ABSTRACT
The idea of super power equivalence, or moral equivalence—popular between the late 1960s and the collapse of the Soviet Union—provided further disincentives to looking closely at the crimes of communism. This chapter argues that the crimes were the responsibility of individual leaders, their personal pathologies, and abuse of power or resulted from bureaucratic "excesses", the flaws of human nature and other "non-systemic" matters. The crimes of the Cambodian regime are better known thanks largely to its conflict with another, more respectable communist state, Vietnam, which after its victory authenticated the massacres. The rise of the third world revolutionary societies —China, Cuba, Vietnam and later Nicaragua —promised to restore the good name of communism (or socialism,) compromised to some degree by the Soviet Union even in the eyes of those on the left. The magnitude of the crimes was proportional to the political-ideological aspirations and their unattainability.
