/lit/ - Literature

Mr. Rummel, in an e-mail, dismissed Mr. White’s numbers as “not reliable,” adding that it matters greatly whether Stalin killed 20 million people, Mr. White’s figure, or 61 million, his own figure. “When the magnitude is so great, it is a profound statement on the nature of Communism,” he said.

Such polemics may have receded in mainstream historical circles since the late 1990s, when the publication of “The Black Book of Communism,” which placed the global death toll of Marxist regimes at 85 million to 100 million, inspired fierce debates about the relative evils of Communism and Nazism. (Mike Davis’s 2001 book, “Late Victorian Holocausts,” in turn, indicted capitalist imperialism for tens of millions of famine deaths in the developing world.)