What is the book about?

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a controversial book edited by professor Stéphane Courtois which attempts to catalog various crimes (deaths, torture, deportations, etc.) that have allegedly resulted from the pursuit of communism. The book is organized into parts written by scholars of communism; for example, Part 1, entitled "A State against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union", is written by Nicolas Werth , a specialist in the history of the Soviet Union. The book was published originally in France under the title, Le Livre noir du communisme : Crimes, terreur, répression.

The authors are leading European academicians and the editor, Stéphane Courtois, the director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.

While most details in the articles of the book are shocking facts that can easily be verified, the most controversial aspect of the book is the introduction, by the editor Stéphane Courtois. It maintains that "the Communist regimes...turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government". Using unofficial estimates, totaling 94 million, he cites a total death toll which "approaches 100 million killed." In addition, a major source of controversy has been the book's unfavorable comparison of the alleged crimes of Communism with those of Nazism.

Majority of historians seem to consider that some value between 60 and 85 million to be the most correct one, depending on the interpretation. Some critics consider Courtois's claims to be vastly exaggerated and sometimes poorly documented. With respect to deaths, he includes 20 million in the Soviet Union, 65 million in the People's Republic of China, 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America, 1.7 million in Africa 1.5 million in Afghanistan and 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power".

A more detailed catalog of the alleged crimes includes: executions of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners and hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1922; the famine of 1922, (five million deaths); the deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920; murder of tens of thousands in the Gulag in the period 1918-1930; liquidation of 690,000 people (including many Communist Party members) during the Great Purge; deportation of 2 million kulaks in 1930-1932; the deaths of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others during the famine of 1932-1933; the deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldavans and Bessarabians in 1939-1941 and 1944-1945; the deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941; the deportation of the Crimean Tatars on 18 May 1944; the deportation of the Chechens in 1944; and the deportation of the Ingush in 1944, deportation and extermination of the urban population of Cambodia and the destruction of Tibetan culture and people by the Chinese.

Criticisms and counter-criticisms

According to critics, most of these are disputable issues, for various reasons. For example, can the deaths during the Civil War be blamed entirely on the communist side? What share of the victims of the famine in 1922 is to be attributed to economic policies and what share to natural reasons, such as drought?

According to the book, after 1918 great famines have occurred only in communist countries, still in the 1980s in Ethiopia and Mozambique, both marxist-leninist. (In fact, North Korea suffered from one in the 1990s even though before communism it was richer than South Korea.) Also non-communist countries have suffered from drought but yet avoided mass deaths, so according to anti-critics one can hardly claim that the reason could be other than the centralization of power.

How many of the people in the Gulag were actually guilty criminals? Can the deportations during World War II be justified by strategic reasons (potential collaboration between deported populations - Volga Germans, Don Cossacks - and Nazi Germany)? Should the killing of Nazis and Nazi collaborators during war time be regarded as deaths caused by communism? Critics allege that in answering these questions, the book consistently takes the most anti-communist position possible.

The total number of deaths blamed on communism by the book is 94 million (94.36 million rounded to one significant digit). Of these, 65 million (69%) allegedly took place in China (mostly during the rule of Mao Zedong), 20 million (21%) in the Soviet Union (the vast majority during the rule of Stalin), 1.7 million (2%) were caused by Pol Pot, and "only" 7.66 million (8%) by all other communist states put together. This highly uneven distribution has prompted some critics to argue that it would make more sense to talk about the crimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot rather than "communism" in general. Similarly, one could say that national socialism is not an evil ideology, just Hitler was evil. Within a single country - such as the Soviet Union - there are massive differences between the number of deaths under one leader and the number of deaths under another (Nikita Khrushchev strongly tempered Lenin's and Stalin's terror). Others note that China and the Soviet Union had much larger populations than other communist states so a higher death toll should be expected in these states. While the number of deaths decreased after Stalin, systems such as the Gulag continued to claim many lives in the Soviet Union and in many other Communist states.

It should be noted that the Black Book does consider lesser crimes too, such as torture, human rights violations or crimes against cultural heritage, that, it claims, were commited by various communist states. Some commentators, such as classical liberal French philosopher Jean-François Revel , claim that this shows that all states ruled by communist parties commited human rights violations.

The book has also been criticised for a lack of context. For example, it says nothing about deaths caused by capitalism during the same time frame, a number claimed by some (for example, the French book Le Livre Noir du capitalisme - "The Black Book of capitalism") to be far greater. However, this was achieved by counting the crimes of colonialism or imperialism, where the deaths were caused by anti-capitalism, i.e., by reducing the economic freedom of people.

Some critics say that no mention is made of lives saved by governments pursuing communism, through the reduction of mortality and the improvement of life expectancy. Noting that China and India were quite similar economically and demographically when the former set off on the communist road in 1949, Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has estimated socialist India's excess mortality relative to the People's Republic of China at 4 million deaths per year, stating that "India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame (the Great Leap Forward)". This, some critics say, can be interpreted as more than 100 million lives saved by the People's Republic of China over a thirty-year period by outperforming a comparable socialist country economically.

On the other hand, India had a statist economy, whereas the more capitalistic countries---South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and others---had a much better record than China. For example, the independent Chinese island nation of Taiwan (the Republic of China) achieved much higher life expectancy than mainland China in the same period of time. It is disputable whether the achievements of Taiwan can be compared with those of mainland China (as it is disputable whether China can be compared with India), but, if they can be compared, this provides a viable counter-argument to the argument presented above. It would seem that the achievements of communist states in terms of life expectancy are poor except when compared to (other) socialist countries. Furthermore, European countries ruled by communist parties (such as the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary) were characterized by decreasing life expectancy and increasing mortality (especially among adult men) in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. No European non-communist country underwent a similar demographic trend. Some scholars (for example Michal Pohoski ) interpret these data as a proof that the systems introduced by communist governments had a negative impact on lifespan. Similar results follow if the capitalist West Germany is compared to the communist East, South Korea to North Korea, Finland to Estonia etc.

Some researchers say that communist, socialist and other systems that reduce economic freedom cause poverty and starvation whereas the most capitalistic countries have produced most wealth and highest life-expectancy. This has been backed by the studies of many leading development economists, such Jagdish Bhagwati and Jeffrey Sachs. Also Amartya Sen has advocated pro-market reforms in India and elsewhere.

Another frequent criticism of the book is that the nations discussed are not actually communist in nature but just socialist. The goal of communism as set out by individuals like Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky was the eventual cessation of capitalism and all it's associated phenomena such as the exchange of money, the use of banks, and governments that ruled from the top down. Critics of the book argue that since the nations under discussion did not achieve these goals and in some cases worked to thwart the achievement of those goals they should not be considered communist and the ideology of communism should not be made to pay for the crimes and betrayals of Stalinism, Maoism ect... Others note that the states were ruled by Communist parties that attempted to implement Marx's theories. They also note that this defence makes it difficult to criticize capitalist states since similarly all problems can be explained by that the apparently capitalist states are in fact not capitalist. If a country is defined to be communist only when no resources are scarce, one can hardly expect to find any such country.

Two of Courtois's co-editors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin , later distanced themselves from his introduction to the Black Book, saying that Courtois inflated the figures to arrive at his desired nine-digit total. Courtois has also come under fire for his assertion that Nazism was "better" than communism because the former supposedly killed "only" 25 million. That number is highly disputed, since Soviet citizens killed by the invading German army in World War II alone are believed to number almost 25 million; furthermore, it does not account for the fact that nazism ruled for 12 years only, while the Soviet Union lasted for 75 years. On the other hand, Courtois himself firmly asserted that both totalitarian regimes practiced "crimes against humanity" on a monumental scale.

All authors, many of whom were communists when they started their research, stand behind the articles of the book even though some of them consider that the number of victims of communism is around 80 millions only.

See Also

Communist states has a list of many other scholarly estimates of human rights violations by Communist states.

Further reading

• Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0674076087

External links

• Reviews on Amazon.com
• Review - Journal of American History
• Review on firstthings.com
• Critical review
• Critical review
• A Trotskyite critique
• Maoist Internationalist Movement responses
• "Counting the Bodies", by Noam Chomsky
• Le Monde Diplomatique: "Communisme, les falsifications d'un «livre noir»" (in French)