- Pipes. Richard.
Communism: A History.
New York: Doubleday, [2001] 2003.
ISBN 978-0-8129-6864-4.
-
This slim volume (just 175 pages) provides, for its size, the best
portrait I have encountered of the origins of communist theory, the
history of how various societies attempted to implement it in the
twentieth century, and the tragic consequences of those grand scale
social experiments and their aftermath. The author, a retired
professor of history at Harvard University, is one of the most eminent
Western scholars of Russian and Soviet history. The book examines
communism as an ideal, a program, and its embodiment
in political regimes in various countries. Based on the
ideals of human equality and subordination of the individual to the
collective which date at least back to Plato, communism, first set out
as a program of action by Marx and Engels, proved itself almost
infinitely malleable in the hands of subsequent theorists and
political leaders, rebounding from each self-evident failure (any one
of which should, in a rational world, have sufficed to falsify a
theory which proclaims itself “scientific”), morphing into
yet another infallible and inevitable theory of history. In the words
of the immortal Bullwinkle J. Moose, “This time for sure!”
Regardless of the nature of the society in which the
communist program is undertaken and the particular
variant of the theory adopted, the consequences
have proved remarkably consistent: emergence of an elite
which rules through violence, repression, and fear;
famine and economic stagnation; and collapse of the
individual enterprise and innovation which are the
ultimate engine of progress of all kinds. No better
example of this is the comparison of North and South
Korea on p. 152. Here are two countries which
started out identically devastated by Japanese occupation
in World War II and then by the Korean War, with identical
ethnic makeup, which diverged in the subsequent decades to such
an extent that famine killed around two million people in
North Korea in the 1990s, at which time the GDP per capita
in the North was around US$900 versus US$13,700 in the
South. Male life expectancy at birth in the North was
48.9 years compared to 70.4 years in the South, with an infant
mortality rate in the North more than ten times that of
the South. This appalling human toll was modest compared
to the famines and purges of the Soviet Union and
Communist China, or the apocalyptic fate of Cambodia
under Pol Pot.
The Black Book of Communism
puts the total death toll due to communism in the
twentieth century as between 85 and 100 million,
which is half again greater than that of both
world wars combined. To those who say “One cannot
make an omelette without breaking eggs”, the
author answers, “Apart from the fact that
human beings are not eggs, the trouble is that no
omelette has emerged from the slaughter.”
(p. 158)
So effective were communist states in their “big lie”
propaganda, and so receptive were many Western intellectuals to its
idealistic message, that many in the West were unaware of this human
tragedy as it unfolded over the better part of a century. This book
provides an excellent starting point for those unaware of the reality
experienced by those living in the lands of communism and those for
whom that epoch is distant, forgotten history, but who remain, like
every generation, susceptible to idealistic messages and unaware of
the suffering of those who attempted to put them into practice in
the past.
Communism proved so compelling to intellectuals (and,
repackaged, remains so) because it promised hope for a
new way of living together and change to a rational
world where the best and the brightest—intellectuals
and experts—would build a better society, shorn of
all the conflict and messiness which individual liberty
unavoidably entails. The author describes this book as
“an introduction to Communism and, at the same
time, its obituary.” Maybe—let's
hope so. But this book can serve an even more
important purpose: as a cautionary tale of how the best
of intentions can lead directly to the worst of outcomes.
When, for example, one observes in the present-day politics
of the United States the creation, deliberate exacerbation,
and exploitation of crises to implement a political
agenda; use of engineered financial collapse to advance
political control over the economy and pauperise and
render dependent upon the state classes of people
who would otherwise oppose it; the creation, personalisation,
and demonisation of enemies replacing substantive debate
over policy; indoctrination of youth in collectivist
dogma; and a number of other strategies right out of Lenin's
playbook, one wonders if the influence of that evil mummy has truly
been eradicated, and wishes that the message in this book were more
widely known there and around the world.
March 2009 