The Black Book of Communism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
Enlarge

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a book authored by several European academics and senior researchers from CNRS, and edited by Dr. Stéphane Courtois. It attempts to catalog various crimes (murders, deportations, torture incidents, etc.) that the book argues resulted from the pursuit of communism (in the context of the book, this mainly refers to the actions of Communist states). The book was originally published in France under the title, Le Livre noir du communisme : Crimes, terreur, répression. In the United States it is published by Harvard University Press.

Contents

[edit] Contents

The introduction, by editor Stéphane Courtois, maintains 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. The breakdown of the number of deaths given in the Black Book is as follows: 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" The authors explicitly claim that Communist regimes are responsible for a greater number of deaths than any other political ideal or movemnt, including fascism.

A more detailed catalog (from the introduction) of some of the crimes described in the book includes:

  • Soviet Union: executions of hostages, prisoners, rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922; the famine of 1922; the deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920; the use of the Gulag system in the period between 1918 and 1930; the Great Purge; the deportation of kulaks from 1930 to 1932; the deaths of 4 million Ukrainians (Holodomor) and 2 million others during the famine of 1932 and 1933; the deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldavians and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941 and from 1944 to 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; the deportation of the Ingush in 1944.
  • Cambodia: deportation and extermination of the urban population of Cambodia.
  • China: the destruction of Tibetan culture.

The book, among other sources, used material from the (then) recently opened KGB files and other Soviet archives.

The authors, or a selection of them, claim to be leftists, and offer the motivation of their work as being that they do not want to give "the extreme right the privilege to alone tell the truth." (pp. 14 and 50, Finnish edition of the book, WSOY, 2001)

[edit] Reception

Unsurprisingly, because of the nature of the subject matter it deals with, the book has evoked a wide variety of responses, ranging from enthusiastic support to severe criticism.

The The Black Book of Communism received praise from the American mainstream media, including the New York Times, The New Republic, National Review and The Weekly Standard [1].

Tony Judt, reviewing the book for the New York Times, described it as "An 800-page compendium of the crimes of Communist regimes worldwide." This view is echoed by many other reviews in the aforementioned publications, all of which hold that the book makes a major contribution to the understanding and comprehensive listing of the destructive impact of Communist regimes worldwide over the 20th century.

Different historians have published widely different estimates for the number of deaths that occurred in the countries mentioned by the Black Book. For instance, the estimates for Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union range between 8.5 million and 51 million [2], and those for Mao'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. In recent years some authors have published progressively larger estimates of deaths under communist regimes; thus, recent books such as Mao: The Unknown Story and A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia have claimed higher death tolls than the Black Book for China and Russia respectively.

Mark Tauger[4] claims that the book contains errors and misinformation, criticzing the description of the Holodomor.

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 played a role at least as important as the role of communism in each case. [6]

A number of critics argue that some or all of the regimes mentioned in the book were not, in fact, "communist". This is not a new idea: the question of whether the historical communist states represented an accurate implementation of communist ideas into practice has been open since the 1930s. In the introduction to the Black Book, Stéphane Courtois claims that "there will always be some nitpickers who maintain that actual communism has nothing in common with theoretical communism."(p. 2) He does not elaborate on this point, and, 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. The Black Book does not attempt to judge whether such ruling parties were honest in their self-description as "communist".

The most common criticism of the Black Book is the charge that it lacks context. The book discusses the communist states alone, without making any sort of comparison to capitalist states. Critics have argued that, if one was to apply the Black Book's standards to capitalism, it could be held responsible for just as many deaths as communist states, or perhaps more according to some scholars (see The Black Book of Capitalism). Among the alleged crimes of capitalism are deaths resulting from colonialism and imperialism, repressions of the working class and trade unions in the 19th century and 20th century, pro-western dictatorships during the Cold War, and the sharp return to capitalism in former communist states after 1990. [7] [8] Le Monde Diplomatique points out that the Black Book incriminates the communist side in many wars and revolutions without mentioning the deaths and other crimes committed by the anti-communist side at the same time. [9] Noam Chomsky holds that the arguments used by capitalists to justify such deaths are very similar to the arguments used to defend the communist states. For example, it is alleged that colonialism and imperialism did not represent true capitalism, and that the deaths under pro-western dictatorships in the Cold War were necessary in order to fight communism.

The article Criticisms of communism contains a more in-depth discussion of the criticisms and counter-criticisms used in debates about communism.

[edit] See also

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../t/h/e/The_Black_Book_of_Communism_1dc1.html"