The PCF, Stalinism and the Cold War

I must admit my great surprise when I was invited to speak at a conference on Louis Aragon. Aragon, arguably more than any other French intellectual in this century, identified his life and career with Communism. And the opening of the Moscow archives, resulting in what may be termed "what we now know" literature, and the appearance of the so-called Livre noir du Communisme, not to mention Francois Furet's Le Passe d'une illusion, (one may mention Tony Judt's condemnation of Stalinist intellectuals in Past Imperfect here as well) have created, or are symptoms of, a very hostile climate for the study of the Communist past, more so even in France than here. (1) What I want to do here today is evaluate both the nature of the recent polemical literature of which the Livre noir is emblematic, and where we are in terms of the "What we now know" literature; in the process I will refer and try to defend my own research on the party done in the primitive darkness in terms of sources that existed over twenty years ago. The authors of the Livre Noir seem to find the PCF today in a coma but lingering; they appear to hope to put it out of its misery. The book, or compendium, has three distinct theses. One is that crime and repression are of the "essence" of communism as a system anywhere and everywhere it has exercised power. Lenin is held responsible for Stalin's crimes, and an absolute equivalency is established between Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, and even Gorbachev, and it is extended to Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, and Poi Pot. An ancillary conclusion is that communist parties not in power will inevitably perform as parties in power have done if they get the opportunity to do so. Machiavelli said man is everywhere the same. The authors of the Livre noir believe Communists are everywhere the same. Proof offered here is the iniquity of the Comintern and its activities in Spain, but political murders performed by Communists as far afield as Spain, France, and Mexico. Stephane Courtois argues that the Comintern, as much as any Communist regime, was a "totalitarian" enterprise. The second thesis is to establish the comparability and the equivalency in evil of Stalinism, Maoism, and the Nazi genocide, although subsequently some of the authors who collaborated on the volume later disagreed with its editor and author of the introduction, Stephane Courtois on this question. Both systems carried out extermination for ideological goals, selected their enemies for who they were rather than anything they did (Jews and Kulaks), interned their victims in concentration camps, and perpetrated mass murder for its own sake. Francois Furet's Le Passe d'une illusion is primarily concerned with giving a long intellectual pedigree to this thesis, while also demonstrating its empirical reality in communist practice. But I find the third thesis of the Livre noir the most disturbing: it preaches the iniquity of utopian forms of thought as inherently perverse and destructive; both Nazism and Communism stand as indicators of the dangers of espousing doctrines that dare to imagine any ideal human society. It seems to me perverse to equate Nazi and Communist notions of utopia, and there is a serious question whether, without utopian thought, any progressive social movement would be possible. (2) Aragon is a target of the Livre noir: He is mentioned at least four times, for his poems in praise of the GPU, of Thorez, and of Stalin; Martin Malia, in his introduction to the American edition, questions why Aragon is praised and republished today in France, and his politics ignored, when former Nazi sympathizers are dismissed as beyond the pale. I must admit to having received a quite contrary personal education in my childhood from Communists among my parents' friends, which was confirmed when I set out to write a book about the PCE The Communists I knew growing up were profoundly humanist; and the former French Communists I interviewed, including Pierre Daix and Dominique Desanti, with whom I am honored to appear today, seemed to me little different. …