...the black book of communism..
Some pointed out that the book's account of violence is one-sided. Amir Weiner of Stanford University characterizes the "Black Book" as seriously flawed, inconsistent, and prone to mere provocation. In particular, the authors are said to savage Marxist ideology.[14] The methodology of the authors has been criticized. Alexander Dallin writes that moral, legal, or political judgement hardly depends on the number of victims.[15] It is also argued that a similar chronicle of violence and death tolls can be constructed from an examination of colonialism and capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, the Black Book's attribution of 1 million deaths in Vietnam to Communism while ignoring the U.S. role has been criticized as a methodological flaw.[16]
Journalist Daniel Singer has also criticized the Black Book for discussing the faults of communist states while ignoring their positive achievements; he says that "if you look at Communism as merely the story of crimes, terror and repression, to borrow the subtitle of the Black Book, you are missing the point." According to him, "The Soviet Union did not rest on the gulag alone. There was also enthusiasm, construction, the spread of education and social advancement for millions." He also argues that if communism can be blamed for famines, capitalism should be blamed for most or all deaths from poverty in the world at the present time.[17]
Historian Ján Křen said in interview that when Karel Bartošek and other co-authors found out the book "is heading towards conjectural shallowness, in which communism is reduced to terror only, there was a bad conflict, which couldn't be solved, because agreement was signed and Stephane Courtois pressured them".[18]
Disputing the "terror-famine" thesis
Historian J. Arch Getty noted that famine accounted for a significant part of Courtois's 100 million death toll. He believes that these famines were caused by the "stupidity or incompetence of the regime," and that the deaths resulting from the famines, as well as other deaths that "resulted directly or indirectly from government policy," should not be counted as if they were equivalent to intentional murders and executions.[19]
Mark Tauger disagrees with the authors' thesis that the famine of 1933 was artificial and genocidal. Tauger asserts that the authors' interpretation of the famine contains errors, misconceptions, and omissions that invalidate their arguments.[20] Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and several historians of the period (such as Dmitri Volkogonov and Aleksandr Bushkov) also developed the views according to which the famine was not racially and politically motivated (which also represents the official stance of the Russian Government). However, the historian James Mace wrote that Mark Tauger's view of the famine "is not taken seriously by either Russians or Ukrainians who have studied the topic."[21] Moreover, Stephen Wheatcroft, author of The Years of Hunger, claims Tauger's view represents the opposite extreme in arguing the famine was totally accidental.[22]
Professor Alexander Dallin said the authors make no attempt to differentiate between intended crimes such as the Moscow show trials and policy choices that had unintended consequences such as the Chinese famine.[15]
Disputing the comparison of Nazism and Communism
Vladimir Tismăneanu, in his review of the Black Book in the journal "Human Rights Review", argued that the Black Book's comparison between Communism and Nazism was both morally and scholarly justifiable.[23] Others however have rejected the comparison.[24]
Two of the Black Book's contributors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, sparked a debate in France when they publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois's statements in the introduction about the scale of Communist terror. They felt that he was being obsessed with arriving at a total of 100 million victims. They instead estimated that Communism has claimed between 65 and 93 million lives.[25] They also rejected his equation of Soviet repression with Nazi genocide. Werth said there was still a qualitative difference between Nazism and Communism. He told Le Monde, "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union",[26] and "The more you compare communism and nazism, the more the differences are obvious."[27]
The Black Book's assessment is consistent with the anti-communist[28] Tony Judt who in his book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (in the words of The American Conservative magazine) "makes plain that for many Soviet citizens, life under the Nazis was better than life under the communists".[28]
Courtois' insists that the Holocaust was "actively commemorated" thanks to the efforts of the "international Jewish community" and that a "single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide... has prevented an assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world."[29]
Some scholars hold Courtois' anti-Communism responsible for historical revisionism and accuse him of blurring the memory of Vichy and Nazi crimes. During the trial of convicted war criminal Maurice Papon, Papon's lawyer attempted to introduce the Black Book into evidence. Holocaust historian Annette Wievriorka argued that the Black Book attempted to substitute the memory of Communism for the memory of Nazi crimes and displace accounts of Nazi atrocities.[30]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_book_of_communism
Comrade Stalin