Harvard University Press: Black Book of Communism

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Note on the numbers below, subsequent investigation showed them to be extraordinarily much higher by several times as much. Communism like Nazism and Fascism, including current AmeriFascism, is a totalitarian tyranny of unbridled savagery.

The Black Book of Communism

Crimes, Terror, Repression

STÉPHANE COURTOIS

NICOLAS WERTH

JEAN-LOUIS PANNÉ

ANDRZEJ PACZKOWSKI

KAREL BARTOSEK

JEAN-LOUIS MARGOLIN

EDITED BY MARK KRAMER

Translated by Jonathan Murphy

ABOUT THIS BOOK

• About the Authors
• Reviews
• Table of Contents
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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.