The Black Book of Communism

by Stéphane Courtois

The Black Book was published in 1993 and actually it was controversial. This is because the editor Stéphane Courtois, unbeknownst to his fellow contributors who were specialists in different types of Communism around the world, decided to use the introduction as a hobbyhorse to put forward his own view which is that the misdeeds of Communism are actually worse than what the Nazis did with things like the Holocaust. This is, of course, highly subjective and made people uncomfortable for a variety of reasons.