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Stephane Courtois is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, and editor of the journal Communisme. Nicolas Werth is a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History. Jean-Louis Panne collaborated on the Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier francais. Andrzej Paczkowski is Deputy Director and a professor at the Institute for Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Karel Bartosek is acting head of research at CNRS and the editor of the journal La nouvelle alternative. Jean-Louis Margolin is a lecturer in history and coordinator of lectures at the University of Provence and a researcher at the Research Institute on Southeast Asia of CNRS.
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)
