The black book of communism : crimes, terror, repression
""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 wide-scale 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."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 1999
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999
History
xx, 858 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
9780674076082, 0674076087
41256361
Foreword : The uses of atrocity / Martin Malia
Introduction : The crimes of communism / Stéphane Courtois
pt. 1. A state against its people : violence, repression, and terror in the Soviet Union / Nicholas Werth. Paradoxes and misunderstandings surrounding the October Revolution ; The iron fist of the dictatorship of the Proletariat ; The red terror ; The dirty war ; From Tambov to the Great Famine ; From the truce to the great turning point ; Forced collectivization and dekulakization ; The great famine ; Socially foreign elements and the cycles of repression ; The Great Terror (1936-1938) ; The empire of the camps ; The other side of victory ; Apogee and crisis in the Gulag system ; The last conspiracy ; The exit from Stalinism ; Conclusion
pt. 2. Word revolution, civil war, and terror / Stéphane Courtois, Jean-Louis Panné, and Réne Kauffer. The Comintern in action / Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Panné ; The shadow of the NKVD in Spain / Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Panné ; Communism and terrorism / Rémi Kauffer. pt. 3. The other Europe : victim of communism / Andrzej Paczkowski and Karol Bartošek. Poland, the "enemy nation" / Andrzej Paczkowski ; Central and Southeastern Europe / Karel Bartošek
pt. 4. Communism in Asia : between reeducation and massacre / Jean-Louis Margolin and Pierre Rigoulot. Introduction ; China : a long march into night / Jean-Louis Margolin ; Crimes, terror, and secrecy in North Korea / Pierre Rigoulot ; Vietnam and Laos : the impasse of war communism ; Cambodia : the country of disconcerting crimes / Jean-Louis Margolin ; Conclusion ; Select bibliography for Asia
pt. 5. The Third World / Pascal Fontaine, Yves Santamaria, and Sylvain Boulouque. Communism in Latin America / Pascal Fontaine ; Afrocommunism : Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique / Yves Santamaria
Communism in Afghanistan / Sylvain Boulouque ; Conclusion / Stéphane Courtois
Translated from the French