The publication of the Black Book in France has, as is known, caused quite a stir. Even there, a significant part of the progressive intellectual community condemned the work. It claimed [...] that the researchers who proceeded to compile this work were fervent opponents of the Left; and yet the origin of most of them is the same as that of their critics.

It claimed that the final sum of the victims of communism includes a significant percentage of victims whose deaths were caused by other reasons, such as the famine that followed the October Revolution; but even this does not seem entirely accurate: the policies that lead to famine are never "divinely ordained." Everyone has confirmed this, most recently in Mengistu's "socialist" Ethiopia, in Ceaușescu's Romania, and in Kim Il Sung's Korea.

The critics of the Black Book claimed that the work aims to equate, in an ahistorical and immoral way, the "work" of the Nazis and fascists with the account of the October Revolution [...] Yet, despite the confrontation of numbers, necessary to some extent for understanding the events and facts, despite the comparison of powers, there can be no ideological identification.

For the fundamental question raised is the following: how did a vision of human liberation and global brotherhood lead, immediately after the October Revolution, to a centralized regime of state omnipotence and the terrorization of every politically or nationally different community? I would add the following: if this question does not concern every human being, how is it possible for democratic societies to exist? [...]

There is no doubt that the Black Book will provoke here more than elsewhere. The better. We must finally, now that we have solid democracy, without deserted islands and Security services, which morally hindered the confrontation with the victims of that time, achieve substantial de-Stalinization in our country, which does not only concern the communist "Left" but clearly also a large part of the Russian-affected public opinion, which does not "remember" at all that the great Pontic Greek community of the USSR was collectively exiled by the "people's proletarian" authority, under dramatic circumstances.

(Richard Someritis - Excerpts from the appendix of the Greek edition)