Historically speaking, what did Stalin's disciplined, urban-based industrializing system have in common with Mao Zedong's reliance on the rural peasantry and the wild Cultural Revolution? Did the fanatical Mao and the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping share a genetic code? Pol Pot, who massacred his countrymen in Cambodia, had more in common with the anti-Communist Idi Amin than with the Communist Fidel Castro. The impulses and historical conditions giving rise to these regimes in various countries were vastly different. Even their terrors were dissimilar: Chinese and Vietnamese repression stressed re-education; the Khmer Rouge massacred categories of people; Stalin permanently transplanted real and imagined enemies. The only thing linking the Communist regimes was that each constantly attested that it was Marxist-Leninist -- and that other Communist regimes were not. After all, Ethiopian colonels and Yemeni bandits used to claim that they were Leninists too, and nothing was easier than calling one's country a "people's republic."

IF we want to categorize the unprecedented violence and terror of the past century, we could just as well use templates that have less to do with left-wing or right-wing isms. Backward countries driven to modernize quickly were (and are) often scenes of repression and sickening mass killing, whether they were self-proclaimed Communists or not. In addition to modernization, one could use religion, nationalism, economic competition, or the technology of war to group the century's deaths. If we want to play this scorecard game with isms, we could post a huge number of deaths to the account of capitalist and nationalist competition, starting with imperialism and two world wars and ending with excess deaths in Yeltsin's democratic Russia.

can be seen as a testament to the Western intellectual view of communism, and it might seem unfair to criticize Furet for the weakness of his coverage of Russian history. But in presenting the Western view Furet feels obliged to provide a good bit of that history. In the process he rejects several decades of historical research on the Soviet Union -- as does Courtois -- and insists on views that were current decades ago. These days the weight of historical and archival evidence is against both authors: they depict the 1917 October Revolution as a mere coup rather than the social upheaval that historians study today. To them the famine of 1932-1933 was simply a planned Ukrainian genocide, although today most see it as a policy blunder that affected millions belonging to other nationalities. Yes, at the end of World War II, Stalin incarcerated returning Soviet prisoners of war, but now we know that most of them were released quickly after routine processing in temporary camps.

Furet writes that the "beginning of the end" for the Soviet regime was Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalin secret speech of 1956, which "overturned the universal status of the Communist idea." For Furet and other intellectuals, this was truly a crack in the ideological façade of the Soviet Union (Furet himself broke with communism that year), and the rest of Soviet history resolves itself into steady decomposition. Ideas matter intensely for Furet, and from the limited point of view of ideology he is right. The break with Stalinism did in fact disorient and begin to disillusion Western Communist intellectuals. French former Communists often date their own defection and the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union together, and argue about who left the Party at the most correct time, thus confounding Soviet history with their own. Furet's view ignores the fact that the USSR existed for another thirty-five years after 1956 -- more years than Stalin ruled. Economically and technologically these were actually among the best years for the long-suffering Soviet people.