The Black Book of Communism

Estimated number of victims

In the introduction, editor Stéphane Courtois states that "Communist regimes... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government."^:2 According to Courtois, the death toll amounts to 94 million.^:4 The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:

Courtois writes 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 deaths through executions, man-made hunger, deportations, 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 says that Communist regimes have killed "approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis".^:15 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,^:15

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."^:15 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:

[A]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.

Support

The Black Book of Communism received praise in many 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. The book has also been influential in Eastern Europe, where was enthusiastically embraced by prominent politicians and intellectuals.^:47,59

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". Similarly, historian Jolanta Pekacz remarked 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."^:311 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."

Historian Martin Malia, who prefaced the English-language edition of the book,^:ix-xx described it as "the publishing sensation in France [...] 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."

Political scientist Vladimir Tismăneanu, whose work focuses on Eastern Europe, wrote that "the Black Book of Communism succeeds in demonstrating is 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." Tismaneanu argued that Courtois' comparison of Communism to Nazism was broadly justifiable, writing that while "[a]nalytical distinctions between them are certainly important, and sometimes Courtois does not emphasize them sufficiently", their "commonality in terms of complete contempt for the bourgeois state of law, human rights, and the universality of humankind regardless of spurious race and class distinctions is in my view beyond doubt."^:126 Tismaneanu further noted that, in making his comparison, Courtois was drawing on Grossman's earlier explorations of the same theme in Life and Fate and Forever Flowing.

Several reviewers have singled out Nicolas Werth's "State against its People"^:33-268 as being the most notable and best-researched contribution in the book. Intellectual historian Ronald Aronson wrote: "[Werth] is concerned, fortunately, neither to minimize nor to maximize numbers, but to accurately determine what happened."^:233

Criticism

A number of observers have criticized the Black Book of Communism on scholarly and political^:139 grounds, with particular attention being drawn to Courtois' controversial introduction.^:236:13

Two of the book's main contributors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, as well as Karel Bartosek, publicly disassociated^:xii themselves from Courtois' statements in the introduction and criticized his editorial conduct. Werth and Margolin felt Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed, and faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries.^:194 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^:178 for failing to draw a distinction between victims of neglect and famine and victims of "intentional murder.". Economic historian Michael Ellman has argued that the book's estimate of "at least 500,000" deaths during the Soviet famine of 1946–48 "is formulated in an extremely conservative way, since the actual number of victims was much larger"—1,000,000-1,500,000 excess deaths according to Ellman. Regarding these questions, historian Alexander Dallin has argued that moral, legal, or political judgments hardly depend on the number of victims.

Many observers have rejected Courtois's numerical and moral comparison of Communism to Nazism in the introduction.^:148 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." In a critical review, historian Amir Weiner wrote: "When 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."^:450-52 Historian Ronald Suny remarked that Courtois' comparison of 100 million victims of Communism to 25 million victims of Nazism, "[leaves out] 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."^:8 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.

In the view of historian Peter Kenez, the book contained several 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'. He incorrectly writes that the peasant rebels during the civil war did more harm to the Reds than to the Whites, and so on." Historian Mark Tauger challenged the authors' thesis that the famine of 1933 was artificial and genocidal. According to journalist Gilles Perrault, the books ignores the effect of international factors, including military interventions, on the communist experience.

Social critic Noam Chomsky has criticized the book and its reception as one-sided by outlining economist Amartya Sen's research on hunger: while India's democratic institutions prevented famines, its excess of mortality over China—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 argued 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."

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 colonialism and capitalism.

Sequel

The reception of the Black Book of Communism led to the publication of a series entitled Du passé faisons table rase! Histoire et mémoire du communisme en Europe in 2002, with the same imprint. The first edition included a subtitle: "The Black Book of Communism has not said everything." Like the first effort, this second work was edited by Stéphane Courtois. The book focused on the history of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Several translations of the book were marketed as the second volume of the Black Book of Communism: Das Schwarzbuch of Kommunismus 2. Das Erbe der schwere Ideology (Germany, Piper, 2004), Черната книга на комунизма 2. част (Bulgaria, Prosoretz, 2004) and Il libro del nero comunismo europeo (Italy, Mondadori, 2006).