3/13/2023 0 Comments Black book of communism![]() ![]() ” -Jeffrey Herf, The Washington Post Book World “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. 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. 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. “ The Black Book is a groundbreaking effort by a group of French scholars to document the human costs of Communism in the 20th century. All these horrors are now brought together in what the French scholar Martin Malia, 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. “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. ” -Alan Ryan, The New York Times Book Review It is a criminal indictment, and it rightly reads like one. “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. “Arguing with the passion of former believers, charge that communism was a criminal system. ![]() 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 Il 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. It is a major study that deepens our understanding of communism and poses a philosophical and political challenge that cannot be ignored. “ The Black Book of Communism, which is finally appearing in English, is an extraordinary and almost unspeakably chilling book. ” -Jacob Heilbrunn, The Wall Street Journal With this translation by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, English-language readers may now see for themselves what all the commotion was about. Scrupulously documented and soberly written by several historians, it is a masterful work. “When The Black Book of Communism appeared in Europe in 1997 detailing communism’s crimes, it created a furor. 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. The myth of the well-intentioned founders-the good czar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs-has been laid to rest for good. The facts and figures, some of them well known, others newly confirmed in hitherto inaccessible archives, are irrefutable. “An 800-page compendium of the crimes of Communist regimes worldwide, recorded and analyzed in ghastly detail by a team of scholars. ![]()
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