* Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity Martin Malia * Introduction: The Crimes of Communism Stephane Courtois I. A State against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union Nicolas Werth * Paradoxes and Misunderstandings Surrounding the October Revolution * The Iron Fist of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat * The Red Terror * The Dirty War * From Tambov to the Great Famine * From the Truce to the Great Turning Point * Forced Collectivization and Dekulakization * The Great Famine * Socially Foreign Elements and the Cycles of Repression * The Great Terror (1936 -1938) * The Empire of the Camps * The Other Side of Victory * Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System * The Last Conspiracy * The Exit from Stalinism Conclusion II. Word Revolution, Civil War, and Terror Stephane Courtois, Jean-Louis Panne, and Remi Kauffer * The Comintern in Action Stephane Courtois and Jean-Louis Panne * The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain Stephane Courtois and Jean-Louis Panne * Communism and Terrorism Remi Kauffer III. The Other Europe: Victim of Communism Andrzej Paczkowski and Karel Bartoek * Poland, the "Enemy Nation" Andrzej Paczkowski * Central and Southeastern Europe Karel Bartoek IV. Communism in Asia: Between Reeducation and Massacre Jean-Louis Margolin and Pierre Rigoulot Introduction * China: A Long March into Night Jean-Louis Margolin * Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea Pierre Rigoulot * Vietnam and Laos: The Impasse of War Communism Jean-Louis Margolin * Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes Jean-Louis Margolin Conclusion Select Bibliography for Asia V. The Third World Pascal Fontaine, Yves Santamaria, and Sylvain Boulouque * Communism in Latin America Pascal Fontaine * Afrocommunism: Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique Yves Santamaria * Communism in Afghanistan Sylvain Boulouque Conclusion: Why? Stephane Courtois * Notes * Index * About the Authors
Stéphane Courtois is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, and editor of the journal Communisme. Nicolas Werth is a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History. Jean-Louis Panné collaborated on the Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français. Andrzej Paczkowski is Deputy Director and a professor at the Institute for Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Karel Bartošek is acting head of research at CNRS and the editor of the journal La nouvelle alternative. Jean-Louis Margolin is a lecturer in history and coordinator of lectures at the University of Provence and a researcher at the Research Institute on Southeast Asia of CNRS.
An 800-page compendium of the crimes of Communist regimes
worldwide, recorded and analyzed in ghastly detail by a team of
scholars. The facts and figures, some of them well known, others
newly confirmed in hitherto inaccessible archives, are irrefutable.
The 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, and those who had begun to forget
will be forced to remember anew.
*New York Times*
When The Black Book of Communism appeared in Europe in 1997
detailing communism's crimes, it created a furor. Scrupulously
documented and soberly written by several historians, it is a
masterful work. It is, in fact, a reckoning. With this translation
by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, English-language readers may
now see for themselves what all the commotion was about.
*Wall Street Journal*
The Black Book of Communism, which is finally appearing in English,
is an extraordinary and almost unspeakably chilling book. It is a
major study that deepens our understanding of communism and poses a
philosophical and political challenge that cannot be ignored. The
book's central argument, copiously documented and repeated in
upwards of a dozen different essays, is that the history of
communism should be read above all as the history of an all-out
assault on society by a series of conspiratorial cliques led by
cruel dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim II Sung, Pol Pot,
and dozens of imitators) who were murderously drunk on their own
ideology and power...Courtois and his collaborators have performed
a signal service by gathering in one volume a global history of
communism's crimes from the Soviet Union to China, from the
satellite countries of Eastern-Europe to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,
and North Korea, and to a lesser degree in Latin America and
Africa...The Black Book is enormously impressive and utterly
convincing.
*New Republic*
To the extent that the book has a literary style, it is that of the
recording angel; this is the body count of a colossal, wholly
failed social, economic, political and psychological experiment. It
is a criminal indictment, and it rightly reads like one.
*New York Times Book Review*
Most sensible adults are aware of communism's human toll in the
Soviet Union and elsewhere--the forced starvations in the Ukraine,
the Great Purge of the 1930s, the Gulag, the insanity of China's
Great Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's murder of one in every seven
Cambodians, Fidel Castro's firing squads and prisons. All these
horrors are now brought together in what the French scholar Martin
Mali, in his foreword, calls a 'balance sheet of our current
knowledge of communism's human costs, archivally based where
possible and elsewhere drawing on the best available secondary
evidence'...The book is all the more damning because each of the
contributing scholars is either a former communist or close fellow
traveler...That The Black Book infuriated the French left is a sure
mark of its intrinsic worth.
*Washington Times*
The Black Book is a groundbreaking effort by a group of French
scholars to document the human costs of Communism in the 20th
century. Its publication caused a sensation in France when it was
first released in 1997, but Americans were not able to see for
themselves what the furor was all about until October 1999, when
Harvard University Press finally released an English translation.
It was worth the wait. Taking advantage of many newly available
archives in former Communist states, the authors (many of them
former Communists themselves) have meticulously recorded the
crimes, terror and repression inflicted by Communist regimes across
the world. It is a powerful work.
*National Review*
The authors of The Black Book of Communism are part of a welcome
change in the moral-philosophical landscape in Paris, and one hopes
elsewhere, as a result of which liberal and left-of-center
intellectuals, scholars and politicians judge the crimes of
communist regimes with the same severity they've applied to those
of Nazism and fascism.
*Washington Post Book World*
Arguing with the passion of former believers, [the contributors]
charge that communism was a criminal system. They all make the case
well.
*Foreign Affairs*
Now The Black Book of Communism is available in English, thanks to
a stellar edition from Harvard University Press that appeared late
last year, with an excellent introduction by Martin Malia,
professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.
*Insight*
This black book has been a best seller across Europe. It details
all the misery inflicted by Communism throughout the world: 25
million dead in the Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million
in Cambodia...Not a pleasant book, a necessary one.
*Evening Standard*
A sober and balanced piece of work. [The Black Book of Communism]
is particularly good on the origins of the Soviet police state
under Lenin and on Stalin's Great Terror. It should be read by
anyone who still has illusions that the Bolshevik revolution was a
good thing--and anyone who believes that something worthwhile was
lost when the Berliners destroyed the Wall 10 years ago.
*The Tribune*
A serious, scholarly history of Communist crimes in the Soviet
Union, Eastern and Western Europe, China, North Korea, Cambodia,
Vietnam, Africa, and Latin America...The Black Book does indeed
surpass many of its predecessors in conveying the grand scale of
the Communist tragedy, thanks to its authors' extensive use of the
newly opened archives of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
*Weekly Standard*
A generally even-toned and informative book, and one that will
serve as a healthy dose of medication for those still afflicted by
a wish to treat the Bolshevik revolution as a mistake, however
monumental, or something that 'had to happen'...The Black Book's
guiding purpose is to cut through the dense tissue of apologetics
that has been deployed in the communist interest, both those
devised in the thick of repression and those added after the
collapse.
*New Times*
The Black Book of Communism] consists of scholarly yet readable
(and superbly translated) essays, some based on recently opened
Soviet archives, and covers the communist revolutions in Europe,
Asia, Africa and Latin America, including Cuba...The Black Book
[is] a most important volume of contemporary history produced by a
group of French Sovietologists...On finishing this magnificent
volume, it is impossible not to see that in three-quarters of a
century Soviet communism had left nothing behind except death and
destruction.
*Weekend Post*
The heart of the Black Book is a compilation and description--in
mesmerizing objective prose-- of the slaughters visited upon
populations around the world by communist dictators in the 20th
century...The Black Book is an elegantly simple and valuable record
of a time many would like to forget--but will have to deal
with.
*Scottsdale Tribune*
I can't think of any book that would be more important for
Americans to read. If you are going to read only one book this
year, make it The Black Book of Communism. This is an 800-page
history of the terror, repression and killings of communism
stretching from the Bolshevik Revolution to the present. Written by
scholars who are ex-communists or former fellow travelers, the book
establishes beyond doubt that communism is the greatest crime
against humanity in the 20th century.
*The Sentine*
An important scholarly achievement of exhaustive breadth based on
new archival material from the Stalin era...This impressive and
important book is well worth the price.
*Library Journal*
A unique attempt by French historians--as important in its way as
the works of Solzhenitsyn--to chronicle the crimes of communism
wherever it has attained power in the world. Not the least
remarkable thing about this book is that this is the first time
such a study has been made. For the cumulative toll of victims of
communist rule, estimated by the authors at between 85 and 100
million, dwarfs even the crimes of the Nazis...A devastating and
important book, already hailed in Europe, and the more harrowing
for its sobriety.
*Kirkus Reviews*
In France, this damning reckoning of communism's worldwide legacy
was a bestseller that sparked passionate arguments among
intellectuals of the Left. Courtois, along with the other
distinguished French and European contributors, delivers a
fact-based, mostly Russia-centered wallop that will be hard to
refute: town burnings, mass deportations, property seizures, family
separations, mass murders, planned famines--all chillingly
documented from conception to implementation.
*Publishers Weekly*
In the end, the Black Book's body counts--necessary as they
are--are less important than the soul-destroying connections
between Marxist idealism and the violence committed in its
name.
*salon.com*
The publishing sensation in France this winter (1999) has been an
austere academic tome, Le Livre Noir du Communisme, detailing
Communism's crimes from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in
1989...[The Black Book of Communism] gives a balance sheet of our
present knowledge of Communism's human costs, archivally based
where possible, and otherwise drawing on the best secondary works,
and with due allowance for the difficulties of quantification. Yet
austere though this inventory is, its cumulative impact is
overwhelming. At the same time, the book advances a number of
important analytical points.
*Times Literary Supplement*
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