Books - The Black Book of Communism

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	Books - The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a controversial book authored by several European academics and senior researchers from CNRS, and edited by Dr. Stéphane Courtois. It attempts to catalog various crimes (deaths, torture, deportations, etc.) that have allegedly resulted from the pursuit of communism (in the context of the book, this mainly refers to the actions of Communist states). The book was originally published in France under the title, Le Livre noir du communisme : Crimes, terreur, répression. In the United States it is published by Harvard University Press.

The introduction, by editor Stéphane Courtois, maintains that "...Communist regimes...turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government". Using unofficial estimates he cites a death toll which totals 94 million. The breakdown of the number of deaths given in the Black Book is as follows: 20 million in the Soviet Union, 65 million in the People's Republic of China, 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan and 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power"

A more detailed catalog (from the introduction) of some of the crimes described in the book includes:

Soviet Union: executions of hostages, prisoners, rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922; the famine of 1922; the deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920; the use of the Gulag system in the period between 1918 and 1930; the Great Purge; the deportation of kulaks from 1930 to 1932; the deaths of 4 million Ukrainians (Holodomor) and 2 million others during the famine of 1932 and 1933; the deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldavans and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1945; the deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941; the deportation of the Crimean Tatars on 18 May 1944; the deportation of the Chechens in 1944; the deportation of the Ingush in 1944.

Cambodia: deportation and extermination of the urban population of Cambodia.

China: the destruction of Tibetan culture.

The book, among other sources, used material from the (then) recently opened KGB files and other Soviet archives.

The authors, or a selection of them, claim to be leftists, and offer the motivation of their work as being that they do not want to give "the extreme right the privilege to alone tell the truth." (pp. 14 and 50, Finnish edition of the book, WSOY, 2001)

Controversy

While The Black Book of Communism received praise from reviewers such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, New Republic, National Review, Library Journal, Times Literary Supplement, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and others , it has also attracted considerable criticism and controversy since its publishing. Both the information it presents and its interpretation of that information have been disputed.

Different historians have published widely different estimates for the number of deaths that occurred in the countries mentioned by the Black Book. For instance, the estimates for Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union range between 8.5 million and 51 million , and those for Mao's China range between 19.5 and 75 million . The authors of the Black Book defend their estimates for the Soviet Union (20 million) and Eastern Europe (1 million) by stating that they made use of sources that were not available to previous researchers (the archives mentioned above). At the same time, the authors acknowledge that the estimates from China and other nations still ruled by Communist parties are uncertain since their archives are still closed. In recent years some authors have published progressively larger estimates of deaths under Communist regimes; thus, recent books such as Mao: The Unknown Story and A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia have claimed higher death tolls than the Black Book for China and Russia respectively.

Critics of the Black Book have alleged that it uses the umbrella term "Communism" to refer to a wide variety of different systems, and that it "arbitrarily throws together completely different historical phenomena such as the civil war of 1918-21, the forced collectivisation and the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, the rule of Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia, the military government of Ethiopia as well as various Latin American political movements, from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to the 'Shining Path' in Peru." While not necessarily disputing the Communist nature of the aforementioned countries, the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique has argued that local history and traditions played a role at least as important as the role of Communism in each case.

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Books - The Black Book of Communism

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Controversy

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