The publication of the Black Book in France caused, as is well known, an uproar. Even there, a large segment of progressive intellectuals condemned the work. They claimed [...] that the researchers who compiled this work were fervent opponents of the Left; yet the origins of most are the same as those of their critics. They claimed that the final tally of the victims of communism includes a significant proportion of victims whose deaths were due to other causes, such as the famine that followed the October Revolution; but even this seems only partially accurate: the policies that lead to famine are never "divine interventions." This was confirmed by everyone, and more recently, in Mengistu's "socialist" Ethiopia, in Ceaușescu's Romania, in Kim Il Sung's Korea. Critics of the Black Book claimed that the work aims to ahistorically and immorally equate the "work" of the Nazis and fascists with the record of the October Revolution [...] And yet, despite the comparison of numbers, necessary to some extent for understanding things and events, despite the comparison of powers, there is no ideological identification. Because the fundamental question posed is this: 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 will add this: if this question does not concern every person, how is it possible for democratic societies to exist? [...] There is no doubt that the Black Book will provoke more here than elsewhere. So much the better. Now that we finally have a solid democracy, without exile islands and Security Forces that morally hindered confrontation with the then victims, there must also be substantial de-Stalinization in our country, which concerns not only the communist "Left" but clearly a large segment of the Russophile public opinion, which does not even "remember" that the large Pontic Greek community of the USSR was also collectively exiled by the "popular proletarian" power under dramatic conditions. (Richard Someritis - Excerpts from the epilogue of the Greek edition)