The Volokh Conspiracy

In response to my memoir about emigrating from the Soviet Union, a Chinese-American reader e-mailed me the following [posted with permission of the author]:

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.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) runs a fascinating website that posts memoirs of Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived over the last 40 years. A friend of the family who runs the site asked me to write up my own story for them. Since HIAS helped out my parents when we first arrived in the US back in 1979, I was more than happy to do so.

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.

The Independent has an article summarizing a new study of Chinese Communist dictator Mao Zedong’s mass murders that concludes that he killed even more people than previously thought:

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.

Today is May 1, May Day. Back in 2007 and 2008, I advocated the idea of transforming this long-time communist holiday into Victims of Communism Day – a day of remembrance for the victims of history’s bloodiest ideology. This year, several bloggers are joining in an effort to commemorate the occasion. Jonathan Wilde of Distributed Republic deserves credit for organizing this effort.

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.

Economist Bryan Caplan wonders why socialism ever developed any broad appeal, given the weaknesses of the idea of the “New Socialist Man”:

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.

Che Guevara is one of the few communist leaders who still has a broad following in the West. Go to any college campus or hip neighborhood and you’ll see plenty of Che T-shirts, Che posters, and even the occasional Che cell phone message. This is extremely unfortunate, since Che was in fact a brutal mass murderer and terrorist, as I explained in this post. Reason editor Nick Gillespie points this out as well, but also cites evidence suggesting that Che worship may be declining:

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.

Barbara Demick’s recent book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, is an excellent account of daily life in for ordinary people in one of the world’s two remaining unreformed communist states. It’s based on extensive interviews with North Koreans who were fortunate enough to escape to South Korea through China.

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 was a freshman in college, watching this Peter Jennings broadcast with my roommates in 75 Holder Hall with a sense of complete astonishment that the world could shift so suddenly– all the while trying to adjust the rabbit ears of our early 1970s TV to try to get better reception.

I’m sorry I wasn’t and I don’t quite know what happened.  I don’t say this to be flippant in the least.  I knew that big things were happening, but unlike many others’ experiences, it all seemed very gradual to me and finally anti-climactic.  It seemed like something that was gradually sliding into place that had been sliding into place for a long time but was also terribly fragile.

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.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. 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. 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.

Last month in Massachusetts, my father, Jerry Kopel, received the Soviet Jewry Freedom Award from the Russian Jewish Community Foundation. He was honored along with his fellow former legislator, Tilman Bishop. (Bishop is now an elected Regent of the University of Colorado. He is a conservative Republican from Grand Junction; my father is a liberal Denver Democrat.) In 1979, my father and Bishop created the Committee to Free the Leningrad Three; these were Jewish and Christian refuseniks who had attempted to flee the Soviet Union in 1970. They were part of a group of 10 which bought all the seats on a small charter plane, and planned to overpower the pilot and escape to Scandanavia. Their plot was thwarted at the airport, before they ever boarded the plane. The group was known as the “samoletchiks”–airplane guys. By 1980, 7 of the 10 had been released due to international pressure. Five of them were part of a swap involving some captured Soviet spies; the other two had completed their prison terms. 

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.

In my last post, I discussed the neglect of communist atrocities. Although communist governments murdered and repressed even more people than the Nazis, their crimes have gotten only a tiny fraction of the public awareness and recognition extend to the latter. But does that neglect matter? After all, the major communist regimes have either collapsed (the USSR and its Eastern European satellites) or evolved into much less oppressive forms (China and Vietnam). But there are several reasons why increasing recognition of communist crimes should be an important priority: providing justice for victims and perpetrators; alleviating the oppression of the unreformed communist governments that still exist today; and ensuring that comparable atrocities are never repeated. The twentieth anniversary of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe is as good a time as any to reflect on these points.

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.

This fall is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and other events associated with the collapse of communism. Paul Hollander, a sociologist who has written numerous works on communism and Western attitudes towards it, has an op ed in the Washington Post, noting some of the lessons of the communist experience, and the failure of most Westerners to fully appreciate them:

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).

Two of Leon Trotsky’s best-known quotes are his statement that “Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation” (made famous, especially among libertarians, in part because it was quoted by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom), and the very next sentence in the same paragraph: “The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.” My GMU colleague Bryan Caplan helpfully provides the context of these quotes, from Trotsky’s 1936 book, The Revolution Betrayed:

During these years [since Stalin took power in the USSR] hundreds of Oppositionists, both Russian and foreign, have been shot, or have died of hunger strikes, or have resorted to suicide. Within the last twelve years, the authorities have scores of times announced to the world the final rooting out of the opposition. But during the “purgations” in the last month of 1935 and the first half of 1936, hundreds of thousands of members of the [Communist] party were again expelled, among them several tens of thousands of “Trotskyists.” The most active were immediately arrested and thrown into prisons and concentration camps. As to the rest, Stalin, through Pravda, openly advised the local organs not to give them work. In a country where the sole employer is the state, this means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

Bryan points out that this context doesn’t reflect well on a man who is still admired by many leftists and even a few ex-leftist conservatives:

Worth noticing: While Trotsky meant what libertarians think he meant, the man’s sheer evil still shines through. He doesn’t mind if the socialist state starves human beings. He was delighted to wield this power when ran the Red Army. No, Trotsky is outraged because the Soviet Union is turning its totalitarian might upon fellow Communists. Was there ever a better time to snark that “Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword”?

As I explained in this series of posts, Trotsky was a brutal mass murderer who objected to political repression only when it targeted his fellow communists. He also opposed Stalin in part because he thought Stalin wasn’t repressive enough. Any residual admiration for Trotsky is sorely misplaced.

Nonetheless, the translation of The Revolution Betrayed quoted by Bryan seems to be less damning than the wording quoted by Hayek. In Hayek’s version, Trotsky is quoted as writing that “Where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation” (emphasis added). Since Trotsky of course favored an economic system where the state is the sole employer, this version of the quote implies that he also favored the inevitable “slow starvation” of oppositionists. By contrast, the translation linked by Bryan states that “Where the sole employer is the State, this [referring to Stalin's policy of denying employment to oppositionists] means death by slow starvation.” The translation quoted by Bryan doesn’t seem to say that opposition means death by starvation in any society where the state is the sole employer, but only if that state is governed by Stalin’s policy of denying work to “oppositionists.” And, as we can see later in the same chapter, Trotsky did not propose to abolish the government’s monopoly over employment, but merely to replace the Stalinist “bureaucratic” class with a different set of economic central planners. The latter might potentially have a more liberal policy on employing oppositionists. Which version is correct? The only way to tell is to check the original Russian text of The Revolution Betrayed. If anyone can find it online, please let me know and I would be happy to do the checking myself.

Even the more charitable version of this passage still doesn’t paint Trotsky in a flattering light. After all, as Bryan notes, the only “oppositionists” whose right to dissent Trotsky wanted to protect were communists who disagreed with Stalin’s party line. Towards the end of the same chapter of The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky calls for “a revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks.” Non-Soviet (i.e. – non-communist) parties need not apply. He had no objection to the “slow starvation” (or even outright execution) of non-communist oppositionists, including even non-communist socialists. Indeed, when he was still in power, Trotsky often ordered such starvation and execution of political opponents himself.

UPDATE: I have found the Russian text of The Revolution Betrayed online here. In my judgment as a native speaker of the language, the Russian version is closer to the translation cited by Bryan than the one used by Hayek. Here is the original Russian text of the relevant sentence:

В стране, где единственным работодателем является государство, эта мера означает медленную голодную
смерть. Старый принцип: кто не работает, тот не ест, заменен новым: кто не повинуется, тот не ест.

Here’s my own translation:

In a country where the state is the sole employer, this policy [referring to Stalin's policy] means a slow death by starvation [for oppositionists]. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

The key Russian phrase “эта мера” literally means “this measure.”

UPDATE #2: Some commenters on this and previous posts about Trotsky ask whether anyone really admires Trotsky anymore. In reality, quite a few modern leftists still do. Christopher Hitchens (see here and here) is one example. As Clive James points out, Trotksy “lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism.”