The Black Book of Communism

The Crimes of Communism

In the first chapter of the book entitled "Introduction: The Crimes of Communism", Stéphane Courtois states that "Communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government" and they are responsible for a greater number of deaths than Nazism or any other political system.^[6]:2

Estimated number of victims

According to the chapter, the number of people killed by the Communist governments amounts to more than 94 million.^[6]:4 The statistics of victims include deaths through executions, man-made hunger, famine, war, deportations and forced labor. The breakdown of the number of deaths is given as follows:

• 65 million in the People's Republic of China
• 20 million in the Soviet Union
• 2 million in Cambodia
• 2 million in North Korea
• 1.7 million in Ethiopia
• 1.5 million in Afghanistan
• 1 million in the Eastern Bloc
• 1 million in Vietnam
• 150,000 in Latin America
• 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power"^[6]:4

According to Courtois, the crimes by the Soviet Union included the following:

• The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners
• The murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922
• The Russian famine of 1921, which caused the death of 5 million people
• The Decossackization, a policy of systematic repression against the Don Cossacks between 1917 and 1933
• The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps in the period between 1918 and 1930
• The Great Purge which killed almost 690,000 people
• The deportation of 2 million so-called "kulaks" from 1930 to 1932
• The death of 4 million Ukrainians (Holodomor) and 2 million others during the famine of 1932 and 1933
• The deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, Moldovans and people from the Baltic states from 1939 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1945
• The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941
• The deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943
• Operation Lentil and deportation of the Ingush in 1944^[6]:9-10

Comparison of Communism and Nazism

Courtois considers Communism and Nazism to be distinct, but comparable totalitarian systems. He says that Communist regimes have killed "approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis".^[6]:15 Courtois claims that Nazi Germany's methods of mass extermination were adopted from Soviet methods. As an example, he cites the Nazi SS official Rudolf Höss who organized the infamous extermination camp, Auschwitz concentration camp. According to Höss:^[6]:15

The Reich Security Head Office issued to the commandants a full collection of reports concerning the Russian concentration camps. These described in great detail the conditions in, and organization of, the Russian camps, as supplied by former prisoners who had managed to escape. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Russians, by their massive employment of forced labor, had destroyed whole peoples.

Courtois argues that the Soviet crimes against peoples living in the Caucasus and of large social groups in the Soviet Union could be called "genocide" and that they were not very much different from similar policies by Nazis. Both Communist and Nazi systems deemed "a part of humanity unworthy of existence. The difference is that the Communist model is based on the class system, the Nazi model on race and territory".^[6]:15 Courtois further stated:

The "genocide of a "class" may well be tantamount to the genocide of a "race"—the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's regime "is equal to" the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime.

He added:

After 1945 the Jewish genocide became a byword for modern barbarism, the epitome of twentieth-century mass terror. [...] [M]ore recently, a single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has also prevented the assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world. After all, it seems scarcely plausible that the victors who had helped bring about the destruction of a genocidal apparatus might themselves have put the very same methods into practice. When faced with this paradox, people generally preferred to bury their heads in sand. [...] Communist regimes have victimized approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million of the Nazis.