[.ca] The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (ISBN 0674076087)

From Amazon.com:
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 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

Statistics of Sorrow:
To begin with, I have to point out that I am extremely anti-authoritarian, having no love for socialism, communism, fascism, or any other centrally planned and/or totalitarian government. However, I've never spent much time reading about the internal workings of those countries that have fallen under such foolishness because it just seems so self-evident to me. However, I have always found it ironic that while Hitler managed to knock off a few million in his "labor" camps, Stalin's crimes have managed to remain below most people's radar. Sure, people know that the USSR was repressive, but when people want to compare a dictator like Saddam Hussein with someone really bad, they invariably choose Adolph Hitler. As the authors of this book point out, the Red Terror, purges, repressions, and other atrocities committed by Lenin and his heirs Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il-Sung and his ridiculous progeny made Hitler look like an amateur. The BBoC is not an attempt to write the definitive history of every communist country, nor is any attempt made to analyze the philosophical nuances of Bolshevism, Leninism, Stalinism, Hoxhaism, Trotskyism, Maoism, etc., or to distinguish such "actual socialisms" from the theoretical spawning grounds of Marxism, Owenism, Fourierism, Fabianism, etc. As it is, the book is over 800 pages long, so an attempt to "finally" resolve these disputes would require additional volumes. I think that criticisms of the book on that basis fail because they are accusing the authors of falling short of a goal that they did not set out to achieve. Rather, what the authors (self-described communists and fellow travelers) have actually attempted to do is to estimate the magnitude of the number of people who died in the name of class struggle. One of the tragic differences that they point out between Nazism and Communism: the SS simply killed its victims without fanfare, while the communists typically forced their victims to sign confessions, endure show trials, and participate in public self-criticism before taking a bullet to the neck (a favorite method of the KGB's predecessor, the "Cheka"). Despite the high drama, the communists and nazis both killed for the same reason (or lack thereof): victims were killed not for what they had done, but because of who they were. Both sides killed Jews, Nazis killed gypsies while Lenin and Stalin killed kulaks. They both killed people because they were related to state enemies. The major distinction between them was that Stalin and Mao were far more successful than Hitler. The authors briefly theorize that the reason Hitler's crimes are more well-known and despised is that Hitler lost a hot war, and the Nuremberg trials publicized the tragedy of the Holocaust. By contrast, Stalin and his heirs lost a cold war with a whimper, long after the worst crimes had been committed, when the few survivors were old, and when the public had no stomach for reliving those years. The other communist countries are still run by criminal gangs that have no intention of opening their records to public scrutiny. For that reason, the chapters on Eastern Europe and especially Russia are the strongest, followed by the chapter on China. The chapters on Latin America, Africa, and Afghanistan are weak. Of all of them, though, I found the chapter on Cambodia to be the most heart-breaking. I knew it was bad, but while most of the book illustrates the ledger-like listing of deaths with a few descriptions of the most inhumane policies, this chapter's author deeply affected me as (s?)he made a serious attempt to answer "Why?". As to whether it is fair to group Stalin's USSR, Khmer Rhouge, and other regimes together, the authors point out in each chapter the remarkably similar methods and timelines and the training received at the feet of the Comintern. I was surprised to find out how frequently and effectively communists used systematic starvation as a method of repression. In most every case, the communists worked with the socialists and anarchists to achieve power, then began to "liquidate" their ideological competition. (The term "liquidate" arises so often that I began to worry about becoming desensitized to it) It is quite possible that Franco won power in Spain not because the Spanish people or Hitler and and Mussolini backed him, but rather because Stalin's Comintern-backed communists were busy killing Franco's opposition in their own megalomaniacal quest. The value of this book is in pounding home the brutality of totalitarian governments. You think you know, but until you have to read page after page of tragedy, you really can't imagine the soul-crushing despair and dehumanization that leads people to rat on their relatives, trade their children for food, and even trade their children *as* food. You begin to understand the hatred that leads even an avowed Marxist like Chris Hitchens to applaud the toppling of Saddam and his Ba'athist gang of murderers.

Bunk:
Many, many statistics and claims are completely (and admittedly) wrong in this book, but HUP refuses to correct them. Mark Kramer, one of the authors, admits to several mistakes, one of which is multiplying death tolls by a factor of at least 10 during translations. Go to Google, type in "MIM," (for Moaist Internationalist Movement), and find their review. They've kept correspondence with some of the authors and publishers about the mistakes, and have a very in-depth review of the book.

Painful to read in quite a few ways:
Someone who is looking for a book of history that is fascinating or informative should definately take a look at this; someone seeking to be entertained or cheered, however, should not. As other reviewers have noted, the amount of information in the BBoC is overwhelming, both in the scale of the detail and in the graphic nature of the many atrocities it describes. As one of the first really comprehensive studies of the history of communism that came out since the Cold War ended, this is a book as informative as it is necessary. However, the climate has also harmed the material the authours could use for research. As many American, Russian, and other documents are still classified and will be for some time, the sources for many events in the book are a mix of more "public" sources - letters, newspapers, and television - at the expense of "internal" primary sources. The later events in the book have to rely on eyewitness accounts and second-hand materials; while these provide a huge amount of information, many of the events in some chapters simply get boiled down to lists of atrocities. These get handled well in some cases - the sections on North Korea and China in particular - and poorly in others. My main problem with the book, aside from understandable source issues, is the writing style. Have a glass of water handy when reading the BBoC, because you'll need a reminder of what things that aren't incredibly dry look and feel like at points. This is a style issue, however, for a book which is not meant to entertain but educate, and it doesn't harm the quality of information this book gives in the least. All in all, the Black Book of Communism is a book which is at times tedious, but through its entire length it remains as informative as it is visceral, and is worth a look at anyone who is seriously interested in "the other side" of the Cold War era. This book is neither a fun nor a light read, and does not intend to be one. It is instead a very densely-packed collection of facts, figures, names, dates, places, and events, all brought together into one place to give one gigantic perspective on what the entire Communist world was like for most of the twentieth century. Despite its flaws, the Black Book of Communism deserves both attention and praise on those grounds alone.

HAHAHAHAHAHA worthless nonsense:
Communism made the world bloody??? NO capitalism is responsible for more deaths than fascism and communism. The USA a bastion of imperialism and oppression has killed more people than Mao Hitler and Stalin doubled. Capitalism is a more warlike philosophy and the wars that are fought are soley for money. I dont defend the USSR it has commited many atrocities but not because it is communist. Name a capitalist country that hasn't started a war. Why we are killing innocent people right now and sending them to prison camps and torturing them for speaking against our nation in Iraq. We have the illusion of liberty and freedom but only for the 250 million americans out of the 7 billion people and the even more sad thing is that this has only been true for scarcely 40 years! Every capitalist nation is evil why do you think they always attack leftist regimes and support right wing fascists? Does that sound fair to you? no it isn't capitalism defends this by saying well we are just lucky trying to cover up the fact that they deserve wealth no more than the people we have driven into starvation and oppression. Every war we have fought was fought for money all the USA cares about is protecting its bank and corporate interests. The USA goes to war whenever are oil interests are threatend (Iraq and soon Venezuela) so which to you looks more reppressive? Communism is for the interests of the workers it looks beyond race and religion capitalism doesnt. Your book and philosophy sicken me you are a brain washed american whose only reason for critisizing communism is to defend your lavish lifestyle and easy living so you dont have to think of the millions of dead and impoverished people around the world that capitalist imperialism is responsible for. Maybe someday you will become educated and learn that equality is the answer and communism is equality.

Fact, after fact, after fact:
Don't look for any entertaining Coulter/Franken type slam books here. The book was just fact after fact layed out in academic detail. 10,000 Kulaks sent here, 5000 executed there. After about the third country, I could write the chapter myself needing only to fill in the actors names and the numbers. The story was the same in country after country.