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The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a controversial book edited by Stéphane Courtois which attempts to catalog deaths resulting 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 most controversial aspect of the book is the introduction, by the editor Stéphane Courtois, which 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.
Critics, including many historians, 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 Afganistan 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.
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? Should the victims of the famine in 1922 be counted, or was it a natural famine caused by drought? How many of the people in the Gulag were actually guilty criminals? Were the deportations during World War II justified by the need to defeat Nazi Germany? Should the killing of Nazis and Nazi collaborators during war time be regarded as deaths caused by communism? In answering all 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 (70%) were allegedly caused by Mao Zedong, 20 million (22%) by Stalin, 2 million (2%) by Pol Pot, and 5.36 million (6%) by all other communist leaders 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.
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 said by some (for example, the French book Le Livre Noir du capitalisme - "The Black Book of capitalism") to be far greater. Nor is any mention 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 non-communist 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 non-communist country economically.
On the other hand, the small part of China which was not taken over by communists and constituted the Republic of China (Taiwan) 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. 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 men) in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. No European capitalist country underwent a similar demographic trend. Given this, the argument of life expectancy and mortality can be also put forward to increase the death toll of communism. It would seem that the achievements of communist states in terms of living standards and economic indicators depend entirely on what objects of comparison are used.
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.
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
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