ABSTRACT
Among the questions which The Black Book of Communism poses is one as old as Communism itself. It is a question that has been addressed from the beginning by its enemies and by its friends and, from within, by an unending succession of heretics and renegades, each reacting, as the saying goes, to his or her own Kronstadt. (These are, of course, not mutually exclusive categories; as is shown by the perennial figure of the exCommunist anti-Communist). All have asked the same question. What was the source of the disaster? Just where did it all go wrong?
