The Black Book of Communism

"Yes, this is really the leitmotif of my study too which has to do with the disillusionment with Utopianism and the way the hard realities about real existing Communism hit home in the late 60s and early 70s and the transition of the generation of student radicals from ultra left attitudes to becoming advocates of social movements, civil society and human rights activists. 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. The point here is that Courtois was an ex-Maoist. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Nevertheless, I think that it is interesting that you can trace this generation’s disillusionment with the ideal of revolution. This is the nation that invented the modern notion of revolution and the romantic investment that the west has had with revolution comes from the scenes of the storming of the Bastille, etc. And if you cut to the present the French have also played a significant role in divesting us of these illusions about how revolutionary political change is an admirable and acceptable approach to progressive political change. So I think it is an important story of the generation that comes of age in the 60s and the 70s and how they are vigorously anti-totalitarian and they are vehemently seeking to atone for the misdeeds of their youth and for the revolutionary pre-dispositions of their own national and political traditions."