The French historiographical context

11Despite the disputes over its heuristic value and normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a significant comeback within French politics and academia at the end of the Cold War. Its resurgence was partly in response to the loss of legitimacy of Marxist theory and the weakening of anti-fascism, henceforth presented as a communist propaganda tool (Hobsbawm, 1996), and partly due to the change in historiographic paradigms that came about in the second half of the 1980s, when different forms of anti-communism emerged as keys to interpretations of the twentieth century. Traverso (2001) coined the first version, which he attributed to Ernst Nolte, as “national-conservative resentment.” This historical-genetic vision of totalitarianism portrayed Nazism not only as a regime similar to Bolshevism, but also as a reaction to the latter. [5] A second, “liberal version of anti-communism,” promoted by François Furet in his volume Le passé d’une illusion (Furet, 1995), posited an equivalence between capitalism and democracy and considered fascism and communism as parentheses in the inexorable development of liberal democracy. Other publications, such as Tony Judt’s analysis of French intellectuals in the aftermath of the Second World War (Judt, 1992), contributed to a “vituperative anti-Marxism among French intellectuals” (Shatz quoted in Ghodsee, 2014, p. 122). The intellectual skirmish between historians Eric Hobsbawm and Pierre Nora – who refused to publish a French translation of Hobsbawm’s volume The Age of Extremes: The Short Century 1914-1991 in 1997 because of “budgetary constraints and ideological reservations” (Ghodsee, 2014, p. 122) – is illustrative of the intellectual atmosphere in France at the time. More generally, the 1990s were a period of intense academic debate about the nature of the Soviet system, and several books on the topic were published in France at the time. Next to Furet and Hobsbawm, it is worth mentioning the publications by François Fejtö (1992) and Georges Mink (1997).

12After the success of Le passé d’une illusion, the publishing house Robert Laffont initiated a publication geared toward satisfying the market’s demand for anti-communist material. In 1995, editor Claude Ronsac, [6] who had already overseen the publication of Le passé d’une illusion, commissioned a volume to be published on 7 November 1997, to mark the eightieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Two French historians were tasked with putting together a team of authors. The first was Stéphane Courtois, a specialist on the FCP and director of the journal Communisme since its founding in 1981. [7]

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14The second historian was Jean-Louis Panné, who had ties to Ronsac through an intellectual circle organised around Boris Souvarine (1895-1984). [9] The Institute of Social History, founded by Souvarine in 1935 to fight Soviet influence in France, had become an important right-wing anti-communist centre after Souvarine stepped down in 1976. In addition to Panné, it had nurtured Pierre Rigoulot [10] and Ilios Yannalakis, [11] who actively defended the BB from severe academic criticism after its publication in France (see below).

A pan-European team of authors

15Courtois and Panné put together a team of specialists based on their personal connections. Courtois contacted Karel Bartošek and Nicolas Werth, who were both members of the CNRS Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) and had been contributors to the journal Communisme. Panné had known Andrzej Paczkowski since the 1980s, when he was secretary of the French support network for Solidarność called “Solidarité avec Solidarité.”

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17Even though the BB thematically dealt with communism as a world phenomenon, all its authors were Europeans. They presented their cooperation as an intellectual “reunification” of the two parts of the continent marked by different experiences of communism. According to Werth, the authors met every three to four months in Paris to discuss the overall structure of the volume, although Paczkowski, who lived in Warsaw, was able to attend these meetings only sporadically. However, both Bartošek and Paczkowski were involved in the creation of the book, of which they are considered co-authors and not just contributors. [12] A telling illustration of Paczkowski’s importance can be seen in Courtois’s attempts to include a specific chapter on the Katyń massacre, to be written by Alexandra Viatteau, who had published a book on the subject in 1982. Paczkowski insisted that this event should be dealt with in his chapter and not isolated from it (Pleskot, 2019, p. 402).

18A conflict arose between the co-authors in 1997 concerning the introduction. Courtois was supposed to write the conclusion, Furet the introduction. After Furet’s unexpected demise in July 1997, Courtois offered to also write the introduction. When he sent the text to his co-authors at the end of August 1997, Werth and Margolin objected to certain parts. Acting as mediator, Bartošek rewrote the most controversial sections of the text, while also deleting phrases that suggested an equivalence between the “class genocide” perpetrated by the Soviets and the “race genocide” of the Nazis. For his part, Paczkowski encouraged Courtois to clarify the concept of “class genocide” (Pleskot, 2019, p. 403), although he tacitly agreed with Courtois’s position (Paczkowski, 2001). Courtois refused the changes and this particular assertion remained in the text. Werth and Margolin subsequently decided to withdraw from the project and even contacted a lawyer who told them that it was too late to quit. Werth met to discuss the volume with the chairman of Robert Laffont, who told him that “this book [would] stick the final nail in the coffin of the FCP.” [13]

19The title of the volume would also become a source of conflict: Ronsac had suggested The Book of Communist Crimes, but Jean-Louis Margolin opposed it. He suggested instead The Black Book of Communism with the subtitle Crimes, Terror, Repression. This title echoes Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman’s The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry (2003), a collection of eyewitness testimonies, letters, diaries and other documents on the activities of the Nazis against Jewish individuals in the camps, ghettoes, and towns of Eastern Europe, which was initially published in 1947. The powerful title “Black Book of…” later became a formula used by French scholars and activists who opposed capitalism (Perraut, 1999) or aimed to shed light on other dark chapters of history, such as colonialism (Ferro, 2003).

20These inner conflicts during the compilation of the BB clearly show that the fault lines between the authors were not formed by differing interpretations, let alone experiences of communism, but by the moral assessment of a univocal condemnation of communism in relation to Nazism.

The translations of the BB in Eastern Europe

21The BB came out in autumn 1997 in France; within a year, it had already been translated into Romanian and German; other translations would follow soon thereafter.

22

23In the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, the book was a genuine success, although not a bestseller as it was in France. While it sold fewer than 3,500 copies in Romania, around 20,000 copies were sold in the Czech Republic and nearly 40,000 in Poland. [14] In transitional economies, the price of the publication was often cited as an obstacle to purchase. [15]

24The BB’s European dissemination was, similarly to its creation, an anti-communist collaboration. In Romania, for instance, it circulated through the channels established by Eastern European dissident exiles in Paris in connection with local anti-communist networks. It was translated as a result of a meeting between Courtois and former refugees in Paris who had mobilised against Ceauşescu’s dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. They invited Courtois to participate in several roundtables in Romania and introduced him to the founders of the Sighet Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of Resistance, a new institution sponsored by the influential Civic Academy Foundation. [16] This foundation, along with the centre-right government in power, ultimately sponsored the Romanian publication of the BB with Humanitas (cimec.ro), a private publishing house that promotes distinctly anti-communist as well as liberal views. In Hungary, the book came out with a literary publishing house which had just recently been saved from bankruptcy by the national-conservative government of Viktor Orbán (1998-2002). In some cases, the authors themselves were involved in the translation and/or publication: in the Czech Republic, the owner of the publishing house Paseka, a long-time anti-communist at heart, was a personal friend of Bartošek’s (Malušková, 2015).

Heated debates in France

26In France, the publication of the BB resulted in a political and intellectual uproar, leading Donald Reid (2005) to claim that France was experiencing a “communist syndrome” akin to the “Vichy syndrome” famously coined by Henry Rousso (Rousso, 1987). For Reid, this syndrome was “fed by the obsessive accusations of those who feel free of taint, or freed of taint, but are driven by a need to reveal what they come to believe can never be fully revealed” (Reid, 2005, p. 296). [18]

27With the BB, Courtois’s goal was indeed to reach an audience beyond academia through a “historical synthesis aimed at reflecting one of the dimensions of communism, the criminal dimension” (Courtois, 2002, p. 35). His intention was not to compare the histories of the two regimes but to pair the memory of communism with that of Nazism. In the introductory chapter, he states that his claim that these regimes had an equally criminal character is underpinned by a moral principle, that of equal respect for the human dignity of victims; that the Nuremberg trials provide a suitable model for prosecuting communism for crimes against humanity and genocide; that the great task of constructing a new, common post-Cold War memory of Europe consists of integrating into it the memory of communism; and that the historian’s role is to act as spokesperson for the victims, observing not only a “duty to history” but a “duty to memory” (Courtois et al., 1997). This introduction – especially its pitting of 25 million dead at the hands of the Nazis against an alleged 100 million dead under communism – proved highly controversial.

28The totalitarian paradigm was not unknown in France; in the 1970s, many disappointed leftists had used it as a tool to criticise the FCP by arguing that communism in general, and its revolutionary programme in particular, inevitably led to terror and violence (Christofferson, 2004; Popa, 2018). Several co-authors of the BB had actually been members of radical left organisations in their youth. Karel Bartošek had been a virulent young Stalinist, while Courtois had been a Maoist. As for Nicolas Werth, his youthful Trotskyist commitment and membership in the FCP (1968-1973) were notorious in France despite his subsequent career as one of the best analysts of Soviet history. Although the BB was presented as an academic work, some readers saw it as an assault carried out by individuals who were, in fact, settling accounts with old comrades (Sturdza, 1998).

29The volume was the subject of violent controversy amongst historians of communism, including some of the authors themselves. Werth and Margolin publicly distanced themselves from the introduction (Werth, 1997; Werth & Margolin, 1997; Chemin, 1997), while Bartošek and Werth resigned from the editorial board of Communisme. The detractors of the BB criticised its lack of methodological rigour, its conception of historical work as one of “justice and memory” and the ideological dimensions of its approach (Dreyfus et al., 2000; Traverso, 2001; Morgan, 2010). As early as 1998, Ronsac supervised the publication of the volume Un pavé dans l’histoire! Le débat français sur le livre noir du communisme, authored by Yannakakis and Rigoulot, in order to defend the BB. In 2000, a group of social scientists published a massive volume entitled The Century of Communisms (Dreyfus et al., 2000) conceived as a refutation of both Furet’s and Courtois’s works. They adopted a sociological perspective to demonstrate that communism was a multi-faceted phenomenon that could not be reduced to an allegedly criminal nature.

30Adding to the controversy, the publication of the BB coincided with renewed debates in France on the Vichy period. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac had given a speech acknowledging for the first time the role of French authorities in the persecution and deportation of Jews during the Second World War. Paul Touvier, chief of police in Lyon under the Vichy administration, had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 for crimes against humanity. In 1997, when the BB came out, the trial of another former Vichy official, Maurice Papon, for crimes against humanity, was still pending; Papon’s lawyer asked for a copy of the BB to be placed in his trial dossier. The volume also triggered a wide range of reactions in the media and political field, including in the FCP. [19] In 1997, a conservative member of the National Assembly created an uproar by accusing three communist cabinet members of complicity with communism’s crimes and demanding their resignation. Then-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was forced to defend their positions in his government, claiming that he was “proud” to have them (Reid, 2005).

31Against this backdrop, the 800-page long BB became an unexpected bestseller in France, where 700,000 copies were sold within the first three years. In 2002, Robert Laffont published another volume edited by Courtois, entitled Du passé faisons table rase! Histoire et mémoire du communisme en Europe, with the sensationalist banner “The Black Book did not tell the whole story.” Courtois analysed the conflict spurred by the BB in France and defended his position on communist history. The volume featured chapters on countries not covered by the BB but that had been added as forewords or supplementary chapters in its German, Romanian, Estonian, Russian and Greek translations. Further, Ronsac, who was once again in charge, allowed Courtois to add two new chapters on Bulgaria and Italy. Du passé faisons table rase! was translated into German, Bulgarian and Italian and was sold as “the second volume of the BB” in these countries.

32The translations of the BB and the publication of Du passé faisons table rase! enabled Courtois to reinvent himself as an international expert on the indictment of communism, despite his academic marginalisation in France. He established valuable connections with important figures in the anti-communist movement such as the former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky [20] and former members of Solidarność, like Alicja Wancerz-Gluza and Roman Wyborski. Courtois became a regular guest at different institutions specialising in the criminalisation of communism, such as the Sighet Memorial in Romania and the House of Terror in Budapest. He also joined a network of activists promoting the memory of the Gulag in European institutions. [21] His subsequent volumes were translated in the former Soviet Bloc. In turn, Courtois contributed to the international promotion of previously unknown Central and Eastern European historians and memory entrepreneurs (Constantin, 2018).

A differentiated reception in Eastern Europe

33Contrary to the French case, the BB’s reception was generally very positive in the post-communist world. If the general public expressed unequal interest in its revelations, several public intellectuals and some influential historians saw in the volume a milestone in historical knowledge on communism and in the recognition of its victims. Three main reasons explain the volume’s success in the four Eastern European countries under study (Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic).

34First, an important feature of the book’s reception was its almost exclusively ideological character. As in France, the main argument presented in the introduction was used in domestic political struggles to discredit the post-Communist left. The depiction of communism as a criminal ideology equivalent to Nazism had been widespread in most post-communist countries since the early 1990s. Political fields were deeply polarised with respect to the former Communist parties, communist ideology and a broadly defined “left.” [22] When the BB’s translations came out, each of the four countries under study was led by a conservative government, while the former ruling parties that had converted to social democracy were stigmatised as the ideological continuation of the socialist state. Only in the Czech Republic was the former Communist Party still in existence as such and represented in Parliament. The BB, with its call for a “Nuremberg trial of communism,” served as an important foundation for claims that the Communist Party elites had evaded justice and continued to maintain comfortable positions in society after 1989, and that a strong moral, political and legal condemnation of communism was necessary for the consolidation of these nascent democracies.

35Central European anti-communism in the 1990s was above all a political tool from which decommunisation policies and the consecration of state-sponsored totalitarian historiography derived. Except in its memorial claim, the BB did not bring anything new to the substance of anti-communism, but provided it with a broader international legitimacy and a moral status equal to that of anti-fascism. The volume also expanded the argument by including anti-communism in a global history of tyranny and the struggle for freedom. Its publication in the late 1990s coincided with the intensification of decommunisation efforts epitomized by the creation of the first institutes of national memory (Mark, 2011; Stola, 2012; Mink, 2017; Behr, 2017) and several museums of communism (Zombory, 2017), after various attempts at the adoption of lustration laws. [23] In Poland, for instance, the law that established the Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, passed in December 1998, encompasses both “communist crimes” and “Nazi crimes.” [24] This act also prohibits the denial of both categories of crimes.

36In the Czech Republic, the claim concerning the criminality of communism was not new. In July 1993, the Czech Parliament had adopted an “Act on the Illegality of the Communist Regime and on Resistance Against It” that qualified the Communist regime as “criminal, illegitimate and worthy of contempt” and described the Communist Party as a “criminal organisation.” [25] The year after the BB’s publication, in 2000, a new article was introduced into the criminal code punishing the crime of “denial of the Nazi and of the Communist genocides,” without geographical specification, punishable by six months to three years in prison. [26] Pundits such as the influential historian and journalist Petr Zídek were harshly critical of this article on the grounds that it was politically motivated. Zídek commented that the BB had only presented “one extreme of the genocidal character of the Stalinist regimes” (thereby explicitly linking the criminal code amendment to the BB) and that the new article would restrain the freedom of expression of historians who did not see in the Czechoslovak Communist regime any traces of genocide or crimes against humanity (Zídek, 2000).

37In Hungary, this operation took a more complex turn. From 1998 to 2002, Viktor Orbán’s government created and supported an institutional infrastructure of historical knowledge production and dissemination through the Public Foundation for the Research on Central and East European History and Society (Kelet- és Közép-európai Történelem és Társadalom Kutatásáért Közalapitvány, KKTTKK), the Twentieth Century Institute, the Twenty-First Century Institute and the House of Terror Museum (Laczó & Zombory, 2012). This infrastructure, created outside of the traditional academic field without any connection to the ministry responsible for higher education and research, was financed by the state instead of two former research institutes, the 1956 Institute and the Institute of Political History, whose public support was withdrawn. [27] This was justified ideologically by the need to break through an alleged liberal-left academic and media hegemony. The publication of the BB was inscribed into this ideological enterprise. As historian Mária Schmidt [28] put it in her opening address at the international book launch organised in Budapest in 2000, Hungary was characterised by an “intellectual terror” imposed by former officials of the Communist regime and “1968ers,” who had “joined forces in the defence of communism and of the past.” Fortunately, Schmidt added, “in Western Europe excellent intellectuals have studied the genocidal policy of communist systems in a series of important works, and they stand against this hypocritical double morality” (Schmidt, 2000, p. 8). Furthermore, she highlighted the contributions of Alain Besançon, [29] Stéphane Courtois and Anne Applebaum [30] – the first two of whom were present at the event, together with Werth, Paczkowski, Panné, and activist Vladimir Bukovsky.

38In Romania, the BB not only buttressed anti-communism as an ideology that served to criticise the past, but also reinforced anti-communism as an electoral tool for the liberal parties and former dissidents to use against their political opponents. After 1989, former members of the nomenklatura had remained in power through a new political formation called the Party of Social Democracy of Romania (PDSR). In 1996, the Democratic Romanian Convention (CDR), a coalition of liberal parties, won the general election and formed a government. The PDSR, which was the second largest parliamentary group until 2000, was accused by the governing parties of being a “neo-communist” party that represented a dangerous continuity with the previous regime (Pavel & Huiu, 2003). It is no coincidence that the Civic Academy Foundation and the Sighet Memorial, which initiated the translation of the BB into Romanian, had very close ties to the CDR and to Emil Constantinescu, the newly elected president of Romania.

39Second, the BB was not considered to be an ordinary intellectual product, but was “made in France” and thus originated from a field of symbolic production that was able to set rules and principles at the European level (Sapiro, 2009). This provided a veneer of legitimacy to Courtois’s theses on the authority of the totalitarian paradigm, on the necessity for a moral reasoning that reflected the equal dignity of victims of any dictatorship, and on the equal criminality of fascism and communism. Nonetheless, the debate differed slightly from country to country, depending on the domestic context.

40After a few negative reactions, contemporary pundits in the Czech Republic mostly took from the BB that people had suffered under communism and that there had been terrible repression. The volume appeared with an original afterword by Patrik Ouředník, a Czech poet and writer who had lived in exile in Paris since 1984. Ouředník emphasised the academic qualifications of the authors, approved of Courtois’s call for a “Nuremberg trial of Communism,” and emphasised the ideological proximity between socialism and National Socialism, which he described as “biologically speaking two branches of the same family.” He later carried this representation of communism and Nazism as the two sides of the same coin further in a hugely popular essay, Europeana: A Short History of the Twentieth Century (Ouředník, 2005), the Czech version of which was published by the same publisher as the Black Book. According to Ouředník, “Jews” and “the bourgeois” were assigned the same social roles under Nazism and communism, those of “plutocrats” and “parasites.” Both regimes were thus equally criminogenic, he concluded. [31]

41As opposed to a predominantly domestic perspective in Hungary and the Czech Republic, the volume’s significance was discussed in Poland and Romania in relation to the debates it raised amongst the Western European left. The stormy debates in France were closely followed in both countries, which turned the BB into an already famous product, filtered through the lens of its local context. In this regard, the BB’s case provides fresh nuances to Pierre Bourdieu’s remark that “the sense and function of a foreign work are determined by the field of destination at least as much as by the field of origin” (Bourdieu, 2002, p. 4): the reception of the BB was heavily influenced in both countries by the first impression the work had left in its original environment. For instance, when he promoted the American translation of the book in the United States, Paczkowski claimed that the controversy about the BB was of little historiographical interest. He portrayed Courtois’s critics as Western European former communist activists who disliked the volume mainly because it upended “leftist stereotypes” (Paczkowski, 2001).

42In Poland, the BB appeared with an original foreword by Krystyna Kersten, a prominent historian of communism. [32] Her position within the dissident historiography was quite specific, as she was sceptical about using the concept of totalitarianism to describe the Polish People’s Republic. The fact that such a figure of scholarly authority had authored the foreword to the Polish edition of the BB undoubtedly legitimised the book as academically sound. According to Kersten, the BB was not only part and parcel of a “memory war” between the left and the right, but also a relevant piece of historiography insofar as it raised the issue of the equivalence between Nazism and communism. The BB was reviewed almost exclusively in the daily and weekly press, although some reviews were written by scholars. Most of them described the book and the discussion it sparked in France as important in the Western European context, but did not specifically discuss Paczkowski’s thesis or the book’s potential contribution to Polish historiography (Machcewicz, 1999). In any case, the comparison between the Holocaust and the Gulag was not questioned: due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the double occupation experienced between 1939 and 1941, the similarities between fascism and communism were widely accepted by the general public.

43The reception of the book in Poland presents a sharp contrast to the situation in Romania, where the translation of the BB was published at a time of fierce debates about the ostensible equivalence between Nazism and communism. In order to join NATO and the EU, Romanian authorities were required to take steps regarding the restitution of Jewish property and the condemnation of Holocaust denial. Unlike Poland, Romania had been an ally of the Third Reich during the Second World War, and hundreds of thousands of Jews and Roma were killed in Transnistria, after being deported there in 1941-1942 by local authorities (CISHR, 2004). When the BB was published in 1998, these facts were the subject of a hefty public debate that cast a shadow over some of the former dissidents who felt their status threatened. Some of them, including several important intellectuals such as Gabriel Liiceanu, the publisher of the BB, derived their legitimacy from the proximity to Constantin Noica, one of the most important Romanian philosophers, who had been a sympathiser of the Iron Guard in his youth. [33] The recognition of the Holocaust was potentially harmful to their reputations and even risked presenting the extermination of European Jews as a bigger tragedy than the communist repression endured by the former dissidents. Intellectual elites engaged in the process of Gulag recognition – especially those close to the Sighet Memorial, who had criticised attempts to impose on Romania an allegedly foreign cultural framework based on the memory of the Holocaust – thus saw Courtois’s statements as a strong argument in their favour (Laignel-Lavastine, 2004). The BB allowed these memory entrepreneurs to challenge not only the uniqueness of the Holocaust, but also the supposed attempt of Western elites to “cover up” the violence of the Gulag (Lovinescu, 2000).

44Third, the success of the BB in Central Europe was – paradoxically – due to its limited reception in the academic field. The volume was considered a major contribution to the history of communism without ever being submitted to a substantive review which could have exposed its methodological and even factual failures. Though widely reviewed in the press, as well as in cultural journals dominated by anti-communist intellectuals, the BB failed to spark much debate in academia. The volume reactivated the many and long-standing roots of the anti-totalitarian paradigm in Eastern Europe. This regional intellectual context provided favourable preconditions for the relatively positive adoption of the BB among academics in the four post-Communist countries under study. In the public sphere (“the secondary market”), the book increasingly became a reference point for former dissidents, memory entrepreneurs and young historians; within academia (“the primary market”), scholars remained rather quiet and turned the volume into a canonical reference work without discussing it further (Hauchecorne, 2009). The BB was more frequently quoted than read, but this sufficed to preserve its academic status and to allow for its wide circulation as an unquestioned milestone in the analysis of communism.

45In Poland, for instance, the BB was barely reviewed in academic journals. Nonetheless, it became generally accepted that the Polish People’s Republic had been a totalitarian regime – the only issue up for debate was whether this qualification applied only to the Stalinist period or to the entire forty-year history of state socialism (Górny, 2007). Kersten claimed that the post-1956 period did not deserve the qualification of “totalitarian” and argued in her introduction for a “moderate repression,” whereas Paczkowski’s chapter presented the previous regime as one of the harshest in the whole Eastern Bloc and considered the period from 1945 to 1956 as the basis for a totalitarian regime that lasted until 1989. [34] Despite these opposing views, the BB did not trigger any new debates about the totalitarian nature of the Polish People’s Republic, in part because major scholarly discussion on the subject had already taken place in the early 1990s (Fik, 1996). Paczkowski’s thesis was understood as fact by most Polish historians, even though an emerging school of social history was already in the process of challenging the totalitarian paradigm (Behr, 2017). As a result, the publication of the BB did not lead to a broader discussion of Polish communism.

46Similarly, the Romanian translation was not submitted to strict academic critique. It also failed to become a scholarly reference, even though major publications such as the Final Report for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania mentioned it as one of the main sources to the history of Communist regimes (CPADCR, 2006). The BB appeared in Romanian with an additional chapter on the local communist regime written by a team of professional and amateur historians from the Sighet Memorial. This chapter was added mainly to prove the extent of communist repression and to shed light on the armed resistance in the 1950s. Given that the original version of the BB presented most of the local partisans who fought against the communist regime as members of the fascist Iron Guard, the purpose of the additional chapter was to reclaim the democratic nature of Romanian anti-communism.

47In Hungary, where a few academic reviews had been published in response to the original French version of the BB released in 1997, the reception of the volume was boosted by an international conference organised in 2000 at the Hotel Gellért in Budapest to promote the Hungarian translation. The public controversy around the BB was not centred on the nature of communism itself but on the country’s relationship to communism: what was at stake was the very authenticity of anti-communism. In the competition for the status of “genuine anti-communist,” the liberal position of the 1990s was challenged by a Europeanised memory discourse of conservative anti-communism embodied by the BB.