‘Black Book’ Tallies Death, Fear, Repression

“A single death is a tragedy,” Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once remarked. “A million deaths is a statistic.”

But how many millions, precisely? This month, 80 years after the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, a Paris-based group of historians has published the first global balance sheet of the “crimes, terror and repression” committed under communism.

The harrowing arithmetic of the “Black Book of Communism”: From the organized extermination of Soviet peasantry to the murderous upheavals of China’s Great Cultural Revolution, from organized famine in Ukraine to repression in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, communism has claimed 85 million to 100 million lives on four continents.

China has the tragic distinction of topping the list with as many as 72 million victims. In the Soviet Union, where the Communist Party ruled from 1917 until the state’s collapse six years ago this December, an estimated 20 million perished in purges, famines, mass deportations and the labor camps of the Gulag, the new report says.

But it is the small Asian nation of Cambodia where the suffering and loss were the most intense. In 3 1/2 years, dictator Pol Pot, through the use of mass deportations, famine and forced labor, killed off as many as 2.3 million of his countrymen, or up to one-quarter of the population.

Though scholarly, thick (846 pages) and relatively expensive at the equivalent of $32.50, the “Black Book” has shot to the top of France’s nonfiction best-seller lists. It has also sparked instant controversy, inevitable in a nation where Marxist theory long dominated intellectual thinking and the French Communist Party claimed the support of up to 28% of the electorate.

Critics of the book, and even some of the bulky work’s own contributors, have blasted its leading scholar, Stephane Courtois, for asserting that communism inevitably carries in it the seeds of terror and mass murder, and for comparing dictatorship in the name of the proletariat to that other totalitarian stain on the 20th century, Nazism.

“The fact that one tragedy occurred shouldn’t blind us to another,” Courtois, a director of research at National Center of Scientific Research in Paris, answered in an interview.

“If we take the global figures, communism of course created more victims, because it lasted longer and reached far more places and peoples,” he said.

A former Maoist who defines himself as a leftist, Courtois said he personally believes that the number of dead will prove to be “closer to 100 million, and maybe higher” once still existing historical blanks are filled in.

The “Black Book,” on which 11 scholars worked for three years, only became possible with the fall of the “people’s republics” of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and the opening of archives in those countries.

But documentation remains thin or nonexistent for countries like China and North Korea, Courtois noted. Co-author Jean-Louis Margolin, historian at the University of Provence, was only able to estimate the number of victims in China at between 45 million and 72 million.

Courtois believes that his country still has an ambivalent attitude toward communism, in part because of French Communist involvement in the anti-Nazi Resistance and the prestige of the left in the land of the French Revolution.

Poet Louis Aragon once spoke of the “necessary cruelty” in the “blue eyes of the Revolution,” and longtime French Communist Party boss Georges Marchais, who died last week at 77, was celebrated for his loyalty to the Kremlin.

Among Western countries, only France has Communist ministers in the government, so the polemics aroused by the “Black Book” have taken on political overtones.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Toll

A new study aims to quantify communism’s toll since the 1917 Bolshevik takeover in Russia 80 years ago. Here is a breakdown of the tens of millions who died as a result of communism, as listed in the new report.

Estimated deaths attributed to communism, in millions

China: 45-72

Soviet Union: 20

Cambodia: 1.3-2.3

North Korea: 2

Africa*: 1.7

Afghanistan: 1.5

Vietnam: 1

Eastern Europe: 1

Latin America: 0.15

* Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique

Source: “Black Book of Communism”