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The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. By Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin. Trans. by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. Ed. by Mark Kramer. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. xxii, 858 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-674-07608-7.)
Since its publication in France in 1997, The Black Book of Communism has played a dual role, both chronicling the crimes of various Communist regimes and also serving as a text that reveals the shifting status of Marxism in the aftermath of the Cold War. Much of the controversy that has surrounded the book has focused on Stephane Courtois's introduction, in which he argues that communism represents a greater evil than Nazism, largely based on Marxism-Leninism's heftier death tally. The introduction's polemical nature, however, does not carry over into all the chapters that follow. Nicolas...