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The Black Book of Communism

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The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a book that describes the history of repressions, both political and civilian by Communist states, including extrajudicial executions, deportations, and man-made 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]

Authors

The book was authored by several European academics and specialists(p. 857-8) and edited by Stéphane Courtois.

  • Jean-Louis Margolin is a lecturer at the Université de Provence and a researcher as the Research Institute on Southeast Asia.
  • Sylvain Boulougue is a research associate at GEODE, Université Paris X.
  • Pascal Fontaine is a journalist with a special knowledge of Latin America.
  • Rémi Kauffer is a specialist in the history of intelligence, terrorism, and clandestine operations.
  • Pierre Rigoulet is a researcher at the Institut d'Histoire Sociale.
  • Yves Santamaria is a historian.

Martin Malia wrote the foreword to the English edition.

Introduction

The introduction, by editor Stéphane Courtois, states that 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 partial listing of some of the repressions committed in the Soviet Union under the regimes of Lenin and Stalin described in the book include:

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

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.

Support

The 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, The National Review and The Weekly Standard.[3]

Historian Tony Judt, reviewing the book for The New York Times:[3]

An 800-page compendium of the crimes of Communist regimes worldwide, recorded and analyzed in ghastly detail by a team of scholars. The facts and figures, some of them well known, others newly confirmed in hitherto inaccessible archives, are irrefutable. The myth of the well-intentioned founders--the good czar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs--has been laid to rest for good. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism, and those who had begun to forget will be forced to remember anew.

Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History:[3]

A serious, scholarly history of Communist crimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Africa, and Latin America...The Black Book does indeed surpass many of its predecessors in conveying the grand scale of the Communist tragedy, thanks to its authors' extensive use of the newly opened archives of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Martin Malia, Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, writing for the Times Literary Supplement:[3]

The publishing sensation in France this winter (1999) has been an austere academic tome, Le Livre Noir du Communisme, detailing Communism's crimes from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989...[The Black Book of Communism] gives a balance sheet of our present knowledge of Communism's human costs, archivally based where possible, and otherwise drawing on the best secondary works, and with due allowance for the difficulties of quantification. Yet austere though this inventory is, its cumulative impact is overwhelming. At the same time, the book advances a number of important analytical points.

Criticism

Questioning the estimated number of victims

There 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][4] 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 jouralist 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. [5]

Argument that some deaths were unintentional

UCLA professor J. Arch Getty 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.[6]

Another UCLA professor, Mark Tauger, also disagrees with the author's thesis that the Holodomor was a man-made famine and genocide [4] This is an ongoing controversy among historians. For example Robert Conquest sees this famine, the Holodomor, as intentional.

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.

Argument that the book is one-sided

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). 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, and pro-western dictatorships during the Cold War [7]. 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 the democratic capitalist "experiment" since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of Communism everywhere.[8]. French author Gilles Perrault, writing in Le Monde diplomatique, also asserts that the Black Book incriminates communists in many wars and revolutions without mentioning the deaths and other crimes committed by the anti-communist side [7]

Marxist 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.[8]. Supporters of capitalism, on the other hand, argue that capitalist nations have the least poverty, based on the empirical research surrounding the Indices of economic freedom.[9]

Comparison in the introduction of Communism and Nazism

Stéphane Courtois in the introduction wrote that Communist regimes have killed "approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of Nazis" [10]. He claimed, using archive documents to support his view, that Nazi Germany's methods of mass extermination were adopted from Soviet methods. As an example, Courtois cited Nazi state official Rudolf Hess who organized the famous death camp in Auschwitz. According to Hess[10],

"The Reich Security Head Office issued to the commandants a full collection of reports concerning the Russian concentration camps. These described in great detail the conditions in, and organization of, the Russian camps, as supplied by former prisoners who had managed to escape. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Russians, by their massive employment of forced labor, had destroyed whole peoples".

Courtois also alleged 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." [10]. Courtois stated that [11]

"The "genocide of a "class" may well be tantamount to the genocide of a "race" - the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's regime "is equal to" the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime".

French author Gilles Perrault, writing in Le Monde diplomatique has described the comparison between communism and Nazism as "disgraceful"[12]. 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:[13]

"The most important point that needs to be made is that both regimes (radical Leninism or Stalinism and Nazism) were genocidal. Analytical distinctions between them are certainly important, and sometimes Courtois does not emphasize them sufficiently, but the commonality in terms of complete contempt for the bourgeois state of law, human rights, and the universality of humankind regardless of spurious race and class distinctions is in my view beyond doubt".

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[14]. 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" [15], and "The more you compare communism and nazism, the more the differences are obvious." [16]


Trivia

The 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.[17]

References

  1. ^ Ronit Lenṭin, Mike Dennis, Eva Kolinsky (2003). Representing the Shoah for the Twenty-first Century. Berghahn Books. pp. p217. ISBN 1571818022. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  2. ^ "Bartošek Karel". www.paseka.cz. Retrieved 2008-02-24.
  3. ^ a b c d "Harvard University Press: The Black Book of Communism : Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stéphane Courtois". www.hup.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2008-02-24.
  4. ^ Ponton, G. (1994) The Soviet Era.
  5. ^ "Communisme, les falsifications d’un « livre noir »", Gilles Perrault, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1997
  6. ^ J Arch Getty, The Atlantic Monthly, Boston: Mar 2000. Vol.285, Iss. 3; pg. 113, 4 pgs
  7. ^ "Communisme, les falsifications d’un « livre noir »", Gilles Perrault, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1997
  8. ^ "Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir". www.thenation.com. Retrieved 2008-02-24.
  9. ^ Economic Freedom of the World: 2004 Annual Report (pdf)
  10. ^ a b c Black book, Introduction, page 15.
  11. ^ Black book, Introduction, page 9.
  12. ^ "Communisme, les falsifications d’un « livre noir »", Gilles Perrault, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1997
  13. ^ Vladimir Tismaneanu, Communism and the human condition: Reflections on the Black Book of Communism, Human Rights Review, Vol 2, Nbr 2, January 2001, Springer Netherlands
  14. ^ Le Monde, 14 November 1997
  15. ^ J Arch Getty, The Atlantic Monthly, Boston: Mar 2000.Vol.285, Iss. 3; pg. 113, 4 pgs [1]
  16. ^ Le Monde, 21 september 2000
  17. ^ Henry Rousso (edt), Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared (2004), ISBN 0803239459, p. xiii

See also

Further reading

  • Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7
  • Anne Applebaum, foreword, Paul Hollander, introduction and editor, From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence And Repression in Communist Studies, Intercollegiate Studies Institute (April 17, 2006), hardcover, 760 pages, ISBN 1-932236-78-3
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