A brutal image, to be sure. Yet it is only one image from one camp in one year of one Communist nation's history ‹ an image quickly obscured when viewed next to the seventy-year reign of terror that was the Marxist-Leninist nightmare. From the USSR to China, the satellites of Eastern Europe, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, and over to Latin America and the continent of Africa, Communism ruled with an iron fist over a third of mankind for the greater part of the twentieth century. It claimed the lives of an estimated 100 million men, women, and children, brutalized tens of millions more, and ruined the lives of countless others. "The Communist record offers the most colossal case of political carnage in history," writes Martin Malia in the foreword of The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999); it is a "tragedy of planetary dimensions." 

To most Western intellectuals, however, the Communist record is the great invisible tragedy of our time. There has never been any real outrage over the gulags, over the government-created famines in the Soviet Union and China which together were responsible for some 50 million deaths, no outrage over the barbarous massacre of innocent villagers by the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge, the relentless purgings and executions of political dissidents or the horrid prison conditions common to every single regime that sprang from Marxist-Leninist ideology. 

Indeed, the crimes, terror, and repression which continue to this day in Communist nations are all but ignored. How many of us are aware of the huge concentration camps that are in operation right now in western China, or of the Chinese government's relentless religious persecutions? How many are aware that in North Korea it is a crime to emigrate, that it is not uncommon in North Korean concentration camps for prisoners to be tortured, starved (and forced to scrounge around for toads, rats, and earthworms), used for slave labor, or used as moving targets for shooting practice? How many are aware of the psychological torture used on political prisoners in Cuba, or that in the high-security Cuban prison camp of Boniato, female political prisoners find it necessary to smear themselves with excrement to avoid being raped? 

No, the outrage isn't there. Instead we are encouraged by journalists and politicians to support Fidel Castro and return to him a six-year old boy whose mother drowned in shark-infested waters so that he might have a childhood in a free country. Professors and historians tell us that the big lessons of the Cold War are that too many Americans were suckered in by demagogues like Joe McCarthy, that our involvement in Viet Nam was unjustified, that Ronald Reagan was a simpleton who imagined all the evil in the Evil Empire and would have blown up the planet had it not been for cooler, wiser heads ‹ the same cooler, wiser heads who laughed at Reagan's "absurd" prediction that the Soviet Union would collapse in their lifetime. 

Communism is the great invisible tragedy of the 20th century for three main reasons. First, for a very long time much of the Western intelligentsia could not bring itself to believe the truth of the horrors in Communist regimes ‹ they were quick, rather, to dismiss the facts as creations of right-wing, anti-Communist spite, thus forging an intellectual environment based on willful ignorance of the truth. Second, in our value-neutral age many intellectuals find it difficult to pass any kind of moral judgment on Communist ideology, believing it can be understood, as Martin Malia says, "as the pure product of social progress," and thereby dissolving the blame for its crimes, terror, and repression in a murky solution of moral ambiguity and historical inevitability. Third, a great number of people still cling religiously to the fantasy that Marxism-Leninism is innocent at its heart, that Stalinism was a corruption and not an outgrowth, that all the death and destruction in Communist nations over the decades and throughout the world were purely the result of isolated power-grabbers and cultural factors. This tendency is particularly strong, naturally, among leftists who still believe strongly in the (pseudo) science of human history and who refuse to see that Marxism-Leninism is a deadly brew. 

The most harmful reverberation of this denial, relativism, and wishful-thinking has been the miseducation of whole generations. Unaware of (or unperturbed by) the extent of evil perpetrated by Communist regimes, Western scholars have allowed heaps of evidence to molder in obscurity. With rare exceptions like Robert Conquest (Harvest of Sorrow, 1987; The Great Terror,1991; Stalin: Breaker of Nations, 1992), and Richard Pipes, Baird Research Professor of History (The Russian Revolution, 1996) few historians have taken it upon themselves to deal with the facts of Communist terror and repressions and present them in digestible form to the literate public. 

It is this pandemic ignorance of the truth of Communist crime, terror, and repression which makes a book like The Black Book of Communism the big splash that it is. A prodigious work, The Black Book is a compilation of smaller historical essays by six French and Eastern European scholars. Originally published in the French as Le livre noir du Communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression, it was described by the New York Times' Tony Judt as "an 800-page compendium of the crimes of Communist regimes worldwide, recorded and analyzed in ghastly detail..." Judt continued, "No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism, and those who had begun to forget will be forced to remember anew." "Ghastly detail" does not begin to do justice to the chilling statistics and accounts of murder, torture, and starvation that are presented in The Black Book. The statistics begin to pile on early; before one is finished with the first part of the book, which deals with Soviet Russia, one's mind grows numb to the numbers. It is the personal accounts from prisoners, soldiers, and various government officials ‹ including Lenin, Stalin, and other Communist leaders ‹ which bring these numbing statistics back home to their horrific reality. Arranged regionally, The Black Book, after covering the famines, purges, gulags, and executions which claimed at least 20 million lives in the Soviet Union, moves on to Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. 

A few salient details found among the pages ofThe Black Book underscore the ignorance of Communist terror that characterizes mainstream Western perceptions of the Cold War. First, we learn in the book that Rudolf Hess, the organizer of Aushwitz, received an extensive collection of reports from the Reichstag in Germany concerning the set-ups and methods of Soviet concentration camps; Lenin invented the concentration camp; Hitler learned a great deal from the Soviets about handling "undesirables" during his dealings with Stalin in the mid 1930s. Second, we learn that the most murderous famine in the history of the world, which took the lives of up to 43 million Chinese in1959-61, was the direct result of Mao Zedong¹s Great Leap Forward ‹ agricultural collectivization under the Chinese Communists was disastrous, just as it was in the USSR in the 1920s and 30s and just as it is today in North Korea, where 2 million have already perished as a result of famine. Third, we get a look at the atrocities of the Viet Cong, who massacred 3000 innocent villagers during the Tet Offensive in 1968, and who, after "liberating" Saigon in 1975, set up a system of "reeducation camps" in which a million students, intellectuals, monks, and political dissidents were imprisoned in subhuman conditions, many of them tortured brutally and a good number killed. Nobody who reads The Black Book can come away satisfied that the Western intelligentsia is doing an admirable job dealing with the facts of Communist history in the post-Cold War era. 

The Black Book of Communism, powerful as it is, may not have much of an effect on the herds of journalists and academics who for decades have made careers out of towing the left-wing line. As St. Augustine points out, many of "the intelligent are infected by a gross mental disorder which makes them defend the irrational workings of their minds as if it were logic and truth itself, even when the evidence has been put before them as plainly as is humanly possible." To educate such people takes more than a single book; it requires, rather "an extended exposition of the obvious, as if we were not presenting it for people to look at, but for them to handle with their eyes shut" ‹ too ambitious a project at this stage in the game. 

But those of us who were just kids when Ronald Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall have the chance to learn most of Communism's history afresh. With fewer preconceived notions and inchoate ideological loyalties, we can more readily deal with the evidence the way it was meant to be dealt with, we can build up a body of scholarship worthy of the subject's historical significance, and we can help to ensure that future generations of schoolchildren are not miseducated with untruths about the destructive potency of ideology divorced from healthy humility before God and history. 

To begin with, students who want a fuller picture of the reality behind the Iron Curtain than most of their 20th century history professors will give them should take a look at The Black Book of Communism. They also might take a look at another recently published book, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, by Brian Crozier, which shatters many myths about the allegedly isolated and unconnected ideological, political, and military histories of Communist regimes around the globe. And we also should not shy away from resurrecting older texts which, outside certain circles of conservatives and anti-Communists have been largely forgotten, among them Whittaker Chambers' Witness and, of course, Solzhenitsyn's monumental Gulag Archipelago. 

Next, and more importantly, the potential historians among us should seriously consider getting involved in Cold War research, particularly in the field of the domestic histories of Communist regimes ‹ a field which, needless to say, is being neglected far too much. Those of us at Harvard can, more specifically, take advantage of the great resources available to us in our libraries, several of which house large collections of Soviet and other Communist archives. Indeed, the English translation of The Black Book of Communism was the work of the Harvard Project for Cold War Studies (HPCWS), which was founded in 1997 in order to promote "archival research in former East-bloc countries and...to expand and enrich what is known about Cold War events and themes." HPCWS has a website, www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws, which tells a great deal about ongoing projects and opportunities for scholars. 

Hopefully enough young scholars are sensitive to the importance of remembering the terrible lessons of history, and our generation will rise to the challenge of researching and educating ourselves and others in the murderous nightmare of 20th century Communism. As the survivors of Hitler's Holocaust remind us, we should "never forget" all those men, women, and children who were, and continue to be, sacrificed for the sake of dark ideological adventures. At the moment, the story of Communist terror and repression is being largely forgotten by cadres of self-deluding intellectuals. But the facts are out there, waiting to be dusted off, examined, and presented with dignity before the judgment seat of history.