Book Review

Since its publication in France in 1997, The Black Book of Communism has played a dual role, both chronicling the crimes of various Communist regimes and also serving as a text that reveals the shifting status of Marxism in the aftermath of the Cold War. Much of the controversy that has surrounded the book has focused on Stéphane Courtois's introduction, in which he argues that communism represents a greater evil than Nazism, largely based on Marxism-Leninism's heftier death tally. The introduction's polemical nature, however, does not carry over into all the chapters that follow. Nicolas Werth's and Jean-Louis Margolin's contributions on the Soviet Union and Asia, respectively, largely shy away from ideological pronouncements and instead relay archival and eyewitness accounts about the depths of terror, repression, and mass murder in these regions. Werth's and Margolin's rejection of Courtois's tone and argument has also led them to denounce publicly the introduction and Courtois's grand total of a hundred million deaths. Other authors, however, seem to embrace Courtois's agenda and tailor their essays to paint as dark a picture as possible of Marxist-Leninist regimes and organizations in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Only Werth's contribution relies on archival sources, and some of the chapters, such as those on North Korea and Communist sponsorship of international terrorism, stand out as tentative and thinly documented.

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