The Black Book of Communism


The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a 1997 book by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczkowski and several other European academics documenting a history of political repressions by Communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, killing populations in labor camps and artificially created 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 was published by Harvard University Press, with a foreword by Martin Malia. The German edition, published by Piper Verlag, includes a chapter written by Joachim Gauck. The introduction was written by Courtois. Historian François Furet was originally slated to write the introduction, but was prevented from doing so by his death.
The book has been translated into numerous languages, sold millions of copies and is considered one of the most influential, although one of the most controversial, books written about communism. While it received strong praise from several publications, it was also criticised and accused of manipulations and inflating numbers, including challenges from the main contributors to the book.
The book's title was chosen to echo the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee's Black Book, a documentary record of Nazi atrocities written by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman. The book has evoked a wide variety of responses, ranging from enthusiastic support to severe criticism.

"Introduction: The Crimes of Communism"

In the first chapter of the book entitled "Introduction: The Crimes of Communism", Stéphane Courtois states that "Communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government" and they are responsible for a greater number of deaths than Nazism or any other political system.

Estimated number of victims

According to the chapter, the number of people killed by the Communist governments amounts to more than 94 million. The statistics of victims include deaths through executions, man-made hunger, famine, war, deportations and forced labor. The breakdown of the number of deaths is given as follows:
According to Courtois, the crimes by the Soviet Union included the following:
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". 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:
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 further stated:

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 subchapters, namely "Politische Verbrechen in der DDR" by Ehrhart Neubert and "Vom schwierigen Umgang mit der Wahrnehmung" by Joachim Gauck.

Reception

Support

The Black Book of Communism received praise in many publications in the United States and the United Kingdom, 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 it was uncritically embraced by prominent politicians and intellectuals—many of these intellectuals popularized it using terminology and concepts popular with the radical right.
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". Anne Applebaum, journalist and author of , described the book as " 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, described it 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".
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 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 "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". 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" as being the most notable and best researched contribution in the book. Intellectual historian Ronald Aronson wrote: " is concerned, fortunately, neither to minimize nor to maximize numbers, but to accurately determine what happened".
In response to the criticism against The Black Book of Communism, the political journalist Jean-François Revel devoted several chapters of Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era to this. Throughout it, he replies to various authors, among them Noam Chomsky, the imputation to capitalism as economic system, crimes that would not belong to it such as those of slavery, colonial statism or the National Socialist regime. Since while capitalism is being blamed for the crimes of the anti-communist right or every political regime who adopted it, attempts are made to amnesty socialism as economic system for the crimes of the communist left. For Revel, every comparison between state socialism and private capitalism in matters of elimination of poverty and raising the level of wages and mass consumerism declare victorious to the market economies over the subsistence economies and the failure of production goals system based on rationing and scarcity of essential goods In response to the criticism directed against the Black Book, Revel emphasizes that there has never been a democratic or pluralist regime into the Marxist–Leninist field of "real socialism", nor a system that would not be in need of totalitarianism, single party regime and political persecution. In contrast to the reply based on the repression of union activity at the dawn of capitalism, Revel considers collectivism inextricably linked to forced labor and state slavery.

Criticism

Whereas chapters of the book, where it describes the events in separate Communist states, were highly praised, some generalizations made by Courtois in the introduction to the book became a subject of criticism both on scholarly and political grounds. Moreover, two of the book's main contributors—Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin—as well as Karel Bartosek publicly disassociated 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 which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship" 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. In particular, Margolin, who authored the Black Books chapter on Vietnam, clarified "that he has never mentioned a million deaths in Vietnam". Historians Jean-Jacques Becker and J. Arch Getty have criticized Courtois 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 1946–1947 "is formulated in an extremely conservative way, since the actual number of victims was much larger", with 1,000,000–1,500,000 excess deaths. 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. According to Werth, there was still a qualitative difference between Nazism and Communism, saying: "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union". He further told Le Monde: "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". Historian Ronald Grigor Suny remarked that Courtois' comparison of 100 million victims of Communism to 25 million victims of Nazism " 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". A report by the Wiesel Commission criticized the comparison of Gulag victims with Jewish Holocaust victims as an attempt to trivialize the Holocaust.
Historian Peter Kenez criticized the chapter written by Nicolas Werth: "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 largely artificial and genocidal. According to journalist Gilles Perrault, the books ignores the effect of international factors, including military interventions, on the Communist experience.
Historian 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—potentially 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" 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".
Le Siècle des Communismes, a collective work of twenty academics, was a response to both François Furet's Le passé d'une Illusion and Courtois's The Black Book of Communism. It broke Communism down into series of discrete movements, with mixed positive and negative results.
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, Черната книга на комунизма 2. част and Il libro del nero comunismo europeo.