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Kristen R Ghodsee is a professor of
Russian and East European Studies at
the University of Pennsylvania, and the
author of Red Hangover: Legacies of 20th
Century-Communism (2017).
Scott Sehon is a professor of philosophy
at Bowdoin College, and the author of
Free Will and Action Explanation: A Non-
Causal, Compatibilist Account (2016).
3,300 words
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Millions of Russians and eastern Europeans now
believe that they were better off under
communism. What does this signify?
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‘[T]he people who struggle against what we call totalitarian
regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. ey, too, need
certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand,
to provoke collective tears.’
Milan Kundera, e Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
T he public memory of 20th-century communism is a battleground. Two
ideological armies stare at each other across a chasm of mistrust and
misunderstanding. Even though the Cold War ended almost 30 years ago, a
struggle to define the truth about the communist past has continued to rage
across the United States and Europe.
On the Left stand those with some sympathy for socialist ideals and the
popular opinion of hundreds of millions of Russian and east European
Tweet
citizens nostalgic for their state socialist pasts. On the Right stand the
committed anti-totalitarians, both east and west, insisting that all
experiments with Marxism will always and inevitably end with the gulag.
Where one side sees shades of grey, the other views the world in black and
white.
Particularly in the US, labour supporters and social liberals who desire an
expanded role for the state hope to save the democratic socialist baby from
the authoritarian bathwater. Fiscal conservatives and nationalists deploy
memories of purges and famines to discredit even the most modest
arguments in favour of redistributive politics.
For those wishing to paint 20th-century communism as an unmitigated evil,
ongoing ethnographic and survey research in eastern Europe contradicts any
simple narrative. Even as early as 1992, the Croatian journalist Slavenka
Drakulić ‘worried about what would happen to all the good things that we
did have under communism – the medical care, the year’s paid maternity
leave, free abortion’. As governments dismantled social safety nets and
poverty spread throughout the region, ordinary citizens grew increasingly
less critical of their state socialist pasts.
A 2009 poll in eight east European countries asked if the economic situation
for ordinary people was ‘better, worse or about the same as it was under
communism’. e results stunned observers: 72 per cent of Hungarians, and
62 per cent of both Ukrainians and Bulgarians believed that most people
were worse off after 1989. In no country did more than 47 per cent of those
surveyed agree that their lives improved after the advent of free markets.
Subsequent polls and qualitative research across Russia and eastern Europe
confirm the persistence of these sentiments as popular discontent with the
failed promises of free-market prosperity has grown, especially among older
people.
In response, east European conservative and Right-wing governments have
created museums, memorials and days of commemoration to honour the
victims of communism. In 2008, conservative politicians signed the Prague
Declaration on European Conscience and Communism to increase
educational efforts about the crimes of communism, followed by the 2011
creation of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, a consortium
of organisations striving to promote their view of the 20th century in
European history textbooks: a view that equates communism with Nazism,
as one of two totalitarianisms.
In Poland and Ukraine, democratic governments have banned communist
symbols, slogans and songs, and the Ukrainian government forced name
changes on villages and towns with nomenclature that sounded too
communist. In the most extreme case, the Ukrainians have legislated an
official history about a recent past through which many present-day citizens
have lived. If a journalist tries to discuss any positive aspects of life between
1917 and 1991, the law allows the government to shut down the newspaper,
magazine or blog, and carries a potential prison sentence of five to 10 years.
Free-market capitalism has not brought freedom of the press. 
In October 2016, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation opened
a new front in the battle for the public memory of communism when they
mounted seven billboards in the heart of New York City. On his Twitter feed,
the executive director Marion Smith wrote: ‘Our ads exposing the
horrendous record of communist crimes just went up in Times Square.’
ese billboards informed passers-by: ‘100 years, 100 million killed’;
‘Communism kills’; and ‘Today, 1 in 5 people live under a communist
regime’.
About a year later, Bret Stephens’s op-ed ‘Communism rough Rose-
Coloured Glasses’ in e New York Times attacked the insistence of the
‘progressive intelligentsia’ on distinguishing between Nazism and
communism, and tarred the US senator Bernie Sanders and the UK Labour
Party leader Jeremy Corbyn with the memory of Soviet atrocities.
Next, President Donald Trump declared that 7 November would be a
National Day for the Victims of Communism. e official White House
statement explained:
Over the past century, communist totalitarian regimes around the
world have killed more than 100 million people and subjected
countless more to exploitation, violence, and untold devastation.
ese movements, under the false pretence of liberation,
systematically robbed innocent people of their God-given rights of
free worship, freedom of association, and countless other rights
we hold sacrosanct.
at there were real horrors is without doubt. But why the urgency to insist
that the history of 20th-century communism is one of ‘untold devastation’?
Are these belated responses to the global financial crisis, or delayed reactions
to the electoral successes of Sanders and Corbyn? Or is it something else?
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O f course, conservatives might insist that they are merely reminding
people of the genuine flaws of communism, lest there be any tendency
to fall towards that path. ey argue that communism must be rejected in
any form, for they fear that we might repeat the mistakes of the Soviet bloc.
But given the extreme unlikeliness of the West’s return to communism in the
21st century, and the continuing nostalgia for state socialism in eastern
Europe, it’s worth examining these anti-communist arguments closely.
oughtful observers should suspect any historical narrative that paints the
world in black and white. In inking, Fast and Slow (2011), the Nobel-prize-
winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman warns of predictable cognitive flaws
that inhibit our ability to think rationally, including something called ‘the
halo effect’:
e halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simple and
coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations: good
people do only good things and bad people are all bad …
Inconsistencies reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of
our feelings.
Since nuance in the story of 20th-century communism might ‘reduce the
ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings’, anti-communists will
attack, dismiss or discredit any archival findings, interviews or survey results
recalling Eastern Bloc achievements in science, culture, education, health
care or women’s rights. ey were bad people, and everything they did must
be bad; we invert the ‘halo’ terminology and call this the ‘pitchfork effect’.
ose offering a more nuanced narrative than one of unending totalitarian
terror are dismissed as apologists or useful idiots. Contemporary intellectual
opposition to the idea that ‘bad people are all bad’ elicits outrage and an
immediate accusation that you are no better than those out to rob us of our
‘God-given rights’.
In 1984, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that you could be ‘anti
anti-communism’ without being in favour of communism:
ose of us who strenuously opposed the obsession, as we saw it,
with the Red Menace were thus denominated by those who …
regarded the Menace as the primary fact of contemporary political
life, with the insinuation – wildly incorrect in the vast majority of
cases – that, by the law of the double negative, we had some secret
affection for the Soviet Union.
In other words, you could stand up against bullies such as Joseph McCarthy
without defending Joseph Stalin. If we carefully analyse the arguments of
those attempting to control the historical narrative of 20th-century
communism, this does not mean that we are apologising for, or excusing the
atrocities or the lost lives of millions of men and women who suffered for
their political beliefs.
Their aim is not mere commemoration, but ‘a
world free from the false hope of communism’
T he Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and other
conservatives (we’ll call them the ‘anti-communists’) argue against
communism by making two separable points: (1) a historical claim about
people dying under communism that leads to (2) the conclusion that
communism should be rejected as a political ideology.
When the Foundation’s executive director announced the billboards,
contrarian Twitter users immediately asked: ‘And are you going to expose
the horrendous record of slavery, murders, and all the capitalism crimes too?’
East Europeans suffering from the severe downturn in economic growth
after 1989 might ask this same question. Ethnographic research on the
persistence of red nostalgia shows that it has less to do with a wistfulness for
lost youth than with a deep disillusionment with free markets. Communism
looks better today because, for many, capitalism looks worse. But
mentioning the possible existence of victims of capitalism gets dismissed as
mere ‘whataboutism’, a term implying that only atrocities perpetrated by
communists merit attention. 
To properly understand the situation, let’s consider the argument today’s
anti-communist campaigners more closely. ey start with a historical
premise – that regimes based on a communist ideology killed 100 million
people. ey then infer a conclusion: communism should be rejected. eir
argument fails, for their historical premise is dubious, and their inference to
the political conclusion is worse.
e source for this figure of 100 million people killed under communist
regimes is Le Livre noir du communisme (1997), published in English as e
Black Book of Communism (1999). In the introduction, the editor, Stéphane
Courtois, used a ‘rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates’ to
come up with a figure that approached 100 million, a number far greater
than the 25 million victims he attributes to Nazism (which does not,
conveniently, include those killed as a result of the Second World War).
Courtois equated communism with Nazism, and argued that the ‘single-
minded focus on the Jewish genocide’ had impeded the accounting of
communist crimes.
Painting the communists as worse that the
Nazis based on a questionable body count raises
alarm bells
e Black Book stoked controversy from its first publication in France. As
soon as it hit the shelves, two of the prominent historians contributing to the
volume, Jean-Louis Margolin and Nicolas Werth, attacked Courtois in the
pages of Le Monde. Margolin and Werth distanced themselves from the
volume, believing that Courtois’s obsession with reaching the number of 100
million led to careless scholarship.
But quibbling about numbers is unseemly. What matters is that many, many
people were killed by communist regimes. We could simply rephrase the
anti-communist’s historical premise to read: states governed under a
communist ideology did many horrible things.
H owever, now we turn to the second and more serious problem: the
political conclusion does not logically follow from the historical point
used as a premise. In philosophical terms, the argument is invalid. An
implicit step is missing. By way of illustration, suppose one said: ‘Russian
athletes are doping; therefore, Russian athletes should not be allowed in the
Olympics.’ e premise does not entail the conclusion, for no connection is
asserted between doping and who should or should not be allowed in the
Olympics. One needs an intermediate step, perhaps something like: ‘Any
athlete who is doping should not be allowed in the Olympics.’ Now the
argument is valid, in the philosophical sense that its premises do at least
imply its conclusion, though one might still reject one of the premises.
Similarly, in their argument, the anti-communists have not explicitly asserted
any connection between countries doing horrible things and their ideology
warranting rejection. is does not mean that the argument is hopeless, but
it means that there is an implicit step missing. What is that step? Perhaps
they would fill in the gap this way:
Historical point: countries that were based on a communist
ideology did many horrible things.
General premise: if any country based on a particular ideology did
many horrible things, then that ideology should be rejected
Political conclusion: communism should be rejected.
Now the conclusion follows logically from the premises, and the premises
look plausible.
But the problem for the anti-communists is that their general premise can be
used as the basis for an equally good argument against capitalism, an
argument that the so-called losers of economic transition in eastern Europe
would be quick to affirm. e US, a country based on a free-market capitalist
ideology, has done many horrible things: the enslavement of millions of
Africans, the genocidal eradication of the Native Americans, the brutal
military actions taken to support pro-Western dictatorships, just to name a
few. e British Empire likewise had a great deal of blood on its hands: we
might merely mention the internment camps during the second Boer War
and the Bengal famine.
is is not mere ‘whataboutism’, because the same intermediate premise
necessary to make their anti-communist argument now works against
capitalism:
Historical point: the US and the UK were based on a capitalist
ideology, and did many horrible things.
General premise: if any country based on a particular ideology did
many horrible things, then that ideology should be rejected
Political conclusion: capitalism should be rejected.
e obvious point: the anti-communism argument is no better (and no
worse) than the anti-capitalism argument. Of course, the anti-communists
are not going to agree that capitalism should be rejected. But unfortunately
for them, the historical point is true: the US, the UK and other Western
countries are based on a capitalist ideology, and have done many horrible
things. e only way to deny the argument is by denying the general
premise. But this is exactly the premise used in their own argument, so the
anti-communism argument collapses.
To avoid this problem, they might try a different general premise:
General premise: if any country based on a particular ideology did
horrible things, and if those horrible things are natural conclusions of
the ideology, then that ideology should be rejected.
If this is the idea, however, they will need to revise the historical point as well,
or otherwise the argument would no longer be valid. So we would have this:
Historical point: countries based on a communist ideology did
many horrible things, and these things are natural conclusions of
communism.
General premise: if any country based on a particular ideology did
horrible things, and if those horrible things are natural
conclusions of the ideology, then that ideology should be rejected.
Political conclusion: communism should be rejected.
But now there is an analogous argument against capitalism:
Historical point: the US and the UK were based on a capitalist
ideology, they did many horrible things, and these things are
natural conclusions of capitalism.
General premise: if any country based on a particular ideology did
horrible things, and if those horrible things are natural
conclusions of the ideology, then that ideology should be rejected.
Conclusion: capitalism should be rejected.
Both arguments are valid, and the shared general premise is plausible. e
defender of capitalism might protest that the historical point is not true:
nobody should think that a belief in free markets naturally entails that
internment camps or slavery are okay; such things are a perversion of the
ideals of any reasonable capitalism.
Members of Ukrainian paramilitary groups that
fought with the Nazis against the Red Army are
now heroes
Fair enough. We will grant for the sake of argument that slavery and the rest
do not follow from the principles of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. But the
historical point in the anti-communism argument is equally dubious. Where,
for example, in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels does one find
that leaders should deliberately induce mass starvation or purges?
By contrast with both capitalism and communism, many of the most
grotesque crimes of Nazism were natural conclusions of their racist ideology.
Nazi doctrine elevated German Aryans above all other races, particularly
Jews. e Second World War was an outcome of the Nazi ideal of
Lebensraum, and the Holocaust a direct application of Nazi racial doctrines.
e revised general premise does lead from historical facts about the crimes
of Nazism to the uncontested conclusion that Nazism should be rejected.
S o far, we have been labouring to make what is – to those trained in logic
at least – an obvious point: the rhetoric of the anti-communists does not
amount to a successful argument. We therefore should consider the
possibility that the anti-communists are not trying to make an argument;
perhaps they are not trying to give reasons. Maybe they are simply appealing
to emotion, hoping that the ‘pitchfork effect’ will make it easy for them to
render communism all bad all the time. But why? And why now?
Here it is especially important to pay heed to lessons from eastern Europe. In
that context, public commemoration of the victims of communism has
served both to allay rising criticisms of capitalism and to exonerate local
histories of Right-wing nationalism. By law, members of Ukrainian
paramilitary groups that fought with the Nazis against the Red Army in the
Second World War are now heroes of Ukrainian independence. Might
renewed anti-communist feeling also serve right-wing nationalism in the US
and western Europe?
When Trump attributed blame to ‘both sides’ for the Charlottesville violence
in August 2017, many Americans baulked at the idea that ordinary people
protesting white supremacy be designated the moral equivalent of neo-
Nazis. But this was no accident on Trump’s part. Right-wing nationalists
have a good reason to construct a looming godless bogeyman threatening to
take away our freedoms. A similar rhetoric can be found in Germany where
the government has recently begun to equate the far-Right hooliganism of
the neo-Nazis with the increasingly powerful Antifa movement, shutting
down the website responsible for organising the massive G20 protests in
August 2017, and attempting to silence what they called ‘vicious Left-wing
extremists in Germany’.
Defenders of the status quo stop at nothing to
convince young voters about the evils of
collectivist ideas
Conservative and nationalist political leaders in the US and across Europe
already incite fear with tales of the twin monsters of Islamic fundamentalism
and illegal immigration. But not everyone believes that immigration is a
terrible threat, and most Right-wing conservatives don’t think that Western
countries are at risk of becoming theocratic states under Sharia law.
Communism, on the other hand, provides the perfect new (old) enemy. If
your main policy agenda is shoring up free-market capitalism, protecting the
wealth of the superrich and dismantling what little is left of social safety nets,
then it is useful to paint those who envision more redistributive politics as
wild-eyed Marxists bent on the destruction of Western civilisation.
What better time to resurrect the spectre of communism? As youth across
the world become increasingly disenchanted with the savage inequalities of
capitalism, defenders of the status quo will stop at nothing to convince
younger voters about the evils of collectivist ideas. ey will rewrite history
textbooks, build memorials, and declare days of commemoration for the
victims of communism – all to ensure that calls for social justice or
redistribution are forever equated with forced labour camps and famine.
Responsible and rational citizens need to be critical of simplistic historical
narratives that rely on the pitchfork effect to demonise anyone on the Left.
We should all embrace Geertz’s idea of an anti-anti-communism in hopes
that critical engagement with the lessons of the 20th century might help us
to find a new path that navigates between, or rises above, the many crimes of
both communism and capitalism.
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