Utopia and its discontents.

• Author: Pilon, Juliana Geran
• Position: Works of Paul Hollander - Critical essay

Paul Hollander, ed., From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 761 pp., $35.00.

Paul Hollander, The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2006), 392 pp., $28.95.

IF MORAL clarity graced our times, the publication of Paul Hollander's comprehensive compilation of first-hand accounts by former communist victims, From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, would elicit a collective shudder of horror and sorrow.

"Systematic evil at work: evil without conscience." So does Harvard University professor Harvey Mansfield describe the grotesque crimes the selections illustrate. The book provides "an indispensable experience for the understanding of our times." No wonder it lingered in manuscript for several years: One publisher after another, simply reflecting readers' priorities, turned down the project until finally the Intercollegiate Studies Institute saved the day. Having failed to predict communism's collapse, our political experts now seem eager to forget about it altogether.

Indeed, as Hollander notes in his introduction, "it is difficult to identify a single American scholar specializing in Communist political violence, either as a comparative endeavor or as one focused on a particular Communist system." The incomparable Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution, among the first to expose the enormity of Soviet crimes, was born in Great Britain, and Anne Applebaum, whose breathtaking 2005 work Gulag: A History earned her a Pulitzer Prize, is a journalist. Hollander, who taught sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was born in Hungary, which he fled after the abortive revolution of 1956. His tome demonstrates that comparative communist political violence is a field eminently ripe for academic study. It is also an impressive tribute to the most horrific event of the last century apart from the Holocaust.

Communist crimes are less known than fascist ones. While newly released archives from the former Soviet bloc will unquestionably deepen our understanding of the Holocaust, we already have a plethora of photographic documentation, surviving physical evidence, magnificent museums and survivor testimony. By contrast, Soviet atrocities are practically ignored.

The reason is certainly not a paucity of information, as this massive work amply demonstrates. But what sets Hollander's anthology apart from other books is less its size than its astonishing breadth. Alongside victims from the Soviet Union are East Europeans--from Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia--as well as their counterparts from China, Cambodia, Vietnam and North Korea in Asia, Cuba and Nicaragua in Latin America, and Ethiopia. The geographic spread does not merely overwhelm the reader: Its principal purpose is analytical. As Anne Applebaum observes in her appreciative preface, at last now "it is truly possible to understand the cross-cultural, multinational history of communism as a single phenomenon." Readers can draw the lines of influence--ideological, financial and strategic--with greater precision than ever, "from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Ho Chi Mirth to Pol Pot, from...