Central to Furet's argument is the belief that in a Europe shaken by World War I, Communism and Fascism were propping each other up. While the totalitarian nature of Stalin's Russia is undeniable, I find the thesis of "totalitarian twins" both wrong and unproductive. To sustain it, Furet is bound to twist facts. Though he recognizes that Mussolini reached power through a compromise with traditional elites and that Hitler had the backing of big business, the author hotly denies that Fascism and Nazism could be rotten products of capitalism. The Nazi-Soviet pact is for him perfect proof of complicity between the two systems, but the Munich agreement--for which he has all sorts of justifications--is nothing of the sort. Such double standards prevail throughout his book. Notably, in dealing with Spain, Furet is harsh on Soviet action but full of indulgence, nay, understanding, for the British conservatives and their strategy of nonintervention, which insured the victory of Franco.

The basic weakness of both The Black Book of Communism and The Passing of an Illusion is their incapacity to explain anything. If you look at Communism as merely the story of crimes, terror and repression, to borrow the subtitle of the Black Book, you are missing the point. The Soviet Union did not rest on the gulag alone. There was also enthusiasm, construction, the spread of education and social advancement for millions; when this momentum was lost in the Brezhnev years the system was close to the end of its tether. Similarly, it is impossible to grasp the fascination of outsiders for the Soviet myth and their reluctance to see the reality if you don't view them in their own environment. If you ignore the Great Depression, the strikes and other struggles against exploitation, the colonial oppression and deadly poverty, the wars in Algeria or Indochina--in short, if, like these authors, you idealize the Western world--you cannot comprehend why millions of the best and brightest rallied behind the red flag or why a good section of the Western left turned a blind eye to the crimes committed in its name. History is understanding, not just propaganda.

Which brings us back to the Hundred Million. Propaganda ought to be countered, though not by yet more comparisons with Nazism. If we were to produce another Black Book, one to name misdeeds perpetrated under capitalist regimes, there would be no need to go back to the Industrial Revolution. Sticking just to our cruel century, there are two world wars and numerous massacres, ranging from Armenia in 1915 through Indonesia, with its slaughter of more than half a million, to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. And since, in this comparison, the accounts are not limited to murder and executions, each annual UN Human Development Report brings us stories of lives lost or shortened through disease, lack of clean water, starvation--in short, through poverty in our increasingly unequal world. Contrary to the tale told by the establishment, young people must be shown that what is immoral and dangerous--because of the ecological limits of our planet--is not the attempt to change our society radically but the willingness to preserve it precisely as it is.

Yet a balancing of corpses is no solution: Even if the victims were a small fraction of the Hundred Million, the wound would be unforgivable and unforgettable. While the criminality of capitalism may be no discovery to us, socialism was supposed to open a new era, and these crimes were committed in its name. It can be objected that socialism could not have died in Eastern Europe because, if we define it as mastery of the working people over their work and their fate, it never lived there. That is right but not sufficient. Nor is it enough to emphasize, again rightly, Russia's backwardness, its isolation, the resulting task of primitive accumulation. We must proceed much further in our exploration, look critically at the Leninist conception of the party and move beyond it. There should be no taboos whatsoever, and it would be most un-Marxist if Marx himself were not questioned in this re-examination. The whole exercise, however, is worthwhile only on two conditions: First, the judgment, however stern and ruthless, must be made not in the void, in the abstract, but in historical context, taking into account real conditions and the available alternatives. Second, it must serve a practical purpose, so that when the people next take power, it will be to exercise it themselves. In other words, democracy must be not the crowning of the revolutionary process but its central element from the very beginning of the transformation.

For our aim--let us not be ashamed to say so--is to revive the belief in collective action and in the possibility of radical transformation of our lives. On the other hand, the ambition of many is to take advantage of the circumstances, of the terrible heritage, to destroy the Promethean spirit of humankind. You feel it while reading their prose. In his foreword to the Black Book, Martin Malia actually proclaims that "any realistic accounting of Communist crime would effectively shut the door on Utopia." Furet the historian is too wise to accept Francis Fukuyama's nonsense about the end of history. One day, he concludes, humankind will resume its search. But, he qualifies, not in our time: "Here we are, condemned to live in the world as it is." This, let us hope, is their illusion.

What should we name the Parisian providers of this "French flu" and others who spread it on this side of the ocean? To call them scavengers of death would be too Stalinist in style. But it seems fair to describe them as keepers of the cult of TINA--the mindset that There Is No Alternative--preachers of human resignation. Parading as champions of freedom and questers after truth, they are in fact the obedient servants of the established order.

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