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Summary: The horrors of atheism.
Review: The history of communism is alot like mankind before the advent of Christianity and Islam; war, greed, oppression and massacres. This book lays bare the atrocities of atheism, a horror that 20th century man thought he had left behind, and the folly of man attempting to erect heaven upon earth if in a rather dry tone. The purpose of this book however demanded that it be done in an academic tone and not in a far more readable polemical style. The research done is of an excellent quality and covers every continent of the world such as Pol Pot's Cambodia and Lenin's Russia, some done better than others, including the marxist terror groups like the IRA and Bader-Meinhoff. Solitzenhyn reckons the true figure for the Soviet Union could be higher. The inference that the communists were worse than Hitler's National Socialists is hardly controversial, it is self evident and it was the common opinion of 1930s America and Europe. Of course a case could be made for including the National Socialist atrocities in this book. I am amazed by people who question this book but then again they are the same people who claim we have just never tried communism.
A book the left already hates, so read it, and no the left isn't morally superior.
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Summary: Communism -- Synonym for DICTATORSHIP
Review: Whether Revolutionary Russia or present day Cuba, communism has been known to oppress, imprison and terrorize anyone suspected of opposing the system. "The Black Book of Communism" compares communism to nazism, sighting that both ideologies are totalitarian, free of any signs of democratic process. The former East Germany, ironically named "German DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC" was a shining example of a nation treating its people as prisoners, dictating even their "choice" of entertainment. As a frequent visitor to East Germany I can personally testify to the dim situation 17 million people found themselves trapped in for nearly 30 years. -- This book is thorough and informative in providing insight. At more than 800 pages, some facts were overstated at times. I recommend this book to any Political Science major or instructor.****
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Summary: Unforgettable
Review: It is a must read for academics, journalists, politicians and social activists alike. With the help of newly opened archival materials of the erstwhile communist countries, it contains country-wise record of communism as it really existed. Reading it all makes an unforgettable experience even for the well-informed folks. Apart from a huge and most authentic data of human and material destruction in the name of creating communism, it also contains thought-provoking analyses of how this phenomenon could be understood.With an experience of two decades in this subject, I sincerely understand that for countries like India or Nepal (where Marxist politics is still respectable) this book has especial relevance. It would be an eye-opener even for the educated class. Most of it still hold greatly mistaken beliefs about the communist experiments held in the Soviet Union, China, East European countries and elsewhere. Reading it can alter their hitherto perceptions for good. Secondly, those engaged in activities of social transformation can learn from this book a lot about changing socio-political systems. The communist experience of the last century is a great material to explore and understand the human inclinations for radical change, and how not to try it. As someone rightly said, "for anyone who wants to protect the future by knowing the past, this book is a Very Important Read." In my view the Black Book of Communism will have a permanent place in the library of the 20th century. The authors deserve every praise for their efforts.
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Summary: Reds
Review: This book lays bare the atrocities of atheism and the folly of man attempting to erect heaven upon earth if in a rather dry tone. The purpose of this book however demanded that it be done in an academic tone and not in a far more readable polemical style. The research done is of an excellent quality and covers every continent of the world from Lenin's Russia to Pol Pot's Cambodia, some done better than others, including the marxist like the IRA and Bader-Meinhoff. Solitzenhyn reckons the true figure could be higher for the Soviet Union. I am amzed by people who question this book but then again they are the people who claim we have just never tried communism.
He didn't however tackle National Socialism , it was after all Stalin who invented the term facism.
A book the left already hates, so read it, and no the left isn't morally superior.
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Summary: Possibly the most important book of the 1990s
Review: This was a difficult book to read, for more than one reason. Because it is primarily a work of scholarship, the narrative does not always flow smoothly, and occasionally gets bogged down in more detail than a popular work would. It's also over 800 pages long, which doesn't exactly make for casual reading. But it's also difficult to read because of the sheer horror of it all. The number of tortures, executions, intentional starvations, rapes, beatings, brutal dislocations, imprisonments in concentration camps, and psychological abuses simply overwhelms. And perhaps most of all, for me at least, it was hard because it made me feel like a fool. When I first became aware of Communism, my perception was of an appealing system. It sounded like a rational society where everyone would work for the mutual benefit of everyone else. With all the problems in our own country, who were we to criticize nations that chose this alternative form of government? Most of all, I believed that people who hated the Communists were dangerous and irrational. They started "witch hunts" in the McCarthy era. Until I was in my mid-20s, hearing anyone, such as the President of the United States, refer to the Soviet Union as an "Evil Empire" filled me with anger and fear. It's taken much reading, and much painful re-examination of my youthful prejudices, to realize just how shallow I was. That, while there were some inexcusable excesses among anti-communist extremists, the truth is that for the most part, Communism's critics were right all along. Great works of historical significance (by Solzhenitsyn, Pipes, Conquest, Haynes & Klehr, Crozier, and others) have documented the crimes of various Communist organizations and regimes before now. But none has accomplished quite what this scholarly work has: created a unified, worldwide picture of Communism in the 20th Century, in all its awesome horror. More than once, when reading this book, my hands shook. More than once, I cried. I am not in the habit of having such reactions to works of history. This work has created a challenge to Communist apologists that cannot be ignored. To pick just the most gross example: U.S.S.R., 20 million; China, 65 million; Vietnam, 1 million; North Korea, 2 million; Cambodia, 2 million; Eastern Europe, 1 million; Latin America, 150,000; Africa,1.7 million; Afghanistan, 1.5 million. These are the number of people butchered by the Communists governing them, and does not even begin to total the number tortured, crippled, mutilated, imprisoned in concentration camps, or rendered destitute. The pile of corpses alone approaches 100 million. And it is important to note that these are highly conservative estimates. Scholars such as Solzhenitsyn, for example, believe the death toll to be far higher. In short, not even the Nazi Holocaust can eclipse this horror, which largely defined the 20th Century for much of the world. The book is not without its flaws. The section on Vietnam is maddeningly vague and lacking in details. The sections on Latin America and Africa, while informative, are much too short. Yet even in these chapters there is important information. How many who remember the horrid famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s realize that it was an intentionally-inflicted famine brought about by a Communist dictatorship? How many who still criticize the supporters of the Contras in Nicaragua are aware of the death squads, horrible tortures, and brutal suppression of human rights committed by the Ortega regime? To their credit, the authors at no point attempt to act as apologists for the often corrupt regimes that Communists often overthrew. But they also show in excruciating detail how Communism was at best a slide from bad to worse for the vast majority of the people who came under its control. Significantly, the authors of the Black Book are not "conservative" or "right wing." They are respected scholars from major universities and historical institutes. Most are members of the political Left, some of them former Communists themselves. In years past, I would often mouth platitudes about how Communism was not "true Marxism." But in surveying the Communist regimes of history, a pattern emerges: First, a new Communist regime is formed, almost always through bloody revolution. The revolutionaries declare themselves the true heirs of Marx. Then, they find only economic ruin and destruction as their policies are put in place. But because they cannot admit the possibility that Marxism itself is in error, they must blame "saboteurs" and "counter-revolutionaries" for any failure of the system. The "temporary" repressions that are "part of the revolution" are stepped up. Over time, more and more people wind up in concentration camps or simply executed. And all along the way, the murder and persecution is done in the name of freeing the people. Most sickening of all, until the regime either collapses or is proven beyond doubt to be a totalitarian hellhole, Western intellectuals suggest that criticism of these regimes are either exaggerated or just plain reactionary lies. Western academics were saying this not just about Russia and China, but about Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Korea, Cuba, North Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua--you name the blood-soaked, despotic regime, and there were Western intellectuals defending it, or playing moral-equivalence games between Communism and the free democracies of the world. What all this has taught me is not that there were no excesses of anti-Communism. That would completely miss the point. What it has taught me is the real meaning of prejudice: judging beforehand, without sufficient knowledge of the person or events you are judging. It's also taught me to be wary of the assumptions of moviemakers and others in the mass media. In a funny sense, my new view is a mirror of an old 60s-activist slogan: Question authority. But I go further than that: Question everything, whenever you can. Especially your most deeply held beliefs. This book belongs on the shelf of any person interested in 20th Century history, or concerned about the horrors that can be unleashed in the name of an ideology.
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Summary: A massive catalog of the crimes of Communism
Review: Much has been written about Nazism and Fascism, the main foes of Western democracies during WWII. After the liberation of the concentration camps and the War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg, the crimes of the Nazis were revealed for all to see. The crimes of Communism were not as well known until quite recently with the collapse of the Soviet Union and access to the KGB archives. Much of the repression was unknown because it took place behind an "iron curtain" through which we could not see, and later in far-flung reaches of the world touched by the international spread of the seductive yet sinister ideology. With the collapse of Communism, it now appears that its impact has been even more deadly and far-reaching than that of the Nazis. This book describes the crimes, terror, and repression of Communism in chilling, well-researched detail, ranking with "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer, and is highly recommended for anyone who wishes to learn about how Communism was quite possibly the most dangerous political ideology of the 20th century.
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Summary: Like water the truth will find its own level
Review: After the fall of Soviet Communism a decade ago the archives in Moscow were plumbed, and for the first time in the over 70 years since the October revolution the results of cramming down this vile ideology upon many global societies were held up to a waiting world. Appalling is too weak a word to describe the tale. Stephane Courtois and friends, all former Communist sympathizers, have given us this compendium, chapter and verse, and the revulsion has been widely felt. For most of the century Communism held much of the globe in its fatal grip with its utopian ideology ultimately responsible for an estimated 100 million deaths. This is more than twice the number killed in two world wars where the stated purpose was the opposite of utopian. Communism is not a good idea that went wrong, it was a bad idea. Never the product of popular demand by the people communism sprouted in Russia rather than in the West where Marx predicted it would be most popular among workers eager to throw off their chains. As historical review shows Marx was seldom right about anything, but that doesn't seem to penetrate the feel good worldviews of fatuous academic elitists in the West. With its abysmal record one might think that henceforth no one would be able to hide behind a claim of ignorance or uncertainty about the outcomes of this state imposed disaster, particularly now that the continuing criminal enterprise of Bolshevik Communism has been revealed. Yet even in the face of overwhelming evidence of the murder of millions upon millions we still have dupes like the writer Kurt Vonnegutsaying, "Communism is a good system it just hasn't been tried." His unfazed ignorance of history, economics, and the statistical interpretation of data, leave him intellectually innocent, as he remains, as so many of those like himself, aglow with the sense of his own virtue. The philosophical wreckage of his fail convictions remains invisible to his noble Socialist intentions. The self-lies and fabrications by these self-anointed arbiters of society, with Vonnegut being merely a small example, are propounded daily in the major media, and the Marxist myth continues to be taught in our halls of academia. Its spawn can be seen rampaging about in locales such as Genoa, Seattle and Washington DC protesting the evils of Capitalism and the virtues of economic nonsense such as "profits over people". The media, academia, and the film community should be held accountable for their outrageous misreporting of reality. This book helps to belie the mythologies with which they aspire to sway the common man. On virtually every issue where conflict exists between free markets and command and control big government Leftist utopian elitist's come down on the side of the latter. No amount of information seems to dent their rock hard worldview of the virtues of collectivism. Perhaps the latest attack by Islamic terrorists will inform a fearful public as to the similarities between the beliefs of Communism, Islam, and the National Socialist German Workers Party - the Nazi's. In Bat Ye'or's "the Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam" one can read how Islam is inappropriately seen as a religion comparable to Christianity and Judaism. Its match should be with totalitarian ideologies such as Bolshevism and National Socialism (Nazi). Each explicitly denied the legitimacy of any form of social, political, or cultural organization other than itself. Khomeini's statement that the Muslims have no choice but to wage "holy war against profane governments" until the conquest of the world has been accomplished was the equivalent of Khrushev's "we shall bury you" comment. His "peaceful coexistence" was but a jihad under another name. Islam, Communism and Nazism sought an eschatological shortcut replacing Christian teachings with "surrender"-Islam, "dialectical materialism" -Communism, and "Volksgemeinschaft" -Nazi. Heinrich Himmler, commander of the Nazi SS, saw Islam as having the qualities he demanded of his troopers; blind obedience, and readiness for self sacrifice untainted by compassion for one's enemies. To that end, he created an SS division made up of 46,000 Islamics in Bosnia in WWII. Does it never end? The Nazi's were beaten, the Communists were proven a fraud, and now we have the Islamic terrorists. It's always something it seems, and this time around the weapons are so much more more severe and so much more capable of inflicting huge damage at ever decreasing costs to the perpetrators. This book catalogues the reality of the Communist experiment as it exposes it as the greatest crime of the 20th century, one which its academic adherents everywhere are loathe to come to grips with. Buy it and put it in your library. Familiarize yourself with the methods of these heinous people. Do your own comparison of totalitarian faiths. Be aware. With so many fools and true believers still in evidence tolitarianism can always rear its ugly head again. The worst of human nature and the banality of its intentions can be seen in the pictorial section of this book and should be viewed not infrequently by those of potentially weakening resolve. Single women, 18% of the electorate, who voted 65% to 22% in the 1990's for Socialist sympathizing Congressmen and Senators come to mind. It is they who are the targets of feel good propaganda. They need to be made aware of the impossibility that a Communist system will ever deliver the goods for society and for their future families. This book will aid them in that endeavor and as such it renders a great service to the annals of the history of man.
Rating: 
Summary: Alot of hype with little substance.
Review: This is a very frustrating book. While being blatantly one-sided from cover to cover, at times it provides a very sober and excellent analysis of the darker side of 20th century Communism. Unfortunately, many of its contributors (and above all its editor, Stephane Courtois) are so biased that they destroyed any chance this book had of being taken as serious history. The worst thing about _The Black Book of Communism_, however, is that it is being used to further a great lie (or more properly a series of lies all pointing to the same false conclusion): that Communists are equally as murderous as Nazis and that all those Westerners who take a "soft" line on Communism are as shameful as any apologist for Hitler. As is the case with the lie it has come to serve, this book is cloaked with just enough facts to lend a facade of credibility to its outrageous claims. Ironically, the extremist views this book has come to represent are not those of its two principal authors. Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin both denounced Courtois for (among other outrages) equating Communism with Nazism and for having an obsession with inflating the "body count" of Communist rule to the ridiculous figure of 100 million. The fact that these men have both publicly distanced themselves from their editor's fallacies speaks volumes in and of itself. Everyone waving _The Black Book_ as proof of some mythical 'Red Holocaust' that dwarfs the atrocities of fascism should understand that even the two most important contributors to their "evidence" have repudiated such nonsense. The book's many chapters vary greatly in quality. Some, like Pascal Fontaine's section on Latin America, are just absurd. Fontaine seems to blame Nicaragua's Sandinista government exclusively for all the deaths caused in that country's civil war, as though US-backing of the 'Contra' narco-terrorists had nothing to do with it. Even Margolin, who put together some decent research on Asian Communism, often neglects to tell the whole story. The Khmer Rouge, hands down the most repugnant so-called 'Communist' regime (I say 'so-called' because their practices were almost the perfect antithesis of Marxism-Leninism), had their murderous rule brought down by the intervention of Soviet-backed Vietnamese Communists. This event is glossed over by Margolin, and the fact that the U.S. sent military aid to the same Khmer Rouge butchers during their guerrilla war against the new pro-Hanoi government is not mentioned at all. Nicolas Werth's 'book within a book' about the Soviet Union, titled _A State against Its People_, is by far the most revealing section. His statements about the sources of revolutionary Russia's extraordinary political violence (decades of dehumanizing oppression suffered by Russia's workers and peasants amplified by the horrors of World War I) fly right in the face of those who insist that it was the Bolsheviks who are to blame for the savagery of the years 1917-22. As for the fallacy that Stalin's methods were merely a continuation of those started by Lenin, Werth directly contradicts this on several occasions, at one point describing the two periods as being 'quite incomparable'. Buried carefully in Werth's text are important details such as Moscow's tenuous control over the actions of its nominal subordinates during the early years of Soviet power and the fact that the punitive measures actually carried out by the Bolsheviks often came far short of matching the savagery of their rhetoric (i.e. having opponents arrested or exiled rather than being 'summarily shot' as so often threatened). To quote Werth directly, most of the evidence of Soviet-era repression 'counteracts the theory of a well-conceived, long-term plan.' Unfortunately, Werth's contribution, while it has some merits almost entirely missing from the remainder of _The Black Book_, contains just as many errors and omissions. His treatment of the famine of 1932-33 repeats the common folly of pinning the blame for that catastrophe almost entirely on the Soviet government, when in fact it was primarily the 'kulaks' (well-off peasants) who precipitated the crisis by hoarding their surplus grain during a period of food shortages in the hopes of selling it at inflated prices once the cities began to starve. If Moscow was guilty of 'using hunger as a weapon' against the kulaks, then it was only following the example set by the kulaks themselves. Werth is better than the other authors of _The Black Book_, but this is a very modest compliment at best. As a catalogue of the abuses of power by Communist governments and their tendency to put ideology before practical reality, _The Black Book of Communism_ only half-succeeds, with occasionally accurate and in-depth research being all too often contaminated by misrepresentation of the facts. In its more politically charged role as a damnation of Communism as a wicked creed on par with Nazism, a role which at least two of its authors have themselves rejected, _The Black Book_ will convince only those who wish to be convinced. Remember, Stalin and Mao both met the strongest resistance to their excesses from other Communists, so many of who risked their freedom or even their lives in order to oppose brutality. Many so-called "crimes of Communism" should more properly be called "crimes against Communism". As for the speculation about a _Black Book of Capitalism_, it actually exists. Authored by another group of French historians and published one year after this book was, you can find a French-language version listed on Amazon.fr under _Le livre noir du capitalisme_. Using the same methods as their counterparts applied to Communist regimes, their research concludes that international capitalism is to blame for up to as many as 300 million deaths since the time of the Industrial Revolution. I sent Harvard University Press an e-mail a while back asking if they were planning to publish an English-language version, but never got a reply. I suspect that like all those who are lauding this book as though it were gospel, they too are only interested in looking at half the story.
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Summary: Yes, communism did MORE damage than nazism and fascism
Review: Primarily, this was because communism got greater opportunities to do so. But I have a key point that needs to be elucidated. In the brilliant book on the Russian Revolution, A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY (perhaps my favourite nonfiction book EVER), there is a quote near the end of the book. I don't remember the exact words (and I don't feel like looking it up) but it runs something like this: "The reason was communism elicited (and still does to this day) is that communism grew up on the intellectual soil of the enlightenment. It is akin to the entire worldview of all intellectuals today. It stood, in theory for equality and the brotherhood of man. [Of course, the one party state and permanent terror as not acceptable means of achieving this, but that's another story] However, nazism SPIT IN THE FACE of the enlightenment and plays on our worst medieval prejudices." Truly, the Russian Revolution is son of the French: Terror, total democracy, and social upheaval were its ideals and realities. The French Revolution was the brother of the American Revolution, the revolution that every respectable capitalist holds dearly. Communism is thus the nephew of American democracy. It's ideals are similar (even if the practices are incredibly disparate); both can agree on liberty, equality, fraternity! American democracy does not result in equality (rich bankers louge in palatial homes while poor immigrants work themselves to death); Soviet and Chinese communism don't result in liberty; but both yearn for these ideals. They share the same traditions. Nazism has no relation to the tradition of America. It's roots lie in religious hatred (something anathema to those American deists and Russian atheists) and intense nationalism (also anathema to cosmopolitan American landowners and businessmen and Russian internationalists). Nonetheless, we cannout shield ourselves from the fact that our precious revolutionary tradition has done more harm to the world than few things ever have.
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Summary: Black Book of Capitalism?
Review: ...What is important about the Black Book Of Communism is the fact that it's written by current and former communist. After decades of hiding and glossing over the atrocities of communism, that these folks would even attempt to face the scorn of their fellow communist and sympathizers on the left is quite amazing and refreshing. The razing of another Potemkin Village by those who formerly praised it is nothing short of amazing... Are the numbers of dead exact? Who knows, which in a way, is the point. The purges of Stalin are well documneted, and millions died. But one can no longer accept as fact that Lennin was the "good guy" who advocated "benevloent communism" while Stalin provided the first horrors of communism. It is clear in the documented evidence that Lenin had as much hatred and antipathy torwards the Russian and (eventually) Soviet people as Stalin ever did...
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