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Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years.
"Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit", Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience -- in the China of "the Great Helmsman", Kim II Sungs Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho" and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalins destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescus leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the wide-scale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Maos Red Guards.
As the death toll mounts -- as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on -- the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.
Info autore
Stéphane Courtois ist Directeur de recherche (CNRS) am "Groupe d'Etude et d'Observation de la Democratie" der Universität Paris X in Nanterre.
Nicolas Werth ist Dozent für Geschichte und forscht am französischen Institut für Zeitgeschichte CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) mit dem Schwerpunkt Geschichte der UdSSR. Zahlreiche Veröffentlichungen.
Riassunto
This international bestseller plumbs archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. The authors show how and why, wherever the ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression.
