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The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression Hardcover – October 15, 1999

4.7 out of 5 stars 442 ratings

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Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years.

"Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit," Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience―in the China of "the Great Helmsman," Kim Il Sung's Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho" and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalin's destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu's leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the widescale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Mao's Red Guards.

As the death toll mounts―as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on―the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.

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Editorial Reviews

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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

From Publishers Weekly

In France, this damning reckoning of communism's worldwide legacy was a bestseller that sparked passionate arguments among intellectuals of the Left. Essentially a body count of communism's victims in the 20th century, the book draws heavily from recently opened Soviet archives. The verdict: communism was responsible for between 85 million and 100 million deaths in the century. In France, both sales and controversy were fueled, as Martin Malia notes in the foreword, by editor Courtois's specific comparison of communism's "class genocide" with Nazism's "race genocide." Courtois, the director of research at the prestigious Centre Research National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and editor of the journal Communisme, along with the other distinguished French and European contributors, delivers a fact-based, mostly Russia-centered wallop that will be hard to refute: town burnings, mass deportations, property seizures, family separations, mass murders, planned faminesAall chillingly documented from conception to implementation. The book is divided into five sections. The first and largest takes readers from the "Paradoxes of the October Revolution" through "Apogee and Crisis in the Gulag System" to "The Exit from Stalinism." Seeing the U.S.S.R. as "the cradle of all modern Communism," the book's other four sections document the horrors of the Iron Curtain countries, Soviet-backed agitation in Asia and the Americas, and the Third World's often violent embrace of the system. A conclusionA"Why?"Aby Courtois, points to a bureaucratic, "purely abstract vision of death, massacre and human catastrophe" rooted in Lenin's compulsion to effect ideals by any means necessary. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard University Press
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 15, 1999
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 858 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674076087
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674076082
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.37 x 2 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 out of 5 stars 442 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2019
    TLDR: Anyone who wants to know why Communism specifically and Socialism in general are so dangerous need to read this book. We do ourselves and society a huge disservice by not understanding the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced.

    This book is a necessary but difficult read. Not only because of the density of the information, but also because of the weight of the material. However, it will open your eyes to the true nature of Communism. It will probably sadden, depress, and anger you, but history repeats itself and if we want to avoid the greatest tragedy of the 20th century recurring, we need to know what happened so humanity can prevent it from happening again. Communism has caused more human suffering than any other ideology in our history and the scale of that suffering bogles the mind. It is incredible that most people know so little about it. This book goes into great detail about the crimes against humanity committed by Communist governments trying to create Utopia.

    It seems to be a very academically honest book. Where there is ambiguity in statistics or multiple explanations for an event, it presents them honestly and gives evidence for what the authors think is most likely correct. If you are looking for an easy read or a happy ending you will not find it here. It is long, dense, and sometimes very boring. It took me about 2 years to finish it because I had to take several long breaks while reading it. However I am very glad to have read it. 99% of what is is this book I was not taught in school and does not seem to be common knowledge. But it should be.
    47 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2001
    This extensive tome is a ringing indictment of Communist governments over the last century as "criminal enterprises." Its condemnation is supported by archival documents that reveal crimes that cost the lives of 100 millions victims: 65 million in China, 25 million in the Soviet Union, 2 million in Cambodia, and millions more in Vietnam, North Korea, Latin America, Angola, Ethiopia, and Eastern Europe. It traces the history of militant Communism from the ideologue Karl Marx, through the blood stained regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Nicolae Ceausescu, and many others. Most victims of the Red Terror were chosen on the basis of class distinction. Sometimes, like in the Soviet Union, they were even picked to fill "a quota;" or in Cambodia, because they unfortunately lived in a city. The supposed enemy was initially dehumanized, then he was exterminated. First published in France, this best seller, authored by six respected scholars, caused a firestorm of protest. Its chief editor, Stephane Courtois, morally equated the evils of Communism with Nazism. For this act of conspicuous bravery, and political incorrectness, he was falsely denounced as "anti-Semitic" by Le Monde, a Paris newspaper. The intrepid Courtois, who was careful not to denigrate the immense suffering of the Jewish people during its holocaust, had dared to write: "The deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian Kulak as a result of famine caused by Stalin's regime is 'equal to' the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of famine caused by the Nazi regime." Famine, Courtois, insisted was "used as a weapon" by the Kremlin, especially, in the Ukraine, 1932-33, where 6 million peasants, mostly Christians, were starved to death for resisting collectivism. Courtois wondered, too, why Communist excesses have been ignored by history. Heinrich Himmler's name is recognized for barbarism, but the Bolshevik monster, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a Jew, who was a mass murderer, too, and head of the dreaded Soviet's Cheka, languishes "in obscurity." This book is thoroughly researched and raises profound questions that challenge our historical perspective on militant Communism. It is a worthy chronicle of a deadly scourge that still haunts our planet.
    89 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2025
    My book came exactly as described and very quickly, I couldn't be happier with my experience, thank you very much!
  • Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2024
    A welcome addition to any historical book collection. It moves way beyond Eastern Europe/Russia into Burma and Cambodia. A good reminder that extreme political ideologies lead to man's inhumanity to man.
    2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Marg.A
    5.0 out of 5 stars fast delivery as always great service. I read this book in Polish
    Reviewed in Canada on March 27, 2018
    fast delivery as always great service.I read this book in Polish,this one is for my son.Great book .Recommend for everyone who is interested in history and politics..
  • YMML
    4.0 out of 5 stars Como prevention y combatir el comunismo. Y mas ....
    Reviewed in Spain on October 25, 2020
    Para saber hasta Que punto the hell of communism destroys the world and the minds. Etc etc ....
  • Dr Paul D Ridley
    5.0 out of 5 stars Communism-real world failure of a utopia
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 16, 2018
    The utopian dream fails in the face of the real world experience as the crimes and economic failure of all the twentieth century communist regimes are remoreslessly documented. Despite the allure and aparrent morality of 'from each according to his means and to each according to his needs' the real world experience of communism is of murder, mass expulsion and torture with routine suppression of free speach and free action and an to attempt suppress thought itself. Much of this history is well known (the book is 20 years old) but curiously the allure of communism persists with identity politics the promotion of equality of outcome and avoidance of offence promoted in western universities. Free speach is suppressed. Cuba is romaticized. There is nostalgia for the old Soviet Union. Soviet memorabilia may be chic. Read this book. Communism is brutally and methodically exposed as only being expressed in the real world in the form of criminal gangster governments.
  • Madan Gopal
    5.0 out of 5 stars A must read
    Reviewed in India on March 24, 2025
    Highly recommended to understand the diabolical hidden history
  • FMA
    2.0 out of 5 stars Muito bom mas com erros tipográficos
    Reviewed in Brazil on April 11, 2024
    O assunto é interessante, mas vejo muitos erros tipográficos como se a edição não tivesse sido revista.
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