The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a 1997 book by Stéphane Courtois, Andrzej Paczkowski, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Margolin, and several other European academics documenting a history of political repression by communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and deaths in labor camps and artificially created famines. The book was originally published in France as Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression by Éditions Robert Laffont. In the United States, it was published by Harvard University Press, with a foreword by Martin Malia. The German edition, published by Piper Verlag, includes a chapter written by Joachim Gauck. The introduction was written by Courtois. Historian François Furet was originally slated to write the introduction, but he died before being able to do so.
The Black Book of Communism has been translated into numerous languages, has sold millions of copies, and is considered one of the most influential and controversial books written about the history of communism in the 20th century, in particular the history of the Soviet Union and other state socialist regimes. The work was praised by a broad range of popular-press publications and historians, while academic press and specialist reviews were more critical or mixed for some historical inaccuracies. The introduction by Courtois was especially criticized, including by three of the book's main contributors, for comparing communism to Nazism and giving a definitive number of "victims of communism", which critics have described as inflated. Werth's chapter, however, stood out as a positive. The book's title was chosen to echo The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, a documentary record of Nazi atrocities in the Eastern Front, written by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II.
Overview
The authors use the term communism to mean Leninist and Marxist–Leninist communism, i.e., the actually existing communist regimes and "real socialism" of the 20th century; they distinguish it from small-c communism, which has existed for millennia, while capital-c Communism began in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution, which Stéphane Courtois describes as a coup.
Introduction: "The Crimes of Communism" The introduction, written by Courtois, was the main source of controversy, and was acknowledged by Martin Malia in his foreword. Courtois writes that "Communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government" and are responsible for a greater number of deaths than Nazism or any other political system. Courtois says that "Communism, the defining characteristic of the 'short twentieth century' that began in Sarajevo in 1914 and ended in Moscow in 1991, finds itself at center states in the story. Communism predated fascism and Nazism, outlived both, and left its mark on four continents." Courtois goes on to explain what is meant by the term Communism in the book. According to Courtois, "[w]e must make a distinction between the doctrine of communism and its practice. As a political philosophy, communism has existed for centuries, even millennia." Citing Plato's Republic and Thomas More as communist examples of what he terms utopian philosophy, Courtois states that "the Communism that concerns us does not exist in the transcendent sphere of ideas. This Communism is altogether real; it has existed at key moments of history and in particular countries, brought to life by its famous leaders", citing Fidel Castro, Jacques Duclos, Vladimir Lenin, Georges Marchais, Ho Chi Minh, Joseph Stalin, and Maurice Thorez as examples of the latter.