page_title: Stéphane Courtois
section_title: Annie Lacroix-Riz et Jean-Jacques Marie
hierarchical_section_title: Stéphane Courtois / Controversies with French historians / Annie Lacroix-Riz et Jean-Jacques Marie
caption_attribution_description: From 1935 publication 'Muss Russland Hungern?' [Must Russia Starve?], published by Wilhelm Braumüller, Wien [Vienna] depicted 1933 Kharkov German:"Die Anteilnahme schwindet." English "The sympathy shrinks!" Українська: Репродукція з Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, 1932-1933: Western Archives, Testimonies and New Research / Edited by Wsevolod W. Isajiw. - Toronto: Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre, Toronto, 2003. Фото з Колекції Кардинала Теодора Інніцира, (Архів Віденської Дієцезії). Центральний державний кінофотофоноархів України імені Г. С. Пшеничного, од. обл. 0-000002
context_page_description: Stéphane Courtois is a French historian and university professor, a Director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Professor at the Catholic Institute of Higher Studies in La Roche-sur-Yon, and Director of a collection specialized in the history of communist movements and regimes.
  The Black Book of Communism, a book edited by Courtois, has been translated into numerous languages, sold million of copies, and is considered one of the most influential, although one of the most controversial books written about communism. In the first chapter of the book, Courtois argued that Communism and Nazism are similar totalitarian systems and that Communism was responsible for the murder of around 100 million people in the 20th century.
  Courtois is a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, in the Géode at Paris West University Nanterre La Défense as well as a Professor at the Catholic Institute of Higher Studies – ICES. He is editor of the journal Communisme, which he cofounded with Annie Kriegel in 1982, and part of the Cercle de l'Oratoire think tank.
context_section_description: In 2006, in the magazine Brave New World, he published an article Famine in Ukraine (Holodomor): you said "denial"? (republished on the website of the historical journal Arkheia) in which he publicly accused the French historian and militant communist, Annie Lacroix-Riz of denying the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–1933.
  The famine was reported in the Western world in 1933 by Welsh journalist Gareth Jones and in 1935 by Boris Souvarine, and many years later by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1973 in The Gulag Archipelago. However, after a carefully sanitized in the summer of 1933 by Prime Minister of France Édouard Herriot, the latter declared there to be no famine. The great famine was confirmed by the opening of Soviet archives in the early 1990s.
  According to him, Annie Lacroix-Rice tried to downplay the event as one of "scarcity" a famine in which several million people died. This article was issued in response to the creation by Annie Lacroix-Riz, of "a website to appeal to his colleagues to mobilize against an unspeakable lie that ran the world for seventy years: No, ladies and gentlemen, there was no famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933, much less a famine that would have caused millions of deaths, and especially not a famine organized by the Soviet regime itself".
  Subsequently, in 2007 and in 2008 respectively, historians Annie Lacroix-Riz (Militant Communist) and Jean-Jacques Marie (Militant Trotskyist) criticized Stéphane Courtois for having expressed his views in an interview with the extreme right monthly Le Choc du mois.
  In 2009, he criticized the militant Trotskyist and historian Jean-Jacques Marie for the contents of chapter entitled: "1922: the year of serenity", published in his biography Lenin, 1870-1924 (Balland, Paris, 2004). Courtois accuses Jean-Jacques Marie for apologising for Lenin for whom 1922, on the contrary, was "the year of transition to paranoia". This showed itself on the one hand, by the note from Lenin to the Politburo on 19 March 1922 in which he wanted to use the Soviet famine of 1921–1922 to destroy the Orthodox Church: "It is precisely now when the famine-struck regions eat human flesh, and thousands of corpses litter the roads, that we need to enforce the confiscation of church property with savage energy and most unforgivingly, and crush any hint of resistance, with such brutality that it will be talked about for decades". This "paranoia" is also reflected in the Terror against the Socialist-Revolutionaries (death sentences, gulag, etc..) as well as the expulsion (or sometimes internal exile) of the Russian intelligentsia. This last event is described by him in the chapter, "Lenin and the destruction of the Russian intelligentsia", in his book Communism and totalitarianism (pre-published in Societal magazine No. 55 to 59): "the deportees were warned that any illegal return to Russia would automatically entail the death penalty". On 25 May 1922, Lenin addressed himself to Stalin in the following terms: "hundreds of these gentlemen must be expelled without mercy. We are going to clean up Russia once and for all.... They should all be turned away from Russia". In September 1922, Lenin justified his act to Maxim Gorky: "the intellectuals, the lackeys of capitalism, think they are the brains of the nation. In reality, they are not the brain, they are crap".
caption: Passers-by ignore the body of a starved man on a street in Kharkiv in 1932.
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