Soviet and Communist studies

Soviet and Communist studies is the field of historical studies of the Soviet Union and other Communist states as well as of Communist parties such as the Communist Party USA that existed or still exist in some form in many countries, inside or outside the former Soviet Bloc. It is a field rife with conflict and controversy.[1][2]

Historiography

The academic field after World War II and during the Cold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of the Soviet Union,[3] stressing the absolute nature of Joseph Stalin's power. The "totalitarian model" was first outlined in the 1950s by political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich, who argued that the Soviet Union and other Communist states were totalitarian systems, with the personality cult and almost unlimited powers of the "great leader" such as Stalin.[4] The "revisionist school" beginning in the 1960s focused on relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level.[5] Matt Lenoe describes the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong. They tended to be interested in social history and to argue that the Communist Party leadership had had to adjust to social forces."[6] These "revisionist school" historians such as J. Arch Getty and Lynne Viola challenged the "totalitarian model" approach to Communist history and were most active in the former Communist states' archives, especially the State Archive of the Russian Federation related to the Soviet Union.[5][7]

According to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the historiography is characterized by a split between "traditionalists" and "revisionists". "Traditionalists" characterize themselves as objective reporters of an alleged totalitarian nature of Communism and Communist states. They are criticized by their opponents as being anti-communist, even fascist, in their eagerness on continuing to focus on the issues of the Cold War. Alternative characterizations for traditionalists include "anti-Communist", "conservative", "Draperite" (after Theodore Draper), "orthodox" and "right-wing".[1] Norman Markowitz, a prominent "revisionist", referred to them as "reactionaries", "right-wing romantics" and "triumphalist" who belong to the "HUAC school of CPUSA scholarship."[8] "Revisionists", characterized by Haynes and Klehr as historical revisionists, are more numerous and dominate academic institutions and learned journals.[1] A suggested alternative formulation is "new historians of American communism", but that has not caught on because these historians would describe themselves as unbiased and scholarly and contrast their work to the work of anti-communist "traditionalists", whom they would term biased and unscholarly.[9]

According to Jacques Sémelin, Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Margolin "view class genocide as the equivalent to racial genocide." Alongside Michael Mann, they contributed to "the debates on comparisons between Nazism and communism", with Sémelin describing this as a theory.[10] Michael David-Fox describes Courtois and Martin Malia as "revisionists" for positing Communism being worse than Nazism, which goes back to the conservative "revisionist" Ernst Nolte and the Historikerstreit. David-Fox criticizes the figures as well as the idea to combine loosely connected events under a single category of Communist death toll, blaming these authors for their manipulation and deliberate inflation which are presented to advocate the idea that Communism was a greater evil than Nazism. In particular, David-Fox criticizes the idea to connect the deaths with some "generic Communism" concept, defined down to the common denominator of party movements founded by intellectuals.[11] In their critique of "revisionists" positing Communism as the greater evil, Jens Mecklenburg and Wolfgang Wippermann argue that a connection between the events in Pol Pot's Cambodia and under the Stalin era are far from evident and that Pol Pot's study of Marxism in Paris is insufficient for connecting radical Soviet industrialism and the Khmer Rouge's murderous anti-urbanism under the same category.[12]

The double genocide theory is a theory popular in Eastern Europe which originated in the Baltic States during the 1990s, positing an equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust and a Soviet genocide committed against the local population. It represents a "revisionist" view that according to Michael Shafir is at worse Holocaust obfuscation.[13] Dovid Katz considers it "Holocaust revisionism", whose debate is prompted by a "movement in Europe that believes the crimes—morally, ethically—of Nazism and Communism are absolutely equal, and that those of us who don't think they're absolutely equal, are perhaps soft on Communism."[14] Although a "revisionist" view, it is built on the "totalitarian model" and is a popular and accepted view in Eastern Europe which is legitimized by political declarations such as the Black Ribbon Day and the Prague Declaration.[15] According to Laure Neumayer, much of the content of the Prague Declaration reproduced demands formulated by the conservative European People's Party in 2004 and draws heavily on the "totalitarian model" theory.[16]

Controversies and debates

Totalitarianism, revisionism and the Holodomor

J. Arch Getty's Origins of Great Purges, a book published in 1985 in which Getty argues that the Soviet political system was not completely controlled from the center and that Stalin only responded to political events as they arose,[5] was a challenge to works by Robert Conquest and part of the debates between the "totalitarian model" and "revisionist school" of the Soviet Union. In an appendix to the book, Getty also questioned the previously published findings that Stalin organized himself the murder of Sergey Kirov to justify his campaign of Great Purge.[6] The "totalitarian model" historians objected to the "revisionist school" of historians such as Getty as apologetics for Stalin and accused them of downplaying the terror. Lenoe responds that "Getty has not denied Stalin's ultimate responsibility for the Terror, nor is he an admirer of Stalin."[6][17]

As the leader of the second generation of the "revisionist school", or "revisionist historians", Sheila Fitzpatrick was the first to call the group of historians working on Soviet history in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist school] historians."[18] Most young "revisionist school" historians did not want to separate the social history of the Soviet Union from the evolution of the political system. Fitzpatrick explained in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."[19]

Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Conquest and Carl Joachim Friedrich were prominent advocates of applying the totalitarian concept to comparison of Nazism and Stalinism. On the other hand, Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer criticize the concept and highlight the differences between Nazism and Stalinism.[20] Henry Rousso defends the work of Friedrich et al. while noting the concept is both useful and descriptive rather than analytical, with the conclusion the regimes described as totalitarian do not have a common origin and did not arise in similar ways. Philippe Burrin and Nicholas Werth take a middle position between one making Stalin seem all-powerful and the other making him seem like a weak dictator.[21] Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin take a longer historical perspective and regard Nazism and Stalinism not so much as examples of a new type of society like Arendt, Brzezinski and Friedrich did, but more as historical "anomalies" or unusual deviations from the typical path of development that most industrial societies are expected to follow.[22]

During the debates in the 1980s, the use of émigré sources and the insistence on Stalin's engineering of Kirov's murder became embedded in the two sides' position. In a review of Conquest's work on the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, especially The Harvest of Sorrow,[23] Getty writes that Stalin and the Soviet Politburo played a major role,[24] but "there is plenty of blame to go around. It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest."[25] In an analysis of scholarship surrounding the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, Jeff Coplon argues that allegations by "mainstream academics", including Conquest, of genocide against the Soviet Union were historically dubious and politically motivated as part of a campaign by the Ukrainian nationalist community.[25] In a letter to the editors, Conquest dismissed the article as "error and absurdity."[26]

Conquest's thesis that the famine constituted genocide and was deliberately inflicted is controversial and remains part of the ongoing debates on the Holodomor genocide question.[27] Vladimir N. Brovkin describes it as a challenge to the "revisionist school" of historians while Alexander Nove states "Conquest seems prone to accept the Ukrainian nationalist myth."[27] Hiroaki Kuromiya states that "those who examine the famine from a general Soviet perspective downplay any specific Ukrainian factor, while specialists on Ukraine generally support the concept of a genocidal famine."[27] The most "notable work in the school of writing that maintains that the famine was not genocide" is by R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, both of whom cite a letter from Conquest stating "he does not believe that Stalin deliberately inflicted the 1933 famine."[27]

Sarah Davies and James Harris write that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the release of the Soviet archives, some of the heat has gone out of the debate.[28] A 1993 study of archival data by Getty et al. showed that a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.[29] Getty and Wheatcroft write that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by the "revisionist school" scholars.[30][31] Steven Rosefielde writes that the number has to be augmented by 19.4 percent in light of more complete archival evidence to 1,258,537, with the best estimate of Gulag deaths being 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953 when excess mortality is taken into account.[32]

The Black Book of Communism

Another controversy came with the publication of The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Courtois, described as one of the most influential and controversial books written about the history of communism in the 20th century,[33] in particular the history of the Soviet Union and other Communist states and state socialist regimes.[34] While it was praised by several publications, its reception among the academic field was more mixed and negative. The introduction, the main issue of controversy, was especially criticized for comparing Communism to Nazism and accused of manipulations and inflating numbers, including challenges from the main contributors to the book.[35] Laure Neumayer argues that The Black Book of Communism contributed greatly to "legitimising the equivalence of Nazi and Communist crimes" by "making criminality the very essence of communism."[16]

According to Jon Wiener, the book was "especially controversial in France because it was published during the 1997 trial of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon for crimes against humanity for his role in the deportation of Jews from Bourdeaux to Hitler's death camps. Papon's lawyers introduced the book as evidence for the defense."[36] The book has been especially influential in Eastern Europe, where it was uncritically embraced by prominent politicians and intellectuals, many of whom popularized it using terminology and concepts popular with the radical right.[37] According to Stanley Hoffmann, "[t]his gigantic volume, the sum of works of 11 historians, social scientists, and journalists, is less important for the content, but for the social storm it has provoked in France. [...] What Werth and some of his colleagues object to is 'the manipulation of the figures of the numbers of people killed' (Courtois talks of almost 100 million, including 65 million in China); 'the use of shock formulas, the juxtaposition of histories aimed at asserting the comparability and, next, the identities of fascism, and Nazism, and communism.' Indeed, Courtois would have been far more effective if he had shown more restraint."[38]

Communist holocaust

Communist holocaust is a proposed concept, overlapping with the double genocide theory, that killings under Communist states were a red holocaust. Both terms have been used, in reference to the killings, by some authors and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation as well as being referenced in the Friendship Act (HR3000) of 1993 by the United States Congress.[39] Steven Rosefielde wrote Red Holocaust in reference to all "peacetime state killings" under Communist states.[40]

The concept is not popular among scholars in Germany or internationally.[12][41][42] Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine writes that usage of this term "allows the reality it describes to immediately attain, in the Western mind, a status equal to that of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazi regime."[21][13] Michael Shafir writes that the use of the term supports the "competitive martyrdom component of Double Genocide", a theory whose worst version is Holocaust obfuscation.[13] George Voicu states that Leon Volovici has "rightfully condemned the abusive use of this concept as an attempt to 'usurp' and undermine a symbol specific to the history of European Jews."[43] Clemens Heni describes "red Holocaust" and the concept of a Communist holocaust, among others, as Holocaust trivialization and "softcore" Holocaust denial not easily identified and that it is often "tolerated, or even encouraged and reproduced in the mainstream, not only in Germany. [...] Scholars have only recently begun to unravel this disturbing phenomenon."[44]

Victims of Communism

A related controversy is the attempt of some authors such as Stéphane Courtois to make estimates of victims, who are typically referred to as "victims of Communism", based on mass mortality from famines, purges and wars.[45] According to Klas-Göran Karlsson and Michael Schoenhals, discussion of the number of victims has been "extremely extensive and ideologically biased."[46] Any attempt to estimate a total number of killings under Communist regimes depends greatly on definitions.[47] The criticism of some of the estimates are mostly focused on three aspects, namely that the estimates were based on sparse and incomplete data when significant errors are inevitable; that the figures were skewed to higher possible values; and that those dying at war and victims of civil wars, Holodomor and other famines under Communist regimes should not be counted.[48][49][50][51][52][53]

"Victims of Communism" is a popular narrative proposed by some authors such as Courtois[50] and George Watson[54] as well as anti-communist organizations such as The Epoch Times, the Tribute to Liberty and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, with 100 million being the most common estimate used from The Black Book of Communism, a work which popularized the narrative.[55] The narrative posits that famine and mass killing under Communist states can be attributed to a single cause and that Communism, as "the deadliest ideology in history", or in the words of Jonathan Rauch as "the deadliest fantasy in human history", represents the greatest threat to humanity.[39]

While it has its origins in Western European scholarship, the narrative has become accepted scholarship in Eastern Europe and among anti-communists in general, although its estimates of over 100 million is considered to be in the high range by most genocide experts. The narrative is criticized by scholars as an oversimplification and politically motivated as well as for equating the events with the Holocaust.[55] Various museums and monuments have been constructed in remembrance of the "victims of Communism", with support of the European Union and various governments in Canada, Eastern Europe and the United States.[45][56][57][58] The proponents posit a link between communism, socialism and the left with genocide, mass killing and totalitarianism,[59] with authors such as Watson advocating a common history stretching from Karl Marx to Adolf Hitler.[54] Right-wing authors argue that Marx was responsible for Nazism and even the Holocaust.[60] Authors such as Courtois propose a theory of equivalence between class and racial genocide.[10]

Kristen Ghodsee posits that these efforts seek to institutionalize the "Victims of Communism" narrative as a double genocide theory, or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and those killed by Communist states (class murder). These efforts have intensified in the wake of the global financial crisis with the hope to discredit and marginalize all political ideologies that could "threaten the primacy of private property and free markets."[45] Laure Neumayer argues works such as The Black Book of Communism played a major role in the criminalization of Communism in the European political space in the post Cold War-era. According to Neumayer, "by making criminality the very essence of communism, by explicitly equating the 'race genocide' of Nazism with the 'class genocide' of Communism in connection with the Ukrainian Great Famine of 1932–1933, the Black Book of Communism contributed to legitimising the equivalence of Nazi and Communist crimes. The book figures prominently in the 'spaces of the anti-communist cause' comparably structured in the former satellite countries, which are a major source of the discourse criminalising the Socialist period."[16] Zoltan Dujisin writes that "the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian 'collective memory' of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism" and the narrative is proposed by "anticommunist memory entrepreneurs."[15]

Victims of Stalinism

According to J. Arch Getty, over half of the 100 million deaths which are commonly attributed to Communism were due to famines. Getty writes that the "overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan."[45] As the majority of excess deaths under Joseph Stalin were not direct killings, the exact number of victims of Stalinism is difficult to calculate due to lack of consensus among scholars on which deaths can be attributed to the regime.[61]

Stephen G. Wheatcroft posits that "[t]he Stalinist regime was consequently responsible for about a million purposive killings, and through its criminal neglect and irresponsibility it was probably responsible for the premature deaths of about another two million more victims amongst the repressed population, i.e. in the camps, colonies, prisons, exile, in transit and in the POW camps for Germans. These are clearly much lower figures than those for whom Hitler's regime was responsible." Wheatcroft states that Stalin's "purposive killings" fit more closely into the category of "execution" than "murder", given he thought the accused were indeed guilty of crimes against the state and insisted on documentation. Hitler simply wanted to kill Jews and communists because of who they were, insisted on no documentation and was indifferent at even a pretence of legality for these actions.[62]

Michael Ellman states "the very category 'victims of Stalinism' is a matter of political judgement." Ellman argues that mass deaths from famines are not a "uniquely Stalinist evil" and compares the behavior of the Stalinist regime vis-à-vis the Holodomor to that of the British Empire (towards Ireland and India) and the G8 in contemporary times. According to Ellman, the latter "are guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence because of their not taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and a possible defense of Stalin and his associates is that "their behaviour was no worse than that of many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."[61]

In comparing the deaths caused by both Stalin and Hitler's policies, historians assert that archival evidence released after the collapse of the Soviet Union confirms that Stalin did not kill more people than Hitler. Timothy D. Snyder writes the Nazi regime killed about 11 million non-combatants (which rises to above 12 million if "foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included"), with analogous figures for Stalin's regime being roughly 6 and 9 million.[63]

Snyder further writes that "[e]ven historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one." Snyder states "[t]he total figure of civilians deliberately killed under Stalinism, around six million, is of course horribly high. But it is far lower than the estimates of twenty million or more made before we had access to Soviet sources." Although "the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought" as "[m]ass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations", Snyder argues "[t]he total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans" (about 11 million) "is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did."[63]

Journals in the field

While this area is now seldom offered as a field of study in itself, in which one might become a specialist, there are related fields emerging, as may be judged by the titles of academic journals, some of which have changed to reflect the passage of time since 1989 and the effect of the end of Soviet rule. These include Communisme, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Demokratizatsiya, Eastern European Politics (previously Journal of Communist Studies), Europe-Asia Studies (successor of Soviet Studies), Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, Kritika, Post-Soviet Affairs, Problems of Communism (renamed Problems of Post-Communism), The Russian Review, The Slavonic and East European Review (succeeded by Studies in East European Thought) and Studies in Soviet Thought (succeeded by Studies in East European Thought). The historiography of strictly Communist studies is also changing, with some different models of its aims as well as the major shift caused by access to archives.[7]

Printed journals include Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (Yearbook for Historical Communist Studies) and Slavic Review. Other serial publications include the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs (1966–1991) published by the Hoover Institution Press and Stanford University[64][65][66] as well as the World Strength of the Communist Party Organizations, an annual report published by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the United States Department of State beginning in 1948.[67][68]

See also

References
  1. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2003). "Revising History". In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter. pp. 11–57. ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
  2. Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas". Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–17. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1.
  3. Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas". Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1. Academic Sovietology, a child of the early Cold War, was dominated by the 'totalitarian model' of Soviet politics. Until the 1960s it was almost impossible to advance any other interpretation, in the USA at least.
  4. Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas". Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1. In 1953, Carl Friedrich characterised totalitarian systems in terms of five points: an official ideology, control of weapons and of media, use of terror, and a single mass party, 'usually under a single leader.' There was of course an assumption that the leader was critical to the workings of totalitarianism: at the apex of a monolithic, centralised, and hierarchical system, it was he who issued the orders which were fulfilled unquestioningly by his subordinates.
  5. Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas". Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 4–5. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1. Tucker's work stressed the absolute nature of Stalin's power, an assumption which was increasingly challenged by later revisionist historians. In his Origins of the Great Purges, Arch Getty argued that the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted to a considerable extent in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose. Getty's work was influenced by political science of the 1960s onwards, which, in a critique of the totalitarian model, began to consider the possibility that relatively autonomous bureaucratic institutions might have had some influence on policy-making at the highest level.
  6. Lenoe, Matt (June 2002). "Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does It Matter?". The Journal of Modern History. 74 (2): 352–380. doi:10.1086/343411. ISSN 0022-2801. S2CID 142829949.
  7. Sheila, Fitzpatrick (November 2007). "Revisionism in Soviet History". History and Theory. 46 (4): 77–91. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00429.x. ISSN 1468-2303. [...] the Western scholars who in the 1990s and 2000s were most active in scouring the new archives for data on Soviet repression were revisionists (always 'archive rats') such as Arch Getty and Lynne Viola.
  8. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2003). "Revising History". In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter. p. 43. ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
  9. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2003). "Revising History". In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter. pp. 43–44. ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
  10. Jaffrelot, Christophe; Sémelin, Jacques, eds. (2009) Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. Translated by Schoch, Cynthia. CERI Series in Comparative Politics and International Studies. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-231-14283-0. "Mann thus establishes a sort of parallel between racial enemies and class enemies, thereby contributing to the debates on comparisons between Nazism and communism. This theory has also been developed by some French historians such as Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism: they view class genocide as the equivalent to racial genocide. Mann however refuses to use the term 'genocide' to describe the crimes committed under communism. He prefers the terms 'fratricide' and 'classicide', a word he coined to refer to intentional mass killings of entire social classes."
  11. David-Fox, Michael (Winter 2004). "On the Primacy of Ideology: Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers (In Response to Martin Malia)". Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 5 (1): 81–105. doi:10.1353/kri.2004.0007.
  12. Mecklenburg, Jens; Wippermann, Wolfgang, eds. (1998). 'Roter Holocaust'? Kritik des Schwarzbuchs des Kommunismus [A 'Red Holocaust'? A Critique of the Black Book of Communism]. Hamburg: Konkret Verlag Literatur (in German). ISBN 3-89458-169-7.
  13. Shafir, Michael (Summer 2016). "Ideology, Memory and Religion in Post-Communist East Central Europe: A Comparative Study Focused on Post-Holocaust". Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies. 15 (44): 52–110.
  14. Liedy, Amy Shannon; Ruble, Blair (7 March 2011). "Holocaust Revisionism, Ultranationalism, and the Nazi/Soviet 'Double Genocide' Debate in Eastern Europe". Wilson Center. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
  15. Dujisin, Zoltan (July 2020). "A History of Post-Communist Remembrance: From Memory Politics to the Emergence of a Field of Anticommunism". Theory and Society. doi:10.1007/s11186-020-09401-5.
  16. Neumayer, Laure (2018). The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War. London: Routledge. ISBN 9781351141741.
  17. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2003). In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage. Encounter Books. pp. 15–17. ISBN 978-1-893554-72-6.
  18. Fitzpatrick, Sheila (October 1986). "New Perspectives on Stalinism". The Russian Review. Wiley. 45 (4): 409–413. doi:10.2307/130466. JSTOR 130466.
  19. Fitzpatrick, Sheila (October 1986). "New Perspectives on Stalinism". The Russian Review. Wiley. 45 (4): 357–373. doi:10.2307/130471. JSTOR 130471.
  20. Fitzpatrick, Sheila; Geyer, Michael, eds. (2009). Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–4, 8–12, 17–19. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511802652. ISBN 978-0-521-72397-8.
  21. Goslan, Richard Joseph; Rousso, Henry, eds. (2004). Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-803-29000-6.
  22. Kershaw, Ian; Lewin, Moshe, eds. (1997). Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56521-9.
  23. Getty, J. Arch (22 January 1987). "Starving the Ukraine". The London Review of Books. 9 (2): 7–8. Retrieved 20 December 2020. Conquest's hypothesis, sources and evidence are not new. Indeed, he himself first put forward his view two years ago in a work sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. The intentional famine story, however, has been an article of faith for Ukrainian émigrés in the West since the Cold War. [...] Conquest's book will thus give a certain academic credibility to a theory which has not been generally accepted by non-partisan scholars outside the circles of exiled nationalities. In today's conservative political climate, with its 'evil empire' discourse, I am sure that the book will be very popular.
  24. Getty, J. Arch (22 January 1987). "Starving the Ukraine". The London Review of Books. 9 (2). Retrieved 20 December 2020. Stalin gave his backing to radicals in the Party who saw the mixed economy of the Twenties as an unwarranted concession to capitalism. These leftists, for whom Stalin was spokesman and leader, argued that the free market in grain confronted the state with an unpredictable, inefficient and expensive food supply. [...] These radical activists, who became the shock troops of the voluntarist 'Stalin Revolution' which swept the Soviet Union in the Thirties, were concentrated in working-class and youth groups. [...] The collectivisation of agriculture from 1929 to about 1934 proceeded in several fitful campaigns characterised by confusion, lurches to left and right, and the substitution of enthusiasm, exhortation and violence for careful planning. Hard-line officials and volunteers forced reluctant peasants into improvised collective farms. Peasants resisted by slaughtering animals and refusing to plant, harvest or market grain. Neither side would give way. By 1934 the Stalinists had won, at least insofar as the collective farm system was permanently established, but they had paid a painful price: catastrophic livestock losses, social dislocation and, in some places, famine. Millions of people died from starvation, deportation and violence.
  25. Coplon, Jeff (12 January 1988). "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust". Village Voice. Retrieved 30 November 2020 – via Montclair State University. 'There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians,' said Alexander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology. 'That would be totally out of keeping with what we know -- it makes no sense.' 'This is crap, rubbish,' said Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania, whose Russian Peasants and Soviet Power broke new ground in social history. 'I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology.' 'I absolutely reject it,' said Lynne Viola of SUNY-Binghamton, the first US historian to examine Moscow's Central State Archive on collectivization. 'Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?' 'He's terrible at doing research,' said veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College. 'He misuses sources, he twists everything.'
  26. Conquest, Robert (21 February 1988). "Letters to the Editors". The Ukrainian Weekly. Reprinted by the The Ukrainian Weekly, 21 February 1988.
  27. Marples, David R. (May 2009). "Ethnic Issues in the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine". Europe-Asia Studies. 61 (3): 505–518. doi:10.1080/09668130902753325.
  28. Sarah Davies; James Harris (8 September 2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas". Stalin: A New History. Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–5. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1.
  29. Getty, J. Arch; Rittersporn, Gábor; Zemskov, Viktor (1993). "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence" (PDF). American Historical Review. 98 (4): 1017–1049. doi:10.2307/2166597. JSTOR 2166597. Retrieved 30 November 2020.
  30. Getty, J. Arch; Rittersporn, Gábor; Zemskov, Viktor (1993). "Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre-war years: a first approach on the basis of archival evidence" (PDF). American Historical Review. 98 (4): 1017–1049. doi:10.2307/2166597. JSTOR 2166597. The long-awaited archival evidence on repression in the period of the Great Purges shows that levels of arrests, political prisoners, executions, and general camp populations tend to confirm the orders of magnitude indicated by those labeled as 'revisionists' and mocked by those proposing high estimates.
  31. Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (1999). "Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 51 (2): 340–342. doi:10.1080/09668139999056. For decades, many historians counted Stalin' s victims in 'tens of millions', which was a figure supported by Solzhenitsyn. Since the collapse of the USSR, the lower estimates of the scale of the camps have been vindicated. The arguments about excess mortality are far more complex than normally believed. R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Re-assessment (London, 1992) does not really get to grips with the new data and continues to present an exaggerated picture of the repression. The view of the 'revisionists' has been largely substantiated (J. Arch Getty & R. T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge, 1993)). The popular press, even TLS and The Independent, have contained erroneous journalistic articles that should not be cited in respectable academic articles.
  32. Rosefielde, Steven (2010). Red Holocaust. London: Routledge. pp. 67, 77. ISBN 978-0-415-77757-5.
  33. Aronson, Ronald (2003). "Communism's Posthumous Trial". History and Theory. 42 (2): 222–245. doi:10.1111/1468-2303.00240.
  34. Suny, Ronald Grigor (2007). "Russian Terror/ism and Revisionist Historiography". Australian Journal of Politics & History. 53 (1): 5–19. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2007.00439.x. The Black Book may be the single most influential text on the Soviet Union and other state socialist regimes and movements published since The Gulag Archipelago.
  35. Chemin, Ariane (30 October 1997). "Les divisions d'une équipe d'historiens du communisme" [Divisions among the team of historians of Communism]. Le Monde (in French). ISSN 1950-6244. Retrieved 3 August 2016.
  36. Wiener, Jon (2012). How We Forgot the Cold War. University of California Press. pp. 37–38. ISBN 9780520954250.
  37. Friling, Tuvia; Ioanid, Radu; Ionescu, Mihail E.; Benjamin, Lya (2004). Distortion, negationism and minimization of the Holocaust in postwar Romania (PDF). International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania. pp. 47, 59.
  38. Hoffman, Stanley (Spring 1998). "Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression (The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, and Repression) by Stéphane Courtois". Foreign Policy (110, Special Edition: Frontiers of Knowledge): 166–169. JSTOR 1149284.
  39. Rauch, Jonathan (December 2003). "The Forgotten Millions". The Atlantic. Retrieved 20 December 2020.
  40. Rosefielde, Steven (2010). Red Holocaust. London: Routledge. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-415-77757-5.
  41. Möller, Horst (1999). Der rote Holocaust und die Deutschen: die Debatte um das "Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus" [The Red Holocaust and the Germans: The Debates on the "Black Book of Communism"] (in German). Munich: Piper Verlag. ISBN 978-3-492-04119-5.
  42. Hackmann, Jörg (March 2009). "From National Victims to Transnational Bystanders? The Changing Commemoration of World War II in Central and Eastern Europe". Constellations. 16 (1): 167–181. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8675.2009.00526.x. A coining of communism as 'red Holocaust,' as had been suggested by the Munich Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, did not find much ground, neither in Germany nor elsewhere in international discussions.
  43. Voicu, George (2018). "Postcommunist Romania's Leading Public Intellectuals and the Holocaust". In Florian, Alexandru (ed.). Holocaust Public Memory in Postcommunist Romania, Studies in Antisemitism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 41–71. ISBN 978-0-253-03274-4. Quote at p. 46.
  44. Heni, Clemens (Fall 2008). "Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah". Jewish Political Studies Review. Jerusalem. 20 (3/4): 73–92. JSTOR 25834800.
  45. Ghodsee, Kristen (Fall 2014). "A Tale of 'Two Totalitarianisms': The Crisis of Capitalism and the Historical Memory of Communism" (PDF). History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History. 4 (2): 115–142. doi:10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0115. JSTOR 10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0115.
  46. Karlsson, Klas-Göran; Schoenhals, Michael (2008). Crimes Against Humanity under Communist Regimes. Forum for Living History. p. 9. ISBN 9789197748728.
  47. Dallin, Alexander (Winter 2000). "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. By Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Margolin. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. xx, 858 pp. Notes. Index. Photographs. Maps. $37.50, hard bound". Slavic Review. Cambridge University Press. 59 (4): 882–883. doi:10.2307/2697429. JSTOR 2697429.
  48. Harff, Barbara (1996). "Death by Government by R. J. Rummel". The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 27 (1): 117–119. doi:10.2307/206491. JSTOR 206491.
  49. Hiroaki, Kuromiya (January 2001). "Review Article: Communism and Terror. Reviewed Work(s): The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, and Repression by Stephane Courtois; Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest". Journal of Contemporary History. 36 (1): 191–201. JSTOR 261138.
  50. Paczkowski, Andrzej (Spring 2001). "The Strom Over the Black Book". The Wilson Quarterly. 25 (2): 28–34. JSTOR 40260182. "Some critics complained that Courtois was 'hunting' for the highest possible number of victims, which led him, as J. Arch Getty wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, to include 'every possible death just to run up the score.' To an extent, the charge is valid. Courtois and other contributors to the volume equate the people shot, hanged, or killed in prisons or the camps with those who were victims of calculated political famines (in the Chinese and Soviet cases), or who otherwise starved for lack of food or died for lack of drugs."
  51. Weiner, Amir (Winter 2002). "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Margolin, Jonathan Murphy, Mark Kramer". Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 32 (3): 450–452. JSTOR 3656222.
  52. Dulić, Tomislav (2004). "Tito's Slaughterhouse: A Critical Analysis of Rummel's Work on Democide". Journal of Peace Research. 41 (1): 85–102. doi:10.1177/0022343304040051. JSTOR 4149657. S2CID 145120734.
  53. Harff, Barbara (2017), "The Comparative Analysis of Mass Atrocities and Genocide". In Gleditsch, N. P., ed. R.J. Rummel: An Assessment of His Many Contributions. 37. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice. pp. 111–129. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-54463-2_12. ISBN 9783319544632.
  54. Grant, Robert (November 1999). "Review: The Lost Literature of Socialism". The Review of English Studies. 50 (200): 557–559. doi:10.1093/res/50.200.557.
  55. Mastracci, Davide (21 July 2020). "The 'Memorial to the Victims of Communism' Should Be Bulldozed". Read Passage. Retrieved 20 December 2020. "This ideological process has consequences. As Katz notes, 'One major symptom of the revisionism underway in Eastern Europe is the rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators as ‘national heroes’ on the grounds that they were anti-Soviet.' This is also happening in Canada. [...] They get that figure from The Black Book of Communism, a 1997 text that tallies up all of the ideology's supposed victims. The TL's website cites the book on numerous occasions, regardless of the fact that it has been widely debunked and was led by an editor who some of the book's contributors said was obsessed with reaching the 100 million deaths mark."
  56. Neumayer, Laure (November 2017). "Advocating for the Cause of the 'Victims of Communism' in the European Political Space: Memory Entrepreneurs in Interstitial Fields". Nationalities Papers. Cambridge University Press. 45 (6): 992–1012. doi:10.1080/00905992.2017.1364230.
  57. Neumayer, Laure (2018). "Introduction". The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War. London: Routledge. ISBN 9781351141741.
  58. Neumayer, Laure (November 2020). "Bridges Across the Atlantic? Intertwined Anti-Communist Mobilisations in Europe and the United States after the Cold War". Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest. Cairn (2–3): 151–181. doi:10.3917/receo1.512.0151.
  59. Mrozick, Agnieszka (2019). "Anti-Communism: It's High Time to Diagnose and Counteract". In Kuligowski, Piotr; Moll, Łukasz; Szadkowski, Krystian. "Anti-Communisms: Discourses of Exclusion". Praktyka teoretyczna. Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. 1 (31): 178–184. Retrieved 26 December 2020 – via Central and Eastern European Online Library. "First is the prevalence of a totalitarian paradigm, in which Nazism and Communism are equated as the most atrocious ideas and systems in human history (because communism, defined by Marx as a classless society with common means of production, has never been realised anywhere in the world, in further parts I will be putting this concept into inverted commas as an example of discursive practice). Significantly, while in the Western debate the more precise term 'Stalinism' is used – in 2008, on the 70th anniversary of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, the European Parliament established 23 August as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism – hardly anyone in Poland is paying attention to niceties: 'communism', or simply the left, is perceived as totalitarian here. A homogenizing sequence of associations (the left is communism, communism is totalitarianism, ergo the left is totalitarian) and the ahistorical character of the concepts used (no matter if we talk about the USSR in the 1930s under Stalin, Maoist China from the period of the Cultural Revolution, or Poland under Gierek, 'communism' is murderous all the same) not only serves the denigration of the Polish People's Republic, expelling this period from Polish history, but also – or perhaps primarily – the deprecation of Marxism, leftist programs, and any hopes and beliefs in Marxism and leftist activity as a remedy for capitalist exploitation, social inequality, fascist violence on a racist and anti-Semitic basis, as well as homophobic and misogynist violence. The totalitarian paradigm not only equates fascism and socialism (in Poland and the countries of the former Eastern bloc stubbornly called 'communism' and pressed into the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, which should additionally emphasize its foreignness), but in fact recognizes the latter as worse, more sinister (the Black Book of Communism (1997) is of help here as it estimates the number of victims of 'communism' at around 100 million; however, it is critically commented on by researchers on the subject, including historian Enzo Traverso in the book L'histoire comme champ de bataille (2011)). Thus, anti-communism not only delegitimises the left, including communists, and depreciates the contribution of the left to the breakdown of fascism in 1945, but also contributes to the rehabilitation of the latter, as we can see in recent cases in Europe and other places." Quote at pp. 178–179.
  60. Moll, Łukasz (2019). "Erasure of the Common: From Polish Anti-Communism to Universal Anti-Capitalism". In Kuligowski, Piotr; Moll, Łukasz; Szadkowski, Krystian. "Anti-Communisms: Discourses of Exclusion". Praktyka teoretyczna. Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. 1 (31): 118–145. Retrieved 26 December 2020 – via Central and Eastern European Online Library. "As we have learned lately from public television, when the two hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx's birthday was celebrated abroad, according to right-wing journalists Marx was responsible even for Nazism and the Holocaust (Leszczyński 2018). As former Foreign Minister in Law and Justice's government Witold Waszczykowski elaborated in an interview with German daily newspaper Bild:
    We just want to heal our country of certain diseases. The previous government applied a left-wing concept. As if the world, according to the Marxist model, must move in only one direction, towards a mixture of cultures and a world of cyclists and vegetarians, which stands only for renewable energy and combating all forms of religion. This has nothing in common with traditional Polish values (Cienski 2017).
    It is hard to find a better manifestation of right-wing all-encompassing anti-communism, which mixes together nearly all possible progressive discourses." Quote at pp. 126–127.
  61. Ellman, Michael (November 2002). "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments". Europe-Asia Studies. Taylor & Francis. 54 (7): 1152–1172. doi:10.1080/0966813022000017177. JSTOR 826310.
  62. Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (1996). "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–45" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 48 (8): 1319–1353. doi:10.1080/09668139608412415. JSTOR 152781.
  63. Snyder, Timothy (10 March 2011). "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?" The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  64. Gyorgy, Andrew (1978). "1975 Yearbook on International Communist Affairs. Edited by Staar Richard F.. (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1975. Pp. 678. $25.00.)". American Political Science Review. 72 (2): 819. doi:10.2307/1954276. JSTOR 1954276. Retrieved 13 May 2017.
  65. Szawlowski, Richard (October 1979). "Reviewed Work: Yearbook on International Communist Affairs 1978 by Richard F. Starr". Soviet Studies. Taylor & Francis. 31 (4): 617–619. JSTOR 150933.
  66. Goshko, John M. (3 December 1991). "As Soviet Union dissolves, 'kremlinologists' shift gears". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 31 January 2018. Retrieved 31 January 2018.
  67. Morris, Bernard S. (December 1970). "Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1968. by Richard V. Allen". Slavic Review. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Cambridge University Press. 29 (4): 704–705. doi:10.2307/2493285. JSTOR 2493285.
  68. McLane, Charles B. (Autumn 1972). "1970 Yearbook on International Communist Affairs and 1971 Yearbook on International Communist Affairs by Richard F. Staar". Canadian Slavonic Papers. Taylor & Francis. 14 (3): 548–551. JSTOR 40866482.

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