Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Video
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$71.00$71.00
FREE delivery:
Thursday, Oct 5
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $39.48
Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
88% positive over last 12 months
Usually ships within 3 to 4 days.
+ $3.99 shipping
85% positive over last 12 months
& FREE Shipping
75% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression Hardcover – October 15, 1999
Purchase options and add-ons
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.
- Print length858 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarvard University Press
- Publication dateOctober 15, 1999
- Dimensions7.25 x 2 x 10.25 inches
- ISBN-100674076087
- ISBN-13978-0674076082
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together

Similar items that may ship from close to you
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
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
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
From Kirkus Reviews
Review
“When The Black Book of Communism appeared in Europe in 1997 detailing communism's crimes, it created a furor. Scrupulously documented and soberly written by several historians, it is a masterful work. It is, in fact, a reckoning. With this translation by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, English-language readers may now see for themselves what all the commotion was about.”―Jacob Heilbrunn, Wall Street Journal
“The Black Book of Communism, which is finally appearing in English, is an extraordinary and almost unspeakably chilling book. It is a major study that deepens our understanding of communism and poses a philosophical and political challenge that cannot be ignored. The book's central argument, copiously documented and repeated in upwards of a dozen different essays, is that the history of communism should be read above all as the history of an all-out assault on society by a series of conspiratorial cliques led by cruel dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim II Sung, Pol Pot, and dozens of imitators) who were murderously drunk on their own ideology and power...Courtois and his collaborators have performed a signal service by gathering in one volume a global history of communism's crimes from the Soviet Union to China, from the satellite countries of Eastern-Europe to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and North Korea, and to a lesser degree in Latin America and Africa...The Black Book is enormously impressive and utterly convincing.”―Michael Scammell, New Republic
“To the extent that the book has a literary style, it is that of the recording angel; this is the body count of a colossal, wholly failed social, economic, political and psychological experiment. It is a criminal indictment, and it rightly reads like one.”―Alan Ryan, New York Times Book Review
“Most sensible adults are aware of communism's human toll in the Soviet Union and elsewhere--the forced starvations in the Ukraine, the Great Purge of the 1930s, the Gulag, the insanity of China's Great Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's murder of one in every seven Cambodians, Fidel Castro's firing squads and prisons. All these horrors are now brought together in what the French scholar Martin Mali, in his foreword, calls a 'balance sheet of our current knowledge of communism's human costs, archivally based where possible and elsewhere drawing on the best available secondary evidence'...The book is all the more damning because each of the contributing scholars is either a former communist or close fellow traveler...That The Black Book infuriated the French left is a sure mark of its intrinsic worth.”―Joseph C. Goulden, Washington Times
“The Black Book is a groundbreaking effort by a group of French scholars to document the human costs of Communism in the 20th century. Its publication caused a sensation in France when it was first released in 1997, but Americans were not able to see for themselves what the furor was all about until October 1999, when Harvard University Press finally released an English translation. It was worth the wait. Taking advantage of many newly available archives in former Communist states, the authors (many of them former Communists themselves) have meticulously recorded the crimes, terror and repression inflicted by Communist regimes across the world. It is a powerful work.”―Mark A. Thiessen, National Review
“The authors of The Black Book of Communism are part of a welcome change in the moral-philosophical landscape in Paris, and one hopes elsewhere, as a result of which liberal and left-of-center intellectuals, scholars and politicians judge the crimes of communist regimes with the same severity they've applied to those of Nazism and fascism.”―Jeffrey Herf, Washington Post Book World
“Arguing with the passion of former believers, [the contributors] charge that communism was a criminal system. They all make the case well.”―Foreign Affairs
“Now The Black Book of Communism is available in English, thanks to a stellar edition from Harvard University Press that appeared late last year, with an excellent introduction by Martin Malia, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.”―Stephen Goode, Insight
“This black book has been a best seller across Europe. It details all the misery inflicted by Communism throughout the world: 25 million dead in the Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia...Not a pleasant book, a necessary one.”―David Sexton, Evening Standard
“A sober and balanced piece of work. [The Black Book of Communism] is particularly good on the origins of the Soviet police state under Lenin and on Stalin's Great Terror. It should be read by anyone who still has illusions that the Bolshevik revolution was a good thing--and anyone who believes that something worthwhile was lost when the Berliners destroyed the Wall 10 years ago.”―Paul Anderson, The Tribune
“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.”―Anne Applebaum, Weekly Standard
“A generally even-toned and informative book, and one that will serve as a healthy dose of medication for those still afflicted by a wish to treat the Bolshevik revolution as a mistake, however monumental, or something that 'had to happen'...The Black Book's guiding purpose is to cut through the dense tissue of apologetics that has been deployed in the communist interest, both those devised in the thick of repression and those added after the collapse.”―Ben Webb, New Times
“The Black Book of Communism] consists of scholarly yet readable (and superbly translated) essays, some based on recently opened Soviet archives, and covers the communist revolutions in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, including Cuba...The Black Book [is] a most important volume of contemporary history produced by a group of French Sovietologists...On finishing this magnificent volume, it is impossible not to see that in three-quarters of a century Soviet communism had left nothing behind except death and destruction.”―Arnold Beichman, Weekend Post
“The heart of the Black Book is a compilation and description--in mesmerizing objective prose-- of the slaughters visited upon populations around the world by communist dictators in the 20th century...The Black Book is an elegantly simple and valuable record of a time many would like to forget--but will have to deal with.”―John Omicinski, Scottsdale Tribune
“I can't think of any book that would be more important for Americans to read. If you are going to read only one book this year, make it The Black Book of Communism. This is an 800-page history of the terror, repression and killings of communism stretching from the Bolshevik Revolution to the present. Written by scholars who are ex-communists or former fellow travelers, the book establishes beyond doubt that communism is the greatest crime against humanity in the 20th century.”―Charley Reese, The Sentine
“An important scholarly achievement of exhaustive breadth based on new archival material from the Stalin era...This impressive and important book is well worth the price.”―Zachary T. Irwin, Library Journal
“A unique attempt by French historians--as important in its way as the works of Solzhenitsyn--to chronicle the crimes of communism wherever it has attained power in the world. Not the least remarkable thing about this book is that this is the first time such a study has been made. For the cumulative toll of victims of communist rule, estimated by the authors at between 85 and 100 million, dwarfs even the crimes of the Nazis...A devastating and important book, already hailed in Europe, and the more harrowing for its sobriety.”―Kirkus Reviews
“In France, this damning reckoning of communism's worldwide legacy was a bestseller that sparked passionate arguments among intellectuals of the Left. Courtois, 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 famines--all chillingly documented from conception to implementation.”―Publishers Weekly
“In the end, the Black Book's body counts--necessary as they are--are less important than the soul-destroying connections between Marxist idealism and the violence committed in its name.”―Lawrence Osborne, salon.com
“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.”―Martin Malia, Times Literary Supplement
From the Back Cover
"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 II 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 wide-scale 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.
About the Author
Nicolas Werth is a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History.
Jean-Louis Panné collaborated on the Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français.
Andrzej Paczkowski is Deputy Director and a professor at the Institute for Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Karel Bartošek is acting head of research at CNRS and the editor of the journal La nouvelle alternative.
Product details
- Publisher : Harvard University Press (October 15, 1999)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 858 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0674076087
- ISBN-13 : 978-0674076082
- Item Weight : 3.04 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.25 x 2 x 10.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #360,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #416 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
- #1,093 in History & Theory of Politics
- #6,722 in World History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
Important information
To report an issue with this product, click here.
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Now there's no real question that a famine did occur in China in the year of 1960. China was traditionally known as the land of famine. Walter Mallory, Secretary of the China International Famine Relief Commission, even wrote a book by that name CHINA: LAND OF FAMINE, which was published in 1926 by the American Geographical Society. The real crux of the claim made about this famine of 1960 is that it was allegedly the worst famine in Chinese history, a famine so enormous that no previous parallel for it existed. This was given a veneer of scientific credibility when Judith Banister published the first serious critical demographic study of China in 1987, entitled CHINA'S CHANGING POPULATION. The Chinese government had only the year before published its own official population statistics in the STATISTICAL YEARBOOK OF CHINA 1986. Banister was an official for the Reagan adminstration and she at one point (p. 85) throws out a comment that:
"...the official data imply that those four years saw 15 million excess deaths ... The computer reconstruction of China's population trends utilized in this book ... results in an estimated 30 million excess deaths during 1958-61."
Unfortunately most people have simply jumped onto those few brief phrases and proceeded to extrapolate without ever actually looking at either the official statistics or Banister's critically revised statistics. The best death thing to do here is simple reproduce some of the figures for population and deaths on a per thousand basis which Banister actually gives in her demographic reconstruction on page 353:
Year Population in thousands Deaths per thousand
1949 559,545 38
1950 563,253 35
1951 567,659 32
1952 574,991 29
1953 584,191 25.77
1954 594,725 24.2
1955 606,730 22.33
1956 619,136 20.11
1957 633,215 18.12
1958 646,703 20.65
1959 654,349 22.06
1960 650,661 44.6
1961 644,670 23.01
1962 653,302 14.02
The thing to note here is that the drop in mortality between the years of 1949 and 1957 is an unprecedentedly swift decline in mortality from 38 to 18.12, a drop by about 52.3%. Banister herself recognizes the achievement with the comment:
"From a demographic perspective, the PRC has come a long way since 1949. A sweeping mortality decline took place in the 1950s, and after a temporary but jolting setback, slower improvement in mortality occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. Even allowing for considerable underreporting of deaths, China has attained relatively high life expectancy and relatively low infant mortality for a developing country, at least until the rise in female infanticide caused by the compulsory one-child limit."
-- Banister, p. 376.
Looking at these figures, the obvious question to raise is which standard of mortality are we using when computing a famine death toll. Whenever one speaks of a "famine," "epidemic" or "disaster" of some kind causing deaths, the implication is that one has an expected "normal" death toll which is forecast under ordinary conditions. The "famine" death toll then corresponds to those occurring beyond the "normal" expectancy. For a country which achieves such a rapid drop in mortality within such a short historical period of 8 years, there is no clearly defined "normal" mortality rate as things are in a state of flux. In this case the more honest thing to do is to calculate varying death tolls according to varying expectations. What I compute roughly from Banister's figures is that if one uses the 1949 mortality rate as a standard of expectation, then the only genuine famine year was 1960 and this famine killed about 4.35 million in that year. On the other hand, if one uses the 1957 mortality rate as a baseline, then all 4 years from 1958 to 1961 were years of famine and the death toll was about 25.4 million. Banister's figure of "30 million" is obviously a rounded version of this. Is it really accurate and honest to cite the figure of 25.4 million for 1958-61 to an audience without elaborating on the fact that this enormous figure has been computed based upon the greatly reduced mortality rate of 1957? Most people who throw around figures like "30 million" are frequently under the misimpression that this represents 30 million deaths occurring beyond the standard of mortality of 1949. That is definitely not the case and using such a figure in this way gives a false impression to the reader.
Say if we take the famine of 1936 which is usually estimated as having killed about 5 million (Robert Nash, DARKEST HOURS: A NARRATIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLDWIDE DISASTERS FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE PRESENT, p. 734). It should be noted that this 5 million estimate could easily be an underestimate since there was no good demographical system in pre-revolutionary China. But let's work with it anyway. If one takes the population estimate which Banister makes for 1949, then 5 million deaths relative to a populace of 559,545 thousand represents about 8.93 deaths per thousand. If one were to add this to the mortality rate of 38 per thousand then one would have 46.93 per thousand. Even if we agree to lower this by 1 to 45.93 per thousand, taking account the fact that conditions of civil war still existed for part of 1949, then the figure is still larger than the 44.6 per thousand which Banister gives for 1960. This type of heuristic comparison illustrates the fact that the absolute mortality rate in 1960 was not substantively different from what China would have experienced during many previous famines. The whole point is simply that the death rate of 44.6 in 1960 stands out against the death rate of 18.12 in 1957. But then, so does the death rate of 1949 stand out against that of 1957 and the higher death rates in pre-revolutionary China were a "normal" thing from year to year with a much higher death toll than 30 million when compared to the mortality rate of 1957.
With regards to the official data from the STATISTICAL YEARBOOK OF CHINA 1986, which Banister claims implies "15 million excess deaths," the general form is the same:
Year Population in thousands Deaths per thousand
1949 541,670 20
1950 551,960 18
1951 563,000 17.8
1952 574,820 17
1953 587,960 14
1954 602,660 13.18
1955 614,650 12.28
1956 628,280 11.4
1957 646,530 10.8
1958 659,940 11.98
1959 672,070 14.59
1960 662,070 25.43
1961 658,590 14.24
1962 672,950 10.02
The thing to note here when comparing with Banister's model is that the drop in mortality between the years of 1949 and 1957, although still very steep, is actually less percentage-wise. Here the drop is by only 46%, from 20 to 10.8, rather than from 38 to 18.12, the drop by about 52.3% which Banister's model gives.
Is it possible that the official statistics might actually be correct in saying that mortality in 1949 was as low as "20" per thousand and then in 1957 as low as "10.8" per thousand, and that Banister's figure of "18.12" per thousand might be too high? Not really. Statistics in the United States have assigned a death rate of 13.8 per thousand to the year 1913 and 9.6 per thousand in 1957. (John Kantner, "A Comparison of the Current Population in the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A." Published in Alex Inkeles & Kent Geiger, (eds.), SOVIET SOCIETY: A BOOK OF READINGS.) China was traditionally known as the land of famine, long before anyone ever heard of Mao Zedong, and it is not at all probable that even Mao would be able to so quickly reduce the mortality rate of China by 1957 to something lower than that of the USA in 1913. Banister's own figure of 18.12 per thousand for Chinese mortality in 1957 could itself be an underestimate, as might her figure of 38 for 1949. But the 10.8 figure in the official data is definitely a sharp underestimate. The most likely explanation for why the official Chinese data underestimated the mortality so sharply for the first decade and a half or so after the revolution was simply the lack of any good record-keeping system in China prior to 1949. If the data had been deliberately fixed so as to lower death rates to Mao's advantage then there's no reason why the official data should give such a low mortality rate as 20 per thousand to the year 1949. This only lets Chiang Kai-Shek off the hook. Just compare the drop from 20 to 10.8 which the official statistics give for 1949-57 to the drop from 38 to 18.12 which Banister's reconstruction gives. Although Banister's absolute figures are greater, the relative drop shown in Banister's data is sharper and reflects better on Mao than does the official data. There is no reason why the official statistics should show this if the motive behind making them was to exculpate Mao. In actuality, both sets of data reflect favorably on Mao. The basic form is that mortality rates were brought down sharply by the Chinese revolution.
The BLACK BOOK fails to provide any demographic population data of the above type and so it throws out wild figures of alleged "victims" without allowing the reader to know by what methodology they were arrived at. If someone is taking a serious interest in these questions then looking up real demographic studies, not only of China but of any relevant country, is essential.
Goes into great detail of the horror of living in a marxian utopia. Unfortunantly students graduating today seem to confused by an ideology that would of made you think the Soviet Union won the cold war. Which shows the intellectual bankruptcy of today's education system.
nimal Farm first and then follow up with this book.
These are numbers that are not often discussed in the West.
Where the Mensheviks were more amenable to the idea of general agreement and a form of democracy, the Bolsheviks ruled by absolute terror. This book will bring you the numbers, generally agreed at around twenty million dead.
Incidentally 'Child 44' is an extremely grim movie depiction of the Soviet Union in the fifties, in all its snitching glory. Watch it and read this book and stick with the Mensheviks.
The author has an interesting perspective on the question of whether or not the terror of Communism can be compared to that of Nazism. Apparently, the very idea of comparing the two is taboo in genteel society. It seems that the anointed and noble Communists commit murder in the name of ridding the world of war and poverty whilst killers of boorish and ignoble stripe are vile and evil simply because they are at least dumb enough to make no such pretensions. He poses the question this way: Is it right to excuse terror when performed under the color of abolishing war and poverty, or is the excusing wrong precisely because the terror is perpetrated in the name of abolishing war and poverty.
I believe it was in the book "Witness" by Whitaker Chambers where this same question is presented comparing the noble terror of Communism with that of boorish Nazism. Chambers, when talking with other former communists, to test the veracity of their break with the faith, he would ask, "What is Communism"? If they answered, "Communism is Fascism". Then he knew that this person has truly broken with the religion.
It seems many are attracted to collectivist ideologies because these political cults claim to hold the secret to ending the two great scourges of poverty and war. To achieve his noble goal the true believer can then justify any means necessary, even if it produces famine and war far beyond anything that has gone before. The goal is so noble that no amount of other people’s blood and suffering can cause the true believer to question a single tenant of the faith.
It seems mankind has always been plagued by these murder cults but none has had such noble ideals, which may explain why the holy men of Communism have been able to get away with racking up a body count of such scale with little or no complaint or even complacency and collaboration from those on the outside. Outsiders who also believe in the eradication of poverty and war may feel compelled to give these monsters a pass because of their shared and noble goals.
Top reviews from other countries
The catalogue of millions upon millions of victims of this ideology which has used terror, mass murder and genocide to establish itself deserves more attention.








