While The Sword and the Shield simply makes use of that ideology, The Black Book of Communism and The Passing of an Illusion are helping to produce it, and it is not entirely surprising that they should be French. The establishment everywhere has the art of getting the ideological services it requires, but these were needed more in France, which had a strong Communist Party and which in 1968 was shaken by a student rising and a big general strike. When, in the mid-seventies, a structural economic crisis came on top of ideological questioning, the system called to the rescue the so-called "new philosophers." Having primitively chanted "Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Lin Piao," they simply reversed the slogan and blamed Marx for the concentration camps. They provided no more than seasoning for a mixture of von Hayek, Karl Popper and Solzhenitsyn. But as a theme of sustained propaganda, their warning--you may rebel individually, but if you act collectively to alter society you will end in the gulag--was very effective. Still, its effects did wear off.

With discontent growing again in the nineties and the collapse of the Soviet empire offering an opportunity, a new campaign has been launched to convince people that to move beyond the confines of existing society is terribly dangerous. Here you have two illustrations of this drive, one very vulgar, the other more sophisticated.

It may at first glance seem difficult to pass judgment on The Black Book of Communism, because this collection of essays is very uneven. Nicolas Werth, the author of the longest piece, on the Soviet Union, is a creditable historian. He is aware of the passions and discontent unleashed in war-ravaged Russia and is even ready to recognize that the "Judeo-Bolsheviks," as their enemies called them, were sometimes also the victims of that violence. His biases, however, are striking. His portrait of Lenin as a fanatic is caricature, and he manages to write a chapter on the civil war without once mentioning foreign intervention. On the other hand, though it does not suit his thesis of "continuity," he does admit that there is a qualitative difference in repression between Lenin's and Stalin's times. It is unfortunate that he agreed to take part in the exercise of propaganda staged by the chief editor of this book.

The main snag with Stéphane Courtois is not the mediocre scholarship of his contributions, of which the chapter on the "Comintern in Action" he co-writes is a good example. Instead of a serious analysis of how the instrument of world revolution became a tool of Soviet policy and how parties with a real following were turned into Moscow's puppets, we get a potted history in which, say, the Hungarian revolution of 1919 becomes a sinister story about the action of bullies called "Lenin's Boys." It is not even that Courtois tries to equate the elimination of the kulaks as a class with the racial extermination of the Jews or, ignoring time and population factors, insists that the Communists killed more people than the Nazis and, therefore, must be equated with them. (This revisionism, incidentally, leads logically to an entirely new vision of World War II; there are already signs of it in this book, notably in the authors' greater sympathy, in the chapter dealing with Yugoslavia, for the Chetnik Col. Draza Mihailovic, who collaborated with the German occupiers of his land, rather than Tito, who didn't.) The real trouble is that the whole purpose of this book is, only too obviously, to pile up corpses--victims of bullets, the camps or starvation--to reach the total of 100 million dead (the Chinese provide two-thirds of that total, the bulk accounted for by the famine of 1959-61). Our preachers will use this magic figure to frighten the younger generation with the fate that awaits them should they not play according to the established rules.

We shall return to this 100 million mark, but even in polemics it is better to deal with an opponent of some stature. Stéphane Courtois is known as the "poor man's Furet"; indeed, if François Furet had not died in 1997, he would have presided over this whole operation. Since Furet's Passing of an Illusion, a bestseller in France [see Singer, April 17, 1995], has just been published in this country, one might as well tackle the master rather than his epigones. Furet was an original, if controversial, historian of the French Revolution. A member of the CP in his younger days and then a left-wing socialist for years, he ended his career as a pillar of the establishment, a member of the Academy in France, an "Immortal," and in this country holder of a chair financed by the very unprogressive Olin Foundation. He was also busy preaching that the age of revolution was over. Whereas his more radical colleagues maintained that the French Revolution, bourgeois by nature, was unfinished by definition, he argued that it ended in 1880, when Bastille Day became a national holiday, or otherwise in the eighties, when François Mitterrand brought France into consensus politics. In writing this book about the Soviet Union and Communism, for which he had no academic credentials, Furet probably wanted to show rival historians, who view 1917 as a continuation of 1789, how their dream turned into a nightmare. He apparently also wanted to understand his own earlier infatuation.

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