Yesterday in Germany, as President Bush met with President Putin, the finishing touches were being applied to a new Washington monument — a monument to the millions of victims of communism.

Until recently it was easy to forget what communism was about. But with Mr. Putin putting pressure on former Soviet satellites to toe his line, threatening to target missiles on Western Europe, and using energy as a new weapon of choice, the memorial comes none too soon.

Washington is filled with memorials in landmark locations around the Mall — the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and many more. Each one memorializes well-known persons or groups of identifiable individuals.

The Vietnam Memorial is a black wall inscribed with the names of the dead.

The monument to victims of communism stands not on the mall but at the intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey avenues, two blocks from Union Station, further away from traditional tourist beats.

At least 100 million people died at the hands of communist regimes in the 20th century. Two-thirds of them — 65 million people — lived and died in China. They were victims of forced migrations, prisons, famine, and other government-instigated catastrophes.

The Soviet Union killed 20 million people, from the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 to the Stalin purge trials of the 1930s to the ensuing decades until its collapse in 1991.

Other communist dictatorships around the world, such as North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, and Vietnam, accounted for millions of more deaths. “Communism” was too often a 20th-century euphemism for despots who remained in power by intimidating, crippling, and killing their own people.

For the 80 years between 1920 and 2000, 100 million deaths are the equivalent of more than 3,400 persons a day. And billions more suffered. Except for communist party bosses, unfortunate residents had lives crushed by the regime. They were not able to act according to their desires. Their opportunities were stunted.

Practically all victims of communism are anonymous. What does it mean to much of the world’s population whose lives were demeaned, embittered, and shortened by their own governments to list the names of the victims on a memorial? To even contemplate inscribing the names of the victims on a wall or a pillar is incomprehensible. How much room should be left on such a monument for the future generations of victims in Cuba, North Korea, and China, where communism still exists, or in Russia, where it has not completely been eradicated?

Many Americans view our country’s wars with some ambivalence, but one war in which there can be no doubt that we were on the right side, and which we unambiguously won, was the Cold War against communism. Ronald Reagan’s epithet to describe the Soviet Union, “the evil empire,” seems mild next to the numbers of lives communism destroyed.

Even others living outside communist countries lived in fear of nuclear war. Our government spent billions on defense systems, money that could have been returned to private citizens in the form of lower taxes.

Although we won the Cold War, communism still persists. North Korea is among the poorest countries in the world, and may be the most repressive one. The few citizens who can flee from Cuba, do so. Once-rich Zimbabwe has crumbled as prosperous farmers have had their land confiscated in the name of collective agriculture. Venezuela is taking the same path, with President Chavez confiscating property, causing investment and human capital to go elsewhere.

Frighteningly, communism is reasserting itself in Russia, where it started in 1917. The head of Yukos Oil, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is in prison on flimsy tax charges, and the remainder of his once-profitable company was auctioned off last month to shell companies backed by the Russian government, reinstating government ownership of the oil sector.

As well as seizing property and imprisoning opponents, the Moscow government has shown a renewed inclination to assassinate its enemies. A Russian who received political asylum in London, Alexander Litvinenko, and whose book, “Blowing Up Russia” is banned in Russia, was poisoned by radiation in London in 2006. Prominent journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered as she brought groceries back to her Moscow apartment.

And Russia continues to pose a threat to its neighbors. According to a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Irwin Stelzer, “Missiles and a nuclear umbrella might have prevented the Red army from rolling across Europe, but they are no match for supply cut-offs that can throw Western economies into recession, and force German, Austrian, French and Italian consumers to freeze in the dark.”

When Mr. Putin visits the Bush family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, in early July, Mr. Bush might want to tell him about the Victims of Communism , why it stands in Washington, and ask him why there is none like it in Moscow. Mr. Bush should have a simple message: communism and despotism failed in the past and they will fail in the future as well.

Incapable of fully comprehending the scale of evil and destruction caused by communism, we in America can only build a monument to the memory of its victims. In Russia, the very land is a silent memorial to the millions crushed by evil governments. Will Mr. Putin’s name be added to the list of despots cursed by the dead, or is there still time for him to change Russia’s course?

Ms. Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.