K P Joseph says he was a great admirer of Communism in his heyday. Even through the bitterness of disillusionment that plagued many a heart when the wave of Communist revolution that swept over the state fell short of expectations, Joseph believed that 50 percent of the promises fulfilled would still create a better world. But then he chanced upon ‘The Black Book of Communism’. The cornerstones of faith were fatally jolted. And he realised that the reason why the cult of Communism failed to deliver is because “it is a collapsed ideology”.
To Joseph, “the electoral debacle that the party faced recently in the state was not merely a result of the mistakes it made. It is, in fact, a part of the collapse of the ideology the world over. But the party is fumbling in the dark trying to figure out the cause of the setback and so is the opposition which has failed in grasping the relevance of the recession. It is all because what we retain here in Kerala is a failed ideology,” he said. “It’s high time the book got translated into Malayalam so that people realise the truth.”
If Joseph sounds provocative to left-leaning minds, ‘The Black Book’ should enrage them. Published in 1997 in France to a massive uproar, the book chronicles a history of political and civilian repression by Communist regimes. Trotsky had called the promising fables that surrounded the Communist coup d’etat, “the ash heap of history”. The foreword to the book informs us that, from that heap of ash, the book offers a pioneering attempt to yield a truer understanding of the Soviet social process that - claimed victims on a scale that has never aroused a scholarly curiosity proportionate to the magnitude of the disaster. It proposes to do so by detailing Leninism’s crimes, terror and repression - from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989.
Says Joseph, “the revolution that Marx predicted was to come when the workers had only chains to lose and a world to gain. But that was not the situation that prevailed in Soviet Russia when Lenin engineered the October Revolution. neo-feudal lords were nomenclatured as party chiefs. And the new feudal system ruled by doing away with anybody who had a different opinion.”
In the introduction, editor Stéphane Courtois states that “...Communist regimes...turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government”. He cites a death toll which totals 94 million including executions, intentional destruction of population by starvation and deaths resulting from deportations, physical confinement or through forced labour. In the foreword, it is said - each major episode of the tragedy - Stalin’s Gulag, Mao Zedong’s Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge - had its moment of notoriety. But these horrors soon faded away into history; nor did anyone trouble to add up the total and set it before the public. The surprising size of this total, then, partly explains the shock the volume provoked.
The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:
65 million in the People’s Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America
10,000 deaths “resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power”.
The full power of the shock, is however delivered by the unavoidable comparison of this sum with that of Nazism, which at an estimated 25 million turns out to be less murderous than Communism.
“The coup in Soviet Russia, effected when Kerensky, a socialist democrat was in power, was not in accordance with the Marxist theory,” says Joseph. So does he, or rather the book, make a distinction between the Marxist theory and the Communist rule, placing the blame on the latter? “Marxist theory has never been put into practice in its true spirit and nor can it be,” he clarified. “Marxism made complex human psyche too simple - believing that brotherhood between human beings will create a better world. But human beings are not that simple,” he reflected. “The ‘new man’ that Marx dreamed of, who was to change the world for good, was never born.”
Joseph underscores that communism should be known by what it produced, like any other school of thought. And not by what it says in theory. “It is too good a theory to be translated into reality, it should not have been attempted in the first place. Gandhian ideology is much like that, but the difference is that when tried to adapt into reality, it does not create any additional violence worsening the already existing chaos.”
What then, asked Bookie, can he suggest as a system that can function as a worthy opposition to right wing politics? “Goodness can be worked towards within any framework. It need not be right or left leaning necessarily,” he said. “Ambedkar’s Constitution is an efficient framework for striving towards the end of a socialist democratic state. Moral consciousness is a virtue that can be cultivated. It is possible to increase the number of human beings who are morally responsible and compassionate towards fellow beings”.
aswathy@expressbuzz.com
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