Hello š all. Iām interested in reading up on the issues surrounding getting an accurate ādeath countā for the (nominally) communist regimes of the 20th century. The Black Book of Communism is sometimes cited as a go-to text here, but itās my understanding that itās come in for some severe criticism from a number of historians (a common talking point is that the authorsā include Nazi war deaths in their death count for the USSR, among other things.). Is there a more fair-minded overview out there that avoids such pitfalls but also doesnāt outright whitewash the more egregious Stalinist crimes? Thanks ššæ in advance.
I found Robert Service's Comrades! A History of World Communism (2010) to be a really great survey of Communism as a global phenomenon. The author is a Soviet specialist for the most part, having written a troika of really well-reviewed biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky but Comrades! is a 500+ page monster of a work which was (unless I'm very much mistaken) almost unilaterally well-received in academia. [1]
It's not quite the utter cover-to-cover denunciation offered by Courtois et al. as Service is fairly sympathetic to the proletariat masses who supported their would-be repressors during each of the various revolutions of the 20th century, but the author is definitely critical of Communism as an ideology. All that said, what you're looking for -- a reliable source which precisely enumerates the number of deaths inflicted by each of these regimes -- is still very much open to debate; work is still being published which revises these figures. There are a lot of mitigating circumstances, and the topic is frankly pretty fraught.
It certainly won't be a "quick" answer to this difficult question, but it is a great resource for looking at some of the results of one-party, extra-constitutional government without either the whitewashing of Stalinist/Maoist/Pol-Potist travesties or the inflation of figures by academics like Conquest and Pipes, or polemicists like Solzhenitsyn.