That famous line, attributed to many authors but apparently said by humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw (aka Josh Billings), applies to history as much as anything.

What liberates oppressed people? I was taught it’s often American power. Just the threat of our military buildup defeated the Soviet Union, and our troops in the Middle East will create islands of freedom.

Unlikely, says historian Thaddeus Russell, author of A Renegade History of the United States.

“As a matter of fact,” Russell told me, “in general American military intervention has increased anti-Americanism and hardened repressive regimes. On the other hand, American popular culture—what was often called the worst of our culture in many cases—has actually done more for liberation and our national security than anything that the 82nd Airborne could do.”

I told him that I thought that the Soviet Union collapsed because the Soviets spent so much trying to keep pace with Ronald Reagan’s military buildup.

Pop Culture Revolution

On the contrary, Russell said. “It collapsed from within. . . . People simply walked away from the ideology of communism. And that began especially when American popular culture—jazz and rock and roll—began infiltrating those countries after World War II.”

I demanded evidence.

“American soldiers brought jazz during World War II to the Eastern front. Soviet soldiers brought it back. Eastern European soldiers brought it and spread it across those countries. . . . Stalin was hysterical about this.”

The authorities were particularly concerned about young people performing and enjoying sensual music.

“Any regime at all depends on social order to maintain its power. Social order and sensuality, pleasures of the body, are often at odds. Stalin and his commissars understood that,” Russell said.

American authorities 30 years earlier also feared the sensuality of black music, said Russell, attacking jazz “as primitive jungle music that was bringing down American youth. Stalin and his commissars across Eastern Europe said exactly the same things with the same words later.”

Then rock ‘n’ roll came.

“That was even more threatening,” Russell said. “By the 1980s, disco and rock were enormously popular throughout the communist world.”

The communists realized they had to relax the rules or risk losing everything, but it was too late. One of the most amazing and significant spectacles was Bruce Springsteen’s concert in East Germany in 1988, when a crowd of 160,000 people who lived behind the Iron Curtain sang “Born in the USA.”

Make Nikes, Not Guns

I’m skeptical. I don’t know how much effect Reagan’s military buildup had versus rock ‘n’ roll, but I bet ordinary consumer goods had an even bigger effect. People trapped behind communist lines wanted the stuff we had. When I was in Red Square before the fall of communism, I sold my Nikes and jeans to eager buyers.

People want choices, and you can’t indoctrinate that out of them.

Which leads me to the most destructive myth about history: the idea that if we are to prosper, government must make smart plans for us. I was taught that in college, and despite the failure of the Soviet Union, many government leaders still believe it.

It’s no coincidence that the countries with the least economic freedom, according to the Heritage Foundation—Cuba, Zimbabwe, North Korea—are the worst places to live. They not only lack freedom, they are also poor.

Who’s at the top of the economic freedom list? Hong Kong. (The United States is ninth.) Hong Kong has low taxes, and as I demonstrated in an ABC special years ago, the government makes it easy to become an entrepreneur. I got permission to open a business there in one day. In my hometown, New York City, it takes months.

Hong Kong doesn’t even have democracy, but because its rulers protected people’s personal safety and property and left them otherwise free, Hong Kong thrived. In 50 years it went from horrible poverty to income levels that are among the highest in world. Prosperity, thanks to economic freedom.

We should try that here.

—Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

Perhaps no author better chronicled the disastrous, soul-crushing European political experiments of the middle half of the twentieth century than Arthur Koestler. The Hungarian-born author wrote magisterially (in English, no less; he first published in Hungarian, German, and Russian) of the follies of the Pink Decade of the 1930s in a series of political novels. Unfortunately, they’re all but forgotten in today’s university curricula. The world requires constant reminders of what actually happens once citizens acquiesce to big-government solutions.

George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and Koestler’s body of work from the 1930s to 1950s proves the contemporary relevance of Santayana’s admonition. Perhaps in no other time besides the era in which they were originally published are Koestler’s literary themes more topical than the present, as our own government expands exponentially to bail out and control our country’s financial and automotive industries; mire other industries to the point of stagnation with cumbersome regulations; redefine such basic individual choices as health care and education as prescribed “rights”; and enact wide-ranging schemes to insinuate bureaucratic reach into nearly every aspect of our lives, from the Internet and use of recreational and/or medicinal inebriants to surveillance cameras at every traffic stop.

As this year officially marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Koestler’s seminal novel, Darkness at Noon, and the 60th anniversary of his essay “The Initiates,” it’s a convenient opportunity to revisit both works as a reminder of what awaits all democratic societies eager to abandon liberties for the sake of utopian ideologies.

Seventy years ago, as war engulfed nearly every continent and the Axis peril seemed poised to destroy two millennia of civilization, Koestler published Darkness at Noon on another, completely different threat to individual freedom: communism. Ten years later “The Initiates” appeared as one of six essays in The God That Failed, a volume featuring the voices of many of the twentieth century’s greatest writers who had embraced the Stalinist enterprise as the singular political corrective to economic misery before abandoning it as contrary to human nature and profoundly detrimental to humanity in general. However, none of Koestler’s fellow travelers—Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Andre Gide, Louis Fisher, Stephen Spender—wrote more authoritatively or convincingly against communism than he.

Darkness at Noon is the third novel in Koestler’s quartet depicting what occurs when centralized governments seize control of the means of production and attempt to mitigate the individualist impulse. Briefly, Darkness is bookended by The Gladiators (1938) and Arrival and Departure (1943), and followed by The Age of Longing (1951). In the first, Koestler novelizes the slave revolt commanded by the gladiator Spartacus; in Arrival and Departure he conjectures on the psychological motivations behind a character who alternately embraces communist and Nazi ideologies; and The Age of Longing is a futuristic novel exploring the irreconcilable nature of religious faith and totalitarianism in Paris of the mid-1950s. But it is in Darkness, in my humble estimation, that Koestler succeeds most in capturing the mindset of the collectivist fantasy in order to completely dispel its flawed precepts.

Encapsulating a Century

“If any figure could claim to have encapsulated in his own life—and recorded—the political, intellectual, and emotional tribulations of the twentieth century, it is [Koestler],” wrote Theodore Dalrymple in “A Drinker of Infinity,” an essay that appeared in The City Journal, Spring 2007, and that took its title from a later work by Koestler.

Koestler’s life leading up to the writing of Darkness at Noon reads like a novel (or several) itself. Born to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1905, he displayed an affinity for math and science that led him to study engineering in Vienna. Before he could graduate, however, Koestler embraced radical Zionism (although biographies report he wasn’t an observant Jew), which led him to live briefly on a kibbutz in Palestine. He subsequently became the Palestine correspondent for a German newspaper group, the Ullstein Trust, was based for a while in Paris, and wound up simultaneously serving as science editor and foreign correspondent for two Ullstein-owned newspapers in Germany.

After Ullstein fired Koestler (some sources assert he resigned) for his political leanings, the writer threw the full weight of his intellectual and physical energies behind Marxism (fully detailed in “The Initiates”). He traveled extensively throughout the USSR in 1932 and 1933 at the invitation of the Revolutionary Writers of Germany, a Comintern front agency. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936 Koestler was writing communist propaganda in Paris and accepted an assignment from a British newspaper to file reports from Francisco Franco’s fascist army headquarters. In Spain he was arrested as a communist spy and sentenced to death. He documented his internment in Spanish Testament (1937). Once released—through international efforts resulting in a Republican swap of Koestler for a fascist prisoner—he returned to France to continue writing for the communist cause. He severed ties with the party over his disagreement with the 1938 Soviet show trials and set about writing Darkness at Noon.

Koestler again found himself imprisoned—this time in a French concentration camp, as a hostile alien—in the first months of World War II. After another international effort, he was released and sought to avoid another arrest by joining the French Foreign Legion. He made his way to Lisbon, then illegally flew to London. British authorities promptly arrested him; he corrected galleys of Darkness at Noon during his six-week incarceration.

“The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian,” George Orwell wrote in an essay on Koestler’s early works. “In 1937 Koestler already knew this, but did not feel free to say so.” By 1938, however, Koestler had broken with the Communist Party and sought to educate Western Europe and the New World on happenings in the Soviet Union.

Darkness centers on the incarceration of Rubashov, a Bolshevik from the 1917 Revolution, for presumed counterrevolutionary activities and sentiments. Although the reader sympathizes with Rubashov, as one would for any prisoner condemned without due process, his significant shortcomings readily become apparent. For one, he served on the Central Committee in the early years of Hitler’s Germany, expeditiously silencing operatives no longer possessing Party utility by betraying them to Nazi police. Even though Rubashov convinces himself these actions are the justified means by which the revolution’s ends will be met, his conscience is haunted by his betrayal of his secretary and lover, Arlova.

The Here and Now

Rubashov is based loosely on Nikolai Bukharin, a Bolshevik who became president of the Soviet Comintern. According to Goronwy Rees, Bukharin’s 1938 arrest, trial, confession, and execution represented “a kind of monstrous reductio ad absurdum of the Great Purge, in which it was proved to everyone’s satisfaction that not only the whole of the original leadership of the Bolshevik Party had become spies and traitors but that the case against them had been conducted by one who shared in exactly the same crimes.” Critics note that Koestler lifted the bulk of Rubashov’s confession from Bukharin’s real-life document.

Two of Koestler’s acquaintances contributed the necessary details of Soviet oppression. Painter and ceramicist Eva Weissberg, a childhood friend, emigrated to the Soviet Union with her husband, physicist Alexander Weissberg, who became a researcher at the Ukrainian Institute for Physics and Technology. Eva related the Weissbergs’ subsequent persecution during Stalin’s Great Purges to Koestler, who used the experiences as background material. His own solitary confinement in Spain lent credibility to his descriptions of Rubashov’s incarceration.

What differentiates Koestler’s work from other highly lauded literary attacks on collectivism by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Stanislaw Lem is perspective. Whereas the other writers projected the results of communism in novels depicting dystopian futures—Lem by necessity since he was living in Soviet-controlled Poland; Orwell and Huxley by choice—Koestler, recognizing the Soviet Central Committee’s initiatives to reconstruct all history as a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, documented what had already occurred under Stalin’s reign of terror during a decade of famine, the Great Purge, and the Moscow show trials. While the famines and purges resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Soviets, the show trials are characterized as an absurd travesty of Kafkaesque proportions in which Soviet apparatchiks obtained public confessions from old-guard Bolsheviks on trumped-up charges, resulting in the coerced “confessions” of counterrevolutionary activities and subsequent executions.

The historical perspective speaks to readers sympathetic to the Soviet cause but baffled as to why multitudes of Old Guard Bolsheviks would confess to crimes against the State for almost certain execution. For those readers unsympathetic to or unaware of Uncle Joe’s brand of totalitarianism, Koestler depicted the result of clashing Marxist-inspired ideologies—paranoia and death on the one hand and paranoia, deprivation, and inhumanity on the other. Koestler portrays the former as no longer willing to accept that all means justify Stalinist ends, and conversely portrays those who accept all means to further the Soviet agenda as amoral monsters:

[I]n the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about 10 million people to do forced labor in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under the conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the highest officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalists counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. . . . We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and with the most refined scientific system of physical and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future of happiness, which only we can see. . . .

Taking nothing from the substantial literary accomplishments of Orwell, Huxley, and Lem, the sheer headline immediacy and empirical evidence substantiating the claims of Darkness at Noon’s protagonist, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, in the above speech given to his old comrade and current prosecutor, Ivanov, conveys a verisimilitude seldom attainable in speculative fiction.

Orwell wrote that no Englishman could’ve written Darkness at Noon, as his countrymen only experienced Soviet duplicity and deceit peripherally as part of the communists’ alliance with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. H. G. Wells, for example, could acknowledge Soviet cruelty while simultaneously justifying it: “Much that the Red terror did was cruel and frightful. It was largely controlled by narrow-minded men, and many of its officials were inspired by social hatred and fear of counter-revolution,” adding, “Apart from individual atrocities it did on the whole kill for a reason and to an end.”

As today’s political systems totter once again toward statist cardiac arrest, albeit masked at first as more kind and gentle than the Soviet model—at least until government coercion increasingly becomes imperative to enforce its rule—we should heed Santayana and remember the history documented by a writer who was able to divorce himself from the Soviet lie. Arthur Koestler suffered from none of the delusions Wells formulated from afar. He had seen firsthand the horrors of the twentieth century and documented its cruelties and dehumanization from the insidious interior chambers of collectivism’s heart of darkness.

The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, by Jason Vuic, an assistant professor of history at Bridgewater College in Virginia, deftly describes yet another episode in the history of the fiascos that occur when governments enable political entrepreneurs.

What can one say about the Yugo? It started out as one of the hottest items in U.S. automotive history, only to become the butt of jokes such as:

Q: How do you double the value of a Yugo?

A: Fill it up with gas.

Interestingly, the very reason the Yugo even became an item was a U.S. government move to keep small Japanese cars out of the United States. The Japanese automakers responded to this protectionism by making mid-sized luxury cars, which created a void for a small, inexpensive vehicle. The Yugo would (at least temporarily) fill that void thanks to the foresight of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin.

Austrian economists such as Israel Kirzner point out that entrepreneurs first see an opportunity and then they act. Bricklin, who is described as a “habitual entrepreneur,” decided that American consumers wanted small cars, and he knew just the company to build them—Zastava, a State-owned firm in Yugoslavia.

Bricklin is always looking for business opportunities, but he likes shortcuts. These invariably land him in trouble and ultimately bankruptcy. Despite having already pushed several failed ventures, Bricklin kept going, proving the wisdom of P. T. Barnum’s declaration that “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

So how is it that the guy who had conned investors in a scheme to fund Handyman America stores (which went bankrupt in 1965) and managed nearly to kill the one good company he founded (Subaru America—and, yes, I drive a Subaru) could find people willing to fund the Yugo venture? Enter the politics of the Cold War.

As Vuic notes, Yugoslavia, a communist/socialist country with “non-aligned” status, was a “buffer” between East and West. The U.S. government aggressively cultivated its relationship with that country, which in normal political times might have gone almost unnoticed. With the Cold War still in full bloom in the mid-1980s, and with Americans wanting cheap transportation, a marriage between the U.S. market and a company making inferior cars (Zastava used an old Fiat plant it had purchased) was consummated. All it took were the efforts of the failed entrepreneur Bricklin and Washington fixers like Lawrence Eagleburger, a former official in Ronald Reagan’s State Department, then working for Kissinger Associates.

U.S. operations opened in 1985, and the car was a huge success. Yugo mania was in full swing, as people crowded the lucky dealerships and waited for months for delivery of their spanking new Yugos.

But trouble soon began. The Yugo, for all of Bricklin’s hype, still was true to its socialist, Eastern European roots. While it wasn’t as terrible as a Wartburg or a Trabant, no one was trying to market those glorified East German lawnmowers in the United States as a “smart” choice. Once people began to drive Yugos they came to realize that communist quality control meant that the workers had proper political attitudes, not that they could build a decent car. Demand plunged as drivers learned about the car’s pathetic quality. In less than a decade Yugo America was bankrupt, as was Bricklin once again. Eventually the Yugo enjoyed a second career—as pop art.

Even though Vuic is not an economist, his well-written and entertaining book sheds a great deal of light on the larger issues of State planning, economic calculation, and every other argument that Austrians have been making against socialism and crony capitalism for the past 90 years. The next time you hear someone talking about the wonderful future for some proposed government-business partnership, remember the Yugo.

Although the book has attracted some zealous followers, it is a difficult read. One wades through lengthy and tiring discussions of Foucault, debates with Sartre, attempts to refashion Marxist theory, and then, sandwiched in between, hopeful tales about the restoration of “authentic identity” among the Maya and lengthy, optimistic claims about how the people of Cochabamba are progressing from “antimodernity” toward “altermodernity.” One suspects that the authors understand that their ideas won’t hold up well if stated in plain English, so they resort to an obscure but intimidating style. Amidst all of this, and among many other intellectual detours, stands a full-blown chapter on Spinoza’s concept of love. Suffice it to say that Hardt and Negri argue that people must be trained and educated in love in order to fight the evil forces of private property.

The authors assume (but don’t bother to argue) that property and market exchange block and destroy genuine human relationships. Marx had this general insight correct, they believe, but they suggest that his analysis needs to be corrected and updated in its details to fit our postindustrial age. Hardt and Negri claim that Marx’s theory of alienation, for example, must be further developed from an analysis of competitive separation of people and estrangement of the fruits of their labor to an “alienation of one’s thought” itself. Exactly what that means isn’t clear, but I think they’re suggesting that our thoughts aren’t truly our own, but are created by the capitalist system that allegedly controls us.

The authors insist that life—genuine, loving human relationships—is nestled in “the common.” The common consists of those institutions beyond private and public ownership of the means of production and, it appears, the fruits of labor, too. (One of the book’s many confusing aspects is that the meaning of “the common” is vague and shifting.) In Hardt and Negri’s view private property is the essence of capitalism, public property the essence of socialism, and the common is the essence of—you guessed it—communism. With this concept the authors try to break from the totalitarian consequences of “the victorious revolutions” of Russia, China, and Cuba. They claim to be optimistic that the revolution is imminent and, at long last, emancipating.

Nowhere do the authors consider the possibility that their revolution might lead to adverse results. Nor do they ever come to terms with the knowledge-communicating properties of voluntary and open exchanges of property rights. The coordination of plans, which is ultimately coordination of thoughts and expectations, is completely ignored in the book. How this can happen without private property and exchange is a mystery.

The common, the authors proclaim, is the ground of freedom and voluntarism. Activities within the common are the source of true wealth (hence the book’s title). The freedom of the common is the freedom to find and develop love, and it provides the source of the multitude’s supposed creative power. But “capital,” that meaningless collectivist concept that goes back to Marx himself, disrupts the common. Capital, they assert, exploits the multitude, the truly productive.

And the multitude is huddled and gathered mainly in cities, in “the metropolis,” used as another collectivistic concept. Marx focused on the factory, but Hardt and Negri claim that the metropolis is supposedly the current site of “hierarchy and exploitation, violence and suffering, fear and pain,” and therefore will be the site of the impending revolt. The authors have absolutely no sense of cities as spontaneous orders where millions cooperate for mutual gain. Maybe people keep going to cities because they are alienated from their own thoughts.

Hardt and Negri try to impress with their knowledge of Foucault, Laclan, Derrida, and Viveiros de Castro, but where’s Smith? Where’s Hayek? Where’s Jacobs? They never address the spontaneous and invisible-hand-like nature of markets, the communicative and wealth-enhancing nature of exchange, the role that cities play in such exchange, and the notion of civil society, an independent sector that is not fundamentally organized through commercial activity or the violent compulsion of the State. Are they even aware of the counterargument? And if so, when do they plan to address it?

Commonwealth is a pitiable effort at resuscitating Marx. But it was a lost cause to begin with.

I’m not the kind of Marxist that you normally think of when that term is used. I have nothing in common with Karl. I am a Groucho Marxist. As the great funny man himself might say, he and Karl were unrelated to each other in many ways. While Karl left a legacy of death and destruction (there was nothing funny about him or his communist nonsense), Groucho still has millions of adoring fans the world over, a third of a century after he passed away.

Count me among those many fans of Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx, born 120 years ago this very month, on October 2, 1890, on the upper east side of Manhattan. But don’t put me anywhere near Karl’s fan club.

The contrast between these two men with the same last name led the American composer Irving Berlin to pen this couplet many years ago:

The world wouldn’t be

In such a snarl

If Marx had been Groucho

Instead of Karl.

What an understatement! No other human being ever concocted a set of ideas that produced more mayhem than Karl Marx, and few were as reprehensible in the way they lived their personal lives. In his book Intellectuals historian Paul Johnson devotes a revealing chapter to the man who wrote Capital and The Communist Manifesto. Karl was an angry, hate-filled man—quarrelsome, neglectful of his family, lazy, and violent. He suffered from hideous carbuncles in part because he almost never bathed. Some of the most memorable phrases from his two books were lifted from others without appropriate credit. He spent almost all his time at home or in libraries, and almost none where the workers he fumed about actually worked. He mooched off of others all his life, prompting his mother to say that she wished Karl would “accumulate capital instead of just writing about it.”

But the worst thing about Karl Marx was not his personality or his hygiene. It was the evil web he spun with deceitful bait that snared and doomed millions. He called the workers of the world to revolution, but, as the Italian writer Ignazio Silone put it, “Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit.” Without exception, wherever Marxist ideology found root, it grew into monstrous depravity. Some of Karl’s disciples have attempted to explain this away with the old phrase, “To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.” The problem is, communists (and socialists and fascists, their kissin’ cousins) only break eggs; they never, ever, make an omelet.

Groucho, on the other hand, did honor to his family’s name and to society at large. In contrast to the loafer Karl, he actually worked at real jobs, enduring many exhausting days for 20 years performing in Vaudeville and in small towns. Early in his show business career, he picked up the nickname Groucho, though he privately chafed at its negative connotation.

After a big break on Broadway in 1924, the Marx brothers team of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo did 13 feature films—including Animal Crackers, Cocoanuts, and Duck Soup. A fourth brother, Zeppo, appeared in five of them. With his trademark cigar, greasepaint mustache and eyebrows, chicken-like gait, zany one-liners, and clever put-downs, Groucho usually stole the show. In later years, he hosted a popular television program, “You Bet Your Life.” His performances are best remembered for pithy wisecracks like these:

• “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”
• “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.”
• “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”
• “Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.”
• “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”
• “He’s honest—but you gotta watch him.”
• “I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.”

Though Groucho in real life called himself a liberal Democrat, he never harbored a blind faith in State power that characterized the warped thinking of Karl. In fact he once opined, “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, diagnosing it incorrectly and then applying the wrong remedies.” That description of politics was on full display in Duck Soup, regarded by many, including me, as the Marx Brothers’ best film.

Duck Soup, released in 1933, takes place in the fictional, bankrupt country of Freedonia (“Land of the Spree, and the Home of the Knave”). On becoming its leader, Groucho’s character, Rufus T. Firefly, literally sings what a lot of politicians do but never admit: “The last man nearly ruined this place. He didn’t know what to do with it. If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait ‘til I get through with it.” A mere trifle leads Freedonia and neighboring Sylvania to go to war, a clear spoof of the insanity of World War I. In Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx, Stefan Kanfer writes that the satirical depiction of Freedonia’s government didn’t sit well with Benito Mussolini, who banned the film in Italy.

Government was also the object of Groucho’s irreverence outside the movies. His son Arthur once published an account of the time his father got in trouble with airport customs by listing his occupation as “smuggler.”

Groucho once quipped that he had worked himself up “from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.” But actually, his talent and hard work earned him a very good living. He accumulated the capital that Karl only wrote about and left behind a legacy of some of the most original and hilarious comedy ever performed on the stage or silver screen.

The very persona of Groucho Marx is still imitated by comedians the world over. Almost nobody, however, deliberately imitates Karl outside of Pyongyang and Havana. And thankfully, a dwindling number of people remain devoted to his philosophy or what it wrought. In his introduction to The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, the definitive catalogue of Marxist-inspired atrocities, editor Stéphane Courtois revealed that communism’s twentieth century death toll of 94 million people was far greater than that of any other political movement.

Karl and Groucho. Two men named Marx. Both brought tears to the eyes of millions but for very, very different reasons.

Portions of this column originally appeared in an op-ed by the author in the August 19, 2002, issue of USA Today.

Anyone who has read The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1996) by Mao’s longtime personal physician, Li Zhi-Sui, would already be disgusted with the man: his failure to bathe or brush his teeth for decades; his wanton use of hundreds of innocent peasant girls (to whom he passed a variety of venereal diseases) for his seemingly insatiable sexual desires; his pleasure in humiliating and hurting even his most loyal followers and fellow communist leaders; and his total disregard for any human life other than his own.

But Jung Chang and Jon Halliday show Mao to be a man of absolute evil. Like many Marxist leaders, Mao was not born into a working-class family. At the time of his birth in 1893, Mao’s father was a relatively successful middle-class farmer in the province of Hunan in south-central China. From an early age Mao was interested neither in physical labor nor systematic education. He preferred to loaf about and read on his own. (Throughout his life he absorbed a vast amount of literature on many subjects, and had special editions of books prepared for himself that became forbidden works for the masses.)

Like Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao seems to have had neither personal charisma nor the gift of oratory. Rather, he had the ability to manipulate people and situations to his own advantage, slowly rising to the top of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s. He was ruthless with both friend and foe, viewing everyone he encountered as mere tools to use and then dispose of in pursuit of absolute power.

Mao was married four times. He treated each wife miserably, as he did most of his children, whom he often abandoned to their fate and sometimes to their deaths. During the famous Long March in 1934–1935, when Mao lead the Chinese communist forces from south-central China to a new Red-controlled territory in the northwest region of the country, he made his third wife abandon their baby son as Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies were trying to surround them. Years later, she unsuccessfully hunted the countryside to find her lost child. Her only clue was the assumption that the son might have two of Mao’s distinguishing characteristics: oily ears and an especially pungent underarm odor.

Both before and especially after the Long March, Mao instigated reigns of terror and tyranny on the Chinese peasants who fell under the sway of his forces. Slave labor, starvation rations, and merciless propaganda and indoctrination sessions late into the night became the hallmarks of Chinese communist rule.Cruel and excruciating tortures and methods of execution were devised to assure destruction of all opposition and disobedience to Mao’s power. (The authors describe many of them in indelicate detail.)

Contrary to the left-wing myths of the time, especially in the American press, that Mao’s Red Army was the main Chinese fighting force against the Japanese during World War II, Mao instructed all his commanders to avoid battles with the Japanese. Instead, he worked to conserve his forces as a prelude to the Chinese Civil War that began in 1945 and ended in the communist conquest of the Chinese mainland in 1949.

The authors detail how Mao’s victory would have been impossible without the assistance of Stalin’s Soviet army, which overran Manchuria in the last weeks of the Pacific war. Stalin allowed Mao’s forces to occupy most of Manchuria behind the Soviet shield and turned over vast stores of captured Japanese weaponry.

The authors also explain how General George C. Marshall, then secretary of state in Harry Truman’s administration, was totally manipulated and duped by Mao and his chief diplomatic negotiator, Chou En-Lai. They persuaded Marshall that they were merely “agrarian reformers” wanting justice for the Chinese people in a coalition government with the Nationalists. All the while they were strengthening and positioning the Red Army for a grand attack to seize the rest of China. They succeeded in making Chiang Kai-shek seem to be the stumbling block to a political compromise,which resulted in the U.S. government cutting off all armament sales to the Nationalist government in 1947, just as victory was possibly in the grasp of Chiang’s armies.

Using Chinese and Soviet archival materials, the authors show that Mao happily assisted, with Stalin’s help, in the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950. Mao began assembling Chinese forces to enter the Korean War long before the United Nations forces pushed back the North Korean offensive and then crossed the 38th parallel to unify a free Korea. Mao was ready to continue the war indefinitely to kill tens of thousands of Americans in a conflict of attrition, even at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers’ lives. Only Stalin’s death in 1953 and the desire of the new Soviet leadership to calm international tensions forced Mao to accept a ceasefire and an end to the Korean conflict.

At an international conference of communist parties in Moscow in 1957 marking the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao delivered a speech calling for the start of a nuclear World War III against America. He declared that it did not matter if half of China’s population was killed in the cataclysm, because there would still be hundreds of millions of Chinese left to rise out of the rubble to rule a communist world. Shortly after that, Chou En-Lai told a Soviet envoy visiting Beijing that they should be planning a new capital city for such a communist-controlled world somewhere on a manmade island in the Pacific, since both Moscow and Beijing would likely be incinerated in the nuclear destruction that was to come.That didn’t seem to bother Mao at all.

In the 1950s and 1960s Mao pushed China into a crash program to make his country an industrial and nuclear superpower. Ignorant of all economic concepts, including the ideas of scarcity and tradeoffs, Mao crushed the Chinese population into abject poverty in an attempt to make himself ruler of the world.

While tens of millions of Chinese starved and died, he lived a life of luxury with dozens of atomic bombproof mansions built for his pleasure around the country, all with large swimming pools constantly heated in case he were to show up. But he spent most of his time in Beijing, lying in bed for days on end, eating his specially prepared foods, reading books banned for everyone else, and enjoying group sex whenever the urge came over him.

The authors explain that the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 was all a grand plan of Mao’s to settle scores with real and imaginary enemies in order to assure his absolute and unchallenged power over China. In the process, the country was pushed into horrific violence and terror that almost destroyed everything left of civilization in China.

Mao Zedong died in bed, an old and sick man in 1976, at the age of 82. His legacy was the murderous destruction of an entire society.

When the masterful and detailed study of twentieth-century communist regimes, The Black Book of Communism, was first published in France in the 1990s, for instance, one French leftist tried to rationalize the human cost of socialist tyranny by arguing: “Agreed, both Nazis and communists killed. But while the Nazis killed from hatred of humanity, the communists killed from love.”

Nazis, it seems, had bad intentions and used bad methods. Communists, on the other hand, had good intentions–they loved their fellow man and wanted to create a utopia for him–they just made an unfortunate error in selecting less-than-desirable means. Oh, well, back to the drawing board!

Richard Overy’s recent work, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, is the most detailed and methodical study, so far, of what the two totalitarian regimes shared in common and in what ways they differed. Indeed, there are few aspects of political, economic, social, and cultural life in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that do not receive meticulous analysis from the author.

It is in the concluding chapter of the book that one discovers what Overy considers the most fundamental premises of the two regimes. Both the Nazis and the communists, he argues, were guided by the spirit of scientism: the misplaced application of the methods of the natural sciences to the arena of human life. Marxian socialists were convinced that they could deduce the “laws” of historical development that necessitated the inevitable triumph of “the workers” over their capitalist exploiters. In addition, they believed that once the revolution had been orchestrated, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” had the ability to remake man and transform society into a collectivist paradise.

The Nazis also believed in the power of science, but in their case it was a “racial science” that defined different human groups and their hierarchical relationships to each other. Through application of eugenics, a purified “master race” could be socially engineered, with “the Germans” being the superior breed meant to rule the world.

Communism and Nazism, therefore, were variations on the same collectivist theme, in which the individual and his identity as a person were determined by either his “class” or “race.” Both were paranoid in their outlook on life. Nazis saw racial threats everywhere, in the form of inferior groups that could defile Germany’s blood purity. Communists saw class enemies surrounding and threatening the existence of the Soviet workers’ state. Vigilance at the borders and secret-police terror internally were essential for the regimes to preserve either the master race or the proletarian paradise.

Hitler and Stalin were convinced of their unique and irreplaceable roles in making history. Hitler believed that just as there is a master race among humanity, so there is a master leader within the master race, who through intuition, insight, and will power knows what is needed to assure the rightful place and destiny of the German people. Fate had called him to that task. Following in Lenin’s footsteps, Stalin believed that socialist victory was impossible without professional revolutionaries who served as the vanguard of the proletariat. Among the vanguard there was the necessity for one determined leader to head the movement, with “history” having assigned Stalin this momentous duty.

For Hitler and Stalin, their ruthlessness and disregard of human life were essential to fulfill their role as leaders of the Nazi and communist causes. What was, perhaps, most dangerous in both men was that they believed in what they were doing to bring their versions of utopia into existence. Hitler and Stalin were “true believers.”

The power of “scientific” social engineering was present in everything that they commanded for the reconstruction of German and Soviet society. Stalin introduced five-year central plans in 1929; Hitler imposed four-year central plans in 1936. Nothing was outside the orbit of control and command, from the most mundane consumer goods to the redesigning of whole cities and the wider countryside. Art, literature, music, sports, and leisure were all used to mold the tens of millions of subjects under their power into the desired shape for a beautiful tomorrow.

As Overy carefully recounts, there was little that was random in the Nazi and Soviet use of terror and imprisonment. Those, too, were planned with a purpose in mind. They targeted the designated “enemies of the people” to isolate and destroy all who opposed “the brave new world” in the making. But those arrested and sent off to concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were also viewed as forced labor for building the Nazi and Soviet societies. The victims were all part of the same central plan, whether for work or extermination.

Overy also highlights the degree of popularity that both the Nazis and communists achieved in German and Soviet society. The secret police were tiny fractions of those populations. With little prodding people willingly spied and informed on their friends, relatives, and neighbors. Both regimes promised and seemed to deliver a new ideal of “equality” in which devotion and hard work in the service of “the cause” assured that even the lowly could find status, position, and reward, now that the old class distinctions were swept away. The state monopoly over news and information succeeded in persuading millions of the truth and justice of the regimes under which they lived. The “masses” in both countries passively or actively worked for the system, with little resistance or opposition.

The Nazi and Soviet regimes have passed away, their cruelties fading in memory. Yet one wonders–if such ideologies could once before mesmerize so many, could they not do so again? Under the right circumstance, could not the appeal of utopia drag humanity once more into a vortex of destruction?

Indeed, the Russian imperial government had sent off many of the leading figures of the future Soviet government into exile in the years before World War I, including Lenin and Stalin.

But as cruel as the tsarist system may have seemed to those who suffered under it, it was mild and benevolent in comparison with the future Soviet regime.

When Lenin and Stalin were ordered into exile by the Russian authorities at the beginning of the twentieth century, they traveled to their places of exile on their own recognizance, with government railway passes to their destinations in Siberia.

They lived in isolated villages, but they could hunt and fish, read and write, and maintain correspondence with their friends and comrades. Political prisoners sent into exile were considered to be above the common criminal, people of ideological conscience who were to be treated differently.

Having lived and continued to work for their Marxist cause in Siberian exile under the tsars, the Bolshevik leaders knew the strengths and weaknesses of the prison and exile systems of the Russian Empire. When they came to power in November 1917, they soon introduced their own system of prisons and forced-labor camps in the huge reaches of the empire they inherited during and after onment and exile like the one they had lived through under the tsars would enable their opponents to maintain and extend their opposition to Soviet power.

Thus the new prison system that became the Gulag was designed to prevent and indeed destroy any ability for enemies of the communist regime to continue their resistance. Furthermore, and most especially under Stalin, the Gulag was turned into a vast slave system to provide the human material for “building socialism” with cheap and seemingly limitless supplies of labor.

In other words, during the 25 years of Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet state, the Gulag was made into an essential element in the system of socialist central planning for the construction of entire new industrial cities in empty and inhospitable regions of northern Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia, and supplied manpower to extract raw materials and precious metals from regions of the country that were virtually unfit for human habitation.

From Lenin’s time to the end of the Soviet system under Gorbachev, literally millions of victims of the regime entered and passed through the Gulag system, with many of them never living through the experience. But among those who did survive the ordeal, hundreds wrote about the nightmare of it all. And from the 1920s to the 1990s many of these accounts were published in the West. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume Gulag Archipelago and Eugeniya Ginsburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind are among the better-known accounts that have been available to the Western reader. And David Dallen and Boris Nicolaevsky’s Forced Labor in Soviet Russia and Nikolai Tolstoi’s Stalin’s Secret War have been among the carefully documented secondary summaries of the nature of the system.

But Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History is the first volume that attempts to give a detailed and fairly comprehensive narrative of the origin, purpose, workings, and reality of the system based on both the memoirs of those who lived through and survived the camps and the now-available archives in Russia.

The first part of the volume is devoted to explaining how the first prison camps were established in 1918 on islands in the White Sea in northern European Russia. The prisoners were mostly non-Bolshevik socialists. Soon the apparent tsarist style of imprisonment was replaced with the cruel severity that became the hallmark of the system in future years. Even so, the Bolsheviks at first tried to make it a showcase of humane treatment, but the camps on the islands were soon closed to prevent visitors from seeing the reality of how they were run.

The first great exercise with slave labor was also given publicity: the building of the White Sea Canal. But this was never done again, especially after the canal fell into disuse because of the poor and primitive manner in which it was constructed.

The Soviet leadership, in fact, did not want attention for the Gulag. Its purpose was not propaganda but rather mass labor under increasingly despicable conditions.

Applebaum recounts the arrest processes and the initial imprisonments. To obtain confessions prisoners were kept awake day and night, made to stand during the long hours of interrogation, beaten, tortured, and dehumanized. Prison cells were often overcrowded with no room to sit or sleep. When it was time to send them off to the camps, they were crowded into cattle cars with no sanitary facilities, poor ventilation, and meager food supplies. The journey to the destination camps in these conditions could last for weeks or even months.

Those who lived through the trip—and many died along the way—often found themselves deposited in empty wastelands of tundra, swamps, dense forests, deserts, or the frigid expanse of the Arctic Circle region. They would have to forage or hunt for food and, with few or no tools, build living quarters. Then they were set to work clearing timber areas, mining for metals, minerals, or precious gems, or constructing new industrial cities out of the barren terrain.

Among the most horrific destinations were the gold fields of Kolyma in eastern Siberia. Prisoners would be shipped by rail to the Pacific and then crammed into practically derelict vessels for the sea journey farther north. The death toll from the sea journey and the harsh conditions of the mines was especially high.

In the camps there was a system of rank, privilege, and power. The camp administrators often took advantage of their positions and isolated locations to rule their domains as if they were kings and princes whom the prisoners were to grovel before and mindlessly obey. The guards were also likely to brutalize and exploit the prisoners for their own purposes and benefit. Among the prisoners there was an ordering of power, privilege, and control. Informers were everywhere.

Death in the camps took many forms: prisoners were worked to death, starved to death, beaten to death, shot for disobedience or rebellion. One inmate later wrote, “Death in the camps possessed another terror: its anonymity. We had no idea where the dead were buried, or whether, after a prisoner’s death, any kind of death certificate was ever written … . The certainty that no one would ever learn of their death, that no one would ever know where they had been buried, was one of the prisoner’s greatest psychological torments.”

Rape and prostitution, both heterosexual and homosexual, were part of camp life. The children born and raised in the camps were treated no better than the adults. Applebaum explains: “Infant epidemics were legion. Infant deaths were extremely high—so high that they were, as the inspectors’ reports record, often deliberately covered up. But even those children who survived infancy had little chance at a normal life inside the camp nurseries.”

When they were older, they were usually transferred to state orphanages that “were vastly overcrowded, dirty, understaffed, and often lethal.” About 30 boys would live in a 12-square-meter room. One report stated that 38 boys shared seven beds and also said that 140 children shared one cup. Starvation was not uncommon in places.

There were rebellions and revolts — all crushed during Stalin’s time. But following Stalin’s death in March 1953, there occurred larger and more successful revolts. Informers would be murdered. The prisoners went on strike, most notably in the region around Vorkuta and Norilsk. But these, too, were finally put down, with hundreds of leaders and activists in the rebellions rounded up and shot.

However, the system never returned to the full madness of Stalin’s time. And in the years following Stalin’s death, large numbers of Gulag inmates were released. For the first time, their stories of life in the camps became known to virtually everyone else in the society, as the returnees told their tales to relatives and friends around the dinner table in hushed voices. But many did not want to hear out of fear or indifference.

Applebaum takes the story of the Gulag through the period of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the end of the system in the 1980s. As part of her summary, she attempts to estimate how many people actually went through the Gulag system. She comes up with a total of 28.7 million people, out of which millions died as a result of the system of forced labor. This, of course, does not include the millions of others who were murdered by the regime during the years of Soviet power as part of the purges or as “enemies of the people.”

In the short space of this review, it is impossible to do justice to the detail and care with which Applebaum recounts the subjects mentioned, as well as many others. It is a moving and serious account of one of the most evil aspects of Soviet communism in the twentieth century, certainly worthy of having been awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction.

The train from Budapest to Bucharest, Romania, was called the Orient Express. The original Orient Express began in the 1880s and connected Paris to Constantinople. The menu on the train’s first run included oysters,  turbot with green sauce, chicken “à la chasseur,” fillet of beef with “château” potatoes,  and a buffet of desserts. In the communist rendition of the Orient Express, there was no food on the train in Romania, though a few morsels may have been available in Hungary.

I had a cabin to myself as the train rolled southeast from Budapest. I had been told that if border guards found a map of Romania or any other dubious papers, I could be arrested or denied entry. So late at night, nearing the Romanian border, I studied the documents one more time, drilling into my head the things that I should be looking for. Then I tore everything up and threw it out the train window, piece by piece.

Shortly after midnight the train lumbered to a stop in Transylvania, at the Hungary-Romania border. The scene had all the ambience of the original 1932 Dracula movie. I didn’t hear wolves howling, but the mountain terrain, low-hanging fog, and military guards with German shepherds circling the train time and again sufficed.

My cabin was searched four times, with each team outdoing its predecessors. The mattresses on the bunk beds were jostled, and practically every cubic inch of space was poked or prodded.

The final inspection was supervised by a cute (by socialist standards) military officer. Perhaps the authorities thought I would confess my perfidy to the opposite sex. Nope: I was just another tourist heading to the “Paris of East Europe,” as Bucharest preened in pre-communist times. Except that there were almost zero tourists in a land renamed “the Ethiopia of Europe.” (I entered the country illegally—relying on an easily acquired tourist visa, instead of enduring the hassles and delays for a journalist visa.)

After the final search, guards bolted my cabin shut from the outside. The pseudo-luxury train had officially been converted into a traveling jail. But at least the intellectual-political virus was quarantined. My American passport had earned me special treatment. I just leaned back and counted my blessings: In Western Europe they charged double for a private cabin.

The Orient Express was no longer an express after it entered Romania, taking 13 hours to go roughly 400 miles and running far behind schedule.

Everywhere were signs of a government increasingly fearful of its people. Throughout Transylvania radio towers were surrounded by military guards and barbed wire. The train stopped at Brasov, a medieval city renamed Stalin City in 1950. A dozen years later, as friction rose with Moscow, Brasov regained its old name. Shortly before I passed through, thousands of workers responded to wage cuts by ransacking communist party offices and killing two government militia men.

Romania looked double-damned by government planning and political meddling. There were horse-drawn wagons next to spewing factories and huge apartment complexes. Many people had abandoned their slipshod cars after government sporadically banned the sale of gasoline for private vehicles.

Around nine the next morning, there was a rapping on my cabin door—like someone sending a secret message. I heard someone struggling with the bolted lock. The door popped open, and half a dozen ragtag Romanian workers poured in. They had heard there was a foreigner—perhaps an American—confined on the train. They obviously knew how to overturn the bolt that sealed the door. The workers stared at me like I was E.T., and it probably wasn’t just because of the old canvas hat I was wearing. Two of them leaned over and pawed/stroked my leather boots—eyes wide in amazement. Leather boots had apparently become the same type of luxury there that full-length mink coats were in America. Yet, in the pre-communist era, leather boots were probably routine for factory and farm workers. We communicated with simple gestures since I did not speak Romanian and they spoke no English. They seemed full of goodwill, but vanished after a few minutes—perhaps fearful of being caught talking to a foreigner.

Starved Into Submission

The workers were likely no fans of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the communist dictator who made Romania the most barbaric and repressive regime in Europe. Though Romania had been a breadbasket of Europe before World War I, food had become as rare as honest economic statistics. The communists destroyed hundreds of square miles of prime farmland to erect factories and open-pit mines. The government responded to food shortages with a publicity campaign on the danger of overeating. The government also revved up advertising in western nations touting Romania’s “world famous” weight-loss clinics.

Ceauşescu seemed determined to starve the people into submission. Romanians were forbidden to receive food shipments from foreigners. Visitors were stopped at the Romanian border and denied entry if they attempted to bring in a chocolate cake or bubble gum.

The government put almost all investments into heavy industry—the ultimate source of bragging rights for communist leaders. But roughly half of Romanian factory output was so shoddy it was ready for the junk heap as soon as it left the gate.

Romanian industry was also extremely inefficient, consuming up to five times as much energy per unit of output as western factories. The government compensated by cutting off electricity to people’s homes for up to six hours during the winter and permitting only one 25-watt light bulb per room.

The health system was collapsing, and the infant-mortality rate was so high the government refused to “register” children as being born until they survived their first month. The government also routinely cut off power to hospitals, which had caused a thousand deaths the previous winter.

The Darling of the World Bank

Yet some western experts thought Ceauşescu was the greatest thing since sliced bread. A 1979 World Bank report, the “Importance of Centralized Economic Control,” praised the Romanian regime for pursuing “policies to make better use of the population as a factor of production [by] stimulating an increase in birth rates.”

And how did the benevolent ruler do this? By prohibiting distribution of contraceptives and banning abortions. These policies turned Romania into the world capital of abandoned babies.

Finally arriving in Bucharest, I learned that the Hotel Intercontinental was the only place westerners were allowed to stay. After I checked in, a beefy thirtyish woman came up and asked in a gravely three-pack-a-day voice: “Would you like to have some company?”

I said no, and got away from her quick. The Romanian government was famous for using its intelligence agents as prostitutes. The woman had the hotel staked out, hoping to gather information from visitors or to entice them into behavior that could be videotaped and used to betray them.

I checked into my room, which looked like it was custom-designed for surveillance. I flipped on the TV set and saw choruses of peasants and workers in overalls listlessly waving flags and singing the praises of Ceauşescu, the self-proclaimed “Genius of the Carpathians,” as the camera zoomed in for close-ups of the great man’s face.

Fascinating stuff, but the plot line was a bit flat, so I sought entertainment elsewhere.

When I visit a new city I love to spend hours walking around—getting a feel for the turf. I stopped at the concierge desk at the Hilton and asked for a street map of downtown Bucharest. I figured it might have a walking guide to the Greatest Triumphs of Ceauşescu-ism within an eight-block radius of Communist Party headquarters.

The guy grimaced and eyed me like I had asked for a detonator for a bomb strapped underneath my overcoat.

“For what do you need a map?”

“Because I want to see the city’s landmarks.”

“We have no maps. If there is some place you want to go, you tell me what it is and I will tell you how to get there.”

“Where is the old part of the city?” I asked, knowing that most of it had been razed to make room for the ugliest “socialist realism” monoliths outside of North Korea.

The concierge scowled and muttered something—perhaps the Romanian slur for vexatious foreigners. My hunch was this guy didn’t make a living from tips.

On the street many people darted their eyes away—as if looking at foreigners might cause leprosy. I had heard that it was a crime for Romanians to talk to strangers. But a few people summoned up a hodgepodge of broken English, pleading for a pack of Kent cigarettes to bribe doctors to treat their sick children. The Romanian currency was practically worthless. The only things with value were western goods, like those Kents, which circulated as a black-market currency.

I stepped into the largest department store in Bucharest; it was dark, dank, and miserable. Sales clerks lounged on piles of new clothing heaped on the floor. One of the main attractions in the store: incredibly rickety baby carriages—the kind to use when you want to kill your kid and sue the pants off somebody. Except that this government never had any liability to its victims, no matter how many perished from its products or policies.

I passed by the boarded-up front door of an ancient church, standing naked amidst construction projects that had razed its surroundings. Many Romanians fretfully crossed themselves as they passed the church.

The U.S. embassy was surrounded by Romanian troops with machine guns to prevent Romanians from entering and asking for asylum.

Like other communist regimes, Romania was an economic theocracy. The government used its iron fist to make sure everything happened according to the Plan. For instance, the 1986-90 five-year plan decreed that Romanian scientists would make 4,015 discoveries, of which 2,423 would result in new products by Romanian businesses. It’s not surprising that the regime “planned” creativity, since it considered itself omniscient.

Romania was one of the World Bank’s favorite regimes, receiving more than $2 billion between 1974 and 1982. It predicted in 1979 that Romania would “continue to enjoy one of the highest growth rates among developing countries over the next decade . . . and become an industrialized economy by 1990.” But much of Romania’s apparent economic growth was the result of World Bank aid. The more handouts it gives a country, the easier it becomes to portray the nation as a success story. Then-World Bank president Robert McNamara cited Romania to tout his own “faith in the financial morality of socialist countries.”

Human Resources

The World Bank also praised the Romanian regime for its ability to “mobilize the resources” required to boost economic growth. In reality this merely meant that the government could brutalize its subjects to squeeze out “surpluses” to lavish funds on World Bank-approved industrial enterprises. Ceauşescu was doing the same thing Stalin did in the 1930s, when he starved up to ten million peasants to squeeze farmers to generate surpluses to build new factories.

The Romanian regime also “mobilized resources” by pawning its ethnic German and Jewish inhabitants. (West Germany would pay money for each ethnic German released from Romania). International agreements banned slave trading in the nineteenth century, but selling human beings in the twentieth century was okay if the receipts went for progressive purposes.

The World Bank never cut Ceauşescu off; instead, he ceased borrowing after he became convinced that western debt was a curse on his country.

As I knocked around Bucharest I assumed I was being followed. Roughly one in 15 Romanians was working as a government informant.

From my experience elsewhere in the East Bloc, I knew that pulling out a notebook set off the alarm bells. Instead, I jotted down notes on the palm of my hand. Such behavior was likely to be seen as merely weird not menacing. Single words served me as pegs to later pull up a strand of facts and thoughts.

Late the next afternoon I arrived at Bucharest’s main airport to fly to Frankfurt. I noticed that most of the businessmen ahead of me were openly giving a pack of Kents to each guard or other dreg at the four different security checkpoints.

I had bought a couple cartons of Kents before going to Romania, and I was soon passing out cigarette packs to airport guards like an old widow tossing candy to kids on Halloween.

I saw one or two German businessmen yanked aside for more invasive searches. As I passed the last checkpoint, I thanked my lucky stars that I had avoided such depredations.

That Lufthansa jet on the tarmac was the prettiest thing I had seen since the Orient Express crossed the Romanian border.

There was one graying soldier standing about 20 yards from the plane. I held up my passport, and he waved me on.

I had almost reached the gangway when I heard: HALT!

I turned and saw the guard running toward me, his submachine gun bouncing off his ample belly.

Puffing a bit, he caught up to me, grabbed my left arm, yanked it back, and pointing at my palm, demanded to know:

“WHAT IS THIS?!!!?”

I looked at my hand, then I looked at the guard.

“It’s ink.”

He paused, squinted, nodded his head knowingly, and then waved me on to the plane.

Two years later, 5,000 Romanians were killed during an uprising that overthrew the government. When Ceauşescu and his wife were summarily executed on December 25, 1989, it was probably the best Christmas present Romanians ever received.

She loved traditional Chinese culture, but her world was shattered on August 30, 1966, when the Red Guards ransacked her home and, on September 27, arrested her. She spent the next six and a half years in Shanghai’s No. 1 Detention House, in solitary confinement.

Communist Party interrogators accused Cheng of being a spy, but her real “crime” was that she was viewed as a “capitalist roader.” She had attended the London School of Economics (LSE) in the 1930s, where she met her husband, Kang-chi Cheng, who later became general manager for Shell Oil in Shanghai.

When he died in 1957, Nien Cheng became a special adviser to the new general manager. She was the highest-ranked businesswoman in China at the time. Her skills in dealing with party officials were invaluable and helped Shell stay in China until the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

During her imprisonment Cheng refused to admit  any wrongdoing. She was tortured and nearly died, but her determination to survive and her deep faith gave her the strength to persevere. She was released from prison on March 27, 1973, only to find that the Red Guards had murdered her only child, Meiping, for failing to “confess” and denounce her mother as a “class enemy.” Cheng’s one hope in life was gone; she left China forever in 1980 and settled in Washington, D.C., in 1983.

Anyone who knew Nien Cheng could immediately see that she was special—even the doctor at the No. 1 Detention House said he never met a more “truculent and argumentative” prisoner. When she learned of her imminent release, she refused to leave the prison unless the authorities declared, in writing, that she was “innocent of any crime or political mistake.” She insisted that they offer “an apology for wrongful arrest” and called the official statement “a sham and a fraud.”

In that statement she was accused of conspiring with the British government because in a letter she signed in 1957, shortly after she joined Shell, “she divulged the grain supply situation in Shanghai.” That accusation was ludicrous. Her secretary was merely conveying common knowledge to the incoming general manager, who was still in London—namely, that “the Shanghai government allows everyone twenty catties of grain per month.”

After nearly seven years in prison she declared, “I shall remain here until a proper conclusion is reached about my case.” The authorities refused, and two female guards had to drag her out of prison. It was not until later that Cheng learned that her interrogators were trying to get her to confess to being a spy so that Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong’s wife) and other radicals could oust Premier Zhou Enlai, a moderate who favored allowing foreign firms like Shell to operate in China.

It was only after Mao’s death in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping’s decision to open China to the outside world that Cheng was officially declared innocent of any crimes against the State and “rehabilitated” in November 1978.

The Realities of Communist Rule

It is ironic that Cheng became enticed by socialism during her studies at LSE. In her essay “The Roots of China’s Crisis” (in Economic Reform in China, which I edited along with Wang Xi), she wrote, “When I read a book on the Soviet Union by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, I thought, ‘How wonderful and idealistic socialism sounds.’”

Later, after her husband had served in Australia as a diplomat for the Nationalist government, the Chengs made the fateful decision to return to China in late 1948. They and many of their Western-educated friends were seduced by Mao’s call for democracy and wanted to help build a new China.

In her essay Cheng notes that while she had learned about socialist ideals at LSE—including the apparent success of Soviet egalitarianism, central planning, and state ownership—her professors never mentioned “class struggle” or “the realities of communist rule.” What she painfully discovered was that in a society where individuals have no economic freedom and no genuine rule of law, no one is safe from the power of the State. Economic life is politicized, corruption is endemic, and inequality of power reigns, in stark contrast to promises of egalitarianism.

As Cheng wrote in her book, “The fact is that the Communist government controls goods, services, and opportunities and dispenses them to the people in unequal proportions.” During the Maoist regime one’s rank in the party determined one’s economic status. “Though the salary of a member of the Politburo was no more than eight or ten times that of an industrial worker, the perks available to him without charge were comparable to those enjoyed by kings.”

The Chinese Communist Party under Mao’s iron fist destroyed civil society and traditional culture. A new China was created after the Communist victory in 1949, but it was not the socialist ideal Cheng had envisioned. Rather, the party created “mindless robots, unburdened by the capacity for independent thinking or a human conscience.”

Success depended on power, and justice vanished. “The result was a fundamental change in the basic values of Chinese society,” she wrote.

Mao’s mantra was, “Strike hard against the slightest sign of private property.” Nien Cheng’s property, including her priceless porcelain collection, was confiscated. Her daughter was murdered and her freedom destroyed by the State.

Crony Capitalism

While in jail, in 1971, the inmates were assembled and an official announced, “Many of you are here precisely because you worshiped the capitalist world of the imperialists and belittled socialist China. You placed your hope in the capitalist world and believed that one day capitalism would again prevail in China.”

Today, mainland China is perhaps more capitalist than any other country, but it is “crony capitalism.”  The nation lacks full-fledged private property rights, especially in land; there is no independent judiciary to protect persons and property against the party’s monopoly on power; and freedom of religion and expression are sharply curtailed. The battle for justice that Cheng fought has not yet been won.

In her book Cheng recognized the significance of President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the importance of engaging China. She witnessed the progress the mainland has made since Deng Xiaoping began to liberalize markets in 1978. She understood the critical role of trade and investment in linking China to the West. But she also understood that “Unless and until a political system rooted in law, rather than personal power, is firmly established in China, the road to the future will always be full of twists and turns.”

Seeking Truth and Justice

Nien Cheng’s journey from an idealistic Marxist liberal at LSE in the 1930s to a realistic market liberal—after living through Mao’s upheavals and seeing the end of private property and the uncertainty and injustice caused by arbitrary and unlimited State power—gave her a great appreciation of America.

Near the end of her life, in a personal letter, she wrote,

I can hardly believe I have lived so long. I think it is mainly because I am never angry nor am I ever worried. I believe in “constant change,” so I always think a bad situation will change into a good situation or not so bad after all. In any case, there is always a solution. As for being angry, after what had happened to me in China, I think I have used up all the anger inside me. There is simply nothing to be angry about in America.

All Americans should be proud Nien Cheng chose to make America her home. She believed that here she would be free to choose and that her person and property would be protected by the law of the land.

Today, as the U.S. government grows in size and power, it would be well to remember the wisdom of Nien Cheng—and the danger to personal freedom when the State erodes economic freedom.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the South China Morning Post, November 15, 2009.