A Unique attempt by French historians - as important in its way as
the works of Solzhenitsyn - to chronicle the crimes of communism
wherever it has attained power in the world. Not the least
remarkable thing about this book is that this is the first time
such a study has been made. For the cumulative toll of victims of
communist rule, estimated by the authors at between 85 and 100
million, dwarfs even the crimes of the Nazis. In the Soviet Union
the toll included 6 million deaths during the collectivization
famine of 1932-33, 720,000 executions during the Great Purge, 7
million entering the gulag in 1934-41, many of them to die, and
nearly 3 million still there when Stalin died. In China there were
probably 10 million "direct victims," another 20 million in China's
gulag, the Laogai, and between 20 and 43 million during the Great
Leap Forward, the largest man-made famine in history. In Cambodia,
the worst recent example, one in seven of the population died. And
to these the authors add the cost in eastern Europe, Vietnam, North
Korea, Afghanistan, Latin America, Ethiopia, Angola, and
Mozambique. Nor is it just statistics: the authors tell, for
example, of the young children in Cambodia hung from the roof by
their feet and kicked from side to side until they died. The
overwhelming question confronted by the authors is: why? The
answer, writes Courtois, lies in the "Bolsheviks propensity for
extreme violence . . . demonstrated from the outset," but above all
in their habit of reducing their victim - as had Hitler in his
attacks on Jews as "subhuman" - to an abstraction: "the
bourgeoisie," "capitalists," and "enemies of the people." The
essays are of varying quality, some quite sketchy in their scope,
but overall a devastating and important book, already hailed in
Europe, and the more harrowing for its sobriety. (Kirkus Reviews)
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.
"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 II 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. 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.
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