Paul Hollander, editor
From the Gulag to the Killing Fields:
Personal Accounts of Political Violence
and Repression in Communist States.
ISI Books, 750 Pages, $35

reviewed by Daniel J. Mahoney

Paul Hollander once asked a class of three hundred students at the University of Massachusetts how many of them had learned anything in high school about repression in Communist countries. Not a single hand was raised. How many had heard of the “Gulag,” the system of prisons and camps strewn across the Soviet Union for the duration of Communist rule? Only four. It is with good reason that the distinguished historian Alain Besançon refers to “forgotten Communism” or that the Sinologist Arthur Waldron speaks of the Nazi Holocaust as the only one of the atrocities of the twentieth century that “is regularly acknowledged and truly well known.”

Rooted in what Hollander suggestively calls the “violence of higher purpose,” the misdeeds of Communism do indeed get something of a free pass in “advanced” intellectual circles. It is certainly the case that the record is available for all those who wish to know it. Many had hoped, and even expected, that a broader public and scholarly recognition of the Soviet Union as a practitioner of state violence and repression on a truly unprecedented scale would follow the fall of Communism and would lead to its permanent discrediting. This has not come to pass. Instead, in academic circles, Communist regimes are often presented as having engaged in flawed but