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.
"ions?? like trees?? must be judged by their fruit??"nazio Silone wrote?? and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience??in the China of "e Great Helmsman??"Kim Il Sung's Korea?? Vietnam under "ncle 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 mountsas many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union 65 million in China 1.7 million in Cambodia and on and onthe 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.
Amazon.com ReviewWhen 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 St?phane 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. Th