The Black Book of Communism
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a 1997
The Black Book of Communism has been translated into numerous languages, has sold millions of copies, and is considered one of the most influential and controversial books written about the
Overview
The authors use the term
Introduction: "The Crimes of Communism"
The introduction, written by Courtois, was the main source of controversy,
Courtois writes that "[r]egardless of the role that theoretical communist doctrines may have played in the practice of real Communism before 1917", it was what he terms "flesh-and-blood Communism" which "imposed wholesale repression, culminating in a state-sponsored reign of terror." Courtois then asks whether the ideology itself is "blameless", stating that "[t]here will always be some nitpickers who maintain that actual Communism has nothing in common with theoretical communism" and that "it would be absurd to claim that doctrines expounded prior to Jesus Christ, during the Renaissance, or even in the nineteenth century were responsible for the events that took place in the twentieth century."[8]: 2 Quoting Ignazio Silone ("Revolutions, like trees, are recognized by the fruit they bear"), Courtois says that "[i]t was not without reason" that the Bolsheviks, whose party was called the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, renamed it as the Russian Communist Party, called themselves "Communists", and erected monuments to honor Tommaso Campanella and Thomas More.[8]: 2 Courtois claims that "the crimes of Communism have yet to receive a fair and just assessment from both historical and moral viewpoints."[8]: 2
Foreword: "The Uses of Atrocity"
In his foreword to the English-language and American edition, Malia states that "Communism has been the great story of the twentieth century" and "it had come to rule a third of mankind and seemed poised to advance indefinitely. For seven decades it haunted world politics, polarizing opinion between those who saw it as the socialist end of history and those who considered it history's most vital tyranny."[8]: ix According to Malia, "more than eighty years after 1917, probing examination of the Big Questions raised by the Marxist-Leninist phenomenon has hardly begun" and that "a serious historiography was precluded in Soviet Russia by the regime's mandatory ideology", further stating that "scholarly investigation of Communism has until recently fallen disproportionately to Westerns."[8]: ix Malia writes that "The Black Book offers us the first attempt to determine, overall, the actual magnitude of what occurred, by systematically detailing Leninism's 'crimes, terror, and repression' from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989."[8]: x Malia also argues against what he terms "the fable of 'good Lenin/bad Stalin'", stating that there never was a "benign, initial phase of Communism before some mytical 'wrong turn' threw it off track", claiming that Lenin expected and wanted from the start a civil war "to crush all 'class enemies'; and this war, principally against the peasants, continued with only short pauses until 1953."[8]: xviii Malia further says that the Red Terror "cannot be explained as the prolongation of prerevolutionary political cultures", but rather as "a deliberate policy of the new revolutionary order; and its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past."[8]: xviii Malia laments that "'Positivist' social scientists ... have averred that moral questions are irrelevant to understanding the past" and criticizes this perspective by arguing that it "reduces politics and ideology everywhere to anthropology."[8]: xvi
According to Malia, there is a "basic problem" in Western historiography of Communism which he describes as "the conceptual poverty of the Western empirical effort." Malia states that "[t]his poverty flows from the premise that Communism can be understood, in an aseptic and value-free mode, as the pure product of social process", faulting that "researches have endlessly insisted that the October Revolution was a workers' revolt and not a Party coup d'état, when it was obviously the latter riding piggyback on the former." According to Malia, "the central issue in Communist history is not the Party's ephemeral worker 'base'; it is what the intelligentsia victors of October later did with their permanent coup d'etat, and so far this has scarcely been explored."[8]: x Malia then goes on to describe "two fantasies holding out the promise of a better Soviet socialism than the one the Bolsheviks actually built." The first one is "the 'Bukharin alternative' to Stalin" which Malia describes as "a thesis that purports to offer a nonviolent, market road to socialism—that is, Marx's integral socialism, which necessitates the full suppression of private property, profit, and the market." The second one "purports to find the impetus behind Stalin's 'revolution from above' of 1929–1933 in a 'cultural revolution' from below by Party activists and workers against the 'bourgeois' specialists dear to Bukharin, a revolution ultimately leading to massive upward mobility from the factory bench."[8]: x Malia writes that "perhaps a moral, rather than a social, approach to the Communist phenomenon can yield a truer understanding for the much-investigated Soviet social process claimed victims on a scale that has never aroused a scholarly curiosity at all proportionate to the magnitude of the disaster."[8]: x
Estimated number of victims
According to the introduction, the number of people killed by the Communist governments amounts to more than 94 million.[8]: 4 The statistics of victims include deaths through executions, man-made hunger, famine, war, deportations, and forced labor. The breakdown of the number of deaths is given as follows:
- 65 million in the People's Republic of China
- 20 million in the Soviet Union
- 2 million in Cambodia
- 2 million in North Korea
- 1.7 million in Ethiopia
- 1.5 million in Afghanistan
- 1 million in the Eastern Bloc
- 1 million in Vietnam
- 150,000 in Latin America
- 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power"[8]: 4
According to Courtois, the crimes by the Soviet Union included the following:
- The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners
- The murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922
- The Russian famine of 1921which caused the death of 5 million people
- The decossackization, a policy of systematic repression against the Don Cossacksbetween 1917 and 1933
- The murder of tens of thousands in the Gulag during the period between 1918 and 1930
- The Great Purge which killed almost 690,000 people
- The dekulakization, resulting in the deportation of 2 million so-called kulaks from 1930 to 1932
- The death of 4 million Ukrainians (Holodomor) and 2 million others during the famine of 1932 and 1933
- The deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, Moldovans, and people from the Baltic states from 1939 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1945
- The deportation of the Volga Germansin 1941
- The deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944
- : 9–10
This and other communist death tolls have been criticized by various historians and scholars. Any attempt to estimate a total number of killings under communist regimes depends greatly on definitions,[10] ranging from a low of 10–20 million to as high as 110 million.[11]: 75, 91, 275 Criticism of some of the estimates is mostly focused on three aspects, namely that the estimates were based on sparse and incomplete data when significant errors are inevitable, that the figures were skewed to higher possible values, and that those dying at war and victims of civil wars, Holodomor, and other famines under Communist regimes should not be counted.[9][12][13][14][15][16]
Historian
In The Devil in History, political scientist Vladimir Tismăneanu wrote: "Speaking of the number of victims under communist regimes (between 85 and 100 million) and comparing this horrible figure to number of people who perished under or because of Nazism (25 million), Courtois decided to downplay a few crucial facts. In this respect, some of his critics were not wrong. First, as an expansionist global phenomenon, Communism lasted between 1917 and the time of the completion of The Black Book (think of North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, where it is still alive, if not well). [Nazism] lasted between 1933 and 1945. Second, we simply do not know what the price in terms of victims of Nazism would have been had Hitler won the war. The logical hypothesis is that not only Jews and Gypsies but also millions of Slavs and other 'racially unfit' individuals would have been destined to death."[21]
Comparison of communism and Nazism
On 12 November 1997, the then-Prime Minister of France and Socialist Lionel Jospin responded to the book's claims and declared to the National Assembly that "the Revolution of 1917 was one of the great events of the century. ... And if the [French Communist Party (PCF)] had taken so long to denounce Stalinism, it had done so anyway." Jospin added that "the PCF had learned the lessons from its history. It is represented in my government and I'm proud of it."[22] In a 21 November 1997 interview with Die Zeit, Courtois stated: "In my opinion, there is nothing exceptional about the Nazi genocide against the Jews."[23] Historian Amir Weiner wrote: "The comparison with Nazism is inevitable. It is merited on the grounds of the mutual commitment to social engineering through violent means; the ensuing demographic, psychological, and ethical implications; and, not least, the fact that both systems constantly scrutinized one another. Unfortunately, the authors of the Black Book reduce the comparison to body counting, charging communists with killing nearly 100 million people and the Nazis, 25 million. At best, this approach is ahistorical and demeaning."[14]
Many observers have rejected Courtois' numerical and moral comparison of communism to Nazism in the introduction,[24]: 148 [25][26] the claim made in the book that "a lot of what they describe 'crimes, terror, and repression' has somehow been kept from the general public",[14] According to Werth, there was still a qualitative difference between communism and Nazism, stating: "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union."[19] On 21 September 2000, Werth further told Le Monde: "The more you compare Communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious."[19] Weiner wrote that "[w]hen Stalin's successors opened the gates of the Gulag, they allowed 3 million inmates to return home. When the Allies liberated the Nazi death camps, they found thousands of human skeletons barely alive awaiting what they knew to be inevitable execution."[14] Historian Ronald Grigor Suny remarked that Courtois' comparison of 100 million victims of Communism to 25 million victims of Nazism leaves out "most of the 40–60,000,000 lives lost in the Second World War, for which arguably Hitler and not Stalin was principally responsible."[4]: 8 Alongside philosopher Scott Sehon, anthropologist and postsocialist gender studies scholar Kristen Ghodsee commented that Courtois' death toll estimate for Nazism "conveniently" excludes those killed in World War II.[27]
At least one scholar in
Jacques Sémelin writes that Courtois and Margolin "view class genocide as the equivalent to racial genocide." Alongside Michael Mann, they contributed to "the debates on comparisons between Nazism and communism", with Sémelin describing this as a theory also developed in The Black Book of Communism.[28]: 37 Margolin, along with Werth, addressed this comparison in a response printed in Le Monde; rather than "indistinguishable evils", they emphasized a marked distinction in ideology. Courtois responded in the same newspaper with an essay in 1997.[29]: 18 Werth compared the idea to ascribe all crimes committed by Communist states to communism with the idea to "throw in the face of a liberal the crimes committed in all the countries that claimed to be liberal."[30] According to historian Andrzej Paczkowski, only Courtois made the comparison between Communism and Nazism, while the other sections of the book "are, in effect, narrowly focused monographs, which do not pretend to offer overarching explanations." Paczkowski wonders whether it can be applied "the same standard of judgment to, on the one hand, an ideology that was destructive at its core, that openly planned genocide, and that had an agenda of aggression against all neighboring (and not just neighboring) states, and, on the other hand, an ideology that seemed clearly the opposite, that was based on the secular desire of humanity to achieve equality and social justice, and that promised a great leap of forward into freedom", and states that while a good question, it is hardly new and inappropriate because The Black Book of Communism is not "about communism as an ideology or even about communism as a state-building phenomenon."[9]
In a 2001 article for
Stéphane Courtois
Courtois considers Communism and Nazism to be distinct yet comparable
Courtois states that the Soviet crimes against peoples living in the Caucasus and of large
Martin Malia
Malia strongly agrees with Courtois, describing it as "a 'tragedy of planetary dimensions' ..., with a grand total of victims variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million"[8]: x and stating that what he terms the "full power of the shock" was "delivered by the unavoidable comparison of this sum with that for Nazism, which at an estimated 25 million turns out to be distinctly less murderous than Communism."[8]: xi According to Malia, "[t]he shocking dimensions of the Communist tragedy" are "hardly news to any serious student of twentieth-century history, at least when the different Leninist regimes are taken individually."[8]: x
Malia mentions Courtois' argument that since Nuremberg jurisprudence (
Malia writes that the "ultimate distinguishing characteristic" of Nazism is the Holocaust which, according to Malia, is considered as historically unique. He laments that "Hitler and Nazism are now a constant presence in Western print and on Western television", while "Stalin and Communism materialize only sporadically", with the status of former Communists carrying no stigma. Malia also laments a double standard in
Malia cites the liberal Le Monde as arguing that "it is illegitimate to speak of a single Communist movement from Phnom Penh to Paris. Rather, the rampage of the Khmer Rouge is like the ethnic massacres of third-world Rwanda, or the 'rural' Communism of Asia is radically different from the 'urban' Communism of Europe; or Asian Communism is really only anticolonial nationalism", further stating that "conflating sociologically diverse movements" is "merely a stratagem to obtain a higher body count against Communism, and thus against all the left." He criticizes this as "
Malia writes that by reducing politics and ideology to anthropology, it "assure[s] us that contrary to Hannah Arendt, the 'Nazi/Soviet similarities' are insufficient to make denunciation a specifically 'totalitarian' phenomenon." He criticizes this argument by stating that "the difference between Nazi/Communist systems and Western ones is 'not qualitative but quantitative.' By implication, therefore, singling out Communist and Nazi terror in order to equate them becomes Cold War slander—the ideological subtext, as it happens, of twenty-five years of 'revisionist,' social-reductionist Sovietology."[8]: xvi He further criticizes it by making the point that "this fact-for-fact's sake approach suggests that there is nothing specifically Communist about Communist terror—and, it would seem, nothing particularly Nazi about Nazi terror either." He states that "the bloody Soviet experiment is banalized in one great gray anthropological blur; and the Soviet Union is transmogrified into just another country in just another age, neither more nor less evil than any other regime going", and dismisses this as "obviously nonsense." For Malia, "the problem of moral judgment" is "inseparable from any real understanding of the past" and "from being human."[8]: xvi
Moral equivalence
Malia asks "What of the moral equivalence of Communism and Nazism?" Malia writes that "[a]fter fifty years of debate, it is clear that no matter what the hard facts are, degrees of totalitarian evil will be measured as much in terms of present politics as in terms of past realities" and that "we will always encounter a double standard as long as there exist a left and a right",[8]: xx which he "roughly define[s] as the priority of compassionate egalitarianism for the one, and as the primacy of prudential order for the other."[8]: xvi–xvii Malia states that "[s]ince neither principle can be applied absolutely without destroying society, the modern world lives in perpetual tension between the irresistible pressure for equality and the functional necessity of hierarchy."[8]: xvii For Malia, it is "this syndrome" which "gives the permanent qualitative advantage to Communism over Nazism in any evaluation of their quantitative atrocities. For the Communist projects, in origin, claimed commitment to universalistic and egalitarian goals, whereas the Nazi projects offered only unabashed national egoism", causing their practices to be "comparable" and their "moral auras" to be "antithetical."[8]: xvii
According to this argument, "[a] moral man can have 'no enemies to the left,' a perspective in which undue insistence on Communist crime only 'plays into the hands of the right'—if, indeed, any anticommunism is not simply a mask for antiliberalism."[8]: xvii Malia cites Le Monde as deeming The Black Book of Communism "inopportune because equating Communism with Nazism removed the 'last barriers to legitimating the extreme right,' that is, Le Pen." While stating it is true that "Le Pen's party and similar hate-mongering, xenophobic movements elsewhere in Europe represents an alarming new phenomenon that properly concerns all liberal democrats", Malia writes that in no way does it follow that "Communism's criminal past should be ignored or minimized."[8]: xvii Malia writes that "the persistence of such sophistry is precisely why The Black Book is so opportune",[8]: xvii much like Courtois' reasoning for writing the book that "the crimes of Communism have yet to receive a fair and just assessment from both historical and moral viewpoints."[8]: 3
About The Black Book of Communism, Courtois further says: "This book is one of the first attempts to study Communism with a focus on its criminal dimensions, in both the central regions of Communist rule and the farthest reaches of the globe. Some will say that most of these crimes were actions conducted in accordance with a system of law that was enforced by the regimes' official institutions, which were recognized internationally and whose heads of state continued to be welcomed with open arms. But was this not the case with Nazism as well? The crimes we shall expose are to be judged not by the standards of Communist regimes, but by the unwritten code of natural laws of humanity."
German edition: "The Processing of Socialism in the GDR"
The German edition contains an additional chapter on the Soviet-backed Communist regime in East Germany titled "Die Aufarbeitung des Sozialismus in der DDR" ("The Processing of Socialism in the GDR"). It consists of two subchapters, namely "Politische Verbrechen in der DDR" ("Political Crimes in the GDR") by Ehrhart Neubert and "Vom schwierigen Umgang mit der Wahrnehmung" ("On the Difficulty of Handling Perceptions") by Joachim Gauck.[33]
Reception
According to historian Jon Wiener, The Black Book of Communism "received both praise and criticism. ... The book was especially controversial in France because it was published during the 1997 trial of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon for crimes against humanity for his role in the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux to Hitler's death camps. Papon's lawyers introduced the book as evidence for the defense."[34]: 37–38 The Black Book of Communism has been especially influential in Eastern Europe, where it was uncritically embraced by prominent politicians and intellectuals—many of these intellectuals popularized it using terminology and concepts popular with the radical right.[32]: 47, 59
According to political scientist Stanley Hoffmann, "[t]his gigantic volume, the sum of works of 11 historians, social scientists, and journalists, is less important for the content, but for the social storm it has provoked in France. ... What Werth and some of his colleagues object to is 'the manipulation of the figures of the numbers of people killed' (Courtois talks of almost 100 million, including 65 million in China); 'the use of shock formulas, the juxtaposition of histories aimed at asserting the comparability and, next, the identities of fascism, and Nazism, and communism.' Indeed, Courtois would have been far more effective if he had shown more restraint."[35]
Academic press
Whereas chapters of the book that describe the events in separate Communist states were praised for the most part, some generalizations made by Courtois in the introduction to the book became a subject of criticism both on scholarly and political[36]: 139 grounds.[3]: 236 [24]: 13 [37]: 68–72 Moreover, three of the book's main contributors (Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, and Nicolas Werth)[6] publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois' statements in the introduction and criticized his editorial conduct.[35] Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed, which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship",[38] faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries,[6][39]: 194 [40]: 123 and rejected the comparison between Communism and Nazism.[3][note 3]
Several reviewers have singled out Werth's "State against Its People"
Historian Alexander Dallin questioned "[w]hether all these cases, from Hungary to Afghanistan, have a single essence and thus deserve to be lumped together—just because they are labeled Marxist or communist—is a question the authors scarcely discuss."[10] Historians Jens Mecklenburg and Wolfgang Wippermann wrote that a connection between the events in Pol Pot's Cambodia and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union are far from evident and that Pol Pot's study of Marxism in Paris is insufficient for connecting radical Soviet industrialism and the Khmer Rouge's murderous anti-urbanism under the same category.[46] Historian Michael David-Fox criticized the figures as well as the idea to combine loosely connected events under a single category of Communist death toll, blaming Courtois for their manipulation and deliberate inflation which are presented to advocate the idea that Communism was a greater evil than Nazism. In particular, David-Fox criticized the idea to connect the deaths with some "generic Communism" concept, defined down to the common denominator of party movements founded by intellectuals.[20] David-Fox also described "Malia's comparison and rhetorical equation of erstwhile social-history revisionists in the Soviet field with David Irving and other Holocaust deniers" as "a quintessentially ideological move."[20]
Historian Tony Judt wrote that "[t]he myth of the well-intentioned founders—the good czar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs—has been laid to rest for good. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism."[47] In History: Reviews of New Books, Jack M. Lauber compared its impact to that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.[48] Political scientist Vladimir Tismăneanu, whose work focuses on Eastern Europe, stated that "the Black Book of Communism succeeds in demonstrating ... that Communism in its Leninist version (and, one must recognize, this has been the only successful application of the original dogma) was from the very outset inimical to the values of individual rights and human freedom."[31]: 126 In Russian History, the journal of the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Jennifer Wynot wrote: "The Black Book of Communism stands out as a significant work that should be required reading for all modern historians. Each essay stands alone as an important scholarly contribution. At the same time, the essays hang together well. It is interesting also that all of the writers have political roots in European left."[49]
Historian Jolanta Pekacz said that the "archival revelations of The Black Book collapse the myth of a benign, initial phase of communism before it was diverted from the right path by circumstances."[50]: 311 Political scientist Robert Legvold summarized the authors as charging that Communism was a criminal system, while others such as Werth gave more nuanced views, and stated that "despite Courtois' brave attempt in the conclusion, however, the authors fail to answer their own central question: Why did communism, when in power, start and stay so murderous?"[51] Historian Andrzej Paczkowski cited the numerous critiques, including it being called "a crudely anticommunist, anti-Semitic work", and agreed that "excessive moralizing makes objective analysis of the past difficult—and perhaps impossible", and the book has weaknesses but wrote that it has had two positive effects, among them stirring a debate about the implementation of totalitarian ideologies and "an exhaustive balance sheet about one aspect of the worldwide phenomenon of communism."[9] According to honorary professor David J. Galloway, "The Black Book provides an excellent survey of scholarship on the Soviet system and the systems of other communist states", and said that this emphasis is valuable.[52]
Popular press
The Black Book of Communism received praise in many publications in the United Kingdom and the United States, including the
Historian Noam Chomsky criticized the book and its reception as one-sided by outlining economist Amartya Sen's research on hunger.[54] While India's democratic institutions prevented famines, its excess of mortality over China—potentially attributable to the latter's more equal distribution of medical and other resources—was nonetheless close to 4 million per year for non-famine years. Chomsky wrote that "supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book" to India, "the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of ... Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone."[55][56] Historian Jacques Julliard and philosopher Jean-François Revel defended the book.[22] According to journalist Gilles Perrault, the book ignores the effect of international factors, including military interventions, on the Communist experience.[45]
Legacy
Reflecting on The Black Book of Communism in the Human Rights Review, sociologist John Torpey wrote: "In view of The Black Book's relatively scanty scholarly contribution, it is hard to read the book in other than political terms. In this regard, The Black Book may be seen as an effort to legitimize the claims to memorialization and reparations of those who suffered under Communism. Such claims have become high stakes in an era that frequently rewards those who can demonstrate that they, too, have been victimized in the past."[36] In a 2001 article for The Journal of American History, professor of history Shane J. Maddock wrote: "Since its publication in France in 1997, The Black Book of Communism has played a dual role, both chronicling the crimes of various Communist regimes and also serving as a text that reveals the shifting status of Marxism in the aftermath of the Cold War. Much of the controversy that has surrounded the book has focused on Stephane Courtois's introduction, in which he argues that communism represents a greater evil than Nazism, largely based on Marxism-Leninism's heftier death tally."[26] In The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War (2018), political scientist Laure Neumayer states that the book has played a major role in what she terms the criminalization of Communism in the European political space in the post Cold War-era. According to Neumayer, "by making criminality the very essence of communism, by explicitly equating the 'race genocide' of Nazism with the 'class genocide' of Communism in connection with the Ukrainian Great Famine of 1932–1933, the Black Book of Communism contributed to legitimising the equivalence of Nazi and Communist crimes. The book figures prominently in the 'spaces of the anti-communist cause' comparably structured in the former satellite countries, which are a major source of the discourse criminalising the Socialist period."[57]
In a 2005
Sequels
The Black Book of Communism was followed by the publication in 2002 of a series entitled Du passé faisons table rase! Histoire et mémoire du communisme en Europe with the same imprint.[22] The first edition included the subtitle "The Black Book of Communism has not said everything." Like the first effort, this second work was edited by Courtois. The book focused on the history of Communism in Eastern Europe.[61] Several translations of the book were marketed as the second volume of The Black Book of Communism, titled Das Schwarzbuch of Kommunismus 2. Das schwere Erbe der Ideologie,[62] Chernata kniga na komunizma 2. chast,[63] and Il libro del nero comunismo europeo.[64]
Le Siècle des communismes, a collective work of twenty academics, was a response to both François Furet's Le passé d'une Illusion and The Black Book of Communism. It broke communism down into series of discrete movements, with mixed positive and negative results.[65] The Black Book of Communism prompted the publication of several other "black books" which argued that similar chronicles of violence and death tolls can be constructed from an examination of capitalism and colonialism.[66][67][68]
In 2007, Courtois edited Éditions Larousse's Dictionnaire du communisme.[22] In 2008, Courtois took part to the writing of The Black Book of the French Revolution, a similar work of historical revisionism which proved to be controversial like The Black Book of Communism[22] and received mostly negative reviews from both the press and historians.[69] Courtois went back to its proposed link between the French Revolution and the October Revolution.[69]
See also
- Anti-Stalinist Left
- Bloodlands
- Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism
- Crimes against humanity under communist regimes
- Criticism of communist party rule
- Criticism of Marxism
- The Great Terror
- The Gulag Archipelago
- The Stalinist Legacy
- Historikerstreit
- Le Livre noir du capitalisme
- Le Livre noir du colonialisme
- Mass killings under communist regimes
- Le Passé d'une illusion
- Prague Declaration
- Mao: The Unknown Story
- Stalinism
- The Black Book of Capitalism: A farewell to the market economy
- The Soviet Story
Notes
- ^ The book was published in English in 1999
- ^ The full list of contributors include:
- Karel Bartošek (1930–2004), a historian from the Czech Republic and researcher at the Institut d'Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) in Paris.
- Sylvain Boulouque, a research associate at GEODE, Université Paris X.
- Centre national de la recherche scientifiqueand the main author and editor of the book.
- Pascal Fontaine, a journalist with a special knowledge of Latin America.
- Rémi Kauffer, a specialist in the history of intelligence, terrorism and clandestine operations.
- Martin Malia, a historian and the author of the foreword to the English edition.
- Université de Provenceand a researcher at the Research Institute on Southeast Asia.
- Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs.
- Jean-Louis Panné, a specialist on the international Communist movement.
- Pierre Rigoulet, a political historian, human rights activist and researcher at the Institut d'Histoire Sociale (IHTP).
- Yves Santamaria, a historian.
- Nicolas Werth, a historian and researcher at the IHTP.
- ^ Aronson wrote: "But most of these problems pale in significance compared with the book's opening and closing chapters, which caused enormous controversy and even occasioned a break among The Black Book's authors. ... Courtois's figures for the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Latin America go far beyond the estimates of the authors themselves, as does Courtois's final body count. ... But two other theses created considerable consternation and have come to be associated with The Black Book: the figure of 100 million deaths and the parallel with Nazism. They became central in the debate that followed. ... In articles and interviews Werth and Margolin pointed out how, in the service of this goal, Courtois distorted and exaggerated: Werth's total, including the Civil War and the famine of 1932–1933 had been five million less than Courtois's 'mythical number,' while Margolin denied having spoken of the Vietnamese Communists being responsible for one million deaths. Interviewed in Le Monde, Margolin likened Courtois's effort to 'militant political activity, indeed, that of a prosecutor amassing charges in the service of a cause, that of a global condemnation of the Communist phenomenon as an essentially criminal phenomenon.' Both rejected the comparison between Communism and Nazism: ... ."
References
- ISBN 978-1-57181-802-7.
- ISBN 978-0812236453.
- ^ .
- ^ .
- ^ a b "Reviews: The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stéphane Courtois". Harvard University Press. Retrieved 24 February 2008.
- ^ ISSN 1950-6244. Retrieved 3 August 2016.
- ISBN 978-0-8032-3945-6.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-674-07608-2.
- ^ JSTOR 40260182.
- ^ JSTOR 2697429.
- ISBN 9780801472732.
- JSTOR 206491.
- ^ JSTOR 261138.
- ^ JSTOR 3656222.
- S2CID 145120734.
- ISBN 9783319544632.
- ^ Margolin, Jean-Louis; Werth, Nicolas (14 November 1997). "Communisme : retour à l'histoire" [Communism: Return to the History]. Le Monde (in French). Retrieved 14 June 2015.
- ^ Becker, Jean-Jacques (July–September 1998). "Le Livre noir du communisme : de la polémique à la compréhension" (in French). Vingtième siècle. Revue d'histoire (59). July–September 1998.
- ^ a b c Getty, J Arch (March 2000). "The Future Did Not Work" (text). The Atlantic. Vol. 285, no. 3. Boston. p. 113. Retrieved 30 August 2020.
- ^ .
- ^ S2CID 226725531. Retrieved 14 January 2022.
- ^ a b c d e Paolo, Paul-François (24 July 2012). "Le Livre noir du communisme" [The Black Book of Communism]. Le Figaro (in French). Archived from the original on 25 July 2012. Retrieved 10 August 2021.
- ^ a b Robert, Steigerwald (1999). "Review Article: Communism and Terror. Reviewed Work(s): The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, and Repression edited by Stéphane Courtois et al." (PDF). Nature, Society, and Thought. 12 (2). Marxist Educational Press, University of Minnesota: 241–251.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8018-8258-6.
- S2CID 201790241.
- ^ ProQuest 224901571. Retrieved 14 January 2022 – via ProQuest.
- Aeon. Retrieved 24 August 2020.
- ISBN 978-0-231-14283-0.
- ISBN 978-0-8032-9000-6.
- ^ S2CID 159911023.
- ^ S2CID 143741542.
- ^ a b Friling, Tuvia; Ioanid, Radu; Ionescu, Mihail E.; Benjamin, Lya (2004). Distortion, negationism and minimization of the Holocaust in postwar Romania (PDF). International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania. pp. 47, 59.
- ISBN 3-492-04053-5.
- ISBN 9780520954250.
- ^ JSTOR 1149284.
- ^ S2CID 144552416.
- ISBN 978-0-8014-4944-4.
- ISBN 978-0822369493.
- ISBN 9781412835176.
- .
- ^ Scammell, Michael (20 December 1999). "The Price of an Idea". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 13 February 2002. Retrieved 18 September 2016.
{{cite news}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ a b Kenez, Peter (30 November 1999). "Little Black Book". Feed Magazine. Archived 1 March 2000 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 1 March 2000.
- .
- ISBN 978-3-89458-169-5. Archived from the original(PDF) on 4 September 2006.
- ^ a b Perrault, Gilles (December 1997). "Communisme, les falsifications d'un 'livre noir'" [Communism: The Falsifuication of a "Black Book"]. Le Monde diplomatique (in French).
- ISBN 3-89458-169-7.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 31 December 2021.
- S2CID 143188977.
- JSTOR 24660822.
- .
- JSTOR 20049582.
- JSTOR 3086399.
- ^ Ryan, Alan (2 January 2000). "The Evil Empire". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 August 2020.
- ^ .
- ^ Chomsky, Noam. "Counting the Bodies". Spectrezine. Archived from the original on 27 March 2018. Retrieved 27 August 2020.
- ^ Škof, Lenart (2012). "Two Recurrences of an Idea: On Political and Ethical Vicissitudes of Democracy". Synthesis philosophica. 27. (2): 225–236.
- ISBN 9781351141741.
- .
- ^ Khumalo, Naphtali (5 September 2019). "Did Over 100 Million People Die under Communism during the 20th Century?". Africa Check. Retrieved 2 December 2021.
- S2CID 229212026.
- ISBN 978-2221095003.
- ISBN 978-3492045520.
- ISBN 978-9547333987.
- ISBN 978-8804517955.
- ISBN 978-2-7082-3516-8.
- ISBN 978-2-84109-325-0.
- ISBN 978-2-221-09254-5.
- ISBN 978-3-8218-7316-9.
- ^ a b "Renaud Escande (dir.), Le Livre Noir de la Révolution française, 2008" [Renaud Escande (ed.), The Black Book of the French Revolution, 2008] (in French). Institut d'Histoire de la Révolution française. February 2008. Archived from the original on 25 February 2008. Retrieved 10 August 2021.
Further reading
- ISBN 1-932236-78-3.
- ISBN 9780226273402.
- ISBN 9780226414195.
- Snyder, Timothy (10 March 2011). "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?" The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
- ISBN 9781784785642.
- ISBN 978-0374277932.
External links
- "The Black Book of Communism". Harvard University. 15 October 1999. Retrieved 18 August 2021. Extracts by the publisher from many different reviews.
- Bourrinet, Philippe (18 March 2002) "Du bon usage des livres noirs" [Good use of black books]. Archived 11 March 2008 at the Wayback Machine. Aujourd'hui le Maroc (in French). Retrieved 18 August 2021 – via Left-Wing Communism. Online.
- Courtois, Stéphane; Kramer, Mark; et al. (2001). "Chornaya kniga kommunizma" Чёрная книга коммунизма [The Black Book of Communism] (Russian ed.). (in Russian). Harvard University Press. Retrieved 18 August 2021 – via Internet Archive.
- Joffrin, Laurent (17 December 1997). "Sauver Lénine?" Archived 8 December 2002 at the Wayback Machine. Libération (in French). Retrieved 18 August 2021 – via Faits & Documents.
- Maddock, Shane J. (December 2001). "Review". Archived 20 February 2008 at the Wayback Machine. Journal of American History. 88 (3) Retrieved 18 August 2021 – via History Cooperative.
- Radosh, Ronald (February 2000). "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, and Repression" (review). First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life. Institute on Religion and Public Life (2): 56. Retrieved 14 January 2022 – via Gale.