[Reader-list] The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression

[Pawan Durani]

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
When it was first published in France in 1997, *Le livre noir du
Communisme* touched
off a storm of controversy that continues to rage today. Even some of his
contributors shied away from chief editor Stéphane
Courtois's<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/exact-author=Courtois%2c%20Stephane/$%7B0%7D>
conclusion
that Communism, in all its many forms, was morally no better than Nazism;
the two totalitarian systems, Courtois argued, were far better at killing
than at governing, as the world learned to its sorrow.

Communism did kill, Courtois and his fellow historians demonstrate, with
ruthless efficiency: 25 million in Russia during the Bolshevik and Stalinist
eras, perhaps 65 million in China under the eyes of Mao Zedong, 2 million in
Cambodia, millions more Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America--an
astonishingly high toll of victims. This freely expressed penchant for
homicide, Courtois maintains, was no accident, but an integral trait of a
philosophy, and a practical politics, that promised to erase class
distinctions by erasing classes and the living humans that populated them.
Courtois and his contributors document Communism's crimes in numbing detail,
moving from country to country, revolution to revolution. The figures they
offer will likely provoke argument, if not among cliometricians then among
the ideologically inclined. So, too, will Courtois's suggestion that those
who hold Lenin, Trotsky, and Ho Chi Minh in anything other than contempt are
dupes, witting or not, of a murderous school of thought--one that, while in
retreat around the world, still has many adherents. A thought-provoking work
of history and social criticism, *The Black Book of Communism* fully merits
the broadest possible readership and discussion. *--Gregory McNamee*
>From Publishers Weekly
In France, this damning reckoning of communism's worldwide legacy was a
bestseller that sparked passionate arguments among intellectuals of the
Left. Essentially a body count of communism's victims in the 20th century,
the book draws heavily from recently opened Soviet archives. The verdict:
communism was responsible for between 85 million and 100 million deaths in
the century. In France, both sales and controversy were fueled, as Martin
Malia notes in the foreword, by editor Courtois's specific comparison of
communism's "class genocide" with Nazism's "race genocide." Courtois, the
director of research at the prestigious Centre Research National de la
Recherche Scientifique in Paris and editor of the journal Communisme, 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 faminesAall chillingly documented from conception to
implementation. The book is divided into five sections. The first and
largest takes readers from the "Paradoxes of the October Revolution" through
"Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System" to "The Exit from Stalinism." Seeing
the U.S.S.R. as "the cradle of all modern Communism," the book's other four
sections document the horrors of the Iron Curtain countries, Soviet-backed
agitation in Asia and the Americas, and the Third World's often violent
embrace of the system. A conclusionA"Why?"Aby Courtois, points to a
bureaucratic, "purely abstract vision of death, massacre and human
catastrophe" rooted in Lenin's compulsion to effect ideals by any means
necessary. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Product Details

   - *Hardcover:* 912 pages
   - *Publisher:* Harvard University Press; 1st American Edition edition
   (October 15, 1999)
   - *Language:* English
   - *ISBN-10:* 0674076087
   - *ISBN-13:* 978-0674076082
   - *Product Dimensions: *9.3 x 6.5 x 2.2 inches
   - *Shipping Weight:* 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and
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   - *Average Customer Review:* 4.2 out of 5 stars
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