Le Siècle des Camps
Joel Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot
JC Lattes, 805 pages.

Contrary to what might be expected, the first recorded use of the expression “concentration camps” did not occur in either Germany or Russia. Nor, even, was the term originally English, as many also mistakenly believe. In fact, as far as it is possible to ascertain, the first person to speak of concentration camps or, more precisely, to speak of a policy of “reconcentración” - was Arsenio Martinez Campos, then the commander of the Spanish garrison in Cuba. Read on »

The Black Book of Communism, Edited by Stephane Courtois et al, trans. Mark Kramer and Jonathan Murphy, Harvard University Press, 1120pp.

Its pages were yellowed, its cheap binding broken, its typeface uneven: there was nothing imposing about the copy of Un Bagne en Russie Rouge - `A Prison in Red Russia’ - which someone once handed me as a curiosity. Nevetheless, the book, published in Paris in 1927, was one of the first to describe the Soviet Union’s earliest political prisons, located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. Read on »

On the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In my mind, I have two distinct images of the fall of the Berlin Wall. One is the televised event that is ingrained in public memory: champagne corks popping, people dancing and cheering, politicians making weepy speeches.

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Arkhangelsk, Russia — The Germans called it humanitarian aid. The International Monetary Fund spoke of structural development, the World Bank of business development. Read on »

This essay was also reproduced in the anthology The Future of The European Past, ed. Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1997.

An essay about the absence of memory of communist crimes.

Venice has the Piazza San Marco, Paris has the Eiffel Tower, and now Prague has the Charles Bridge: wide and pedestrianised, blackened with age - and suffused with the spirit of capitalism. There are buskers and hustlers along the bridge, and, every fifteen feet or so, someone is selling very much what one would expect to find for sale in such a postcard-perfect spot. Read on »