ABSTRACT
A group of French intellectuals published The Black Book of Communism, an 860-page indictment of the bloody swathe that communism cut across the twentieth century. Editor Stephane Courtois argued in his introduction that there was a moral equivalence between Stalinism and Nazism, that Stalin's "class genocide" paralleled Hitler's destruction of the Jews. In France there are still plenty of people willing to believe that communism has some redeeming features. The Black Book sets out to provide a comprehensive and definitive account of communism's "crimes, terror and repression" worldwide, drawing upon the latest available archival materials and secondary research. The Black Book's guiding principle, as laid down by its editor, is to count the victims of communist regimes. If The Black Book does not break new ground in explaining the phenomenon of communism, then its main value should be as a documentary record. The Black Book merely mentions that some Kazakhs fled to China.
