Black Book of Communism

[Qfwfq]

It isn't life that I find confusing, thanx. Perhaps you have imagined meanings behind my words.

[Phileas Fogg]

Has anyone else read The_Black_Book_of_Communism?

I would urge anyone who holds positive views on the Soviets or on communism to read this book and be enlightened.

Yeah, I've read this, in fact it's still there on my bookshelf with hundreds of other Soviet-related stuff. It's a well-written book, although I feel Anne Applebaum's Gulag - A History, and Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine refllect still better the eastern-bloc style of suffering.

I can not see communism/Soviets as epitome of evil. When I found this book, I was hooked with one religious cult, and was struggling to regain my spiritual freedom; and I took the Black Book of Communism as analogy.

 

It made me laugh in some places. There were all those tricks, those human things.... of violence I had come to know in practise in religious circles. I gathered that humans have been always like this, in all societies. It's just dynamism of group behaviour.

 

Then ... other thing. I think it's so easy to see these things working in the Russian soul, because Russians are awfully open people. I think it's misguided prejudice to think that Soviet Union was somehow specially secretive. On the contrary, I feel they are less secretive, than we western people.

 

Well, I think this explains the relief I felt when reading it. It was cathartic; - purifying.

 

I've always felt love - you can say - towards Russian people, and this book didn't diminish it any way. That they did it so openly, and brutally, reflects their innocence.

:cup: