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The Black Book of Communism
Cover of the first edition
AuthorStéphane Courtois (ed.)
Nicolas Werth
Jean-Louis Panné
Andrzej Paczkowski
Karel Bartosek
Jean-Louis Margolin
Ehrhart Neubert*
Joachim Gauck*
(*German edition)
Original titleLe Livre noir du communisme
LanguageFrench
SubjectCommunism, Totalitarianism
PublisherHarvard University Press
Publication date6 November 1997
Publication placeFrance
Published in English8 October 1999
Media typePrint
Pages912
ISBN978-0-674-07608-2

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a 1997 book edited by Stéphane Courtois, who includes contributions by several European academics documenting a history of repressions, both political and civilian, by Communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and artificial famines. The book was originally published in France as Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression by Éditions Robert Laffont. In the United States it is published by Harvard University Press. The German edition, published by Piper Verlag, includes a chapter written by Joachim Gauck.

Contents

Estimated number of victims

In the introduction, editor Stéphane Courtois states that "Communist regimes... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government." He claims that a death toll totals 94 million. The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:

Courtois claims that Communist regimes are responsible for a greater number of deaths than any other political ideal or movement, including Nazism. The statistics of victims includes direct deaths through executions but as well as indirect deaths from famine, deportations, physical confinement, and forced labor.

Soviet repressions

Repressions and famines occurring in the Soviet Union under the regimes of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin described in the book include:

Comparison of Communism and Nazism

Courtois considers Communism and Nazism to be distinct but comparable totalitarian systems. He claims that Communist regimes have killed "approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis". Courtois claims that Nazi Germany's methods of mass extermination were adopted from Soviet methods. As an example, he cites the Nazi SS official Rudolf Höss who organized the infamous extermination camp, Auschwitz concentration camp. According to Höss,

The Reich Security Head Office issued to the commandants a full collection of reports concerning the Russian concentration camps. These described in great detail the conditions in, and organization of, the Russian camps, as supplied by former prisoners who had managed to escape. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Russians, by their massive employment of forced labor, had destroyed whole peoples.

Courtois argues that the Soviet crimes against peoples living in the Caucasus and of large social groups in the Soviet Union could be called "genocide", and that they were not very much different from similar policies by Nazis. Both Communist and Nazi systems deemed "a part of humanity unworthy of existence. The difference is that the Communist model is based on the class system, the Nazi model on race and territory." Courtois stated that

The "genocide of a "class" may well be tantamount to the genocide of a "race"—the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's regime "is equal to" the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime.

He added:

fter 1945 the Jewish genocide became a byword for modern barbarism, the epitome of twentieth-century mass terror... more recently, a single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has also prevented the assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world. After all, it seems scarcely plausible that the victors who had helped bring about the destruction of a genocidal apparatus might themselves have put the very same methods into practice. When faced with this paradox, people generally preferred to bury their heads in sand... Communist regimes have victimized approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million of the Nazis.

German edition

The German edition contains an additional chapter on the Soviet-backed communist regime in East Germany, titled "Die Aufarbeitung des Sozialismus in der DDR". It consists of two sub chapters, "Politische Verbrechen in der DDR" by Ehrhart Neubert, and "Vom schwierigen Umgang mit der Wahrnehmung" by Joachim Gauck.

Reception

The book has evoked a wide variety of responses, ranging from enthusiastic support to severe criticism.

Praise

The Black Book of Communism received praise in a number of publications in the United States and Britain, including The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, The New Republic, National Review, and The Weekly Standard. Some reviewers compared the book to the Black Book, a documentary record of the Nazi atrocities by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman.

Historian Tony Judt wrote in The New York Times, "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".

Anne Applebaum, journalist and author of Gulag: A History, described the book as "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."

Martin Malia, writing for the Times Literary Supplement, described the book as "the publishing sensation in France detailing Communism's crimes from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989... 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."

Courtois's controversial propositions were influential in Eastern Europe, where they have been enthusiastically embraced by prominent politicians and intellectuals.

Criticism and debate

A number of historians have criticized the Black Book of Communism on methodological, factual, and political grounds, with particular attention being drawn to Courtois' controversial introduction.

Two of the book's main contributors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, sparked controversy in France when they publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois' statements in the introduction about the scale of Communist terror. They felt Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed, and faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries. They also argued that, based on the results of their studies, one can tentatively estimate the total number of the victims at between 65 and 93 million.

Historians Jean-Jacques Becker and J. Arch Getty have criticized Courtois' arithmetic for adding up deaths from heterogeneous causes and failing to draw a distinction between victims of neglect and famine and victims of "intentional murder." French journalist Gilles Perrault, writing in an op-ed in Le Monde diplomatique, has accused the authors of having used incorrect data and of having manipulated figures. On the other hand, some of the estimates given in the Black Book have been deemed "too conservative". For example, regarding the Soviet famine of 1946–48, Michael Ellman wrote "In their 'black book', Courtois et al. (1997, pp. 258–64) do discuss the famine. The number of victims they give, however, while correct ('at least 500,000') is formulated in an extremely conservative way, since the actual number of victims was much larger." Regarding these questions, Alexander Dallin has argued that moral, legal, or political judgements hardly depends on the number of victims.

While political scientist Vladimir Tismăneanu argued that Courtois' comparison of Communism to Nazism was both morally and historically justifiable, others have rejected the comparison. A report by the Wiesel Commission criticized Courtois for trivializing the Holocaust and expressed concern at the political use of this comparison by the Right in Eastern Europe. According to Werth, there was still a qualitative difference between Nazism and Communism. He told Le Monde, "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union", and "The more you compare Communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious."

Historian Peter Kenez of has criticized the book for historical inaccuracies: "Werth can also be an extremely careless historian. He gives the number of Bolsheviks in October 1917 as 2,000, which is a ridiculous underestimate. He quotes from a letter of Lenin to Alexander Shliapnikov and gives the date as 17 October 1917; the letter could hardly have originated at that time, since in it Lenin talks about the need to defeat the Tsarist government, and turn the war into a civil conflict. He gives credit to the Austro-Hungarian rather than the German army for the conquest of Poland in 1915. He describes the Provisional Government as "elected." Historian Mark Tauger challenged the authors' thesis that the famine of 1933 was artificial and genocidal, arguing that the book's account of the Soviet famine of 1932–33 contains errors, misconceptions, and omissions that invalidate their arguments about its intentionality. Other hitorians have criticized the book's overall tone. Amir Weiner of Stanford University, while acknowledging book's list of Communist crimes as "long, informative, and, for most part, indisputable," nonetheless characterizes it as "seriously flawed, incoherent, and often prone to mere provocation."

Linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky has strongly criticised the book's methodology and reception. Chomsky cites the work of Amartya Sen, who estimated the excess of mortality in India over China due to the latter's "relatively equitable distribution of medical resources" at close to 4 million a year, for non-famine years. Chomsky goes on to argue that, "supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers" 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." Similarly, Daniel Bensaïd, a French philosopher and Trotskyist activist, argued that a similar chronicle of violence and death tolls can be constructed from an examination of colonialism and capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

See also

References

  1. *Stéphane Courtois is a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS).
    • Nicolas Werth is a researcher at the Institut d'Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) in Paris.
    • Jean-Louis Panné is a specialist on the international Communist movement.
    • Andrzej Paczkowski is the deputy director of the Institute for Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a member of the archival commission for the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs.
    • Karel Bartošek (1930–2004) was a historian from the Czech Republic, and a researcher at IHTP.
    • Jean-Louis Margolin is a lecturer at the Université de Provence and a researcher as the Research Institute on Southeast Asia.
    • Sylvain Boulougue is a research associate at GEODE, Université Paris X.
    • Pascal Fontaine is a journalist with a special knowledge of Latin America.
    • Rémi Kauffer is a specialist in the history of intelligence, terrorism, and clandestine operations.
    • Pierre Rigoulet is a researcher at the Institut d'Histoire Sociale.
    • Yves Santamaria is a historian.
    • Martin Malia wrote the foreword to the English edition.
  2. Ronit Lenṭin; Mike Dennis; Eva Kolinsky (2003). Representing the Shoah for the Twenty-first Century. Berghahn Books. p. 217. ISBN 1-57181-802-2.
  3. Werth et al. 1999, p. 2.
  4. ^ Werth et al. 1999, p. 4.
  5. Werth et al. 1999, pp. 9–10.
  6. ^ Werth et al. 1999, p. 15.
  7. Werth et al. 1999, p. 9.
  8. Stéphane Courtois, Joachim Gauck, Ehrhart Neubert et al., Das Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus. Unterdrückung, Verbrechen und Terror. (1998) Piper Verlag, München 2004, ISBN 3-492-04053-5
  9. ^ "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stéphane Courtois". Harvard University Press. Retrieved 2008-02-24.
  10. Rousso, Henry, ed. (2004), Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, p. xiii, ISBN 0-8032-3945-9.
  11. ^ 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. p. 47; 59.
  12. "Les divisions d'une équipe d'historiens du communisme". Le Monde.fr (in French). 1997-10-30. ISSN 1950-6244. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
  13. Gvosdev, Nikolas K. The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: A Postscript. Transaction Publishers. p. 194. ISBN 9781412835176.
  14. Margolin, Jean-Louis; Werth, Nicolas (1997-11-14). "Communisme : retour à l'histoire". Le Monde (in French). Retrieved 2015-06-14. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)
  15. « Le Livre noir du communisme : de la polémique à la compréhension », Vingtième siècle. Revue d'histoire, n° 59, juillet-septembre 1998, p. 178. En ligne sur Persée
  16. ^ Getty, J Arch (Mar 2000), "The Future Did Not Work" (text), The Atlantic Monthly, 285 (3), Boston: Hackvan: 113.
  17. Perrault, Gilles (December 1997), "Communisme, les falsifications d'un " livre noir "", Le Monde Diplomatique (in French), France.
  18. The numbers were 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 excess deaths according to Ellman (Ellman, Michael (2000), "The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines" (PDF), Cambridge Journal of Economics, 24 (5): 603–30, doi:10.1093/cje/24.5.603).
  19. Dallin, Alexander, Slavic Review, vol. 59.
  20. Tismaneanu, Vladimir (January 2001), "Communism and the human condition: Reflections on the Black Book of Communism", Human Rights Review, 2 (2), Netherlands: Springer,
  21. Bartov, Omer (Spring 2002), Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 3, pp. 281–302.
  22. Le Monde, 21 September 2000
  23. Peter Kenez, "Little Black Book", Feed Magazine, 30 November 1999. http://web.archive.org/web/20000301191738/http://www.feedmag.com/essay/es271_master.html
  24. Tauger, Chapter 20 for Roter Holocaust book (PDF), WVU.
  25. Weiner, Amir (Winter 2002), Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 32, pp. 450–52.
  26. Counting the Bodies - Noam Chomsky (text)
  27. Bensaïd, Daniel. "Comunismo y estalinismo Una respuesta al libro negro del comunismo" (in Spanish). Translated to Spanish by Alberto Nadal. Retrieved 2015-03-11. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)

Further reading

External links

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