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The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a book which describes a history of repressions, both political and civilian, by Communist states, including extrajudicial executions, deportations, and artificial famines. The book was originally published in 1997 in France under the title, Le Livre noir du communisme : Crimes, terreur, répression. In the United States it is published by Harvard University Press[1]
[edit] AuthorsThe book was authored by several European academics and specialists(p. 857-8) and edited by Stéphane Courtois.
Martin Malia wrote the foreword to the English edition. [edit] IntroductionThe introduction, by editor Stéphane Courtois, asserts that "...Communist regimes...turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government". Using unofficial estimates he cites a death toll which totals 94 million, not counting the "excess deaths" (decrease of the population due to lower than the expected birth rate). The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:
The book claims 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 executions, intentional destruction of population by starvation, and deaths resulting from deportations, physical confinement, or through forced labor. It does not include "excess deaths" due to higher mortality or lower birth rates than expected of the population. A more detailed listing of the accusations of repressions committed in the Soviet Union under the regimes of Lenin and Stalin described in the book include:
[edit] Comparison of Communism and NazismAuthors compared Communism and Nazism as slightly different totalitarian systems. They wrote that Communist regimes have killed "approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of Nazis" [3]. Nazi Germany's methods of mass extermination were adopted from Soviet methods As an example, authors cited Nazi state official Rudolf Höss who organized the infamous death camp in Auschwitz. According to Höss[3],
According to authors, the Soviet genocides of peoples living in the Caucasus and exterminations of large social groups in Russia that 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." [3]. Courtois stated that [4]
They also added that "after 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." [edit] ReceptionThe book has evoked a wide variety of responses, ranging from enthusiastic support to severe criticism. [edit] SupportThe Black Book of Communism received praise from American and British mainstream media, including the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, The New Republic, National Review and The Weekly Standard.[5] Historian Tony Judt, reviewing the book for The New York Times:[5]
Anne Applebaum, journalist and author of Gulag: A History:[5]
Martin Malia, Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, writing for the Times Literary Supplement:[5]
[edit] Criticism[edit] Questioning the estimated number of victimsThere is no consensus among historians about the number of repression victims in the Communist countries. Some of them put the number of deaths higher than in Black Book, but others say that the number is lower. For instance, the estimates for Joseph Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union range between 3.5 and 60 million,[2][6] and those for Mao Zedong's China range between 19.5 and 75 million [3]. The authors of the Black Book defend their estimates for the Soviet Union (20 million) and Eastern Europe (1 million) by stating that they made use of sources that were not available to previous researchers (the archives mentioned above). At the same time, the authors acknowledge that the estimates from China and other nations still ruled by communist parties are uncertain since their archives are still closed. French journalist Gilles Perrault, writing in an op-ed in Le Monde diplomatique has accused the author of having used incorrect data and of having manipulated figures. [7] [edit] Argument that some deaths were unintentionalA revisionist historian J. Arch Getty [8]noted that famine accounted for more than half of Courtois's 100 million death toll. He believes that these famines were caused by the "stupidity or incompetence of the regime," and that the deaths resulting from the famines, as well as other deaths that "resulted directly or indirectly from government policy," should not be counted as if they were equivalent to intentional murders and executions.[9]. Another UCLA professor, Mark Tauger, also disagrees with the author's thesis that the Holodomor was an artifical famine and genocide [4] This is an ongoing controversy among historians. For example Robert Conquest sees this famine, the Holodomor, as intentional. [edit] Argument that described political systems were not "communist"Critics of the Black Book have alleged that it uses the umbrella term "communism" to refer to a wide variety of different systems, and that it "arbitrarily throws together completely different historical phenomena such as the civil war of 1918-21, the forced collectivisation and the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, the rule of Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia, the military government of Ethiopia as well as various Latin American political movements, from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to the 'Shining Path' in Peru." [5] While not necessarily disputing the communist nature of the aforementioned countries, the French newspaper Le Monde diplomatique has argued that local history and traditions also played an important role in each country [6]. In the introduction to the Black Book, Stéphane Courtois argued that "there will always be some nitpickers who maintain that actual communism has nothing in common with theoretical communism."(p. 2) For the purpose of the book, a communist state is defined as a one-party state where the ruling party openly proclaims its adherence to Marxism-Leninism. Courtois writes in the conclusion that belief in Marxist ideology, with its claims of scientific truth and utopian ultimate society, justified and contributed to the mass terror. According to Courtois, mass terror was the only way for a regime only supported by a small minority to stay in power and apply its radically different "scientific" doctrines. He argues that in Communism there also exists a form of social Darwinism where obsolete and damaging social institutions and classes are to be replaced by a utopian society and in essence a new human species (the "new man"). Eliminating such damaging and inferior obstacles is thus seen as both scientific and justified. [edit] Argument that the book is one-sidedAmir Weiner of Stanford University characterizes the "Black Book" as seriously flawed, inconsistent, and prone to mere provocation. In particular, the authors are said to savage Marxist ideology. [10] The methodology of the authors has been criticized. Alexander Dallin writes that moral, legal, or political judgment hardly depends on the number of victims. The authors are said to make no attempt to differentiate between intended crimes such as the Moscow show trials and policy choices that had unintended consequences such as the Chinese famine. Dallin finds that there is not a satisfactory analysis or explanation of the behavior of communist governments. [11] Another criticism of the Black Book is the charge that it discusses the communist states alone, without making any sort of comparison to capitalist states. Critics have argued that capitalist countries could be held responsible for just as many deaths as communist states, or perhaps more (see The Black Book of Capitalism)[12][13] Noam Chomsky writes that Amartya Sen in the early 80s estimated "the excess of mortality" in India over China to be close to 4 million a year. Chomsky therefore argues that in India alone, the democratic capitalist "experiment" since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of Communism everywhere.[14] Journalist Daniel Singer also criticises the Black Book for discussing the faults of communist states while ignoring their positive achievements; he argues that "if you look at Communism as merely the story of crimes, terror and repression, to borrow the subtitle of the Black Book, you are missing the point. The Soviet Union did not rest on the gulag alone. There was also enthusiasm, construction, the spread of education and social advancement for millions." He also argues that if communism can be blamed for famines, capitalism should be blamed for most or all deaths from poverty in the world at the present time.[15] [edit] Disputing the comparison of Nazism and CommunismFrench author Gilles Perrault, writing in Le Monde diplomatique has described the comparison between communism and Nazism as "disgraceful"[16]. However other authors, such as Vladimir Tismăneanu, in his review of the book in the journal "Human Rights Review", contend that the Black Book's comparison is both morally and scholarly justifiable:[17]
Two of the Black Book's contributors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, sparked a debate in France when they publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois's statements in the introduction about the scale of Communist terror. They felt that he was being obsessed with arriving at a total of 100 million victims. They instead estimated that Communism has claimed between 65 and 93 million lives[18]. They rejected his equation of Soviet repression with Nazi genocide. Werth, a well-regarded French specialist on the Soviet Union whose sections in the Black Book on the Soviet Communists are sobering and damning, said there was still a qualitative difference between Nazism and Communism. He told Le Monde, "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union" [19], and "The more you compare communism and nazism, the more the differences are obvious." [20] Courtois' insistence that the Holocaust was "actively commemorated" thanks to the efforts of the "international Jewish community" and that a "single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide...has prevented an assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world" was perceived by some to be anti-Semitic. [21][22] Courtois' argument that communism was on par with, if not worse than, Nazism, was thought to have catered directly to the revisionist, negationist, and extreme right-wing groups in France and elsewhere. [23] [edit] TriviaThe book Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared argues that the title echoes that of Ilya Ehrenburg's and Vasily Grossman's documentary record of the Nazi atrocities, The Black Book.[24] [edit] References
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