Black book of communism (Harvard University Press)

Already famous throughout Europe, this text 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 70 years. "Revolutions, like trees, must be judged aby 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 Sung's 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 Stalin's destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu's levelling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the widescale devastation visited on Chinese culture aby Mao's 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 as established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression.An extraordinary accounting, this book documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the 20th century.