Ricardo Artola, writer, editor and historian, head of the publishing house. Arzaliapresents us with a reprint of a book that 25 years ago stirred up scientific and intellectual forums around the world, “blowing up the Moscow Cathedral.” The black book of communism: crimes, terror, repressions was published in France in 1997 and for the first time attributed the number one hundred million died from communism. No one has ever killed so many people in the name of ideology. Today, thanks to more declassified files and more evidence collected, this figure, which caused an attempt to discredit the book, has been ratified and “has been increased in subsequent studies.”
In the mid-90s, the Berlin Wall had already fallen and the disintegration of the USSR was in full swing, but the intelligentsia did not dare to question or condemn the persecutions, massacres, deportations or famines arranged by Lenin or Stalin.
Artola says in an interview that “communism is a moral issue” and compares it to the Holocaust: “it’s a moral issue, in my opinion, you can only have one opinion, and if you deny it, you are on the same side, and if you admit what happened, you are in another. Regarding the debate about the numbers, he wonders: “The biggest criticism they made of the book, very clumsy, is that the numbers were exaggerated and if three million people had died in the Holocaust, it would have been morally different.” ? has an immediate answer: this is not a problem of size, but of concept, and if instead of a hundred million there were fifty, would that change anything?
New edition The black book of communism1100 pages, there is a new prologue of the coordinator of this work, Stephen Courtoisupdated illustrations and revised, corrected and unified text.
The modern classic is still sold out. “The bottom of the closet, a book for those who appreciate books.”
publisher says
Originally published in 1997 (Spanish was the world’s first translation), undeservedly reviled and long gone from bookstores, this black book of communism This is a story about the horrors that the application of this ideology has engendered in the world since 1917.
From the creation of the first totalitarian state in history after the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, to its triumph in countries like Cuba in 1959, passing through the territories where it still operates (above all China), this book is devastating allegations of crime, terror and repression who accompanied this ideology
in its distribution around the world for more than a century.
Faced with criticism received at the time for his alleged exaggeration of the number of victims, Stephane Courtois, on behalf of the group of authors of the work, tells us in the prologue of this edition that “investigations since 1998 have confirmed the figures announced in 1997.”
The authors
Led by renowned researcher Stephen CourtoisThis book was prepared by a team of ten historians from different areas where communism had existed since 1917. These included Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Pannet, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin. .