In Cuba, a completely sane 16-year-old student named Jose Alvarado Delgado is committed to a mental hospital, given electroshock therapy, and force-fed psychotropic drugs. In the Soviet Union, Evgenia Ginzburg is interrogated by the secret police for seven days straight, without sleep or food. In Vietnam, Doan Van Toai sees a fellow prisoner commit suicide by biting off his own tongue and choking on it. In Cambodia, Haing Ngor witnesses a Khmer Rouge soldier suffocate a pregnant woman with a plastic bag, then rip out the fetus with a bayonet.

As I read these accounts of victims of communism collected in “From the Gulag to the Killing Fields” (ISI Books, 760 pages, $35) – an anthology of memoirs from around the world and across the century, including famous writers and anonymous prisoners, ardent revolutionaries and innocent bystanders – I kept thinking of a phrase from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s influential 2000 book, “Empire”: “the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist.” Substitute the word “fascist” in that sentence, and you would have a sentiment that every civilized person would instantly condemn as not just evil, but insane. Yet “Empire,” with its eleventh hour attempt to rehabilitate communism as a source of political hope, was widely hailed in the academy as a great achievement. Decades after Stalin’s purges, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot’s genocide, it is still possible for educated people to associate communism with lightness and joy, and to be praised for doing so.

The momentary celebrity of Messrs. Negri and Hardt is a trivial matter. But the moral blindness of which that celebrity is a minor symptom is anything but trivial. It is, in fact, the reason Paul Hollander, the eminent scholar of Soviet communism, spent the last decade assembling this large, frightening, and important book. In his brilliant introduction, “The Distinctive Features of Repression in Communist States” – the best brief summary of the nature and crimes of communism that I have read – Mr. Hollander notes:

While there is a vast literature on the Holocaust … and while it has justifiably stimulated a huge and continued outpouring of research, moral outrage, and soul searching, the mass murders and other atrocities committed in the Soviet Union under (and after) Stalin have inspired little corresponding concern and interest.

Stalin, however, is at least recognized as a figure of almost unparalleled evil and cruelty; outside the lunatic fringe, he has as few admirers as Hitler. More perplexing is the continued willingness of Western intellectuals to make cult heroes of other communist despots. It is still not uncommon to find admirers of Lenin, seen as the pristine embodiment of communist virtue, or of Fidel Castro, seen as the daring patriarch of Third World liberation. Other communist regimes are simply missing from our moral radar. For all that has been written about the Vietnam War, most Americans know next to nothing about what happened in South Vietnam after the communist victory. The famine that struck Ethiopia in the 1980s is remembered here as a humanitarian crisis, not as the criminal result of Mengistu’s collectivization policies. Finally, and most ominously, there is the People’s Republic of China – usually portrayed in the news media these days as an emerging capitalist dynamo, but still governed by the Communist Party that gave its people famine and forced labor, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square.

In short, while it is common to speak of the defeat of communism in the Cold War, that defeat has not been total, especially in the way communism is remembered and understood. It is still possible for Western intellectuals to deny the crucial lesson of the 20th century, that utopian politics are shortest route to dystopia. And this denial is all too easy to understand. After all, if the rhetoric and the declared intentions of communism are so good – universal liberation, perfect equality, an end to want – how can the reality be so bad?

That is the question raised, again and again, in “From the Gulag to the Killing Fields.” It is one of the common themes running through these eyewitness accounts of every communist regime in the 20th century, from Russia to Cuba, China to Nicaragua, Bulgaria to North Korea. Naturally, the details of what each author experienced – the methods of torture, the inflections of propaganda – vary according to time, place, and cultural background. Witnesses from Vietnam are especially shocked by the communist cadres’ rudeness to their elders; in Ethiopia, Mengistu’s refusal to allow his victims to be buried is seen as the worst possible outrage.

But the disbelief remains constant. Everywhere, the victim of communism initially finds it impossible to believe that a revolution in the name of the people could oppress and destroy the people. How could it be that, in the words of the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov, “no other political religion … has … a stronger impact on the baser human instincts and passions … [and] has given such encouragement to human vice generally, as the Communist ideology”?

The shock is especially great for true believers, who so often fall victim to their own revolution. Evgenia Ginzburg, an old Bolshevik and wife of a high-ranking Soviet official, was shocked that an NKVD interrogator would manipulate her answers: “Why don’t we have a stenographer to put them down?” she asks, only to be met with “peals of laughter.” Anna Larina was shocked at the fantastic accusations brought by Stalin against her husband, the Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin: “The sheer mass of crimes … could not possibly have been committed by one criminal in his entire lifetime.” Inevitably, given the audacity of the regime’s persecution, the prisoner begins to wonder if he is guilty in some way he never suspected. “Was I a criminal?” Harry Wu wonders after being sent to a forced labor camp. “Perhaps my ideas had brought harm to the majority of the Chinese people.”

The psychological and material techniques of communist oppression are not, of course, a secret. They have been plain, for those willing to see, at least since Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s. But for scope, comprehensiveness, and direct emotional power, no document of those techniques surpasses “From the Gulag to the Killing Fields.” Any reader who begins reading the book with some lingering sympathy for communism will close it with the words of Teeda Butt Mam, a victim of the Khmer Rouge, echoing in his ears: “Silently, I berated myself, tortured myself, for being so gullible. Why had I allowed myself to believe the lies? Would I never learn?”