Rating: 
Summary: An impressive book!
Review: I could not but buy and read this impressive book of almost 900 pages ... I was hoping that now, that the secret archives of the ex USSR are open to the historical research, some serious scientists would use them in order to prove the claims about the tens of millions of communism's victims. During the previous decades, we were able to read the works of R. Conquest, A. Solzhenitsyn and others, who were based more on their phantasy than on scientific research. One cannot write about 26 million victims (Conquest) or even 110 million victims (Solzhenitsyn) only in the ex USSR, based on statistical approximations and evaluation methods that nobody would take seriously if they had been applied in any Western country. Hence, the repetition of such claims by the authors of "The Black Book of Communism : Crimes, Terror, Repression" is quite deceiving. Moreover, this repetition is not excusable for intellectuals and researchers of such calibre, as they ignored the historical sources that are today accessible to them. Although I am not a specialist, I would like to point out the works of Professor J.Arch Getty (University of California, Riverside), G.T. Rettersporn (National Centre of Scientific Research - CNRS, France), V.A. Zemskov (Russian Academy of Science), or even Nicholas Werth (CNRS). Those researchers, who cannot be consifered as sympathetic to communism (on the contrary!), went into the pain to study the archives opened by Gorbachev in 1990. Their conclusions, as far as the number of victims of communism in the ex USSR is concerned, are quite astonishing. They have been published in scientific reviews such as the "American Historical Review" of the American Historical Association already from the early nineties ... but it is quite strange that nobody seems to pay attention to them! I cannot resist the temptation to report the total number of prisoners (political AND common) who died (execution, disease, hunger, etc.) in the Soviet prisons, gulags, labor camps, etc. in the period 1934-1953: not 10 or 20 or 60 million, but 1.053.829 persons (less than one third of them being political prisoners). Moreover, more than half of them died not during the Great Purges of the thirties, but during the 2nd World War, mainly from starvation. The above is just one example of the inconsistency of the "Black Book of Communism". Other chapters (for example those concerning China) are even more deceiving ... they would match better in a book of science fiction. The question here is not if, for example, the 1.053.829 persons who died during a 20-year period in the Soviet Union is not a significant number ... The question is, why no average person has not, in reality, access to genuine scientific works, like those mentionned above? Why every average person who is eager to study this issue is obliged to limit himself/herself to vulgar fiction covered under scientific clothes? Now that "communism is finished", as almost all politicians and intellectuals declare all over the world, why there can be no dispassionate account of last century's history? Quite an impressive book, indeed!
Rating: 
Summary: History Rectified
Review: The tolerance of the world to it's most murderous regime is incredible. For too long historians have chosen to pardon selected groups of mass murderers, and even portray them as heroes of the people. It's now time to clear the bookshelves of the works of Lenin and his murderous cronies, and put this excellent book in their place.
Rating:
Summary: BLACK BOOK INDEED
Review: This book is a must read for all students of twentieth century history. This century cannot be understood without an understanding of the effect, more than eighty years, of the brutal, nihilistic and morally corrupt political system called Communism. THE BLACK BOOK covers the history of Communism, starting with the Bolsheviks in Russia and, chapter by chapter, covers the communist movements and governments, country by country, to the present day. It thoroughly explores the crimes of slavery, genocide, murder, terrorism-which even the youngest of children were not exempt-and repression committed in the name of Communism. The most poignant aspects of this book are excepts from narratives of unfortunate people sentenced to socialist concentration camps for political crimes. We in the western democracies have long held a double standard with regard to Fascism and Marxist-Leninist Communism. Books are published almost weekly concerning some aspect of Hitler and the Nazis. Programs, such as THE NAZIS: A WARNING dominate documentaries concerning the twentieth century. Hitler and his followers formed but one of the disgusting stains on the fabric of humanity. However, the Nazis were never able to compete with the scale of terrorism, murder, torture of Communism. The land areas and populations under repression by the Nazis pale in comparison with Communism. A recent election in Austria, in which several supporters of a Nazi apologist were elected, was met with cries of outrage from all over Europe and the United States. No such outcry has greeted the election of any communist legislators in Europe or elsewhere. This book should serve as a warning to those who have never come face-to-face with the reality of Communism, especially here in the United States. It should serve as a warning concerning those that, in their youth, fully supported the Communist movements in Asia and Cuba and still seek to have major aspects of Communism as a part of the laws and society of the United States. We should remember that Communism has not gone away, it is still very much alive in the world today.
Rating:
Summary: A Masterful Overview of Communism in Power
Review: The Black Book of Communism A Black Book is a name associated with various official books (usu. bound in black) of public significance; The most famous black book of the 20th century was one the Allied Powers published after the Nuremberg Trials documenting Nazi war crimes. Unlike that Black Book, this one on Communism is not the product of governmental investigation, though one is long overdue, but the work of scholars. This book does not replace the earlier histories of Soviet Communism, say Medvedev's "Let History Judge" or Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago," or even the work of western scholars such as Robert Conquest's "The Great Terror." Nor does it replace the works on other communist countries such as the People's Republic of China. What this black book seeks to do is give a catalog of the "achievements" of communism, namely, terror, repression, and in the case of Ukraine and Cambodia: genocide. It succeeds. The book does have comprehensive coverage of communists in power, but it does not give a history of communism in places where the communists never came to power. I would have liked to have read about communism in Western Europe and the United States. The disgraceful behavior of the communists and their apologists in the west would have made for a controversial and a compelling chapter. I use this book as a handy reference guide, and that was what it was made for.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent edition
Review: When "Le livre noir du communisme" was first published in France in late 1997, it caused a sensation. In the United States, however, very few people could tell what the commotion was all about. Now, with this superb English translation, we all can see why the book generated such heated debate and emotion. Harvard University Press should be congratulated for turning out such a fine edition. (Among other things, I notice that errors in the original "Le livre" have been fixed in this edition.) Several decades ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin warned that millenarian ideologies were apt to lead to extreme forms of tyranny. Utopianism, he argued, bred intolerance of those who were unwilling to fit into the utopia. The validity of his argument is evident, time and again, as we read the chapters of the Black Book. From the violent intolerance of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to the bloody upheavals of Maoist China to the bizarre slaughters perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, we see the stark consequences of the empowerment of a millenarian ideology. Communism is not alone in this regard; other utopian schemes also have created a totalitarian temptation. But Communism, as the Black Book shows, took a particularly ghastly toll, placing it on a par with Nazism in the pantheon of human evil. This book should be read by all those who want a better understanding of the recent past and its legacy.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely necessary
Review: This book could have been a lot longer. It could not have been any shorter, though: it takes a brick of a book to really provide the crushing scope of this murderous ideology, and the authors have slowly, methodically, relentlessly added example after example to put in display, naked, a monster that killed tens of millions in the 20th Century and that will continue to kill (one hopes in a far smaller scale) in the 21st until it wastes itself out and vanishes. Communism became religion and state and proceeded to murder away as if the body count meant better chances of achieving that utopian society it pretended to aim at. We now know the absolute disasters that all Communist societies were -and are-, but this book is necessary as a ready reference work on evil that should be next to to William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." Communism has managed to kill more than 100 million people, and this estimate is actually quite conservative: Solzhenitsyn puts the figure at 60 million in the former Soviet Union alone; Roy Medvedev opts for 40 million dead just under Stalin, not counting those who died because of World War II. Nobody really knows how many millions were murdered by Mao. Many historians and writers had told us parts of this sad tale: Milovan Djilas, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest, W.S. Kuniczak, Aino Kuusinen, Armando Valladares, Roy Medvedev, Dmitri Volkogonov, and others, so many, indeed, that a complete list would require several pages. But the authors of "The Black Book of Communism" do what none of the other authors had done before: they provide us with a total view of malignity, proving that, from Russia to Korea, from China to Cuba, from Africa to Europe, Communism was, indeed, a cancer. An excellent and necessary work.
Rating:
Summary: Cannot recommend too highly.
Review: This book effectively documents Communism's mass extermination of 100 million people. Nothing really ground-breaking--the Communist genocide was known as early as the 1930s (Stalin had killed 7 million Ukrainians before World War 2 even started). However, since many on the Left want the world want to forget the Communist Holocaust (in Europe and Asia and Africa and Latin America...), it's good that this book is here to remind them.
Rating: 
Summary: Necessary but could be better
Review: A huge tome highlighting what is clear to anyone with open eyes: communist societies, by nature, are supremely nasty and criminal ventures. Despite a great and necessary concept, the book is uneven. It unfolds methodically but the writing is often more perfunctory than compelling. Some of the lesser sections seem hastily assembled and not very informative. The Russian section is ok, but this material has been better covered in any number of books: Conquest's "Great Terror," Kravchenko's "I Chose Freedom," and Solzhenitsyn's searing "Gulag Archipelago" (the first volume in particular is better than any other book at highlighting that the criminal nature of the Soviet state was there from the beginning. The writing is brilliant.)
Rating:
Summary: This book is an insult
Review: I think that this book is very useful in knowing what actually happened during the past century in communist countries. However, I think that it sends a bad image of communism, showing all the bad sides and not showing all the advantages or benefits that it brought. Che Guevara maybe did execute a young kid, but I refuse to accept that he killed him just because he ate when he was not supposed to. Also, Che Guevara helped millions of people in the world recover their freedom so insulting him like this in this book I think is totally out of order.
Rating:
Summary: Important
Review: Liberal elites should read this book. Johnny Depp (millionaire) was recently on the cover of "Premiere" magazine wearing a Che Guevara (Castro's communist partner) medallion. This book points out that, when a 13 year old boy in Che Guevara's army ate some food he was not supposed to, Che Guevara had him killed. There is obviously a big gap between the Johnny-Depp-types' perception of communism, and the reality of communism. This book shows you the reality.
|
