Was communism as bad as Nazism?

A debate between Anne Applebaum and Anatol Lieven

by Anne Applebaum / October 20, 2000 / Leave a comment

Dear Anne,

Let me be clear. I hate communism. I am vicariously proud of my great uncle’s fight against the Bolsheviks during the civil war in the Baltic from 1918-20, and of my father’s role in helping to undermine communism as head of the Russian and later the East European Services of the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s. I went as a journalist to report on the Mujahedin fight against Soviet occupation in the late 1980s, and the Baltic independence struggle of the early 1990s, partly as a result of this anti-communist sentiment. And I agree with every word of Nicolas Werth’s recent chronicle of Soviet atrocities in The Black Book of Communism, which destroys for good the left-wing fiction that a line can be drawn between the “good” Lenin and the “wicked” Stalin.

But I also agree with Werth in rejecting the new conventional wisdom-represented in the Black Book by St?ane Courtois-which asserts that communism was worse than Nazism. Courtois argues that there is an essential similarity between communism and Nazism, and then, by comparing the number of alleged victims, comes up with a neat figure of 95m dead for communism against 25m for Nazism. Ergo, communism must have been worse.

Courtois’s approach has four main flaws. First, it blurs the distinction between directly-willed actions and unintended consequences. The Soviet famine of 1921-2 was a consequence of the revolution and civil war, but it was not willed by the Bolsheviks, who even sought western aid. However, its victims are simply added by Courtois to those of the artificially created Ukrainian/Cossack famine of 1932-33. Second, there is a dangerous looseness in Courtois’s use of the word “genocide”-a looseness characteristic of the old hard left. Third, Courtois fails to examine the very different nature of communist and Nazi ideology, above all on issues of race and nationality. Marxism preaches the common progress of mankind towards communism, which could not be more different from the Nazi beliefs in racial superiority and war as a good in itself.

Finally, Courtois and company fail to draw proper distinctions between communist regimes in different countries and at different times. To an unwary reader, the Soviet Union under Brezhnev might seem broadly the same as under Stalin; and Castro the same as Pol Pot. Understanding both the multi-nationalism and the not wholly unreal “socialist legality” of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years is crucial to understanding…

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Comments

Jerzy Bialowas
March 29, 2013 at 18:34
V.good Anne. I agree with you 100%. I just wanted to add the communism would be still alive in Poland and the rest of the eastern Europe but it run out of steam. What I mean was lack of food!. That was one of the main reasons the communists gave up power. The polish pope helped too. Jerzy Bialowas
Ilya
June 11, 2013 at 03:59
Dear Anatol, I can assure you that Sakharov and most other members of dissident Soviet intelligentsia from the 80's would support Anne's position (including many WW2 veterans), not yours. Unfortunately "Russophobia" that you seem to denounce has been well-deserved, as the trajectory Russia has been following after the fall of the SU so amply demonstrates. Also what you seem to miss is the fact that Nazism was a local and completely irrational, even random - and thus necessarily short-lived - ideology and regime, as opposed to an all-pervasive, all-too-seductive global evil of Communism. Nazism is not scalable, so to say, whereas Communism is. Nazism is gone for good, but C. is alive and well, always reinventing itself. So which one is more dangerous? Dear Anne, I am amazed, and even a little relieved (though not by much - this is a losing battle) you are as prominent as this (I have jumped to this site from some "deep thinkers" list where your rank - while not comparable to El Baradei's - is still high.) I still have a copy of Gulag with your inscription.
Jacob Field
February 20, 2016 at 16:24
Nazism came from Communism., The concentration camps were copied from Gulags. Some would say being gassed to death is less painful than being starved to death, both are evil in my view. Communists killed far more than Nazism and lasted much longer. Most of the poverty in the world is a result of Marxist polices one way or another. So communism was far worse than the short evil of Nazism. Remember the USSR invaded Poland with the Nazi, no USSR no Nazi party.
Stenka Razin
May 4, 2016 at 01:05
Nazism was much worse than communism. Nazis managed to massacre only 6 million Jews (my people) in 1930s–940s, not speaking of damage they caused to neigbouring countries. By contrast, the whole Stalin repressions took the toll of 4–5 million, out of which 1/3 were executed. I quote the official Soviet data. Please, don't write that you have better information – you can't, since no other exists, what you have is speculation people (so-called British scholars never been in the Soviet Union) like to blindly believe in. Russophobia is basically the same as antisemitism. All apologies were given. It's not the fault of Russia that some countries continue to live under 'Russian' or 'communist occupation' even 25 years after.
1. Simon
  September 12, 2017 at 12:28
  But Mao killed about 60 million people, because of starvation and executions. Communism is ALOT worse than nazism.