The introduction, by editor Stéphane Courtois, maintains that "...Communist regimes...turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government". Using unofficial estimates he cites a death toll which totals 94 million. The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows: 20 million in the Soviet Union, 65 million in the People's Republic of China, 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan and 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international communist movement and communist parties not in power" The authors explicitly claim that Communist regimes are responsible for a greater number of deaths than any other political ideal or movement, including fascism.
A more detailed catalogue (from the introduction) of some of the crimes described in the book includes:
Soviet Union: executions of hostages, prisoners, rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922; the famine of 1922; the deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920; the use of the Gulag system in the period between 1918 and 1930; the Great Purge; the deportation of kulaks from 1930 to 1932; the deaths of 4 million Ukrainians (Holodomor) and 2 million others during the famine of 1932 and 1933; the deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldavians and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1945; the deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941; the deportation of the Crimean Tatars on 18 May 1944; the deportation of the Chechens in 1944; the deportation of the Ingush in 1944.
Cambodia: deportation and extermination of the urban population of Cambodia.
China: the destruction of Tibetan culture.
The book, among other sources, used material from the (then) recently opened KGB files and other Soviet archives.
The authors, or a selection of them, claim to be leftists, and offer the motivation of their work as being that they do not want to give "the extreme right the privilege to alone tell the truth" (pp. 14 and 50, Finnish edition of the book, WSOY, 2001).
Two of the other authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, sparked a debate in France when they publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois's opinions about the scale of Communist terror. They felt that he was being obsessed with arriving at a total of 100 million victims. They instead estimated that communism has claimed between 65 and 93 million lives[2]. They rejected his equation of Soviet repression with Nazi genocide. Werth, a well-regarded French specialist on the Soviet Union whose sections in the Black Book on the Soviet Communists are sober and damning, said there was still a qualitative difference between Nazism and Communism. He told Le Monde, "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union" [3], and "The more you compare communism and nazism, the more the differences are obvious."
