The profound sense of liberation came later for me, when I finally believed that it was permanent and not a temporary blip.

Not very Reaganite, but then I wasn’t a Reaganite or a con or a neocon then.  The books that were on my mind were George Konrad’s magnificent, but unbearably sad, The Loser and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and, above all, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I had a deep fear that if one looked at it all too closely, someone, the Red Army, someone, somewhere would take it all away again.  I was an editor with Telos, the critical theory journal that had introduced so much of the zamizdat intellectual production into English from Eastern Europe; I knew lots and lots and lots about the intellectual politics there.  It was very hard for me to believe that this was actually real and tangible, and not something so fragile that a little puff could bring the house of cards down.

So I wish I had been more attentive to events, and wish that I could blame it merely on working such long hours in the law firm – but rather, it felt to me like something happening in slow motion across many years.  November 11 was weirdly not so special for me, because I had been involved for so many years, since the early 1980s, with HRW and Telos watching events unfold at the level of civil society activists.

A close friend of mine was there when it happened, though, David, a gay man with AIDS.  I was astounded when he stopped by to see me in New York with photos of himself chipping away at the Wall.  Possibly a little bit cheated – since when was David off partying in Berlin and not me?  He had never been “political” in any sense, not gay rights, not really anything, and I told him I was pretty sure he couldn’t find Bratislava on a map – until AIDS caught him and he became deeply involved in ACTUP.  Since when did he deserve to go celebrate the end of Communism and the Wall?

But David saw in some deep way, as AIDS closed in on him, that being at the fall of the Wall was as an act of liberation even for people otherwise altogether uninvolved in the politics of the Cold War, or the politics of Europe, or any of that.  It was just freedom, and maybe David actually captured its pure spirit – dissociated from politics.  If that is possible, and  I don’t know that it is; actually, I am pretty certain it is not.  But David died just a month later, AIDS caught up with him for good, in the hospice of the San Francisco Zen Center; the Lord bless him and keep him, he was a good man, and so were the monks of the Zen Center who watched over him.

And so, for better and worse, that’s how I remember the fall of the Wall.  Photos of David that I no longer have, pre-digital, gaunt and his long hair swinging round, laughing and singing, wearing some kind of weird poncho that he never would have worn in 80s LA (but of course I might), standing on top of a big pile of cement.  There isn’t any big moral here about freedom and liberty – there is all of that, for me as for others, but in my case it wasn’t associated with the actual moment.  The comprehension of liberation and freedom came later.

First and foremost, Cold War-era Berlin was the most visible demonstration of the superiority of capitalism and democracy over communism and dictatorship. Despite the fact that East Germany had one of the highest standards of living in the Soviet bloc, it had to build a wall to keep its people from fleeing to the capitalist West. By contrast, West Germans and other westerners were free to move to the communist world anytime they wanted. Yet only a tiny handful ever did so. Decisions to “vote with your feet” are often even better indicators of peoples’ true preferences than ballot box voting, since foot voters have better incentives to become well-informed about the alternatives before them. Even more powerful evidence is the reality that many East Germans and others fled from communism even when doing so meant risking their lives.

Second, the Berlin Wall was an important symbol of the way in which communist governments violated the human right to freedom of movement, one of the most important attributes of a free society. If people are forcibly trapped under the rule of the government in whose territory they happen to be born, they are not truly free; rather, they are hostages of their rulers.

Finally, the sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 vividly demonstrated the extent to which communist totalitarianism relied on coercion to maintain its rule. Some Western scholars and leftists contended that most Russians and Eastern Europeans actually supported communism or at least preferred it to the available alternatives. The events of 1989 gave the lie to this notion, though a few writers still defend it today. Once the Soviet government and its puppet states in Eastern Europe signalled that they would no longer suppress opposition by force, the Berlin Wall was quickly torn down, and communist governments throughout Eastern Europe collapsed within months under a tidal wave of popular hostility. Both the communist rulers themselves and many Western observers had been misled by previous widespread expressions of support for communism. They failed to take full account of the fact that those expressions of support were in large part the result of fear. Once the fear dissipated, so too did most of the support. Unfortunately, many scholars and journalists still haven’t learned this crucial lesson. In analyzing places like Cuba and Iran, they too often take public expressions of support for repressive rulers at face value. This is not to say that communist governments had no popular support at all or that decades of communist indoctrination were completely ineffective; far from it. However, the true level of support for such regimes is likely to be much lower than it seems.

Despite all of the above, I am somewhat conflicted about the status of the Berlin Wall as the symbol of communist oppression in the popular imagination. My reservations have to do with the underappreciated fact that the Wall was actually one of communism’s smaller crimes. Between 1961 and 1989, about 100 East Germans were killed trying to escape to the West through Wall. The Wall also trapped several million more Germans in a repressive totalitarian society. These are grave atrocities. But they pale in comparison to the millions slaughtered in gulags, deliberately created famines in the USSR, China, and Ethiopia, and mass executions of kulaks and “class enemies.” The Berlin Wall wasn’t even the worst communist atrocity in East Germany. As historian Norman Naimark has documented, Soviet occupation troops in East Germany raped some 2 million German women, executed thousands of political prisoners (only a minority of whom were Nazis or guilty of war crimes), and imposed extensive forced labor on much of the population. It is true, of course, that German troops committed comparable, and sometimes even greater, atrocities in the USSR. But the one set of wrongs in no way justifies the other. Forced labor and concentration camps continued on a substantial scale even after the Soviets established an “independent” East German state in 1949.

Terrible as the Berlin Wall was, focusing on it as the main example of communist injustice may actually lead people to underestimate how awful that system truly was. It is a bit like portraying Kristallnacht or the Night of the Long Knives (both atrocities had death tolls comparable that of the Berlin Wall) as the main example of Nazi oppression, rather than the Holocaust.

It is important to remember the Berlin Wall and the lessons it teaches. But doing so is only one small part of the task of rectifying the longstanding neglect of communist crimes.

Thanks to the Committee to Free the Leningrand Three, the remaining three were all released by 1985.

In a recent column, my father explained some of the Committee’s unusual tactics. First, they did not adopt the standard legislative approach of merely getting a resolution adopted. A resolution is a one-time thing, but the Committee aimed for continuing pressure. Colorado legislators were invited to join the Committee, which eventually comprised 95 of Colorado’s 100 state representatives and senators. Every member was required to write personal letters, not form letters, to the Soviet authorities, and to the prisoners. Bishop (who started in the House, and then went on to a long tenure in the Senate)  made sure the Committee members kept up the writing.

More information about the samoletchiks and the campaign to free them can be found in recent articles in the Boston Globe  and in the Intermountain Jewish News.

State and local officials who want to support international human rights often have a difficult time finding ways to act effictively without running into conflicts with the federal government’s primary role in foreign relations. The Committee to Free the Leningrad Three provides a good model for constructive local action with global consequences. Today, there are many prisoners of conscience around the world who could be saved by state and local American government activism.

I. Justice for Victims and Perpetrators.

Millions of victims of communism are still alive today. They include former Gulag inmates, forced laborers, dissidents subjected to political repression, ethnic minorities such as the Crimean Tatars who were forcibly deported, and many others. With a few exceptions (principally in Eastern Europe), little has been done to recognize the suffering of these victims or to compensate them for the wrongs they suffered. Obviously, the scale of communist crimes was so vast that complete compensation is impossible. However, the impossibility of perfect compensation is no excuse for doing nothing. After all, the same can be said for the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. Yet extensive efforts have been made to compensate Holocaust survivors and return property confiscated from Jewish and other Nazi victims. The German government has paid reparations to Holocaust survivors and former forced laborers, among others. These efforts at reparations for Nazi crimes surely have many shortcomings. But they far outstrip anything that has been done for the even more numerous victims of communism.

The same can be said for the issue of justice for the perpetrators. The Nuremberg trials punished some of the most important perpetrators of Nazi atrocities. Even after sixty years, US and European officials continue to hunt down Nazi criminals. Yet very little has been done to bring to justice the perpetrators of communist atrocities. This, despite the fact that many of the communist atrocities are much more recent than the Nazi ones, and more relatively high-ranking perpetrators are still alive. As in the Nazi case, it is impossible to capture and punish all of the guilty. And there is the additional problem that some of the worst communist criminals are protected by governments in nations where the communist party is still in power (China and North Korea, among others). Still, the best should not be the enemy of the good. The international community should at least try to punish those communist perpetrators who can be found, while putting pressure on recalcitrant governments to try or extradite the others.

We must do more to give justice to the victims and perpetrators of communist crimes. It isn’t yet too late. But it might well be in a few years, as more members of both groups die of old age.

II. Focusing Attention on Oppression in the Remaining Unreformed Communist Governments.

Most of the world’s communist regimes have either collapsed or reformed. However, at least two unreformed communist governments still remain: Cuba and North Korea. North Korea, in particular, is probably the world’s most oppressive regime, having starved to death at least 1 million of its own people as recently as the 1990s. It also maintains a system of Gulags and secret police that is, if anything, even more draconian than that of the USSR under Stalin. Despite the good press it enjoys among some Western leftists, Castro’s Cuba is only modestly better. Since coming to power in 1959, Castro’s government has executed some 1.5% of Cuba’s population for “political” dissent, while incarcerating another 5.6% in concentration camps. These figures would be even higher if not for the proximity of the United States, which enabled a large part of Cuba’s population to flee. Nonlethal political repression in Cuba is less severe than in North Korea, but still worse than in all but a tiny handful of other governments.

Despite these atrocities, Cuba and North Korea receive only a tiny fraction of the attention that human rights groups and the international community pay to much lesser offenses committed by democratic governments or non-leftist dictatorships. Imagine if, after the fall of Hitler, an unreconstructed Nazi-like regime had remained in place in some small European country, and continued to run concentration camps, a Gestapo-like secret police, and so on. Would not that regime be an international pariah constantly targeted by human rights groups and subjected to severe sanctions by all self-respecting democratic states?

It’s difficult to say whether pressure by human rights groups and Western governments could force Cuba and North Korea to reduce their oppression. However, both regimes have weak economies and both seek to create a positive image in the West. A comprehensive system of sanctions imposed by all democratic states and a massive campaign of shaming might have at least a chance of success.

III. Never Again.

The extensive attention paid to the Nazi crimes has helped sensitize people to the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and extreme nationalism. These evils have not disappeared. But at least the need to oppose them is widely accepted throughout the democratic world. A similar focus on communist crimes might increase recognition of the dangers created by ideologies based on class warfare and socialism (by which I mean full-blown state domination of the economy, not merely government regulation of private industry or a welfare state).

It is unlikely that communism will reappear in the exact form practiced by Lenin, Stalin, or Mao. However, the core ideas of socialism and class warfare are still advocated by various political movements and governments, especially in the Third World; for example, by rulers such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, both of whom have cited the communists as models for their own policies. Sometimes, socialism and class conflict are coupled with extreme nationalism and oppression of minority groups, a combination pioneered by the Nazis. The debate over socialism is far from over. Moreover, future political and technological developments could make a resurgence of socialist totalitarianism more likely.

Of course, the combination of class warfare and socialism doesn’t inevitably lead to mass murder on the scale committed in the USSR, China, and Cambodia. However, they do greatly increase its likelihood. Almost every fully socialist government (by which, again, I mean a government that manage to take control over the vast bulk of the economy) that held on to power for more than a few years ended up murdering a substantial fraction of its population (usually at least 1-2%). Even the relatively moderate government of Yugoslavia -generally considered the least oppressive communist regime – killed some 1 million of its people, according to calculations by political scientist Rudolph Rummel. Indeed, the risk of mass murder associated with full-blown socialism may actually be even greater than that caused by racism or anti-Semitism. Many racist or anti-Semitic regimes have existed for long periods of time without committing mass murder – including the majority of such governments. Nazi Germany was an unusual extreme case – one where mass murder was itself partly facilitated by state control of the economy almost as extensive as that in communist states.

Of course, racism, anti-Semitism, and extreme nationalism are great evils that should be combatted even when they don’t lead to mass murder. Yet the same can be said for socialism and extreme class warfare. Even when socialist governments stop short of mass murder, they still suppress political and economic freedom in a variety of other ways – to say nothing of reducing the standard of living of the people.

In sum, there are many good reasons to increase awareness of communist crimes. Achieving that objective in the face of widespread indifference and occasional hostility will be a difficult task. But those who take the idea of “never again” seriously must not flinch from the challenge.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST WATCH: I suppose I should mention that many of my own relatives are among the victims of communist crimes and potentially could receive compensation for them, if serious compensation programs were established. At least one of my relatives (my late grandmother) also received compensation for Nazi war crimes from the German government.

UPDATE: I suppose I shoulld briefly rebut the silly but inevitable charge that my emphasis on the importance of recognizing communist atrocities is somehow a cover for attempts to discredit domestic liberals. This ploy is akin to saying that criticism of racists, anti-Semites, or Nazis is really just a ploy for discrediting US conservatives. In further response, I will say only that I have always carefully avoided labeling domestic liberals as socialists (to say nothing of communists), have criticized such labeling by others, and have not used that charge myself in my various VC posts and other writings criticizing liberal domestic policies. As people like Harry Truman, JFK, and Henry Jackson recognized, there is no necessary contradiction between being a liberal on domestic policy and a strong opponent of communism.

The Berlin Wall that came down 20 years ago this month was an apt symbol of communism. It represented a historically unprecedented effort to prevent people from “voting with their feet” and leaving a society they rejected. The wall was only the most visible segment of a vast system of obstacles and fortifications: the Iron Curtain, which stretched for thousands of miles along the border of the “Socialist Commonwealth….”

While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans — hostile or sympathetic — actually knew little about communism, and little is said here today about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The media’s fleeting attention to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s matched their earlier indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states….

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology….

In the aftermath of the fall of Soviet communism, many Western intellectuals remain convinced that capitalism is the root of all evil. There has been a long tradition of such animosity among Western intellectuals who gave the benefit of doubt or outright sympathy to political systems that denounced the profit motive and proclaimed their commitment to create a more humane and egalitarian society, and unselfish human beings. The failure of communist systems to improve human nature doesn’t mean that all such attempts are doomed, but improvements will be modest and are unlikely to be attained by coercion.

Hollander expands on his analysis in this longer article.

As he points out, communist atrocities have not received their full due in the West, despite the fact that the victims of communism (including some 100 million dead) far outnumber even those of the Nazis. Part of the reason is that the communists, unlike the Nazis, were perceived as having noble motives. However, this is a poor distinction. After all, Hitler and his supporters also believed they were doing the right thing, every bit as strongly as Lenin or Stalin did.

The second distinction often drawn between the two is that the Nazis killed people because of immutable characteristics such as race and ethnicity, while the communists did not. This argument also fails, for two reasons that I discussed in greater detail in this series of posts. First, Communist regimes often did kill people based on immutable characteristics. For instance, they often murdered people because of their class origins; no one could help being born a “Kulak” or a “bourgeois.” Also, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and several other communist rulers targeted various ethnic minorities for deportation and extermination. Second, it is not clear that the distinction between killing innocent people for immutable characteristics and killing them because of mutable ones carries any moral weight. In my view, the case for distinguishing them falls apart on close inspection (see here and here).

Yet even if one ultimately concludes that the Nazis were somewhat worse than the communists, that still does not justify the massive size of the disparity between the enormous attention paid to the crimes of the former and the relative neglect of the latter.

UPDATE: One of the few Western organizations specifically devoted to promoting public awareness of communist crimes is the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has a website with lots of helpful information. I will probably mark the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall by making a contribution. Political scientist Rudolph Rummel, a leading academic expert on mass murder, has this website with lots of quantitative data on the extent of communist crimes (as well as those of other dictatorships).