Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
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The Storm over The Black Book
A scholarly effort to tally the human cost of communism around the world has stirred enormous controversy. One of its authors explains why.
On November 7, 1997, in Paris, a book was published that was substantial in every sense. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression contained almost 900 pages, weighed about two pounds, and was very expensive.
By the end of 1997, it had sold more than 100,000 copies in France, and by the spring of 1998, about 150,000. That May, the first translations of the book appeared--in Italy and Germany--and they were also successful. To date, the book has had editions in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Sweden, Bosnia, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Holland, Russia, Lithuania, Turkey, England, and America, and it is expected to appear in Ukraine, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. The total number of copies sold now exceeds 800,000.
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